Recovery (long post but please bear with me ?) I feel like I’m in a place where I can consider myself mostly recovered from OCD, (just anxiety to tackle now) and I thought maybe sharing my experience and how I got to this place could be helpful for some people, especially when a lot of the time, recovering feels so damn impossible. I got ROCD when I was 15. It was awful, completely debilitating, and my boyfriend of the time wasn’t overly helpful. I don’t know why I didn’t google it and find out what was wrong. I think I was just so convinced no one could possibly help me. If I’d found this app back then, I would have made a lot of progress. By the time I was 16 I also had fairly regular anxiety attacks (mine come on in the form of severe diarrhoea episodes) and the relationship was crumbling around me, partly due to ROCD and partly due to toxic relationship problems that couldn’t be fixed. Ultimately we broke up, and the ROCD went away. I started dating my best friend at the time but within months the ROCD was back, and I understood it was something that needed to be dealt with, but had no clue how to proceed. Around this time I got really sick. Diarrhoea anxiety attacks after every meal, and I also started vomiting really frequently due to stress and anxiety. I lost weight, I never went out, never did anything, it was awful. This went on for like 2 weeks. I was watching Game Grumps (youtube channel) to unwind when one of the hosts talked about his experience with OCD, which lead me to a diagnosis. I got therapy but the treatment didnt seem right to me (ERP? How would EXPOSING myself help??) and I refused to accept I had OCD, only something that was similar and refined to relationships. So ultimately I barely tried to recover and do my therapy and suffered unnecessarily for a long time. My ROCD went away after I decided to break up with him, but I was left with severe depersonalisation due to stress and anxiety that I just didn’t know how to cope with. I had the shortest respite period ever when I suddenly got hit with a new obsession - could I be sexually attracted to animals? This came from a false memory of a meaningless incident that happened when I was really young, and I just...couldn’t remember what had happened, if it had happened at all, etc. I got groinal response which didn’t help and couldn’t understand what was happening to me. It FELT like ROCD, but it wasn’t. This was when I accepted I had OCD. I put my depersonalisation on hold for a while (it had become much worse due to the new stress of my OCD) and tried to find the resources that could help me. I ended up on intrusivethoughts.com and used their chatbot to help me make sense of it all. Eventually I found this app, and immediately got to work making myself a heirarchy of fears and working through them step by step. It felt like one step forward, two steps back, but I must have been improving without even knowing it. Aside from daily ERP I met with my therapist to work through the feelings of confusion and guilt that came with this false memory (she is amazing, I cannot thank her enough) and was able to embrace the uncertainty. I still have the thoughts. I want to make that clear. But they are thoughts, and they mean nothing. They don’t make me anxious anymore. That doesn’t mean I’m attracted to animals, or even okay with people who are attracted to animals. It does mean Im able to dismiss them as misfirings in my brain and not obsess. Recovery is hard. Its so hard. And unfortunately I had to accept that it would make my Depersonalisation a lot worse before it could get better. But being in this place of recovery is amazing. That doesn’t mean it won’t come back - I know I’ll probably have to start again for ROCD in my next relationship, but that doesn’t scare me. I have the tools I need and I know I’ll overcome it when the time comes. I think later today I’ll post some general self care tips that also helped me enormously, if you guys think that would be helpful. I just wanted to reinforce that recovery is possible, you’re not crazy, and you’re not alone. You can do it. I know you can ?