- Date posted
- Yesterday
An ordinary morning turned into ocd
I'm currently an inpatient on a psychiatric ward, home for weekend leave. I have OCD, along with depression and severe anxiety. This morning I was lying on the bed under a sheet while my wife gave me a face massage. My five-year-old climbed on and started "massaging" my stomach the way small kids do. Three times his hand ended up somewhere it shouldn't. I moved my hand across to stop it, but he'd already stopped on his own. Afterwards he laughed and said something like "haha I touched Daddy's willy." He was playing. My wife was right there. He thought it was funny, the way five-year-olds do. About half an hour later my wife and I were intimate, while the kids were downstairs watching TV. Here's the part that's really got its hooks in me. The thoughts were already going before we were intimate. My brain was already saying: if you do this now, it means something — it means you're only doing it because of what happened earlier. And I went ahead anyway, because wanting to be close to my wife mattered more to me in that moment. So now it isn't just "did something happen." It's "you were warned and you did it anyway." That's the bit I can't put down. It feels less like an intrusive thought and more like a decision I made with full knowledge. I can see the mechanism when I look at it straight. It's retrospective linking — two ordinary things, half an hour apart, and my brain drawing a line between them and calling the line proof. It's the same machinery that had me replaying the first moment frame by frame and then going back to correct small details so the account would be exact enough for someone to finally rule on it. I know the urge to get the story perfectly accurate is itself the compulsion. But naming it hasn't touched how it feels. It feels true. It feels like something I've found out about myself rather than something my illness manufactured. That gap — between knowing it's OCD and it still landing as evidence — is where I'm sitting, and I feel sick with it. I'm not asking anyone to tell me I did nothing wrong. I know that's the compulsion, and I know reassurance is a loan against tomorrow. I'm not going to add more detail so it can be assessed either. What I'm doing: not reviewing it further, not seeking reassurance from my wife, and telling my treatment team today when I go back — once, as a theme, rather than every time it surfaces. What I'd genuinely value: hearing from anyone who's been through this flavour, particularly the "I was warned and continued anyway" version of it. How did you hold the line when your own mind was building the case against you? I didn't want to sit with this alone until I'm back on the ward.