I have so many mental compulsions I didn’t know I had. I strait convinced myself that I had no compulsions (basically just self gaslighting). I have been in mental health treatment for like almost 8 years now and I haven’t even begun to address my ocd yet and I’m yearning for relief. Everything in my life is made harder by ocd and things seem impossible to achieve. Questions for the community: 1) Has anyone here been married while they are suffering? How can I properly explain to them how I feel and my triggers without exploding? 2) How do any of you guys get relief? I feel like I’m always wound up in a knot and I can’t eat or sleep and it’s painful honestly. 3) Have any of you ever overcome mental compulsions? I feel like it’s so much easier to hide than physical ones and I’ve been doing them since I was a small child I just had no idea. (Definitely not invalidating physical compulsions though).

First post... I ruminate all the time, getting triggered by the smallest things that remind me of terrible events in my life or fears tied to my compulsions. It could be as small as a lawyer looking at my LinkedIn profile and me convincing myself that means I'm getting sued. Or even an article about taxes that makes me spiral into thinking I'm negligent. I could be fine one minute & wonder if I'm making it all up and then cry for two hours the next, cursing people who are neurotypical and wishing I could be like them. I tried talk therapy for two years and now I'm doing NOCD + ERP because I'm pregnant and had to reduce my dose of medication. Pregnancy almost made my OCD mental compulsions worse, and I got diagnosised with MDD, too. Not to mention the skin picking disorder I've had since childhood. It's becoming really hard to be positive despite a daily gratitude journal, walking 5k steps a day, and doing calming yoga with the occasional meditation when things get really bad. I'm trying, I really am. But having three diagnosed disorders makes me feel like I'm set up to fail despite having a wonderful husband and life, plus my coming first baby. It makes me feel like a horrible person when everything around me is seemingly fine but I can't seem to focus enough on the present to appreciate it. I feel so lost about it all and am plagued by guilt and shame. Does anyone else relate?

I’m a good man and I know that. My OCD revolves around relationships. While dating someone a truly enjoy, I find myself needing to compulse everything on my mind or else I feel like I’m being a liar or keeping secrets. I also am pretty confident I suffer from false memory ocd. I don’t like to put a label on things but I’m 99.9% sure I do. My compulsions a lot of times come from things I’m not even sure are real. The more thought I put into them, the more I start to believe they are real. One of the worst compulsions I had in my relationship was I had a thought “what if I find my ex more attractive” and “what if I thought the sex with them was better”. I ended up compulsing these things to my gf. After lots of time to think and get a ahold of myself I was able to remind myself that these things weren’t true and I was just in a downward spiral. There was a 2-3 month period where every time I was relieved of something then I would instantly think of something else. These compulsions have caused insecurity in my gf and I feel like a terrible person. Never meant to hurt her at all and was just trying to find a sense of relief. While I know it is not true, I can’t fix things with words and I feel terrible. I would love to hear from people with tricks and strategies that can help. I love my gf and want to fix things and understand this is not a relationship fixer app but I would like to know what are some ways you are able to deal with these kind of things.

(Long post warning) Hi, I’ve been struggling with severe OCD for six years now. it started in 2019 with my theme being getting sick/emetophobia. it devastated my life. I almost didn’t graduate high school from it. I remember washing my hands for three hours one day until they were nearly bloody while crying and asking why I could not stop doing it. I remember id have to write and rewrite sentences when I did my English homework and that’s why I nearly failed that class. I remember how I would spend up to thirty minutes to an hour pacing the halls of my apartment while my mom was asleep until I neutralized the thoughts about throwing up and I could finally go to bed. I don’t know when it happened, but my theme switched. Sometimes in late 2020 or early 2021, it switched to POCD. It started with a single thought, and I focused on it and it’s been my theme since then for four years. It has been absolutely destroying me. I feel so disgusted and lost and just tired. My compulsions are severe now. I thought they were bad before, but now they’re ten times worse. I can’t eat, drink, change my clothes, walk, or even do things on my phone normally. I’ve developed so many mental compulsions that it’s so intricate and complicated yet at the same time I’ve done them so much that they’ve become normal. An example I have is if im putting on a shirt and I have a “bad” thought, I have to take it off and put it back on two more times (that’ll make it 3 times I put the shirt back on - odd numbers are my safe number). I have to have a good thought on the third time otherwise I have to take it off and put it on two more times to make it five times I put on that shirt. If not that then I just put on a different shirt because the original is now tainted with my bad thought. I can’t open apps on my phone. It’s with the numbers again. If I open TikTok once while having a bad thought - I have to close it and open it two more times and so on. Sometimes I do it up to 30 times. So I just don’t do things usually. I don’t turn on the TV because I know I’ll redo it. I don’t open a book or grab it off my shelf because I’ll have to repeat the action. I can’t even lay in bed without getting up and redoing it even if im exhausted. I just feel so helpless. I don’t know what to do. I feel disgusting and even now my minds screaming at me that I am dirty and what I think is true. I just wish I was free of this, I wish I could just live my life. I’ve wasted hours and days because of my compulsions. I mask it so well around my friends. I don’t do them in front of anyone or I’ve learned to hide it well. But when im back home alone, it goes haywire. I just want to live again.