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.

Same here! I had OCD when I was little and I had to confess every bad thought I had in my head. I got over that, and then I got religious OCD as a teenager. That took a while to shake off, but it eventually went away. I have HOCD now and this is by far the one that has been the hardest to get rid of. I feel you bc it takes all of those insecurities that you have about relationships. It’s a weird theme of OCD and I never thought it could happen to me, but it has

Mine would be suicidal OCD, which is also what started my OCD. It hit me hard and fast and has remained here throughout the occasional popping up of other themes here and there. It stared for me back at the end of August so it will have been a little over 9 months (?) now. I didn’t get diagnosed and starting ERP until 3 months ago, so it’s still a work in progress. Doing ERP has helped with the certain triggers I’ve been working on, mostly physical objects, but I still have to tackle it just randomly popping into my head. It’s such a horrible theme because it literally feels like life and death for me, and it has shifted in its angle of attack throughout the months. At first it was more like I thought I would just lose control or become almost in a zombie state to kill myself, later on it would shift to what if I became depressed and got so down in it that I would actually want to die, and now it’s kind of the same thing, but I’ve been getting hit lately with these strong waves of negative emotions (pain/distress/guilt/shame) and I’m terrified it’ll be too much and I’ll want to die. There are some days where I’m actually doing good, haven’t really thought about it and if it does intrude it’s more in the back of my head, but in bad days it’s more in the forefront (mixed with existential OCD sometimes) and I’m such a mess I have to constantly try to calm down and I keep going back and forth of whether I should be put on medication (which I rather not) or admit myself to a psychiatric hospital or something. Very hard but I’m slowly working on it with my therapist

I had ocd since I was a child and I didn’t realize I had hocd since my twenties until it kicked my ass last year cuz I know exactly what triggered it. It teamed up with Tocd now and it sucks but yeah hocd was def the worst / longest which is why I am in therapy with a good therapist.