How have you guys dealt with your stickiest / most long lasting theme? For me this is HOCD; I had other themes popping up in the last few months but I was able to get past them quite quickly with acceptance and a sort of shrugging manner, like ‘the probability of this happening isn’t enough for me to waste my time obsessing over’. However HOCD has always been different, it was what started my ocd and what I obsessed over for a year before discovering I had this disorder, and it often feels like when I decide not to obsess over it, I’m just sweeping the issue under the rug and not thinking about it. I’m better with a lot of the triggers but the big ones, like ‘comphet’ and my relationship nerves, are so hard to ignore. A part of me is always saying ‘you’re just ignoring this, you shouldn’t be!’. This is always been the theme where I find it so hard to distance myself from the content and look at it from an ocd perspective because when something relates to your identity say, I find it harder to ignore than obsessions about health or existentialism for example.

My OCD wants to keep switching “themes” on me, but once again it always concerns my mom or family. This time it’s sexual-related. The one I experience the most is the harm-related thoughts towards her, thinking I want to hurt her or thinking she abused me in the past (she did not) so that’s why I have these thoughts. My mind is always trying to see if there are deeper meanings to these thoughts and how I really feel. Yesterday my thoughts started going towards - “what if I’m attracted to my mom?” I was reading a book and it was a romantic scene and an image of my mom popped into my head. I tried to just dismiss it since I know we can’t control what comes into our heads, but I of course ruminated about it more and it has become a full-blown obsession. I have started wondering if I really am attracted to her or not, do I want to be in a relationship with her, am I just denying my feelings, etc. It sounds so disgusting and disturbing to share these things, but it’s difficult to disengage with this kind of thinking. Like it’s too disturbing to just let it go. Which leads to other worries like what if I can never be in a real relationship because I will just keep having these thoughts, what if this is true and how will I live with myself, what if my mom sexually abused me as a kid and that’s why I’m having these thoughts, etc. I know I’m going down the rabbit hole, but I just keep coming up with more and more “reasons.” Trying to go about my day and not pay them any attention, but it has been difficult to focus on anything else. Which then makes me wonder if I’m actually just fantasizing now and not actually obsessing.

My last and almost life long theme/sub-theme largely subsided recently and my ocd felt like it wasn’t even an issue. Then I went on winter break from uni and being alone made my mind come up with a whole new topic to obsess over. TLDR on my fears, my advisor wouldn’t email me back for a while about signing up for classes so my mind started to worry “what if he doesn’t in time and you can’t enroll this semester and you lose this whole life you just built and all these new friends” So when that issue was resolved my mind found other scarier ways I could be uprooted from my current life and friends that I’ve grown so attached to. Then my mind remembered back when I was struggling with false memories and scrupulosity and I essentially made a post on a forum 2 and a half years ago saying I did something or was convinced I did something that I never actually did. Now I’ve been spiraling about someone finding it reporting me and I either get seen as a horrible person or arrested or something over something I never actually did but “admitted” to out of fear of going to hell. My mind won’t let it go and keeps finding new reasons for it to be “valid” “logical” or even inevitable. I feel like it’s just hanging over my head and I can never rest easy. Especially when I try to focus on my daily tasks or plan for the future I get this horrible flair up of “why plan for the future when this could come back in that future and you get uprooted from all of it” my mind won’t rest without certainty being uprooted won’t happen but certainty doesn’t exist, at least not with ocd. This sucks and I miss being care free.

So, I know my capacity to get fixated on things. And it's normally something that's relatively remote but, my latest issue is really getting to me and I was wondering if people have any advice. I'm avoiding getting too into specifics, as I don't want this to get reassurance-y but, in essence.. I came to the realisation recently that people who I'd been "friends" (feels like the wrong term now) when I was younger were not very nice people, and normalized a lot of very unpleasant behaviour towards other members of the group. They really normalized it, sold themselves as figures of authority, as older and more responsible and grown-up than others, and looking back, they acted horribly. And coming to this realisation, that I'd been manipulated into just accepting their behaviour has just... broken me. My OCD has latched onto it and I can't stop feeling irreversibly tainted by it. I've talked to others about it, and they've reassured me, told me it's not a big deal and that I hold myself to too high a standard, but none of that sticks. I feel better for a bit, then think 'Maybe when you told them you were skewing it to make yourself look better' or 'Did you leave out a crucial detail'. I keep ruminating over and over, trying to remember exactly how everything played out, trying to figure out if I fed into the behaviour, if I did something bad myself (because y'know, I feel like I was accepting of it at the time, so what does it say about my own values?). I know I need to stop doing all this if I want to improve, but then some part of me keeps saying 'So, you're just going to let yourself off the hook then?' Normally, I can rationalize my own fears to some degree, assure myself something won't happen, but the realness of the situation, and the fact I only came to understand the reality of it because the thought had been bothering me means it feels so much more all-encompassing. I know confessing in itself is a compulsion, but I keep feeling that if I'm not I'm somehow concealing what I 'really am' from others around me, and any positive interactions are me deceiving them in some way. I feel like I can't enjoy anything in life right now, and a good part of me feels I should not enjoy it ever again. If anybody has any advice on it, I'm all ears. Or even hearing if you relate to these feelings, I might appreciate the solidarity at least.