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Hey! This is my first post here and I’m not sure quite how to put it but I’d love to connect with people who have struggled with obsessive thought loops,? Sometimes I’ll think the same thought over and over for hours, days or even weeks every now and then. It can be a simple thought like about a painting i’m going to work on or it could be a thought about something horrible in my past. No matter the degree, the thought just plays over and over, sometimes it even carries to my dreams. It’s exhausting and I can hear a ‘second’ voice in my head begging it to stop but I have no control. This is actually the very first symptom of my OCD that I’ve ever experienced and it’s what made me realize that my thoughts are definitely unwanted and uncontrollable. I mean literally the same thought plays over and over. Like a song, but just a thought or memory. It can make me spiral horribly into magical and spiritual OCD and I’ve yet to find anyone to talk to about this. Thank you!

So I woke up today and my OCD woke up with a vengeance. It has been trying to convince me I liked my thoughts and sensations it gaves and I want to try them out. Can someone give me some advice on how to deal with this?

I have recently switched themes and now I have like 6 emails 4 old ones and 2 new I created to keep everything organized because one of the emails started getting a lot of adult content spam and I felt gross and that made me feel like that email is messed up now so I need to transfer everything over and delete unused accounts and separate emails for shopping and social media and then when I forget and use the wrong account for social media I want to start over all over again and create another email because what if that email gets sold and gets gross spam.Also when I have a image pop up in my head I don’t like I think to take a shower to reset or clean to reset the area I’m in.Are all of these things ocd?please help.Im out of therapy atm and I don’t know what any of this means.

Tbh I don’t really remember exactly what/when I saw or read that first triggered my potential ocd (not officially diagnosed yet), not sure if it was a thought that led to research or research that led to thought. Is this normal? And can ocd first be triggered by something you read or is it like you read something + getting a thought?

Hi, I'm new here, I'm about to go into my second year of college, and I've been reflecting quite a bit on my relationships over the summer. I get these really loud intrusive thoughts all the time that I'm exploiting my friends/partner and that if I don't mask my "true intentions" they will abandon me. I feel like I never do enough for them and when I do try I just end up messing up or just making the situation worse. I just want to know if anyone else experiences this? If so, any advice? I'm thinking about seeking advice from my psychiatrist and psychologist about more thoughts I will not get into on here. Thanks!

I met my current boyfriend after ending things with my ex a month earlier. By coincidence, my current boyfriend and I had a class together, we became friends, and of course I started liking him. By May 2021, two months later, my feelings for him grew stronger and stronger. At that time, I wasn’t really going through a depression over my ex. In fact, little by little, we had stopped talking since January 2021, and by the end of March I told him I needed my personal space because I was dealing with another type of OCD. Looking back, during all that time I was open to getting to know this new guy (my current boyfriend). Finally, in July everything was going well between us, and we decided to stop giving each other space. Meanwhile, my ex was stalking me on social media. I was very happy to be getting to know my boyfriend at that time. In August, we had our first kiss and then, as I mentioned earlier, we stopped dating for a while. In September, we ended things, which hurt me a lot, but in November we tried again. During all that time, I didn’t have OCD. Later, in January, when my boyfriend and I made our relationship official, the doubts started: “Am I still in love with my ex?” “Am I using my boyfriend to forget my ex?” “Am I really over my ex?” The memories, physical sensations, all of that. So, my question is: does OCD with thoughts about an ex only happen to people who just broke up and are still grieving, or can it also show up later on, even if you’re already in a new relationship? I ask this because I’m afraid I might not have gotten over my ex and that these intrusive thoughts mean something else, since I’ve read that some people develop OCD right after a breakup and get stuck there. But in my case, I just moved on, and then the intrusive thoughts showed up later.

21, have had OCD for as long as I remember and I have had no social life for as long as I remember too. I spent more time at home with compulsions, and any social mistake I made would lead to weeks of intrusive thoughts, so I simply stopped talking to people. I can barely speak, I'm not sure how to say what I want to say and I constantly stumble over my words and am just incapable of being socially normal. Like I can barely talk, there's people who learned English as a foreign language who are far more capable of talking than I'll be in the language. So I simply become more reclusive and my OCD becomes worse, which leads to me being more reclusive and so on. Even if I ever get cured I'm not sure I'll ever be socially normal, I think I'm too late for that. Is that true? Or can I change. I'm just giving up at this point I think, I'm just not sure I can. I sound just so odd.

My partner had a big spiral last night his foot became contaminated so he didn’t want to put it on the bed. We spoke for a bit then he decided he would just try and go to sleep. Now this morning he won’t eat or get up he believes the whole bed is now contaminated I’ve tried convincing him to do his meditation/breathing exercises and use some of the apps that have been helping him, but he’s just completely shutting down. I feel like anything that helps him he doesn’t want. I hate it when he won’t eat or drink. But he says it’s a punishment for how stupid he is. Does anyone have any advice? Has anyone gone through stages like this? What did you do? What do I do?

I'm going to preface this with: I just wanna vent a bit. Maybe show you a piece of my and many others' experiences. I just need feedback, not even reassurance. This is what some of if not most of my days look like. I keep asking if it's just OCD. I've been stuck researching and ruminating, anxious, trying to figure out whether I'm having OCD or going into the territory of sexual deviation. My thoughts involve multiple taboos and also fears of sexual abuse. I just can't tell sometimes, and I'm scared. I keep asking myself whether OCD hasn't changed my morals, why I'm desensitized to the unthinkable, and I feel like I am beyond repair. I've read about everything from arousal nonconcordance, to groinals, to even false attraction - and I'm not sure if it isn't just all cope to deny a real problem. Did I get desensitized when it came to Harm OCD too? Sure. Was I panicking? You bet I was. But it once again feels like OCD has gathered enough evidence to make me anxious again. It all feels too real, like too much. I've been anxious for the past few hours just stuck. Pure O is a living hell - if it still is Pure O. I keep looking into my past, asking myself "Does this increase the risk of me being a pervert?" "I've heard childhood trauma can lead to paraphilia - what if that's happening?" "I was exposed to NSFW at a young age - oh my god, what if I end up being a r*pist?". I question every decision I've made, my reactions and behavior, I look for symptoms to confirm or deny whether I am a sociopathic deviant. I avoid certain situations because I fear getting the intrusive thoughts, experiencing attraction or straight up finding out I'm someone I don't want to be (even though all of that sounds absolutely insane and irrational). Whenever I see a trigger, I immediately start checking if I'm feeling something. I can't even look in the general direction of it because I'm afraid I will feel something. I tend to physically avoid triggers. Sometimes I feel like people around me can sense my OCD and look at me because of it, then stay away from me from sheer disgust. Sometimes I'm afraid of even my own imagination - it's very vivid and detailed which would be a great thing.. if I didn't have OCD to use it against me by giving me mental images of the most disgusting and abhorrent scenes imaginable. I'm afraid of doing art because I feel like I'll lose control and draw something deeply disturbing, or somehow uncover some hidden truth about me in the process. It really sucks. I can't be the only one in this, right?? I can't be the first person on planet earth to have gone through this exact torment? You guys, I just need advice / support. Please, to anyone who's gone through something similar, feel free to share your experiences. I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy, seriously.

Does anyone here often get frustrated from all the double checking they've been doing? This is one of my OCD compulsions. In fact, I don't just double check. I triple check. Four, five, almost twenty times. It revolves around making sure that my nursing files in MacBook are perfectly synced with my Google Drive. It drives me insanely mad that I already know and can see that they're synced, but there's always a part of me that believes they aren't. So, here I am, ending up spending twenty long minutes checking the same thing over and over again. It's so tiring, folks. I don't understand why my brain can't just properly decipher things. I have this feeling that my eyes are lying to me, and what I check couldn't really be true unless I've done it a bunch of times. Honestly, it's driving me insane, and this is the only place where I could tell how I feel without sounding like a lunatic.

So after going back to therapy, I’ve been doing really good. I didn’t care about the thoughts or any of my obsessions. But this past week, my mind has just been looping so many thoughts that are scary and sad. The rumination cycle feels like how I felt before even receiving therapy. I don’t know if it’s just because I’m not doing compulsions as much, but I’ve been so afraid this is never going to away, and I’m going to feel anxious and scared forever:(

Hey, I am a 19 year old girl, who have since February 2024 begun questioning if I am a lesbian. I have always LOVED boys, and have always known that I do not like women sexually, but I remember one night I got the thought “what if you like women” and I have not been able to not think about it since then. I remember I began questioning this during Covid when I was home alone in 2020, but has since then been able to be 100% that it was just a fase where I was curious, but had since then been able to talk openly about me not liking women without it triggering something. But since February I have thought about it EVERY day and every single minute of the day. I have a boyfriend of 3,5 years who I love so much, but since I began having these thoughts I cannot feel attracted to him. I need to ask him for reassurance 10+ times a day “pinky promise I’m not into women but only men” and have to ask him a certain way. I also think “oh I feel the need to look at women’s private parts and get a tangly feeling 3 or more times before I can look away cause it has to feel right. I also feel like I can’t listen to eg “I kissed a girl” or “born this way” because if I do I will feel attracted to it. Another example is that I constantly seek reassurance from Google, ChatGPT or TikTok and it is so draining because in the end I keep thinking “I don’t have a OCD diagnosis what If im in denial and is just a lesbian who is lying to me bf” I feel as im in denial just writing this. I have lived with it for a year now and is starting to question “what if I have just changed and must accept that I don’t like boys and is masculine e.g.” but the thing is, I have ALWAYS loved makeup, and loves girl stuff, but when I have these thought I can’t feel as I am in control of who I am. It makes me question myself to the point where I feel as I have to go out and be with a women because it is what my brain tells me to do. During a 5 month period in between this year the topic changed to “what if I have cheated on my bf without him knowing because I don’t remember” and I went down another dark hole. I have thrown all my clothe from that period of time out because I felt guilty and as it held “bad memories” and now I regret it because the topic has changed. But during that time I had to seek reassurance from friends “have I flirted - do u think I talked flirty or looked at them, have I done anything” and I had to have it IN writing, otherwise it wasn’t valid. I even promised God that I would not go out clubbing until New Year’s Eve at 12 am, because then he would forgive me and it would make me a not lesbian person. But it did not help a bit, the topic just changed and my “am I a leabjan” spiral started again. And it makes me so sad because why can it not just think “okay you are bisexual” NOT JUST “oh you are either heterosexual or ONLY into women” it is like my mind is afraid. So I guess my hope and question is, is there anyone who can tell if this sounds like OCD, and if I am into women. Before gaining these thoughts I was certain, and I know i don’t ONLY like women, but I can’t even be sexually active with my bf because if I think of women during it, I must get turned on by it and be a lesbian. I am so exhausted. Sorry for the long question, I am just so drained. Backstory: my family has a lot of mental illnesses on my dads side, and when I was a child I dealt a lot with having to wash my hands until they bled and crying because i did not know why I lived. I was never diagnosed.

Pissed of bc I have to write this shit again 😭. This will be all over the place sorry. So if you check out my other posts you would see I’ve been dealing with SOOCD for a long time. I am also currently dealing with ROCD now that I am in a new relationship. What a fun and exciting combination 😀!! I think my relationship is a major exposure for me and it’s been a very interesting time. I’ve known my boyfriend for a very long time and he’s been a very close friend for many years. Before we got into a relationship I wasn’t really dealing with much intrusive thoughts (i was avoiding everything) or anxiety and my feelings/attraction towards him were so clear to me. Our relationship is pretty new and it’s been great and also so fucking hard. Basically, anxiety and ocd are trying to beat my ass. Even though things have been hard for me, I have decided to follow the advice I was given on one of my posts, which is to continue living. I have literally made it my MISSION to reclaim my life. I already know my compulsions are rumination, reassurance seeking, and mental checking of emotions, feelings, attraction, arousal, etc. When I’m with him I try my best to stay in the moment, stop mentally checking, stop ruminating, and all that. Although i’m definitely not 100% successful, and I do catch myself doing those things a LOT, I always end up having a great time and the dates are always so sweet. Since i’ve been dealing with SOOCD since I was 15, my past relationship was pretty traumatic for me. My ex was a terrible boyfriend and it was a stupid high school/early college years relationship. I was always subconsciously checking my emotions, feelings, attraction, and arousal around/for him ALL THE TIME which made being with him scary and it felt like my intrusive thoughts were right. Especially since I was extremely depressed, rarely found anyone attractive, had a low libido (still deal with last two/read older posts to get better understanding of where I am w ocd), and I never enjoyed/felt anything when we were intimate. This makes me check everything around my boyfriend now. I’m trying to follow the great advice I got on my last post, and I’m trying my best to stop my compulsions when i notice myself doing them, continue to kiss, hold hands, and hangout. I’m also trying my best to sit with any discomfort/anxiety i experience (which is a lot). I try to stay in the moment (not always successful) and when I do I always really enjoying the dates. The hangouts have been so sweet and have given me a lot of hope that I can get through this. When i’m with him it’s easier for me to be a bit less anxious (even tho i check a lot i can remain calm) but when im away i literally go insane. TMI but we’re already discussing being intimate and im so afraid that i wont feel anything when it happens and it will make me numb to him. I’m always wondering, what if i don’t really like him? what if my intrusive thoughts are right? most of the time you can’t fully enjoy the kisses what if you don’t enjoy s*x? what if that completely ruins your friendship and relationship? yk the usual. I also had a horrible anxiety spike right now because he crossed a boundary he doesn’t know i have, and instead of thinking, “yeah it’s normal he did that especially since i was ok with it during our friendship.” I immediately became extremely anxious and start to think, what if this changes the way i feel about him/see him? what if i can’t feel anything for him anymore? what if this ruins out relationship? what if i feel nothing when we kiss or start to get intimate? what if im lying to myself? what if im not attracted to him at all and all my intrusive thoughts are right? what if all i can feel is anxiety the next time i see him (i thought this before the last time we hung out and i was fine 🧍‍♀️crazy how my brain is)? the usual shit. I’m trying to hard to continue living with this and it’s so fucking annoying!!! It’s so scary and i’m still struggling but im also so fucking proud of myself. I might feel like shit most of the time but this is nothing compared to how i felt when i was younger. I was so miserable and i hated living. I remember balling on my bed feeling so helpless that i started to pray to a god i don’t believe in to help me. As I type this the fear is going away (fuck the groinal response tho idk why it always shows up when im anxious) and I feel more and more hope. I’m going to continue trying to stop my compulsions and continue sitting with the discomfort. I’m already looking for a therapist on here. I know this will definitely not be easy but bitch IM READYYYYY im feeling scared AND motivated. I know this is all over the place but if you read this thank you. I rmbr my grandma telling me a mexican saying like “when you feel hopeless you need to get up, take the bull by the horns, and push” and yeah she’s right I WILL BE DOING THATTTTTT!!! I’m so over this shit but idc I’m going to live my life 😭!! Anyways If you have any tips PLEASSEEEE share them with me!!

I am so incredibly tired of living life in fear. I’m in constant fear that I’m going to have a heart attack or stroke. I’m hyper aware of every sensation in my body and I’m in constant fight or flight. I’m exhausted and I just want to be normal. I received a Covid vaccine Saturday because im afraid of getting Covid but now I’m worried about the vaccine making me sick. I know it won’t I’ve had them before but my mind is just in obsessive mode. I want a good nights rest but now I’m crying and scared because I don’t feel good. I’m just so sick of life being so hard. I want to enjoy it. But then I spiral and I’m crying because I’m worried about being alone in life. Thankfully I have my mom now but I worry about the future. I’ve tried erp twice here and just can’t feel like it’s helping. I’m working with a therapist now and we are doing DBT plus starting erp. I’m nervous it won’t work again. I’m doomed to feel this way the rest of my life. It’s been almost 2 years of this constant fear, worry, and spiral. And when it’s not the health anxiety it’s awful intrusive thoughts that make me feel like a monster.

Hi, My OCD tells me that everything I do is a compulsion and that even seeking help means I am doing a compulsion and I will be stuck forever. So that’s a really fun subtype. Yay.

It’s been a minute since I have been on here. I did get NOOCD therapist session a while back to verify if I really had OCD. I was told it sounded like I had “just right” OCD. Of course, temporary relief only with that confirmation which are two professional takes on my situation. You think that would be enough for my brain. If I detect even the slightest doubt in someone’s voice on my ADHD/OCD diagnosis then It messes with me. I lost my Dad last month. I was taking care of him the best I could but I replay events. HOWEVER, I am on Adderall and when it quiets my default brain network I handle life without crying. I think about what I am doing but as it wears off then I am back to thinking about everything I don’t want to think about. Adderall for me confuses me if it’s right. Especially, when so much of my life is still a disorganized mess. I think it’s making me kinda detached from people. I don’t know that I feel things the way I should be that’s healthy. What breaks through the Adderall in my mind is I default to questioning my diagnosis again. I use to not believe I had ADHD, then didn’t believe I had OCD. I fully accepted ADHD but now I am questioning if it’s actually all OCD after all and being medicated completely wrong. I notice this has gotten worse, plus I am doing this gathering of things. People gave me or I found a great deal on. All with the intention of listing on eBay YET nothings organized and when I sit down to list then nothing happens. I can’t get things in my environment or mind just right to list. I get hung up on photos not being good enough plus everything else with double checking my entries being right. Then I don’t list because I doubt it’s good enough. I had this problem before my Dad passed away but everything’s off the charts right now I guess. My mother called me a hoarder. I have accumulated things faster than my abilities to organize and sell them has occurred but at least it’s all in a shop and not my house. She’s always been the worst for my self esteem. I guess I am mainly just venting here. I am sure OCD would flare up worse after loss of a parent. I just feel like the wheels have come off and don’t know how to gain control.

there is this guy in my university. i think he looks good. but since im so afraid of liking someone else, everytime i see him i have wild intrusive thoughts about him. everytime he looks at me i imagine the tension. i hate it so much i hate him so much. yesterday, i saw him look at me multiple times but i avoided the thought. after a while, the picture of him wanting me desperately came to mind again and i thought “what if he liked me and what if he came and told me that i want a relationship with you” and i imagined that. i instantly got pulled and felt like id wanna be with him. like really really wanna be with him. and simultaneously i was terrified of thinking that so in the back of my mind i was screaming NO NO DONT THINK THIS and it felt like i was falling off from a building. but i thought it again and i had the same feeling. I love my boyfriend to death, i feel like im betraying him. Am i? I realized after days of rumination, that I had no reason for my attraction. Its not like I had any kind of physical bodily attraction. I thought the face was nice. But I didn’t even know the person. Why would I feel such a strong urge to be with someone I don’t even know? I thought it was invalid, but I strongly think it is because I have projected a personality on him that I would want to be with. He held a meeting today. Hes my colleague in a club. I was in the meeting. For the first half hour, I was stressed because I hadn’t written down a thought I had previously had. I was doing my work simultaneously. I was talking to people simultaneously. When I paid attention to the guy, I thought “yeah see he’s just a normal person, plus he has an ugly voice” the minute I thought this, I turned into a fan girl of his fully and I loved the voice I felt like I had a crush. And then I panicked. I moved past it. After a while, while he was talking, a little girl screamed in the background. I immediately pictured his younger sister. Like I pictured him having a sister and she looked kindof yk like him. Basically my first instinct was oh she might be so cute. See I think he looks nice, so I kinda pictured him having a sister who was pretty and all cute like how he looked. And then I flipped out while at the same time getting a one second black out, after which I had flashes and images of him being a father and me being attracted to that. I just got random flashes of images and I felt attracted to that I think. Im not too sure. I don’t remember any feeling/ thought/ order at all. It kept on replaying in my head and while contemplating about it I thought it is probably cuz I don’t know anything about their personal lives so it feels enticing to know that they have a personal life beyond work(since they’re professional connections.). After this, I had a billion other thoughts of this sort. “why am I still thinking of him” “does this mean I like him” “who thinks that” *replaying the thought over and over* “maybe he likes me” all these situational thoughts. I can’t even ground myself by thinking about love for my bf. “I love him I want him so bad” “no you don’t” “he’s the best” “you don’t really think that” “how will u handle ur life other guys ur relationship ur hectic schedulel” “fuck up” “these thoughts r supposed to be normal” “its just attraction” “attraction for so long? Everytime u see him?” “youre gonna try to downplay the thoughts like u always do” “this is not normal” I just froze there crying till I couldn’t breathe for 45 minutes. Next morning, I woke up thinking its just something that is not important, I love my boyfriend so much I should put my energy here. I was then called in for a meeting. I pictured the guy just being in university and I felt like normal softness towards him, I got pulled. And then after a while I saw his fair through the online meeting I was worried ill think something wrong. Then I heard him talk to a girl and I was worried ill think im jealous and get jealous. Then after avoiding the thought for a while I got the thought, I felt like I was jealous. But at the same time I was so anxious because I didn’t wanna think like this. And after that I saw him again and I pictured me being with him there next to him in a flash and then I got anxiety and I’m here now.

In the past 2-3 years ive been having extremely distressing thoughts that for a year(towards the beginning of when it started) made me have extreme panic attacks every day and I was extremely miserable 24/7. The thoughts relate to pure ocd and pocd. It happened literally out of no where one day and it hasnt stopped since(it has slowly tapered down or i just got used to it to an extent) I have a thought and i begin to feel overwhelmingly anxious and horrible in general. I begin to question myself as a person. Not sure if im something that I dont ever want to be in a trillion years but never able to truly answer myself. I spend every day an hour and a half minimum looking up ocd symptoms to alleviate the mental anguish and questioning im going through sometimes it can be as long as 4 hours. Im not sure if this is just extreme anxiety but it hasn't stopped for years. Strange thing though is sometimes the severity of my struggle gets extremely bad ranging from a day to a year at a time and then other times its less severe to where I dont feel like its taking over my life unless my trigger (if I really do have ocd) is reminded to me but no matter how severe it gets Its always lingering over the back of my shoulder and can show up at any time. One thing I can say is ive dealt with sever anxiety since I was thirteen to where I would have panic attacks every day (18 now, symptoms for ocd started at around 15) and the level of anxiety I have now related to what im experiencing now is on an unbelievably higher level than what I used to have. Is it possible I could have ocd? If it is possible, does it sound like mine is severe? Or on a lower more treatable level. Please help I dont want to live like this anymore

I’ve been suspecting for awhile now that I might have OCD once I started to look into it. Often times I get a lot of thoughts of me being a terrible awful person and being afraid that I don’t even know if I’m aware of that. I try my hardest to ‘diffuse’ these thoughts constantly. I go over them and remind myself that that isn’t me but I also wonder if that’s what I truly think. I’ve experienced this for as long as I can remember. I’ve always had instrusive horrible thoughts, even from when I was a child. It’s always been background noise to me but sometimes I tune in and scare myself and often wonder what my motives are. I don’t want to have these thoughts anymore but they keep coming back. I don’t like constantly worrying if my friends all hate me or if anyone around me thinks something is completely wrong with me. It’s extremely hard to operate properly already and constantly being streamlined these thoughts 24/7 just makes it more difficult. I have to try to think of literally anything else to prevent myself from having intrusive thoughts but even that doesn’t help. It feels incredibly disabling and it often times prevents me from doing things I actually have to do out of fear because of those “what ifs”. I just live in fear. I constantly worry even when there isn’t anything to worry about. I am incredibly paranoid. I feel like anything can happen at any given moment when I am not in control and it’s exhausting. I don’t want to live like this anymore.