Hi! First of all, same. It took until my therapist told me this before I felt any relief… real events, though real, are still misconstrued by the brain. This is Bc anxiety is running the show. Since your ocd has latched to it, you will never truly be able to remember it correctly or feel a normal amount of guilt over it. Your fear is excessive because you have ocd, not because of your event. This means you aren’t an exception to the rule- it is still ocd no matter how real and painful it feels. Erp on the event is key and also giving yourself compassion for past mistakes. We all have them. Even terrible ones.
This is great advice. Thank you so much. That’s the thing - I know other people have done this. I know my real event isn’t as unique as my ocd tries to tell me. It’s crazy because I lived with this and didn’t care until ocd latched into it, then did all sorts of compulsions like checking online that made it 100x worse. Now I feel like I’ll face consequences for the original event AND the checking. Ocd really is a never ending loop.
I struggle a lot with real event OCD. I obsess about things that happened recently and things that happened many years ago and catostrophise very negative outcomes. I understand how you feel. It feels very real because the events are supposed to be real and that makes it much easier for my mind to think the negative outcomes are inevitable. It is hard to sit with these thoughts and accept the uncertainty of what outcome will come to be but I am trying this app and trying out this therapy trying to see if I can find a way to do this. You are not alone.
Thank you. I’m sorry you deal with the same. I guess I’m learning now that feeling some anxiety or guilt isn’t what makes it ocd, the obsessive nature is what makes it ocd. I wish I didn’t give this event from years ago so much attention. All the compulsions just made it worse.
@anonymous Yes. The compulsions make me want to seek more compulsions. I go back and forth. I obsess about something that happened recently, like within the past few months or so, then stuff a few years ago, then stuff over a decade ago, and then come back to recent things as new events happen. I came to the realization that I need to find a way to be able to not engage these obsessions when they happen otherwise the longer I live I will just keep gaining more and more life events that will ultimately fuel more obsessive processes. That's why I am trying this app out. ERP sounds terrifying when I think that I have to find a way to accept the uncertainty of how the events may or may not affect future outcomes, but if that is what I need to do I am more than willing to consider it if it helps me get some quality of life back.
@intrusivedaily I’m the same. It started off as something insignificant at 14 and blew up into something huge because of compulsions and I cant stop doing them. This app will definitely help, and if you can, I’d love to hear the advice you get for real event ocd when you do speak with a therapist. Unfortunately NOCD therapy isn’t available where I live which really sucks so I’ve kind of just been figuring out what’s going on in my brain from research.
@anonymous I am still trying to figure out if my insurance will let me use the therapy feature of this app. I just started yesterday so I am very new. But i am trying.
@intrusivedaily Ah I see. Hopefully it does. Best of luck to you
Does real event ocd make you feel worse about yourself in general? Maybe not even past mistakes, but just feel like a terrible person? Ocd is so new to me, and the treatment is so much different than general anxiety, so I can’t tell if it’s just general anxiety and depression or OCD. For me a lot of it has to do with my porn addiction, which I just feel like a terrible person for. I’ve always hated it, but since the ocd started, the self hate has just been so much. Hating something but not being able to stop. It contributed to my OCD because OCD is about losing control, and this is something that I always lose control over. My brain just tells me that since I can’t control this compulsive addiction, I’m going to just lose control one day and my ocd fears will come true
It does all of those things. Mine is about pornography too. Every time I think my ocd is unique I get reminded that it isn’t. Tw// pornography I first saw porn at 13 or 14 and got addicted to it, but what my ocd latches onto is the categories. I looked up categories I thought were ok at 14 that I saw on sites like PH and didn’t think much of it because I knew other kids my age did, then when I got severe POCD it became a huge theme. Now the fear is going to jail. This is all ocd that I’ve heard many experience, but that doesn’t make it any less difficult. Here if you need to talk btw.
@anonymous Thank you. Yes for me my porn addiction has made my OCD really bad. It actually triggered my ocd. During one of my “sessions”. The content has escalated so much since I had started watching when I was 12. I’ve gone to therapy and my wife knows and all this is super helpful. But every time I have an urge to watch porn, it triggers my OCD because its something I hate but can’t stop. Makes me feel like one day it’s going to escalate so bad I’ll hurt my son or something. It’s killing me. Then I start having trouble discerning the difference between a porn urge and a OCD thought. Both make me feel anxious and terrible.
@anonymous Btw you’re not going to jail for something you did when you were 14. Not trying to give reassurance, but that just doesn’t happen in general.
@Ocdislame Classic ocd. Creates correlations out of nowhere. But your job to combat that is not debate the ocd, agree with it. My favourite method is sarcasm. Like, “hey ocd, I’m totally gonna hurt my son because of a porn addiction, yep! You’re totally right!”. It sounds stupid but it actually works.
@Ocdislame And yeah… sometimes I realize it’s a stupid fear. But the thing is when I was 15 and 16 dealing with a major ocd spiral I felt the need to search for all these categories again to “confirm” what all the videos I saw were. Now I worry, will I go to jail for this? It was ocd and I know that but maybe the police won’t. I don’t know. I’m so mad at 14 year old me for not seeing the issue with “teen girl/young boy” categories. Just because shit like xvideos advertises it I shouldn’t have been stupid enough to look it up.
@anonymous Shit. kinda asking for reassurance there. I told myself I’d stop doing that. It’s just hard, you know? I’m 17 and want my life back. I have covid rn. Everything is just shit and on top of that I’m dealing with this scary fear.
@intrusivedaily I know. It does make it worse at first, but helps in the long run. An ocd recovery method that gives immediate releif doesn’t exist. The only way to get immediate releif is compulsions, which we know is detrimental in the long run.
@anonymous I hate to provide reassurance to you because I know this can make things worse. But those terms are very vague and there are a lot of porn categories and videos that contain that terminology that are all perfectly legal. 18 and 19 is both teen, and young. This would never even raise a flag as the porn industry THRIVES on these categories for revenue. They are the most searched year after year.
@anonymous The good thing is you are young and can still have an better chance to stay away from porn. I’m much older and have been watching porn for much longer. I wish I would’ve realized how bad it was and what it would do to me when I was your age. You’re in the right track.
@intrusivedaily Don’t google stuff. Worst mistake I made. It’s such a bad compulsion and ruminating about the past is also a compulsion. Keep practising exposure and sitting with the anxiety, proud of you for resisting that compulsion!
@Ocdislame Thank you for this. I’m trying to accept that, but my ocd tells me “if you looked that up on google and not the site itself you’re going to jail”. 14 year old me thought if I looked that up on google, google would “assume” I meant xvideos categories. It did, but that doesn’t change the fear of going to jail. You see how this is impossible to escape… ocd just comes up with new scenarios and possibilities. The amount of panic attacks I’ve had about this particular theme is ridiculous.
@anonymous I guess that’s what makes ocd terrible. Have you worked on exposures?
@Ocdislame I can with every other theme but this one. I think I have ocd figured out until this theme comes at me in full force like it did last night. Idk why it feels different. I guess because I’ve made it feel different. I’m convinced it’s not ocd and it’s real. I’m gonna keep trying, though. I tried therapy once last year and it made it worse because they weren’t specialized in ocd. When NOCD therapy becomes available where I live I will definitely try it.