Does any one feel that the general things people go through because of ocd doesn't necessarily apply to you? Yet you have been diagnosed by multiple therapists as an ocd patient. The things i listed down mostly applies to people with high brain control or a high level of personal strictness i do not mean to sound condescending at all just trying to seek help. So here are some points that are confusing me let me know if anyone can relate. 1. People have anxiety with thoughts but for me i can easily control my anxiety level its entirely up to me to feel 10/10 or 1/10 anxiety. It won't make the thought go away or anything its just i would be feeling different with different levels. High anxiety may cause extreme shivering and want me to hide myself from the world, while low anxiety feels like I'm claiming yes this is my ocd thought/compulsion so what no ones opinion on me matters. 2. Ocd patients have difficulty talking related to their obsessions, have difficulty doing certain actions, extreme fear of triggers while it makes no difference to me whether i interact with them or not. Its not like anything changes by experimenting with these behaviours so whats the fear about.... 3. Getting reassurance can be that i am not a bad person or anything else, again i felt like ocd doesn't change who you are so i know what i am even your opinion doesn't matter ocd. 4. Though i had issues dealing with guilt in the beginning as my compulsion goes against my religious beliefs but when i learned about the leniency for patients in religion i have no guilt for these obsession/compulsion. 5. Paying attention to thoughts this thing has never had any meaning to me as a person who constantly tries to change himself for better i haven't been able to do so ever since the thoughts started paying attention or not does anything really changes? Besides these i had a really hard time adjusting to medication took me 8 months just to get a suitable SSRI but these medications just limit my compulsions while deactivating certain parts of my brain and sets my stamina to ZERO. Not talking medication increases my compulsions but gets me on normal brain levels and regular stamina. Now I'm not questioning the abilities of my therapists but it feels a waste of time and money. Felt no improvement over a year all i do is adjust myself to feel different which i have been doing before therapy. Contribution of therapy in my life feels null. Can anyone advise me where to move forward from or what is the forward for people like me?

Right I need some serious help. Well where do I begin, I have been doing rituals since 4 years ago. I started doing rituals because I think I was having a really bad week at school and when I started doing the rituals they seemed to be making things better, and gradually I just started doing loads of them and I just lost track of how many I had, it was unbearable. Fast forward 4 years and here I am, I was upset anyway because I was feeling anxious because someone looked at me funny and I started panicking and I was thinking stuff like, what if they hate me and why were they looking at me. At the time I was opening up to my mum and we was watching a series at the time I was opening up to her. Then suddenly, a scene came on where there were terrorists and I just froze, what if I am a terrorist, and since then I haven’t been able to get out of my head the thought of being a terrorist and my mind convincing me that I am one even though I know I am not. I am still struggling with these thoughts now and your mind really does a good job in to thinking you are an evil terrorist even though deep down you know you’d never do something like that. I have managed to stop the rituals now but I still suffer with the thoughts which makes me think “maybe it isn’t OCD then as I don’t do any compulsions, maybe I am just evil” and then I always get stressed out and reply with “No, I am not” which I know isn’t good and I try to not reply and just let them be there but I just don’t know how to, it’s so hard. I’m really impatient with meditating. When I first started having the thoughts I couldn’t eat, I can eat now and go out but I am always getting the thoughts. The only time I don’t get the thoughts is if I am really busy doing stuff like work etc, I also get the same thing with like school shootings anything to do with that sort of terrorism stuff, I hate it so much. I have been to the doctors and I am on antidepressants and I am also getting therapy for it but will it help me? Would you say I have OCD? My intrusive thoughts always seem to target the things I like most so for example they target when I go to football games, my brain tells me I am going to commit an attack here and it makes me upset and it also happens when I go to college and my brain tells me I am going to commit an attack there which also upsets me. My brain also tells me when I start working (which I want to do) I am going to spend all of my money on weapons which therefore prevents me from wanting to get a job which means I can’t buy stuff that I want or start driving as I need money for it. Lately, my OCD has been weird because I have been getting the thoughts but I don’t get as anxious which makes me feel like, maybe it is just me, maybe I am a terrorist, maybe I will act on it which therefore makes me feel weird and scares me a bit but doesn’t scare me as much as it should do because I want to be really scared of the thought of acting out on it (which I used to be) but now I don’t react to it with as much anxiety but the thoughts are there and I feel like I should be reacting to them in a way where I shut them down but I am not. This all stemmed from when my doctor asked me, “am I planning something” and I said no but since then it has just stuck in my head and it has been like, “what if I am planning something” or what if I do plan something. Lately, I’ve been talking to a girl that I really like and my thoughts targeted her because I really like her, like when I met her my brain was telling me I was going to hurt her or her family when I obviously wasn’t going to and I’ve tried to just let the thoughts be there but sometimes it just gets too much for you and you can’t not get emotional. I cried a lot the other day about it. I’m starting therapy tomorrow so hopefully I can get some help. I also seem to get triggered by reading about what other people experienced because I read about other people’s experiences with their OCD and some had paedophilic OCD and I was like what if I am one of them? And then I looked at a young girl and my brain told me I was attracted to her but I obviously wasn’t but that one came for like 2 days non stop and then stopped. When I hear loud noises I also think about terrorism things like, gun shots or bombs and it really scares me. I also have horrible thoughts like, what if I get angry and act out on any thoughts and it really stresses me out or what if one of my close family members pass and I act out in a bad way due to not coping with the grief. I also get quite worried because I never see anyone with my sort of intrusive thoughts and it makes me feel like it isn’t OCD which stresses me out and makes me overthink. That isn’t even getting started on my relationship with my girlfriend. I have been booked in for CBT therapy in 3 months, but will it actually help me? Will it actually improve my life? Sorry for the really long message, I just really need some help.

Hey everyone. This is my first post here and it’s probably going to be a long one because I guess I feel comfortable enough to be open here. I need help. When I first got diagnosed with OCD, I figured it only impacted a small part of my life. I thought I was only affected with compulsions and obsessions that dealt with contamination, tangible perfectionism and the obvious intrusive thoughts and that’s it. Well, I’ve come to realize that most of my thinking has been impacted by OCD. At this point the only way to describe how it feels to me is a forest of thorny vines growing in place of my mind or maybe through and around my brain constantly growing every-time I give into this type of thinking (which is basically all the time because I wasn’t aware this was OCD). I’ve definitely felt it more recently, but I know it’s always been there from what I recall from past memories. I got diagnosed not so long ago with OCD and I was happy to because it explained this thing I knew was wrong with me but I didn’t know how much it will and has impacted me in the past. So, I think I’ve created a matrix in my mind or strengthened the OCD thought patterns because now I feel like my OCD impacts everything I do. And I guess I’m saying I need help here because maybe you guys will be able to see it, maybe validate me and point me where I can get help. I’ve been telling the people around me, I think my thinking is disordered and I need help but I don’t think they really understand the amount it’s affecting me or grasp what I meant when I say “I Need Help”. I did have a therapist before but because of a insurance change, she can’t work with me anymore and I’m not sure when I’ll get another (just to clarify). Back to the matter, the past couple of months I’ve been in my head just thinking and thinking. About everything. To the point where my head starts to hurt or until I feel sick of thinking about it but I can’t. I find that’s my obsessions and compulsions (other than the need for order [which can also be mental]) are very mentally based and I find myself ashamed of them so I hide them so maybe that’s why the people around me don’t feel my need for getting help as much as I do. Anyways, examples of this have been, -constantly thinking about what’s the purpose of all of life and the hidden messages in life -feeling like if I don’t do everything perfectly then what the point or being very mad at myself -being obsessed with how I present to the rest of the world sometimes even in close relationships -having calculated movements and actions (having to move my body a certain way or it doesn’t feel right) -obsessing over an absolute truth -questioning friendships and other relationships - obsessing over achievements or failures -obsessing over people -obsessing over decisions and outcomes because I want to make the perfect decisions I could go on and on but basically it’s just a lot of thinking and ruminating and obsessing to the point where people tell me I look like I’m some where else all the time. And I’ve started to feel like I find comfort in it now. I’m also diagnosed with depression and anxiety and I feel like it’s all just OCD. And same goes for my dissociation. I feel like they all root from my OCD. I’m so tired of feeling like this all the time and without my therapist I feel like I’m stuck here. I can’t make decisions, I’m never present, I can’t make or keep friendships/ relationships, everything impacts me deeply because I create a emotional obsession to it, I can’t just be without questioning everything and I’m constantly in my head. I’ve also started getting high all the time because I feel like it’s the only way to escape my brain but I’ve felt like it’s getting out of hand. I’m starting to lose in any type of hope of getting better. Does anyone have an advice for working on OCD by yourself or identifying when it’s OCD (especially mental obsessions and compulsions) so I can start to chip at this boulder that’s weighing down my life and energy?

I have this issue that I need help with and I would like to hear if anyone else has gone through something like this along with any tips. A few months back I had what was arguably my worst OCD episode in my whole life, it lasted a whole week, in this week I felt nothing but constant anxiety and obsession over this thought, it was like nothing in life mattered except this thought and that lead me to really become disconnected from what’s around me and become so occupied in my own head. After this week, I felt extremely numb and disconnected from myself and my identity which lead me to go down a spiral of disconnection and I had a lot of nostalgic sadness due to thinking “I miss the old days when things were so simple and I didn’t have severe ocd” and this caused me to become very sick of ocd thoughts to the point of suppressing them. Now it’s been quite some time and I have become much calmer but I still feel 2 main things from this extremely bad OCD episode that have stuck with me. 1) I feel extremely disconnected from my identity, my thoughts and emotions, I cannot name my emotions nor embrace them anymore and I can’t think straight (brain fog). 2) that sense of continuous background anxiety that I experienced in that week in my bad OCD episode has stuck with me and now I feel that anxiety all the time for no particular reason along with feeling dull, sad and disconnected. I feel like I have unresolved emotions and experiences from all this but at the same time I feel like I can’t point out anything specific that is causing me to feel this way. I have searched up symptoms for generalised anxiety disorder because of my continuous anxiety but I do not seem to match any of the symptoms, in fact I currently never feel anxious about anything except things related to my bad OCD episode. Please do not hesitate to leave any helpful comments if you have any :) and thank you in advance.