I want to open up about something I struggle with still, and maybe some of the people I comment and offer help on may in turn have ideas for me? Because we know ocd is a constant path of recovery we coast on I struggle a lot with picture-taking. I feel like any time I notice something I want to “remember”, I need to take a photo of it. And if it doesn’t look exactly like how I’m seeing it (a plant catching the sunlight, my body in the mirror), i need to continue retaking it. This is starting to get to be a problem because I’ll end up taking around 50 or more photos a day. My phone gets super cluttered, and when I can’t find a photo of something actually important/worth keeping, it’s very embarrassing. I go back and delete as many old screenshots and random photos, but until I stop doing it every day I’m basically treading water. I’m not sure if this need to remember something exactly how it was in that moment came about (I think when one of my family members passed away from dementia I got this fear of not being able to preserve things exactly so) but I figure as a community, I could reach out to some of you guys. Thanks for taking the time to read. :)

I would really appreciate it so much if someone took the time to read this and help me. I don’t know what to do anymore. I haven’t posted here in awhile. I had my OCD managed pretty decently for a year or so on medication, but I had to stop taking it, and after around 3-4 months, the OCD has become unbearable again. It used to be much more surrounding existential themes, eating, and others, not really real event/false memory stuff. But now it’s gotten really out of hand and I don’t know how to do it anymore. It’s surrounding a time of my life a long time ago. It was a dark time. I wasn’t myself and I was going through a lot of things, and I did a lot of things I regret. I self-destructed, embarrassed myself, and wasn’t good to the people around me. I was able to get my mind off of it for a long time, even though I would still think about it a good amount. I was able to be in the present, at least moreso than now. But now that I’m off medication, the guilt has become my obsession again. I can’t move on. I can’t do anything without thinking about all of these memories. I’m obsessed. I’ve started hating myself again, so much so that it’s hard to do anything anymore or believe I deserve anything good. The people around me tell me it wasn’t even that bad, but to me it was. To me, I failed myself, lost myself, and failed everyone around me. I can’t stop thinking about every person I said something wrong to or every time I screwed up. I’ve now started to convince myself I did terrible things I can’t remember, and that my mind just can’t deal with it. And that’s why I feel so guilty. There’s nothing to really support this though. But I’m starting to really convince myself that’s true. I’m trying not to listen to it, because I’ve convinced myself I have hit people with my car before and haven’t remembered when I absolutely didn’t and I know I never have. I drive back over and over to check there’s no one, even though I never heard any bang or felt myself anything. I can convince myself of some crazy false memories. So I know that I shouldn’t listen. But it’s hard not to when I have this guilt gnawing at me constantly. I come to conclusions that this guilt must be because I did something terrible that I don’t remember, even though I already think the things I remember were bad enough. But I would know by now right? If I did something bad I don’t remember? I don’t feel like this all the time. But it’s a lot of the time. But maybe that should be reassuring, that I only start obsessing like this when I think to. The past haunts me though. And I can never be in the present. I’ve started to resort to some unhealthy behaviors to distract myself or help me work towards something. I am starting to hate myself so much and feel like there’s no way I’ll ever be able to get out of this loop. I feel like I just can’t do this anymore. Maybe I need to go back on medication. But I don’t know. I don’t really want to. But will I ever fix this without it? Why do I feel SO guilty, all of the time? I do all these things for people because I feel indebted to them, because I feel undeserving of everything. I feel awful about myself. I don’t know what to do. Does anyone else deal with this?

Hello, I’m new to this app. I’ve always had an anxious brain, and I’ve had coping mechanisms for as long as I can remember. When I was a kid, from as early as I could spell, until I was probably early teens, I would constantly write words in my head along to the beat of music. It’s such a vivid memory because I never stopped doing it. The word had to perfectly match up to the lyric and I loved that it kept my brain busy. I grew out of that, but felt like good context. My anxiety increased drastically around ages 17-19, and I began therapy. I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety and panic disorder, due to having a panic attack nearly every day at that time. I overcame that as well, and now the panic attacks are every now and then, but the anxiety is constant, and some recent symptoms have led me to believe I might have some form of OCD. Maybe not. I’m trying to understand myself and get better so I joined this app to make sense of things. Lately I’ve been having really intense intrusive thoughts. I’m really embarassed and they make me feel like a bad person. Thoughts pop in my head seemingly out of nowhere. It will be an image of me harming myself or someone else in a really bad way. (Trigger warning) for example the other day I couldn’t shake the image of me putting a knife through my own forehead, although it’s not something I want to do. Or I’ll imagine someone killing me. I imagine my loved ones dying often. The thoughts feel so out of my control it’s insane. I hate them. Another persistent issue that isn’t as new is replaying social scenarios. I’m a hairstylist so this one is difficult since I meet a bunch of new people every day. I obsess over how I act and if people like me. I will impulsively say things all the time and they will haunt me for weeks. I question even my closest friends and family who show their love. I find myself so angry and numb and like I have so much built up emotion and a busy mind always. While doing my job I spiral really badly if any little thing goes wrong and it’s embarassing. I know there’s more but I can’t think of it now. I just want to feel better and like I’m not constantly battling my mind.

I’m new to NOCD and just wanted to share my experience to see if anyone else can relate or has any thoughts or advice. My thing is needing a system or some kind of digitally saved reference (online article/notes app) to make decisions on how to live my life and spend my time- then I get super caught up in what is the objectively “right” system to have which never really leads anywhere- over the last 6+ years I’ve probably changed this system over 100 times because at some point I realized it wasn’t “right”. At best, I stick with a system for months and be pretty free from OCD but at worst I can go months where I only experience intermittent periods of living free from OCD and spend hours and hours putting my life on hold trying to figure out what the right system is or to answer and figure out impossible answers to completely subjective things. I get a lot of regret over all the time and life I’ve wasted in this cycle, and feel kinda like everything I’ve done in previous systems was “wrong” so I try to fix that by undoing some of those actions. I think part of the root of this is wanting to control so many parts of my life and the fact that there are other parts of life I could be experiencing, ways I could be improving, and that there is so much out there that I could never ever do or experience all of it leads me to try to figure out some system that gives me a better feeling of control over this. If anyone reads all this that’s awesome- lmk if this resonates with you at all