my brain feels very clogged today and i’m anxious about a lot of things. it’s been about a year since i dealt with tocd, and just thinking about it makes me extremely nervous and uncomfortable, and i’m so scared it’s gonna come back and i’m gonna deal with it all over again

If it does come back you can handle it. You beat it once you can beat it again. Stay strong

Hi there. I am sorry to hear about what you’re going through. I am currently a first timer over here struggling with TOCD that feels so incredibly real. I can barely even function, I don’t know what to do. It feels as though these thoughts are real and the anxiety accompanying them is because I know they are true and just don’t want to admit it. I am so scared because, as a straight female, I do not ever want to be transgender. How did you manage to find relief from your symptoms and remind yourself that your TOCD thoughts do not define you and your true desires?

i had been dealing with it for 4 months and was panicking every single day. i had read online that the only way to stop ocd thoughts was to just accept that maybe they were real and maybe they weren’t, and there was nothing i could do about it. it was terrifying at first because it felt like i was letting my ocd win, but in the long run it was the best thing i could have done to combat that specific theme

@nicklepickle I appreciate that. Unfortunately, it feels like everything is just leading me to this point, even though I desperately do not want to feel this way or live in fear that I am meant to be transgender and will never be able to escape it, even though that is the last thing I want. If I may ask, did you ever get physical sensations about your TOCD thoughts where you like visualized yourself as the other gender or felt like you looked/sounded in that way? These things just started happening to me and I am now convinced with almost certainty that this is real and that it must be what I really want because it feels so much like gender dysphoria rather than ocd.

@cf05 i did and the amount of panic that i felt when that would happen to me helped in me understanding that i’m not trans because if i was i would like it. i know it feels like you do but i can promise you even though it’s hard that you absolutely do not or you wouldn’t be fighting with yourself so hard over it. i know how awful and uncomfortable and panic inducing tocd can feel, and how it completely takes over your brain and you feel suffocated. it is literally debilitating. all i can do is promise that you will feel better eventually

@nicklepickle Thank you. It’s starting to feel as though I like it, even though I think if I did I would not be sick to my stomach over it

@cf05 that’s exactly what i’m talking about. if you liked it, you wouldn’t feel so awful and stressed all the time

@nicklepickle If you don’t mind me asking, did you feel like people were constantly going to “figure you out”? I’m always on edge but I also have social anxiety so I can’t tell if this is a combination of my ocd + my social anxiety or if the reason that I have both ocd and social anxiety is because I am actually transgender. I would not want to live if I. Was