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How not to be afraid of OCD coming back after you recover? I've already done that, but I can't find strength to do it again.

Is this normal? I’ve been with my boyfriend for 5 months and he makes me so happy and is the best boyfriend i’ve ever had. He literally worships the ground l walk however i can’t help but doubt my own feelings for him. I obsess over everything to do with him and it’s making me depressed. I keep asking my friends and mum if I love him when deep down i know i do it just feels stuck somewhere. I feel like i’m stuck in a bubble. Is this just relationship anxiety and ocd?

What is the best way to respond when intrusive thoughts come in?

I’ve been having weird dreams for the last 2 days and In one of the dreams was me liking girls but the dream last night was more clearer. In the dream I accepted that I want to be bisexual and it felt soo real and when I woke up I felt my hocd coming back after not being loud for a long time

Does any else hate waking up? Like if you could stay in that level of sleep where you’re not thinking or feeling or even dreaming? Does anybody else take sleeping pills? Or take other pills that cause heavy drowsiness that way you can just silence the thoughts just for a couple hours? I always wake up arguing with myself about, ugh 😣 🤢, and boobs and wondering but then I don’t like them and what scares me is that I feel like my brain is trying to give me something happy to think about like the side of a man’s chest like from profile. And so my body would get kind of heavy but then wires would get cross and I don’t know if I am I don’t want to I can’t tell if I was but I don’t throb over boobs when I actually look at them consciously then it doesn’t feel right right and that means but that doesn’t mean I have anything for them subconsciously right? My wires could just get crossed right? I’m scared it happened naturally like I did I don’t want to have been throbbing over boobs I’m pretty sure it was my attempt to imagine pectorals and I’m scared that I’m just telling myself I don’t an actually but I don’t! I don’t like boobs and no have you ever tell yourself you know you don’t like it and then felt worse?

Hey guys I’m going to rant and seek some guidance. So the reason why this all started for me is because of a situation where I thought he SA me. Reason being is because I was half asleep when it happened. I had an idea what was going on , it felt good, and when I told him to stop he did. 2 months go by and I get a thought that he SA me. This sent me into a spiral where for months straight I would replay that night in my head. Every detail, I would tell everyone I was comfortable the situation and how to handle it but nothing felt right to me . I would consistently go back and forth. I would cry so much. I would bring this up to my boyfriend too much to seek reassurance but it was never enough. I told him how I never want to wake up to sex or him do stuff sexually to me while I’m asleep. Lately those thoughts have resurfaced again and it’s been making me uneasy. I just been letting them be, I do sometimes ruminate wondering why they are back. Tonight I spent time with him. We’ve been in a good place since this whole thing happened. I even apologized to him for all the damage I did to him and our relationship. We were cuddling and I kept going in and out of sleep like I normally do. I always go in and out of sleep because I have to get home at a certain time so I consistently check the time so I won’t get introuble. So I was triggered and was put in that certain situation again

Can someone explain what exactly ERP is? Can it help with someone with Pure O like myself?

Can ocd make you feel like you arent yourself anymore

It’s been 9 days since I’ve been on here to read and to post. I feel like I come on here a form of therapy where I can talk about how I feel. I stopped NOCD therapy sessions for like a month now. I been decent I guess. I try to do erp. I do stuff that I know I fear. Definitely been making plans and been productive. Recently my original struggles have been presenting themselves a lot lately. I was just cuddling with my boyfriend and I was getting all these thought and ruminating. I started to remember everything I read on here or googled. Things I thought about, the scary places my mind were at. It’s still there but not as often. I came on here because I remembered the fear of reading everyone’s post. It’s still hear I became afraid again. I feel like a fraud because i don’t have OCD as bad as everyone on here. If I never googled anything I think I would be fine and not have all these thoughts, guilts and fear. I kinda want to cry because im really upset about where I am in life with. My existential thoughts have been hitting. It just sucks because I feel like I been on edge. Like I can’t rest comfortable, I can’t be alone as much. I use to love being alone, with my thoughts. I loved not doing nothing and it’s hard for me to do that because of the thoughts in my mind. I thought I had gotten over my original theme but it’s been bugging me a lot. I have so much more I want to say but I won’t bore you with that. I wish I ocd was cure able. I wish someone could just wipe all the bad in my mind. I’m trying to be better, I really am. I just keep thinking about the future which is making me more sad and worried. Just thankful that I’m in a better place than what I use to be.

Please Help I can’t take this anymore. I just went to tuck my daughter in and she snubbed my hug, she was like a little wet noodle and clearly didn’t want anything to to with me. I walked out of the room trying to fight back tears and I could hear my younger daughter telling her how rude she was for hurting my feelings. A few minutes ago she came into my room crying and apologized that she didn’t mean to do that, I told her it was fine I wasn’t mad and I understand kids just don’t want to hug there moms sometimes. I asked her if she was ok and If there was anything she needed to talk about, of course she said no and went back to her room, but I couldn’t help but feel like she was holding back. I have false memory OCD and am convinced I did something inappropriate to her 2 yrs ago. This just made it worse. Why can’t I connect with her, why does she push me away. She hates me. I have a 16 yr old as well so I know that girls can get this way but this feels different, like we share this secret that neither one will speak of. I feel like she knows what I think I did or maybe I did do it, I just don’t know anymore. I wish I never had kids, I’m such a monster, I’ve destroyed her.

really scared i might be a narcissist after watching this video about narcissism and how narcissists in childhood had parents that did high praise and high abuse and so all they know for love is praise and they can either cling onto the messaging that they were a piece of shit and die by age 40 by suicide and drug overdose (according to the guy in the video) or they cling on to the praise they got and think they are above other people and only are after praise and thats why a lot of them are charming and funny because they know how to read people give them what they want to get that supply and like i relate to being addicted to making other people like me... but not in order to take advantage of them... its more because im desperate to feel good about myself...i never thought about it as being for praise but like yeah my job growing up in the family i felt was to make my dad laugh it made me feel special and also sometimes it meant he would not become explosive and scary and so now most of my relationships are based on me making people love me by being "on" but to be clear its a reflex im not like plotting or planning but its definitely effort but like effort of talking too much and telling too many stories to make me feel calm because people are laughing so everything is good but still its a stream of thoughts like verbal diarrhea that i cant stop but like i feel exhausted after social interactions because of it and im afraid of being vulnerable and i mean ive never intentionally hurt a friend but i mean when a friend has been mad at me i have withdrawn and hid and sometimes people say narcissists withdraw as a form of hurting others and i do sometimes i just get so mad and dont know how to deal with it that i just shut down and i do silent treatment because its the only way i know how to express im mad at someone i mean dont get me wrong i have screamed and yelled before but i try to keep that to a minimum and really have only shown that ugly side to my family because i dont want to lose people if they saw my shitty anger and so like fuck i really dont want to be a narcissist but honestly i love making strangers laugh getting attention and people think im charming im not trying to toot my own horn like " ugh im so awesome therefor i must be a narcissist " like i just know these are things people have told me and ive never had romantic relationships like i only like flirting and getting that attention but i get scared of any real interest any real connection or intimacy and i mean my sister is pretty sure my dads a narcissist im pretty sure she was the scapegoat child and i was one who got more praise and i just dont want to be that i dont want to be someone who thinks of people as supply i dont think i do but i also know i have unhealthy connections i always thought of myself as more codependent like my mother but idk maybe im just obsessing over finding a label for every pattern of behavior i have and need to calm down but it seems like NPD and BPD have become huge trends online in the past 10 years so many diagnostic videos of how to know if youre around someone like that and i used to think my ex best friend was a narc and i was codependent but what if its the other way around? and why are these personality disorders something everyone online talks about now? like not just reddit or quora but youtube and twitter so often someone will talk about an ex bf and someone will say sounds like he was npd and they never even met the person like everyone not just people with ocd are like compulsively labeling people with mental health disorders that they dont seem 100% qualified to make especially fake dr. phil internet doctors i mean maybe im just saying this because i dont want this guys video to be right because that description of an NPD person's childhood resonated with me so much but i mean thats what my brain does its latches onto the one symptom of shit like this and then im convinced i have the personality disorder ... how do i know if its an ocd spiral or something to worry about for real? isnt a good sign that you arent npd if you dont want to be or is that bullshit too?

How do you know if you are a selfish person? I OCD about this all the time because I am told that all the time. I talk to my therapist about this a lot. I have ruminated on this subject for as long as I can remember and I truly think that I am an empathetic and kind nurturing person but I am consistently told that I am not. So how do you know?

OCD and CBD or THC?? I don’t smoke but I’m just curious about how CBD and THC have impacted your OCD and if they’ve helped at all

Hi everyone, struggling at the moment with existenal OCD, keep getting thoughts of "how do I know that everything i see, feel and touch is real" ...like literally everything... how do I know its just all not made up in my head? Its the most terrifying thought and not sure how to deal with it? .. anyone else suffer with this same thought?

Help :( so the last place I lived a left in a HUGE GROSS mess ( I was so scared of germs I just stopped cleaning or moving about in my flat it was awful and scary ) . When I moved out my dad had to spend 5 days cleaning it out and he was absolutely furious bc I didn’t help out of fear of the dirt. I’ve apologised to him and he doesn’t stop going on about how “ horrific and unbearable it was for him “ even though I offered to pay for a cleaner to do it . He keeps saying how I’m untrustworthy and awful person and he comes round to my new place and inspects in all the time . I feel heartbroken how he doesn’t realise how ill I am and I rlly didn’t mean for it to happen. I feel so misunderstood and he just keeps insulting me . Now both my parents hate me for the things ocd makes me do/avoid. I’m at a loss :(

My name is Alexandra. I want to share my story with you, as I am not sure I have OCD, but reading the different forms it can take on your website and others, it really clicked for me. This started a few years ago and I have not realized until now that it might be OCD. I was in a very stable relationship with my now-fiance and something just triggered my relationship-OCD. I randomly started having this thought that I was going to fall in love with his best friend, or with anyone. I was scared that when I will start a job, I will fall in love with someone at the office so I became really alert with who I engaged with. Regarding his best friend I started having this phrase in my head constantly “I love… “. It scared me out so bad, because I knew it wasn’t true, but at the same time it made me unsure of my feeling. I started questioning everything, if I love him, if he is beautiful enough, funny enough, if he is the right choice, if our kids would be beautiful. I would sometimes cry when we had sex because I was feeling so guilty that I had those thoughts. As a compulsion, I started replacing the obsession “I love *his best friend*” with my fiance’s name. I would force myself to not think that. However, it fade away after aprox. 2 years and my fiance proposed to me back in June. Apart from the excitement I felt, I was scared that my thoughts never really got away and I was still unsure of what they meant and a feeling of guilt covered me. 2 weeks after our engagement, I started to look out for this symptoms online and I stumbled across relationship-OCD and ERP therapy. I thought this is what I needed and I tried to talk with my fiance that I wanted to see a therapist, without giving him all the details, because I was ashamed and scared that he would not understand and leave me. He thought it was not necessary because I didn’t give him all the details and for him it didn’t make any sense. One night I started feeling really bad, it was a feeling of depression, like something sucked all the joy in me and began feeling really scared for no aparent reason. I fell asleep really hard that night and randomly had this thought “you should kill yourself”. The next morning I was feeling the exact same way and I didn’t know what was happening and almost passed out in the bathroom. I didn’t think it had anything to do with those thoughts. First I thought it was just a calcium drop, then I was scared that I had depression, because the thought of suicide just got stuck in my head ever since. I was so scared I would kill myself. I looked at the balcony and thought I would jump, I imagined how I am gonna strangle myself, how I am going to cut my veins and so on. I would try to shave and I would be scared to hold the shaver because I thought that I would use it to harm myself. I started doing psychotherapy immediately after I had this breakdown and it helped me a lot, but these thoughts, however, never dissapeared. I still have them and actually they’ve taken so many forms as an existential OCD. I started thinking what’s the meaning of life, if it’s just work, seeing friends from time to time and have a vacation once a year. Then I thought I was living in a simulation and had really nasty feeling of depersonalization and derealisation. I was asking who really are those people around me, I was questioning the existence of my parents as my parents or just as strangers who are supposed to be “mom” and “dad”. I also had feelings that I was never asked to be born and now I am here and forced to live a live. That I “have to”. These thoughts scared me out so bad. Some fade away, as the realtionship-OCD ones, but some still stick around and somehow, it’s always something new that revolves around life. Currently, I have this question in my head “do I really want to live?”. Or this idea that “life is monotonous and boring and the same thing happens everyday and it’s not really something great”. I wake up with this question and very often I try to confront my thoughts or to give it reasons that I would never kill myself or that life is worth it etc. But I think this maked it worse, because those obsessions still come back. I am scared of this, because I LOVE LIFE. I am the kind of person who enjoys the little things, that finds pleasure in doing the most boring activities. I am not like that and I don’t know what happens to me or why this happened, but I want my life back. I sometimes say to myself, when I really have good time “please don’t think something bad about this”. There are moments when I am just thinking about how I will enjoy my coffee tomorrow and my brain just goes “so what? You did that yesterday too. It’s worthless”. It sucks away all the joy. I want to overcome it.

Is anyone else obsessed with being percieved as "good" ? I get super anxious thinking people think badly of me and always try to make people have a good image of me but then i obsess over if im manipulating them to think that im good and im lying and are not really a nice person. Anyone ?

Man I’m trying so hard to not let my ocd obsess over covid, but I can feel myself starting to panic more and more about it. My city has now reached more cases than when the pandemic first hit, and this new wave I now actually know people personally who caught covid, including a familiar brother. There’s cases at every school in my city and nothings being done about it. A kid had covid in my brothers class so he just had to get tested. Even though everyone is vaccinated which means symptoms won’t be nearly as severe, it’s still scary catching it, and I feel myself having a lot of overwhelming thoughts of “what if it never ends?” And obsessing over everyone I loves health. I’m starting to panic about what if the older people in my life catch it and die? I obsess over my moms health a lot even though she’s a healthy person and still pretty young (40). I know covid and everything can be a hot topic for debate, and I respect some people have a different opinion on things I said, but I’m just looking for responses from people who can relate to the stress of all this. I’m so overwhelmed and the fear all my loved ones are going to die is getting worse everyday

Mental health communities can be so draining. Aside from the anti-recovery behaviour, there's the tone policing. I get it, I've been there, but sometimes it just makes it more tiring than not reaching out for help at all

My partner and I were doing stuff on the phone and it was so erotic and I was enjoying myself but then I had the thought, “Almost there but not quite” I immediately felt myself shut down and suddenly I was scared and grossed out. I hate myself , we were both really enjoying ourselves and my mind just pushed me completely out of the moment because I wanted something more but I don’t know what and this happens a lot I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Am I always going to have that thought??? I was really enjoying myself 💔💔