- Date posted
- 4y
- Date posted
- 4y
you’re an absolute legend. i’m about a month off of nic and a week and a half off of weed. your story is inspiring, and keeps others who see no hope holding on.
- Date posted
- 4y
Jake, are you having cravings for a cigarette? Or did you vape ?
- Date posted
- 4y
@mccargar85 Also what form of cannabis did you consume?
- Date posted
- 4y
@mccargar85 yeah, i vaped nic since i was 15 (20 now), and with weed i’d use a bunch of methods, mostly joints and dab carts. it not that, then bowls, bongs, or dabs off the rig
- Date posted
- 4y
@mccargar85 What's interesting/funny/frustrating is I have completely conquered my addictions...but my anxiety and ocd is through the roof right now..but even you saying what you said gives me strength and hope that I got this ...I was able to kick my habits ..I can persevere and work on getting my ocd under control and me and my dr will get my anxiety under control as well
- Date posted
- 4y
@jake Ever smoke cigarettes?
- Date posted
- 4y
@mccargar85 you’ve got this man. im so serious. it was reading your post that gave me the courage to continue to not use. you WILL get your anxiety under control, no matter what your OCD tells you. i have a reccomendation for you. try out the Wim Hof method. i owe the cessation of my panic attacks, and a lot of alleviation from my obsessive thoughts to it. it’s a breathing method combined with cold showers. i highly recommend looking up videos before hand, and once your ready to jump in buy the course. it’s a lil cost heavy (round $180), but honestly the value is $1000+. this is one of the things that gave me hope. you’ve got this brother, i mean it.
- Date posted
- 4y
@mccargar85 hahaha i’ve taken a few drags off cigs but never consistently
- Date posted
- 4y
@mccargar85 more of a cigar guy myself
- Date posted
- 4y
@jake Are you having nicotine cravings?
- Date posted
- 4y
@jake Gotcha...yeah I started smoking cigs in 2013..I'm 35 now ..only vaped a few times..was smoking 1.5 packs a day for a while
- Date posted
- 4y
@jake And was smoking cigars a lot In 2013
- Date posted
- 4y
@jake In regards to weed ..why did you stop consuming?
- Date posted
- 4y
@jake I just looked him up on YouTube..ill definitely check him out I appreciate that for real
- Date posted
- 4y
@mccargar85 honestly, i’m not having a lot of cravings at all. to be honest, i attribute my ability to refrain from nicotine from an incredible lsd trip i had a little over a month ago. don’t reccomend acid to everyone tho lol
- Date posted
- 4y
@mccargar85 i stopped smoking after a panic attack. i’m not trying to quit per se, but i’m taking a break indefinitely until i have a mind that’s disciplined enough for responsible use
- Date posted
- 4y
@mccargar85 and of course, Wim Hof is the man! super cool dude with an incredible story
- Date posted
- 4y
@mccargar85 and the fact that you’ve quit after a pack and a half a day is outstanding man. you’re doing so well
- Date posted
- 4y
@jake Yeah I've beard LSD can help for sure ..glad to hear your not craving man
- Date posted
- 4y
@jake Weed...gotcha...yeah I stopped after I had first panic attack a few months ago...my dr was wanting me to not consume cannabis as well so we can see how my meds are doing without any chemical interference...but yeah I'm hoping to be able to someday find an indica that I can consume...but since I've stopped consuming cannabis I realized that I was definitely not using it in a responsible way..I was always wanting to get super fucked up and that's no way to live
- Date posted
- 4y
@jake Cigs..now I honestly can't believe I used to smoke..its for real like a a dream..like it didn't happen
- Date posted
- 4y
@mccargar85 yeah man, i had my second panic attack for the first time like 2-3 weeks ago and it was seriously scary... i thought i was going insane/derealizing, one of the reasons why i need to take a break. and i believe you can man, moderation is possible but only until you know you’re strong enough to use responsibly
- Date posted
- 4y
@mccargar85 that’s so awesome man, it’s not easy quitting. it took my grandma 70 years of her life to quit.
- Date posted
- 4y
@mccargar85 if i may ask, what theme is your OCD? personally i struggle with pure ocd, so existential, fear of having serious mental health issues, and occasionally so and pocd.
- Date posted
- 4y
@jake I've only had 1 panic attack and honestly I thought I died right there and then..it was way scary..that was the light bulb moment for me that I need to stay away from weed at least for now till I get things figured out with meds and be able to consume responsibly
- Date posted
- 4y
@jake Ocd..its always been intrusive thoughts ranging from animals to kids to men(im straight) to my siblings..so definitely HOCD intrusive thoughts..then the Just Right kind of OCD..meaning I need to feel just right ..my clothes..my body..I'm always adjusting myself/ my clothes trying to feel just right...the big thing I'm dealing with over the past few months is not being able to get comfortable unless I'm laying in my bed and evwn then it takes me a little bit to get comfortable..I have legitimate aches and pains that make me uncomfortable (back and neck pain, shoulder etc) but I turn trying to get comfortable into more than that and into an OCD thing ..so I've been constantly moving/trying to get comfortable which is very mentally and physically exhausting..that's my deal
- Date posted
- 4y
Wow your so smart! You’re so strong and brave! Keep going!
- Date posted
- 4y
I appreciate that! It's been a long past 4yrs or so..I've kicked all my habits which is awesome but it's very frustrating that after getting rid of all my addictions that now my anxiety and ocd are going crazy...
- Date posted
- 4y
But im working on my ocd and I k oq me and my dr will get my anxiety under control
Related posts
- Date posted
- 19w
TW: SO-OCD. I have been a part of the NOCD community for around 4 years now. I am seeing more and more posts, but I am very rarely seeing people actually commenting, reposting and engaging back. I think I have always had obsessive thoughts, but never knew it was a thing until around 5 years ago. I believe my first theme was Harm OCD, when my little brother was first born in 2007. I used to scream at night as I was so worried he was going to be kidnapped, or he may d*e. I would avoid sleeping at friends house's, my dad's (as my parents had split) as I thought if I wasn't there to protect him then something bad would happen. My mum said she would wake up and I would be asleep net to his cot in the morning (I was only 10 at the time). Fast forward to 2017, where me and my high school boyfriend split up, I convinced myself I may be gay as I no longer wanted to have sex with him (almost found it a chore). I was 16/17. We split up and I lived my 'single' life. Spent my time dating males etc and then myself and my ex got back together in 2018. My intrusive thoughts took a turn for the worst in lockdown, when again may libido decreased significantly, and I didn't feel and ;urge' with my boyfriend sStill current partner). I remember one day, bursting into tears, had a panic attack and cried for hours with the most excruciating anxiety chest pains. I told him and my mum about my thoughts. They are both incredibly supportive and my mu actually told me that she had these thoughts too when she was round 19 and still does now (I also didn't know that COD can be inherited). After about 18 months of the worst mental health, significant weight loss, social thoughts and almost ending my relationship, I started to see light at the end of the tunnel. 2022, things started to get better. My partner and I were in the best place we could have EVER been! Sex life was AMAZING (quality of quantity I mean) and I honestly thought, this was the end. March 2024 I fell pregnant. Again, I had a great pregnancy, sec life was great, was so excited for our future. I have never been one to be bothered about marriage, but kept having this lovely vision of us getting married and our little girl walking down the aisle. Baby girls born in November 2024 and BAM, SO-OCD and ROCD have kicked in. I am now questioning my sexuality again, if I am in the right relationship, am I just 'settling'?, does he deserve me?, am I in denial?, what if we get married and then it turns out I am gay?, I don't want him to propose as I am scared etc. Just relentless every single day. I even question, if any of the conversations I have had with family and friends where they have related to me, were even real or if I made them up for my own comfort, so that I do't feel alone?! I am constantly reviewing past events, as I worry that I wanted to explore my sexuality in university, as I remember having an amazing friendship with a lesbian (who was, I am not afraid to admit, very 'handsome'), and we did flirt, as she did with everyone!! But we never took it any further, it never crossed my mind! I almost don't even get the 'anxiety/'sick' feeling anymore because I am SO used to the thoughts. I don't have an urge to act on my thoughts, but they are also no longer debilitating for me. I just feel exhausted with them. They are ALWAYS there. I have gone down the rabbit hole of avoiding meeting new women friends incase 'I find them attractive', if there is a same sex couple on a program I watch, I automatically avoid. I compare my relationship to others. I saw an insta reel yesterday of a women in her 30's that said 'when you're lay in bed with your husband, searching 'Am I Gay' questionnaires and you decide to divorce and follow your heart' and it was a page dedicated to her helping other mid life adults cope with coming out as gay! It really really really triggered me. I am just exhausted. If anybody else wants to share there story, comment below. It doesn't have to be the same sub types, but just an opportunity to vent!
- Date posted
- 17w
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
- 14w
I few years ago, I did self-harm a few times, and then I got super into spirituality, and about a year ago, I remembered I did self-harm and ever since haven't been able to shake the guilt off... Constantly, every day, my mind would make me feel guilty about it and think about it all day. It's like my brain knew the thought that I could/ have cut myself scared me, so it kept bringing it up. My family had no idea I had ever done this, so my OCD told me I was a liar for not telling them about every day. I was afraid that they wouldn't love me anymore and send me to a mental hospital if I told them. About 2-3 months ago, I had gotten so fed up with having these thoughts every day and confessed to my mom what I had done, and her reaction was great. And I thought I'd never have thoughts about when I did self-harm again because I finally confessed. I was wrong. Even with people telling me that it's okay, I did that, I can't shake the guilt I had around this event, and even more so the fear/guilt around my own thoughts... My therapist and I talk about how the problem isn't the thoughts but what the OCD does to them. I try to create positive neural pathways, but that just makes me more stressed about it. There are things I'm supposed to tell myself when I feel negative, but I think I get that confused and tell myself those things every time I have thoughts about what I did. Which is feeding into a mental compulsion (replacing every "bad" thought with a "good" one. What works for me is (if I can) do nothing and have the thoughts... It's been hard to get better because I have had no idea what's been happening to me and felt like for the last year I was going crazy... I always thought OCD was cleaning stuff and physical compulsions . Everything that happened to me happened in my head. On the worst days when my OCD is really bad, every single time I was conscious and aware, I was thinking about the fact that I did self-harm. I would lie in bed all day trying to figure out my thoughts because I thought if I watched TV, I would be avoiding important things. I thought I had to figure out all my thoughts. I would ruminate, replay, and second-guess all. day. long. It was hard to recognize it was OCD because I thought I had done something seriously bad and wrong, and that I must deserve these thoughts. I think the trick is that you feel like you must have positive thoughts, and the most distressing thing wasn't necessarily the fact that I did self-harm, but the fact that I couldn't stop thinking about it. I find the best thing you can do is just have all your thoughts in your head and try not to separate them from good and bad, if you can. It's nice to have people who understand!!!! More to come, about the journey. My favorite thing to say when I'm stuck is "that sly devil... OCD. Silly OCD is getting to me right now, but it won't last forever. That sneaky guy tricked me again" Love you!!!
Be a part of the largest OCD Community
Share your thoughts so the Community can respond