Harm OCD

Yes. It’s just like I will have intrusive thoughts and images and immediately feel like I don’t want to or do a complusion and reassure myself I don’t want to hurt anyone. Now instead of that I’m just having thoughts that I do want to or am going to hurt someone.

My HOCD recently flaired up again... I stayed away from people for two years due to Covid, now that I started to go out a bit more, HOCD got worse than ever, but I decided to not allow it to become a strong theme. Even though it scares me, I try to think - Maybe, maybe, maybe

@Zoë_84 I have been dealing with this for about 2 years. I held it in for 23 of those 24 months and I finally exploded this past month. It was nice to get the ocd diagnosis and know that I’m not alone in this. I really felt crazy and like a horrible person. I started ERP few weeks ago and have seen progress and have been doing better. Now I’m feeling like my thoughts are changes and that I want to hurt someone and not getting as anxious and it’s really scaring me

@Jamescpowers22 Ah, now I get it... Yes, being scared about not being scared... like - Am I indifferent now? Does that mean I am a bad person and don't care? It's just OCD trying to not lose more ground... To see OCD as the enemy stresses me, so I recently started to try and see it as a mental auto immune decease. Our brain warning us about potential harm is a good thing, it is essential for our survival, but an OCD brain is massively overdoing it. Our OCD brain is warning us constantly about irrelevant, not dangerous things. So you doing ERP, sitting through your anxiety without doing the usual compulsions, confuses your brain. Before, your OCD brain reported irrelevant things to you and by obsessing about it and doing compulsions you told your brain - Hey, thank you for alerting me, this is highly relevant, please keep a look out and please keep alerting me, whenever this pops up! And that's what your brain kept doing. Everytime you obsessed about it and did compulsions, you unintentionally told your brain to look closer, to put more effort in monitoring and alerting you. Over time your brain started to alert you constantly, but during ERP, you neither obsess, nor do you do any compulsions, which confuses your brain, like - Not to long ago, you wanted me to carefully watch it and alert you... and now you just ignore my alerts? What happened? Don't you care about it anymore? Why don't you care about it anymore? What's going on? I don't understand! Keep doing ERP and your OCD brain will learn, that you won't answer it's questions and after a while it will go like - No answer? Nothing? No reaction whatsoever? Hm, what I have reported must have been irrelevant then... Sorry, that was a bit long...