Hi Friends! As we all get closer to the New Year, I would love to hear your goals for 2021 with regard to your OCD. My goal is to continue catching and labeling my OCD thoughts as to prevent acting upon them with compulsions.

Earlier today I did some pretty high-level contamination exposure, inspired by my therapist, and now I'm listening to a triggering song on repeat — the very song that kicked off my first serious bout of OCD in high school. There is a part of my brain that is telling me I can't handle the song and that I should find a compulsion to do, but my goal is to have it in the background while I go about my self-care tasks. I'm already starting to get used to it 💪 How are y'all challenging your OCD today?

I still do not have an OFFICIAL diagnosis (I dont have the means to do so) but given my symptoms, past and present in my life hugely suggest OCD is what I am dealing with. I cannot be 100 percent certain but after searching for answers and researching for a long time now, I am fairly certain and confident this is what I am struggling with. Given this step forward, I am making more effort into giving up compulsions. at the current moment I believe to be dealing with ROCD, as I have been having several intrusive thoughts that conflict with my relationship. For starters, recently over the past month or 2, I have been struggling with intrusive thoughts like not being over my ex, being attracted to someone else, losing feelings for my partner and not being in love, etc. I can consciously identify that I dont believe these thoughts to be true but it causes me so much distress and anxiety. It gets extremely unbearable some days, and I have leaned into 2 main compulsions. I have relied on thought checking and googling as my source of relief. At first the googling was genuinely to start finding answers; hence why I have made some of the discoveries I have about OCD including this site. But it developed into every time I was anxious, I would whip my phone out and start googling strictly to find an answer that would reassure me or calm me down. As for thought checking, it acted as a way to reaffirm my love for my girlfriend in my head when I have had the thoughts that collide with my relationship and how I feel about my girlfriend. It worked at first but developed into a compulsion where every time a bad thought got me worked up id either do my normal googling or Id think about that in my head to calm myself down. Over time these compulsions have gotten less and less affective and now when I do them it only gets me more anxious and desperate for reassurance (strengthening the cycle or whatever it is lol). I did some more research and finally have accepted the very real fact that I am going to have to sit in heavy anxiety and not give into compulsions for a while in order to treat this. I have to sit in the thoughts that make me feel all this hightened anxiety and distress without giving into compulsion. to be honest I am scared, the thoughts are more rampant than ever, but I am ready to commit to this. I dont think I am gonna be able to go cold turkey on my compulsions so I am ready for the reality I might relapse on the compulsions sometimes, But am gonna keep going until I can break these shackles OCD has on my life right now. I wanna ask, what is everyones methods they use to avoid giving into compulsion when the thoughts get loud? any advice is welcome :)

Ever since starting ERP, my SO-OCD and general OCD has lowered. This has been great. I just wanted to have somewhere to share my thoughts and ask questions. For anyone else, have you realized that the SO-OCD and other forms of OCD are all rooted in what people have said in the past that I hadn’t processed, and up to this point believed hadn’t affected me. It was also odd because to me, I had never had a problem questioning my sexuality, even labeling myself as queer. However, this fear plagued my thoughts whether or not I decided to identity as straight, lesbian, bisexual, etc. It was so weird to me because it felt so foreign to how I’ve always been. I hated the guilt I felt over possibly being in denial or in the closet, over being homophobic, and all of that would just lead to constant stress and spiral. I felt so bad dating or being with my friends, on the off chance I was using them or going to cross lines. Progress isn’t linear, but I definetly feel so much better shedding the random fear I had of expressing affection towards my friends or of “using guys” to prove I was straight. Most of the time, I find that the stress comes from something really real. Like my past experiences with an old friend that I had or just not liking the guy I was dating and not wanting to lead him on. Being able to discern the OCD thoughts and stress from regular stress has been like a breath of fresh air.