First - I want to say Thank you to this amazing community. Second - OCD is a sneaky little shit! I have come so far since diagnosis and treatment, and in the last week each time I am having a really good day with tackling challenges that I haven’t in the last 6 months without doing compulsions, I suddenly find my self having an intense OCD episode with a completely new sub type. Normally I deal with Just Right and no intrusive thoughts, instead i get intense urges to change, fix, or clean something, which was sending me into 10-12 hours of daily compulsive loops prior to treatment in March. It has been almost 3 weeks since the last one and it was only 45 minutes. So this whole experience with intrusive thoughts is new to me. (Except life long with existential that I just found out is OCD last week) Each time the new themes have come, it’s super intense, scary, upsetting and I have freaked out for about 30 minutes. And then realized it was OCD and responded using the tools I have learned from PHP program, NOCD therapist, and thru the OCD community. I want to thank everyone that shares there struggles, there wins, there tools. What pulled me out of the panic each time has been remembering something said by someone during a community group that made realize what I was experiencing was OCD. I am so thankful for this community and for everyone that shows up to help themselves work on managing OCD.

As you well know, I’m not really the intrusive-thoughts sort either… so encountering them more than (cough) “normal” people is a red flag for me personally that there’s something acute going on… mainly failed rounds of occasionally testing new meds (looking at you, Ritalin and Prozac). But one of the main things I’ve learned about myself is that as a person who spent years boxing with C-PTSD (a flavor that didn’t exist with my first dx), I still have biochemical knock-on effects even though I’ve therapied the psych/behavioral aspects into the ground. Basically, my body was conditioned to constantly be pumping out like 5x most people’s cortisol levels, until I burned my adrenals out entirely in my early 30s. Even after I recovered enough to do shit like… I dunno, get out of bed on my own and not pass out everywhere, losing hypervigilance (bc not producing enough cortisol to “deploy passive radar”) felt like going blind. That was partly what propelled me back into therapy, because I was genuinely adapting to losing one of my senses. All this to say that even though I’ve spent the time since then working on rewiring my brain to be unusually chill, when my adrenals began to really recover over the past few years I’m also discovering that my latent cortisol-brain likes to… manufacture(?) stress to trick myself into amping up my cortisol levels. (Agreed, sneaky mofo 😒) Also, thank you for posting this because I think I had some other epiphanies while I was writing all this down 🤔