It’s been 4 days and I can’t seem to get over the thought, I need help because a part of me wants to move on but a part of my brain keeps holding on to the details and I keep coming back to it to reassure myself that it’s just ocd. I’m so sick of feeling like this no matter how hard I try I keep falling back to the traps of ocd. I hate the fact that I keep obsessing over the thought and trying to turn back time by analyzing every movement I did the day when I got triggered. I just want to feel like I don’t have to be cautious of my brain trying to make me terrified every 5 minutes and live life like a normal person would I’ve been trying to recover but when I get two great days one absolutely horrible trigger comes and I fall back down again. Just feeling hopeless and lost at the moment I wish I could do a compulsion to make it all stop but there’s no physical compulsions I can do to get a relief from the thought. It’s all mental compulsions and rumination I’m tired of feeling like this

Hey I'm so sorry you're dealing with this! Sometimes telling yourself it's OCD can become a compulsion because OCD then wants to check to make sure. It works best if as soon as a thought about your feared theme comes up immediately say hello OCD it's not going to work and then move on to a new thought you do want to focus on. Give it no further analyzation. View these thoughts as clouds passing by that have no effect on you. I hope this helps a little!

I've spent enormous amounts of times trying to decipher which thoughts are OCD or not. Or acknowledging that something is probably OCD but not really being able to fully accept that it is and stop paying attention to it. It all feels way too risky. But I've also made a lot of improvements in this area. It feels so good when something sort of clicks in your brain and you can easily handle a thought and move on.

Do you just let it go? I think my main fear is sometimes letting go of a triggered moment feels like a risk like what if I start living my life normally disregarding the thought and it comes back to haunt me later in life I know I sound irrational but we all know the tremendous false guilt ocd gives us despite knowing in the back of our head that it’s always been ocd all along. I think we create false scnenarios in our head all the time and make it believe it to the point of insanity. Thank you for sharing your thoughts

That's how OCD keeps us captive! It uses all these tactics to keep us involved! At a certain point for some fears I was able to say ok I'm risking that this thought/fear is not something I need to pay attention to or check on or figure out and I'm not giving it any more of my time and energy. And that little risk of not paying attention to OCD can make you think you are so irresponsible and making a huge mistake but once you do and the anxiety decreases your brain starts to readjust to normalcy and it gets easier!

You are right, I think I went from physical compulsions to mental compulsion because I’m analyzing every detail mentally just like I was doing physically compulsions analyzing everything again and again and of course I made a huge mistake of powering up the thought again so it got worse which made it harder to get out of it

Mental compulsions can be sneaky! I notice that too the more times I repeat the compulsion mental or physical it gets harder to stop it's so weird!

Do you ever feel false guilt? Do those fade in time as well? I know analyzing has no place in ocd but what are your thoughts giving myself the reassurance on the thought that triggered me by solving it? The extreme discomfort is just too much and i want to start fresh trying to recover and beat this thing called ocd

I actually don't fully understand how this part of ERP works. I feel like I need to reach a certain level of assurance to be able to decide or accept that I'm going to choose not to pay attention to whatever momentary obsession is going on but sometimes it feels like in my ERP treatment I'm supposed to wing it and I'm not ok with that because my anxiety will not go down if I don't have some logical reasoning as justification. Maybe I'm misinterpreting it or the counselor is just that much more confident than I am. lol I do notice though that sometimes reassurance can be a never ending quest and OCD won't accept solid proof and keep you asking more questions. So I think if the reassurance can be accepted pretty quickly to move on from the fear and help you still fight compulsions I think this is good, in my personal opinion. Also as time goes on and the obsessions become repetitive it does become easier to recognize oh this is just another OCD thought, pretty much everything that pops up in this category is going to be OCD so just don't even pay it any mind. I hope all that made sense.

Thank you! It’s starting to clear up to me now, I just made a mistake of making myself believe a silly scenario inside my head that powered it all up. Now I’m slowly rationally thinking again. Thank you for your kind words, stay strong we got this ❤️

Totally that's sounds just like the OCD bully! That's great i'm so glad it's helping! Thank you for the support also! Speaking about all of this is a great exposure for my social anxiety as well so thank you for asking!

Do you ever get what if thoughts inside your head? Like what if this wasn’t ocd what if it’s ocd? That’s what I’ve been struggling with lately