Does anyone with HOCD worry about the times they were homophobic? Like today in my Women’s study class, we were doing the heterosexual questionnaire and then my teacher asked us to fill the blanks in our head. I filled it with homophobic responses because I thought about what my parents or what others might say. But now I’m convinced that I’ve been faking being accepting the whole time and I’m really as bad as my parents.

Me. I’m 20 and I will admit to say really homophobic stuff when I was like 12/13 and I don’t even know why I said it, I don’t remember actually caring whether people were gay or not. I think it may have been because I heard a lot of homophobic stuff from the people around me. But I feel literally sick at the thought of the things I said and I feel the need to confess it all the time. I also worry that the things I said were ‘internalised homophobia’? this really panics me.

Yes. I have a big problem with obsessing over having said anything bad about people, whether individual, group, communities, races, etc. this includes times where I have joked about gay people in an over-the-top sarcastic way. Now, like any group that I may have said something bad about in the past, I now experience crippling anxiety and OCD when around a member of that community. I guess the OCD voice is saying something like ‘you think they like you now, but imagine if they knew what you’d really said about them, you ought to be ashamed of yourself...’ etc.

Like I spewed out a few homophobic comments while I was trying to explain to my friends what I was going through/how I felt and while that was NO EXCUSE to say that at the time, I was also very angry with myself for being so anxious about that. Like I even thought about it last night and all the things I said about my gay friends in support of them, and how I am a giant hypocrite.

I think it’s part of OCD trying to take things away from us that we care about. I care deeply about having connections with all sorts of people, and in my past, I was always someone who could get along with anyone genuinely. The OCD has slowly narrowed down my options in that regard and I hope I can steer it back over time using ERP, self-compassion and mediations.

Like the illogical stuff that went on inside my head sounded 200x worse once it came out of my mouth.