Hey all, after being ok for a while, my ocd seems to have slipped back? However the thing is im not getting intrusive thoughts as such? So heres my question Is it possible for the ‘intrusive thought’ to be anxiety? Like you just feel anxious for no reason and want to get rid of it? Then get scared because it feels horrible and it keeps coming back? I know the ‘what if this doesnt go away’ part is ocd but man, ive never had this before and I feel scared and alone, and I dont know where to start Any advice is truly appreciated as I want to put in the effort to get through this as soon as possible Thanks all

I haven't been officially diagnosed with OCD but when I learned more about it, I never related to anything more. A little back story: when I was younger, there were a couple of youth suicides in my area and the schools felt the need to have someone come in and talk about suicide. Well the person they had come in did a horrible job teaching it and basically made it seem like the smallest negative emotion or feeling or change in behavior made you suicidal. This ended up scaring me so much that I got horrid anxiety. Fast forward to now, Everytime I feel anxiety and panic, I fear I'm going to kill myself. Everytime I feel down and depressed, I fear I'll end it all. I'm scared to be around anything sharp because the "What if" I hurt myself comes into my mind. There are always intrusive thoughts at almost every point of the day. And it's not only for me. Everytime I hear someone being negative, I fear they will be suicidal. I know in my heart that none of this is true but it's terrifying me that it's stuck around so much that it makes me scared that maybe it is true. I've had a lot of death in my family in the past year and a half and a lot of other family drama that I'd never had before that is now also bringing up existential intrusive thoughts. And I'd never questioned anything about life before but now I get the "why is life like this?" and "does anything we do matter?" and I hate it. I don't want to think like that. I just want to go through life being able to handle things normally again. It terrifies me even right now going "what if you give up?"

Where do I begin with this…….. so my OCD has been around since childhood and has had many themes over the years. I only realised I have it just over 2 years ago. I’ve tried many things to help it not be such a monster and thought I had a good grip on it for a length of time until now! Some of my strategies have been acceptance, change of perception of thoughts and sometimes on hard days just telling myself that no matter what, I have to be brave and go out and live life. In the last few months I’ve developed none OCD related anxiety as well and so have been looking at ways to help with that. Sunday morning I was just casually scrolling TikTok and a video only about 30 seconds long or so comes up, seemingly a therapist of some kind, straight away the video began something like “you cannot replace a thought with another thought” along the lines of “you can’t THINK your way out anxiety” I don’t know the full context of the video it wasn’t long enough, I don’t know who the therapist was I didn’t look but now purely because of that one sentence my OCD has gripped onto it so badly and is trying to tear down some of my strategies because I have used changing my thought patterns a lot to help me, self compassion etc but now because of that video I’m struggling! I’m not looking for answers but I am just really upset and it feels like I’m in an impossible grip of OCD again

This might contain triggering content, but I'm also wondering if others have dealt with this similar thought, and if so, how to deal with it? Overall, I've been doing so well these past few days. I'm able to eat again, which I hadn't been able to do because of how much anxiety I'd been experiencing. I'm spending time around loved ones and not just rotting in my room, and I've been able to wake up without immediately being bombarded by intrusive thoughts. When things first got really bad, I'd wake my mom up every night for reassurance, but I haven't done that in a while either. I'm really proud of myself, but there's still this nagging thought in my mind... While looking through others posts on here, hoping to find advice that'd fit my situation, I ended up making things worse. Someone mentioned how they had a fear that they'd purposely search for illegal content (related to POCD). I panicked, and "what ifs" flooded my thoughts. "What if the intrusive thoughts affect who I am as a person, and I do that?" I'm terrified that I'll search for those things, which I know means I wouldn't do it. But then, another person on here said they'd actually looked for those things, and that freaked me out even more. Does that mean it's possible for that to happen to me? I don't want to do that, but I keep having intrusive thoughts surrounding it. I've been doing so well these past few days. I'm just... stuck. I don't know what to do. I've spoken with other people who have the same fears, but how do I manage this? It's not something I've even thought about before seeing those posts. I've been practicing accepting the uncertainty, but I'm really struggling with this one. I hate this. This morning, I woke up, and the intrusive thoughts were back. It's just disheartening.