- User type
- OCD Conqueror
- Date posted
- 3y
Racism OCD?
Does anyone have the theme of racism for their OCD? Am I the only one?
Does anyone have the theme of racism for their OCD? Am I the only one?
Its not a theme for me but I regularly get intrusive thoughts like racial slurs when seeing different people. I know they are just thoughts however.
The part that gets me is this thought involved one small true statement and ocd is just running with it.
Same. Lately, I’ve had my ocd cling onto bits of innocent truth and twist it into something racist and evil. Ocd does a fantastic job at blurring the lines between what you really believe and what it wants you to believe. It’s so hard to tell if I actually think these thoughts because it feels so real. It feels like I 100% do. But I don’t want to believe these things.
Well I can tell you one thing racist people don’t worry. They just are racist. I mean maybe some of them had a change of heart. But I feel like it’s still something they do not worry about 100%. My best advice is to sit with the thoughts as hard as it is!
@Princess4677 Also just read something that even if intrusive thoughts are about something true, ocd distorts it and frames it in a way it isn’t. Which made me feel a little better.
@OCDewewew Oh yeah totally ! It’s with every theme too but it’s all mental torture for sure :/
I have this fear a bit especially since I’m white. People claim that white people naturally have it in them and that’s scary to me lol.
i can relate to this. in middle school, a friend called a classmate of ours a racial slur and said that it was me and not her, that classmate threatened to kill me and brought a gun to a school event and i remember being terrified and my friend at the time thought it was rather funny. ever since my OCD will latch on this when i have friends who are of different races, like i have to be fearful. i myself i’m a minority and that singular event really impacted me and my OCD latched on to it the most bizarre ways.
Oh my gosh I am so sorry!!!! That sounds awful.
I suffered this in 2020, I think it’s actually what started my OCD. Understanding that everyone has internalized racism to some degree or another makes your OCD take that truth and blow it up in you and make it seem morally corrupting. What helped is letting those thoughts be there, accept them, even say a slur to yourself when you’re alone. You’ll realize that instead of having them transform you into a racist, they’ll eventually die and you’ll be the person you once were.
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Honestly, saying white people are racist for me personally doesn’t bother me. I get so triggered when people are racist Bc it makes me question all my intentions. Everything I do and think when it comes to my ocd racism theme makes me feel awful. But thank you so much for speaking on ocd and everhthing. I feel like we all support each other. It makes me feel so good. I’m sorry you have to endure any racism at all.
I've suffered with OCD for 50 years with many different themes. SOOCD is my primary theme, and no matter which theme I may be in the middle of it always comes back to SOOCD. I'm back in therapy because after a couple of really good years, I've been in the middle of a flare up. My new therapist with NOCD, recently asked me what my core fear about homosexuallity is. I can't seem to answer that. The only answer that I can come up with, is that it is just egotistic. I'm a heterosexual man who loves my wife and raised three great kids. My question is, have. any ofyou ever been able to answer that question. I would appreciate any thoughts on this question. Thank you and have a great day.
for the past few years i have been struggling with a certain theme of ocd as well as most of the other themes. but this one i have not figured out a good way to do my own form of erp or non-engaging responses. basically i will be daydreaming or thinking and have a very random thought. i wouldn’t call these thoughts intrusive thoughts because it’s not necessarily fear of the thoughts coming true, its just fear that my thoughts are too unique. my ocd will latch on to random or weird thoughts and may also add in that i was doing something weird while doing the thought. let’s say for example i thought of something random while i was rubbing my feet. then my ocd would be like “why are u having such a unique thought while doing something weird? nobody has ever thought about that specific thought while rubbing their feet before” (just an example). but basically it’s like my ocd bullies me for having thoughts that are too random and things i’ve never heard people talk about before if that makes sense. i am just trying to see if anyone relates even a little and how i can accept that everyone has unique thoughts.
Cross post from Reddit: TW Religious ocd TW Racism This is going to confuse a lot of people but I’ll try my best. OCD could be tricking me. I don’t know. But I’ll do my best to explain. Warning: there are some extremely sensitive themes including racism. OCD has caused me to worry about making bad prayers. It is mainly an anxiety of what others would think of if I prayed for something bad. Basically, it can think of something bad, and I can think of why I want it, and say “amen” pretty easily. Not sure if that constitutes a prayer really since it is ocd driven, and might even feel more real to me than it actually is, but it gets very complicated. None of this makes any logical sense to anyone but me, but to me it makes sense and that’s the issue. My mind invented something where I can pray to pray for something. Yes, that’s right, and it makes no sense. Essentially these ideas for prayers come in automatically. I don’t necessarily choose them. I can somewhat choose how I react, but that is where it gets tricky. OCD also blunts my emotions with certain prayers or makes things feel more real than they are So, what happened, is my ocd targeted the theme I was most worried about having a bad prayer about, which was unfortunately racism. In the past, I made a mistake that was racist (I won’t get into what it was here), and I thought about it a lot. I imagined people never wanting to forgive me and saying I deserve to suffer forever. Additionally, worrying about making racist prayers made this go up. It was frustrating, because with ocd it can take what people say too literally. So if someone says: “you deserve to suffer,” I might be thinking that thinking about it 10 hours a day for multiple months was justified. This made me have a misdirected frustration towards the people I perceived as yelling at me, which was unfortunately people of color. Here’s where ocd comes in with the prayer obsession. OCD gave me the idea: well you’re so mad at them you could pray for them all to die. Unfortunately, with the prayer obsession I’ve had, I’ve had a bit of a history with doing bad prayers when I’m not feeling great, and I don’t know if that is just part of the ocd or not, or just doing them to do them. One example is world war 3. I don’t want people to get hurt, but when I was feeling horrible I thought “screw it, I’ll pray for it cause I want to die.” I knew God wouldn’t actually do it, and the normal me didn’t want him to. Then, and I don’t know why, it seemed extremely easy for a moment to pray for people of color to die, and I actually almost did it, but I stopped myself. This is where the praying to pray comes in. With ocd, if I have a moment where I almost did a bad prayer, my mind “saves” that mindset, and it is possible for me to go back to it any time. So this situation will present itself many times to me. With praying to pray, I can essentially be put back in the mindset at any time no matter what is going on, and by saying “amen,” my brain basically magically does it and it feels like the same thing. Because it feels real to me, it seems like the same thing as a prayer. Last night that is what I did for this and I regretted it less than a two seconds later. So basically, I ended up doing a prayer that was racist. This is exactly what happened in that moment. This isn’t who I normally am (although my brain would disagree), but in that moment, with magical thinking, I prayed for all people of color to die, out of what my brain said was “hatred.” My brain also said I felt genuine hatred, but I don’t think I really do. I think it is all related to a misdirected frustration of feeling like I was yelled at, which stemmed from ocd. After the prayer, all those feelings were immediately gone. I don’t know how messed up my brain was, or how much of a role ocd played. It probably at least blunted my emotions. It sort of came on all of the sudden too, but I did it. I’m really sorry. I don’t hate people of color despite what my brain says, but I feel like I did something really bad. When I sit with what happened and don’t engage with it, it does not feel like a big deal at all. The guilt is almost all ocd driven. So I don’t know if that means there is something I’m missing or not. I might be missing something, but I know what happened in the moment
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