- Date posted
- 6y
- Date posted
- 6y
Thank you guys for sharing. It’s great to know I’m not alone. You are all so brave for continually fighting. It’s so nice that even though our stories my be different we can still relate to each other.
- Date posted
- 6y
Symptoms started probably around 10 with an obsession with computers. Then it morphed into an obsession about having health issues. I was diagnosed and hospitalised at 13 when my theme had changed to contamination and I talked about killing myself. I stayed at the hospital for 3 weeks. For the next 4 years no symptom. Then at age 17 it came back with HOCD but nobody had told me OCD was for life so I had HOCD undiagnosed for 7 years. Then it got diagnosed and just diagnosing it made it disappear (WTF!) Now I'm 33 and I've been struggling with relationship OCD for 4 years. I obsess over partner's flaws. I've been doing ERP for about a year and I'm making progress but no breakthrough yet. OCD is still a major disruption in my life, though I function normally.
- Date posted
- 6y
I did read your journey and appreciate you sharing. Figured it wouldnt be fair to post mine if i didnt read yours. My journey started mainly when i was 21 (24 now) . I was with my friend and i started saying this phrase ( satan cant win, Yeshua is my lord and savior) i had no idea why at first but it got worse and i told my bro i think im saying this protect against something. About 6 months went by and it stopped comepletely. A year later i was about to lay down and a harmful thought came at me... and i was like what just happened. Scared i walked out of my house to look around and get fresh air but it wouldnt shake. I went to work that night and would stare off and just constantly think and worry. I asked my brotha to eat with me and talked to him and after that i battled for about 7 months before getting help. after the first therapist, the second help amazingly, almost completely better in 5 visits... a year later up to now it hit again and have not been able to shake it. It hurts a lot and sucks i cry nearly everyday and hide everyday. But something in me fights everyday and i know i am stronger and i dont give up. We are all strong
- Date posted
- 6y
I have OCD since I was around 7, it hasn’t been diagnosed at that time because of the symptoms. I had a lot of sexual intrusive thoughts that made me suffer a lot as a kid, and I’d always go tell my parents to relief the anxiety, though it was really stressful to tell them cause I thought i was doing something wrong. Years went by and when I had those fluctuating symptoms of washing hands and etc. but nothing really serious, as I got older sometimes I’d think that I, maybe, was lesbian and I ruminated about it but eventually I’d forget. When I turned 18 my mind just blew up. I became depressed and OCD worsened in a way that I had to seek for a psychologist and a psychiatrist as soon as I could. Since everything would happen only in my mind (avoid looking at women and child, for example) it wasn’t easy to detect it was OCD. Since then I’ve been battling OCD, now the theme that bothers me the most is contamination, it drives me crazy, but I know we’ll all get over this!
- Date posted
- 6y
I was diagnosed at 18 right before graduation. I did poorly in school bc I would question everything and spend way too much on certain things. I was misdiagnosed with generalized anxiety and impulse control bc I did not open up about my anxiety. I kept my obsessions hidden because I thought I was a shitty person for having them. I began using alcohol and my prescription meds to relieve the pain. Little did I know that was a compulsion. My parents threatened me to getting sent me boarding school. We resolved this issue and I saw a new therapist and still my same psychiatrist. Im writer and paper was my only way to express my guilt and intrusions knowing I wouldn’t be judged. I told my therapist I liked to write and she told me to share something. It took me awhile but through the process she saw how much I would get fixated on certain people and situations. Fearing I would loose them or hurt them. So I asked so much reassurance. Questioned literary anything a guy who I was involved with and try to analyze it. She thought it was best if I went to my psychiatrist for a true diagnosis. I confessed everything I feared telling again about fear of harming people that I was act in destructive ways bc I was terrified those were my conscience thoughts. My parents took me to two other psychologist and psychiatrist and make sure I had the right diagnosis. They all came back the same. Now I’m college student who is a college tutor who realizes these are just thoughts and I decide if I want them to effect me or not everyday
Related posts
- Date posted
- 15w
this is the most i will ever go into depth about my mental health, all in one post; all in one sitting. this will be draining. to start this off, yes, i have OCD—but i also have several other disorders as well. some of my diagnoses that will come to light in this have a strong correlation to comorbidity and so instead of this being a story simply about my OCD, i will cover all areas of my mental health. for readers, i want it to be clear; this is for me. i’m doing this to put my story out. i hope you find some interest in what i have to say, but in the end, my intentions are strictly to make my damage good. symptoms of my mental issues were present frequently in my childhood experience. for years i avoided any truth to how i thought or felt. thinking, feeling, acting—all 3 were never in cohesion. i had a very anti-social attitude towards life for most of my pubescent years. i got use to faking and manipulating to appear a certain way when i knew i was at risk of punishment; it allowed me to get away with a lot of immoral behaviors for a long time before i eventually was forced into counseling from a school fight i had initiated. i was roughly 14 at this time. counseling was my initial therapy for a while. i have since seen 5 therapists. i can’t say any of those therapists knew a single truth about me, really—with a mixture of pathological lying and a bad masking habit, I was stopping myself from getting any real treatment. i don’t know why, but for a long time i was content with this truth. a part of me never really felt the need to address it. my manipulative behaviors were often unintentional and not once had i sought a need to be callous, even when doing the things i was doing. with every new therapist, i had tuned my personality specifically to fit them—a concept that i don’t have a name for but now can dissect in immense detail. i would take parts of my personality and accentuate them to fit the attitudes and interests of particular people. in my head it was always about admiring the story. nobody was real; everyone was a character, everyone was a unique, self-manifested character. i just made my character with greater intents. i was a good listener, i think understanding that made me get more comfortable with my destructive and manipulative tendencies. when someone believes your listening, like really, actively listening—they’ll eventually tell you everything about themselves. now for a slight addressing of the obvious, i want it to be clear, i’m not describing ASPD—aka, the real life equivalence of sociopathy. i do think i show strong signs of it early on in my youth, and i bring these behaviors up because i think the issues that i do have developed from my anti-social behaviors—however, i was a child; i didn’t know the consequences of my behavior like i do now. if anything is needed to be said here, it’s best to address the following events like this: i understand now, i didn’t understand then. turning 15, i had started off 2023 in a relationship that meant a lot to me—a lot more to me than anything in my life leading up to this point. it’s best to address this now as well—i don’t feel a lot, but when i do, it’s usually irrationally intense and feels completely uncontrollable. at this time, i had gotten over a lot of my anti-social tendencies by now and have spent the last year improving myself after the things i had done began hurting the people i valued most. from a long list of lying, manipulating, preying, harassing, even stabbing people with whatever sharp thing was at my disposal—i had come a long way in creating a character that i actually liked. an important thing to keep in mind during this time was the early development of my OCD that had initially come in the form of suicidal ideation. most of the people in here i’m assuming are people that personally have OCD and understand that it’s not a disorder based in the stigmatized-lens of perfectionism but rather an irrational need for certainty. death quickly became my “ultimate form of certainty” in my teenage years as i turned to the concept like a comfort place—a hand on my shoulder saying “it’s okay, you can fuck up however you might, there’s always a way out.” i had not been truthful about that in therapy either, nor did the several medications prescribed in my lifetime ever do something of benefit to what my issues actually were. of course, i blame no one but myself for not benefiting from outside sources. skipping over a lot of meaningless detail—the gist of the year went like this: Jan-April relationship breaks up badly—in my irrational state, i attempted to take my life and was hospitalized, and eventually, institutionalized. i stayed there for 11 days. at the time the only diagnoses they could make of me was MDD and ASD with slight signs of generalized anxiety. May-August i get extremely medicated and start taking 150+ pills a month to maintain what at the time was being treated for bipolar and schizophrenia. i was too young to see my clinical record, and i assume they wouldn’t tell this to a minor, but it seems they believed whatever my issues really were—i was simply too young to get an accurate assessment. September-December the medication makes me completely apathetic and my loss of care for life brought back my irrational gimmicks and self-destructive tendencies. i, in a 4 month period, ruined every single relationship i had kept close to me. 2024. i was alone. i stopped taking my pills due to a loss of interest and excessive weight gaining but it made my intense emotions start to bite me again. this was the year my OCD had fully developed and by April, i was diagnosed after failing a risk-assessment. for a long period of time, i lived a meaningless, uneventful, isolated life. that year, i let my mental health take over all acts of my being. i got deep into philosophy, psychology, pathology, a lot of tv shows built around psychological dynamics—i was desperate to understand this parasite that seemed to destroy my life without any awareness. i never wanted it to take the years it did since i was initially that 13 year old boy, but i write this now with a simple truth—a truth i refused to let myself believe until recently. i can’t fix this. the more i feed into it, obsess over it—the more these issues are going to worsen. for years i wasted my days thinking i was trying everything i could and it just wasn’t working. i couldn’t accept the fact that i don’t control this, and despite being told that again and again—it never got through to me until i spent the last week not feeding into the OCD and emotional dysregulation, and for the first time, i didn’t find myself counting the seconds that passed me by. it might not mean that much for an outsider looking in, but since my OCD had fully developed—i would always be counting the seconds in the back of my head, not like 1231, 1232, 1233… but as a tick of a metronome that made me always aware of the time. the days where this wasn’t annoying, it was boring, which i ultimately hated more. i’m seeing a light i haven’t seen in years, and with it i keep reaching the same notion—i wish i didn’t waste so much of my life being miserable. i’m getting a psychological evaluation within the next month. i’ve been out of therapy for about a year now but i’m going in now looking to help myself. this is specifically for my emotional dysregulation. my current theories revolve around cluster B personality types, 1 of 4 including ASPD as i had mentioned earlier, albeit my bet is actually on BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder.) I crossed off Borderline for a long time because the symptoms list always felt too broad, but the more i understand the disorder—the more i feel connected to it. my theory comes from several factors—my rapidly changing self image, my impulsive/erratic behaviors, my irrational emotions, my long history of unconventional relationships, my fear of abandonment, my chronic emptiness, my history of self harm, etc. this is not confirmed however, and i wish to get an evaluation specifically for the disorder. getting a personality disorder diagnosed in a minor isn’t easy, but i’m doing it half for the certainty of just knowing—and half for potentionally getting a medication that can help me live a healthy-adjacent life. i never thought i would see a life free of obsession since being diagnosed with OCD. now i can enjoy the silence. thanks for reading. any commentary appreciated.
- Date posted
- 13w
This is my first post on this app, though I made this account back in late September of 2021. I grew up in a toxic environment, and was mentally abused by my parents, included being taken advantage of because of my autism. I’ve been suffering from OCD as long as I can remember. Ever since I was a child, I’ve sometimes had thoughts that scared me, and I’d often try to find ways to calm myself down. I’ve had thoughts over the smallest and silliest of things, but as time went on, these thoughts suddenly became more violent, like wanting to step in front of moving car while waiting for the bus, or grabbing a knife on the dinner table and using it to stab a family member. Even thoughts of death and what happens afterwards scared me. Aside from being afraid of a kids horror show for a while, OCD did bother me at points in my life, but they never severely crippled me… until my teenage years. Throughout my teen hood, I would very occasionally suddenly imagine fictional child characters being SA’d. I would also sometimes imagine children getting injured while noticing them sometimes. I didn’t know why those thoughts popped up into my head and they would weird me out, but I would be able to usually push them aside and not think about them too much… but it got worse after I was dropped out of high school without my consent by my parents. In March of 2017, I was at a gas station when I saw a child and imagined doing a disgusting action with them. It freaked me out immensely and sent me into a panic attack. I was able to calm down from it shortly after, but I think it planted a seed into my brain, and it would launch a horrific attack on me the very next month. Me and my family were driving around a town for a special occasion when I had the worst OCD attack I’ve ever had. Every child I saw, I imagined doing something disgusting to them. I was having a full blown panic attack and it honestly felt like my mind itself was being sexually assaulted by this horrifying thoughts. This incident scarred me mentally, and to this day, I’m still afraid of being around anyone younger than me. I tried researching what these thoughts could mean, and I found out about these being symptoms of OCD. After talking with a psychiatrist a month later, I was diagnosed with OCD. For a while, I thought I’d be okay from that point. I thought I could conquer this on my own… but by early 2018, I was still struggling. I eventually came out to my older sibling and parents about what I was dealing with. They thankfully didn’t ridicule me, and did help me with getting a therapist. The first visit with my therapist went alright, but I was an emotional mess after finishing the session. The next time I went in however, I was seen by someone else because my therapist was out. The man I saw honestly felt condescending, and he basically made go to a group therapy session. The group therapy didn’t help in the slightest, and with more toxicity developing in my family afterwards, I stopped going after the group therapy. I did see my therapist at least once I think, but that was it. Ever since 2018, I was silent about my OCD. I was just hoping that someday I’d be free of my shackles both from my mental illness and my toxic environment. Two years later though, a friend (now partner) of mine heard about my family’s living situation and wanted to help get me out of there. I first visited them in 2021, and thankfully I stay with them for the most part. That being said, I was still worried about opening up to them about my OCD. I did talk with them about general OCD from time to time, but never got into P OCD… until last year finally. I opened up them fully about it, and both they and their mother told me that they weren’t upset, and that they understood where I was coming from. I think that genuinely helped me out, and I don’t feel as anxious as I did before. Just yesterday, I finally talked about my OCD to my older sibling (they’re super supportive and understand our parents toxicity). I was genuinely nervous about telling them for a while out of fear of them either abandoning me or ratting me out… but they understood. They were accepting and didn’t ridicule me at all. It was like a weight was lifted off my shoulders… and honestly, I think I might have the courage to speak up on this app finally and hopefully find a therapist who can help me. I’ve been suffering with P OCD for over 8 years now ever since I was 18. I just recently turned 27 a few days ago. I’ve been suffering in silence for so long due to trauma, fear, and PTSD. But now, I think I want to take a step forward and get onto the road to recovery. It most likely won’t be easy and it won’t happen overnight, but I feel relieved knowing I have people who love and support me, now that I’m in a better environment.
- Date posted
- 10w
Some background: I’m a woman in my 30s who’s been struggling to find the right diagnosis for years. Since 2022, I’ve had multiple psych hospital stays, and with each stay came a different diagnosis and different sets of medications: Bipolar II, CPTSD, MDD with psychotic features, “high functioning BPD,” and most recently, Schizoaffective Disorder (depressive type). Before all of that happened, I had been seeing a therapist for CPTSD and AuDHD traits for 2 years, but after they left the practice, I struggled to find someone I trusted again. Most of my breakdowns happened during my last relationship. Looking back, I was in survival mode with them, leaving who *I* am behind. I got to the point where I started doubting my own reality from the abuse. This eventually added up and landed me in my first episode of psychosis. That combined with my attempts is what got me my schizoaffective diagnosis. After finally leaving that relationship 1.5 years ago, I’ve slowly rebuilt my life: new town, new job, new friends. Many of my old symptoms (major ones) haven’t returned, which makes me believe I may have been misdiagnosed due to reliving past childhood trauma and stress responses from the abuse. Through all of this, I’ve felt like nothing ever truly fit. I journal, I reflect, I replay the recordings and I’ve even watched old vlogs –the puzzle pieces still don’t come together. It’s left me feeling like I’ll never really know what’s going on, and I’ve started to fear that my diagnoses will just keep stacking up without ever leading to effective treatment. Recently, I opened up to a friend about this. She mentioned that her neighbor went through something similar not exactly like me but she thought it would give me a starting point—multiple diagnoses that never felt right—until a new doctor finally identified it as OCD. That one diagnosis changed everything for her. It made me realize I really don’t know much about OCD beyond the stereotypes. I didn’t know OCD could involve intrusive thoughts, rumination, or mental compulsions. My friend encouraged me to look into it, especially as I start searching for a new therapist. Facebook and Google lead me here… So now I’m wondering: could OCD be a better explanation for what I’ve been experiencing all these years? Questions for the community: 1. What steps did you take to find out if OCD was what you were dealing with? 2. If you had a long history of misdiagnoses, how did you finally find a clinician who got it right? 3. How did you advocate for yourself when people dismissed your concerns? 4. Is there anything you wish you had done earlier in your OCD journey? Thank you so much if you made it this far. I’m really grateful for this space and just want to start finding answers and the right kind of help.
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