- User type
- OCD Conqueror
- Date posted
- 3y ago
Yes, I have. OCD won't let me let go of my mistakes. Even things that aren't necessarily bad I twist and turn in my head until it feels like I've done something unforgivable and I feel like I'll be forever marked by everything I've done wrong. And of course some things we do are genuinely bad, but in my experience OCD often blows such things out of proportion. I've thought much about how people without OCD react to their mistakes, but if they react like I do, everyone would go around feeling like the worst person ever. I doubt that, and besides, everyone can't be the worst at once :) I'm doing ERP therapy for it right now. I've done it before for other OCD themes and it works!
Good way of explaining it. I have told friends my story and several therapists and nobody has had a negative reaction. But the ocd says what if someone makes it worse than it was?
Oh yes I have real event ocd over something that happened as a boy. My NOCD therapist and erp therapy have helped me to realize that ocd is a liar. When we are children we do the best we can and as we learn we do better.
Thank you for sharing,in the back of my mind,I know this,and I feel really bad about it,I’m not sure how to approach it,just sit with it,or agree with it,that’s the part that always confuses me.
It’s okay to feel bad about it. We all do things we regret and would like to take back. But we can’t and we learned a valuable lesson from it then we can be assured we are being our best selves.
Then it starts with,is there anything else you did that you don’t remember?it’s like being a hamster on a wheel,and you can’t get off!
Yup I have the same struggle, and I opened up to someone without ocd once and she admitted to doing something she deeply regretted as a child too. I think that everyone has done something really weird/out of the ordinary before our brain was fully developed and we knew better. That’s just a part of being a child. I know I could never say what I did out loud but I know that I would NEVER dream of doing this now that I am mature and I understand right from wrong
Exactly- doing something as a child is a far cry from doing something as an adult. A child acts impulsively and with maturity we know better as adults.
Trying not to seek reassurance, but rather connect the dots on my OCD and possible reasons as to why I am the way I am. I have severe OCD (or at least I hope I do) mainly surrounding POCD. I've had symptoms of OCD the majority of my life but this theme has come up more recently. When I was a kid, and i'm talking 6-7, I was first exposed to some really gross adult content online. It was introduced to me by a friend of mine around the same age of me. I saw some really disgusting things that a 6-7 year old should definitely not see. This was not a one time occurrence, as I had been exposed to taboo topics online years to come after that, such as the same friend introducing me to Omegle... And i'm sure you can imagine how that went, theres a lot of genuinely disgusting human beings on there. Coming back to the reason for making this post; is it possible to early exposure to this content could be one of the reasons I struggle with POCD? It genuinely scares me to death because you hear that real p*dos dealt with simular situations when they were kids, so thats kind of making me feel that this could be more than OCD, and I could be a genuinely bad person. My POCD feels so real, that at times i'm fully convinced its not OCD. Sometimes I can't even distinguish the feelings of attraction between a younger person and an older person, except for the feeling of anxiety and fear. Its really hard to explain without going into detail, but it just feels so real. Some feedback on this would be great, thank you all.
So, I know my capacity to get fixated on things. And it's normally something that's relatively remote but, my latest issue is really getting to me and I was wondering if people have any advice. I'm avoiding getting too into specifics, as I don't want this to get reassurance-y but, in essence.. I came to the realisation recently that people who I'd been "friends" (feels like the wrong term now) when I was younger were not very nice people, and normalized a lot of very unpleasant behaviour towards other members of the group. They really normalized it, sold themselves as figures of authority, as older and more responsible and grown-up than others, and looking back, they acted horribly. And coming to this realisation, that I'd been manipulated into just accepting their behaviour has just... broken me. My OCD has latched onto it and I can't stop feeling irreversibly tainted by it. I've talked to others about it, and they've reassured me, told me it's not a big deal and that I hold myself to too high a standard, but none of that sticks. I feel better for a bit, then think 'Maybe when you told them you were skewing it to make yourself look better' or 'Did you leave out a crucial detail'. I keep ruminating over and over, trying to remember exactly how everything played out, trying to figure out if I fed into the behaviour, if I did something bad myself (because y'know, I feel like I was accepting of it at the time, so what does it say about my own values?). I know I need to stop doing all this if I want to improve, but then some part of me keeps saying 'So, you're just going to let yourself off the hook then?' Normally, I can rationalize my own fears to some degree, assure myself something won't happen, but the realness of the situation, and the fact I only came to understand the reality of it because the thought had been bothering me means it feels so much more all-encompassing. I know confessing in itself is a compulsion, but I keep feeling that if I'm not I'm somehow concealing what I 'really am' from others around me, and any positive interactions are me deceiving them in some way. I feel like I can't enjoy anything in life right now, and a good part of me feels I should not enjoy it ever again. If anybody has any advice on it, I'm all ears. Or even hearing if you relate to these feelings, I might appreciate the solidarity at least.
Being exposed to taboo p*rn as young as first grade ruined my life and now ocd is making me pay for it. I have so much guilt for being a child/teen and looking at taboo stuff, and it was all fictional or anime or whatever but it was still so so gross. and I didn't realize It because I had been used to it at so young 🫠 I think what haunts me most is when I was a kid/young teen (like 12-14ish) and didn't have access to p*rn I'd imagine stuff similar to what I'd seen in the art. I can't even believe I'd imagine scenarios involving kid characters or whatever because it had been so normalized to me and I assumed it was normal since it was fiction. I'm 23 now so it's been a decade since I've done anything like that and I've never had the urge to since but still. I've NEVER been attracted to kids or had any urges or anything ever, even when I was addicted. The thought makes me want to vomit, I'd rather die than associate anything sexual with kids/minors and I think people who groom or assault kids are vile. But I still feel like the fact that I imagined stuff similar to the things I read sometimes when I was young is proof I'm a p*do. I don't think people would believe me if I said I'm not. I just feel like I don't deserve to live or that if I do, I'm living a lie. I know 'I was a kid too' but even when I was 13/14 I read/imagined stuff with characters younger than me because I thought it was normal. I'm so disgusted. I've had this theme for so long I'm starting to wonder if ocd is right. I feel too ashamed to tell my therapist.
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