- Date posted
- 3y
How I trained POCD on myself
I got diagnosed with OCD, when I as 12, but had been deemed "odd" by my mother, since I was a toddler. Through out my childhood, I was anxious about a lot of different things. Before OCD "broke out", I controlled the swing in the garden ever night for 5 minutes, then one night, I felt the need to control the lamp in the dining room and needed to make sure it didn't swing. My Magical Thoughts OCD had been born. Soon it spread from the swing in the garden and that one lamp to everything that was hanging, Contamination OCD made a brief appearance, but for me my Magical Thoughts had been my form of OCD and I had been sure, I was stuck with it for life. When a new intrusive thought popped up in my head, I didn't recognize it for what it was. I thought touching the leg of the 14 year boy, I tutored as a side job, with my leg, while sitting close to each other in order to read the same book, might have aroused me meant something was wrong with me. I felt the need to investigate, to think it trough, rehash and make 100% sure, I had not been aroused by my student. Me having very lively imagination skills came in handy there, unfortunately not for me, but for my OCD. I tried to imagine how a pedophile would feel, when they liked a child. I tried to create the emotional and physical feelings, I think a pedophile would feel, and compare them to how I had felt. I did this to gain certainty, but after months I realized I had trained a new OCD form on to myself. The thoughts would come and I would go through the motions, trying to feel what a pedophile would feel, compare it to how I had felt and then finally, after sometimes hours, be able to ensure myself, that I didn't feel that way. The thoughts became more and more, not only children and teenagers I encountered would trigger me, also seeing them on TV, or thinking of them sent me down the rabbit hole. Pretty quickly it also extended to my cat, then to animals (even insects!). 17 years later POCD rules my life, it is always there, it turned more in to a constant feeling of tension and guilt, like a predator sitting on a wall, waiting to attack. Every sexual arousal needs to be checked, I can only engage in anything sexual, sex, or masturbation, when I can feel sure, it had nothing to do with a thought about a child, or animal. When I don't assure myself properly, check and think, or just try to let it pass and say to myself - Yeah, don't worry - I feel guilty after. What I find weird is, that everything seems to arouse me now. Anything slightly sexual, that years ago wouldn't have aroused me, does now. It's is kind of like having gotten hyper sensitive around the topic sex. And that triggers my POCD even more, as it got hard for me to not be aroused. I also feel like masturbating often, as I feel constant tension in my groinal area, but that runs the risk of OCD getting worse during, or more often after. On the website of NOCD I today read about groinal rousal to POCD thoughts and that any sexual thought can trigger it without one being attracted to children. I felt better after reading it, but that wore off quickly. Like always OCD got it's power back, it feels, that when I get a bit of freedom and piece of mind through therapy, or stepping back and telling me - This is OCD, you are not a monster! - OCD had a go at me to gain its territory back. Only 2020 I found helpful articles about POCD, for years I only searched in my mother tongue and found one article, that didn't describe POCD as good and detailed as the articles on the website of NOCD do and above that, the author (a psychologist or psychiatrist) stated that only men are able to suffer from POCD. I had been crushed, I thought, if only men are able to suffer from it, what am I experiencing then? At the end of 2020, I thought to myself - Why not search in English? - and finding great articles written by psychologist/psychiatrists with such insight, that I thought, the articles must have been written by someone who suffers from POCD, really blew my mind and helped me a lot, till, yes, you guessed correctly, OCD came at me with full force again. Before I read some of the posts in here, I felt pretty much alone with suffering from POCD, that's why reading your posts really made me feel less alone. I would love to meet POCD sufferers and talk to them, if there is a chat option for that on here. Thanks for reading, Zoë