Hi everyone. I want to share my story here cause I think you might understand. I got triggered over something very stupid. I noticed that my brain is not focused and the thoughts are bothering it. I didn't give it much attention. the next day the same thoughts came to bother me.. this went on for a couple of days untill I had enough so I decided to push away the thoughts when they came. This led to a chaos in my head and It got to the point that I didn't know what to do. If I left my brain for itself It would bother me and would not let go and If I fought the thoughts It would just get worse. So I made a decision (which made sense to me at the time for some reason) to force myself to be focused all the time and not get distracted by the thoughts. This meant I was putting a lot of pressure on my self since I was afraid of leaving my brain for itself cause I was very afraid of it (I had a history of my brain locking on some things constantly for months and It was very though). I kept living this way for two months and at a certain point I had a breakdown cause I couldn't take it any more. I again fell into the loop of trying to remove the thoughts from my head (my mental ritual) to not have any annoying thoughts and stop the thoughts from making me lose my focus (due to this whole thing. I developed an obsession about not losing my focus!) . It got to the point that I was doing this mental ritual every second of every day and It became very automatic :(. From that point it took me two months to be able to stop doing the mental rituals, which I did by looking at the frame of my glasses each time I had the temptation to do the rituals. this stopped me from doing weird stuff in my head and I came out of my head. Unfortunately after I put an end to doing the rituals I noticed that I was extremely depressed and was experiencing depersonalization and derealization. I am depressed to this day (two months after stopping the rituals) and I feel like an alien on this planet. I feel like I'm not understood and I feel like I suffered so much for something that didn't need suffering. I'm afraid I might get to the point of blaming myself for not being able to not be strict on my brain and just let go. I'm Afraid of getting to the point of wanting to end myself. I know I did my best in that situation but that doesn't stop me from the fear. I would like to hear about your thoughts.

I am adding a trigger warning, but I’ll still be mindful to censor. So I guess I would say I’m in a relapse. I was doing well (I think). I wasn’t having intrusive thoughts and I overcame a really hard theme. So for a few months I was doing pretty okay. My living situation and relationship took a huge hit and I guess I couldn’t handle the pressure idk. Anyway, one day I was trying to sleep and I got this intrusive thought about losing my mind I guess. Not being able to identify anything, speak, ect. Just being a blank mind or something. (I know, doesn’t my one ounce of sense to me either) Anyway, this really scared me, triggered me so badly that one of my old themes that I truly thought I had overcame came back. Not only did it come back, it sent me spiraling ( still am). It feels so much worse this time. And I’m struggling to overcome it. This thought: “how do we understand words?” And then it’s spirals into other thoughts related to this, but I’ll leave it at this. I can’t cope, my mind is hyper fixated on every word, not just mine. I can no longer watch tv comfortably, listen to conversations, or even speak myself. It’s making me feel like “unaliving” myself. I feel extremely alone in this. Like as if I’m the only person in the world to ever think this or struggle with this kind of theme. Getting some feedback would be great, but I won’t hold my breath.

Hey everyone. This is my first post here and it’s probably going to be a long one because I guess I feel comfortable enough to be open here. I need help. When I first got diagnosed with OCD, I figured it only impacted a small part of my life. I thought I was only affected with compulsions and obsessions that dealt with contamination, tangible perfectionism and the obvious intrusive thoughts and that’s it. Well, I’ve come to realize that most of my thinking has been impacted by OCD. At this point the only way to describe how it feels to me is a forest of thorny vines growing in place of my mind or maybe through and around my brain constantly growing every-time I give into this type of thinking (which is basically all the time because I wasn’t aware this was OCD). I’ve definitely felt it more recently, but I know it’s always been there from what I recall from past memories. I got diagnosed not so long ago with OCD and I was happy to because it explained this thing I knew was wrong with me but I didn’t know how much it will and has impacted me in the past. So, I think I’ve created a matrix in my mind or strengthened the OCD thought patterns because now I feel like my OCD impacts everything I do. And I guess I’m saying I need help here because maybe you guys will be able to see it, maybe validate me and point me where I can get help. I’ve been telling the people around me, I think my thinking is disordered and I need help but I don’t think they really understand the amount it’s affecting me or grasp what I meant when I say “I Need Help”. I did have a therapist before but because of a insurance change, she can’t work with me anymore and I’m not sure when I’ll get another (just to clarify). Back to the matter, the past couple of months I’ve been in my head just thinking and thinking. About everything. To the point where my head starts to hurt or until I feel sick of thinking about it but I can’t. I find that’s my obsessions and compulsions (other than the need for order [which can also be mental]) are very mentally based and I find myself ashamed of them so I hide them so maybe that’s why the people around me don’t feel my need for getting help as much as I do. Anyways, examples of this have been, -constantly thinking about what’s the purpose of all of life and the hidden messages in life -feeling like if I don’t do everything perfectly then what the point or being very mad at myself -being obsessed with how I present to the rest of the world sometimes even in close relationships -having calculated movements and actions (having to move my body a certain way or it doesn’t feel right) -obsessing over an absolute truth -questioning friendships and other relationships - obsessing over achievements or failures -obsessing over people -obsessing over decisions and outcomes because I want to make the perfect decisions I could go on and on but basically it’s just a lot of thinking and ruminating and obsessing to the point where people tell me I look like I’m some where else all the time. And I’ve started to feel like I find comfort in it now. I’m also diagnosed with depression and anxiety and I feel like it’s all just OCD. And same goes for my dissociation. I feel like they all root from my OCD. I’m so tired of feeling like this all the time and without my therapist I feel like I’m stuck here. I can’t make decisions, I’m never present, I can’t make or keep friendships/ relationships, everything impacts me deeply because I create a emotional obsession to it, I can’t just be without questioning everything and I’m constantly in my head. I’ve also started getting high all the time because I feel like it’s the only way to escape my brain but I’ve felt like it’s getting out of hand. I’m starting to lose in any type of hope of getting better. Does anyone have an advice for working on OCD by yourself or identifying when it’s OCD (especially mental obsessions and compulsions) so I can start to chip at this boulder that’s weighing down my life and energy?

Hi I’m Matt. I’m new. I’m struggling a lot even to write this, my mind feels confused, uncertain, tired, I can’t line up my thoughts, I’m not even sure I know how or what to think anymore, I feel dizzy, anxious, short of breath, cold, frightened, empty, and I just want to sleep. That’s how I’m feeling right now and every second of my life in general. It didn’t use to be that way, it just happened over the past few years and became unbearable during the last. I’m not very good at being concise, but I’ll try. I’ve had OCD since I was a kid, it started out when I was around 8 as what looked like a contamination fear. I would wash my hands several times a day until they bled. Then a couple of years later it morphed in some sort of mystical/ethical/moral OCD. I’m agnostic but I was brought up catholic, and that education really messed with my head. Religion terrified me. I would always feel dirty, guilty, a sinner and I would do the sign of the cross hundreds of times a day. My parents saw all this, they thought it was a quirk, a phase. And did absolutely nothing about it. Growing up, in my early teens I started to have verbal intrusive thoughts (horrible insults directed at dead people kept coming up and I would do mental compulsion to chase them away). I was also scared of hurting people. When I was around 14/15 I started fearing of beating a pedophile and that I would end up murdering the people I loved the most, as well as hurting people in general. It was very distressing to me and I did not talk about to anyone. I felt so guilty towards my parents too, because I tried to avoid any family situation that involved younger children (bear in mind I was a child too, 14-15) and when I was forced I would behave weirdly and try to avoid those children as much as possible. That showed and my mother hated me for that. I saw a couple of therapists and even though I talked about my fear of arming people and the fact that I was uncomfortable around children (I didn’t specifically say that I was afraid of being a pedophile at the time, because to me that was way worse than being a murderer). No of them figured out I had ocd. I discovered I had it via my own research when I was 24. I was a textbook case. All check boxes ticked. I was living all over Europe so I did not see a therapist for a few years (also because my previous experiences were so discouraging). At the age of 28 the intrusive thoughts were giving me a really hard time. So I sought for help. I was broke and I didn’t want to ask my parents for money (also because the general idea there was: psychologists are just for nutjobs and weak people. Buckle up) so I called the Italian NHS and ask for therapy, they said the waitlist was at least a year… but hey, if you wanna take drugs no problem, the psychiatrist can see next week). I have always been against psychiatric drugs but I was so desperate at that point and I thought that my ailment was so incurable that I caved in. During a 20 minutes visit the doctor confirmed that I had OCD and gave 20mg of paroxetine which was soon replaced by lexapro 20mg. Ten years have passed since then. I’ve been on and off medications and therapy until I got tinnitus right before the first lockdown and that was devastating. I started doing therapy again and they gave me a mix of ssris, antipsychotic drugs and benzos. Those drugs destroyed me and I felt so numb and pathetic and I lost interest in everything. There was also some cannabis use going on (which before the meds was good for me. I started smoking THC very late in life, Whalen I was about 33, to come off the benzos I was prescribed and I hated. Before tinnitus and meds, I would smoke weed and watch history documentaries for hours, after that I would solely smoke for the purpose of numbing myself). Tinnitus with OCD is an explosive mix, because it’s a sound that works exactly like an intrusive thought, if you engage with it, it gets worse). I was completely destroyed end not functional at all. I started obsessing over my tinnitus, the fact that I would never hear silence again, the fact that I couldn’t sleep, make music, read, focus, work, even think anymore. I would check my IQ to see if tinnitus was causing neurological damage. I thought that I had become completely stupid and I couldn’t recall anything anymore. The therapist I was seeing was well aware that I had severe ocd, I was very specific about that, but she would just “treat” the distress, my episodes and the subsequent depression. She did nothing for ocd. The kept medicating me and finally they gave me venlafaxine which made me suicidal. What did my therapists do when I told them that such meds were giving me those thoughts? They recommended hospitalisation telling me a fairy tale about this wonderful place that did individual and group therapy, group work and exercise, walks, talks, even a gym! It turns out it was the kind of 1950s sanitarium you see in scary movies. Worse than a prison, I’m not kidding. All they did was pumping people full of sedatives and drugs and there was no therapy whatsoever. I went there voluntarily with the specific purpose of coming off meds in a protected environment and so I did, even though they made me stop cold turkey and they kept insisting on giving me other drugs, which I refused. That was last October. I haven’t taken any meds since them and I don’t want to take any anymore, I’m still suffering from withdrawals and I still don’t feel like myself. Well it comes to recent days and my last therapist who I tried to be as accurate as I could with and after while she told me that I had to choose what problems I wanted to work on, and eventually when I was talking about my financial issues (never saying I couldn’t pay her fee) she told me to “come back when you have the money”. Obviously she did not even address my ocd. Now I’m all alone and hopeless. I’ve got maybe two friends and my best friend basically told me she does not have the time and the mind for this and she’s very busy. So I’m basically living with my mother who has a ton of issues too and even though she’s great and loves me dearly does not really know how to help me. What I have now is completely all-encompassing. I can’t work, I can’t watch a movie, read a book, be around people, nothing… my inner monologue is always there and has taken over every aspect of my life, my ocd is everywhere and makes me doubt everything about myself, my choices, my life, even my own thoughts. I don’t trust anyone and especially I don’t trust myself. Every second of my life is pain, mental torture, dizziness, tiredness, anxiety. I don’t enjoy anything anymore. Nothing. I loved music, IT, languages, history, politics, diy, so many things… now? Nothing. I just wanna lie in bed and go through my paranoias for the millionth time all over again. Hoping I would soon fall asleep but at the same time fearing it because then I’ll have to wake up an live. I don’t wanna die, but I can’t live anymore. I thought my OCD would just stay the way it was (I had kinda learned how to cope with it a little bit) but now it has morphed into this life consuming thing that never goes away. On top of that in the past 3 years I went to a fair share of trauma: tinnitus, a very heavy breakup that I’m still obsessing about, met a very abusive and manipulative person that completely destroyed what was left of me and my life. Those are the most notable ones. I also have major depression, autistic traits and probably narcissistic traits. Ok I guess that’s it, sorry for the very long post.