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Obsessive thoughts about being unable to sleep are causing insomnia. Has anyone experienced this or have any advice?

I just wanted to vent for a moment. But I'm so scared of being unable to find love. I'm 31, and have abstained from a LTR over the years, as I was putting too much on partners for validation and reassurance. I might as well have asked them to valiDate me. I am at a point of healing now where I think I am ready to re-enter the dating world but I'm fucking terrified. What if they find out about my intrusive thoughts and find me as disgusting as I find myself? I want to be human, but I've never been able to think of myself as such. What if they make fun of my past like my first real significant other did? I hate these thoughts. They're so terrifying. And I feel so alone. Which is where I tell myself I need to be, even if I don't want to be here. Thanks for listening.

please help. was anyone on here misdiagnosed? I just had a consultation with this young therapist and she said she doesn’t “think i have ocd” she says i have severe anxiety. I know I have OCD. nothing else explains this. I was vulnerable and told her all my obsessions and intrusive thoughts and how i do my compulsions to get rid of them or ease my anxiety. how i have to loop around 2-4 times driving thinking i hit someone or caused an accident. How i take videos and pictures and check 5 times if the stove and lights and water isn’t running and i turn it on and off until it’s just right. how i think i’m a bad person and i’m to blame for everything. how it makes me depressed because i obsess over things for 24 hours of the day for weeks and it makes my stomach hurt and i get all sweaty and anxious. I told her specific situations and how i think back on my past and will think i cheated on my partner when i was drinking and i’ll just never know and how i ask for reassurance. how i’m scared i’ll blurt out a slur or something bad and stuff i would just NEVER ever do and i felt horrible and gross. how i google 24/7 and have to do things 3 or 5 times. how i’m so scared of hurting people i can not drive or do anything normal. how i have to clean things and wash my hands because i’m so scared of contaminating somebody at work . i just felt so safe knowing that this diagnoses matches me. and this app helped me so much. and now she’s saying that i just have severe anxiety? I don’t know what to do. help

Hey y'all! Happy thursday! I am sharing this post again because I think some of y'all need to see it :) Please be gentle and kind to yourselves with your progress! Progress is not made overnight. The more you check, compare, and expect perfection, the more unrealistic your ideas of recovery will be. Keep that in mind! You have a whole community of people here backing ya up. You got this! How's everyone's day going? Feel free to chat in the commentsss😊💛

How did you tell your partner that you have OCD?

I definitely got better with NOCD help, I got better at reacting to thoughts. But I do not necessarily feel better, through all of this I definitely lost a whole chunk of myself that I can’t seem to find again

i fall asleep at 3 every night no matter how hard i try to go to bed earlier, wake up at 7, and then have intense anxiety just because i feel like i’ll get anxious, if that makes any sense. then i can’t go back to sleep. it’s been like this for weeks and i’m so exhausted… i have a handle on my intrusive thoughts and realize it’s just OCD, but i’m still getting the same intense anxiety without the fears. it’s like i’m scared to get the fears.

How do you guys stop compulsive googling at night? I can’t stop and it’s ruining my sleep. My brain is so active at night with thoughts and questions and sometimes they seem harmless but I can’t stop. It’s become an addiction.

Woke up this morning an the first thought I could think was an intrusive thought, sometimes I don’t think I even have OCD it seems so real, I struggle with POCD and it seems real it’s insane but I think over the years I definitely have struggled with other types of ocd since my childhood like I used to think about my family dying tragically and have intrusive thoughts like that and then as the years went on I think I developed a little bit of health OCD and would think there was things wrong with me specifically HIV/AIDS I can’t be bothered anymore

Question (and venting) about ERP I’m going to want to do ERP, but I’m really scared. I don’t know how I will be able to deal with the exposure, especially for hocd. I’m Catholic, and when I’m not experiencing a bad episode, I stand firm in my values and don’t doubt them. I don’t want to watch pornography. I don’t want to do anything unchaste. I truly believe that it’s a sin, and watching any kind of porn would be awful to me. I also used to have a mild addiction to masturbation, so I really am just scared. I’m scared that an exposure I will have to do will involve watching same-sex porn. It’s not even the fact that it’s same-sex. It’s the fact that it’s porn. I’m scared that I’ll fall back into masturbation. I did this summer, and it was awful. I don’t have these values and beliefs because I’m blindly following what I’m told. I have truly felt the effects of watching pornography and consistently masturbating. It made me feel awful before I was even Catholic. It made me feel dirty and wrong. Not just because someone told me it is. But because it feels wrong. It’s not natural. I started doing it at a very young age to try to understand what my abuser had done to me. I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to have to put aside my values to heal. I don’t want to have to go to confession and say “I watched porn to treat my OCD.” I don’t want to have to go into treatment constantly trying to defend my faith. I’m scared that I’ll get a therapist who tells me my religion is hurting me. Catholic people can suck. But I didn’t grow up with them. I chose to be Catholic. I chose to be religious. I chose this for God. I don’t want to have to turn my face from Him. My OCD is telling me that everyone who reads this will think I’m in denial and I’m ignorant and I’m stupid. Please don’t. That’s all I can say. Please don’t assume what all of my beliefs are. I don’t hold all the same beliefs as some people who are Catholic claim to. I truly believe in Love. I just want to be healed. TL;DR: Will I have to watch same-sex porn if it goes against my religion, values, and beliefs? Is that a requirement in order to heal from hocd?

Has anyone else noticed that your ocd will make a conclusion and then you feel awful? I used to watch a lot of true crime (don’t anymore because it’s triggering) and my brain wouldn’t even have enough time to process what was happening in the video before my ocd told me “you don’t feel bad for that person, you’re a terrible person.” But you hadn’t even had time to comprehend what had happened? I’m not sure if this is all over the place. But if you understand and have experienced it let me know.

Hi I’m worried I cheated on my bf and don’t remember and have been obsessing about it . I confuse things I’ve done prior to our relationship to during our relationship . I messaged a lot of boys and girls to get help from anxiety and scared I said anything wrong to the boys during that kind . I want to die, this is so stressful I’m terrible.

Vent I’m having a really hard time coming in here as a compulsion. I feel like I’m making that up. But I think it’s true. I just have no one to talk to OCD about. I could talk to my best friend, but I feel so ashamed about my thoughts. This is the only place that I have felt safe in 20 years (maybe an exaggeration, but it feels true). For the first time in my life, I /know/ that other people feel the way that I do. And I just want to feel safe so badly. So I’m stuck here. I don’t know what to do. I’ve been coming here because I don’t have therapy until next Thursday. My counselor is trained in EMDR, and we thought that’s what I needed to treat my childhood trauma. She has no idea that I think I have OCD because I found out like a week ago (after I already went to therapy). I don’t think she knows anything about ERP. I’m scared to lose her. She already knows about some of my fears, just not the fact that I think they’re OCD. I hate this. It feels like it has to be a secret. When I thought I just had anxiety, I didn’t mind telling people. Now the thought of telling people I have OCD feels awful. I already told my bestie, and she sympathized and told me that she thought the same thing after a previous conversation about my childhood struggles (we’re both psyc majors)..she just didn’t think it was right to tell me. When does this end? When do I stop obsessing over every thought in my brain??? I’m so tired. I slept almost all day. This is truly exhausting. I think I’m getting worse now that I’m aware of what’s wrong with me. I thought it was helping me, but I’m not so sure anymore.

Has anyone with hocd ever felt nothing (almost like an out of body experience) when kissing someone they thought they liked? I had never felt this way about a guy before and then when he kissed me today i just felt nothing. Like it wasnt me there. And i didnt have a panicked feeling either or anxiety really, all i was thinking was “you dont feel anything” all the time. It feels like i must be in denial. I dont know what to do, things were going so well and I genuinely thought i liked the guy so much but how could i if i felt nothing?

Ok so Christian OCD ers my OCD has been through the roof about all sorts. I was sat in my front garden listening to Christian music and sobbing. Basically Its a fear surrounding the unforgivable sin. Are there any Christians out there who can help?

I need help !. It just feels like I can't accept I'm gay or whatever. I'm so lost l. I try and say I'm gay to myself and that doesn't feel right either. And I'm trying to date girls but I think how can I with this going on 😔

This morning I kind of dissected my journey with Real Event OCD and it’s kind of funny, however depressing and not how I want things to be. So 7 years ago I struggled with Real Event OCD with a theme that would torment me for 3 years, at the time I had no idea it was Real Event OCD (having no clue about OCD in general at the time) but in retrospect it was a classic case. Anyhow, through the 3 year torment I basically went off the rails and lost control of my life thinking I was a bad person and I deserved nothing but the worst in life, I was suicidal, nihilistic, drinking, having risky sex, doing drugs, smoking cigarettes, getting silly tattoos - anything to punish myself. Everyone saw me as the funny non-conformist who rarely had a bad word to say about anyone - perhaps I was too preoccupied with having bad words with myself, plus the anxiety of not having people like me - oh the horror! I left that scene after the 3 years and started to make positive changes to my life, stopped drinking, stopped having risky sex, stopped doing drugs, stopped smoking cigarettes, started getting some tattoos removed. And I felt good, I still thought about the original theme but it just ceased to have power over me. Life was going real good. Then, you guessed it, I started to obsess over my past regrets and the 3 lost years of my life which as you can imagine I have a pretty sketchy memory of, but of-course I remember the “horrible” things I did during that 3 year period - in-fact there’s only one that I really obsess over (but many others things I feel like I knew better to do). And it’s excruciatingly painful. What I did wasn’t great, there’s a minute chance that it has had the effect that OCD tells me that it has… but if it did, I want to make it right, and apart from posting online my transgression in hopes that this person finds it so I can find the reassurance myself - there’s not much I can do. Through past compulsions I’ve found it’s rare, but what I’m worried about has happened before to people and bitten them in the arse. This, I’ve been obsessing over for nearly 2 years now and there have been some ups, but the downs are horrific. But there’s no end, and it drives me deep into wanting to find out this one little bit of information that will free me forever to live my life. I couldn’t even explain in words the relief I would feel. And that’s the pull, it’s the sheer overwhelming emotion of freedom it would provide. Sometimes I think “I wish it would just happen right now, because if my OCD is wrong, I will probably never know”. Don’t get me wrong, I would feel terrible about my actions, hell - I do now. My OCD tells me it would ruin me, and hey - maybe, maybe not eh? But I tell you one thing, it would severely change my life. I try my best to not do compulsions and do my best to do self-help. It reduces the anxiety, the guilt and shame remain but take a seat further back in the row - but the unworthiness of being helped can hinder all of these. I think I’ll try ERP one day, I’m currently seeing a therapist and he’s helping somewhat. I’m currently into spirituality and it’s hard to know whether I’m just into it to “purify the wrongs”, or whether I actually want to gain insight into spirituality, but I know deep down it won’t solve the “issue” I have. I struggle with perfectionism, and I used to act as “if there’s a scratch on the boat then the whole ship’s getting sunk”. But no more, I want to do right by myself and others, but Lord is it a painful thing this OCD. I guess what I’m getting at is, if only I’d have known about Real Event OCD 7 years ago and this may well have been avoided. And that made me chuckle for a moment.

Does ERP help?

Has anyone had a breakup or a major life change that triggered an OCD episode? How did you cope?

Does anyone mind sharing their experience with Zoloft? I’m interested to try it, but unsure about side effects. Thanks!