“But I’m not even performing compulsions!” I see people on this forum suffering a lot to understand why they seemingly aren’t performing compulsions, but their obsessions persist. What I also notice is that within the same post (sometimes even the same sentence!) people are actually performing mental compulsions. Understanding and identifying mental compulsions is one of the hardest parts of learning to deal with your OCD. If you can’t figure out when to say to yourself, “hey, that’s a compulsion!” and stop, recovery is much harder. I found this nice resource online that explains mental compulsions better than most others (way too many out there summarize mental compulsions as simply counting or wishing... ugh.) So here it is: http://www.steveseay.com/pure-o-ocd-obsessions-mental-rituals/ An excerpt: “Mental rituals are varied and include such activities as repeating certain words or phrases in one’s head, counting, reviewing/checking memories, intentionally thinking “positive thoughts” to counteract “negative thoughts”, pre-planning words before speaking, making mental lists of similarities between one’s own experience and others’ experiences, conducting online research to prove or disprove a fear, or repeating/restarting prayers due to distraction or worry that one’s prayers are not 100% genuine. For some individuals, mental rituals also include complex cognitions. Complex mental rituals often begin simply with one of the following statements or questions and then take on a life of their own: OCD Mental Rituals - “I would never do that…but what if I do?…I don’t want to…but what if I secretly do?” - “Why is this happening?” - “When will this stop?” - “I can’t live this way…” - “I need to know…” - “I’ll never be strong enough to face this…” - “I wouldn’t be having these thoughts if I didn’t secretly want this…” - “Maybe I need to act on these thoughts to finally be rid of them and feel closure…” - “It’s always going to be this way…” - “I can’t take the chance, because if I did…” - “If I could just figure this out, I would be able to move past it and it wouldn’t bother me anymore…”