Suffer from Harm OCD (fear of stabbing a loved one mainly) and used to love horror movies, but now I'm pretty terrified of watching them because I fear I'll trigger my intrusive thoughts even more. Anyone have experience with this? Advice?
Watch them.
I’ve had this with violent video games. Nothing is ever off limits for this horrific condition.
Is anyone struggling with Halloween at all if you have Harm OCD? Would watching horror films be a form of ERP to help face this fear head-on? The past 20 years, I couldn’t watch these films, but since the past 2 months of dealing with some OCD on steroids harm ocd out of nowhere, I want to face it head-on but smart at the same time.
Okay, so for the most part, if you have harm ocd/intrusive thoughts, you’ll understand (hopefully). If you haven’t seen, everyone is talking about the Netflix documentary “Dahmer”. Most harm ocd sufferers (myself included) that I’ve gotten to know all struggle with fears of being evil in any way (like a sociopath/narcissistic, etc). Do we need to make ourselves watch it? Even some of my friends without OCD say they couldn’t do it. The reason I don’t want to watch it is because I’m afraid it’ll trigger me. I’ll look for any common traits (this is what I do) and it’ll send me into a panic attack. But aren’t we SUPPOSED to on purpose watch things that bring us distress? The series has everyone talking about mental health and it SUCKS because OCD is considered “mental health” and I feel like it lumps us all into a giant category. Everything true crime triggers my harm ocd. I don’t even want to know humans are capable of such things because then it reminds me “it’s all possible”. I don’t know if I explained it well, but does ANYONE understand where I’m coming from 🥺🥺🥺🥺
just a couple days ago i experienced this for the first time from watching the new DAHMER series. Im having intrusive images and thoughts of me harming or killing my loved ones and its so scary because i would never do it. It has me questioning if im crazy and im having severe panic attacks over 3 times a day. Im mentally and physically drained, i’ve told my mom about it and we are going to see a therapist tomorrow. Im scared to because idk if they specialize in OCD and if i tell them my thoughts they are gonna put me in the mental hospital or say im crazy and don’t have OCD, can any therapists on here or fellow people with Harm OCD let me know if you think im showing signs of it, i just want it to go away and to be able to sleep at night without severe overthinking.
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