POCD / In tears at family gathering/fear of touching? Any advice please. 34 y/o male. Have been suffering with POCD groinal reactions, ROCD, scrupulously, etc for many years. Does anyone fear that they are trying to touch or rub against people? Sometimes this thing will happen where something will provoke me to move my body (like turn around or move out of the way of something) and I’ll worry that what’s actually happening is that I’m trying to rub against someone. This happened last year at a party I was at where a woman walked by and I moved away to let her by, but was really worried that I had actually tried to touch her. The same thing happened again today only with my 11 year old niece. Having POCD, I have had horrifying groinal reactions/false arousal around her. God, I hate this disorder. I would never dream of doing anything inappropriate to her. OCD has been a terror to me for the last few family gatherings. I think something got my attention in the line to get food from the kitchen counter and I turned to get out of the way. In the split second that it took me to turn around, I heard one of the kids in our family (couldn’t tell if it was my niece or nephew) approach. I am really, really worried that I had an impulse to rub against my niece in this split second. I was horrified. I would never ever under any circumstances try to do something inappropriate to my niece, but I’m worried that my body just did it on its own. Turns out, it was my nephew standing behind me and I didn’t even touch him when I turned around. I am relieved that I didn’t bump into him, but I can’t help but wonder - what was my intention? Did my body really move to touch what I thought was my niece? Anyone relate?

Every time I go to bed late and I’m falling asleep, I suddenly get an intrusive thought of a child’s face and my groinal area always responds to it. It’s such an uncomfortable experience. I am way too tired to try and freak out so I end up falling asleep. The next morning I’m always trying to figure out whether I had the groinal response first or after the thought. I start giving OCD power but it feels like If I let it go, then I’m in denial or whatever. I don’t want to ever do anything sexual with a child. I don’t even feel comfortable talking platonically with people who are 17, much less a child. My therapist says that I have a deep rooted fear that I’m this horrible person and that OCD loves to feed off of it. When you get a groinal response, it makes the thought that much more real. I never want these things to happen. I want to only be into adults. It’s so discomforting and stressful. Especially since I’m hyper checking how anxious I am, and if I find I didn’t really have much anxiety, then I’m like “well if I didn’t have anxiety, what does this mean?” And more questions occur til I end up in a rabbit hole

Trying not to seek reassurance, but rather connect the dots on my OCD and possible reasons as to why I am the way I am. I have severe OCD (or at least I hope I do) mainly surrounding POCD. I've had symptoms of OCD the majority of my life but this theme has come up more recently. When I was a kid, and i'm talking 6-7, I was first exposed to some really gross adult content online. It was introduced to me by a friend of mine around the same age of me. I saw some really disgusting things that a 6-7 year old should definitely not see. This was not a one time occurrence, as I had been exposed to taboo topics online years to come after that, such as the same friend introducing me to Omegle... And i'm sure you can imagine how that went, theres a lot of genuinely disgusting human beings on there. Coming back to the reason for making this post; is it possible to early exposure to this content could be one of the reasons I struggle with POCD? It genuinely scares me to death because you hear that real p*dos dealt with simular situations when they were kids, so thats kind of making me feel that this could be more than OCD, and I could be a genuinely bad person. My POCD feels so real, that at times i'm fully convinced its not OCD. Sometimes I can't even distinguish the feelings of attraction between a younger person and an older person, except for the feeling of anxiety and fear. Its really hard to explain without going into detail, but it just feels so real. Some feedback on this would be great, thank you all.

Does anyone imagine they are doing their harm thoughts during an action, making you feel like you acted on your thoughts? For example, someone gave me a hug and at the last second I imagined I was touching something I shouldn’t during the hug? I want to make it clear it’s something I have zero desire to do! But the problem is, I thought it on purpose and it makes me sick !! Obviously nothing happened but my mind is telling me that was me trying to do it. Even though it was physically impossible to do. Am I a monster or could this be OCD? I’m freaking out and don’t want to be here anymore. I feel like I’m the exception and that this isn’t OCD. I know I post about this stuff a lot but I’m struggling and don’t know what to do.