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CW: fears of bigotry - I would feel absolutely horrible if I made anyone feel uncomfortable. I have no intention of minimizing the genuine trauma and injustice of oppressive systems. I beg of you not to read this if you might be insulted, and I apologize in advance for any potential harm my honesty might cause. I really hope it doesn’t. Also CW for anxiety about worthlessness/stupidity and lying/exaggerating diagnosis. Hey everyone. I want to start by saying that, if you’re only logging on for a few minutes, you don’t need to prioritize my post. I know many folks on here are in crisis and don’t have much of a support system, and I believe they need and deserve responses before I do. (I have a therapist and supportive family.) But I’ve been afraid to post on here for a few months now, and I’m finally doing it, though I don’t really know why, because it feels futile + wrong. I’m so terrified that I’m a worthless person in every way. I feel like I’m a disgusting bigot. I have horrible racist thoughts and I know I’m not sufficiently disturbed by them. I was diagnosed with OCD, but I feel like I’m just using this as an excuse when I am, in truth, an unforgivable monster. I’ve had therapists tell me that, if I was truly who I think and fear I am, I wouldn’t be so disturbed by my thoughts, but I just don’t believe that’s true, even if I wish it were. I know that these beliefs are evil because of the environment I grew up in, but wanting to be anti-oppressive doesn’t necessarily mean one is; anybody can hold bigoted beliefs, even if they don’t like them, and I feel I must pay attention to them and suffer as a result. I’m currently on leave from college and I know I’m going to have to go back because that’s what my parents want, but I truly feel I am a horrible person and I don’t deserve success or happiness. I feel I should suffer in perpetuity and be isolated from society; otherwise, I may forget how diabolical I truly am. I feel terrified that I’m exaggerating my suffering; that I’m not depressed or anxious enough and that I’m too easily getting through the day, which a good person with these thoughts or a truly mentally ill person never could, but that I’m not even afraid enough of being a liar. I need to be a good person and do the right thing, but I’m being forced into treatment, which I know is a privilege; however, I fear it will desensitize me from my horribleness, thereby making me even worse. I’ve tried so hard to believe I’m not this awful person, because I desperately don’t want to be, but I can’t delude myself when the evidence is overwhelming. I know that if these were just intrusive thoughts, I wouldn’t have the right ones sometimes and the wrong ones in other situations; I wouldn’t be able to so easily move past them, and there wouldn’t be exceptions to my horrible beliefs. I also know that I am a worthless person in other ways. I am so stupid, incompetent, and irresponsible. I don’t even know how to navigate getting around my city despite being 20, I lack common sense and basic knowledge - I am a horrible human being and I feel like I lied to myself for my whole life.

It’s getting so bad I have thought about suicide. This is the worst most torturous disease to have when your mind eats away at itself and makes you feel like a monster I know I probably need to see an OCD therapist but I’m also really worried about disclosing my pocd in case I’m misunderstood. I’d rather die than hurt a child Has anyone recovered from this theme without therapy?

I believe have developed it. I’ve been thinking for hours at a time whether or not we are real. Whether I am real and no one else is. That I’m alone. This has given me episodes where I feel like I’m losing my insanity. It hasn’t been as bad as my ROCD but yesterday at my girlfriends house, I was playing with her cat and the cat wasn’t scratching me as she usually does. I started freaking out because she seemed not attracted to my girlfriend. So I started being rough with the cat so that she would bite me / scratch me. Finally she did and I went outside to talk with my girlfriend. It was a compulsion I assume but this seems like a very difficult subtype to deal with. I’m also scared it might develop into religious ocd besides the fact that I don’t really believe in a god. Get back with what advice you have, it is music appreciated:)

I know, that this is not the place for it, but on Saturday I ended my relationship, because my partner constantly put me on the back burner, no matter what, other things had always been more important to him and, when I complained about it, he stopped talking to me for a day and last time, he turned very emotionally cold and distant and didn't snap out of it again (that was only last week, but still.) I seem to always end up with guys, even though they look different and seem very different in general, the always declare how much they love me, but then turn to treat me like shit. I suffer from OCD, depression and anxiety and additionally to that I have no friends (no one I can call now, where I could pour my heart out)... and no partner anymore, not that he had been much of a partner anyway... It seems, the deeper I get, the more of me hits the ground, the more kicks life takes at me. Does pain attract pain? Do the people who suffer most magnetically pull more pain towards them? I have no idea what to do... I started ERP therapy last week and the little number of people I had is getting even smaller and smaller... I'm not suicidal, I'm just so utterly lost.

Sometimes I remember how badly I used to want kids and my heart breaks. As a kid I used to think about it on the daily I loved kids and babies to me they were so beautiful and funny and joyful and now they’re just scary

It’s what if after what if. Existential stuff. What if the way I perceive the world is different from how the rest of the world sees the world. What if my feelings aren’t real? What if everything is an illusion? What if these new thoughts are how things actually are? What is even “right” or “true”…? Why are things the way they are? Why are people the way they are? I didn’t start having thoughts like these until I dated someone who was unlike anyone I’d ever known. He was abusive, manipulative, delusional, overly philosophical and biblical, and didn’t make much sense. The way he viewed the world and people was so off and so wrong and disturbing. He definitely had mental illness and I spent so much time racking my brain trying to understand why he is the way he is that I’ve become obsessed over what is even real and what makes things “ok” or “right”… I know it sounds silly but it is MADDENING and I just want to go back to being happy and blissfully unaware. Life and people and things just seem soooo complicated and scary and NOTHING makes sense. Help. Can anyone relate?

hi everyone! i wanted to ask if anyone has any experience with medication? i’ve been having a very rough few weeks with anxiety (along with s*icidal ideation) and the depression ruts i fall into are horrible. if i’m not actively panicking, i feel numb and hopeless. does medication seem like a good idea? i’m hesitant because i’m pretty young (21) and my dad (who suffers from chronic depression and likely many other things) is heavily medicated himself and has tried leading me away from it. i’m trying to hold out but i don’t know how long i can keep doing this. i’m barely functioning as is and i know i’m scaring the people around me. is it worth the risk?

I think I just got MASSIVE trigger and I have no freaking ideia what to do. I just wanna disappear. !!: I'm gay and I struggle with the fear pf being straight or bi.

Why do I feel like such a coward?

I've been doing more "surprise" exposures (like just watching TikToks and if I see a trigger, I try to just watch it and move on like normal) and I'm running into the issue of: now I'm having more intrusive thoughts, and they feel more sticky than they did *before* the exposures. I ask because I don't have access to a therapist to guide me on this, but is this common? It isn't a backdoor spike because I'm, quite frankly, not managing my OCD that well yet to have that happen. I have absolutely seen progress in myself, but I'm really hitting a wall and it feels like I'm getting stuck - and I hate it. Especially while I'm doing everything on my own because I don't want to live like this anymore. :/

I keep having intrusive thoughts about breathing and fainting

So I am in ERP with a NOCD therapist, and I was getting better, much better I thought I was back to normal. But then I had to do an exercise that just triggered me bad and now I feel like I’m going backwards. I have pocd and it sucks, but do you guys know why anxiety is just full on blast in the am I hate it cause I feel like I want to throw up, I start to gag a lot! I had it under control before but now it just feels like I’m back in square one! Could really use y’all’s hell, much appreciated!

Does anyone ever fear losing their mind or going crazy??? Cause that what cause majority of my panic. Ughhhh 😮‍💨

I saw a reply mention how it's important sometimes to not confess intrusive thoughts/worries to others, and I feel like that's true for me. Confessing them caused some negativity in my relationship as it makes my boyfriend worried especially when how I said it gave the feeling I couldn't tell if my thought was real or fake, so my boyfriend couldn't tell either. I deeply worried and get nauseous when I worry if I am hiding something, lying, not being truthful, decietful, etc. If I don't tell a friend or mainly my boyfriend about it. I proceed to confess what it was. Either my brain could come up with a worry of itnrusive thought, I then feel bad about it, and act on the impulse to tell. Or it could be something I've done before that seemed minor at the moment but come back up ehere I overthink it and make it a big thing. This then lead to days of thinking about it, retracing the entire situation, my intentions, what I said, double check messages, scroll through texts and spend hours reading them, trying to remember what I thought about or said, etc. I confess it to someone and often get rhe reassurance is not a big deal or I changed from that time, which helps only for that moment. I'm trying to practice now to hold in what my mind is racing about now, cause at one point I went to my boyfriend nearly every day about what it was since I feared I'll be hiding something if I didn't. Or if I did make a mistake or do something wrong or said something not good/did an action that wasn't, I'll also think about it for days on end and worry if I am the same since it happened, am I a horrible person, did I do something bad, I have to tell someone about it otherwise I'm lying about myself and giving a different impression of me. I'll lose sleep over it, cry, feel sick, don't want to make friends, worry if I'm bad for my boyfriend, etc. A lot of my worries are ridiculous to people around me (even to myself) as it's worrying about the possibilities of something and the changes. When I do confess, it's often a whole full page of it, or I think I wrote two pages before as I typed it out first then sent it. Im currently just logging down/airing out anything that worries me onto a document, notes app, or sometimes here now so I can keep log for whenever I get therapy or to be able to get it out of my mind and not tell others around me. I feel like it helps so far. When I lost one of my friends, they told me that certain things need to be left in the notes app. It wasn't really why I started keeping them down, but to pre-write then eventually I just turned it into a place to vent. Other times it is hard to keep it only to my notes and grow in worry of confessing it. Other times when I think something, I worry if it could be interpreted a different way, what does it mean, etc. And I also look back on situations and worry if I forgot a missing piece that prove that what happened in that situation was 100% my fault and I was a horrible person, or my brain could try and come up with memories that more likely or not didn't happen or it tries to take out of context to fit the narrative that I was horrible in my head. I feel the best way to describe my inner head is two split people arguing non stop. One is rational or very cruel to myself, the other is irritational. Another is where it accuses me or try and create false things and question my motives or interrogate me non stop. My inner head been like this for a long time, with two of me constantly fighting with each other and having split mindsets. I don't know who to listen to as sometimes both can be intrusive or accusational.

I make very long paragraphs for anything 😅 I'm slowly moving pass this trigger, as I learned to just avoid trying to look when I see someone that triggers the anxiety or fear. It causes me to try and stare or study their face to make sure I don't, only to cause me more anxiety. Brain then accuses me of ahving a crush of them cause I'm nervous but I'll be nervous cause it's someone that triggered that anxiety and it causes me to be uncomfortable. It then makes me worry if they think I'm sending the signal of liking them cause I'm looking at them and it scares me more since I don't find them attractive and don't like them and don't want them to think I do or that I'm unloyal. I'd say for two days now it died down a bit and go through some parts of the day without anxiety about it. Currently I feel guilty about it cause it feels as if I'm checking them out and my brain is saying "you're just trying to find an excuse to look at them" when I'm not, and I love staring at my boyfriend and amdirinf him only. But though I know it's my brain trying to mess with me, I create the idea in my head that my boyfriend won't believe it especially cause I tell him about my intrusive thoughts and worries. I don't want him to think that they're my sugar coated way of telling my real thoughts or that I'm lying. Currently it's just a tiring thing cause I feel as if I've committed an act of unloyalty even though I get no enjoyment out of any of this and I would feel sick. Even if it counts as cheating or not, I still don't appreciate doing it. I love the confidence I get in my BF about himself, and I dont want to cause him to he concerned about the idea of me being unloyal. I don't wanna make him anyore worried about my anxieties or my intrusive thoughts or what I'll be worried about, especially this one. It's relieving to know at least that it happens when I acknowledge the person/the anxiety acknowledge they have something to do with the anxiety- which triggers that if you get what I'm saying. When that doesn't happen, I don't begin to get anxious around anyone as my brain didn't point out "hey what if you're-" (it does this without even saying the thought I just get the feeling now). I feel like a horrible girlfriend. Just mainly putting him through a lot of my worries and stuff, but he says that he's going to stick through me with it, and I am too even when my thoughts make me doubtful and worry of I'm holding him back from happiness. He says I make him happy and he makes me happy. I'm beautiful and amazing to him and he certainly is to me. No one (if you count a boy band but got over them after I started dating him) been attractive to me ever since I met him, and never caught my eye. That's how I especially know my brain is messing me with me cause I know I never felt the need to check people out or find them attractive and I still don't. So let's say I have a guy friend, and never even up to this point found him attractive or let alone liked him. Now, I'll constantly look at him to make sure I don't, get anxiety or a rush of it when I'm near him, or unable to communicate cause Im focused on the trigger. If I don't look I get the impulse to do so to "prove".But when my brain don't bring up that intrusive thought or feeling, I could interact with him nornally. Some of this trigger could be me fearing that I'll do it, another could be cause one of his ex friends (no longer friends for this exact reason and more) kept cheating on her BF and checking out other guys. It was a friend group, So the girls had a separate GC and they were all fonding over guys except me cause Its not something I like doing. I then got a slight worry of "what want to, what if I did" so I stopped answering as they were sending photos and to not further my discomfort. It was this time her formed sent a bid of her talking to one of the guys she later cheats on. I was scanning the vid to see what it was about, and when I saw her and the boy I get a rush of "oh crap you just triggered my intrusive thought oh no" and felt so much discomfort after. I wouldn't even see someone's face and I could begin to panic. These are some examples but I say it happened a bit prior to that point, but could have something to do with her actions and worrying If I'll act the same way as her. I at one point even worried if I forced myself to love my boyfriend because she said she did so with hers. It made me worried cause I can't imagine doing something like that. So some interactions me and him have after has the heightened worry of "am I faking my love for him??"When I look at him I can't help but squeal at how amazing he looks and is, and I get random jolts of energy near him cause he's so wonderful (I get very jumpy). We're going to be a year on October 10th, and I can't trade that for someone else. Im currently trying to find therapy that has CBT (I've called a place and they said they'll get back to me by this week but haven't yet) so I can be able to work out any problems to better myself and less the anxiety I place on the both of us cause of what I worry about. I don't want to cause insecurity or uncertainty in the the relationship. It hurts to see my boyfriend upset whether I did something or someone else did. I care a lot about him and his feelings, so seeing him hurt, hurts me too.

has anyone ever been prescribed xanax for ocd intrusive thoughts and anxiety?? if so has anyone noticed a difference in symptoms

I don’t want to be on medication. And I will not be on it. I refuse to have to take a pill to feel happy. Or to feel better. I can do it on my own with my therapist. People have told me “take medication it’ll help” no nope and no. I don’t agree with taking medication FOR ME not for anyone else just myself. My morals, is that a pill will not be the thing that helps me. HOWEVER, if my anxiety and ocd gets to be so bad to the point it can’t function properly, then maybe. Maybe maybe maybe. It really depends.

Is this even ocd or should I actually be worried because I had really horrible intrusive thoughts, images, false sensations that I’m so upset about and I really don’t want to have to tell my mom (who they were about usually categorized in the theme of insest OCD) because it’s so embarrassing and just horrible and I just got home and I’m around her and my mind won’t shut up trying to get me to talk to her and I usually tell her about my intrusive thoughts and if I’m really stressed out which usually results in her getting irritated at me for telling her all the time and her telling me I don’t have it but I hate when my mind is telling me I HAVE to or the feelings of guilt won’t go away. So I don’t know what to do. I feel terrible like I’m a horrible monster but I’ve always had intrusive thoughts about her and many other people but I always try so hard to not talk to her about the ones that are about her specifically. I don’t like them I hate them I’m upset and full of fear. I pray to God I don’t have to have that conversation with her but like I said it’s like there’s a bug in my ear that won’t stop until I “fix” it

I know to some people that may be an exaggeration but I honestly don’t think I’ve hated anything more than myself. It makes me so mad I can’t be perfect and everything I do, it’s either wrong or it’s going to end up wrong. I don’t know if anyone gets things like this, but when I’m hugging someone my brain will tell me things like “oh push against them more” and it will happen for a second and I’ll feel sick over myself. I also like touched my friends arm and my brain was like “push their arm harder” and I must have put pressure for a second and I felt so awful. I feel like I’m suffocating. My family are fed up with me but I don’t really blame them. I’m sick of me too. Why do I have such a horrible brain? I wish I wasn’t like this at all. It’s like whenever I get an intrusive thought or urge my brain will start to do it for a second and then it stops. But most people don’t even start it. They just have the thought. So I’m guessing I’m just extra bad. And I don’t think I’ve ever felt so alone in my life.

So we know that lots of people have perfectionism, “just right”, and contamination OCD, but I’ve noticed that sometimes people with these types will openly use that as an excuse to regularly do what I presume to be compulsions—like excessive hand washing, double/triple checking, compulsive cleaning, etc. My question is, shouldn’t we challenge these people to not give in to the compulsions? It doesn’t seem right that we preach about practicing exposures & living with uncertainty but oftentimes people with these types of OCD essentially get a free pass to do their regular compulsions.