Not sure whether I really have OCD? I’m 22 and have only considered the possibility I suffer from OCD in the past few months. I know I have had obsessive inappropriate thoughts and compulsions to confess to them that were so intense I felt sick all the time until I told my parents since I was a really young child, and in all my relationships have been worried I am gay and do not love my boyfriends / I do not love them anymore and have to dump them / intense paranoia they are cheating on me and will not tell me. In recent years I have had flare ups of thoughts that fit POCD and IOCD but when I told a friend I was worried about having OCD after looking into incest nightmares online, she told me she did not think I had it because another of our friends has OCD with counting compulsions (door locking, oven buttons, etc) and I believed I was just really messed up and that maybe it was just my anxiety. My boyfriend (not knowing about my POCD or IOCD thoughts at all) linked me to an article about a woman with OCD and suggested I research it more, and the behaviours and fears seem to fit me very well and make me feel so much less sick and alone. Does this sound like I may have it or might this just be my anxiety clinging onto something? (I have a tendency to cling to diagnoses then be disproved)

Ok so I’m a 17 year old female, and I’ve always thought I was straight. But I just really want to know how you would know the difference between so-ocd and actually questioning your sexuality. I have nothing against the LGBTQ community (in fact I am very much a token straight friend, lol) but I saw a video about comp-het recently and it sort of felt like what I was experiencing. I don’t want to be gay, I want to be with men, I want to like men, I’ve always liked men, but now I’m questioning whether or not that’s real? Because people can be gay but not want to be right? I’m single and I always have been. I think women are gorgeous, but when I try to imagine actually having any sort of romantic or sexual relationship with a woman it feels wrong, at least most of the time it does? Sometimes I’m less sure, and I’ve never been particularly boy crazy. I’ve liked maybe 2 or 3 people in my life, (not to say I’ve never found other guys attractive, but it doesn’t seem to be as often as most people) I have no particular reason to be afraid of being gay, very supportive family, safe area ect, but I don’t want to be, does that mean this is ocd, I don’t know what’s going on every time I say I’m straight I feel like I’m lying, but that might just be because I think about it so much. The idea of being with a woman doesn’t feel like something I would want, but is that just because I don’t want to want it? People online say things with so much sureness, if you feel like this it means this. Ect.

I have constantly been feeling like if I hit one arm, I have to hit the other and if I set something down and it just didn’t look right or feel right I had to do it again or I had to move it to a different spot in my room I’ve had never been a clean freak, which is mainly what I get told is OCD And I don’t know if I should even have this app. I don’t know if I actually have it. I’m constantly worried that I did something in my past that harmed others and that’s why people don’t like me or I’m constantly worried People are constantly watching me and I don’t know if that’s OCD or if I have it so please tell me I will delete this app and never think of it again if I don’t I just really wanna know

Trying not to seek reassurance, but rather connect the dots on my OCD and possible reasons as to why I am the way I am. I have severe OCD (or at least I hope I do) mainly surrounding POCD. I've had symptoms of OCD the majority of my life but this theme has come up more recently. When I was a kid, and i'm talking 6-7, I was first exposed to some really gross adult content online. It was introduced to me by a friend of mine around the same age of me. I saw some really disgusting things that a 6-7 year old should definitely not see. This was not a one time occurrence, as I had been exposed to taboo topics online years to come after that, such as the same friend introducing me to Omegle... And i'm sure you can imagine how that went, theres a lot of genuinely disgusting human beings on there. Coming back to the reason for making this post; is it possible to early exposure to this content could be one of the reasons I struggle with POCD? It genuinely scares me to death because you hear that real p*dos dealt with simular situations when they were kids, so thats kind of making me feel that this could be more than OCD, and I could be a genuinely bad person. My POCD feels so real, that at times i'm fully convinced its not OCD. Sometimes I can't even distinguish the feelings of attraction between a younger person and an older person, except for the feeling of anxiety and fear. Its really hard to explain without going into detail, but it just feels so real. Some feedback on this would be great, thank you all.