Fears :(

Hey so I’m an 18 year old college student I’ve had ocd for a long time but I never wanted to admit this aspect of it as part of it and I still don’t. That’s why I won’t say it cause I’ll just end up crying again. I don’t even want to post about it cause this would just make the problem real. I know I’m not sexually attracted to them but my mind wants to trick me and I end up getting confused on which is rlly me, like the other aspects of my ocd. It spiked ig when someone sent me a meme and it was fine but at the end of it it showed a child being shown in a sexual way which was suppose to I guess be funny but it wasn’t rlly funny to me at all and got uncomfortable and the pocd thoughts came in hard and I had such a bad panic attack and then I felt the need to go back and check to see what I was feeling and went to the video the next day after avoiding it to see which after reading the threads here is I guess a big no no? I know I’m not sexually attracted but my mind is playing these games and confuses me and I’m so scared to even talk to my therapist about it or ask people for help cause what if they think I’m a pedophile? Children genuinely make me happy and I have a motherly instinct to care for them but my mind turns it into something darker and I know I don’t think of these kids sexually but it’s like I have the power to?And that freaks me out so much and it won’t leave me alone I don’t know what to do I know I’m not one but my mind is tricking me and it’s freaking me out and if my mind says it could be what if other people think I am no one I trust will even understand idk what to do I just needed to put this somewhere to vent

Hey everyone! I’m new here and thought that it might help to get my OCD story off my chest. My intrusive thoughts are so bad that I never want to talk about them to anyone so maybe that’s why I’m here. When I was 13 my grandma was in the hospital. She was my best friend in the whole world. I imagined so much life with her. I remember pulling into the hospital one day with my Dad and immediately knocking on “wood” (the car door) to help put me at ease about my grandmas health before going in. I knocked on wood because everyone knows that’s what you do when you don’t want something to happen. I didn’t want anything bad to happen to her so bad that all I could think about in that moment was something bad happening. So I knocked on wood. It made me feel better so I kept doing it whenever I had bad thoughts. But then it going confusing. If this was helping ease these thoughts, why was I starting to have these thoughts more frequently? 13 year old me didn’t understand what I was doing or why these bad thoughts started. It had got so bad that I was knocking on wood every second of the day, every surface I came across that felt right, and if I didn’t I would force myself to turn around and touch that surface. I would have to knock on wood 8 times every single time but the 7 would have two knocks because the word 7 have two syllables. But then the 8 times wouldn’t be enough, I still wouldn’t feel satisfied so I would do it again and again and again until my entire day was overpowered by intrusive thoughts or knocking on wood. My family and friends started to notice, asking why I do it. I would always avoid the question or make a joke out of it because I couldn’t tell them these terrible thoughts I was having. I was so deeply afraid of something bad happening to the people I love the most or myself that it was debilitating. A couple years later I noticed how bad it had gotten and wanted a change. So I forced myself to stop knocking. I would tell myself angrily that nothing bad would happen if I don’t knock. It took me a lot of convincing and small steps to realize this, but it worked. I got better. I went to the doctors office at about 15 and told them everything. How I did this but how I solved this. They told me it takes great mental strength to be able to fight something in your brain like that. I have always been so mentally strong but hearing them say that made me feel so much better. And I was better. For years. Yea I went through times when it was bad again but it was so much better. The past couple years it has gotten worse again. I noticed that it gets worse when my anxiety about things is higher. New changes, new people, new things. Now, at 21 I won’t let myself get back to the point I was when I was 13, but recently I can’t seem to keep the intrusive thoughts out. I am so terrified of myself or someone else getting hurt of getting older that I put the whole toll on myself. I am so so so happy with my life right now that I don’t want anything to change. That is why it’s been so bad recently. Life is amazing which is why I only want it to get better and I’m so scared something might get in the way of that. I realized after talking to my friends that I never want to say my intrusive thoughts out-loud because I believe strongly in speaking things into existence so I only speak good things out loud. That’s how I’ve always been. But when I talked with my friend she said she’s the opposite, she says the bad things out loud because then you jinx them and they won’t happen. Her saying that gave me a little peace because it made me realize that it’s okay to get these things off my chest and that saying these things out loud isn’t so serious, it’s not life or death like I thought it was. Honestly, the weight of getting my story off my chest has already helped me feel a little lighter of a load on myself.

Am I the only one who feels different for having my ocd manifest in completely different ways than most of the people I know that struggle with ocd? My type of ocd relates to me not eating due to thinking there are worms in my food, which lasts for weeks, it’s this constant obsession of the grossness of worms and my fear of them. Everytime I tell someone this they think it is some sort of schizophrenia, but I am diagnosed with ocd because I dont see worms, I just can’t get the idea of them being in my food out of my head. So when I explain it to people, they constantly bash me for it, tease me about worms, call me weird, and one time my ex boyfriend started telling his friends to start showing me photos of worms to anger me. I just feel so different and although exposure therapy has been suggested for me, I just can’t seem to think of the concept of being comfortable with worms without crying.