hi i just recently joined this app and i am terrified. i am a 15 year old girl that has been dealing with intrusive thoughts my entire life. my first recollection with it was the constant fear that my siblings would forget how to breathe. i would stay up all night just to check on them and ensure that they are ok. it went away but then i started having problems with my religion. i was so constantly scared that every move i made would disappointment god and that i would be sent to the devil. it got to the point where i would feel as if a demon was watching me while i slept. now i am dealing with my sexuality. i have known my entire life that i am straight. only ever had romantic feelings for men and never thought of women as anything more than a friend. cause of quarantine i have developed these intrusive thoughts where i feel as if everything i do will make people believe i am gay. i am an ally to the lgbtq community but i keep having these unwanted thoughts of me being homosexual even though i have never felt attracted to women. i need help. i am just a teenager but i have been suffering with ocd my entire life and just now i decided to acknowledge it. i am also way too scared to tell my parents. they are so loving and protective of me that i feel as if i will disappoint them. im sorry this was long i just needed to let it all out. have a good day!!

Hi, I’m new to the app as of today. I’m 20 years old, and wanted to get some stuff off my chest about the types of OCD I’ve been experiencing over the years. I’m not entirely sure how or when my OCD was brought up, but I’ve been a perfectionist for as long as I can remember. Anywhere and everywhere I go, if I see things placed in an order/angle that my brain doesn’t approve of, next thing I know I’m “fixing” it to be in the placement I feel looks better. I’m not aware of why I feel the need to do that, but until an object is in the “right” placement, I won’t take my eyes off of it. My eye will even twitch. Another form of OCD I have is in relationships. I spend each day overthinking and over-analyzing every one of the relationships that are important to me. Friends, family, significant other. Another one is what’s considered “Pure OCD” . When I get an intrusive thought of something devilish, whether it’s randomly seeing my great aunt naked bc my grandma considers her “fat” even though she’s not, or it’s seeing something demonic and traumatizing, I immediately tell myself, “I don’t wanna see/think about that” over and over and over until the thought is gone. Or I’ll try to replace one mental image with another. One other form of OCD I face every day, is religion. I got baptized for the first time in my life earlier this year in January. I had finally started to repent for my sins, and now I’m constantly feeling afraid that I’m letting God down due to my depression/lack of motivation and vaping/smoking. I also fear excessively that He’ll banish me from His kingdom, or just turn a cold shoulder. I know that what I’ve just typed up is probably all over the place. That is my brain unfortunately. How do you go from being a mentally disorderly and seemingly erratic young woman, to a more well-established, successful woman? I’m all ears!

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.

Hello. I joined this app because I realised my experiences might be due to OCD. I often have these really disgusting and terrible pictures of me becoming someone horrible, doing horrible things to others. These ideas really disturb me, and often in my mind, and physically sometimes, I literally scream quitely to myself, "Shut up!" Over and over until the image goes away, but unless I distract myself with something else immediately after, it comes back and gets worse. I also end up looking back on these thoughts, and being terrified that maybe I am thinking of this because it is what I truly want, so I end up desperately trying to filter my thoughts, and this ends up carrying into something like SO-OCD, even though I am confident that I am a straight male, and there is no evidence that I am not, I keep trying to prove to myself that I am straight to make the thought go away. I also get the fear that after I maybe do something and say something I know I maybe shouldn't have to someone, that when they leave, or I can't find them for a bit, they have gone to commit suicide. Likewise, I also get intrusive thoughts of me killing myself, even though I have no desire to, and this scares me a lot as well. I used to occasionally get these thoughts in chunks like maybe for 2 weeks and then I wouldn't for another few weeks, but they have gotten worse and more frequent this past semester. They are still not bad enough to actively effect my daily life and routine, but they definitely come frequently enough to distract me, disrupt what I'm doing and make me take a break, and it has dramatically effected my mood and mental state lately. Do you guys recommend any ways to deal with this, is this really severe enough to even call OCD? Would love to hear, thanks! ❤️