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Has anyone ever had symptoms of chronic health issues but struggling to get a diagnose? If so, how can you balance the anxiety and the perfectionism of needing to know with also the real normal anxiety of needing to know.

I'm wearing a sweatshirt and after I got to class, I noticed it smells a little sweaty. I just washed it and I think my dryer is making my clothes smell like this, but idk why and some people say it might be bc of mildew, but my clothes were dry before i put them away. now, i'm just scared that my clothes from that load were all contaminated and i already put all those clothes away in my closet/drawers, so idk which clothes are contaminated and which ones are not, but i don't think all of them smell bad. i'm panicking :(

guys, I have a few questions. OCD is such an interesting thing because it is so simple yet so sneaky. The OCD I've been going through recently is (resistance to feelings) "I better not get feelings for anyone because I might lose control and be abandoned" my therapist has got me doing an exposure which is "I will get feelings, fall in love and be rejected" 5 minutes a day, 5 times a day. I noticed the anxiety subsiding but then I do move towards getting feelings and the fears return. Any advice here?

I understand seeking reassurance is not going to help. But I truly feel like I’m just in denial of being lesbian and it’s the most overwhelming and frustrating thing ever. I keep doubting my feelings in the past towards men and I feel things now that I didn’t feel towards women before. Now I find it hard to even imagine being with a man, imagining being with a women feels like what what I’m wanting but I DONT KNOW. My loss of attraction to men is so bad at this point I feel like it’s all true

Is there any online support groups specifically for harm ocd? I have been to some in general OCD support groups, but when people had time to share their story I felt like I couldn’t relate. I feel like if there were more people in 1 group talking about their harm ocd experience I would feel more comfortable and less worried to share my experience. Any suggestions?

Hi everyone! I used to suffer from Harm OCD and now it has changed gears to Health OCD. Long story short: I felt a pea sized lump on the back of my neck, which I’m presuming is a lymph node. I googled it and google said I had lymphoma. That’s probably the worst thing I could have done. Anyway, I’ve been in mental turmoil ever since and I honestly don’t know how I’m making it through each day. I scheduled an appt with a doctor but that’s not until 3 weeks. Do any of you guys suffer from health OCD? Do you guys have any tips? How do you keep yourself from reeling about this? Thank you so much!!!

Hey everyone! Hope your week started well! :) For people taking Sertraline (Zoloft*), I was wondering if anyone else was taking 50mg/day? And what your experiences are/were, if you don't mind sharing please? (When did you start feeling better, did you end up needing more, etc?)

I think I have hocd. I’m currently in a relationship with the opposite sex and it’s making it a lot harder. I have non stop thoughts about “maybe I’m in denial”, checking to see my responses/reactions to lesbian things, it ruminates in my head all day long. The obsessions and compulsions are so bad right now I feel distraught. Not only about fearing that I actually am gay, but I’m terrified to ruin the person I’m with and relationship I have now. Just a few weeks ago we were talking about marriage, but now I feel like I’m wasting his time because what if I am gay? I watch things with lesbians and don’t feel attraction to it, I try to have a conversation in my head about coming out to others and it doesn’t even feel right. I just feel lost, I don’t want to lose what I have at all and I just want these thoughts to go away because they’re ruining me.

I need support, or some kind of encouragement. I’m trying not to seek reassurance but I feel like I’m holding myself back from a panic attack, idky my ROCD is spiking so bad right now. One little tiny trigger and suddenly I just wanna cry. I love my boyfriend so much, my biggest fear is losing him and my dog. My stupid ex watching my story last night had me spiraling. I don’t wanna spiral back into a depression and get stuck in the ocd loop. Im so scared of getting super bad again. It takes one bad panic attack and any kind of trigger to throw me. I need to keep doing ERP, I just haven’t in awhile because I’ve been great.. Ugh. I hate this. Idk what to do. Im trying to do erp but I am so scared of letting myself spike. I don’t wanna get depressed again. Im afraid of these obsessive thoughts. I hate my stupid high school ex for messing with my head by watching my Instagram story. I wanna make my Instagram private now but I don’t want that to be an avoidance. I just wanna go back to how I’ve felt for months. I love my boyfriend so much. So so so much. Lately I’ve been obsessing over losing him. He is the purest most gentle soul in my life. He’s my best friend. I can’t see my life without him. In so afraid my ocd will get so bad that he’ll leave me or something. I know he wont cause he stood by my side through my months long ocd episode last summer, but then I get afraid that I’ll leave him for whatever reason. Our six year anniversary is November 20th. We’re talking about marriage and children. We love each other so much and do life together, live together and cherish each other. He’s my baby 😩I’ve been doing so great for soooooooo long, and one trigger happened. Now im obsessing and I wanna cry and im scared of my head and I don’t ever wanna get so trapped in the ocd loop that the depression has me in a chokehold. Ugh. I just want my boyfriend home. I don’t wanna he alone with my thoughts and I want him to hold me. But then when he comes home I have this compulsion of confessing to him that my ex watched my story and that it’s bothering me. I don’t want him to get upset or think I want that. My brain is so sensitive.

I’ve been suffering for 17 years. I’ve had various themes but this one always comes back. I’m in a happy marriage with two children. My husband doesn’t know that this is a theme, bc how do you tell your significant other that you’re having intrusive thoughts about your sexual orientation? I would be like what?? Anyway. Im feeling especially alone in my head with this today. Just looking others in the same situation. I hate this.

I feel like I’m compulsory by being on here with what I’ve read online about what people do but I find I match the descriptions to both quite well. But is that the rocd making me believe I have obsessive love because it’s not a real love. My love works in a way that I fall very quickly almost instantly I’m attracted to a person and just want to talk to them I get jealous very easily but the thing that stunned me which I read about old is about being able to see them happy. I could never do that with someone I love becasue if it’s not with me I can’t be happy for them becasuse they’re not catering to my needs of wanting them is this normal or can I not love properly was I never in love with this girl and just an obsessed lonely person?

I just need to vent. I feel so bad I want to cry but I’m at work. Yesterday I got triggered at work and left half way through the day, went home, and ruminated for five hours alone. I cried in the bathroom for an hour. I’m so tired of getting triggered a thousand times a day. I’m tired of making the same mistakes. I’m tired of resisting the ocd. I’m tired of living. I’m tired of watching my children age and neglecting them and my wife so I can hide in the bathroom and think about the same “real event” from ten years ago. I’ve wasted ten years of my life on this. Ten years. And what do I have to show for it? Nothing but thousands of hours with my family that I’ll never get back. But does that mean I see the futility of ruminating? Does that mean I won’t waste another hour thinking about this event? Nope. Part of me still feels the pull. Ocd is so like a terrible addiction. I keep doing the thing I don’t want to do. I’m in therapy with a great ocd specialist. I’m on medication. I’ve read tons of books. I’ve listened to hundreds of hours of podcasts. Watched hours of lectures on ocd. Spent two months at an ocd treatment facility. I know what I need to do. Am I so weak that I can’t do it? Am I just pitying myself? Am I just scared to get better? What’s wrong with me? I just want to curl into a ball and ruminate all day everyday. At the same time that sounds literally like hell. God have mercy.

So, last night I had a huge panic due to some feelings of not feeling real. I won’t go into details about the intrusive thoughts but they were bad. I know some people answer their intrusive thoughts with “maybe, maybe not” and I’ve been doing that. But what happens when that second wave of anxiety and intrusive thoughts hit you harder. For some reason, the urgency of them seem so so real to me. How do I know how to trust I’ll be okay?

I’ve been doing really good with SOOCD and TOCD. I stopped having so many intrusive thoughts and etc but now that I’m happy in a new relationship, it’s starting to come back (at least today). And I’m just scared it gonna fully come back. Any help?

I know this is going to sound horrible but sometimes I think one or both of my bf’s brothers are better looking than him and recently I don’t feel that guilty about it. I have been having intrusive thoughts about one of them but not a lot of guilt and I feel bad now for not having guilt. And sometimes when I don’t think my bf is looking good I have really mean thoughts about his appearance

So I have been suffering from hocd for over a year now. And at first it gave me anxiety, and I would look up how to turn back being straight ect. But here I am now and have zero anxiety, I don't i have distress, I don't know I have but right now I'm like im actaully gay, like it feels like im gay, and I'm convinced that I'm gay and if I said I was straight, it feels like lying to myself at this point. And I want to be really sad and know that these aren't my real desires or I know that I would be unhappy and be very sad, but I don't feels sad, or unhappy, or depressed. Like I can say I don't want to be gay but it feels like im lying to myself at this point, I dint feel any attraction towards women anymore or If u ever had. Is this still hocd?

The other day I saw a picture of an old friend. This somehow lead to me remembering something my best friend told me a few years ago??? He told me that someone he was seeing lied about their age so he cut them off. this didn’t bother me before because he wasn’t at fault. he’s never been the type of man to do anything inappropriate either. as soon as i remembered this i felt anxiety rush down my back. even the thought of hanging out with him made me anxious but i don’t understand why. why am i suddenly obsessed about this? it’s tearing me apart because he’s the last person i wanted my intrusive thoughts to target. it keeps repeating in my mind & my body is telling me we have to panic because your best friend is a terrible person. i 100% know he’s not a terrible person though. a day or two later i started having “ what if “ intrusive thoughts & kept hearing twisted statements. “ what if he’s a rapist? what if he’s hiding something? he dated a minor so he’s unsafe now “. i learned a few coping skills from a subreddit that has helped me but i still feel stuck. my best friends actions have never made me feel uncomfortable or unsafe so i know in my heart that these thoughts are irrational. background info for everyone to better understand: i’m severely traumatized from my past relationship because my ex told me he sexually assaulted his little brother. i haven’t dated anyone since 2019 because im terrified of someone telling me a similar secret. i obsessed about what he told me for an unfathomable amount of time. since then, i’ve ghosted 2 people who’ve said/done anything remotely close to what my ex did. i tend to do that as a way to protect myself. i’ve been fighting against my compulsions as to not repeat my past behaviors. during past episodes ive either avoided the person indefinitely or nagged them with questions. this time im doing my best not to avoid my best friend in any way. i caved & asked him a few questions about the past incident but the reassurance didnt help much since im writing this. id hate for my brain to ruin an 11 year year friendship. i don’t understand how or why this is happening. what do i do?

I'm a little confused and concerned by my past actions. I'm sorry for the mistakes but it's getting hard to forgive myself, and constantly my head ruminates about going to the police to confess what I did. I did nothing to hurt someone or intentionally illegal, but all of a sudden these thoughts came up the past couple of days and I don't know how you handle it. It was indecency but I was never accused or caught, but I don't know what to do. Thoughts say confess everything even though I did nothing wrong.

For someone like me, a cis-gender, African-American, feminine, man who identifies as bisexual, it made growing up partly confusing and frustrating. I dealt with everyone’s opinion of me since before I could remember. My feminine traits made my peers ridicule me. I was called the f-slur, gay, etc. These terms were used to describe me before I even knew what sexuality and any of those words meant. As children, who haven’t yet been tainted by the world, we are confident of what we know of ourselves. We were naive, but we were happy. As a result I was sure of my attraction to girls as a kid and when someone would accuse me of being gay i responded saying I was “straight” not yet realizing my attraction to men. During this time I didn’t know I had ocd (despite my symptoms at such an early age) and it wouldn’t come in to impact my sex life till I was in high school and had my first strong attraction towards a guy in my class. He was perfect to me and I was so infatuated by him. I wanted to know all about him, talk to him, stare at him, and imagined life with him. It was at this time I realized I was bisexual, as I still liked women. Sometime later after high school I started to obsess over my sexuality. I was doubting myself despite my attractions. Allowing the doubts of all those people who told me, “I was gay” or “going through a phase” get to me. I would then grow to fear I would not be who I am and that I would live a life that wasn’t authentic to me. I feared ending up with a woman or man and I would hate my life with them and do something to myself that I could never take back. I would wonder if I would take my life, hurt the person I was with, or just live in regret forever because I couldn’t “pick a side”, a saying so commonly heard by bisexual people. It wasn’t until reading someone’s stories with ocd who installed the realization within me that what I was experiencing (the constant rumination of my sexuality and my future) one of the many subtypes of ocd, sexual orientation ocd. Hearing her story and how her experience was so similar to mine made me see that I am not alone. There is no such thing as picking a side. According to a thetrevorproject.org, it was mentioned by bisexual advocate Robyn Och, “bisexuality is, “The potential to be attracted — romantically and/or sexually — to people of more than one sex and/or gender, not necessarily at the same time, not necessarily in the same way, and not necessarily to the same degree.” This was the perfect way to word how it feels to be a bisexual. There is no right way or wrong way to feel an attraction, and that way of feeling attraction looks different for all of us. To anyone struggling with Sexual Orientation OCD, whether you are bisexual, straight, gay, or anything. You are unique and your feelings are true. There is no right way to love. Finally, you must learn to love yourself so you can in turn love somebody else. Thankyou if you read all of that haha.

Hey everyone, I’m still pretty new to OCD and was wondering if anyone has any strategies that help reduce OCD symptoms that are not compulsive.