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I feel so stuck this time. I get flare ups each year and this feels like the worst. I had confidence before that I'd be able to heal but now I'm doubting myself. I feel so much pain. Why does this feel so much harder?
For the past month I’ve had constant thoughts and worries consistent with HOCD. I am constantly checking my reaction to men and women, I overanalyze everything from my childhood or previous hetero relationships and my mind convinces me that the things I did or how I acted make me gay. I’ve been convincing myself that past relationships were not real even though they were and it is taking over my life. I don’t sleep anymore or eat anymore and am constantly fighting the urge to seek reassurance even though it’s all that makes me feel better. Any advice??
sometimes when things get bad, i feel like everything is wrong, everything i do, everything i feel is wrong. everything just feels off. and it feels like there’s no way to fix it. for example, “if i leave this thing in my purse, later i’ll see it and i’ll associate my purse with that negative feeling and event”, so i move it but that also feels wrong so i move it back, etc.. but nothing feels right. it’s overwhelming. or everything in my room is wrong and there’s nothing to do to fix it bc i’m so overwhelmed and confused with things in the wrong place and my emotions have associations with every item. i feel like their placement will impact my life in huge ways. there’s a blanket feeling over my life that feels traumatic, like i’m tainted and dirty with feeling avoidant and like nothing i do is right. in my opinions, feelings, thought, actions, choices. i see perfectionism ocd with this feeling but i feel like my symptoms are more feeling based, i’m not sure if i’m experiencing ocd or something else, or a mix. does anyone have an opinion or similar experience?
I feel like for years I’ve never really been ‘here’. I’m just the little character in my head that’s always arguing with my brain. I try to be in the moment and enjoy things but all I can think about is how my time will run out soon and this will all be a memory. I feel like I can only live in memories. Like if I go to the beach and it’s a great day, I just think ‘this will be a great memory later’. And then I try so so hard to ‘live in the moment’ and feel (I’ll close my eyes and think of all the sensations, I’ll stare at things like a pretty flower or the sunset, I’ll just try to do things that make me feel) but I still am kinda numb. I feel emotions really strongly but don’t feel like I’m here really?? My brain tells me I shouldn’t be caring ab things bc I don’t rlly feel all that present, but at the same time I feel things too hard?? I also need my disassociation sometimes to cope with things. For example, I think I have ADHD and I have this thing where I’m really sensitive to sensations (my clothes are really uncomfortable and I get compulsions to ‘fix’ them all the time) so I kinda zone out and it helps. It also helps if someone’s mad or me or I’m going thru smthn difficult to kinda just not be there or just think of the future when everything is going to be okay. But using that to deal w the negatives also affects the positives. But even when I try to stop it doesn’t work, no matter what I ruminate about how little time I have left. Even now, my thought process is that I have to fix this problem while I’m still young before I waste my youth not enjoying things fully, but I’ve never really known how it feels like to not be “floating”, so I don’t know when I’ll even get there. Thanks if you read this all.
But im not so happy about it... Im more afraid, cause my whole life was ruled by ocd, what i thought that i dont like bc its not for me or its bad, i didnt liked it bc ocd told me that its bad... So actually my value system is based upon ocd... So why i am afraid? Its there... its because if i start to do exposures and act on not what ocd tells me, i might become a bad person. Alot of times i thought okay ocd is bad but atleast it makes me a good person. And what i mean by that? I realized i stopped doing things in the past bc of ocd. I stopped going out with people who drinks, parties or even do drugs cause i was afraid that i might become them. Fear made me stop going out with them, not my value system. Another one, im a christian, i dont do alot of things that i did before cause i dont want to be a bad christian. I dont listen music what is unbiblical, or be with people that arent respecting christianity all because of fear. I like to write song lyrics. In the past i used to write worldly songs, it was terrible, now i just only write songs about faith,God, and struggles in our life, cause i can connect to this better right now. But i realized i could write love songs too(not cringe ones,more like those Bruno Mars ones) but i got this feeling of fear that if i go back again i might leave God again(cause back then i didnt believe) I will forget what is important now and my life will broke down...i would get lost... so its fear that stops me, and its like i value God but with fear,so its like for exposure i should write worldly songs, go out with people who drinks,do things that i did before, but im afraid maybe i will like this things and i will leave God. Sometimes i do afraid that i only believe in God cause its a hiding place where i can feel comfortable(i dont do this i just feel like it is,,) So idk,.i should do exposures but im afraid that i would fall back to sinning cause deep down i might like these things...
:/ i swear. i spiral so bad. i think about one bad trait and it leads into any bad interaction i've had with anyone. and it makes me feel so bad. i can't stop replaying it and the guilt starts to eat my alive and i ruminate so much and it just makes me want to spill my guts to someone- repent or something, even if A. i already apologized B. i can't do anything about it now C. it might not even be that bad in the first place this kind of shit was REALLY bad last year but i started taking celexa and i ruminate less, but when i do spiral it's really hard to get ahold of myself. it feels like i'm just putting a blanket on it. like if i don't ruminate in guilt i'm a bad person- or until i "confess" or apologize, or get a second opinion. i really wish i could take control of this
I’ve got into an obsession with deliberately imagining intrusive thoughts and it’s become a big problem, to see if I hate the thought or get shudders from them. Sometime last year I imagined a ‘smothering’ intrusive thought about my mum on purpose and for some reason it felt like I knew how it felt to do that and it ‘felt good’ to do that now I’ve got that In my head that I ‘enjoy the feeling’ and sometimes that feeling comes back and feels extremely real like I would actually do that because I ‘like the feeling’ and now i keep testing myself by imagining the smothering thought about people I care about to see if that feeling will come back but even when I imagine the thought and my body goes tense and I pull a disgusted face because I don’t get anxiety then my head tells me that maybe I didn’t imagine the thought properly or imagine how it feels to ‘actually do that’ horrible thought so then I imagine the thought in more detail. Even like I was exercising and ruminating at the same time and I went to wipe my nose and it felt like when I wiped my nose my airways were blocked for half a second when I brushed my nose and then I started thinking what if that’s what it feels like to be smothered and then I started trying to put my hand over my nose to see how jt would feel and then deliberately imagining the smothering thought about my mum to test myself and see if I ‘like’ the feeling or making someone not be able to breathe and I don’t know why I keep trying to imagine the thought in different ways to see if that feeling would come back and trying to make it more realistic and feel more real or like in movies when you see people that died with their eyes open then I try and imagine that with the smothering thought and start pulling a disgusted face and I grab my face and like wave my hands about in dismay and like eww what is that and I’ve gotten use to imagining the thoughts and don’t even get anxiety and now I’m thinking is there something wrong with me? Why would I want to try and understand how it feels to do that horrible thing ? I’m worried that feeling is still there because sometimes it does come back and feels super real and like I would actually do that and ‘enjoy’ the feeling of doing that? But surely if I actually ‘enjoyed’ the feeling of doing that I wouldn’t be doubting and testing myself but it’s just because of that ‘feeling’ that feels super real in the moment that I ‘enjoy The feeling’ and ‘know how it feels to smother someone’ that makes me believe it and doubt everything
i have a severe problem with people pleasing. i obsess over how i look, or how i act. if someone doesn’t like something then i shouldn’t like it. or if someone likes something i don’t then there’s something wrong w me. i feel like if i don’t do or act like someone else then i’m doing it wrong. it’s tiring and i just want to not feel like this anymore. i don’t want to care ab what others think or want of me. i want my own opinion and i want my own feelings to matter to me.
i literally just joined this app, so i kinda just wanted to share my ✨wisdom✨ on my ocd (and maybe help me figure out the timeline of this bc it’s been a rollercoaster ride these few years) here’s my story: i never really noticed the thoughts at first so i don’t really know when they started. i just know about 5 years ago i started noticing a problem. i think the earliest thoughts and compulsions i remember was when i was like 8, but at the time i didn’t think much of it. i was in the car on my way to church, and for some reason i told myself that my right side of my body was God’s side, and the left was the bad side. so i had to do everything on God’s side and if i accidentally did anything on the bad side, i’d have to do it way more times on the good side. I would move my toes so much on the right side that it started to hurt. i guess that’s where it started. i noticed in Church i would get bad thoughts abt Jesus being naked and other sexual things that are too triggering to me (even still) to mention. this kinda repeated until i stopped going to church but at the time i kinda developed a new subtype of ocd: Pure Ocd. this one tortured me for a year. it was so bad that i eventually told my mom and got put on medicine from a doctor who assumed i was just depressed. then the religious ocd came back (i mean it never really left but other thoughts were more concerning at the time.) but this time it more aggressive, and the compulsions were to hard not to do. every time i felt i had sinned, i had to pray. i was praying constantly bc of this and praying for forgiveness of the thoughts that never stopped. i was convinced something was truly wrong w me. this subtype has never went away, never gotten better. i still suffer from it and it’s a daily battle. it wasn’t until i looked up my symptoms, thoughts, compulsions, that i had ocd. i did my research on it and cried bc finally there was some solution to why i was having these thoughts. i didn’t get diagnosed until last year. but when i finally got my actual therapist she wasn’t really equipped to help me with ocd specifically. she helped w my anxiety (which ik ocd is an anxiety disorder but how could she truly understand my thoughts if she doesn’t understand my disorder?) eventually i felt okay with my anxiety so i kinda quit therapy. but i still stress over my thoughts, i still have compulsions, and idk if they’ll ever go away. i definitely missed a lot in this and i’ve definitely had other subtypes but religious ocd and pure ocd have been the most brutal. thanks for reading <3 and if you have any questions lmk bc im not a very good writer lol
I am 100% sure I bring nothing positive, only hurt to those around me. I'm not capable of anything else.
I continue to get distressing thoughts surrounding my love for my boyfriend and if we are going to work out and are meant to be together because he is of different religious beliefs, and I grew up hearing that doesn’t work in relationships. We have been together nearly two years. I know I love him, and he supports my beliefs and I support him, we have had conversations about it. but my brain goes through intense periods of hyper focusing on the anxiety surrounding it, making me feel like I am going to hurt him, or we are going to break up because of me and our differences. It’s very distressing and I ruminate a lot about him and try to calm myself down by thinking through the situation, a mental compulsion? I know worrying about your partner is normal but I feel like I hyper fixate on the compatability between us and me hurting him and I don’t know if it’s ROCD or if it means we aren’t compatible. It’s upsetting.
It’s getting harder and harder to feel like it’s OCD these days. I keep wondering if maybe it’s not and if it isn’t, then what’s the point of living anymore? I’d rather die if I really was a pedophile like I don’t wanna live like that, there’s no point… and it’s so unfair, like why can’t I just be normal? Why can’t I go back to being unaware of anything like this? I feel like I mistakenly opened a door and now I’ll never be able to close it. Just today I saw a screenshot of a post on Twitter where someone asked if older people get attractive to you as you get older and how it was a concern for this person. And I saw so many people act like it was weird or like someone should be considered weird for even wondering about that. But I worry about that too! And they would say things like “oh well it’s not like you’re attracted to the same people you were as a teenager, right?” The problem is I’ve never really truly been attracted to anyone (as far as I can tell??? I don’t know)!! And I wish sometimes I was because it scares me… People would say “oh well the idea of dating even an 18 year old disgusts me” and I fear not having enough of that disgust. Or that I never had enough of that disgust. Maybe there’s been something wrong with me all along and I’ve just never really been able to tell until now. 😞 Not only do I worry about being attracted to children or even just someone too young for me (to the point of wanting to cry and wasting time thinking about it and not being able to find an answer), I worry I’m too shallow and a bad person for thinking that older people aren’t that attractive and fearing getting old. People say it’s ridiculous to fear aging but I kind of do and I don’t want to but it doesn’t work like that, so I just do. I guess I also have FOMO massively? Like what if I end up attracted to younger people because I never had a chance when I was younger, like I don’t want that! I don’t want to care about that - it shouldn’t matter so why do I keep thinking about it? What if I get too old to enjoy things - I haven’t even had a college experience (I’m in a “gap year” situation right now I guess and OCD isn’t helping) and I worry I’m gonna miss out and never get the chance… I don’t know what to do anymore. I feel like I’m never gonna get over this and my life is just gonna be miserable forever. What’s the point to any of it if I can’t enjoy life because I’m always going to be worried I’m a freak or afraid of getting older? I feel like I got messed up somewhere or that I did something to ruin myself. This sucks.
I started therapy last week and I wanted to post about my anxiety and rumination regarding my therapist not believing I have OCD. This has opened a floodgate of intrusive thoughts that I began ruminating on almost immediately after my appointment. There wasn’t a sense of relief with my appointment but, sadness and loneliness. I’m planning on addressing these thoughts with her in my next session so she knows how I’m feeling. I wanted to ask if anyone else has experience with this and what exactly do I look for in a long term therapist. Does anyone have experience with finding therapy through NOCD-how was/is it going?
I'm getting over my health ocd once and for all but it's getting replaced by an extrem fear of developing new Obsessions. What are ways to deal with the fear of new Obsessions and compulsions?
I know this question comes up a LOT in OCD spaces and I am not the first to ask this but I feel like some of my actions really really do indicate denial. For example, I started suffering from TOCD when I was 13 years old. Before that I was a massive massive tomboy who loved being grouped with boys and wouldn’t even touch anything feminine, especially around my friends because I was so embarrassed. I had a feeling that my inner self was girly but I could never show it and i liked being mistaken for a boy a lot. When TOCD hit I did a whole 180, I tried to be as girly as possible. I was basically forcing femininity on myself. Started wearing womens clothing for once, I started looking at my naked body more trying to see or prove that I don’t have dysphoria. I started to explore feminine styles and all that. Idk how to feel about this, I guess I did enjoy it and I thought I looked good, I did get confidence when I was going out, etc.. but I was also very confident going out being super masculine in the past. I also think I forced myself to have more female fantasies and put my new ULTRA FEMININE self into daydreams that I never had before. I was also defensive and said stuff like “oh yeah, I totally wanna look like (female actor here)” when I really didn’t, and more stuff along those lines. I still did have the obsession and compulsion though, I posted on here several times every day and I never got closer to any answers, the obsession DID hit me like a truck one day, I did have panic attacks and trouble eating and I definitely did ruminate on it all day long and was terrified of the possibility of being transgender. but I definitely was pretending to be feminine when I wasn’t. later when my ocd subsided I came back to more androgynous style, even looking not like either gender. I still kept some girly aspects especially when I met my boyfriend. Another thing is that I started engaging in a lot of terf and transphobic spaces during and after my first bout of TOCD when I was 13. I started having problematic views on gender and didn’t like transgender people, especially those who were young and also conformed to their birth sex. I spent hours on detrans spaces and everything. I feel like i conditioned myself into thinking I’m cis, because I’ve read all of these things I did seem so much like denial of being transgender. And now I feel like I have internalised transphobia even when I have been very supportive the last few years before my TOCD came back. The obsession went away on its own after something else very mentally difficult for me happened in my life and I worried less and less about it. But a lot of my behaviour indicated denial. I’m scared, and I don’t know if this was a normal thing for me to do. Right now with TOCD I just wanna be the same as I was before, I’m not striving to be more masculine or feminine or change my presentation, I’m more just analysing what I feel and think and my desires. But I’m so so scared because I doubt if the first time I had TOCD was even real.
I’m 17 and have had two crushes maybe three (I’m not sure anymore). One when I was 12 & the other at 16. A great majority of my other crushes have been of my other crushes have been on celebrities. I stumbled on a tiktok post saying that if you’ve had celebrities crushes then it means your a lesbian. I’ve been spiralling about this and ruminating. I’ve never saw my self together with a woman. But now my brain is trying to convince me by intrusive thoughts 24/7 or a even dream about the same gender (this has been especially distressing). It makes me so scared and anxiety ridden & also feel like a terrible person for being scared. Because I feel as though I’m homophobic. I’ve been diagnosed with OCD back in July. And will start treatment at the end of this month. But I’m suffering badly. My thoughts revolve around this, I struggle to do basic things now and just stay anxiety ridden. The intrusive thoughts & ruminating and trying to find the meaning for things and the researching is never ending. My brain won’t leave me alone.
I just hate thinking that I don’t like my boyfriends voice. Does that mean I don’t live him? I don’t want to hate his voice or how he sounds I wanna like it… I used to say his voice was soothing and I was basically obsessed with it why can’t I be like that now :/ i hope this is my ocd and not me :/ sometimes I don’t like my boyfriends singing I find it cringe but because I feel like he doesn’t have the voice for it but I don’t wanna care :/ gosh I wanna love him for him and not care about how he sounds :/
Im so scared when people are close to me or when I realize I’m close to people I start worrying and I hope I don’t bump them or I move at all bc I’m just scared bc I feel like it’s assault and I feel bad and sometimes I get weird feelings that I don’t want to have I just don’t know what to do I’d honestly rather be alone so I know I can’t bump in or be close to people my anxiety is so bad I feel like shit lol , I’ve talked to my therapist and she says she doesn’t think I have ocd that I just have like anxiety so idek
My hocd started about a year and a half ago. Prior to my hocd, I was in a relationship for almost a year, I was sexual active, everything felt great. I always knew I was straight, I was always very turned on by women, and I was never questioning if I wanted to be with a women. Since hocd started, all of that has vanished. In the early stages I had constant anxiety surrounding my intrusive thoughts. Once I learned what hocd was, which was about 6 months into having it, my symptoms started to change. I got more urges and false attractions with no anxiety. it started to attack my emotions, it made everything feel real to the point I just felt like I was in denial. It made me question constantly if I want to love a women or man. It has made me question if I’m faking this whole thing just so I don’t have to come out. When I look at my phone every time I see a picture of man and a women I’m always wondering who I looked at first, and thinking that when I look at a man first that it means I’m gay. My brain is constantly telling me my sexuality changed. I don’t understand it because I always had a very strong attraction to women prior. But now that my attraction and libido are gone, it feels like my body has made a permanent change. I’m stuck honestly. I’ve made Improvements for sure, but it’s just tough to believe that this a disorder doing all this to my mind and believing these are actual hocd symptoms when my mind keeps making me feel like I want the thoughts or that I want to be gay. I don’t know how to disregard it when it’s feels so true and real. I just wish I had a sign or some hope that I want to be with a women. I want to be able to take back my emotions again. Can anyone else relate to this?
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