I'm living in mental torture. I take my meds, go to therapy, try to eat well but yet here I am struggling so bad. OCD is terrible. So misunderstood. Such a life sucker. I'm in physical pain from the anxiety it leaves.

I wish so bad that I could go back to being how I was before the anxiety and OCD had taken over my life, and the subsequent medications and their side effects . It’s mostly bodily sensations now. Tension headaches daily. Fast pounding heart rate. Feeling like I’m constantly out of breath. Feeling like I’m going to pass out. My eyes moving involuntarily. Feeling intense anxiety for no apparent reason. Feeling like the ground is moving under me. I’ve tried so many things. Many different meds, many different therapys, and I only seem to be getting worse as the years go on. I’m loosing hope that I’ll get better than I am now.

I’ve struggled for POCD for years, since I was 17 and I’m 22 now, about to be 23. I had other obsessions, HOCD being the second worst, but now even that doesn’t bother me anymore. When I developed POCD it was a very traumatizing day. I was just figuring out that I had OCD and researching pure O OCD and saw POCD listed underneath the types of obsessions. I was so freaked out by the possibility of that that I developed it. I ended up spiraling into a panic attack and watched videos on YouTube that had children in them in order to try and prove that I didn’t have POCD. But of course that just made it worse. I went to therapy and did ERT which made it a lot better, but even back then I was still uncomfortable talking about my groinal responses and false attraction responses so I don’t think I fully treated it. I was able to be fine for a long time, years, of me being able to be okay with dealing with POCD even when It popped up. It mainly only bothered me when I saw children in media for some reason but not in real life. Now it’s just both Oh and I’ve been a summer camp counselor since I was 15, so I’ve worked with kids every summer. I think POCD is especially difficult for me because I’ve always enjoyed working with kids and it deeply scared me.😭 It wasn’t until last summer that I started to notice it being more difficult to deal with again. Then I went through a rough patch in my life and since then it’s been way worse on and off again. I will go through the motions of feeling like “okay I’m just gonna think maybe, maybe not. I don’t care, I know myself so I’ll be fine. I’m a great person. I can handle this.” To something actually triggering me and me feeling this intense and gripping feeling of anxiety, like a sinking pit in my stomach and then it’s so hard to turn away from. I’ve tried doing ERT on my own but as soon as I stop I always feel like I move backwards. I just don’t know if I can ever move past this like I have with my other obsessions…it is so haunting and has traumatized me more than once. I’m working on seeing an OCD therapist, most likely through the NOCD app. So I am planning to do that as soon as I can, I just feel so frustrated right now…I’ve kept being triggered the past 2 weeks and I just want it to leave me alone. I don’t want to think about these things. I just want to focus on living my life. It’s so annoying and awful, and it makes me feel sick and so uncomfortable. It’s like telling someone to stop but they won’t; my brain just won’t stop even though I want it to. And my intrusive thoughts are paired with images, so it’s also like having something awful shoved in my face that I can’t turn away from because it’s in my mind. I just really felt the need to vent some of my feelings out…I’ve been going through a rough time again, had a lot of stress over college exams & projects, had a misunderstanding with my partner, got a random tooth pain, and also got screwed over on said project by my team members giving me awful scores for no reason. So yeah it’s just been rough 😔I will be going to the dentist soon. Ugh just so many bad things are happening and OCD just makes it feel worse. Sometimes I think what if the universe is punishing me for having POCD? Then I try to remember to be kind to myself instead. If you’re dealing with this you’re not alone ❤️

I just am so sick of constantly battling my mind it’s so fucking annoying like what’s even the point of spending anymore time on earth if non existence is preferable to existence. I’ve been diagnosed with OCD but more obsessions than compulsions it’s really more of a mental fight than anything psychical although I do have a bit of that contamination OCD. I’ve tried the SSRIs and I would 100% reccomend them to anyone who has OCD but it feels like there are too many triggers that force me back into that intrusive thought loop which is just hellish. Its really hard to imagine any sort of torture that could be worse than those thought loops genuinely hard to conceive of any torture even physically that could be worse than that. I have actually been doing much better recently but I really just can’t conceive of going back into another one of those fucking miserable intrusive thought loops again like I see the symptoms coming back and the feeling that I get before the intrusive thoughts start really really piling in has come back again. Idk just thought I should share my experience like anyone else who has this mental condition I feel really sorry for. Here’s something that I read I feel like was really important that I wanted to share with anyone else who has OCD “You are a sensitive person, so altruistic that you get worried by even having bad thoughts. Learn to be a bit more selfish, and fight for your own happiness. You truly deserve it!”