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I feel like the worst kind of person and I am ruining my husband. I don’t know how I’m going to be able to change.

does anyone else get flashbacks of things they’ve seen due to giving into their compulsion??? whenever i’m having a remotely normal time or having fun or thinking of making a big decision i have flashes of videos or pictures or just made up scenarios that are related to horrible things i’ve seen and compulsively watched and did stuff with. it immediately kills my mood and makes me ruminate about it and i think about it over and over. i find myself wondering if ocd drew me to do those things or if it was genuine attraction. what if im a horrible monster who’s into awful and illegal and morally wrong stuff??? what if im using ocd to cover it up and it’s not ocd it’s just i thing i was into??? these thoughts are never ending and show up at the worst times. i’m terrified all the time. it renders me sick & unable to make any decision because i’m afraid if i choose to do so it’ll make everybody aware of the things child me/young teenage me did. it feels like all my past traumas and experiences are being blasted on a jumbotron. i’m even scared to post this. again does anyone else know what i mean + does anyone know how to “get over” this feeling/any tips???

( First I appologize this is so long I feel really bad) I work at a daycare and I am new to my job. so am terrified of being mean or disciplining a kid or if someone snaps at me or is mean to me I can’t snap back or else in my mind I am a terrible person and I will not be able to forgive myself for the longest time. I am constantly asking people if I was accidentally mean without me realizing it. A long time ago I was manipulating and emotionally abused and other abuse happened to me and J struggled well before the abuse as well. The abuse made it worse, now I feel a lot of shame for feeling my emotions. I am a happy person with a lot of anxiety and depression if you met me J am super patient. At my job it was my first time running a room with 6 kids under 24 months. I LOVEDDD it sooo much! However kids started to bite each other and a couple of them were crying and there was one that kicked me I told them they couldn’t bite or kick which was super hard for me going again my thoughts but it was to protect them and even that is so hard on me! I can’t disapline a child without feeling unbelievable shame and guilt. From there they told me since the biting happened I will no longer be able to run my own room and I was very discouraged about myself and it spiraled into I am not a strong enough person and I am a bad person or I am going to turn into anbad person if I displine and I began hyperventilating and almost passed out. I know disaplining doesn’t mean being mean but my mind says I am an awful person if I do or if I don’t do something perfect at my job then it says I am terrible. I am worried I will be fired and this is my first real job. I have been beating myself up over it a lot. However I feel like I can’t change it without unbelievable anxiety coming with it. I love kids but I want to do what’s best it is so hard with anxiety thoughts I am not for sure what to do thank you!! I was wondering if anyone happen to have advice? I spiraled into I got the wrong job and I shouldn’t be working with kids even though I love it and one of my favorite things in the world! Thank you! 😊 Ehat do I do in this situation? Then I got into trouble for not being an adult and had very bad anxiety about that what all do I do? Thank you!!

I find that the intrusive thoughts that hurt me the most are the quiet ones. The ones that, at a glance, can be hard to differentiate from your own thoughts. The louder thoughts are easy to diffuse, to say "maybe, maybe not" to but the quiet ones leave me ruminating for hours trying to figure out if they're mine or OCD's. They leave me feeling disconnected from those around me and even from myself. I can go from happily thinking about marrying my boyfriend in the future to feeling like I have never actually loved him in a matter of minutes all because a thought was a whisper rather than a scream. This is my first post and I'm not sure what I'm looking for in making it. Advice? To know I'm not alone? I guess if there's anything you feel the need to share I'd love to hear it.

Have you ever felt the need to hide knives because you’re scared someone might hurt you while you’re sleeping? Or have your thoughts ever tried to convince you that you have feelings for your family members? Maybe you feel like you need to tell your parents to “drive safe” every time they go somewhere, believing that it will prevent them from crashing, or that something bad will happen if you don’t. These are things I’ve experienced, but they didn’t last long, and because of that, I’m unsure if I actually have OCD, as these thoughts don’t happen frequently. I’m 17, so maybe it’s still developing, but I’m not sure. At one point, I even thought I might be a psychopath and would become a serial killer (i was analyzing my past and feelings but it went away quickly) When I was a kid, I was also scared I had a tumor and constantly needed reassurance from my parents that everything is okay, but it wasn’t as intense. Recently, I’ve been scared that ghosts would come or that a demon would possess me, or that if i open my eyes i will se my dead uncle (i was 16😂) which kept me from sleeping. Are these signs of OCD? Should I consider getting treatment? About three months ago, I had my first big obsession about possibly having OCD itself (i was scared of going crazy, of feeling like this forever, of not being perfect, of not having control), and now I’ve been struggling with HOCD for three months. But I’m scared that I don’t even have OCD, and that these thoughts might be true. It’s funny because just a few months ago, I was terrified of having OCD, but now I feel like I want to have it. I think a traumatic experience with weed might have made my OCD worse, but I’m not sure. What do you think? I also found out that my mom is also hiding knifes and that she was also obsession over sickness…

some days I wake up with so much dread and guilt. It makes it so hard to keep going. I open my eyes and I’m hit with a wave of nausea and terror. I feel ashamed of my compulsions and my OCD. I feel like a monster for my checking compulsions. For momentarily sexualizing things that shouldn’t be sexualized out of anxiety. I’m ashamed of a lot that I give into because of anxiety. Confessing things that are meaningless to my boyfriend. I feel so awful and unworthy of existing and of love. I feel hopeless I don’t want to keep pushing, the more I push the more meta my OCD becomes and the more guilt I feel for this mental illness. The more confusing it becomes to do ERP. If compulsions are a choice, they feel like life or death and it’s driving me insane, I beat myself up so badly over them I’m scared of compulsions, I’m scared of thoughts, I’m scared to be awake, I’m even scared of sleeping because my intrusions and compulsions haunt me there too. I spend my dreams trying to explain or justify my OCD and compulsions to people. I’m exhausted, I want this to stop so badly. My severe OCD isn’t feeling any less severe and it’s been months. I don’t want to keep questioning my every move but I’m so hyperaware of everything I do. I’m so tired. Some days I don’t even have tears to cry with. I’m just so full of despair and shame

I hate when false memory targets memories where I was half asleep. For example, earlier this morning im guessing 2-3 am i dunno but I was half asleep, I turned my head and saw my cats butt in my face. I grabbed my cat tail and put the tail over his butt, so his butt will not be in my face and his tail will cover it. I think he ended up moving to cuddle, or I grabbed him to cuddle with me., but my cat ended up licking my hand and it gave me a groinal response. I am pretty sure that moment it did make me feel weird and uncomfortable, but I just tried to sit with it and ignore. I’m also sure that I just told my cat to leave, or just let him go. But my ocd is making me feel like i did something wrong or like WHAT IF YOU DID. Like no matter how much i try to figure it out my chest hurts so bad and i keep rethinking about it and i can’t find where I did something wrong but my brain is like what if you did this but you were half asleep so u don’t remember. Like this is super difficult. My chest hurts so bad like im trying to not think about it but wtf.

So, back when i was 18, i got involved in an online art/rpg community through instagram. We would make characters, draw them, join group chats and talk about our characters interacting with each other- if was chaotic, but fun, and i got hooked. Eventually, as the group kept growing, people started making different discord servers, each surrounding different stories with over-arching plots, and everybody would develop their characters and have them interact. Imagine a mix between DnD and a collaborative novel. I started dealing with severe OCD when i was about that year, in the depths of quarantine, and these servers became an escape for me. There was one in particular that was very involved lore-wise, and i was very deeply invested in because one of my characters had a romantic arc with one of the server hosts characters. It wasn’t until i started dealing with POCD when i began to have issues with the server. The issues begin with the fact that the age range of people on the server was very wide, ranging from high school to college aged. I believe the youngest person in the server was about 13, but i didn’t interact with her much. I was homeschooled and i have younger siblings, so i’ve never had a problem with having younger friends- growing up, i had a best friend who was 2 years older than me, and through high school until just recently, my best friend was 2 years younger. That friend was actually in this art community as well, i got her involved during quarantine. The point being, i never even considered that having younger friends might come off as creepy. There were definitely inappropriate jokes being made in the server, but i tended to roll my eyes and brush them off. As far as i recall, i never made any myself- i didn’t even dare to start swearing until i was 21, i’ve always been a bit of a rule-follower- but my best friend did make suggestive jokes on occasion, and i would laugh, and now i worry that i goaded her on. There was one specific occasion where the two of us, along with a few other people- i don’t remember all of them, but one was my age, 19, and another would have been about 16 at the time- ended up in a separate discord chat, and they were all cracking jokes about creepy discord mods, calling each other “kitten” and being generally icky for the shock factor. I remember being very uncomfortable at the jokes being made, and i believe i even said so, but in a lighthearted “omg stop” way, when i should have just left. There were a few similar instances where people got a little too comfortable, and i just put up with it and laughed along instead of leaving, which i very much regret. The community eventually started to fall apart. Drama between members was the main reason- the server owner called another adult member out, saying some of her characters had ships with characters belonging to minors that were too explicit. This whole thing was shocking to me. i talked to both of them, considered them both my friends, and didn’t know what to believe. Looking back now, i very much think they were both in the wrong- the server had a “NSFW” art channel that you needed a special role to access, but the owner had set the age requirement to 17 instead of 18 because a younger member whom she was close with had asked her to. I believe i was told this secondhand by my best friend, who always knew more drama than me, and i had marked it as strange, but shrugged it off because it wasn’t my friendship, and i wasn’t in charge. I also have a tendency to trust the judgement of literally anyone else over myself, so if i did have any doubts, i would have brushed it off as my overthinking things. The server died eventually- the owner disappeared, so the plot couldn’t progress further, and i’m pretty sure there was a lot more drama going on that i wasn’t privy to, which is fine by me. I was in therapy while a lot of this was going down, so i told my therapist a lot of it- at the time one of my main concern was another adult member about my age who had gotten too comfortable making sexual jokes with one of the high schoolers, and i did eventually message him and ask him to be more mindful- he did agree that he had been out of line and promised to be more careful in the future. It’s been about 3 years now since i left the community- i still keep in contact with a couple people, but i’ve parted ways with the majority. However, i’m still absolutely wracked with guilt over the entire thing- i was friends with some of the minors, too. There was one friend, 3 years younger than me, whose character was going to have a romantic arc with one of mine at one point. I remember warning them that my character was asexual as a way of warding off any weirdness, and i think they might have made some joke back about their character “not having time for that anyway” though i can’t clearly recall. They also really liked one of my other characters at one point, and would make flirty comments about them- i can’t remember what i said in response, probably some form of “they’re flattered”. I worry so much that i might have encouraged it, and that makes me predatory. Most of my guilt comes from the fear that i’m guilty by association, that being there at all makes me a creep, that i should have said something sooner or just left. Another part of me doesn’t even fully believe that the server owner or the other girl she was fighting with were bad people- i was friends with them, we were in the same online spaces for years! It’s so stupid, but i genuinely compared my own behavior to theirs, used them as a measuring stick to make sure i wasn’t doing anything wrong when my OCD started raising alarm bells. To this day, i still can’t tell if i’m blowing things out of proportion. I know i need to be in therapy again- this has been weighing on me so heavily recently, making me feel nauseous and doomed for literal days at a time- but i could really use some outside perspective. That RPG used to be such a comforting form of escapism to me, but now just remembering it makes me feel vile. i feel like i need to go back through all of my old chats and make sure i didn’t say anything gross to anyone, but i’m so afraid of what i might find, the thought makes me ill.

So after my ocd has become more prominent, it gets harder to fight through these compulsion’s everyday. I don’t go to therapy or take any medications and to be honest I am very lost in my journey on how to navigate life with ocd. I don’t want it to take over my life. I want to be able to feel like I can live without a weight on my chest and to finally feel like I can breathe. Any suggestions or words of advice is more than welcome.

When I talk about how terrible I used to be to my girlfriend it makes me feel like I’m gonna do it again which I don’t wanna do and it scares me and then I get intrusive thoughts and feelings about it doing it but I don’t want to, weird I know.

I feel so worthlessssssssss. I feel like I’m not even me anymore . Like my ocd is me.

A little sad and down. I just feel uncomfortable in my own skin. I grew up with trauma, made mistakes, dealt and still deal with hyper sexuality, and my ocd is so bad. All of this makes me feel tainted, like a weird bad person. I hate being around people and even talking to therapist bc I feel like ive successfully fooled them. Also, I recently saw a POCD hate train on TikTok so now I just feel like a fraud. I get all these thoughts and feelings that im just using ocd as a mask because I actually am a bad person.. and that im some sicko or something, and also my brain tells me and I go back and forth with myself about “oh you just have morals because you don’t want to be shunned from society, and if you were to have no rules you would do disturbing things” and I know I wouldn’t, because I have morals now that are ingraved into me…I just want a normal life. I just want to feel normal. I tend to feel useless in this world, when I really want to do good things but I feel tainted and like I taint this world. I try not to let this consume me but it’s hard.. If you read this thank you. I know I am just in a funk right now but sometimes I wonder if it will be a forever funk… or that I need to “accept” im a bad person so that I can move on… which I won’t bc even if I am (maybe maybe not… I will never know with ocd) I wouldn’t want to be.

Today I've let myself go down a huge rabbit hole regarding this phrase and it's stressing me out. Sometimes, yes, it is that deep. But other times, it really isn't. I keep finding myself torn between these two ideals. I've been seeing all these videos regarding the rise of anti-intellectualism and the anti-woke mob, all that. These videos make me extremely worried about cancel culture and moral guilt, and they had me rethinking every morally wrong, gross, questionable thing or thought I ever had. I saw many comments saying that yes everything is that deep and it feels like my mind is on constant security and asking myself "what would the internet think about the things I've thought of or may have done?" On one hand, I feel like if I say "it's not that deep", I feel like a hypocrite or a bad person or an idiot. But on the other hand if I say "it is that deep", my OCD begins to spiral and analyze everything about myself. It's not healthy to overanalyze everything but it's also not healthy to ignore bad things. It's very stressful Does anyone relate to this?

So I havent started NOCD therapy yet, I see my therapist on Monday. Backstory- I was on paxil and I started having lots of break through anxiety/panic last year. So in December my dr and I decided that I should try a different SSRI. On dec 27th I started a crosstaper off paxil on to lexapro. Little over one week I did 15mgpaxil and 5mg lexapro. Then I did a little over 1 week on 10mg and 10mg of both. Then went to 5mg paxil and 10mg lexapro. Then 2.5 paxil for a couple days then on Jan 21st I start just 10mg lexapro. From there I did about 18 days on 10mg then moved to 12.5mg lexapro. Then this past Saturday I went up to 15mg. During this I have been taking ativan for my anxiety and panic attacks. I had ativan or xanax to take as needed before but during the starting of lexapro I have been taking ativan almost everyday to cut the anxiety. Then I googled if I was addicted/dependant on my ativan and got scared from what I read. Then I started reading about ativan withdrawals and that scared me. So last night and this morning I've been spiraling on if I'm going to have a seizure from the ativan and I started panicking this morning when all I wanted to do was lay down and sleep in since I didn't have to go anywhere today. Since I started panicking I took my ativan and now I feel like a loser. I just want the lexapro to start working so I can feel some what normal again. I have good days and bad days and yesterday and today were bad days... When does this get better... I hate worrying about my health and if something is wrong or if something will cause me to get sick. Im scared to die and my emdr therapist says that means that I love being alive and respect life but then why do I waste it worrying and living in fear

Prior to coming to college, I knew that I was having thoughts that other people weren’t having and that it controlled my actions or feelings of guilt in a way that I just couldn’t see in my friends but I ignored it. Since coming to college, my compulsions and stressful thoughts have gotten a lot harder to handle and my new friends have started pointing out that they think I have OCD. I’ll try to explain some of the reasons people have pointed out or I’ve noticed but at the end of the day I always question if I’m just doing these things for some sort of attention or something. I have this strong belief that when I’m walking on pavement, the amount of times that I start stepping on a tile with either my right or left foot have to match. And people always ask me if I’m just superstitious about stepping on the cracks but I don’t mind that as long as I make it match with my other foot. The problem is that whenever I’m unable to “make the tiles or cracks match” I feel like I’ve left some universal channel open and something extremely bad will happen to me in the next 24 hours (after that it resets). Sometimes it makes me look weird when I’m walking and it’s really embarrassing when people ask me about it and I can’t fully explain the concept to them. People generally just get confused and I feel like they just regret asking and think I’m weird. Once, when I was walking down the street with some of my friends, i ran out of tiles to make my steps even and totally FREAKED OUT. I got really anxious and I couldn’t stop bouncing my leg. One of the people I was with made me feel terrible about it when he said “wait that’s actually real?” So now my fears of faking OCD just because has become a bit more real to me since my friends don’t understand the full extent of how it makes me feel, even when they’re actively seeing me break down. Besides this, which is really the most inconvenient part of my potential OCD, there’s a multitude of other things I’ve noticed that show signs of it. Whenever I take a test, I have to be wearing at least 2 hairbands on my wrist and be wearing a sweater in order to do well. Numbers really matter a lot to me because they each have a different meaning and I’m scared of some of them. When I was little, and even now in other instances besides sleeping, I used to count how many times I rolled over before I fell asleep in fear that I would land on one of the bad numbers. For example, 1 would mean a serial killer was in my room, 3 would mean something would come out of the mirror, 4 would mean a doll came to life and was trying to murder me with a knife, etc. They all sound like stupid fears and are highly improbable but it used to feel very real to me. Now I still associate those numbers with the bad things but I’ve worked on trying to expose myself to certain numbers some nights and find some safe ones. Now the number 4 has changed in meaning and evolved into my worst fear, the zombie apocalypse. This all ties back to my tile crack issue because when I “leave the channel open” by making my steps uneven, the number I mess up at (ex: 4 tiles started on the right means I need to start the next four with my left) is the chaos that the channel will bring. Also, I constantly feel like a terrible person because I’m scared that I’m faking my sexuality even though I only like girls. I’ve been closeted for so long throughout high school that sometimes I feel like my current shame and fear of telling important people in my life (ie. parents, family friends, people who I feel are slightly homophobic) is a sign that I’m not like devoted enough to my sexuality – making me scared of calling myself a lesbian. I’ve also never been with a girl because I only recently came out at college and it fuels my rumination that I subconsciously must just be asexual or once again doing it for attention. I’ve tried dating guys to make my mom believe I wasn’t lesbian but kissing them or the thought of spending the rest of my life with a man always makes me literally cry. I go to Virginia Tech and the lack of an LGBTQ+ community here is making my coming out process and search for a true relationship extremely difficult and bleak. Whenever I see a girl I don’t find attractive (even though I see a bunch that I do) it scares me and makes me think I might not actually be lesbian even though I like girls. Idk what to even say about this it just sucks. There’s so much more that I can relate to based on the discussion board such as fears of accidentally having pdophelia and cheating on people I’m not even dating. But at this point I feel like I’ve already written an essay and I don’t even know where to start with the different types of OCD and where to seek a diagnosis. The hardest part about asking for help or guidance is the fact that I never attempted to get diagnosed, making it feel like I can’t even claim that I have it. Thanks for reading this, please write back if you can relate at all :)

I posted recently on this app about my false attraction Someone told me to stop obsessing and you'll know whether they're really false..! it triggered me But when i tried to calm down and asked myself am I really attracted to girls i heard a voice YES..😓 Like i havent been professionally diagnosed with hocd And also im too young they say im just exploring.. but how??I've always been interested boysand i ve always had supportive background but i dont want to am into coming out process? Im going crazy now, cant feel anyting almost out of breaths...

hi this is my first post on here and I’m in desperate need for anyone to hear me out and offer support or advice or just about anything even though I’m fully aware reassurance is a nono A little about me : early 20s, straight female (my soocd would disagree lol) and mild to moderate autism I started seeing an ocd therapist a couple months ago and she was lovely. I was coming out of a difficult period of my life where I had stopped my ssri and that decision bit me in the ass because my ocd came back in full force (soocd, real event, pocd, rocd, pure ocd thoughts, statements, etc ) For the most part all of my themes have settled but today my rocd has struck so hard I can barely function, I’ve been a crying wreck all day feeling sick with shame and guilt over my fears with my bf and not finding him attractive all the time or when I notice other attractive men and sometimes I question if he is it for me because he is my first everything so I have nothing to compare to and all these thoughts are so overwhelming (even normal curiosity about dating other people freaks me out) I love him so much (at least i think i can never be 100% certain) and that’s what *obviously* scares me. No one here can tell me how I feel but I’m just so scared and the guilt and shame is eating me alive Another trigger of mine is the fact he wasn’t my type physically when we first met (we weren’t dating then) but overtime I started to like him a lot his personality complimented mine and he became attractive to me and I felt all the lovey feelings and excitement Essentially I’m scared I don’t really love him because if I truly did I wouldn’t notice or fixate on his physical flaws or the things he does or doesn’t do that bother me sometimes I try to think logically he probably has similar thoughts about me but doesn’t bat an eyelid Im just so tired and I can’t see my therapist till Friday :((

Hello there. I’m new here and think I may have OCD I’ve struggled with anxiety my whole life. However, in my early teens, I started experiencing obsessive fears and engaging in compulsions because my brain convinced me that if I didn’t perform a certain action a specific number of times, it would “prove” that I wanted something terrible to happen. When I was 17, I began seeing a therapist and opened up to her about this. She diagnosed me with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), and I accepted the diagnosis But last night, I became curious about whether people with GAD engage in compulsions and have specific fears, so I looked it up. I was shocked to learn that these are not typical characteristics of GAD Now, I would love to find a therapist who specializes in OCD so I can get a formal diagnosis and the appropriate treatment

Finding this app has helped me a lot in feeling like I'm not isolated and I've definitely met so many kind and helpful people here. You guys have helped me on my darkest days. However, because of my fragile state of mind, I think scrolling on here is becoming a compulsion and I feel like I end up triggering myself more by scrolling through some posts. I think it just ends up adding more to my intrusive thoughts and more ammo for my false memories and POCD to latch on to. And I know exposures are good for treating OCD, but this level of exposure seems to be doing more harm than good. So I will try to be less active (maybe I won't, who knows lol).

I want to have a crush on Pennywise cause I just think he looks good character wise but people say his true form is female but the Robert gray is also supposed to be Pennywise which is male. I don’t want to have a crush on a female character eww. So I need someone’s help on the it lore I’m ruminating on this character cause I have a fictional crush on Pennywise and no one understands me. And the IT creature is supposed to be female so doesn’t that sadly mean the clown is female? SOS please send help