Nothing can help me

I don’t even say I have OCD anymore because it feels like I’m lying. Maybe this isn’t about OCD anymore and is about accountability instead. Accountability for how twisted and sick I am. Sometimes I force myself to admit that it’s not OCD and that I’m just dark and twisted and need to protect the world from me. I mean god this feels too real to be OCD. Sometimes I look back at my memory and wonder if I did certain stuff on purpose and ask myself who could do stuff like this? Everyone says it’s OCD but it feels too real. I have a gut feeling that I’m a deviant psycho. I want to be gone.

How do I know if my obsession really is ocd or If im lying to myself about a past intention

Sometimes I feel like it’s getting better but then I feel like I’m lying to myself again, and when I think about what happened the anxiety is so overwhelming and distressing that I feel sick. I find it hard to eat and sleep and even do basic things like washing and keeping my environment tidy and clean. The problem is that I’m struggling so hard with the denial obsession. Ever since finding out about rationalisation I have been unable to feel better or “normal” again. The problem is the online definitions and then examples are confusing. It says that rationalisation is where someone constructs a reason behind an action to make it seem better and to make themself feel better. Yet all the examples it provides is minimising the severity of one’s actions and finding excuses, not lying to yourself about why you did something and the motivation behind it. But then I’ll look it up again and I can’t make sense of it. The examples that they provide of this behaviour reassures me sometimes but then the actual definition of it makes it seem like it means something else. I feel ill because if rationalisation does mean lying about the motivation of an action, intention, etc, then I don’t think I’ll be able to convince myself that I’m not in denial and I’ll be forever in a state of extreme distress and self hatred. I can’t let it go. I know people are going to tell me that I shouldn’t be researching, but they don’t realise the seriousness of it. It feels like something I cannot just “accept the uncertainty” of. I just want someone to make it all go away. And the “explanation” I have behind the act I did in the past, I feel like most people would call it insane because it doesn’t make sense. I really don’t know how to make myself feel better. I’ve been ruminating and agonising over this for about a week now, and it feels like I’m dying. Or at least dying inside. I no longer feel able to convince myself that it was all okay and not that bad anymore. And if it is all denial, then I can’t love anymore, I wouldn’t be able to have relationships, and if I did it would mean dating someone who is also a “bad” person. When I feel like I can’t take it anymore I tell myself that I don’t have to figure it out on my own and that I can go to a therapist and they’ll make it all okay again. But I am seriously convinced that if I do tell a therapist, they’ll tell me it’s not ocd after all, because the therapists in the adult services are stricter. This is going to sound awful but I felt safer when I was younger and in the child/adolescent mental health services because they always reassured me it was ocd even when it sounded obvious to me that it probably wasn’t and that I’m in denial. And when I first mentioned my concerns about it, and asked what they thought, they didn’t tell me if they thought it was ocd or not, the lady just started saying “I don’t know” or that many people who are like that don’t actually want to harm anyone anyway. This just made me more anxious. So ever since this particular fear started, I have avoided telling any therapists/psychologists my fears. There was this one ocd specialist that I saw once a few years back and I told him everything (all though my recollection of the event at the time was hazy because I wasn’t panicking about it.) He seemed very nice and genuinely seemed to believe that it was ocd, which was reassuring at the time. But I’m afraid now if I tell someone everything now with all that I remember, and my thought patterns, and complete refusal to even consider the possibility (even though it seems far more likely) that it’s denial, they’ll tell me it’s definitely denial. When I research about the types of denial and the thought patterns, behaviours a person in denial engages in, it sounds very much like me. When I research OCD, I can’t find many similarities anymore between my experiences and the ones listed on there. I mean how on earth am I going to convince myself that I’m not rationalising my behaviour? Other things I tell myself like “even if it is denial, you don’t have to accept that”, “so what if it’s denial, if denying a possible truth makes me feel better and able to live happily with myself, then why can’t I do that?”, and “if it really were that bad, you would never have gotten over it.” But the thing is, I could’ve just been rationalising all this time, even before I remembered the event. It’s gotten so bad, that I genuinely can’t shake off the feeling of “knowing the truth”. Even when I’m feeling less anxious. So if I go to bed still feeling convinced it’s denial, I hope that when I wake up that the anxiety is back and that it provides fuel and motivation for me to convince myself that everything’s okay and that it’s ocd. When I tell my parents what happened, they insist that it’s still ocd. They’ve even told me that because I was 14 at the time, my hormones must’ve been everywhere and if it really were a real desire, it would’ve happened again and again. This doesn’t make me feel better because I feel like they’re excusing my actions and that they’re in denial, and that if I went to a therapist and they said it was denial, my parents wouldn’t accept it or even me, and I’d be alone. I do not want that to happen, because I do not want my parents to be upset or have to deal with that emotional burden. Another aspect is that in the past, I was having concerns about my feelings and feeling convinced I was attracted to it, what you might call “false attraction”. But I wasn’t convinced because maybe it was just groinals. And it felt different from my actual attractions. But then sometimes I was worried that maybe it felt more intense than my attractions and that was proof. When I started worrying about this specific event in my past, those worries mostly subsided, unless I started worrying if maybe I was suppressing it, and then those “feelings” returned a bit. But most of the time, I wasn’t worried about it, because I wasn’t having them or those doubts. If I had an intrusive thought or image, there were no feelings. But then I remembered reading about “latent” attractions and now I’m worried about that again. When I have a fleeting thought or image, it feels like it’s real feelings, but if I examine it and make myself re-examine every single thought, it disappears. But in that fleeting moment, sometimes it feels real. This adds another level of fear, because in the past I had thought to myself “maybe it was real at the time and the action really was that bad and awful, but maybe it’s gone away and it might have just been something that happened once when my brain wasn’t fully developed”. But if it was just suppression, that takes away that layer of reassurance from me. Every day, towards the middle of the day, I feel like I’m getting closer to reassuring myself, but then the doubts come back and I feel worse again, or even worse than that, calm, and feeling like I’ve accepted it as true. I really don’t know how to feel better anymore. The therapy appointment is next week and I’m not sure I’ll have the guts to tell them about it. I feel like a coward and a horrible, disgusting person.