If you have some, share your recovery stories! Myself, I was lucky and strong enough to completely overcome Contamination OCD and had a small period of Pedophilia OCD. there are still rare thoughts but they don’t affect me at all. Additionally I’ve made a tremendous progress in relationship ocd, so now thoughts rarely disturb me or have much effect on me. You all got this!

Thanks! Can you elaborate a bit more on acceptance part? Anything you did in particular when it was affecting you a bit stronger?

I think I need to work on letting the thoughts/guilt just be there and moving forward. I think the hardest thing is doing that for me.

Agreeing with thoughts is actually such a good tip, it’s been helping me today

@lilly_lu Yes my ocd therapist encourages you to agree with them because that’s the ERP! It does help. I think I’m stuck on forgiving myself

@blech123 I think that’s the hardest thing for all of us today. We got this though! We can do hard things!

@JS?? Thanks JS - I think mine issue is already pretty complex as I’ve been dealing with it for about a year and half now, hence I’ve already created some bad habits and anxieties ??‍♀️ but I do think that this is some great exercises to employ for other things that come along ?

@Sunrise22 Thank you!! ?

It will get better. I don’t think it was my biggest problem, I just was able to recognize that my mind was just messing with me and say a giant fuck it to it

Congrats! Did you also do it by yourself or did you get therapy?

@Sumsum I did it by using medication with controlling the compulsions of contamination OCD.

No, for contamination I really had to just stop every time I had an urge to do something like clean etc. For others I just let it be and most importantly stopped internalizing it and trying to make sense of it. It just left eventually once I stopped fueling it and I was free.

@lilly_lu For contamination, how long did you have it before you did this? And how long did you have to consciously stop your compulsions to clean before the obsessions went away?

@??? It was a while ago, but I’ve had it for solid half a year, stopping it took like a month. For contamination what helps is try to get it more dirty lol, like drop your food on the floor and eat it, counteract it

@lilly_lu Was your contamination OCD severe or mild?

@Sumsum I’d say it was mostly mild but getting moderate

@Sumsum That’s when it itself started freaking me out so much I’ve done everything to stop it

@lilly_lu Hmm, maybe it's easier to stop it then when it's not severe.

@Sumsum I still believe it’s possible for you to stop it even if it is really hard, you got this and we all are rooting for you if that’s what you’re struggling with!

@Sumsum Also it’s not nice to undermine someone else’s experience

I’m still going through therapy for this, so I wouldn’t say I’m completely in recovery unfortunately :/. It’s hard because I have OCD, not just pure O, so I do physical compulsions too and it can leave a lot of shame and guilt. There’s good days and bad days but I try to do my ERP practices regularly and remind myself that I have a disorder and this isn’t who I am. How about you?