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Or intrusive thoughts and false memory I’m not certain I have ocd but I’m curious bc sometimes I smoke and it gets worse and I’m more anxious but sometimes I’m relaxed

Can someone explain to me why I’m constantly having intrusive urges or intentions? I have a constant feeling of my brain almost wanting to “act” on these thoughts! I need advice! Medications? What?

Hi. I have OCD for like 4 years now and this week is the worst week of my life. I am ashamed to talk about this and I feel so much guilt but I need help. Sexual intrusive thoughts, to me, are not new. I had them before about family members, and yeah, sometimes it was bad and made me believe I am attracted to my male family members, but in time, I had them down. Recently, for a week, I got Zocd. I am an animal lover and these intrusive thoughts tortured me to the point I wanted to die. I keep having sexual intrusive images and thoughts about my cats and it bothers me so much. I also get urges and they feel so real and it scares me to the point that I'm starting to cry. Sometimes I am afraid that I might actually be a zoophile that doesn't want to accept it, but I love my cats and every other animal and I would never do those things to them. I just want ro go back to normal and play with my cats without tbose disturbing images and thoughts. Please help me! I'm so tired.

Recently, I opened up to my husband about my hocd and sought treatment. I was doing better and had some ocd free days which allowed me to see that my thoughts were all from ocd. But I just had an argument with my husband and he brought up my intrusive thoughts and he said he thinks they are real! I spiraled and I’m back at square one.

Is rumination considered as compulsion? I stopped dioing my rituals and praying when I feel like I do sins. But still thoughts are awful. Then I started to manifest now like my hands are shaking sometimes, back is painful, knee is hurting. I haven’t had 8 hrs of sleep for almost 2 months 😔 What should I do?

Hello! I'm Non-binary and have never been diagnosed with OCD, but through ive began to really understand what im going through. please be kind and patient with me. thank you all so very much! (Disclaimer: i full respect people in the military, and those who choose to do it after high-school. i have family in the military, and ive heard stories from their service, and respect them a lot! if you are reading this and are active/ retired/ etc. thank you for your dedication to the military and putting your lives on the line so people like me have the privilege to be a little bit safer. i appreciate you all so very much, and know i mean none of what i saw with malice or disrespect) Ok, so im 18, but im not in college, or going to college because my parental figures told me id never make it/ they were putting me in the military (i had said as a 14 year old i wanted to join the military to prove my parent wrong for saying i wasn't good enough. now that i look back on it, i allowed spite to dictate my future. i didnt know anything about it, but now i do and im not interested in it anymore). My older relative has been trying to help me move out so i dont have to go to the military, but im a bit stressed. i graduated highschool with pretty averge grades (i had A's a majority of my Junior/ Senior year), and took online dual credit classes. unfortunately, i never got to take the SATs or ACTs. my question is, will community college take me if i sign up next year? im just really tired and want to lead my own life. i want to build my own structure and achieve things on my own. i want to go to college and bust my booty cheeks every day at a job. i want to be able to plant my feet and grow on my own, even if that means i have to grind really hard with community college. so, please, if you know, will community college take me? and if i do well in community college, can i transfer to a bigger school?

I have done awful things around 5/6 years ago and I don't think I can forgive myself

Question have any straight males who have hocd and have done some questionable things in childhood does it help the ocd make it more convincing and especially if you watch porn of the same sex (one time only)does that really make you gay or is it still the hocd I have a porn addiction along with hocd I’ve always watched women and today I watched a porn video with a women who looks like a man a lil but I been knew she confirmed herself but I decided to watch it and ejaculate to it anyway I’ve always liked women but the hocd since Ive had it has made it more and more convincing that I might like both even though I’ve never really opened up about this time I tried sex with the same sex when I was around 6 7 or 8 I’ve always regretted and never liked that I did that I also feel like it’s made me even more religious even though I’ve always believed in god I think I have most types of ocd I saw a trick on where people said don’t fight the thoughts and it works but it also makes the intrusive feelings feel real to the point where I went from having the strength and courage inside to say it’s the ocd now it’s like I feel beat up in the inside like I lose my courage anybody else felt like this and does it get better?

So my first experience with OCD was around 14 years old. I thought that I witnessed something while I was on a family vacation that caused me to think about glitches in reality. This pulled me down a rabbit hole of emotions for the remainder of the vacation which had me questioning my existence, if my family was even real, and if reality existed at all. This made me feel incredibly lonely because I didn’t believe anyone was truly conscious or real. Eventually the thoughts went away but I’m honestly not sure how or why they went away. Fifteen years later I am back down the same rabbit hole of existential dread where I am questioning reality and the existence of another person with consciousness (I know, I sound absolutely nuts but I can’t shake my recurring thoughts and no amount of research is going to help with such a philosophical obsession). It was triggered by a TV show I was watching the other night. I’ve never been on meds for my OCD, nor have I ever received true professional help as it just makes me feel vulnerable. My OCD had morphed into many different subtypes over the years but this existential dread is by far the worst I have felt. I just wish the thought never crossed my mind because I seriously don’t see how I can recover from it; my thoughts just loop and loop in this never ending cycle of believing no one exists, not even myself and then just wondering what the point of my existence actually is, this is just awful.

Good night/day everybody. Well this might sound really stupid maybe but today I’ve accidentally dropped my phone and i checked if it was okay and I’ve noticed that it got a bit damaged at the top of the volume button. I realize and i know that the damage is not big its like a DOT. Literal dot. But somehow my brain cant stop forcing me to think that its big and i have toc heck it every five minutes to see that dot again and again and i am really upset about it. Some people would just be upset for few minutes and then let that go because its not that big if a deal but nope, not me. How to deal with this? I mean how to just let it go and understand that everything is not that bad. Thx for reading all of this😅 my thoughts are faster than my fingers lol

Anyone else scared to take showers because you know you’ll be tempted to ruminate? I’ve been in the habit of ruminating in the shower for 16 years. Not every time, but many times. It makes me dread showers because I don’t want to give in to a compulsion.

Hi, I am just new here and never familiar with NOCD, are there any Christian Therapist here? I feel that I am battling with Religious OCD and Scrupulosity. I am not being able to sleep properly for almost months. Been 5 months since I have this battle so exhausting!

Hey everyone, I am demisexual and have been dating my first kiss/boyfriend for 6 months. I’ve felt anxious our whole relationship to some degree, but it’s difficult to tell if that’s because of ROCD or genuine incompatibilities. Sometimes I leave situations with him and I feel a bit deflated because he is a blunt tell-it-how-it-is kind of person and I am a very sensitive people pleaser. We also have significant religious differences that we are trying to work on, but he doesn’t always know how to respectfully learn and talk about my religion because of his bluntness. We have some good things going (he cares about me, wants to communicate, and we laugh together), but I genuinely wonder if I will always feel this anxiety in relationships due to ROCD or if it is because of specific incompatibilities with him. How do you tell the difference?

I have these awful intrusive thoughts while I'm attending church and in return I keep compulsively praying and sometimes I wonder that what if God's gonna punish me for not having faith in Him and keep compulsively praying and that He might make all of these horrible thoughts come true .... Oh Lord I'm so scared... wth is wrong with my brian? why won't it shut up?

Sorry this is a long one that requires a lot of background and explanation, but thank you to anyone who takes the time to read it. One of the main things my (what I suspect could be but isn’t diagnosed) OCD focuses on is my relationship and a specific ongoing(ish) situation that’s affected us. It’s hard to summarise but the context is my boyfriend has a female friend he’s known for about ten years and over the years they’ve liked each other but previously never done anything proper or liked each other at different times etc. Last year my boyfriend and I had a rough patch and eventually he wanted us to break up, but it ended up only lasting for a month or so. This was partly due to general issues we’d been having, somewhat caused by my behaviour due to my mental health, but also because the previous year his old friend had told him she still liked him and he started feeling like he liked her again and since then he was essentially questioning whether he wanted to be with me or her. Within the time that we were struggling, he was talking to her a lot and flirting and having deep chats, which made me really insecure and anxious, and then while we were broken up he spent a lot of time with her and they kissed once. He didn’t tell me about this until six months after it happened, when we were already back together, but at that point said it had made him realise she wasn’t who he wanted to be with. It’s been a year since that time now and we’ve been a lot more communicative and dedicated more time to us and our relationship is much better than it was. Despite this, and despite the fact that there’s now no evidence of him liking her and he talks to her a lot less, and him reassuring me every day that he wants to be with me, I feel like I obsessively think about what happened last year and what I did that contributed to it happening, and it feels like by thinking about it and going over it again and again I can prevent it happening again by being aware, because I’m so scared of it happening again because it was so awful. But this thinking over/ruminating just makes me feel the emotions again and feel low and anxious a lot of the time and I feel almost constantly on guard for his behaviour/feelings changing or my own behaviour starting to lead us down the same route. As well as this, I get intrusive thoughts of images of the two of them together and of things he said to me when everything was bad that I worry he still thinks. I also sometimes get compulsions to look through his messages with her when he leaves his phone, which I know is bad and I really shouldn’t do and when I did this last year and two years ago I saw messages I really shouldn’t have that hurt a lot to read so I still remember vividly (looking at the messages also makes me feel like such a bad person which is kind of another obsession I have). Plus some of my other compulsions that for a while have related to keeping him safe have become more amplified and related more to keeping our relationship good. This past week I’ve been holiday with my boyfriend and has family, and his old friend and her family have also been in the same area and I was really anxious in the lead up because I thought we’d see her a lot and I didn’t know how I’d react, but we ended up only seeing her briefly a couple of times, and it almost seemed like she was avoiding us because of how awkward it would be. But knowing she was nearby still made me anxious and worry about her feelings for my boyfriend coming up again (although she now has a boyfriend too) or my boyfriend’s feelings coming up. I had a few conversations with my boyfriend about it because of how I was feeling, and we’ve had similar conversations fairly regularly over the last year. Within these conversations I find myself seeking a lot of reassurance from him, but no matter how much he gives my brain always brings something else up to be anxious about and it’s like no amount of reassurance actually reassures me. I know that this is typical of OCD, but I don’t know how to navigate it when this feels like such a genuine and important thing to be worrying about when it’s an actual situation that happened in the past and could happen again, and something that we need to discuss and be aware of in order to keep our relationship good and healthy (although my level of anxiety and reassurance-seeking arguably doesn’t do that). I haven’t talked to my boyfriend about thinking I have OCD yet, and I don’t really know what to do about it or how to prevent it coming into this situation which triggers it so much. From what he tells me my boyfriend has basically moved on from it all and would probably like to just forget it all, but keep being more dedicated to us, but I remember things for ages, especially hurtful things so I don’t know how to move on, but my (potential) OCD is basically making it worse when it could actually not even be a big deal anymore. Sorry again that this is so long and rambling. Thank you so much if you read it all and if you have any thoughts/advice to share I’d really appreciate it.

Fighting with ocd it’s hard and mostly when it got really hard in 2020… I have this routine at night that if I don’t do it I should not sleep and if I sleep I should do it before getting up (that means, no water, food or bathroom (that has changed) or shower). I’ve been like this since that year and it’s not easy… I had to also confront the lose of a family member… my skin it’s getting dry and pretty red that itches a lot on my face and even my fingerprints… they feel like there’s something burning and I’m scared of having now sone sort of sickness idk :,(… my eyes itch a lot too… now I can’t breath property and it’s getting like really stressful all of this situations… I really don’t feel i have a real friend… maybe a girl but we’re beginning that, I have my boyfriend but sometimes feel alone… I’m scared that my body it’s tired of having one meal since 2020 most of the days, and not showering for 3 days or 1 week, feeling I can’t eat or drink until I finish my routine… I’ve been holding and being strong a long time :,( my body it’s talking bc of it I’m really upset… Today I was laughing and my mom from nowhere looking at my room told me “aren’t you tired of living like this?!” I feel she was only talking about my messy room… but it really hurt like h… like… yeah mom, I definitely didn’t choose to live like this, I’m worried of my physical reactions of my body and I don’t like to not eat at all… with all respect to my mom, I love her but like… please don’t do this to me… why asking? Sorry… I wanted to just let it out… I’m not in a good time, I’ve really had to pass through a lot… I know ocd it’s not easy… Idk if this also might help that you’re not alone, ocd it’s not easy but not impossible to treat… we’re doing a great job… sorry for this; I needed to just let it out :,) with a community that can understand me so literally… I hope your doing great, Gos bless you

I know this doesn't belong here but I've tried posting on Reddit but received nothing. For context yes I'm a huge worrier about health and I'm probably a hypochondriac. So basically I'm convinced that I have cancer and I've been convinced of this for a long time. I have this hard lump under my rib that's been there for a long time. Also one of my toes is really inflamed and doesn't look normal. People will tell me just go have it checked out but I can't. I can't face what could come of it. People say if I'm that worried I could have it looked at by the doctor but I can't think of a single innocent explanation for the lump. I want to cry because at this point I feel like I've accepted something I don't even know because I'm convinced the chances of it being nothing bad are so low. The only way to know would be going to the doctor but I just can't. I'm so sorry for posting this here because it is not the place for this but I don't know what else to do. I can't describe the feeling of having convinced myself of something that could actually turn out to be true. It's crushing.

I wish I could be content. I wish I could just live in the present and be happy with how things are going. That my brain could slow down and enjoy things, and I could take in the world better. But my mind is constantly stuck in the future. I can’t shake this feeling all the time that I must be doing something, I must be preparing or working. I can’t simply “be”. I must be doing something all the time 24/7, according to my brain. Or else I start worrying about the future, that if I’m not doing anything then I’ll fail. This makes it nearly impossible for me to slow down and enjoy things, although I want to, I really do. I’m exhausted, but my brain pushes me every day to do more.

How can you tell if the feelings you have for someone are romantic or platonic? Sometimes friends can bring feelings of intimacy, love, connection etc. in a truly platonic way. How can you tell they are platonic though? Long story short I have relationship OCD and since my mental health has been in crisis I get anxiety about any good feelings I feel with anyone. I genuinely can not tell the difference anymore and I always worry that any good feelings I experience with someone may be cheating emotionally if I continue to talk to the person. To make matters worse I’ve been attracted to both men and women before so I don’t have a “safe” gender. Also, before my OCD went into crisis I never had many close relationships with friends to reference. I’m really lonely because I fear connection with anyone. I just want to know from people without relationship OCD how do you tell?

Anyone else scared to take an SSRI sand you have gotten past it and the med actually helped? I’m so nervous to take my lexapro. I know I want to try but what if I have a panic attack or something?