Question

i have been diagnosed with OCD & generalized anxiety disorder. for some reason, i’ve been very hyper aware of everything. like the way i talk, the way i see the world, how certain things sound/look/feel, and it’s very distressing. i feel like the hyper awareness makes me afraid of things? like for some reason, my mind attached to cartoons, and i was hyperfocusing on it, and got extremely scared, like scared of the cartoon for no reason? i’ve done this a lot, and i get scared i have psychosis or schizophrenia, or something that makes you afraid of things for no unknown reason. i feel so scared that this is my new normal…. im heartbroken. so many what if’s. did i just ruin my own life?? 💔

Hello everyone. I often get the feeling that I will go crazy or in a state of permanent suffering. The thought is very persistent and I think is OCD repeating that disturbing thought. If anyone feels the same way. What do you do about it?

My OCD diagnosis is still very new, but now that I know what it is, it is clearly something I’ve had for as long as I can remember. Contamination/bugs and health have been a consistent theme since childhood, but religious/existential themes emerged during adolescence. Around that same time, there was also a good deal of trauma, and during middle school I started experiencing hallucinations. Tactile (like bugs crawling on me or biting me, an eyelash being stuck in my eye, but nothing was really there); visual (like moving shadows or things that would dart past in my periphery, and then I would just have intrusive thoughts of scary things around corners or under things); and auditory (an angry male voice that grumbles or yells indistinctly, or a high pitched noise like a microphone/speaker feedback but muffled and less sharp). Because of the religious denomination I grew up in, I initially assumed these were demons and tried to address it that way, but when I was 14 or 15, it occurred to me that those voices/sounds sounded like the way I felt, and the visual/tactile experiences happened during times of stress too — and so all of those experiences could just be seen as an expression of a fragmented part of myself. That acceptance didn’t make them go away — I still experience them now and I’m in my 30s — but it made those experiences less scary and more manageable. I also see now how these all pop up specifically when OCD obsessions are super triggered and when I’m super sleep deprived. Anyway! Since this diagnosis, and talking about the hallucinations at all, are new to me, I am wondering who else has had similar experiences. I don’t really know how much of the hallucination experience is OCD versus trauma, but it seems like this might all make sense under the “quasi-hallucination” label.