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I have violent intrusive thoughts of killing my mom or killing people or harming my pets. I’ve been dealing with this for 10 years now, but it keeps getting worse. I keep taking medication but it’s not working.

Every highly anxious person has to cope with intrusive thoughts. Intrusive thoughts are frightening thoughts about what might happen to you or someone you care about, or what you might do to yourself or another person. They seem to come from outside of your control, and their content feels alien and threatening. For some people, intrusive thoughts are part and parcel of panic or intense anxiety. In these types of intrusive thoughts, it feels like the thoughts come about as a result of the anxiety, and they function to add more fear to the anxiety you are already experiencing. The intrusive thoughts keep the anxiety going, and maintain the fear-producing spiral. So, for example, you might think, “what if I have a heart attack?” in the midst of an anxiety attack. You are already in the altered state of consciousness that I call anxious thinking, and your thoughts feel likely to happen. However, there is another class of intrusive thoughts that I call intrusive obsessive thoughts. These thoughts seem to come from out of nowhere, arrive with a distressing whoosh, and cause a great deal of anxiety. The content of intrusive obsessive thoughts almost always focus on sexual or violent images. Here are typical examples of intrusive obsessive thoughts: “Killing someone. Torturing a pet animal. Stabbing a child. Throwing someone (or yourself) out of a window. Jumping onto a train track as the train comes into the station. Molesting a child. Raping someone. Taking off your clothes in public.” This is not a complete list, but it gives you a good feeling of the content of these thoughts. People who experience intrusive obsessive thoughts are afraid that they might commit the acts they picture in their mind. They might imagine hurting someone or committing an act of sexual violation. Intrusive obsessive thoughts can be very explicit, and most people are embarrassed and frightened of them. There are a number of myths about intrusive obsessive thoughts. The greatest myth is that having thoughts of a sexual or violent nature mean that you want to do the things that come into your mind.This is not true. You do not want to do the things that enter your mind when you have intrusive obsessive thoughts. In fact, the opposite is true. People with intrusive obsessive thoughts are gentle and non-violent. FULL ARTICLE: https://drmartinseif.com/intrusive-thoughts/

I don’t know much about my past. I just learned yesterday that my father was in the military. Tonight, i lost it and got mad at my mom. I was upset because ive been so ignorant about my upbringing. She literally laughed at my meltdown and said ‘thats not my responsibility , you never asked’. I have asked about my father… many many times before. She either tells me very little or doesn’t talk about it at all. I’m beginning to believe I’m not worth it. I’m a burden. A joke. Pointless, really.

I need more happy recovery story’s to feel hope on I can get better. I need to know the except steps they took to recovery.

I said something and the word I used came across so wrong, and now I can’t stop shouting at myself that im a disgusting horrible gross human being and that I really fucked up and that I should crawl under a rock and perish. When I DIDNT EVEN MESN IT THE WAY J BRAIN IS TELLING ME I SAID IT! Idk if that makes sense but I’m really stressing myself out and I wanna forget about it but I CANT

Does anyone feel scared of being outside or getting on with life while dealing with this? I’ve struggled with existential Ocd for the past few months and I am scared to be out and about because I’m scared of thinking into stuff or relapsing, or looking at something and it looks weird or unreal. Sometimes even watching people trigger me, I Haven’t been going to work because I’m scared to drive alone and also avoid being out at night at all costs because any of my worst panic attacks have been in the passenger seat of bfs car in the dark😢

I struggle really bad lately with wanting to confess every bad thing I’ve done to my partner I already gave him a list of people I’ve slept with but now my mind wants to tell him everyone I’ve done anything with kissed, sent nudes etc. I am a 21 year old F and all these things were done in high school I was very promiscuous and broken and sought male attention but since the last 3 years we’ve been together I never felt this need but since now I’ve told him the people I’ve slept with we have been separated due to me giving details and saying things I shouldn’t have about them because my ocd said I had to or I was keeping it from him. I still fell like I’m keeping this stuff from him even though It happened 3-5 years ago like what is he knows these people what if we see them in public one day what if he works with them etc we live in a smaller town and it just scares me so much. Anyone else felt with this???,

i was just looking in the fridge and there was some raw meat in a container but i didn’t know that it was meat so i opened the container to check what it was. and i don’t know if it was blood or if they were marinating it but a little bit of it got on my fingers and i wiped my hand on my clothes without thinking and then i just rinsed my hand in the sink, and thought it would be fine cause i only touched the container and i also wasn’t really sure if it was meat or not yet because i didn’t get a good look at it and i just kept doing what i was doing, but then i kept thinking about it and started realizing it wasn’t fine and went to wash my hands with soap and i didn’t know if i needed to change my clothes or not so i thought it was fine too and laid in my bed and stuff and now i realized that i should’ve changed my clothes and i did but now the bacteria could be on my bed and other places and i don’t remember everywhere i touched and i can’t think straight and im too scared to leave my room and wash everything in case of spreading it more and my dad and brother are drinking so they’re not gonna listen to me if i said to wipe everything out there and im just freaking out. i feel horrible for being so careless and i’m really scared that my pets and dad and brother will get sick because of me

I don’t know if anyone else feels this way but in the mornings for the past few months now I feel like I’ve been waking up with my mind already intensely racing about like 100 different random things. It makes me very distressed and causes me to end up being in my head like all day and feels like I can never just be in the present moment and focus on what’s going on because I’m constantly just in my head thinking about my problems.

TW - Christian things Anyone else feel unheard when they talk about their feelings/fears? I feel like I can never get anyone to listen. Specifically, for example, every time I bring up that I'm a Christian who feels like God has a special place in His heart for the Israelites versus the Gentiles, nobody seems to care to simply listen to me, especially not for more than one time of hearing me. They'll try to prove that I'm wrong though. I wish I had someone who would listen. I kinda gave up looking though.

What do you do when you feel something you’ve done is unforgivable? How do you move on? I have tried radical self acceptance, lots of therapy, and many other things to try to move forward in life. But I’m stuck in a never ending spiral of self loathing. Do I just need to accept/embrace that I’m a villain? I feel so hopeless.

So i like this guy da da da and we have been seeing eachother for sometime now and we had a fight over wanting to call off things and he initially didn't and i did and then he got mad about that cause we have had this conversation a few times and he said now he wants to but i didn't then cause i had an emotionally roller coaster kinda day that day and didn't know what was coming from my mouth and but then things escalated and i tried to make amends he said he wants time to think i was like okay but the part that scares me is all along this relationship i have been looking at astrotalk this app with astrologers telling you about your life and i have been diagnosed with ocd so I run to reassurance and i did with this someone told me to leave him and someone told me to stay and someone said its okay to wait but now the thing is i dont know who to believe at this point and whether or not to believe it at all cause any trigger makes me run to it so i am not in the best space tbh i am asking for reassurance from random strangers on an app that can lie to me and i will believe it cause sometimes it will give me the reassurance i need and that is just making me so mad at myself that i have gotten to feel so weak because of a guy and this time as well i spent money and spoke to someone and they said all will be fine but what if its not and what if things dont work out and maybe she is not right and the others as well and more than that maybe this entire thing is a lie and I believe in god so why am I believing in this and wouldn't god take this as a sin maybe? And think if i dont trust him and trust these people then it will be so and god will punish me..

So I had my second appt with my therapist and I’m feeling down cause I wanted to tell her about an intrusive thought that’s been bothering me but I was scared she would be like umm that’s not normal but anyways she told me to try and do like when a thought comes to stop myself spiraling and do deep breathing and refocus myself into the present and I’m trying to it’s just I’m so paranoid over this thought I know a thought is just a thought but it feels so real and it’s freaking me out and it doesn’t help cause I was so mad when it happened I’m like what is wrong with me and worried.

i’ve had ocd for a while now and my parents were in denial because they didn’t want me to be labeled as mentally ill. they constantly ask me why i don’t have the stereotypical OCD symptoms such as cleaning and organizing stuff. i am a somewhat messy person because i never have time to clean when i’m doing my “rituals”. i’ve told my mom about my obsessions and she always says the same thing, “why can’t you obsess over winning the lottery?” i’ve told her that it’s not how it works and that i don’t GET to choose my obsessions, it’s usually things i don’t want to happen. has anyone else experienced this? it feels like i’m being down played every time i express what i feel

So i like this guy da da da and we have been seeing eachother for sometime now and we had a fight over wanting to call off things and he initially didn't and i did and then he got mad about that cause we have had this conversation a few times and he said now he wants to but i didn't then cause i had an emotionally roller coaster kinda day that day and didn't know what was coming from my mouth and but then things escalated and i tried to make amends he said he wants time to think i was like okay but the part that scares me is all along this relationship i have been looking at astrotalk this app with astrologers telling you about your life and i have been diagnosed with ocd so i run to reassurance and i did with this someone told me to leave him and someone told me to stay and someone said its okay to wait but now the thing is i dont know who to believe at this point and whether or not to believe it at all cause any trigger makes me run to it so i am not in the best space tbh i am asking for reassurance from random strangers on an app that can lie to me and i will believe it cause sometimes it will give me the reassurance i need and that is just making me so mad at myself that i have gotten to feel so weak because of a guy and this time as well i spent money and spoke to someone and they said all will be fine but what if its not and what if things dont work out and maybe she is not right and the others as well and more than that maybe this entire thing is a lie and I believe in god so why am I believing in this and wouldn't god take this as a sin maybe?

I'd love if another mom could help. We co sleep still with our son. I was half in a dream but still felt like I knew what was happening in real life this morning. He was moving his foot a lot on my leg in real life and at the same time I had just fallen back to sleep. I started to have a dream. Then something in my dream was about an adult and it caused an intense groinal and I woke up and right as the groinal happened I thought " that was from the thing in the dream" But I'm terrified it's because my sons foot was moving on my leg. Because it was continuously. And after the dream his foot was still moving on my leg and I kept getting groinals still. Also, I'm always petrified to have an "o" in my sleep because it happens sometimes and I'm so worried that the intense groinal was actually an "o" since I woke up to it. And because it was intense. I can handle if it was just the dream but I can't handle if it was because of his foot moving on my leg. Or if somehow the dream got mixed with him doing that and caused it. Plus knowing I was half asleep so I still could feel his foot in my dream. Please help

How do people know the difference between a relationship not feeling right cause of rocd or not feeling right because it just isn't? I've been going through such a rough time with my ocd lately and I had started to feel a little stronger when I had a few days to myself. Now I'm back with my boyfriend and all the doubts, worries and bad feelings have started up again. I don't want to feel so awful when I'm with him, it feels unfair to both of us. So so hard to let it pass and not give in to my urges to just run away.

I've suffered from SOOCD since I was 12 and I'm now 22. I've been diagnosed three or four times (not completely sure) with OCD, but I struggle to believe that's what it is. The reason for this is that though I've never completed ERP successfully (I always continue compulsions) I will go months where the thoughts of being a lesbian are still there but I am able to function on a daily basis and think about other things-- I'll even think about how "this time, I've finally beaten it". Every three to four months though (and sometimes even longer), I will have a "relapse" where I am bedridden, I don't eat, I can barely sleep, I'm throwing up from anxiety, etc. This doesn't seem like a normal pattern of OCD or OCD recovery. I don't want to run the risk of treating something that isn't OCD. If anyone else has experienced this pattern, please let me know. Thanks.

I was a night out last saturday. I was talking to everyone in the bar. I had a similar thing 5 years ago and in the mean time a few times but not that sticky. Because I knew that I would panic when I drink and dont remember every little thing, I told my friend who was playing at the kicker table about every conversation that I had the evening. At the end of the night I knew almost everyone in the bar. At the end of the night I met a girl whi rememered me from that night 5 years ago. I guess that triggered me? I went to the toilet multiple times and remembered thinking about "what if I think I had sex tomorrow?" And imagined some stuff.Something like that I can not recall it a 100%. When we were going home I cried so much about meeting that girl from 5 years ago, i was just going crazy. I know think that I did have cheated on the toilet and that cryiing was because I did cheat. So the next day I guess everything was fine I was talking about the evening with my friends, they said I was a hyperactive squirell. And we were talking about the evening. Wehen I came home I told my bf that I missed him and told him about the evening. Something felt very off. The next day I was checking my body and saw scratches on my inner thigh.. i knew that I was peeing in a bush of thornes but somehow my mind just didnt want to accept it. Now 7 days later I have really disturbing images in my head of cheating on that toilet. I remember so much if that night but not everytime I went to the toilet. I am so sad.. i think its not ocd. It is real and i just surpressed it. I was feeling so good in that relationship of 8 years with my partner I love him more than everything, but I can nit let that images go. What if I thought having sex is no cheating... or that I needed to know how it felt like to cheat so I can be sure I didnt do it 5 years ago. I cant handle this!!!! I hate myself so much.. I somehow got out of this miseries of disturbing images with other real events like 5-6times but this time I think, it must have happened. What if I had mean thoughts about my boyfriend. Wat if I cheated on him 5 times ....

my intrusive thoughts regarding my false memory ocd are SO bad. i genuinely can’t tell what’s real or not anymore. one in particular is sticking with me and i’m not sure why. this is what it is: earlier today at work i was taking someones order. i was already getting intrusive thoughts so i was fighting compulsions (mine are sometimes physical) and was uncomfortable. the customer was trying to redeem their app points and i was ready to scan them, but it wasnt working and they said like nvm u dont have to worry about it. this is the part that my intrusive thoughts go for. i can’t remember what i said. i think i said okay and then tried to tell them their total but they gave me the money before i could finish and i said okay again? i have no idea, i literally can’t remember. when i was counting their change my intrusive thoughts were saying that i sounded rude or said something bad and just don’t remember. the customer was super nice and everything was fine but i just keep thinking about it. did i say something offensive or bad and just don’t remember?! did they hear it and pretend not to?? i can’t tell what’s real anymore. i keep forgetting things so quickly and my intrusive thoughts twist them, then when i think about what *couldve* happened my intrusive thoughts repeat horrible things and make me think I’M the one thinking it. does anyone else go through this?? am i crazy and a horrible person?? 😭😭