I listen to a lot of ocd podcasts and watch a lot videos read a lot of articles. And I’m recently feeling a bit worried when I hea stories about how ocd has manifested in other people’s lives. A lot of people talk about experiencing some perfectionism as a kid, often counting or being afraid of germs. I don’t temper experiencing such things. I don’t think I’ve ever struggled with contamination ocd. I’ve only really struggled with pure o types of ocd. This leads me to worry “maybe it’s not ocd.” Does anyone else feel this way?

OCD manifests itself. I read an account once of a woman who had intrusive images of a billboard for two years. OCD isn’t a logical disorder, it’s one of emotion. It’s also super coming to wonder if it’s OCD. How you have the disorder, or why, isn’t important. It’s that you do have it, because knowing what it is and the experience of it is far more pertinent to your recovery. Wondering about how it happened is doing nothing to ameliorate the circumstances you’re now in.

I'm wondering whether the reading articles and listening to podcasts has shifted from information seeking to reassurance seeking

@csquared that is a wonderful point. I spent a lot of time wondering why or how my OCD developed, was it something I did? Something that happened to me? After bringing this up to my therapist he gave me this advice - even if you could know what brought it on, would it change anything? The answer tends to be no. I also put it this way - even if we could figure out what gave us/why we have OCD, our OCD would just question it anyway.