Would love to hear how other mamas are doing with dealing with Postpartum OCD….Sometimes I feel like a danger to myself and my child or worse what if I acted on my intrusive thoughts! Looking for help/advice
Harm OCD is harm OCD. I'm not a woman. Harm OCD is triggered by a)Our care for the person (infant, child, adult) and b) our perception of their weakness. A baby is entirely helpless, so the anxiety with harm OCD has to be crushing. I have Harm OCD about my parents. My mother passed in 2008. I live with my father, and he got sick last year and got severely weakened. My harm OCD is off the charts. Don't avoid your child. What I recommend is seeing a therapist of course, but also taking l-theanine, which will lower anxiety, or chamomile tea. I recommend taking a warm / hot shower or bath to relax. I recommend trying talking to your best friend about this. And I recommend reminding yourself that the reason the thoughts are so scary is because you LOVE YOUR CHILD and WANT TO PROTECT HIM/HER. You are looking out for danger and you falsely wonder if maybe YOU are the danger. ANd you aren't.
I had it after having my daughter and she’s 19 months now and I can get intrusive thoughts and accept them and they pass. I’m 25 weeks with my second and had intrusive thoughts during my baby’s ultrasound today but let them in and let them pass and I continued the ultrasound not thinking twice about it. Did a few weeks of therapy with a wonderful therapist, if you need one I can let you know her name. She’s all online and made me feel SO comfortable. She’s specializes in ocd and hears all the intrusive thoughts all day so what I was going through was routine for her. If I can offer any advice it would be to ask for help with a therapist, get a support system even if it’s online group or friends. And remember you’re scared for a reason. You love your baby dearly. Postpartum OCD was the hardest thing I have battled, you have this tiny little being you love with your whole soul and more and a mind that races with what ifs. I regret not reaching out for help sooner. But I am overall okay now, and my baby and I are closer than ever. Also AVOID COMPULSIONS. It sounds so hard but do it! And sit with the anxiety. You will prove time and time again you’ll never do anything and these are just fears.
@Kilo2001 I really appreciate it so much! Please tell me who you go to! I love hearing your experience it makes me feel like I’m not alone😊
@Anonymous https://northshoreocd.com Just shoot her an email, I believe it’s on the website and she’ll respond pretty quickly! I will say the first appointment is kinda pricey but she does offer 30 min and 60 min sessions. 30 min obviously being cheaper. She does not take insurance.
@Kilo2001 Thank you so so so much😊
@Kilo2001 Thank you so so so much😊
@Anonymous No problem, remember you’re not alone! And while it can be a battle you can totally get your brain back.
@Kilo2001 You have no idea how much this helped😊
Wow this help more than you know! Thank you so so so much!
You're more than welcome. I've had harm OCD for 28 years.
I am wanting to go to therapy to hopefully lower my OCD symptoms but I am terrified to tell anyone else, like a therapist, about my intrusive thoughts. Has anyone else had this experience and if so how did you get over it?
I’m having a very bad evening with my intrusive thoughts. I was doing really good dealing with them but tonight one hit me hard. I’ve been having a lot of different intrusive thoughts but I’ll have one occasionally about hurting my mom or my dog who I love and they’re the only family I have in my life. They’re my world. I was helping my mom put away the dishes and I had the big kitchen knife in my hand and my intrusive thought was you could stab your mom. And then my brain said I had a twitch in my hand and that meant I wanted to do it. Let me just say that I wouldn’t hurt a fly. I actually caught a fly in a glass and put it outside instead of killing it this evening before this intrusive thought happened. I’m such a gentle and compassionate and caring person and these thoughts instantly cause me to have a panic attack. And I have no one to talk to them about. I know they’re hard for my mom to hear and I don’t want to be any more of a burden than I already am. I do desperately want to tell her and have her reassure me that I’m not crazy or a psycho. Then my thoughts wander to if your hand did flinch could you be a psychopath. Is hurting someone in you. I know it’s not but I feel like my mind is out to get me and hurt me. I’m working so hard and I thought I was doing so good but I need to know why I have these thoughts. They’re not ok. I need someone to help me make sense of why. I know we aren’t supposed to ruminate but I shouldn’t have thoughts like this about people I love and care about the most in the world.
This might contain triggering content, but I'm also wondering if others have dealt with this similar thought, and if so, how to deal with it? Overall, I've been doing so well these past few days. I'm able to eat again, which I hadn't been able to do because of how much anxiety I'd been experiencing. I'm spending time around loved ones and not just rotting in my room, and I've been able to wake up without immediately being bombarded by intrusive thoughts. When things first got really bad, I'd wake my mom up every night for reassurance, but I haven't done that in a while either. I'm really proud of myself, but there's still this nagging thought in my mind... While looking through others posts on here, hoping to find advice that'd fit my situation, I ended up making things worse. Someone mentioned how they had a fear that they'd purposely search for illegal content (related to POCD). I panicked, and "what ifs" flooded my thoughts. "What if the intrusive thoughts affect who I am as a person, and I do that?" I'm terrified that I'll search for those things, which I know means I wouldn't do it. But then, another person on here said they'd actually looked for those things, and that freaked me out even more. Does that mean it's possible for that to happen to me? I don't want to do that, but I keep having intrusive thoughts surrounding it. I've been doing so well these past few days. I'm just... stuck. I don't know what to do. I've spoken with other people who have the same fears, but how do I manage this? It's not something I've even thought about before seeing those posts. I've been practicing accepting the uncertainty, but I'm really struggling with this one. I hate this. This morning, I woke up, and the intrusive thoughts were back. It's just disheartening.
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