I’m 23 years old and just got diagnosed this year with OCD. I’m kind of all alone in a mew city, and just scared. Mine takes the form of POCD probably other forms as well but this is the worst. I suffer from very bad intrusive thoughts about babies/children and I try to distract myself from the thoughts but it depresses me that the thoughts were/are there in the first place. Do the thoughts alone make me a bad person?

No, it's OCD you can't control it they are intrusive thoughts. I can also relate. I hate the facts that the thoughts were there in the first place.

No. We don’t author our thoughts or emotions. It’s that subtle misunderstanding, that is, the notion that we bear responsibility for having certain thoughts and that their presence must mean something about us as a consistent “self” that causes an immense amount of suffering. There’s a vast range of human emotions. The obvious pleasant ones like happiness or excitement, and the distressing emotions like sadness or anger. In both cases, if we become lost in them we lose a sense of balance in our lives. If you’re so intoxicated by your happiness, you will feel it’s inevitable loss more acutely. If you’re too absorbed in your sadness, it becomes a self-perpetuating vortex pulling you deeper. All things are impermanent, including our states of being. You are, physically and from the perspective of conscious experience, a different person than you even three minutes ago. That all sounds philosophical and esoteric, but there’s a lot of sound science being done into practices like mindfulness that cultivate an ability to experience what I’m talking about more acutely. Mindfulness is nothing but the practice of cultivating awareness, because so often we are carried away by our emotional state rather than being aware of it. This is especially true if you’re suffering from OCD. So, what is your recourse? Treatment is. ERP helps you reorient your relationship to the thoughts in your head and helps you move forward, the science is very clear on this. So, if you aren’t working with a specialist then please do so. It’s available for you right here on the NOCD app.