Off my chest

*venting* I’m so tired of life. I just woke up, and I feel like going back to bed and sleep until this nightmare passes. This week has been one of the hardest of my life. I don’t think I can face another day of intrusive thoughts, fear, anxiety. I need some moments of relief, but there are none. I wanna have a life again. Anxiety and obsessive thoughts have killed my social life, my ambitions and desires, my happiness. I’ve been fighting for the past 6 months for nothing. I don’t see any improvement. I’m on day 3 of Lexapro and of course i can’t tell if it’s gonna work for me or not. I’m on the first stages of ERP therapy and I still haven’t got any assigned homework to work on, which I really need because I need to feel like I’m doing SOMETHING to help myself with ocd and Gad. I just hope someone could just take out whatever part of my brain isn’t working properly and replace it with a new piece. I don’t wanna feel like a burden to my family or boyfriend anymore. I can’t believe all the damage that I’m causing. I don’t know what to do with all this self hate. I don’t know where to turn to. I seem to have all the help that one could need - therapy, medication, support system. Yet I feel like I can’t spend another day living like this.

Hi everyone, this is my first post here. I have OCD for as long as I can remember. But the last year it has become unbearable... I don't know how to move on... My brain began to generate terrible, and scary thoughts about the people who are the most important and dearest to me. It's tough even to write about this... My fear is based on "magical thinking" and the belief that if I think something bad about someone I love, bad things will happen. And the more I worry about it, the more terrifying scripts my brain creates. Here is my OCD story in a brief summary. I started to have intrusive thoughts as a kid. Even in my childhood, my rituals were mostly mental. During my college years the obsessions almost disappeared. Then a few years later they came back (probably because of stress at my work), but I still could live with intrusive thoughts because they didn't take up most of my time. Everything has changed recently, after a chain of traumatic stressful events occurred in my life in a very short period of time. My anxiety has increased significantly, OCD has gotten worse. When I was looking for some useful information about struggling with intrusive thoughts, I read a post by a woman in which she wrote that she was afraid of accidentally cursing her child. I understand that it sounds crazy and there's no logic at all, but after a while I realised that this thought popped into my head and I can't get rid of it. This really scared me. I know that OCD quite often attacks the things we love and care about. For me, it's my family. I'm afraid that I'll wish my loved ones something bad and it will hurt them... These thoughts come up against my will. I realize that this is illogical, and probably the only person I can harm with my thoughts is myself. But the "what if..." thought destroys me. Unfortunately, I can't afford the ERP therapy because I live in Eastern Europe. At this moment, I'm researching sources and specialized literature on my own. As I understand one of the main factors in the success of therapy, and one of the first steps is the acceptance of the thoughts. But in my case, the problem is that there remain a couple thoughts that are still in my mind unacceptable (like wishing bad things on my family). I don't know what to do about it... I'm so desperate... Maybe someone has experienced something similar? I really want to believe that there is a way out of this trap because OCD is taking everything I care about... I'm really scared, and it's occupying all my mind.

I'm stuck. My compulsions always centered around expelling all anxiety from myself, but now I've found something external that can't be neutralised - completely ego-dystonic centered around the most horrific thing I've encountered in my life and the thought that someone could know I had watched it and thought I was genuinely into it sexually. I always clung to this idea that I could expel enough anxiety that it wasn't bothering me. Wouldn't be perfect, but I could at least get rid of it enough to function well. But this has knocked me down completely: This is a thought that will always cause me anxiety anytime I think it, every social situation, every day at work is a ticking time bomb where I feel I have to avoid it. There's positives. I've learned a lot about my compulsions around perfectionism socially. After the anxiety passes I'm still confident, I'm still funny, it doesn't affect my personality. I know it isn't me. But I can't laugh off the subject matter like I would normally do, and no matter what I do I will always be able to think something that causes me anxiety on this. And when it does, my anxiety slaughters me. It throws me cognitively, if I've eaten anything, I get to taste it twice; that happened yesterday - Thankfully I have a great relationship with my manager and team leader so could convince them to keep it between us and keep working but the moment you feel your stomach go and the saliva starts to come, it's coming up whether you want it or not. The anxiety spike hits me when I wake up in the night, stopping me sleeping. When I'm enjoying myself 'too much, it brings it up to put me in my place. When I go to the gym or out with friends, the fear of the anxiety hits me. It's actually not even the situation anymore, it's the anxiety about the anxiety. But I've watched myself slide backwards from all the incredible progress I've made. I've made mistake after mistake feeding compulsions I never should've done, all the time working towards a different compulsion that I thought would magically fix all this. That's the most insidious thing about OCD. The more you try to fix it, the worse it gets. I've never had this before. Never something external that can't be resolved. I can't sleep much. Can't eat a lot. Watching my muscle mass deteriorate. What if it happens on a date? What if it happens in an interview? Why this? Why did my OCD latch on to something this disgusting (That one probably answers itself actually haha). Either this helps me finally realise that not all thoughts are meant to be resolved, reveals more about the OCD and helps me improve. Or it doesn't. Anyone had anything like this? A period of sustained downhill with the OCD that you pulled out of? Something external that you couldn't ever get confirmation of, but helped you in the end? Maybe didn't, but you still soldiered on anyway. Just looking for a little optimism tbh.