There is one thing I realized after a year of suffering from HOCD and POCD, my two most prominent and reoccuring themes. It's been really hard to put into words and it has been causing me much pain through rumination. The thing is, I know who I am, I'm not going to do anything suddenly out of character and completely against my values. It's stressful when those thoughts occur, sure, but my only instinct is to avoid the triggers, which is the complete opposite of my feared scenarios. I've been exposing myself not through ERP (currently working on getting a therapist, you can't get NOCD therapist where I live) but by almost forcefully resuming my social activities and working/studying more. It's a simple way of dealing with OCD, you ask yourself what would I be doing right now if I didn't have OCD. The other part is asking yourself what wouldn't I be doing if I didn't have OCD. Of course, after asking yourself you do the opposite of your OCD. That way you can identify various compulsions (such as avoidance in the first or rumination/mental compulsions for the second part, atleast for me) and by avoiding the compulsions you'll be able to bring up the thoughts you've been avoiding. That way I was able to bring up almost one year old thoughts which I thought were gone, only to find out I've been doing avoidance compulsions all this time to avoid being triggered. When you bring them up it's up to you to prove the value of habituation and avoid further compulsions (which you would have identified this way), however unpleasant it may seem. It's not a complete solution but one that keeps me in a somewhat functional state. But going back to the original thing that I wanted to say, I do not fear having a different sexual orientation. It's a somewhat okay thing in todays world and I'm sure I would be able to make it work somehow. Likewise, I'm not afraid I would hurt or abuse children/underage people, just writing it feels laughable. Yes, people sometimes do impulsive things and peoples thoughts attach to that micro possibility of you being a threat to other people but deep down I know that I would avoid doing such things with all my strength. Those thoughts of death being a preferred scenario are just mental reassurance. I do not believe I'm at risk any more than anyone else, I would even go as far as saying I'm a lower risk. The thing I realized is that all of my themes can be boiled down to the fear of losing my identity. It's not the acting out the thoughts part, I'm the one in control of my body. It's been a huge part of my rumination because I would worry why am I not afraid of the thoughts? Are you not afraid of acting out your thoughts? You damn should be, you just had a thought involving a 14 year old, how dare you! You should feel like absolute shit, you SHOULD be afraid of acting out the thoughts! That was the difficult part of explaining it to a psychiatrist that I was talking to a few months ago. Of course I can have any thought pop up. I can actively think about chopping your head off with an axe, won't make it any more probable than before having the thought. It is the easy to understand part. The feared scenario is the possibility of having those devious attractions (referring to POCD here, not HOCD) and it's feared because it completely contradicts my character and identity, the acting out part is not so much the feared part which at first glance seems atleast irresponsible. Although the manifestation is different, those two themes feed of the same fear of losing my identity. I could write much more but I just realized how long this already is, thank you for reading my rambling if you got this far 😅. Excuse my english, I'm not a native speaker.