Is anyone with POCD dealing with the intrusive thoughts happening more when they are watching something and it mentions anything sexual ? Every time anything like that is mention, the Intrusive thoughts get really bad. Similar thing with if I do something like masturbate. I haven’t done it in weeks because I’ve been so scared to. I hate when the thoughts happen and I feel like a terrible person (especially because of when they come) also, sorry if this is tmi, I just need to get it off my chest and hear about other people’s experiences. Anyway, I tried to masturbate again, and the intrusive thoughts happened again and an image of a child would just pop up in my mind, and I would stop immediately, and then when I forced myself to think of something else, I tried again and then the thoughts came back. It’s so frustrating, I can’t do anything g anymore without intrusive thoughts ruining it and making me feel disgusting and horrible ! It makes me feel even worse that the thoughts happen when I’m doing something like this because I feel so guilty and OCD can trick your brain into thinking you enjoy it, but I know I don’t because I would never do anything to hurt a child. Ever ! I would rather hurt myself. And then afterwards when I was trying to get asleep, the worry kicked in and I thought ‘omg what if I continued to masturbate when the intrusive thoughts came and I enjoyed it ?’ So now obviously I’m worried that I did, and now I can’t decipher between if I actually did that or if I didn’t, and now false memories is making the situation even worse by making me think that I purposely thought of the thoughts whilst I was masturbating, and now I just feel awful and guilty. Or ‘omg what if I am actually a pedophile’ and then I kept trying to test my reactions by thinking of a child to check that I was disgusted by the idea, and if I wasn’t completely uncomfortable then I would begin to worry more, thinking that I somehow enjoyed it. Honestly, OCD is torture. To whoever’s reading this, I hope you’re having a good/okay day with your OCD and I hope you’re happy today. This illness sucks and I’m sorry that all of us have to deal with it. Sometimes I wish I would get amnesia or something and forget that I have all these thoughts and all the things that OCD convinced me of, and I know that sounds horrible, but sometimes I think that’s the only way I can get better and forget about this. Or I think ‘wouldn’t it be so good if someone invented a device that could just take all the bad thoughts away and I wouldn’t even know I ever had them’

It is honestly so hard but I promise it won’t last forever and you’ll be okay❤️ exposure isn’t pushing the thoughts away it’s accepting them and letting them come through. I work with kids everyday so for me that’s an example of an exposure. For some reason, my thoughts all revolve around male babies which suck. What keeps me going is my rational mind, hobbies and family and friends around me. Plus this app is so helpful❤️ remember that you aren’t your thoughts because you were normal before any of this. Sending love and hugs ?

Thank you so much. Your comments have been really helpful It’s been really nice to talk to you, you seem really nice and caring and I really hope you get better too. ❤️ sending love and hugs too ?

I’m struggling so much with the same thing you are not alone; everything you have described I am going through ? atm my brain is tricking me into thinking that I would want to sexually abuse I child and I know I wouldn’t. But my mind has an irrational and rational side which scares me. Everyday is a mental battle but I’m trying to accept and fight the thoughts, occupy myself and imitate being happy. We will all get through this. If you ever need to talk I’m here. It’s so scary especially when you are a very sexual person and this weird demon comes to your mind. Remind yourself that you are not your thoughts, you would never want to hurt a child, the sexual thoughts and feelings are a psychological response and you have so much support around you ❤️

Thank you !

So glad I saw this, because this has been bothering me lately. For some reason when I masturbate I get intrusive thoughts and it’s scary. It’s hard to tell if I enjoy the thoughts, if they are “helping” me or repulsing me. From what I think, anything that comes into your head during masturbation or sex can “feel good.”

It’s good to know I’m not alone !! Have you ever dealt with the issue of ‘did I continue when the thoughts came’ ? I deal with that a lot, and it’s something that really scares me.

I completely understand you !! When the thoughts even arise when you’re doing something like that, it’s so scary and I constantly feel guilty and like I’ve done something wrong. And then I worry that the thoughts were there when I was actually doing it, and everything gets blurred and I then don’t remember the situation completely which then makes me feel even worse. And then I get scared that I purposely had the thoughts. It’s so distressing.

Do you mean, the thoughts were there, you just tried not to focus on them whilst you were doing it ?

Yeah, I completely relate to that ! Glad to know I’m not alone. I hope we get through this !

It’s really funny. Writing this could trigger them but I avoided the thought during climax. Yet.....when I allowed them to come, yeah it sucked but......they come less now. Now it’s gone to certain sex acts in certain positions. But it’s the same method. Anyone else would say stop what you’re doing. But the very last thing you want to happen during what you want to do is what you should do. The unaltered path is key here. Also separating purposeful and intrusive thoughts. You’d feel pleasure not anxiety. If it’s anxious you power through. Picture of a kid, family member, dog, watery turd whatever! You CARRY ON!!! It will generalise to everything. So you must practise doing what you wanted to do regardless of thoughts. Choose your chosen activity (masterbate to heterosexual content) and continue no matter what intrudes ( and of you wonder if the ‘wrong’ content was being brought up by you then it’s a fucking intrusion - any ? Attached = intrusion). Know it’s made you uneasy. Keep calm and carry on. You cannot out think anxiety, it doesn’t work that way. It’s a danger signal that is now generalising to an entire topic and will continue to do so. I’m still fighting it. Fucker will be around for a while yet. But unaltered path. Choose, and fuck the intrusions. Think courage wolf with this. We need masterbatibg memes for that. If joe public judges you in your head? GET FUCKED! OCD is misunderstood by sufferers never mind some fucking joey on the street! Self trust. Underneath all this shit is the real you. Do some deep work on yourself in and out of your ocd. I honestly believe a number of things have to be in place for this cunt to get a hold in the first instance. Sure we have a propensity for anxiety, but it takes a lot more factors for it to evolve into ocd. So do the work. Treat it like physical training. Follow the steps. Unaltered path. Confidence over certainty Not impossible but highly improbable. Adapt, survive.....then thrive! This is a bully. And you know what you have to do. You got this.

All of your training, your thinking, your deciphering IS the problem. The habits are so perfected you don’t know any other way to think at the moment. Underneath all this is the following and correct me if I am wrong. You’ll feel pretty anxious as you read this: get ready, but don’t run away: You believe that masturbating while these thoughts arise AND allowing them to sit there for as long as THEY decide could develop a deeply unwanted but no less real sexual attraction to underage people or children. Read this again and again and let me know if this is correct. It is a prediction, and it makes some logical sense. Only thing is, OCD is built on fear, not a genuine interest, it is powered by avoidance. You are running from not running TOWARD. Acceptance is NOT RUNNING TOWARD! It is also NOT RUNNING AWAY. You have to find comfort (and subsequently freedom) in standing on the thin red line between no fear and no interest. You have approximate 388 what ifs as I write this swimming in your mind. You are going against the grain. It is not impossible for you to decide that you will overcome all inhibitions to develop an interest in having sex with children. It is deeply, extremely unlikely and unfortunately the nature of ocd means you have to desensitise to this content. Or at the least the fear of its presence. Because the system driving the content doesn’t give a fuck about the content, only that an acknowledged fear was present at one point and the cortex FAILED to feedback ‘false alarm’ to the amygdala. It makes it no more real or no more interesting to you but it also makes it no less scary. I have taken the choice to continue in my sexual activities (as I have suffered this theme, other themes and even other sexual themes), and accept the oreeencenof the thoughts which has been short, long, imaginary targets and my own children even. It is very scary. I am not free yet, but I am risk taking. We will see. You need to find deep courage to reclaim yourself and your fear and face it. It’s so frightening I know because what if the worse did happen. It hasn’t happened yet for those with ocd. You would literally be one in we’ll over a million if it was. But those odds are not 100% certainty which you want with THIS content. You have to avoid avoidance, you have to develop courage slowly but surely. Grade it if needs be. Maybe try carrying on once, and next time stop. Then carry on twice, then stop. The brain thinks it is helping you. Thoughts are like a river, or water. Block it too much, it will burst the biggest dam. Let it go and it finds its own peaceful and non aggressive streams and paths, giving birth to life and causing no damage. Be flexible, or as Bruce lee says; Be like water my friend.

It’s an archaic system we have that lies underneath a much more advanced system. Only in humans due you have a mental system that is so terribly conflicted and at war with itself with or without mental illness. The cortex and the limbic system are continually at odds with one another. The former offers rationality and the other emotionality that regular tarnished what would otherwise be good experiences. Frankly the day we can override this entire system (which would probably come through technology rather than evolution) the better. It was handy 1 million years ago. Now it fires off continuously to make sure it never misses an actual threat. That is a shit measure of efficacy

Thank you for this. It’s so nice to have a support system like this to turn to. I’m always here to talk to if you ever need it. ?Sorry to hear that you are going through this as well, it’s horrible and we shouldn’t have to feel like this :( is pushing past the thoughts when I’m masturbating an example of exposure ? I get scared if I ever do it and the thought doesn’t fully go when I’m masturbating because then it makes me feel like I’m doing it to the actual thought and my brain thinks I’m enjoying it. But I feel like I remember stopping when the thoughts came and then trying to think of something else before continuing, but of course with OCD I can never be 100% sure of what actually happened, I just have to deal with the guilt of the ‘what if I didn’t stop’ ? when you said ‘imitate being happy’ I relate to that so much, I feel like that’s what I do everyday to try and trick myself into thinking that I’m actually okay. It’s so difficult.

I have dealt with that. Its completely logical that that would happen to you. I would advise you to stop because it tends to make the POCD worse. If you’re brain targets a specific child especially. you’ll get through this

Which part are you referring to ? Sorry, I got a bit confused ?

Second part

Stop masturbating ? Or stop going over what I did ?

Probably both

Does it make POCD worse ? And in what ways ?

There’s a lot more guilt and if it targets a specific child in your life than being around them will be hell

That actually does sound true, because if I do ever masturbate, it makes me feel so guilty because of the intrusive thoughts and I feel terrible for ages. Thank you for your input

No problem! Keep fighting, you deserve it

Mhmmm! That happened to me yesterday. They came in, I kinda kept going, finished, and then I was like “what did I do?!?!”

I mean I didn’t finish to or keep thinking of those thoughts, but just knowing they were there scared me

Yeah that’s usually happens for me. They pop in (especially at the point of climax) and I get soooo freaked out. Because it “feels” good but in reality, what feels good is whatever we were originally thinking of or doing. And sometimes the feeling of adrenaline adds to it

@soniclen thank you so much for your insight. What you have said makes a lot of sense. So you’re saying that even though the intrusive thought happened when I was masturbating and my anxiety was surrounded by the thought of ‘what if I continued when the thought came’ or ‘what if I purposely thought of this’ then it’s important to push past the thoughts rather than avoid them ? Because I’ve been feeling so much guilt about it, I haven’t stopped thinking about it since it happened and I’ve felt so down. Similarly with the thing I mentioned of the content I read (fan fiction) when I was young (around 13 or 14) and i didn’t know what it was about, but when I read it, it was clearly about an older man doing something inappropriate to a child, and I remember being shocked but now I can’t stop thinking, what if I kept reading it or masturbated to it, and the more I think about it, the more I think it happened. I hate OCD, it’s so difficult and draining. Do you have any ways in which you ‘train’ yourself that have worked in any way ?

@soniclen Yes, what you said makes a lot of sense to me. I get very anxious when the thoughts come and feel very guilty because I’m so afraid of what they mean. And all the what ifs are surrounding ‘what if this means that I actually want these thoughts’ ‘what if I’m a terrible person. And the anxiety increases as does the guilt when I think about a past experience such as the one I mentioned of when I was 13 or 14, because then it makes the thoughts seem even more real and I’m terrified of them. And yes, you were right, reading it did give me a lot of anxiety and what ifs. So in order to decrease the anxiety and fear, I need to avoid running away from it ? It’s genuinely terrifying. I’m constantly aware of what I’m doing because I don’t want to do anything wrong or out of place. It’s exhausting and really quite depressing. I’m terrified of being a bad person and of what others think of me if I were to tell them about this particular part of my OCD. Thank you so much for your constant help by the way, I really appreciate it and you explain things really well. I hope you are feeling well.

I’m gunning at it. Taking the risk. A therapist at my abuse survivors group who is a survivor himself explained what happens. Exactly why the brain does that it does. You have to FEEL IT and not block it. It will take time, and it is a life skill you are building here! It’s about feeling everything. We intellectualise everything with this fucking condition. Our habitory thinking patterns are a nasty recipe with anxiety and high complexity intelligent thinking being the main ingredients. Do something that simpler, but also brave. Get brave, test your predictions. You won’t know for certain ever anyway. The thinking pattern is the problem, we need to give it the fuck up!

The worst thing we can do is intellectualise feelings. We are fucking shit are just feeling feelings.

@soniclen thank you for your help. I’m going to try and be braver and not spiral, it’s going to be difficult, but I will try. I need to re-evaluate my thinking pattern, and when I start with the what ifs, I will try and stop myself from letting them make me spiral. OCD is horrible, it takes over every single day and makes me feel like a terrible person, and I am constantly riddled with guilt and anxiety about different things. I hope there will be more research in mental health illnesses and that there will be more funding, this illness is crappy and I’m sorry we all have to suffer with it.

Also, I didn’t know you were a survivor of abuse. I hope you are okay now.

It didn’t colour my whole childhood. I probably would have ocd anyway. It’s more that ocd and overthinking has this tasty morsel From the last to use in my symptoms. But it also means that I have to tread carefully on erp for those that replicate the trauma. You don’t go hell for leather with post traumatic ocd.

The original incidents don’t bother me. The ocd images do.

Aww, I’m sorry to hear that, but it’s good you aren’t bothered by the original incidents. For leather ? What does that mean ?

Hell for leather means to really hammer at something. Give it your all and go as hard as you can. And you don’t go as hard as you can re: ERP for obsessions feeding off trauma

Ohhh. Thank you for explaining. I don’t go as hard as I can ? Or was that an example ?

No it was relevant to me. Unless you feel your POCD links to past adverse experiences ( which ocd often does to some degree - as in bad things don’t cause ocd but they are great material for it to torture you with).

Ohhh okay. No, I don’t think any past experiences have linked with why I have OCD. I’m not sure.

It can be indirect I guess. Some ideas are past bullying, or some less than stellar experiences with peers or siblings growing up. Also beliefs about how the world works and how you should conduct yourself. Another thing. Trauma is a very tricky thing. Some people can respond very differently to things. For example I knew a guy who was raped by a relative when he was 9. He knew he was abused but was like hey ho about it. And I believed it - he showed NO signs of trauma. Yet when it came to his career and doing music because he was so behind in it he felt like a failure. His emotional reaction and perception of both events are what drove his traumatic responses ENTIRELY! You could have something as simple as being really afraid when left at a nursery or your first days at school. If it triggers the limbic system, something can get crystallised and frozen at that time. Problem is the thinking patterns and associated data are also frozen. And children begin to learn the ways of the world through magical thinking. It’s when we don’t shed that process in one form or another that we hit problems. It doesn’t have to be something overt to trigger the system, it can still create a bug in the code. Something is driving this in all of us. The predisposition is just that. It STILL needs something information based to bring out that predisposition. Find the big, rewrite the code, update the system, eliminate the OCD. I truly, truly believe this is the case. And I think future treatment will recognise that.

Find the bug

Oh, okay, so does is always have to be something that has triggered our brains into developing OCD or can people just get OCD ? I was bullied a lot when I was younger, and I’ve had several experiences when I was younger with family, (not me, but my siblings also going through a rough time with different things) but none of the events seem to have any links with what any kind of OCD that I suffer with, at least I don’t think it does any way. Can memory of certain things that you have done in the past spur on OCD ? Is there anything that I have mentioned in all my posts on here that may have spiked OCD without me even knowing it ? When I look back, there was certain signs of OCD when I was younger, but it obviously wasn’t to the point where it was worrying and I wound need help. But as I’ve gotten older, the OCD has gotten worse, and it’s so obviously here now.

Bullying is pretty core to a lot of ocd sufferers experience. We seem to be quite sensitive to our environment in a way that most other people are not. Highly sensitive people with highly sensitive nervous systems. It doesn’t mean you have any abuse in your background it just means you are questioning yourself endlessly which may have started with the bullying or got worse due to that. The thought process is out of control now which is why to power it down will take a lot of effort and work to do so. It’s just not unusual for past experiences to become incorporated into the symptoms of OCD. That is where I am now.

Oh okay. That makes sense. It’s so strange how the brain works and how everyone’s brain is wired differently.

There really should be more research on mental health illnesses, and there should be so much more available for people suffering with it.

Anyone in this thread can help me ? It’s fine if not I don’t want to trigger anyone . I’m struggling with this