Attempting to get onto the Road to Recovery

Hiii! This is my first post. I found NOCD through a tiktok ad that spoke to me. It was titled signs you didnt know were OCD or something like that, and one of the slides was “checking my pulse throughout the day to make sure i was okay”. This is something ive done for i dont even know how long. atleast 10 years, im 24 now. Ive always known Ive had OCD. Light Sanitation OCD runs in my family. But over the years ive started to realize i had way more than the “family trait”. Checking my pulse 40+ times a day is something i refer to as my “OCD tick”. Its to the point where people who dont know about my “tick” often ask if i am okay when they see me do it. Maybe this post is me putting it on paper for the first time so i myself can analyze but some other stuff i struggle with are: Often having thoughts of if i dont do A, B will happen. An example that is common for me is “if i dont refold this shirt me and my boyfriend will get into an argument” or if im out to dinner with a friend, “if i dont pick up this cup and place it back down, i will get into a car accident on the way home”. This is one i struggle with almost everyday, especially when im around people (work or outings). This compulsion happens multiple times a day. Now in my life i try to practice exposure therapy, even getting annoyed i feel the compulsion and think to myself “oh my god this is so stupid no!” but if i dont follow through i feel guilty. often when i get my next compulsion shortly after i tell myself “okay doing this will make up for not doing the previous one”. I definitely dont have a number based OCD, but i would have to pick up and put down the cup until it feels “right” or “correct”- same with checking my pulse. I have to check my pulse until the feeling is “just right”. With sanitation as i said before, i have a very clean and sanitary family, although mine is more severe than their feelings. I avoid touching certain surfaces after i have washed my hands, such as the front door knob, or living room tv remote, etc. If i need to touch or use these things, i have to immediately wash my hands again. Even if someone comes home and asks me to go and lock the front door ill often respond with “i cant i just washed my hands, if i lock the door ill have to rewash my hands”. thankfully my family is very understanding. I often feel like certain things are contaminated. For example when i come home i sanitize my phone immediately as it is contaminated from being outside of my house. I often have a feeling of something having to feel “just right”. If i go out to dinner i have to be the first to pick what seat or side of the booth im sitting on before the rest of my family sits down or i will feel anxious the whole dinner. Sometimes when im typing i have to back space and retype the same word over and over until i feel i typed it “just right”- even if i didnt make a typo. sometimes when i am driving and space out i often think “oh my god did i just hit someone” when there is no evidence that i have. it worries me. I think oh my god i mightve done a hit and run. But tell myself it can not be possible, theres no police chasing me, no honking, or anything. It is scary. this one is very rare. once in a blue moon i get a false memory. A main one ive felt since i was a kid is if someone or some object touches any part of my body, for example my left arm, i have to have them or atleast my self touch my right arm in the exact same way or i feel uneasy. this isnt with every single touch, but mainly when i feel triggered- although i never know what triggers a moment where i need the symmetry. I guess ive always known, i am very honest with my family, friends, and boyfriend about it. But i didnt start to realize how neurodivergent i was until asking some friends “you never randomly feel *insert compulsion*?” and they say never in their life have they felt like that. Im very self aware and have come to an acceptance with all these things, although it is debilitating. Periodically i think, wow it must be nice to not live life with these feelings but oh well. To be honest, downloading this app is the first step ive ever taken to find out more about OCD. Ive always kind of just been like “yeah i definitely have OCD but okay” more or less.

this is the most i will ever go into depth about my mental health, all in one post; all in one sitting. this will be draining. to start this off, yes, i have OCD—but i also have several other disorders as well. some of my diagnoses that will come to light in this have a strong correlation to comorbidity and so instead of this being a story simply about my OCD, i will cover all areas of my mental health. for readers, i want it to be clear; this is for me. i’m doing this to put my story out. i hope you find some interest in what i have to say, but in the end, my intentions are strictly to make my damage good. symptoms of my mental issues were present frequently in my childhood experience. for years i avoided any truth to how i thought or felt. thinking, feeling, acting—all 3 were never in cohesion. i had a very anti-social attitude towards life for most of my pubescent years. i got use to faking and manipulating to appear a certain way when i knew i was at risk of punishment; it allowed me to get away with a lot of immoral behaviors for a long time before i eventually was forced into counseling from a school fight i had initiated. i was roughly 14 at this time. counseling was my initial therapy for a while. i have since seen 5 therapists. i can’t say any of those therapists knew a single truth about me, really—with a mixture of pathological lying and a bad masking habit, I was stopping myself from getting any real treatment. i don’t know why, but for a long time i was content with this truth. a part of me never really felt the need to address it. my manipulative behaviors were often unintentional and not once had i sought a need to be callous, even when doing the things i was doing. with every new therapist, i had tuned my personality specifically to fit them—a concept that i don’t have a name for but now can dissect in immense detail. i would take parts of my personality and accentuate them to fit the attitudes and interests of particular people. in my head it was always about admiring the story. nobody was real; everyone was a character, everyone was a unique, self-manifested character. i just made my character with greater intents. i was a good listener, i think understanding that made me get more comfortable with my destructive and manipulative tendencies. when someone believes your listening, like really, actively listening—they’ll eventually tell you everything about themselves. now for a slight addressing of the obvious, i want it to be clear, i’m not describing ASPD—aka, the real life equivalence of sociopathy. i do think i show strong signs of it early on in my youth, and i bring these behaviors up because i think the issues that i do have developed from my anti-social behaviors—however, i was a child; i didn’t know the consequences of my behavior like i do now. if anything is needed to be said here, it’s best to address the following events like this: i understand now, i didn’t understand then. turning 15, i had started off 2023 in a relationship that meant a lot to me—a lot more to me than anything in my life leading up to this point. it’s best to address this now as well—i don’t feel a lot, but when i do, it’s usually irrationally intense and feels completely uncontrollable. at this time, i had gotten over a lot of my anti-social tendencies by now and have spent the last year improving myself after the things i had done began hurting the people i valued most. from a long list of lying, manipulating, preying, harassing, even stabbing people with whatever sharp thing was at my disposal—i had come a long way in creating a character that i actually liked. an important thing to keep in mind during this time was the early development of my OCD that had initially come in the form of suicidal ideation. most of the people in here i’m assuming are people that personally have OCD and understand that it’s not a disorder based in the stigmatized-lens of perfectionism but rather an irrational need for certainty. death quickly became my “ultimate form of certainty” in my teenage years as i turned to the concept like a comfort place—a hand on my shoulder saying “it’s okay, you can fuck up however you might, there’s always a way out.” i had not been truthful about that in therapy either, nor did the several medications prescribed in my lifetime ever do something of benefit to what my issues actually were. of course, i blame no one but myself for not benefiting from outside sources. skipping over a lot of meaningless detail—the gist of the year went like this: Jan-April relationship breaks up badly—in my irrational state, i attempted to take my life and was hospitalized, and eventually, institutionalized. i stayed there for 11 days. at the time the only diagnoses they could make of me was MDD and ASD with slight signs of generalized anxiety. May-August i get extremely medicated and start taking 150+ pills a month to maintain what at the time was being treated for bipolar and schizophrenia. i was too young to see my clinical record, and i assume they wouldn’t tell this to a minor, but it seems they believed whatever my issues really were—i was simply too young to get an accurate assessment. September-December the medication makes me completely apathetic and my loss of care for life brought back my irrational gimmicks and self-destructive tendencies. i, in a 4 month period, ruined every single relationship i had kept close to me. 2024. i was alone. i stopped taking my pills due to a loss of interest and excessive weight gaining but it made my intense emotions start to bite me again. this was the year my OCD had fully developed and by April, i was diagnosed after failing a risk-assessment. for a long period of time, i lived a meaningless, uneventful, isolated life. that year, i let my mental health take over all acts of my being. i got deep into philosophy, psychology, pathology, a lot of tv shows built around psychological dynamics—i was desperate to understand this parasite that seemed to destroy my life without any awareness. i never wanted it to take the years it did since i was initially that 13 year old boy, but i write this now with a simple truth—a truth i refused to let myself believe until recently. i can’t fix this. the more i feed into it, obsess over it—the more these issues are going to worsen. for years i wasted my days thinking i was trying everything i could and it just wasn’t working. i couldn’t accept the fact that i don’t control this, and despite being told that again and again—it never got through to me until i spent the last week not feeding into the OCD and emotional dysregulation, and for the first time, i didn’t find myself counting the seconds that passed me by. it might not mean that much for an outsider looking in, but since my OCD had fully developed—i would always be counting the seconds in the back of my head, not like 1231, 1232, 1233… but as a tick of a metronome that made me always aware of the time. the days where this wasn’t annoying, it was boring, which i ultimately hated more. i’m seeing a light i haven’t seen in years, and with it i keep reaching the same notion—i wish i didn’t waste so much of my life being miserable. i’m getting a psychological evaluation within the next month. i’ve been out of therapy for about a year now but i’m going in now looking to help myself. this is specifically for my emotional dysregulation. my current theories revolve around cluster B personality types, 1 of 4 including ASPD as i had mentioned earlier, albeit my bet is actually on BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder.) I crossed off Borderline for a long time because the symptoms list always felt too broad, but the more i understand the disorder—the more i feel connected to it. my theory comes from several factors—my rapidly changing self image, my impulsive/erratic behaviors, my irrational emotions, my long history of unconventional relationships, my fear of abandonment, my chronic emptiness, my history of self harm, etc. this is not confirmed however, and i wish to get an evaluation specifically for the disorder. getting a personality disorder diagnosed in a minor isn’t easy, but i’m doing it half for the certainty of just knowing—and half for potentionally getting a medication that can help me live a healthy-adjacent life. i never thought i would see a life free of obsession since being diagnosed with OCD. now i can enjoy the silence. thanks for reading. any commentary appreciated.

(Long post warning) Hi, I’ve been struggling with severe OCD for six years now. it started in 2019 with my theme being getting sick/emetophobia. it devastated my life. I almost didn’t graduate high school from it. I remember washing my hands for three hours one day until they were nearly bloody while crying and asking why I could not stop doing it. I remember id have to write and rewrite sentences when I did my English homework and that’s why I nearly failed that class. I remember how I would spend up to thirty minutes to an hour pacing the halls of my apartment while my mom was asleep until I neutralized the thoughts about throwing up and I could finally go to bed. I don’t know when it happened, but my theme switched. Sometimes in late 2020 or early 2021, it switched to POCD. It started with a single thought, and I focused on it and it’s been my theme since then for four years. It has been absolutely destroying me. I feel so disgusted and lost and just tired. My compulsions are severe now. I thought they were bad before, but now they’re ten times worse. I can’t eat, drink, change my clothes, walk, or even do things on my phone normally. I’ve developed so many mental compulsions that it’s so intricate and complicated yet at the same time I’ve done them so much that they’ve become normal. An example I have is if im putting on a shirt and I have a “bad” thought, I have to take it off and put it back on two more times (that’ll make it 3 times I put the shirt back on - odd numbers are my safe number). I have to have a good thought on the third time otherwise I have to take it off and put it on two more times to make it five times I put on that shirt. If not that then I just put on a different shirt because the original is now tainted with my bad thought. I can’t open apps on my phone. It’s with the numbers again. If I open TikTok once while having a bad thought - I have to close it and open it two more times and so on. Sometimes I do it up to 30 times. So I just don’t do things usually. I don’t turn on the TV because I know I’ll redo it. I don’t open a book or grab it off my shelf because I’ll have to repeat the action. I can’t even lay in bed without getting up and redoing it even if im exhausted. I just feel so helpless. I don’t know what to do. I feel disgusting and even now my minds screaming at me that I am dirty and what I think is true. I just wish I was free of this, I wish I could just live my life. I’ve wasted hours and days because of my compulsions. I mask it so well around my friends. I don’t do them in front of anyone or I’ve learned to hide it well. But when im back home alone, it goes haywire. I just want to live again.