Has anyone thought about how similar we are to drug addicts regarding the compulsions? We depend on compulsions to cope with everyday but the more we do them our symptoms and lives get worse, trapping us in endless compulsive cycles until finally the compulsions become our main focus in life. Stopping the compulsions even felt like quitting smoking to me. We use our compulsions in almost the same ways a heroin addict uses heroin.

It is not the thoughts or urges that scare me anymore. It is the way I feel like I’ve absorbed the compulsions into my identity :( I am doing them so automatically that it feels like I am choosing them freely and they’re me. and because of that, it feels like I AM the OCD now, not just someone with OCD. I think I’m just deeply trapped in a loop. I was trying to survive unbearable fear so I started scanning. Then I started pre-scanning. Then checking if I pre-scanned. Then I check how I feel during all that. I run to beat my OCD to the “punchline” (intrusive thought, urge, sensation) because I’m so scared all the time. So scared that I don’t even feel it anymore. I feel numb and all that’s left is this jittery residue and numbness. Now it’s all tangled together in a huge knot. I feel so extremely lost. I think this may just be meta OCD, but I’ve never ever felt so gone before :( I’m really scared.

I still do not have an OFFICIAL diagnosis (I dont have the means to do so) but given my symptoms, past and present in my life hugely suggest OCD is what I am dealing with. I cannot be 100 percent certain but after searching for answers and researching for a long time now, I am fairly certain and confident this is what I am struggling with. Given this step forward, I am making more effort into giving up compulsions. at the current moment I believe to be dealing with ROCD, as I have been having several intrusive thoughts that conflict with my relationship. For starters, recently over the past month or 2, I have been struggling with intrusive thoughts like not being over my ex, being attracted to someone else, losing feelings for my partner and not being in love, etc. I can consciously identify that I dont believe these thoughts to be true but it causes me so much distress and anxiety. It gets extremely unbearable some days, and I have leaned into 2 main compulsions. I have relied on thought checking and googling as my source of relief. At first the googling was genuinely to start finding answers; hence why I have made some of the discoveries I have about OCD including this site. But it developed into every time I was anxious, I would whip my phone out and start googling strictly to find an answer that would reassure me or calm me down. As for thought checking, it acted as a way to reaffirm my love for my girlfriend in my head when I have had the thoughts that collide with my relationship and how I feel about my girlfriend. It worked at first but developed into a compulsion where every time a bad thought got me worked up id either do my normal googling or Id think about that in my head to calm myself down. Over time these compulsions have gotten less and less affective and now when I do them it only gets me more anxious and desperate for reassurance (strengthening the cycle or whatever it is lol). I did some more research and finally have accepted the very real fact that I am going to have to sit in heavy anxiety and not give into compulsions for a while in order to treat this. I have to sit in the thoughts that make me feel all this hightened anxiety and distress without giving into compulsion. to be honest I am scared, the thoughts are more rampant than ever, but I am ready to commit to this. I dont think I am gonna be able to go cold turkey on my compulsions so I am ready for the reality I might relapse on the compulsions sometimes, But am gonna keep going until I can break these shackles OCD has on my life right now. I wanna ask, what is everyones methods they use to avoid giving into compulsion when the thoughts get loud? any advice is welcome :)

We who live with OCD are really good at one thing. We can ruminate for hours. We can even make up false memories and believe them to be true. But above all, we are good at attaching meaning to our thoughts. Where the average mind naturally shifts forward to the next thing, our minds crave certainty, and that craving drives us to assign significance to nearly every thought that passes through. Whether it is trying to make peace with a thought through rumination or trying to deny it outright through suppression, these are all what we would call compulsions. But beneath that label, they are really just reactions to the meaning we have attached. It is like a smoke alarm that goes off in the kitchen every time you make toast. The alarm is not broken. It is just hypersensitive. It reacts as if there is a fire when in reality there is no danger at all. OCD is like having that alarm wired directly into your mind. Thoughts that are harmless or uncertain set off the siren, and our compulsions are the frantic rush to put out a fire that does not exist. From birth, and more intensely for those with OCD, our minds were trained to attach meaning to every thought, feeling, and sensation. OCD, at its core, is compulsive meaning attachment: the inability to stop assigning significance to thoughts that are uncertain, unknowable, or meaningless. What I have been discovering in my own journey is this: yes, it is important to stop engaging with compulsions. But there is a deeper step too, which is learning to stop attaching meaning in the first place. Letting the thought be just a thought. Letting the toast cook without grabbing the fire extinguisher. I am not here to hand you a 10-step miracle cure. If there was one, we would all take it in a heartbeat. But I am here to share what has been working for me, and how by loosening the grip on meaning itself, I have found a surprising amount of peace.