Is it still only OCD when…?

this is exactly how my ocd started, i saw a post on TikTok talking about how if you have bad anxiety you might’ve been ‘abused’ in childhood and that sent me into a complete spiral and I started worrying my dad was secretly some weirdo.. this is just like every other ocd theme it all works the same. Treat this like you’d treat any other intrusive thought or theme, I’m not recovered or anywhere near to it but since u have the ocd conqueror label im guessing you know how to do that! im so sorry ur dealing with this though, it really does suck

I definitely relate to this. At this point, I know I had a pretty normal childhood and i trust myself on the things I remember because I can remember memories from when I was really young. I always still have those intrusive thoughts that are so fucked up, like “what if my parents abused me and I just repressed the memory?” But I’ve always felt comfortable and safe around my parents and I have enough experience with comfortable and uncomfortable people now that I trust that feeling and I know the thoughts are just OCD. There’s a quote by Maya Angelou, “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” So you can trust how someone makes you feel. If your thoughts (which are just thoughts) are what are causing the distress, that’s different if the person’s actions and words and presence are causing you distress.

Something I've learned recently is that judgment is the first compulsion. It helps me to consider if I'm doing an OCD thing... I struggle as well with "what if xyz happened and I don't remember?" and it helps me to remember that why that distresses me is because I would then judge that having happened and me not remembering as "bad". That I am judging myself as not remembering as bad, that I am judging my entire family dynamic based on whether something did or did not happen, etc. OCD can attack what we value, and for me, I value feeling safe... So it can pose painful "what ifs", where if true I would feel unsafe and uncertain. Also, the brain can connect things in ways that are not literal. If you feel concern about something like abuse, it could be that you value safety and your mind is connecting to a *fear* of not being safe, rather than something that really happened. Or you may feel unsafe but in a different way, that your mind is placing onto your family or childhood for whatever other reason. You are capable of going both "yes I had this dream and it distressed me" and "the dream is a neutral experience and I don't have to judge me or anyone else for it", and I think OCD tends to turn things more black and white and less nuanced, like "because I had this dream, and I didn't like it, something is wrong."