- User type
- OCD Conqueror
- Date posted
- 4y
I have a close friend at work who is black. He's genuinely one of my closest confidants. He has helped me get to know the place I work in, and the area I now live in (I moved 3 years ago). He watches out for me, and takes care of me. I have gotten to know him and to understand the background he came from, and I am honored to be his friend. I would trust him with my life. Unfortunately, I also have intrusive thoughts of intentionally or unintentionally saying horrible things to him, including racial slurs. Its extremely distressing.
These thoughts always seem to attach onto the ones who hold near and dear to our hearts. OCD is evil.
This is pretty cut and dry OCD right here from my experience. Also from my experience, the best we can do is ERP with these like any other thoughts.
Yeah it just feels really convincing. I even researched one thought I had and turns out it’s a valid thought and I’m probably blowing it wayyyy out of proportion, but it still is distressing Bc I absolutely don’t wanna think these things.
And also remembering that having the thought doesn't define who you are, just like having a harm thought doesn't make you a harmful person.
I struggle with that. “What if I say something racist” etc
i have in the past
How in the world did you differentiate the real thoughts you believe from ocd being a straight bitch?
perhaps! would you be comfortable with elaborating? :) if not, no worries! i'd imagine what i've experienced might be similar, so yes.
It’s just racist thoughts that come into my head and send me into panic. I then delve into if I actually believe these thoughts or not, then I end up convincing myself I do of course. And then I confess and confess and confess.
@Lovepurple And I genuinely cannot tell if I think these thoughts. And sometimes I catch myself trying to justify the thought in case I do really think that. And that sends me into a further panic.
@Lovepurple 100% right there with you in that case. it's so stressful to not know which part of you that's coming from! especially if you're informed and somewhat educated on racism/racial injustices, the guilt and confusion and panic can be overwhelming. i feel ya, friend. you're certainly not alone here! 🖤
@theoprue Ugh ir sucks! And I am a full supporter of BLM and equality. So these thoughts stress me out to the max, especially when I think theyre coming from my own mind and I go and try to justify them. Like I need this to stop.
@Lovepurple in my book, as long as you're not projecting these wack-ass thoughts on the world around you, if you can separate yourself from the thoughts enough to not let them bleed into your actions, then you're on the right track, you're doing the right thing. just keep trying to better yourself, whatever that looks like, and be kind to yourself while you work on it :)
i have issues with this and it i hate it. whenever i go out and see a non white person my mind screams at me that I'm going to say a slur or something insensitive. I feel so bad because i think so much about I'm worried that because i think so much about it I'm gonna end up actually saying it and really hurting someone
I freaked out once thinking I was gonna be damn to hell because I didn’t like my mixed ex boyfriend when I was with him
Very brief mentions of pocd and nsfw jokes,id like this to be adults only . Repost bc i had to edit something Does anyone have experience with real event ocd attached to your online footprint etc? I keep checking old messages,trying to find old people i knew i used to talk to etc. To find out every problematic thing I did and if I've ever been unfollowed or blocked by anyone I used to be friends w online/atleast on good terms w. I am particularly concerned abt doing something bigoted,esp racist bc i have racism ocd,and doing something predatory bc of my pocd. I remember hanging around people who could use 'edgy' or offensive humour in my teens and i remember a lot of sex jokes and that i would join in on sex jokes sometimes . i dont remember details w the offensive humour as much,i feel like i didnt join in on it as much but i was definitely WAY passive abt things and prob let a lot of bad stuff slide i shouldnt have bc i didn't speak up it was wrong,I remember one friend in an online community would say slurs and horrible jokes when i was 16. I dont remember my response to it as much but i feel i didnt speak up abt it aside one time i found in the dms where he made a bad joke on a thing i shared for social justice. I cant stop going thru old messages and stuff or trying to find ppl from the past. I feel like if I don't check it now,that eventually it'll come to haunt me or that I'll stumble across it eventually. I worry what if someone messaged me on one of these apps I un-installed or on one of the accounts I don't have access to,confronting me abt all this stuff I did. I had an obsession w this back in 2020 and did check in depth on all my accounts,but now that it's been 4 years the obsession is back in full swing.
Sometimes i think everyone on the right is evil. I ask myself “how can i love people with values different than mine?” I struggle accepting the fact my parents political beliefs are different than mine. I love them so much but it baffles me. We have talked and they say its fine to have different opinions but i can’t help but wonder if i’m doing something wrong by having my beliefs. And then with all the economic chaos today in the US, I can’t help but think that I was right about everything and I just feel like it is my fault that the world is in turmoil. Idk. I think i wish i could stop thinking about it but ever since the election cycle began around a year ago it has been dominating my life. I question myself, i question others, i appear very extremist and rigid and i don’t like it. I want my OCD to go away. Its apparently OCD but it feels so real right now. Can anyone relate? What are yalls thoughts on this subtype?
Cross post from Reddit: TW Religious ocd TW Racism This is going to confuse a lot of people but I’ll try my best. OCD could be tricking me. I don’t know. But I’ll do my best to explain. Warning: there are some extremely sensitive themes including racism. OCD has caused me to worry about making bad prayers. It is mainly an anxiety of what others would think of if I prayed for something bad. Basically, it can think of something bad, and I can think of why I want it, and say “amen” pretty easily. Not sure if that constitutes a prayer really since it is ocd driven, and might even feel more real to me than it actually is, but it gets very complicated. None of this makes any logical sense to anyone but me, but to me it makes sense and that’s the issue. My mind invented something where I can pray to pray for something. Yes, that’s right, and it makes no sense. Essentially these ideas for prayers come in automatically. I don’t necessarily choose them. I can somewhat choose how I react, but that is where it gets tricky. OCD also blunts my emotions with certain prayers or makes things feel more real than they are So, what happened, is my ocd targeted the theme I was most worried about having a bad prayer about, which was unfortunately racism. In the past, I made a mistake that was racist (I won’t get into what it was here), and I thought about it a lot. I imagined people never wanting to forgive me and saying I deserve to suffer forever. Additionally, worrying about making racist prayers made this go up. It was frustrating, because with ocd it can take what people say too literally. So if someone says: “you deserve to suffer,” I might be thinking that thinking about it 10 hours a day for multiple months was justified. This made me have a misdirected frustration towards the people I perceived as yelling at me, which was unfortunately people of color. Here’s where ocd comes in with the prayer obsession. OCD gave me the idea: well you’re so mad at them you could pray for them all to die. Unfortunately, with the prayer obsession I’ve had, I’ve had a bit of a history with doing bad prayers when I’m not feeling great, and I don’t know if that is just part of the ocd or not, or just doing them to do them. One example is world war 3. I don’t want people to get hurt, but when I was feeling horrible I thought “screw it, I’ll pray for it cause I want to die.” I knew God wouldn’t actually do it, and the normal me didn’t want him to. Then, and I don’t know why, it seemed extremely easy for a moment to pray for people of color to die, and I actually almost did it, but I stopped myself. This is where the praying to pray comes in. With ocd, if I have a moment where I almost did a bad prayer, my mind “saves” that mindset, and it is possible for me to go back to it any time. So this situation will present itself many times to me. With praying to pray, I can essentially be put back in the mindset at any time no matter what is going on, and by saying “amen,” my brain basically magically does it and it feels like the same thing. Because it feels real to me, it seems like the same thing as a prayer. Last night that is what I did for this and I regretted it less than a two seconds later. So basically, I ended up doing a prayer that was racist. This is exactly what happened in that moment. This isn’t who I normally am (although my brain would disagree), but in that moment, with magical thinking, I prayed for all people of color to die, out of what my brain said was “hatred.” My brain also said I felt genuine hatred, but I don’t think I really do. I think it is all related to a misdirected frustration of feeling like I was yelled at, which stemmed from ocd. After the prayer, all those feelings were immediately gone. I don’t know how messed up my brain was, or how much of a role ocd played. It probably at least blunted my emotions. It sort of came on all of the sudden too, but I did it. I’m really sorry. I don’t hate people of color despite what my brain says, but I feel like I did something really bad. When I sit with what happened and don’t engage with it, it does not feel like a big deal at all. The guilt is almost all ocd driven. So I don’t know if that means there is something I’m missing or not. I might be missing something, but I know what happened in the moment
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