How do you guys know if you’re worries are OCD or not? I’ve sort of attributed my worries/paranoia/anxiety to being OCD, but lately I’m questioning if these are even OCD at all. How do you differentiate legitimate concerns from OCD concerns?

The fact that a lot of my OCD has been about real life stuff, both past events and future possibilities, kept me from realising it was OCD for years even *despite* knowing for a decade now that I had harm OCD as a child and being told by a psychologist that he strongly felt I had it. I basically just thought it was rumination and anxiety/paranoia issues from my PTSD or CPTSD or from the damage done by it, or autism-related anxiety about predictability/not knowing the future and that maybe I was ruminating about the past so much to feel a sense of control. Now I can see that it's some sort of combination of everything as there is so much overlap and different symptoms can be for different reasons at various times. Having so many diagnoses is difficult but I actually appreciate it because I think they are accurate, even if it's a messy over-all picture. The bottom line needs to be that if the methods for treating OCD help you, they help you. If they only help a bit, then there might be other diagnoses which explain why that is or other methods which are better suited or can be added. Labels don't matter at that point. A huge number of OCD concerns have an overlap with real world concerns, like a coronavirus obsession for example. The whe thing with OCD is that there's no way of knowing for sure what level of risk the real world presents and therefore how accurate your emotional response is/whether it's appropriate to worry etc. In that regard, this video is amazingly helpful: https://youtu.be/DqXk38FA4wM To sum it up, "legitimate" and "irrational" fears are both still just mental images about the future, not real things. Other than doing the things we can do to influence a situation (e.g. doing my homework on time or washing my hands the recommended amount), worrying doesn't ever actually change anything, so it's best to treat all worry as not legitimate once the preoccupation with it extends beyond you doing sensible, appropriate things.