Welcome to
the NOCD Community

Harm ocd is the worst possible thing I’ve ever experienced. It’s legit about my girlfriend and family whom I love so much. This all came about after a crime case and it latched onto it and I can’t seem to let go. Anyone have any tips on helping with harm ocd?

I have been on therapy twice a week for a month now. I am apparently a hard case to think up exposures for. I have done 2 and they seemed so pointless. I need some encouragement bad but I'm not suppose to get reassurance from anyone. It's a very tough situation. My family needs me back so bad. My children, and wife are watching me suffer. It's been a year and I don't see a light at the end of the tunnel. I have been diagnosed with OCD for as long as I can remember, but it's all thoughts. Thoughts of never getting over this extreme anxiety and depression. So I never see stories that I can relate to when it comes to OCD.

I feel like I then did so much reassurance seeking on the internet and on here for the past month that I don’t even care to look anymore i see a lot of good stuff but the small amount of bad stuff my brain an heart goes with some reason I feel helpless is like I feel normal but i feel confused and odd for some reason like I’m not in control of my thought and feelings and sensories for some reason does anyone else feel like this or felt like this in the past and does it get better?have an meds and therapy took these problems away?

from when you first had intrusive thoughts, did you ever think of a demon got inside of you or something? sounds crazy. But, when I had my first intrusive thought.. I immediately thought some sort of evil got to me. Or if someone did a curse on me before… idk. It’s til this day that I sort of feel like that. Because OCD is scary, but super crazy that such disorder is that way. I mean.. it’s a crazy disorder, I hate it. But anyways, you too or just me?

Anyone else super into the metaphysical? Like, YouTube astrology videos and tarot readings? I keep watching stuff about the "age of Aquarius" that we are entering, and how it's going to cause some "identity shifts" in individuals. I've been spiraling out of control everytime I hear this phrase being used. I automatically think it means my sexual identity is changing/going to change/already did?! To top it all off, I keep getting LGBT content recommended to me on all social media platforms. It feels like the universe is trying to send me signs that I'm actually a Lesbian and not a woman who loved men?! I can't take it anymore. I can't even be around my bf or say "I love you" without overthinking that! ? We are about to celebrate our 3 years anniversary together and I STILL am dealing with this stupid theme!!!???

I constantly get a strong urge to take revenge on some people who hurt me, and when I try to suppress this urge I get thoughts telling me that I’m weak and have no dignity and I must take revenge or else Could this be OCD ?

A month ago my boyfriend and his parents planned a trip to go down to SoCal for the moms bday and to see some family and they invited me to go too! ( my bf lives in NorCal so we are long distance) I was very excited but 2 days before the trip my bf was going thru some things and basically broke up with me. Ofc later that night he regretted his decision and wanted to talk but I told him I would only talk in person. When his parents heard the news his mom told him not to go bc he’d be too sad. But he’s 19 and we really needed to talk things thru! His dad let him go and he spent that Thursday with them and he picked me up on Friday! We talked and everything was okay and he apologized! It was his moms bday and she wanted to hang out at the pool in the hotel! I was feeling super anxious so I was having anxiety so I told my bf to go with his mom bc it’s her bday and she probably wants to spend time with him. He went and I sucked it up and came down an hour later! We stayed at the pool for an hour and then I had to leave bc of my anxiety but also no one knew and his cousins followed us up 20 min later bc they were done with the pool! ( also the pools were separated by adults and kids so certain pools you couldn’t go in bc you had to 21 and over! So we couldn’t really hang out with his mom). We bought her some snacks and I gave her a Minnie mouse pop up card for her bday! I also sent her a text apologizing for not coming down right away and telling her I didn’t wanna panic and make ur day about me especially since me and ur son talked all morning. She never saw the text 😅 We even bought her a sworaski ( I think that’s how you spell it) but it was a crystal groggy bc she loves grogu! The next day it was his cousins bday and my bf slept in so we got there late ( I tried waking him up several times) so I told him since we are late you gotta get her a gift and so we did!! When we got there everyone was with each other his cousins were with their friends and all the adults were together! So no one really talked to us and I even made him go in the kitchen to we can at least talk to his mom more!! I even helped them pick up a spilled drink! We gave her the present and she really loved it! But we left around 8 pm so we were there for 3 hours but we only left early bc no one was talking to us we both felt left out and ofc when we leave they kinda seem bothered. My bf asked if I could spend the next day but she said no that he needs to spend time with family. I totally understood so ofc i went home but also I kinda wanted to go home bc I was so anxious about ruining their day! My bf said that he wasn’t having fun and he was basically only hanging out with his little cousin who’s 8 and another who’s 15 but his cousins who were his age weren’t talking to him and judging him too!! His mom pulled him aside saying she was upset we used her bday to talk and I feel bad but I really tried to make it up to her getting her gifts and sending her a long apology text!! Also we couldn’t even spend the day with her bc we couldn’t even be in the same pool! Also last 4th of July I came over and we were supposed to go have a party but both his parents slept in so we did nothing and no one even said sorry! ( I felt bad for my bf more bc he was so excited to have a party) I just feel like even when we were around no one really cared to talk to us or be around us yet they wanted us around more. Also My bc had two older brothers and they didn’t go on this trip just bc they didn’t want to….. yet she’s mad at my bf for not spending enough time even tho no one ever tried with him! Idk I’ve been anxious with my ocd and I’ve been severely depressed ever since I got home and this situation is making it worse too!

WARNING LONG READ WITH A LOT OF GRAMMATICAL ERRORS Recently i went on vacation/holiday, with my friends to ayia nappa which is a very “lad culture” holiday with plenty temptations there as it is a proper party holiday destination. I have recently just got into my first relationship at 21 and in the past i have been more of a man whore getting with people on nights out which meant going on a lads holiday was something i didn’t want to do as my OCD always thinks the worst and thinks that I was gonna get overly drunk and ruin my relationship that i am extremely invested in. After a few days on holiday i had been out drinking and hadn’t had a single OCD thought of anything bad happening as i always had someone with me which was either my friends or girlfriend on FaceTime but on one instance after a night out drinking i decided to leave a club early and walk home on my own. During the night i remember all the events in the club and i remember most if not all the details of my short 10 min journey from the club to the McDonalds as i was only a bit tipsy, but there was a small gap in the journey i don’t remember. After waking up in the morning quite fresh for after a night out drinking, i have an extreme sense of anxiety (hangxiety) and guilt that i had done something wrong that night. So OCD kicks in as usual and starts thinking of the tiny gap in the journey that i don’t really remember that well because most likely i was just walking not doing much but OCD/my brain started filling it with fear that i did something wrong, I couldn’t think of anything that i did wrong that night and all i kept thinking was what if i did the worse possible thing that i could have done and that was kiss another girl as my amazing relationship would be ruined. After ruminating and ruminating for hrs on end for a couple of days i started visualising me kissing a girl on holiday, i have no memory of a face or situation just the vision of me kissing a girl with no face in either 3rd or 1st person. I kept going back to it saying I wouldn’t do that and why would i have walked home completely fine get a McDonalds, be happy and normal a lil tipsy though when i spoke to my friend at the hotel room, I spoke nothing about a cheating situation to him just about how good the burger was. I would know the second and remember completely the moment that if cheated on the love of my life wouldn’t i? It would have shocked me sober and scar my brain forever wouldn’t it? On the last day of my holiday i had stopped ruminating and didn’t have anxiety over the situation at all no more i kind of accepted that i didn’t do anything and gave the thought no attention. That was the case until one of my friends who also had a girlfriend had cheated on her the last night out on holiday and he said he couldn’t remember it very well and this was the ultimate trigger i went from nice and calm happy to go home, to full mental breakdown on the phone to my parents. Ruminating started again and it just didn’t end the what ifs kept going and going, with the main why/what if being, “if i didn’t do anything wrong why do i have this awful vision of me cheating on holiday?” I sat there on a 5 hr flight doubting, feeling guilty and making up all sorts of conclusions, even with all the reassurance from my friends and parents saying i didn’t and wouldn’t, but how would they know they weren’t there? I got back to England and as soon as i was home i went and saw my girlfriend, i could barely look at her the same as i did before holiday i just felt guilty but tried my best to ignore it, and be okay with my girlfriend and not show it but, everytime id laugh, talk about the future or just genuinely be really happy with her, id always get the though “what happens if i did do it?” And then id get worried cos i wouldn’t get to have a future with the girl i really do genuinely love. Nearly a month down the line i still think about it everyday while i have been getting therapy to help my OCD, but overall i have been a lot better and at one point for a week my mind wouldn’t even bother giving attention to it. But recently my mind has started drawing attention to it again and when I am with my girlfriend i just feel guilty and get down, start ruminating with the what ifs and making new Scenarios about the event again. It has got to the point where i just want to stop the torture and tell her i did it even though i know i wouldn’t and didn’t do it and that the vision is obviously fake. I relapse on the situation all the time and I just sit there wondering when will this “fake memory OCD” end as the anxiety and down moods i get from it has already started affecting my relationship as it constantly plays on my mind and i always sit there and think if i feel guilty i must be guilty. Sorry if this was a very long read just had to get this down, but if anyone else has experienced something like this could u please message how u have handled it as i am struggling at the moment and i don’t want it to affect my life too much, thank-you.

does anyone else ever feel like calling a private investigator on themselves so they can confirm or deny an event that took place ? desperately racking my mind for the memories, timeline, evidence is so exhausting bc it was too long ago to remember ☹️

I know it would be the best thing for recovery but i feel like its false to say every bad emotion or thought that we have is ocd... i would like if it would be true but it sounds unrealistic. Sometimes when i feel like i did something bad but im not sure, i get a strong feeling of guilt and beforeni would fall into that spiral of depression, i say its just ocd cause of the guilt feeling... but its normal that if you do something bad you feel guilt... so then i feel bad that maybe i avoid accepting that i did something bad and after that im afraid that im bad or what i did was bad and im trying to see if really is bad or its just my emotions, but that feels like trying to avoid accepting that i did something bad😅😅 I deal with alot of strange emotions and saying that every bad feeling i have is ocd... idk feels like im avoiding my feelings... But am i wrong? Is it really ocd ruling our emotions so we should count as ocd every negative emotion or reaction we have?

I always get scared that my boyfriend is not moral enough or something for me. We agree on most things about moral/social issues but sometimes he thinks somethings aren’t as big of a deal as I do. It scares me because what if he is wong and people think he is a bad person. I know he is a good person and he treats everyone well but I think I’m afraid of finding out he is not. Or like what if other people believe he should be more involved with an issue. I hate this cause it takes up so much of my time thinking.

I know people deal with this for years, with the anxiety, intrusive thoughts, unwanted feelings, depression, sadness,etc. it hits different when it’s unwanted bro. I am so genuinely tired, I do not deserve this mindset. Nor the anxiety. Like why me. & I don’t want this for years bro. I just can’t do it. Like I’m really tired & I don’t like myself, for the very first time. I do not like myself.

When closing your eyes do you start to notice imaginary convos or stories that relate to movies, things you’ve seen, or situations you’ve been in? I’m told this is a form of thought suppression but what do you do to refocus when trying to sleep because you realize these are made up stories etc ? So I pray? Count till I knock out?

how can you deal with regret from a real event 😣

is anyone currently on zoloft / have experience with it? i just got prescribed it and am really nervous about the side effects.

Hey guys! I have finally set up an appointment with a mental health specialist but it is going to be out a couple weeks so in the mean time i’ve been dealing with a pretty bad ocd flare up its been abt a month. My thing is I do things that I think are the end of the world and I ruminate and then go around and bother everyone around me and confess everything all the time in order to get reassurance from everyone. I feel better after getting reassurance so should I keep doing it or is it a compulsion? Should I learn to manage it without having to confess everything or should I continue to? I just dont know if its the right thing to constantly be asking everyone around me if im okay 24/7. I know it helps but then i still spiral even after they have told me its okay. Does anyone know how to deal with this? or have dealt with this? What is the right thing to do?

struggling so bad when pocd and wanna give up because i feel like a pedo here’s my story: this summer i began babysitting for a one year old boy who i love and adore. during this summer i had perfectionism ocd and rocd. i never would’ve thought that pocd would’ve been added to the list. but it started off one day i was changing the baby and i got these terrible intrusive thoughts of doing something sexual to him. this freaked me out and the more i wanted to get the thoughts out of my head the more they came. i was terrified. then i stared thing about the baby while me and my bf did sexual things. they were all intrusive thoughts but i hated them. soon i felt like if i touched the baby in any way that i was doing something inappropriate. like if i was changing him and had to wipe him that oh what if i hit his private part and went down a spiral of thinking it was inappropriate. a while ago i had a false memory that the baby had triggered my groinal response. i was at the the house i babysit for and i straddled their couch and of course it triggered my groinal response because this event was a while ago when i remembered i convinced myself it was the baby sitting on my lap that would have caused this sensation. this sent me down a spiral of freaking out. i thought you could only get a groinal response from contact at the time. so not wanting to use the baby i used stuffed animals to place on my lap and on my private part to see if it “felt good” i told myself i’m not going to use the baby to check for my groinal response. then i was playing with the baby on my lap and i had the thought of “what i’m using the baby to check for my groinal response” but here’s the issue. i don’t remember when i thought this thought. if i thought of it before i put him on my lap or while i was playing with him on my lap. i’ve replayed this event so many times. since i only thought groinal responses can be triggered from contact down there i was worried i purposely put him on my private part to see if it felt good. what actually happened was i put him on my lap and was playing with him. i don’t even think i put him on my private part of my intention was even to check i just think it was a thought that came to mind while playing with him. ever since that i’ve replayed this event many many times. i can’t even remember what happened at this point. i’ve convinced myself i’m a pedo. i told myself i sexually assaulted him. the thing i’m so worried is if i put him on my private part to test if it felt good that it would be assault. and since i can’t remember if i did or not i’ve convinced myself i sexually assaulted him. i think things like how would my parents feel raising a rapist. it’s been hell and back and i’m suffering so much i wanna give up. i babysat him and put him on my lap again and was playing with him like i did last time. but this time i purposely put him on there to test if anything i was doing would touch my private part. like as in i recreated what i thought i did last time just to make sure none of the ways i was playing with him would’ve touched my private parts. which gave my temporary relief. i know people have told me that i didn’t do anything wrong or that i probably never put him on my lap and my intention wasn’t to put him on my private parts. but i can’t believe anyone or anything because im just convinced im a rapist and it sucks so badly. i’ve tried to ignore these things and not let it get to me but it’s so hard. anything helps.

Hi! This is my first post ever on this app. It’s been almost 2 years since I walked away from my ex boyfriend after he lead me on. Months after we broke up, he wrote me a letter which prompted me to contact him again. He started flirting with me, talking about the future, talked about trips he wanted to take with me, things like that. It made me super happy. I always asked to make sure that we were on the same page with things so that my intentions were correct. When I went and visited him, he was very affectionate and loving. But a couple weeks after, I asked if we were dating again and he promptly said he only wanted to be friends and that his whole intention was to only be friends with me. It was absolutely heart shattering, so I walked away. I tried moving on by going on several dates with guys but nothing stuck. At this point, my self esteem was so low that I was kind of trying to distract myself/fill the void with tinder dates. I went on a date with this one guy who I hit it off with pretty well and it seemed like he liked me, but when I asked to hang out again, he told me he didn’t think we were right for each other. I stopped using dating apps after I had been aggressively groped by the last two of my dates. A year later I started developing feelings for one of my friends (whom I also met on Tinder). He had a crush on me for a long time so I thought things would work out. Turns out he had been seeing me and another girl at the same time, then ghosted me when he started dating her. This spring I had randomly looked at my ex’s Facebook since I noticed that he changed his profile and saw that his status said he was in a relationship. I broke down. I was still in love with this person and I was struggling so badly with meeting other people. I kept getting these intrusive thoughts about how happy he must be with his new partner. I don’t know what this person looks like, they’re not tagged or anything on his social media. But that couldn’t stop me from making up stories. I couldn’t stop wondering why I wasn’t enough for him, or what was wrong with me. I kept hearing voices convincing me how I am a failure and how I will die alone, and how I was never enough for him. Just non-stop. My obsessive thoughts about my ex got so badly I thought of ending my own life. I started becoming very self conscious about not having a partner when all of my friends in college started getting into relationships which left me alone quite a ton. I kept worrying about not being able to move on. If he’s moved on, why couldn’t I…? The weird thing about him is that I found out he was still following many of my friends and family members; following my mom on both of her accounts. When I told her about it, she removed him off. But he continues to follow my friends even after some of them have posted pictures of me with them. This would make me spiral even more. It didn’t help either that I was suffering in school, I took so many hard classes to get into nursing school that I burned out entirely. So now I was a failure in school too, which lowered my self esteem even more. I had to move back in to my parents house to help recover my credits. I am so lost on where I want to go in life that I became so afraid and trapped. I continued to make up stories about my ex living happily on his own with his new truck and his new girlfriend. I couldn’t stop comparing myself to him since I really failed this year. I am currently trying a new medication that has been helping me with these obsessive thoughts and started getting back into dating apps. But I still get so scared that I will never move on and that I’ll be alone for the rest of my life.

What if you did something extremely horrible as a child that you didn’t know how horrible the events were that your POCD and real events OCD targets? Does it make the intrusive thoughts true? I'm getting anxious from my POCD and real event OCD based on real events (3 times) from when I was 13…… I don't ever want to ever be a P at all… I don't ever want to ever be a Chomo at all... i don’t ever want to ever be a rapist at all… I was 13 when these real events happened and now I'm 22… I've asked my mom about this so many times and every time she tells me that it's not serious anymore, that the person is okay, and that I'm not a rapist or a P or a chomo... a former ocd therapist said “Thirteen-year-old children do not have an adult's sexual understanding or responsibility. So, you can see why you didn't realise the horribleness of an event until you matured. So now, in the present, you know yourself to be a good moral person. It allows you to let go of the past…” I didn’t realize how horrible the real events actually were… I was 13 at the time… now I’m 22… my POCD and real event OCD call me a P or a chomo because of the real events… while my mom reassures me all the time that it’s all over, that it’s not serious anymore, that the person is okay, and that I’m not a P or a rapist or a chomo, but when I was doing compulsive research, I remember when I saw a post on a non OCD forum about someone’s similar situation to mine and two people said to the person that they m*lested and that they needed  to turn themselves in… I don’t ever want to ever be a P or a chomo in any way shape or form… i didn’t know how horrible the real events were when I was 13… I really didn’t… and after the real events I never did anything like that ever again, and I never once ever thought (before, and after) about doing stuff with kids in any way shape or form... I never once fantasized about kids or wanted to do anything with kids… I was 13 and didn’t realize how horrible the actions were at the time and I never did it ever again… I never once fantasized about kids before or after the real event… I don't ever want to ever harm a child in any way shape or form... I seriously don't ever want to do that to any child in any way shape or form and I seriously don't ever want to do anything like that to any kid now or in the future… I never have had any fantasies about kids and I don't ever want to... I don't ever want to ever be a P or a chomo in any way shape or form... I was 13….. and after the real events I never did anything like that ever again, and I never once ever thought (before, and after) about doing stuff with kids in any way shape or form... I never once fantasized about kids or wanted to do anything with kids…  I was 13 and didn’t realize how horrible the actions were at the time and I never did it ever again… I never once fantasized about kids before or after the real event… And it’s comparing me to actual P’s and chomo’s who did stuff from 12-15… and making me think I’m a P and a Chomo because of it… I don’t ever want to ever be a P or a chomo in any way… 😭😭😭 and I get intrusive thoughts of people calling me a P and a chomo and me getting arrested… I don’t ever want to ever be a P or a chomo… the real events happened only 3 times and I really didn’t know how horrible it was… I don’t ever want to ever be a P or a chomo in any way… I don’t want to ever be attracted to or harm kids in any way… 😭😭😭

I keep thinking what if I was sexually abused then I said is that why I’m attracted to triggers. But I’m not, am I saying that because I feel false attraction and I believe it’s true when it’s not