Has anyone here managed ocd?

That's awesome Good luck in your journey Your therapist will definitely help you to beat ocd

@Diego?? Thanks!

Tell me your story I'd love to hear

@Diego?? I will try to remember when I'm not at work. It's a long story lol.

@advocate109 haha No problem

@I'm not afraid? So I'll start off with, I've liked girls my entire life. I've had crushes on girls since kindergarten/first grade area. Around like age 11-13 I discovered porn and then I eventually discovered "comic porn" (without going into too much detail). I eventually came across gay comic porn when I was around 17 or 18. I really didnt enjoy it. But I kept going back to it, checking and eventually, I think my brain may have made an association with masturbating and the gay cartoon porm (I would cycle back and forth between that and regular porn very often). I would get massive anxiety throughout these sessions, I didnt really know what was going on. That would come and go for about 3 months on 3 months off. Freshman year of college I met a girl who I'll call sasha for anonymity reasons. I fell in love with sasha hard and she saw me as a friend and I never really made an advance because I always thought "oh you might be gay." Fast forward to either me 3rd of 4th year in college and I finally got the courage to ask her out. I thought that if I could get a girlfriend who I really loved, I'd stop thinking all the time about how i might be gay. She rejected me however and a few months later i met a different girl who i kinda sorta had feelings for. I'll call her sue again for anonymity reasons. So me and Sue dated a while and I continued having these obsessions, i started checking (with gay/strait porn) more and more and i would always be so not into it when we were having sex (part of me feels like the whole reason I started dating her was to prove to myself I wasnt gay before I dated someone I actually liked). I started developing genuine feelings for sue, not as intense as those feelings I had for sasha, but still feelings none the less. I would still talk to Sasha all the time, given that we were really great friends, but sue always suspected something was up. Shed always interrogate me and ask if I was in love with her because of how happy I'd get when I told her stories about sasha or whenever sasha texted me I'd grin ear to ear. So she eventually told me I couldn't talk to her and this was very conflicting for me, but I thought along the lines of, well sasha has already denied me and if it really hurts sue than I should probably break that friendship off. And all the while I'd have these increasing obsessions and anxiety over my sexuality. Fast forward 6 months in and we almost broke up. She saw that I was distancing myself (i was because of the ocd). So I told her everything about the porn habits and what not. I thought I "might be bi." And she said that was fine but she wish she told me earlier. I thought that would make everything better but it made everything worse. I started checking my groin area whenever I saw a guy, I checked my groin area when I saw girls. I couldn't really look st someone without checking. I started watching way more porn of both varieties trying to figure it out. Sue even pegged me a couple times, I didnt really enjoy it but I tried to as hard as I could for the check. Nothing helped my anxiety. FINALLY we broke up at the end of my 4th year headed into my 5th and final year of college. I texted sasha and told her 5hat we broke up and she basically said she made a huge mistake by not saying yes to me before and she wanted to date me. I told her that I wasn't ready to date yet but I still want to down the road. Fast forward a couple months and I'm finally dating the girl of my dreams. Being in a relationship that I genuinely cared about my OCD kicked into another year. I had given up looking up any gay porn but I would watch strait/lesbian porn like 5 times a day, my public checking got worse. I switched from groinal responses to looking for feelings in my chest/stomach area. My anxiety was at a 10 during the bad moments and a 7 average overall. I would stay up crying for hours because I "might be gay" and "may not be able to be with sasha". I eventually found a gay affirmation therapist. Dr. Joe Kort. A very experienced gay affirmation therapist whose written many books on male sexuality. (A gay affirmation therapist helps gay people realise they're gay and come out) After the first session he was almost positive I wasnt gay and that I had HOCD. After the second session he was even more sure and recommended me to an OCD therapist. Since I got in touch with that therapist, my anxiety level has decreased dramatically, but chipping away and my HOCD also made me realize that this is part ROCD with how it reacts to relationships with people I actually want to be with. I no longer believed that I was okay, and was learning to accept the doubt. 3 weeks ago me and my girlfriend broke up, we were fighting all the time for reasons relating to my ROCD and the simple fact that I didnt (or maybe dont) love myself. Since that day 3 weeks ago, I have been vigorously working towards loving myself by incorporating sayings into my ERP, doing mindfulness meditation, and a whole mess of other things I'm learning from reading about it. Right now I'm in the best place I've been in a while, despite my OCD taking a slight uptake due to my switched focus from tackling my OCD to tackling my self love but I'm slowly making them go hand in hand. I realize this is everywhere so to help you with exercises you can do specifically with OCD, I'll list the ones I do below. 1. Attention training white noise exercise 2. Every day situational ERP 3. Script exercise 4. Mindfullness meditation 5. Getting up immediately in the morning (make breakfast or take a shower or do one of these exersizes, start the day off productive) 6. Heart focused breathing 7. OCD mantras (it's not me, its ocd. This too shall pass ect. Put these mantras up as posters, phone alarms, sticky notes on ur desk, wherever you'll run into them) 8. More. If you read this scrambled story, you're a trooper. Gold star for you. Hope it helps.

@advocate109 Kicked my ocd into another gear*

@advocate109 No longer believed that in was gay* and learned to accept the doubt

@advocate109 Thanks for sharing. I wonder if this was as prevalent 30 years ago before the arrival of gay porn. I don't expect you to have an answer to that question since you are obviously a young adult but do you think you would have struggled with HOCD as intensely, or even at all, had you not been exposed to gay porn at such a young age?

@advocate109 Great story man I'm glad now you're doing better

@Fear Strikes Out Thrres no way of knowing. I think I would have just compulsed differently or maybe had a different theme. Like my ROCD would probably just be through the roof

That's a great mindset What themes did you have?

Oh I see I've had perfectionism with religion I thought I had to be perfect,self criticism happens a lot I'm happy you overcame it

@Diego?? How are you doing with feeling the need to be perfect? Does it affect you in school or on the job?

@Fear Strikes Out I'm dealing better with this now Understanding that we are all humans and make mistakes helped me a lot

@Diego?? Very good to hear.