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I have harm ocd and my friend has been self harming and I want to be there for them but I am not sure how to. Any advice?

This is not ocd related. But does anyone feel that they’re so used to being in toxic relationships instead of someone who actually loves you. I feel like in a way that’s why it feels numb and weird to be with someone who actually tries. It’s kinda like i associate pain with love if that makes sense In no way am i supporting anyone being in a toxic relationship just fyi lol

I've been struggling with my gender identity since about 2018 and have reached the point where I am currently on hormones. For a little bit I thought I was a woman but as time has gone on I've settled more into nonbinary as an identity. Now that I am on hormones, I'm noticing that some changes are positive in my mind and some give me a pretty decent amount of distress and doubt. I then discovered that TOCD is a thing and it's kind of thrown me for a loop since I already know I have OCD. I already had doubts but now I'm like, "Could I just be lying to myself and I actually have TOCD?", "Is this just a transphobic diagnosis that keeps people from living as they want?", "Is it possible for me to have TOCD and still be trans/nonbinary?". I'm going to have to talk to my therapist about it but in the meantime I would love some help understanding this whole issue. Thank you.

Does anyone else experience feeling of dread or just wanting to quit life and give up. I notice I get like this after intrusive thoughts. Last night I had a bad one. I was up until 3am I couldn’t sleep because I was obsessing over the thought. I have harm OCD and it makes me fear that I could harm my husband. It’s awful he’s the best thing in my world and I just want all of this to stop😭😭 How do you guys deal with feelings like these. Do you experience dread? Also is night time worst for you?

I'm worried that I, purposefully or not idk, used my bad mental health to make my friend have a bad night and worry about me because I feel like they don't care about me anymore. I feel awful. I hate myself.

Long story short it feels like I might have cheated on a class final project and my ocd is causing intense rumination and mental checking that I did nothing wrong or had no bad intentions. Also feel the urge to get validation from others if what I did was cheating or not and even confess to make the thought cycle stop. My question is how do I discern what I should truly feel guilt for vs what’s ocd just making my life harder by telling me I’m a bad person and done something terrible. How do I just let it go and move on without knowing for sure I did something wrong or confessing?

hey, i saw this on tiktok and i’ve been struggling really bad my whole life. i’ve never been diagnosed but im too scared that people will tell me im being dramatic or im making it up to get help. i think it started when i was in 1st or 2nd grade, i would come home everyday and confess things to my mom. like not taking my usual routes in the hallways and not returning a pencil to anyone. i dont know why it has to be her but i still do this. it’s like she’s my only comfort person and sometimes it feels like im just bothering her with it. i dont know who to talk to or what to do to fix it. everyone has told me that getting on medicine will only make it worse because if i come off of it it will be a whole lot worse. as i got older, it kind of left me for a while until earlier this year. i’ve always been told that having an extreme conscience was a good thing, but this feels awful. i turned to God which i still believe it but i don’t think it was the right way. i was overly paranoid that the end times were coming so much that i couldn’t do my daily routines. my sister has 2 babies and when i turned to Jesus it was also because i was having insane intrusive and embarrassing of doing horrible things to them. i didn’t even know who i was. i love both of those babies like they’re my own, i constantly come over to see them, bring gifts, etc and i could never intentionally hurt them but when i have these thoughts it’s like seeing yourself in a different perspective. when i signed up for this app a few minutes ago i think it said that was POCD. i would never do anything to hurt anyone, ive always been a very gentle and caring person so it’s kind of hard to argue with yourself. i was also at the time hitting an extreme point of paranoia about my health, constantly obsessing over everything because i thought i was dying. it left me again for a few months but now it’s back and i don’t know what else to do. i don’t know if this is ocd or if im straight out just a terrible person. any advice, comments, or anything is welcome!

This is my first post on this forum and I want to share my experience with OCD so far. I was diagnosed with OCD, specifically Harm OCD about 2 months ago. However, my OCD reached new heights at the beginning of 2023. My OCD began to manifest as extreme anxiety about my health, specifically my appendix and my heart. I was obsessed with a “made up” pain in my stomach and I constantly pushed on my stomach to the point that I bruised it. I ended up going to the hospital, spending thousands of dollars just for a doctor to tell me everything was fine. 15 minutes after leaving the hospital, the reassurance was gone and I was still worried. As that obsession fizzled out, I began to obsess over my heart and I had terrible panic attacks to the point that I could not breathe, I had physical pain in my chest, tightness, and pain in my left arm. I was convinced I was having a heart attack. Back to the hospital… and guess what? Thousands spent and the doctor said nothing was wrong. So I went and started doing traditional talk therapy and I did not follow the guidance and sort of faked my way through therapy and then my OCD reached an all new height and ventured into a very dark place: Harm OCD. It started while I was laying in bed and the thought was harm yourself, there were many ways that popped into my head constantly and I had to wake up my Dad to have a talk and get a plan. We scheduled an appointment for my therapist and at this point ultimately ended up scheduling with an OCD therapist. Shortly after the self harm ocd spiked, my ocd began changing themes to harming others. It seems ways to harm will just pop in, regardless of a trigger, and I started Zoloft which has calmed my anxiety and panic attacks, but I feel so numb it’s terrifying. Has anyone ever questioned their wants when dealing with with vivid harm thoughts that don’t go away? Do you question if these thoughts really bother you?

Hi! I am wondering if I am going about this wrong or backwards. I havnt spoken to a therapist and don’t even have a Diagnosis, I am only assuming I may have a form of OCD and well, not even sure if therapy would actually help. Never really thought I needed help. But I am curious about learning about myself more and bettering my self. Anyone have OCD/Hair pulling/ occasional intrusive thoughts? Im not sure if I am even in the right place. Also this took me over three days many restlessness nights and half my afternoon to actually type out….

Has anyone experienced like feelings of needing to cry for no reason and it’s like you can almost feel like this intense urge to cry but it’s not even appropriate for the situation?

Months ago I made a mistake at work and I havent brought it up. Im a grad student and part of my work is in the lab. I took some things out of the lab and into a different lab where there's more potential for cross contamination and I'm worried I may have contaminated them and someones lab work will be messed up but because I didn't say anything they'll never know. I feel like I need to announce what happened but it's been months, and I dont actually know if I did contaminate anything and Im embarrassed so I'd rather not. But it keeps popping up and haunting me. I know my OCD is at play right now, I'm not sure if this is a real fear or not...but I also think what I did was wrong, like there's a pretty common protocol to not take that stuff out of the lab, I just didn't think about it at the time. I could tell my advisor on Wednesday and see what she thinks I guess, but in the meantime I'm feeling consumed with guilt and it's hard to work. I know this is possibly an urge to confess so maybe it's good for me to wait? Any thoughts??

Ok so like already mentioned I’m extremely scared I might have sexually abused my dog in the past and now I feel terrible. I know back then my sister or even more family members were around and have already thought of asking my sister if she remembers sth. But just now my parents had called me for dinner and I just simply started to have tears running down my face because I feel so terrible and so of course my parents noticed and asked me if sth was wrong. My father doesn’t know I have ocd so I of course couldn’t blast out that I was scared I might have abused our dog and our dog was right next to me and that made me feel even worse. My mother kept asking if everything was alright bc the tears just didn’t stop flowing. At first I had excused it saying „oh that was just randomly in my eye I don’t know“ but the tears wouldn’t stop flowing and started forming in my other eye too so my parents knew sth was up. My mother asked me if I am being bullied at school or anything. If only she knew it’s even worse what I’m hiding. She said she would go upstairs after dinner and have a talk with me. Rn I’m sitting in my room and can’t stop crying anymore. But maybe she remembers this event or can ask my sister and maybe they can help me. I don’t know anymore I can’t deal with the uncertainty of this event. I don’t want to sexually abuse sb and I would never forgive myself for such a horrible crime. I keep hearing things from similar situations and people saying even worse things and then people responding by saying „you’re a different person now, everybody deserves a second chance“ but I’m not feeling this. If it had indeed happened the way I fear it, then I don’t want a second chance.

Hey guys, I‘ve been struggling a lot recently with the feeling that i in fact may not have ocd. I am feeling a tremendous amount of uncertainty and fear and i think i know where this is coming from. I‘ve dealt with psychiatrists and therapists in the past that i feel like were obsessed with maintaining psychological power over me, which is very toxic especially because of their high responsibility towards their mentally ill patients (who are not capable of dealing with this additional dimension of struggle in the phase where they do not (yet) have any trustworthy relationship with them) I felt abused, unsafe and so anxious; i never felt sth like this before. It was a bit like a black hole or the feeling of drowning. They kept making me feel like i have to prove my pain and one time my therapist literally said to me that my stuff i was telling him was basically nothing. And now i am constantly feeling like an imposter and think that others have it so much worse than me. Can somebody relate to this? Much love (P.S. i now, luckily, have a very understanding therapist where i feel quite comfortable and safe, but i‘m still not over my past experiences)

Does it usually bring great sadness? Besides anxiety?

I just mostly wanted to get this off my chest, I guess maybe some advice if anyone has any. I’ve noticed lately that my husband has been really distance lately. He doesn’t talk to much like today he has only said a couple of words to me and it meant very little. He less affectionate and doesn’t seem to care. I also notice every little detail about him. I know this is part of my OCD, finding little things that big become huge in my mind. But I’m having a hard time distinguishing if I’m really seeing something wrong or if I’m just making things bigger then they need to be like. I’m he has already lost interest in me during our short time of marriage. For context we’ve been together for 3 years and married for 6 months. I just been so sad about it lately, and when I asked him he says nothing wrong but I just don’t believe him.

At this point I don't care if I'm reassurance seeking. I don't know what else I'm meant to do. I know this next bit is practically another confession but I'm all out of other ideas. In advance I'm genuinely sorry and I hate this. So I'm pretty sure I romanticise like adhd and maybe autistic traits. I'm sickened by myself. I read, and I was reading and this character, while not said to have adhd, in my opinion had the traits that I associate with it. And I feel like I like those traits. Do I find them cute? Interesting? I literally don't know. Only thing I know is that I'm disgusted with myself. I also remember feeling "something", whether that be a groinal response from worrying about being attracted to these traits, or actually being attracted to these traits, I have no idea, it's 50/50. But I'm pretty sure that it's the latter. I feel disgusting all over. I'm going to have a shower because I was going to anyway, but this won't even make me clean again, I know it won't. I just want to apologise, that's all. I don't know why I'm like this. I don't like it. I wish I was different. I wish I could go back to being young when the only thing on my mind was what I was going to have for tea. I knew no wrong. Now look at me. I am the wrong. Also I can't tell people about my worries because all they'll say is that it's intrusive thoughts and ocd. Like, okay, sure, maybe I worry more than the average person, but these are real genuine worries and I hate them. Maybe I'm putting this on the wrong place but I have nowhere else. I'm sorry. I'm just sorry. Words can't describe how badly I'm sorry. I think of what people with adhd would think of me. I'm disgusting. Maybe I'm just feeling overly sorry for myself to make myself seem like less of a disgusting monster, but I genuinely am sorry. I don't want any of this. I just want to be a good person.

me and my boyfriend have had periods where we fight a lot recently. Ever since then, a lot of people, strangers, coworkers, classmates, anytime, I am around them, I find them attractive, or find qualities about them that are attractive. I feel like maybe this happens because I am lacking something that my boyfriend is not giving me. I just don’t know what, I’m really sad because I really do love my boyfriend and I don’t want anyone else, but these thoughts are really hard to deal with. I also have coworkers that are males that I speak to at work, and I always get intrusive thoughts while I’m talking to them or after. I’m really scared. This means I’m a cheater, or about to cheat. A lot of things have happened to me and my boyfriend’s relationship, not cheating at all but you know there’s way more than that that can happen. I feel like a lot of things have happened that we need to discuss and it’s been weighing on me and causing these thoughts. I feel like maybe I have these thoughts about other people, but my OCD makes it more than what it is and gives me anxiety. Help :(

Can i have soocd and ocd at the same time, can someone explain to me what does it mean pure o with soocd?

I've been having a really hard time fighting HOCD for 5 months know. It got worse and worse, and it ruins my new relationship as well. I had thouhths like what if I'm gay for a few years know, but I always liked girls, I had a girlfriend, had a lot of girls in partyies as well, and I never had any sexual attraction towards men so I could get over these thouhths, but HOCD got really worse in the last 5 months due to some big stress in my life. It is so bad, it makes me question everything, my basic values. I love this girl, she is the love of my life, but I started questioning first weather I like her enough, and then the what if I'm gay question came. I strugge with false attraction, and it is so bad. Deep down I always know I like girls, but HOCD makes me question everything, I get a lot of mixed feelings, sensations and urges as well. I love this girl, I know I want to be with her, but my OCD tells me every type of shit,like: you don't love your girlfriend, you want to be with men, you like men and so on, but I always have so much anxiety concerning everything with my life since OCD and I could not think to the future positively. Not to mention my sex drive lowered, I have ED before going into the sex part, and I have anxiety concerning the whole topic as well, and I always question everything, whether I like it or not. I do ERP for a few weeks now, OCD got better for 2 weeks but it got stronger know then before. I try to do ERP all day, but sometimes my OCD is stronger. Could you please tell your stories or share some similarities to know I'm not alone. Thanks.

Do you guys have certain shows/situations that are triggering to your OCD? Like for example since my brain has convinced me of thinking inappropriate things about children/babies, any shows I watch I get really uncomfortable when seeing kids and babies which makes me really upset. Also being around people or out in public and seeing kids or babies my OCD gets really bad. Does this happen to other people??