Hi all ❤️‍🩹 I’m “kind of” new to this and would greatly appreciate any insight. (Back story) After a panic attack in 2017 I started to experience very random and negative intrusive thoughts towards my significant other. These thoughts affected my every day life for a while, but I was able to keep them under control for the most part. Some of these thoughts consisted of: “What if I don’t actually love my partner?” “Why is my brain telling me I have to leave my partner?” “Am I attracted to my partner?” “I think there is someone out there better for me..” And many many more! Mind you, I was/ still am in a very loving relationship with a wonderful man. After months of these thoughts they didn’t mean so much to me and I was able to return back to my “normal” life with the thoughts only occurring once in a while. Anyway, that was just a bit of background of when I first started to notice symptoms of OCD. Recently, I believe I developed a new theme of OCD; Harm OCD. After accidentally (truthfully accidentally!) eating a THC edible I was thrown into a terrible state of panic, anxiety and paranoia. I was experiencing terrible intrusive thoughts while in the height of the high & now those thoughts have apparently, come to stay. I was on FaceTime with my mom a few days after the incident (at this point I still didn’t feel like myself and was certainly experiencing derealization). A random thought popped into my head, “What if I want to hurt my mom?“ “do I want to hurt my mom?” This thought made me spiral. For the past few days I keep getting these thoughts. When I am around her I am so tense and anxious because I can not even fathom ever hurting the person that means the most to me. These thoughts are quite literally torturing me. I now worry about if I accidentally will harm her because my mind is telling me to, or my mind will cause me to write out a plan to hurt her ( I read that this is what “real” killers would do). Mind you, I have never even hurt and fly and these harm thoughts completely came out of nowhere for me. Truthfully, I believe these are the worst possible thoughts that could have popped into my mind because I love and adore my mom dearly.

Basically long story short, ive been dealing with anxiety for a very long time all my life I'm 23 now but about 5 months ago my anxiety started to get really and I overthink a ton and get worried to easily. So my chest hurt for a while from stress at work made me worry why it was hurting, then me worrying and thinking worse case scenarios was making it worse. So i and to go to the doctor and got diagnosed properly with anxiety and I have a med now that I take when I really need it called hydroxyzine but I also have another med that is Zoloft that I have been taking for a about a month now, to help with my intrusive thoughts I have sometimes i only get them when im stressed or when I'm by myself or when i just overthink in general, my loneliness depression is one of the reasons for my anxiety because I wish I had someone as in partner wise to love me and for me to love them. But anyways I've had intrusive thoughts about possibly hurting myself and family, or even my dog. Ive never acted on any of my thoughts in the past and I don't want to but I have had anxiety attacks when everything feels to real and really scares me. I constantly have the thought of am I crazy or am I becoming crazy and stuff and I've done a lot of looking stuff in the past about symptoms but most of them are identical to what anxiety is so it's hard to tell the difference. It's been probably 2 weeks since we last talked. I've been mostly doing good. But I just was wondering if had a little Harm OCD intrusive thought happen yesterday that targeted my Aunt at work she was complaining all day and when it got closer to the end of the shifts for us. I was already annoyed with a situation that happened earlier in the work day. But she came into my department and then went back over to hers and I said it out loud to myself and said you better get back over there or I'll, I tried to say something else because the word I was going to say was kill you. Obviously I don't but that's what my intrusive thought wanted me to say. And made me think thats why i got to hurt her to stop her complaing So the rest of the night I was saying she is safe I am safe I'm control, like this is just anxiety lying to you, it's just because I'm tired and got annoyed earlier. I can't tell if it was working or not because I was so tired and just wanted to go home. But after work her and I spent time together at our house she was on the one couch and I was on the other with a bunch of our dogs in the living room. I tried to keep my mind off of what happened, and I was fighting some stomach achyness already. But I obviously don't want to hurt her and we had conversations just fine. But I went to my other aunt house at night after work to go to bed because she has to watch my aunts dogs because my other aunt and family is on vacation. But anyways I'm trying to get over that word Kill, that word is what is scarring me and sticking. Like my anxiety is lying saying kill, or basically do harm. I don't want to do anything bad but I'm trying to shake that feeling and stickiness of that word. I'm just so scared and worried.

I don’t have an official OCD diagnosis, but I will be asking my doctor tomorrow if I can get referred to a psychiatrist to get an official diagnosis. The way I came to the conclusion that what I’m dealing with is OCD is because a month and a half ago I just started having the most horrible disturbing intrusive thoughts that go against all my values and beliefs and attacking the stuff/people I care about the most out of absolutely NOWHERE. Mind you, I have never had anything like this happen in my life. I feel that I have always been someone with a peaceful mind and one of the worst intrusive thoughts I can ever remember having before this happened, was “what happens if I cut my finger right now” while I was cutting fruit. That’s pretty much it. After this whole horrible intrusive thought spiral started happening I was so scared because I have never had such awful intrusive thoughts like this that were the complete opposite of me, it just quite literally started out of NOWHERE, and that’s what was so scary and terrifying. It was like my whole life got turned upside down because of this and I’ve been mainly isolating in my room, feeling so much anxiety and dread and guilt/shame. I get four of the same thoughts and one intrusive image repeating over and over again even if I would not try to think about them, and it caused me so much distress and anxiety that I would be so anxious and cry everyday just thinking how I could ever possibly think such horrible intrusive thoughts like that. It’s caused me insomnia which I’ve never dealt with before and I went three days in a row without being able to sleep no matter how hard I tried (even while taking melatonin). Other days I struggle so much to fall asleep due to the intrusive thoughts being much more present at nighttime, and even when taking melatonin that doesn’t do anything because of my mind being so active and having so much anxiety. Is this what they call an OCD flare up? After constantly looking up all the symptoms of ocd (the more and lesser known ones alike), I noticed there were some symptoms of it that I displayed in childhood when the ocd could’ve been more dormant or mild you could say (skin picking), because once again I have never had such horrible intrusive thoughts like this out of nowhere and constantly repeating in my mind that felt like they were out of my control. I noticed that these intrusive thoughts started on the second day of my menstruation when I was in a lot of pain and was feeling very emotional/stressed. One of the things I’ve heard a lot is that during the menstruation cycle is when ocd flares can happen more often due to the increase in hormones during that time, and I wonder if that’s what happened to me? I’m also overall such a big over thinker and have been for as long as I can remember. I also have had anxiety and depression since middle school as well. Any insight would be very much appreciated 😭

Hi Everyone! I hope whoever is reading this is having a good day so far :) So for years now I’ve had very bad intrusive thoughts about things that I have done or embarrassing things that I’ve said or have happened and it’s mortifying and debilitating on a daily basis. Specifically these thoughts are mainly things that have occurred from 2018-2020 and some are more simple just as a stupid joke I made or being way too loud on calls while my family was trying to sleep and others being way more complex such as past relationships and how I’ve hurt some of the people I care the most about and when I have acted on intrusive thoughts and these thoughts will appear with no triggers at all I’ll just wake up and already have something I did just nagging me. I don’t want to live like this anymore and I’ve tried working through it with self compassion but sometimes the things I said or did back then it’s very hard to forgive myself for and I’ll reminisce on it for hours on hours, gaslight myself into believing that’s not how it happened and try to change the memory itself, or just suppress it entirely. I know those habits aren’t healthy and truly I want to get better but I don’t know how to overcome some of these thoughts. I have talked to my fiancé about this a few times and even today we talked about it and he fully supports me and is helping me work through it. I might also contact my sister too, I don’t talk to her overly too much but ever since I was little she’s thought I’ve had ocd and was one of the people who made me consider that I might have it (I’m still undiagnosed but I’ll try to when I have the money and time) and I know she could maybe provide some insight. Another thing that is troublesome about the situation is my other family members specifically my mom aren’t the most helpful and can trigger thoughts. To put it in perspective on how her thought process is and some background info she is an ER nurse and has been for 30 years due to this she believes she knows mainly everything there is about mental health and she gets extremely upset when I don’t take her advice or set boundaries. She’ll force me to talk to her about my problems and when I don’t want to she’ll pin me in a corner where I’m forced to and last summer I had a really bad episode and was really overstimulated and I just finished taking a shower and due to the water on me, my hair being wet (my hair is naturally curly and it takes forever to dry and it’s very draining taking care of even with a keratin treatment) and all the intrusive thoughts I was having and she forced me to talk to her and I did open up for the first time about my thoughts and brought up how sometimes I have thoughts of hurting my animals and it makes me physically sick. Her response to this was threatening to call the cops on me saying it was a behavioral thing and I was doing it for attention. I have never hurt any of my animals but later that day my cat came into my room and a few minutes later she comes up just gives me the death stare and after a few seconds just asks me “are you going to go kill snickers?” In the most condescending tone and she’s always like this daily where she’ll force advice onto me or get upset and yell and then reinforce thoughts I’m having. I just want to know first how to stop the thoughts from so frequently and how to heal in an environmental where it keeps reopening wounds despite trying to place boundaries? I’m sorry this is really long I usually do go really in detail about things and it’s just how I’ve always been. If anyone has any questions feel free to ask and I’ll answer them to the best of my ability. I really appreciate the time you took to read this and thank you for your help! 🥰