Welcome to
the NOCD Community

Looking for all the flaws in my partner’s appearance makes me think that I’m just actually not attracted to him and that I’m in denial/using anxiety as an excuse. I used to think he was one of the best looking people I’ve been with and one day when I was feeling particularly infatuated months ago I remember thinking “how could I have ever have doubted this? He’s amazing!” I am now hyper aware that he’s not the most conventionally good looking person but it’s his soul that always made him attractive to me. I just can’t stop looking for ways to confirm I don’t find him attractive. I feel awful even typing this out. Even now my anxiety is telling me he’ll somehow come across all of my doubting posts and breakup with me because they’d hurt him to read

I’ve never sought professional help for OCD but when I’ve read about it it always sounds like me. I think I’m too embarrassed or scared to talk about it with someone or hope that it will get better on its own because it does seem to get better at times but sometimes it can be so bad it feels like suffering. I will sometimes replay moments in my head over and over and over again to reassure myself I did nothing wrong but the voice never shuts up. It’s the same voice that asks if I’m sure I locked the door when I’ve already checked the lock 5 times. (Not an actual voice of course but a thought or a fear) I’ll check the lock again just to quiet the anxiety that thought gives me. I just wanted to share. Thank you.

How do I tell my therapist of 2 years I want to try another therapist? She's been wonderful with me in uncovering my past traumas and providing great tools for me to cope with anxiety but.. She doesn't think I suffer from OCD, just Generalized Anxiety. She's also not specialized in OCD so I'm too sure she knows the concept of PureO and/or ocd subtypes. Our sessions are usually us doing talking about my obsessions, her giving me meditative exercises and reassurance.. I really want an OCD therapist to nip this shit in the butt once and for all. But I don't know how to tell her

I get intrusive thoughts of “What if I jump off this 3 story balcony” or what If I jump off a Cruise Ship” I usually just let it sit there til it fades away I’m not sure if it’s Suicidal OCD because I only get the thoughts like every now and then and not like all the time so I’m not sure if I should start ERP for it , I’m so confused wether it’s developing into OCD or just Intrusive thought, what it sound like to you?

Advice? In the past before my hocd started, I used to think it was "cool" to be in lgbt since my a lot of my friends where in it , and the main thing that's bothering me is that when someone used to ask me (my friends only mainly) if I was straight, I said "I think" or something like that but not yes which is really triggering my ocd even though I don't say that anymore as I promised myself that I'd stop saying that cause it's wrong, False and affects my ocd a lot so now obviously I just say yes if someone asked me if I'm straight but I'm now ruminating whether I still think it's "cool" to be in lgbt , I haven’t told anyone this as Ik it’s wrong and idk what my parents, friends reaction would be as they’re homophobic and they might think I’m in lgbt or smthing idk. Please help me with this!!!!

Have any of you ever felt that you were misdiagnosed from a provider who diagnosed you with something different than OCD? I have was previously diagnosed with depression and severe anxiety. I was put on medications that made me feel numb and I felt my head and thoughts were in a constant fog. I eventually chose to go off of them and slowly tapered off the medications intrusive thoughts came rushing back in like a Dam that cracked open; flooding everything around it. In the beginning, depression and anxiety diagnoses made sense because I believed that doctors know what they are doing because they are educated and trained in the field. As I began to question things, their diagnoses did not make sense. My intrusive and repetitive thoughts and actions made me feel like a horrible person, depressed, and anxious. I was told I had a chemical imbalance leading to my depression and anxiety, but I figured out what was really causing it was my thoughts. I eventually came across false memory OCD and other types of OCD that I never knew was OCD. I felt as though I finally knew what was going on and things would become easier by knowing, but in many ways things have not become easier. I feel that mental health awareness has improved, but the the services, education, and access to services have not caught up to the same extent with improving. I have learned that at the end of the day, it is important to not always accept what I am told by others including professionals and to question things. At the end of the day, it is myself that I am left with and nobody can know me the way that I do.

I started growing out my hair and my father is insulting me and everything about my haircut like heavily he says it’s what druggies look like and I’m selling he told everyone in my family I feel so embarrassed idk what to do

So I wanted to ask, to what extent should your family know about your OCD? And is it helpful that they know the full extent of the themes you suffer from. For myself my family knows I have OCD coupled with intrusive thoughts and I’ve described some of them such as my hit and run OCD and some lighter Harm themes, but I’ve never truly divulged the full content of my thoughts because I feel like there’s a possibility they might not understand entirely and maybe be confused by some of the more taboo themes I.e. Harm OCD, POCD, Sexual thoughts etc. Personally I feel like I don’t need to tell them absolutely everything going on with my OCD but was just curious how others have gone about it. Thanks.

And how is that going now?

Does anyone worry they are using ROCD as an excuse to not face their true feelings? I think I’m numb but at the same time I wanna cry. Lately I’ve experienced low symptoms I’ve read so many posts throughout the 2 years I’ve been suffering. My partner believes I’ve gotten everyone else’s experience mixed up with my own… he is right. But now that I am trying not to bring the feelings back and just deal with it. I feel off completely… I just wanna cry… I asked my partner for a hug 3 Times yesterday bc I was very sad and just wanted to hug him. Without trying to feel anything I just don’t feel right… like everything he talks about seems boring…. 😢 it’s really upsetting me

This is embarrassing to admit or talk about, but I just need to get this off my chest after talking to my therapist about it. a few weeks ago I got really drunk at a bar by accident/peer pressure to drink (pretty out of character for me). I think I selfishly wanted to feel good because of the torture ocd puts me through daily. Anyways, I got pretty drunk, to the point where I blacked out for some periods of time. I vaguely recall hitting on somebody pretty openly and for a long period of time. I probably was a complete selfish idiot. To make things worse I have a wife and kid. I let my wife know out of shame about my mistake the next day and she forgave me, but the damage had already been done. My ocd is making me feel convinced that something bad happened like I hooked up with that person and I’ll have a child with them and ruin my marriage and it’ll be this awful spiral. I always tell myself, “surely, if something like that happened, you’d remember it”. But my ocd makes it feel so real and it makes me really paranoid. Thankfully I have a wife who understands my brain, but I feel very worried about it all the time recently. It’s been about 3 weeks since the incident, but my brain won’t calm down. Anybody have any experience with dealing with true event ocd after drinking? What did you do to help you through the storm?

(I posted this same thing on the ocd reddit too so sorry if this isn’t your first time seeing this lol) hi so i feel like this is soooo stupid and inconsequential but i dont really know what else to do about it basically almost ever since i started having really bad ocd episodes i had like "sub-themes" where like, for example, when i was struggling with sexual intrusive thoughts, and at the time i was super into this one video game, i started getting thoughts like "well what if you started associating the sexual thoughts with the video game". and this just completely drained all my passion and enjoyment for the game, because all i could do was keep checking my emotions and thoughts and see if i really *was* associating the game with my intrusive thoughts. but the more i stressed about it while playing the game the more i started to actually associate them with eachother, or thats what i thought was happening, anyways. i hope that made sense so this has been happening for pretty much every single one of my interests ever since my ocd "started". again it sounds really dumb, but being interested in a show or book and just having passion for a piece of media was something i had always done for as long as i can remember, ever since i was a kid. ever since my ocd got really bad, i cant do that anymore without ruining it for myself. it's really put a damper on my sense of self and my happiness and passion for life. even in some of the worst times in my life i always had a video game or something to obsess over and take comfort in. i can't do that anymore, not without being constantly on edge. seriously, i feel like a completely new person everytime i get to enjoy a piece of media, at least before ocd starts attacking it. its come to the point where ill be consuming media and then i just think "what if you stopped liking it right now" and then i really dont know if im actually enjoying it or not, and that stresses me out and then the media starts stressing me out and then i actually *dont* enjoy it anymore. it makes me feel so empty and it genuinely depresses me, i feel like im going crazy and like, it feels different from when im genuinely not interested in something anymore, or at least thats what i think. i know that i can let go of interests just fine whenever i just dont like it anymore. but whenever *this* happens, its like i still really want to consume the media and enjoy it like i did before, i really do miss it, but everything in me is saying that i shouldn't go back to it, its over, ill just have to find something new again. bcs i genuinely do feel worse if i try and push through and keep consuming it. i really didnt want this to be this long but i just wanted to know if anyone has experienced something similar to this and what i should do about it? and thank you for reading through all of this lol

I overthink during sex and I can’t tell if its ocd or im gay. Im getting married and im so scared..what if i cannot satisfy her? What if i find out im gay?? Im horrified

I think a big problem is that I have watched so many movies and shows and that my imagination has always been so so big. I have been really going through the worst time in my life this past week and a half I’ve lost almost 10 pounds from not being able to eat because of fear that I somehow took my boyfriends “soul” and if I look at LITERALLY anything (even these letters) and food or ANYTHING I feel like I left his soul on there. So in order to “get his soul back” I have to roll my eyes and do this compulsion until it feels right and until it feels like I have it back…If that makes any sense? Its so distressing and it’s much much more than that like vivid images and ideas that I’ll praise to people that he’s not real and that he’s something weird like a robot or something idk and it’s so fucking terrifying to think of doing those things but sometimes it feels like I’m going to do it so I bite my tongue really hard. My brain is so scrambled it feels like I’m going to 100% convince myself that he’s not himself. im terrified and I can’t eat or sleep and when I try to sleep my mind goes wild when I close my eyes :(

does anyone with rocd feel like a part of them is turned off like happiness and love? all i can really feel is sadness and anger. i know that i love my partner but a part of me just feels blocked.

This isn’t ocd related but I feel like I just need to talk to someone about what’s going on in my brain. I think from a young age I’ve been super scared of getting close to people. I can’t figure out why that is, but I also tend to put so much focus on just being accepted and have had this need for others to show me love. Like I know this stems from not loving myself but I’m like so depressed, scared, emotional to focus on work and my usual meditation feels wrong. It feels like I’m just in denial and not living my truth. I had an experience over the weekend that took me back to who I was before I started therapy and getting better. I was hooking up with my boyfriend and felt extreme euphoria, like it was an out of body experience. I think this was playing into my need/attachment to others. Anyway, I was sooooo overwhelmed. It all felt good, but then at the same time it all felt way too scary and overwhelming. I started thinking about the female body. And then that scared me SO MUCH MORE. idk how I could be so lovey dovey with my boyfriend and then feel the need to be sexual with a woman, like my boyfriend wasn’t enough. It feels like a trauma response from my youth but I can’t point to anything that would’ve caused it. It reminds me of feelings I have always had throughout my childhood of needing other people to validate me, accept me, love me so that I could love myself. I’m not sure how it all ties together but this feels like a desperate need. I’m now worried that I’ve been lying to myself… like my love for my boyfriend has only been because of an unhealthy need I have and being with him has uncovered this more true desire to be with women. That doesn’t feel right saying that but I’m not sure why my brain went to that place. I’m really struggling to focus today, feeling overwhelmed by my emotions and my fears. I’m not sure what to do. My usual isn’t working. I feel so disconnected from my mind, like all I have are intense feelings that I need to sort through before I can be a functioning human, but I’m scared that when I do that, I won’t need my boyfriend and then I’ll panic again. I just don’t even know where to go from here.

Hi all- I’m a 23 y/o female who is extremely health- i workout 5x/ week, eat right, walk, read and show up every single week to my counseling sessions, but i’m scared of medication, like an SSRI. Has anyone had success with their medication? If anything i’m getting worse, instead of better. Please share your success stories ❤️

I’m so triggered please someone help me I’m freaking out! My grandma has the news on and I got so triggered because they were talking about really triggering things to people with POCD about cp and that kind of stuff and I’m so so scared and I will explain why… When I was a teenager I had a tickling fetish. When I would go on ifunny or whatever I would strictly look up that fetish and that’s it. It was the subject of it I was into. Why I don’t know it was something I got into when I was younger. I didn’t understand it and I didn’t know what would come up or happen. From maybe age 14 to maybe 18 or 19 I would look up the fetish and that’s it. The reason that this makes this much more horrible for me is that self please was involved because it was a fetish. It had absolutely nothing to do with the people in the memes or videos and unfortunately at the time I had no idea what I would come across scrolling and I was so stupid that because it was about the fetish, I did something I shouldn’t have and I had no idea or no clue until many years later I developed OCD and it hasn’t stopped bothering me since. It’s been haunting me for 3 years ever since I figured I had OCD and then eventually got diagnosed with OCD. My main theme is POCD and I’m scared to death of what if what I did makes me a p or what if I’m in a lot of trouble even thought the things I would come across that had to do with that tickling fetish had NOTHING sexual it was all innocent things but because I didn’t know better and the m word was involved, and I had a stupid tickling fetish and the words or reactions of people had to do with it I guess I don’t even know how to explain this but I swear on my life if I would have known, it would of NEVER happened. I was in it for the stupid fetish but because I probably came acrossed it more than once and because of it being about the stupid tickling, I’m absolutely ashamed and I feel like I deserve to give up. I’ve brought this up to my dad before he passed and he said as long as they were wearing clothes and they absolutely were, he said I was going to be ok as long as I would never make the same mistakes again and I promised him that it was just about the fetish, nothing else. I do NOT ever want to become a p. I would rather die than ever let that happen. This has caused so much pain mentally. I’ve talked to my mom about this too and she told me I was being way too hard on myself and that I need to forgive myself and move on and I can’t. I just can’t do it. No matter what anyone says even my therapist, I can’t do it. I feel like I deserve to be punished or something. I would never ever want the “what if’s” to be true. I just don’t think I can do this anymore. If I’m a bad person and the mistakes I made as a teenager make me a horrible person, then I can’t do this anymore. If OCD is blowing it out of proportion and I should listen to my therapist and my own mom, then I will still feel like I could never forgive myself and it’s sad because if someone I knew or cared about came up and told me the exact same thing I’ve been though, I would be forgiving and understanding and be nice to them but me…I absolutely hate myself and sometimes I feel the bad things that happen to me all the time is what I deserve…please if you’ve read this far and you can possible give me some sort of resources or something let me know. I don’t necessarily need reassurance. I just want someone to tell me I’m not alone or not a monster

I hate my life.

The last few days were good cause i was usually distracted a lot due to my exams and things but the only thing now telling me this could be ocd is the fact that 3 years ago and like till 6 months ago I panicked at these thoughts which i now think are fake and like its some way of my mind tricking me into thinking its ocd and not denial cause i made a good friend in college and she is cute and sweet and we became friends pretty quick today i just gave her a hug cause she is very sweet to me and we laugh and stuff and then this thought mixed with feeling crept in do i like her differently and i shoved it way like it was normal to me and felt like i was forcing myself to think about it later and I actually did force myself to think of it cause i am scared of it being denial so i am using all ocd tactics but was that ocd again or why did that feeling whatever that was felt real and normal and nice?!? Cause I watched a show where this girl considered herself straight her entire life spend time and hung out with a lesbian and got feelings for her and changed everything and like that she was straight before all of that it it was so possible for her and so easy how is it not for us?!? And like that too when she was 26 how do i know thats not what’s happening to me now?!? Like why does it feel like denial and like i am stopping myself am i?!?!? Its like i am trying to interpret always what my thoughts mean and feel like?!? Do thoughts actually carry feelings with them if they do thats denial right?!? Is this also something ocd is causing i am also like getting flashes of the same sex in senarios romantic or not when i think of something and I don’t take it as something wrong and why did i not types all this earlier cause it didn’t affect me was it because i considered them true?!? Like what are these sudden flashes like is that some reality did i ever truly like guys back in the day how is this not me realising some shit what if i am scared of all this cause I don’t know how the community works and its new to me cause the kind of what i felt today with the friend what was that?!? What if all this fear and anxiety is because I don’t know how to react or know how people will which is why i am a little scared but i like this feeling!!??! Is this soma kind of false attraction cause i am asking these possibilities when i should be scared of them did ocd lead me to actually denial and was it denial all this while what do i do?!? What should i hold on to?!? Also i have never had a bf and as of now dont like anyone will i ever further like someone or is this some indication of it not being denial also i forget about my thoughts after a while which more like feel like feelings and not intrusive thoughts anymore so is that forgetting a proof of it still being ocd?!? But I don’t panic as much rather fake panic to tell myself its still ocd.. i am so close to losing it suddenly why else would i get this feeling induced thoughts today even if someone tells me its ocd why does it feel like i won’t believe it would i be happier if i just accept?!? Pls help me what should i do?!! Is this even ocd anymore where should i go?! I saw a video on Instagram of a gay couple and the thought that popped in my head was do i want that?!? Thats cute?!? Is that my reality?!! Is that something i want?!? Will that make me happy and if some part of my brain says yes then what!!? I don’t think this is ocd anymore cause even if i think about the thoughts what is the explanation for feeling or did i interpret it wrong cause of ocd but why then did it feel like what i could feel for a guy which is like the last proof right?!? Why did it feel so real… this is not ocd right i am not even panicking while writing this and like normal and okay like i accept it and fake calling the anxiety so that means something right… what should i do?!? What do i hold on to now?!?