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Lately I’ve seen way too many comments under posts about OCD, especially the harm, POCD, and relationship themes that are incredibly misinformed and honestly harmful. People saying things like “these thoughts are unnatural,”or “you need to go get real help” and encouraging confession ***compulsions*** when they clearly have no understanding of how OCD actually works. Let me be clear: OCD involves distressing and unwanted thoughts, images, or urges. That doesn’t make someone dangerous. It makes them someone with a mental illness who is terrified of their own brain. Saying these people are “unnatural” or implying they’re broken only reinforces shame, and shame is the opposite of what helps anyone heal. If you’re commenting under OCD-related posts on an OCD ***app*** without understanding what intrusive thoughts are, or what compulsions can look like, or **how OCD can attach itself to the things we fear most** then please, stop. You are not helping. You’re reinforcing stigma and pushing people further into silence. OCD is already isolating. We don’t need more people moralizing or projecting trauma theory onto something they haven’t experienced or don’t understand. If you really care, go learn. Read about intrusive thoughts. Learn about ERP therapy. Or maybe just listen. Because some of us are barely hanging on, and comments like those don’t just miss the point, they can do real damage. I’m sorry if I come off too angry, it just really upsets me to see people speak on something they clearly don’t understand. End of rant. Thank you for reading 🤍

Trigger warning So I can’t stop wondering if I was attracted to this kid I saw a few days ago because I felt something that felt like genuine attraction, it made me worried I was a p, so I tried to leave the place immediately. I also had urges to look to check if I was attracted or not and urges to not to look. All of it made me feel like a genuine P. What is all of this I’m doing, are they compulsions? Or are they pr3detory actions?

I’ve been really struggling with Relationship OCD since I got married, and 3 years later, I’m afraid I’ve lost the love of my life. Between the Relationship OCD, the Religious OCD, and the Sexuality OCD, she couldn’t handle it anymore. Now that she left, the fog of doubt has faded, and I’m realizing how much I truly loved her all along. I just don’t understand how our minds can play such sabotaging tricks on us. And why? I don’t know what to do. I hope and pray we eventually get back together, but I know I need help. I want to do whatever I can to return to a place where she can feel loved by me, the way she did before ROCD took over. Is anyone here going through something similar? Has anyone overcome ROCD? Were you able to repair your relationship? I’d really appreciate any insight or advice. Thank you.

I’m really anxious because I know my ocd is really bad right now so I shouldn’t try to figure it out cause my thinking is a mess but I’ve been having feelings of like I’m not sure if I love him anymore or worrying that I haven’t felt a lot like numb (a lot because ocd has been getting worse and worse) and thinking of like how I’ve been focusing on the negatives and only been looking at him through that lens and analyzing and also feeling like I don’t want this anymore. Basically just like negative thinking in feeling like I’m really scared it’s that it’s I don’t love him cause I don’t want it to be over and the thought of having someone replace him makes me ill. But like it feels like I’m not seeing him how I used to and it makes me upset. Today I was near someone I was like oh this person is cute and then I was thinking that the possibility of meeting someone new sounds exciting and now I’m freaking out because this in combination with feeling like maybe I don’t love him anymore is bad. Also my thoughts keep changing. and like sometimes it feels like I don’t care at all and this has happened but like worst it’s ever been and then other times I’m like I do care I do still feel. I’m just really anxious has anyone else felt this before and it was still ocd? 😭😭

I just wanted to apologize for my last post, it was very angry and fearful, and I don’t think it was a great reflection of myself. I’ll try to avoid posting anything nearly as frantic or emotional again! Seemed like a lot of people avoided commenting on it, so I’ll avoid doing that again. Keep fighting your OCD guys!

I’ve heard it’s not good to seek reassurance or give it because it lowers your tolerance to uncertainty. But how do I avoid seeking reassurance when my thoughts and doubts are so bad, I genuinely just don’t know anymore if I’m a bad person or if it’s just OCD? I know I’m supposed to sit with the uncertainty, but how can I do that when the uncertainty has me unable to trust my own brain? Especially when the OCD is real event and POCD? How can I not seek reassurance when I feel so alone and so abnormal and just don’t wanna feel that way anymore? In turn, I see so many people on here struggling so bad and my heart breaks for them. How can I give advice to towers without giving them reassurance and hurting them in the long run?

Nobody responded to my post I feel like the worst person ever I don’t want to eat or do nothing you have no idea how in pain I am right now I feel worse than a P or a r

I've been doing more research on the ins and outs of Catholicism, and man are the guidelines very strict. They're not bad in any sense, and following them makes for a good person, but with ocd these guidelines seem near impossible to properly follow. For example, it's a mortal sin to have an impure thought, and commiting a mortal sin puts you in a state of sin. This means you cannot receive the eucharist (body of Christ) at mass, which is a way to connect closer to God. You have to confess in order to be free from mortal sin. This is fine and all, but this means in my case I'd have to confess almost every week, which can be so tiring. I'm not trying to bash on my own religion, but these guidelines make it so incredibly difficult for me to feel good about myself. Knowing I'm committing one of the worst forms of sin everyday. Intrusive thoughts are a constant thing, does that make me a child of sin? I even skipped mass today because I feel guilty about being in mortal sin, but skipping mass is also a mortal sin! I feel absolutely terrible about myself right now, and feel as if my connection with God has been cut and it's entirely my fault...

my thoughts are screaming at me telling me that i dont want my relationship anymore and that i realized i lost feelings. i have a beautiful relationship of two years with a beautiful boy that loves me dearly and i deal with this thoughs for a year and a half. Im so scared it feels so real im scared i have changed and my last therapy session made it worse she basically told me i have to realise the thoughts are true and stop lying to myself. And made me think i am so scared and heartbroken bc i put high expectations on myslef to be with my boyfriend for all my life. Maybe i dont want to hurt him??? im always questioning my feelings for him 24/7 for over a year. I wm tierd

Today I woke up with severe panic attack. My heart jumps out of my chest. As I do every morning. When I wake up and my brain is awake it automatically goes straight to intrusive thoughts about my partner, my life and everything else. That I don’t love her, I don’t want to be with her and she’s not the one for me and I should break up with her. This all happened from TikTok comments I saw that triggered this. Since then I haven’t been able to stop my thoughts. I know she is the one for me I know I love her I just can’t stop the thoughts. It feels so real. The voices feel so real.

I can't look at 18+ videos, comics, etc. I am straight, but SO-OCD tries to make me think I am not And the thoughts turns to feelings, and makes me scared, uncomfortable, sad, because I know this is not me. And when I try to imagine myself being with the woman on adult videos, and comics, my OCD gives gronal response not at the girl, and it fills me with fear, and anxiety, I always loved, and was attracted to women but I can't and it caused me to be depressed, and I keep ruminating I keep trying to focus on her, but it's so bad that I avoid those all the time now. I am wondering has anyone gone through something like this, or currently is, and wondering how you have done to combat this!

i was with my lover we didn't have that much time together and at some point she fell asleep because she was overwhelmed. at first, I was okay with it but as time passed I started to feel stressed andd annoyed, because i wanted to spend time together which is no excuse i feel bad about this. also, i hoped we might have been intimate ( i didn't tell her or ask her to be intimate tho) and the fact that she was sleeping meant that we couldn't cus we wouldn't have had enough time so idk i felt annoyed about that. i have this thing that i deeply hate where every time we have alone time together i get the hopes that we might be intimidate but when j realise we probably can't i start having this obsession where i have to reassure myself to the point of nausea because the idea of being disappointed ( or actually feeling disappointed) about not having sex terrifies me ,it makes me feel like im dangerous or that i want to force myself on her so i just start repeating to myself that it's fine. so like this obsession started happening, but im afraid that for a moment ( idk how brief it was, im deeply ashamed of this ) i felt justified about being annoyed about not having sex because she was sleeping and it's not fair cus she was struggling and overwhelmed and i should have cared about that not about fickle things. but still I was annoyed and stressed out ( because I also started feeling really guilty ) and when she told me she was sorry about her mood i don't think i reassured her properly, i told her it was okay but i wasn't that sweet, I was a bit quiet idk if i actually seemed annoyed. after a little while i tried to stop feeling this weird wnd i tried to focus on her and how she felt, so I cuddled her and tried to make her feel better. I reassured her that she had nothing to be sorry for, that it's okay if she had a bad day. in the end she did feel better, she thanked me a thousand times for being patient and kind but that made me feel even worse because internally i felt annoyed which is horrible. i feel terrible also, i tried to wake her up a few times. it's not unusual because she usually tells me to let her nap 10 minutes. so at first i let her nap for like 30 mins cus she had very little sleep that day, i wanted her to rest. and then j started to try and wake her up, when she wouldn't wake up i would let her nap a little while longer ( at least 10 mins ) but i feel bad because i probably was a little pushy because i felt annoyed about not having that much time together and so not having time to be intimate. idk. i feel horrible. i shouldn't be that annoying and annoyed about not having sex, It feels so scary that i insisted on waking her up, i hate being pushy. idk

(Long read) hello everyone. i was out of the country for about 3-4 months and traveling. my ocd was not that bad at all and I was able to handle it even if it came up. on my way back home, it immediately started. i have learned how to handle it better, but i am more sad and just “awaiting” for something bad to happen. for example, i have sexual themed ocd. pocd and family related stuff, and also my ocd targeted my pets for about a year and it manifested into compulsions that disturbed me and made me not want to be around my cats. now that i am around my cats, i feel like “what if i harm them or do something bad?” or “what if you do those weird compulsions that happened before?” , when i look back on the compulsions that happened, it doesn’t feel like me and it was clearly driven by ocd, but it makes me worry i am just a sick person. i know myself and i know im not, but i had such a weird childhood and then ocd from 15 years old and up. so when these weird compulsions had happened , whether it was for the pet ocd theme or pocd or the family ocd, it feels like some sort of proof. anyways, i feel a bit for content with myself but i know how real ocd can feel and i just remember feeling so hopeless and suici da l, i just don’t want to go through that again. i take a more spiritual route of life and healing, and i wonder if anyone has some deep spiritual warmups or practices i could do to maybe open up my mind more? maybe to realize this is all in the mind? but also to not fight it… Not fight it meaning not let it take over my life. i racked up so much debt in therapy and i truly think i can get through this alone i just need a bit of help. but i dunno. any advice would help! thanks everyone ☀️

I guessed someone had a mole on their back, I basically saw the photo first then zoomed in and guessed they had a mole. (It’s a weird compulsion) Chatgpt told me that maybe I saw a shadow in the image first and that’s why I guessed? Now I want to so badly go & find the image again and see if I could’ve seen any shadows. I’m trying not too.

I sometimes see posts on here of people saying their OCD fears becoming true and it’s so so triggering for me. It makes me question if I ever had OCD and if I’m just faking it. I’ve tried to accept that my fear was real. Okay? Before I knew this was OCD, I really TRIED to accept it as a part of myself because I figured if I was even having those thoughts, it must be true. But in reality it just made me feel worse in the end. It wasn’t until several hours/few days after accepting the thoughts as true did I realize they were not and how uncomfortable it made me identifying with them that way, so eventually I went back into the rumination cycle. And I’ve done this multiple times. No matter how much I’ve accepted it as real, I never come to a conclusion in the end and I just get 10x more miserable. And I am still so scared of my fear coming true as those peoples did. But I know that’s what we all fear, otherwise we wouldn’t be here. And with a new fear I just developed, (all in the realm of the same theme) I’ve also tried to accept it as real when I felt SUPER convinced and even though it felt excruciatingly real, there was a part of me that couldn’t fully believe it, because I just know viscerally that it’s not. But the feeling of it being real is just too powerful and it overmastered any ounce of insight I had left. It wasn’t until my OCD spike calmed down when I was able to see through the viel. I hate this. I have no desire to do anything that my thoughts tell me. I know what I want to be, want to do, and it’s the opposite of those OCD thoughts. But these triggering posts won’t leave. (Not really the publishers fault, it’s my ritual that I engage in). They make me come all back to square one (if I wasn’t there already) and question if I’m using this as an excuse. I don’t want to do what my OCD tells me to do, but my brain just spits, “you’re just convincing yourself you don’t want this!” as it so often now does. I’m so tired. Please give me my old self back. Please give me 100% certainty that none of this is real and my fears are not at all based in reality. My brain cannot accept uncertainty and will not leave me alone. My brain is raged and powerless without knowing why, and spiels that anger back on me to get a reaction, and when it gets what it wants, the cycle continues. And goes way longer than I had bargained for :(

This is killing me slowly day by day, im a straight female 20 years old, i started getting hocd after a break up with an ex and coming off intense use of 🍁🍃 for a few years on and off, i think it has messed up my brain so bad… my hocd is weird because ive been with men my whole life always wanted to be with men.. i also used to always question every relationship “do i love him? Does he love me? Am I with the right person?” Anyways after my hocd triggered my tocd due to researching hocd and finding they can often be linked, I started getting tocd and it’s worse then ever because it’s not who I want to be and I’m going back to situations where my abusive ex partner called me a “man” during a fight. I’ve always been a tomboy but never had same sex attraction. Help. This is killing me. I haven’t been able to study or leave the house most days, and work! I’ve lost motivation for everything and I’m in a dark hole. I need some success stories please

I know right now i shouldnt ask for reassurance... and that its unhealthy... but right now i am so triggered by the events on my previous post and I just need someone to respond so so basly...

Youtubers are constantly getting accused of doing p*dophilic activity and its making me think my real events are as bad or as worse as them... Ive vented a lot to a lot of people in the PM's about my OCD... some of them younger (minors)... because I wanted reassurance from everyone and anyone... but this situation triggers me the most because I was venting about my 18+ HOCD situations... In an HOCD support group I was in, I vented to 2 minors in the PM's about my 18+ HOCD situations... The leader of the support group (that i vented to) was 17... I was 19 at the time... the other minor i vented to was younger (14-15)... the younger one told me she was uncomfortable when i vented to her in the PM's twice... i stopped and blocked her after she told me the second time... i kept asking the leader of the support group for reassurance for my 18+ HOCD situations for months because she kept giving me reassurance... i thought she was cute but didnt pursue her because of my age... i dont ever want to ever be a P or a MAP or a groomer in any way... I keep getting this gut feeling in my stomach that i "flirted" with the younger one that I vented to, who i blocked after she told me twice she was uncomfortable about me venting about my 18+ hocd situations... i didnt ever vent to them for malicious intent... I was trying to get reassurance for my hocd... Plus my pocd keeps saying I cant have any opinions online because of my pocd and real events ocd situations and that Im not a good person so I cant say anything online... Also i keep getting intrusive thoughts of people labelling me as a P and a MAP in the future because of these pocd real events... And i keep getting intrusive thoughts of being outcasted and "cancelled" online when someone "exposes" me for my POCD and real events OCD...

I want to get thought this weird horrible period, it has been horrible. I am doubting everything. I’m not diagnosed but when I look at my past I’ve always been horribly anxious and worrying about health, death and basically everything while suffering from major a lot of insecurities stemming from bullying and lately a lack of intimacy with my partner, Every time I think I’m on the way out, or see some light at the end of the tunnel my mind always pulls me back in. It’s torture. I’ve always been insecure about how I look and I find myself comparing myself at other males and it’s made my self esteem on the floor. I have a girlfriend and prior to this we had a future planned and talked about kids (we’re still young, but it felt so real), this all began to bubble when we stopped being intimate and the loss of my job. I don’t know anymore how to move on, every day feels like a chore. The intrusive thoughts telling me I’m in denial, constantly thinking about men I’ve felt insecure about their looks compared to mine wishing I looked like them plaguing my mind. The false attractions, prior to this i was comfortable in acknowledging good looking men. However now my mind takes this as evidence, every single thing in my past seems like some form of evidence. Not having male friends, the comparisons, being questioned about my sexuality from siblings. I’m sorry if this is reassurance, I am just needing to get some things of my chest. Every time I think about my first real attraction or girls I found pretty/attractive or I liked my mind is like your in denial and then I feel horrible about thinking those thoughts as I have my girlfriend. I miss just being with my girlfriend and not having these thoughts and feeling horrible. I feel like a fraud and a horrible partner. I’ve tried to accept maybe, maybe not, but something always comes back. These 4 months have been terrible. I want to sleep without horrible dreams, I want to eat. I want to feel like myself again. Thank you to anyone who reads this. Hope you’re strong too.

I’ve recently been struggling a lot with OCD. I have had OCD for a long time I just didn’t realize it until more recently. About seven months ago I developed panic attacks one day randomly at work. I thought I was having a heart attack and went to the hospital where they told me it was just a panic attack and I assumed I would snap out and be better within a few days. However it didn’t. Here’s where it gets scary, I was staying at my then boyfriends house while dealing with blurry vision, anxiety attacks everyday, and more (unsure of what was going on). But at some point I saw my bfs (pew pew 🔫) on his table and it sent me into an anxiety attack after sudden thoughts that I was going to hurt myself with it. I begged him to put it away when I’m not looking so I didn’t know where he put it. He did. These thoughts lasted for about four days but began to go away. (I thought that was it and I would be back to normal). Unfortunately though I ended up moving back in with my family when we couldn’t get my panic attacks under control in time for me to get back to work and pay bills. However, coming home brought up a lot of trauma from when I was kid. My anxiety got worse but I didn’t have those thoughts again. About two and half months ago though, I got sick and went to the hospital where they gave me steroid pills and a steroid shot but sent me into some kind of psychiatric event. Ever since then though, I have been suffering from harm OCD, I have had moments of intense anger that I usually have to completely walk away and go on my own because of how intense they are, and it feels like it’s getting worse. Today I felt fine until about and hour and half ago where I started to dwell on the fact that my suicidal thought was influenced by my OCD and at the moment my OCD is at the worst it’s been. This caused me to get suddenly really depressed and I started crying thinking about how I can’t handle this. I then saw a post talking about how suicide rates are high for people with this form of OCD and it made me question if I am mentally strong enough to pull through this. I fear that at times I’m getting worse. I have good days but I have a lot of bad days. Unfortunately this sent me into such a bad panic attack I went over to my nanas crying about how I can’t deal with this. I took a 0.25 mg Xanax which helped calm down the panic attack portion of it but my brain is still uncomfortably active. I guess I just need hope. I’m so saddened by this. It’s like my life took a total 360 in 10 months and got even worse since the steroid shot. Idk what to do about it. I can’t stop the spiral. I talk to two different therapist weekly and start more next week, making it 5 times a week. I feel no improvements…