- Date posted
- 5y ago
- Date posted
- 5y ago
I know what you are saying but you also know that I'm not supposed to make you feel better, right? Please know this is just your anxiety. Me, a complete stranger reads this and I don't see a individual who did/thinks anything bad. I see someone in pain. Also, I haven't researched groinal responses and I'm glad or else I might freak out too but I have never considered that they have to be both gendered. I don't think they do. The only "pattern" is overthinking and obsessing. I'm not going to abolish your anxiety because even I don't have the power to do that but please snip this thought. Cut it off at the root. The more you feed yourself negative talk the worse you will feel. Cut it off. Get up, go do something. Let the thought be there WITHOUT activity digging into it. You can do this.
- Date posted
- 5y ago
This was so moving to read. I bookmarked it. Thank you so so much ❤️
- Date posted
- 5y ago
I was thinking about you today and knew you'd be back with antoher question. This is the nature of the beast. Are you seeing a therapist?
- Date posted
- 5y ago
The OCD isn't always the "action" it's often how we are associating to that action. The OCD doesn't have to be the groinal response. It's how you are obsessing over it. So the action itselitself (which is actually natural) is being made into something perverse by your obsessing/evaluating right now. Again, the more you dig into this the worse it will become. Reading this will bring you relief. And maybe 5 hours later, maybe 1 hour later a "but wait!" will pop up. This is still your anxious brain. When you are feeling anxious you can't trust your thoughts. EVEN if it's something that really happened. The way you are relating to it in a time of high anxiety is faulty. So when the "but wait" come, BREATHE, count down from 100, label the thoughts as anxiety, doesn't matter if it happened or not, the thought is causing anxiety, and do something physical to pull you out of your brain. Best of luck. And go easy of yourself. When you catch yourself, say, "I know I'm scared. We will get through this. Thank you brain for letting me know but this isn't something I need to worry about at this time." EVEN when it feels like it is. Rememebr when you are anxious thinking, you are using a different part of your brain. You can't tell the difference. So cut it off. Let it go.
- Date posted
- 5y ago
Thank you again. It means a lot to hear you were thinking of me, and your advice is spot on. You’re exactly right about the feeling good in the moment and then the “but wait!”
- Date posted
- 5y ago
People have whole themes about being attracted to one gender.
- Date posted
- 5y ago
No I know, I guess what scares me is that the responses happened with kids from the same gender. Like looking back I remember I had gotten a GR and this was before I really knew what POCD was. I’m scared that it’s a “pattern.”
- Date posted
- 5y ago
You're very welcome.
- Date posted
- 5y ago
I’m really so glad you wrote that. I keep rereading it. What’s scary is that these incidents happened before I was diagnosed with POCD, so they don’t register in my mind as a part of my OCD, but moments of my “regular” life where I had gotten a groinal response. If that makes any sense?I’m trying my best to follow your advice.
- Date posted
- 5y ago
What kind of treatments have you tried?
- Date posted
- 5y ago
Just talk therapy. My new therapist and I just started getting into all of this.
- Date posted
- 5y ago
@figuringitallout glad you're seeing a therapist. I no longer have issues and just did ERP and scripting at home by myself. Took me about ten sessions to feel cured. There is hope! I was ready to commit suicide because my thoughts were so abhorrent and pervasive. But now I feel free.
- Date posted
- 5y ago
@James Oh my goodness I’m so glad you’re here and doing better! ❤️❤️❤️ do you suffer from POCD?
- Date posted
- 5y ago
@James That is amazing. I've been in psychotherapy for a year and a half. Still struggling bad. I hope ERP helps. I tried it with my therapist for a session and fell into a depression and almost quit.
- Date posted
- 5y ago
@figuringitallout Yes I did but I don't any longer. The thoughts still appear but they no longer phase me. I no longer have to 'check' every time a thought appears. It just passes through and I move on with my life.
- Date posted
- 5y ago
@christinejg94 Best of luck! I usually meditate for a few minutes before I do an erp session to calm my mind.
- Date posted
- 5y ago
@James Yes, my therapist stressed self care. I will have to do that for sure.
- Date posted
- 5y ago
So glad to hear you are both doing better! I actually did recover but I guess I relapsed a bit. It’s just a lot of shame and guilt over what my body did, I feel like there’s something wrong with me.
- Date posted
- 5y ago
Best of luck in your recovery! Don't give up!
- Date posted
- 5y ago
Would you guys mind if I told you my story? I kind of did already in my original post but I thought I’d ask.
- Date posted
- 5y ago
Go for it!
- Date posted
- 5y ago
@James I know I shared my story before, and people may not be interested, but I need to get this all off my chest (again.) I am struggling because I remember when I was younger working at summer camp I had gotten semi-erections (I guess the proper OCD term is groinal response but I didn’t really have bad intrusive thoughts then) when playing with some of the kids. It only happened a few times, and I have done enough research ad nauseam to know that this can happen to someone, and I do accept that. However, what is scaring me now is that all of the times it happened it was a male child, and I am convinced now this means something. I know I have/never had any desire to hurt a kid, and when I told my therapist this she did not show concern, said all the usual stuff (it’s just a reaction to something on your body/ hormones/anxiety) all of which I agree with, and yet I am stuck here. The gender thing I am just hung up on.I know seeking reassurance is bad, but just hearing that I’m not being judged can help tremendously. Please don’t think I’m a sick person.
- Date posted
- 5y ago
@figuringitallout I know I pretty much said this in my original post but lol I kind of wanted to provide more details. Please don’t judge me!
- Date posted
- 5y ago
@figuringitallout Yes you are not alone in your experience.
- Date posted
- 5y ago
@James Omg you think? I feel like I’m the only person who has experienced something like this. The gender thing especially with groinal responses.
- Date posted
- 5y ago
@figuringitallout You are not the only person.
- Date posted
- 5y ago
@James How do you use this site without getting triggered?
- Date posted
- 5y ago
@christinejg94 I can't explain it really but I don't get triggered any more. I've posted in the past about my experience with erp and scripting. Those combined with meditation and a few lifestyle changes have seemed to cure me. No guarantee I won't relapse but right now I feel free and just want to help others who are going through what I went through.
- Date posted
- 5y ago
@James That is so fantastic. I wish you the best in your future!
- Date posted
- 5y ago
@James Also, what is scripting?
- Date posted
- 5y ago
@christinejg94 Writing out your worst fears and the scenarios in your head and reading them over and over again. It desensitized me to those thoughts and they still show up but my mind just lets them float by mostly unnoticed. There is an exercise in mindfulness ocd book that I used.
- Date posted
- 5y ago
@James Oh, okay. That's the exercise I tried once and almost quit therapy. ?
- Date posted
- 5y ago
@christinejg94 Haha yeah it's scary for sure. But I feel it was crucial to my healing. I'm not a therapist but I think the mind likes novelty and things its not supposed to think. So letting it see those thoughts and make them mundane takes their power away. I still get those thoughts and sometimes even try to engage with them to see if I'm still affected but honestly my mind just finds them boring and moves on.
- Date posted
- 5y ago
@James Instead of finding my fears mundane, repeating them made me believe they may be true and that wasn't a life I was willing to live. Hopefully instead of thinking, "this is true and you have to deal with it" it'll be more along the lines of, "this is a thought and you don't have to like it but it's here for a bit. How would you like to proceed?"
- Date posted
- 5y ago
@christinejg94 Yeah I understand that. I had those fears arise as well.
- Date posted
- 5y ago
This is so crazy seeing it from another person. This exact thing hasn't happened to me but things kinda similar and it helps me realize that we're all just suffering. That's all I'm going to say because I'm not going to enable you.
- Date posted
- 5y ago
So glad to hear you say this! And I’m sorry you went through something similar. Are you doing okay with it?
- Date posted
- 5y ago
Well, it wasn't a one time thing that set me off. I can come up with new things all the time if I let myself. ? Am I doing okay? Well.... most days. Thanks for asking.
- Date posted
- 5y ago
No problem! You’ve been such an amazing help today. I’m sorry to hear you had similar issues, but you seem so intelligent with how you handle it!
- Date posted
- 5y ago
I've been in therapy for a year and a half. And it's easier to preach it then to do it yourself lol. I struggle too.
Related posts
- Date posted
- 15w ago
Every time I go to bed late and I’m falling asleep, I suddenly get an intrusive thought of a child’s face and my groinal area always responds to it. It’s such an uncomfortable experience. I am way too tired to try and freak out so I end up falling asleep. The next morning I’m always trying to figure out whether I had the groinal response first or after the thought. I start giving OCD power but it feels like If I let it go, then I’m in denial or whatever. I don’t want to ever do anything sexual with a child. I don’t even feel comfortable talking platonically with people who are 17, much less a child. My therapist says that I have a deep rooted fear that I’m this horrible person and that OCD loves to feed off of it. When you get a groinal response, it makes the thought that much more real. I never want these things to happen. I want to only be into adults. It’s so discomforting and stressful. Especially since I’m hyper checking how anxious I am, and if I find I didn’t really have much anxiety, then I’m like “well if I didn’t have anxiety, what does this mean?” And more questions occur til I end up in a rabbit hole
- Date posted
- 13w ago
Trying not to seek reassurance, but rather connect the dots on my OCD and possible reasons as to why I am the way I am. I have severe OCD (or at least I hope I do) mainly surrounding POCD. I've had symptoms of OCD the majority of my life but this theme has come up more recently. When I was a kid, and i'm talking 6-7, I was first exposed to some really gross adult content online. It was introduced to me by a friend of mine around the same age of me. I saw some really disgusting things that a 6-7 year old should definitely not see. This was not a one time occurrence, as I had been exposed to taboo topics online years to come after that, such as the same friend introducing me to Omegle... And i'm sure you can imagine how that went, theres a lot of genuinely disgusting human beings on there. Coming back to the reason for making this post; is it possible to early exposure to this content could be one of the reasons I struggle with POCD? It genuinely scares me to death because you hear that real p*dos dealt with simular situations when they were kids, so thats kind of making me feel that this could be more than OCD, and I could be a genuinely bad person. My POCD feels so real, that at times i'm fully convinced its not OCD. Sometimes I can't even distinguish the feelings of attraction between a younger person and an older person, except for the feeling of anxiety and fear. Its really hard to explain without going into detail, but it just feels so real. Some feedback on this would be great, thank you all.
- Young adults with OCD
- Students with OCD
- False Memory OCD
- Mid-life adults with OCD
- "Pure" OCD
- POCD
- LGBTQ+ with OCD
- Date posted
- 12w ago
Sometimes I think " do I like kids?" "Would i get aroused if I saw content with kids?""What if I'm a pedo and cant accept it?" "What if I'm ok with these thoughts?" "What if I'm not distressed enough " "What if I enjoy these thoughts?" , i avoid kids as much as i can, i cant look at them bc I'm scared I'm gonna have some groin like response. I keep testing if I'd get turned on or if I'd have some groinal response to sexual scenarios with kids. Sometimes I think that if I took my life this would be over and i wouldn't have to think about this and i wish i doubted something else instead of things like this. I had similar situations just with different topics such as if i loved or found sexually appealing a guy while in a relationship and i kept asking myself those questions for months and i avoided going to school for weeks and when I went I'd cry and have anxiety attacks. I had it with past actions i obessed over and felt the need to exploit every detail and be honest because otherwise i was being a fraud. I had it for sexual things that happened when i was a child. Im not diagnosed with ocd but should i tell this to my local counselor? Can someone help? Give me advice or tell me anything?
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