- Date posted
- 1y
It’s been like this for a year
I saw someone on here say they dealt with POCD for only 3 months and they just got better…I’ve been dealing with the same theme every day for the past year now. What does that mean?
I saw someone on here say they dealt with POCD for only 3 months and they just got better…I’ve been dealing with the same theme every day for the past year now. What does that mean?
It wholly depends on the person’s life experiences and how far deep in the OCD rabbit hole you’re in. You post a lot of reassurance seeking posts, which just makes OCD worse. That’s why therapists say to not seek reassurance, check, ruminate, etc. because it prolongs symptoms and OCD issues overall. Most likely, that person stopped doing compulsions completely, even though it’s really hard, and threw themselves into ERP with their therapist. And they could’ve just have developed OCD and got help nearly immediately, so there’s not years of bad habits built up and lots of issues connected to OCD due to compulsions and rituals. It took me 6 years to fully recover. It’s going to be different person to person. Comparison is a killer of hope.
Youre afraid that because youve dealt with it longer it might mean something deeper? Youre looking for certainty but trust me when i say that ocd wont let you have that certainty. Its like a monster that eats certainty and gets hungrier the more you feed it. How do you kill it? Starve it. Stop looking for certainty and remember that youre not alone! I believe in you!
Im still searching about pure o ocd while I still look for a specialized therapist so that's why I'm asking the following thing lol Is normal to have months and/or years without an ocd episode? I noticed I had a considerable amount of episodes in all my living years but sometimes they took a year or a bit more than a year to appear, in worse scenarios I noticed the took just months to appear once again Is that normal? Im kinda feeling guilty about it because I notice some people live 24/7 with ocd since they are kids while my thing is more like, episodically, not 24/7 since I was born? My last episode started in August of last year and is still haunting me but I know people had it worsened since their earlier years of life
(Long post warning) Hi, I’ve been struggling with severe OCD for six years now. it started in 2019 with my theme being getting sick/emetophobia. it devastated my life. I almost didn’t graduate high school from it. I remember washing my hands for three hours one day until they were nearly bloody while crying and asking why I could not stop doing it. I remember id have to write and rewrite sentences when I did my English homework and that’s why I nearly failed that class. I remember how I would spend up to thirty minutes to an hour pacing the halls of my apartment while my mom was asleep until I neutralized the thoughts about throwing up and I could finally go to bed. I don’t know when it happened, but my theme switched. Sometimes in late 2020 or early 2021, it switched to POCD. It started with a single thought, and I focused on it and it’s been my theme since then for four years. It has been absolutely destroying me. I feel so disgusted and lost and just tired. My compulsions are severe now. I thought they were bad before, but now they’re ten times worse. I can’t eat, drink, change my clothes, walk, or even do things on my phone normally. I’ve developed so many mental compulsions that it’s so intricate and complicated yet at the same time I’ve done them so much that they’ve become normal. An example I have is if im putting on a shirt and I have a “bad” thought, I have to take it off and put it back on two more times (that’ll make it 3 times I put the shirt back on - odd numbers are my safe number). I have to have a good thought on the third time otherwise I have to take it off and put it on two more times to make it five times I put on that shirt. If not that then I just put on a different shirt because the original is now tainted with my bad thought. I can’t open apps on my phone. It’s with the numbers again. If I open TikTok once while having a bad thought - I have to close it and open it two more times and so on. Sometimes I do it up to 30 times. So I just don’t do things usually. I don’t turn on the TV because I know I’ll redo it. I don’t open a book or grab it off my shelf because I’ll have to repeat the action. I can’t even lay in bed without getting up and redoing it even if im exhausted. I just feel so helpless. I don’t know what to do. I feel disgusting and even now my minds screaming at me that I am dirty and what I think is true. I just wish I was free of this, I wish I could just live my life. I’ve wasted hours and days because of my compulsions. I mask it so well around my friends. I don’t do them in front of anyone or I’ve learned to hide it well. But when im back home alone, it goes haywire. I just want to live again.
Can anyone who has dealt with pocd/harm ocd tell me if it ever gets better? I don’t even trust myself anymore and I’m so tired of it.
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