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What would a good start/hook be for a college essay about OCD. I mean I can’t just be like “when I was 10 I thought I was sexually attracted to my sister….” although that would definitely get their attention 😭

I don't know what this is but I don't think I can take another thing wrong with me. Everything in my life is going down hill and I'm so afraid of more things that would impact the quality of my life. So I was really worried about my eyes for a bit and then out of nowhere I started focusing and seeing sort of like static or pixels or noise when looking at a plain wall. I'm okay when I'm distracted though. Then today I was out on a walk and I noticed when I'm looking at the trees when it's a bit dark I can see that noise, static mostly when I don't focus on something. I'm so scared it's visual snow. I've also been really focusing on eye floaters. I can't take another thing wrong with me. I want to cry:(

I don't know why I did this but I decided to help a minor with OCD. I don't like talking to children and I made that clear to myself at the time and to this person. But, I still did it. I just wish I knew why. I hate that I still did it because it's given me a ton of guilt now. They suffered from POCD and I do as well (which is ironic since this is giving me bad POCD triggers) and all I wanted to do was help them with OCD. I just don't understand why I would take it to DMs. It makes no sense. There's people I have replied to on here and I don't know their age and they could be minors, which gives me less worry but still worry. The biggest problem I have with this event is the topics we discussed within OCD. Since it's about POCD and I think SOOCD we spoke about pretty sensitive topics that aligned with our OCD. But I just feel like I shouldn't have. I sometimes think to myself that if I were a therapist talking to a minor about POCD, that wouldn't be wrong. It's their job to do so. It isn't my job to do that though. I guess I just wanted to do good? But why with this person in particular? They knew there were things I was uncomfortable with and didn't want to go forward with. Eventually I stopped talking with this person because I felt like I was no longer helping with the constant reassurance I was giving and I was just too uncomfortable with talking with a minor. I just wasn't okay with it and I'm still not okay with it now. I want to tell myself that I was just trying to help this person, I knew I didn't want to do anything wrong, but I felt like I did something wrong inadvertently by just doing this. There were pretty adult key words that I can recall in the conversations we had and that disturbs me greatly. From the receiving end and sending. This never gave me intense anxiety at the time so why now? I just can't let go of this. I feel like I've committed a crime and I feel like my life is over everytime I think about this. I feel like I'm just failing my life. It's hard to do anything and be happy without thinking about this. I get worried that I'll be called some kind of groomer because of this even though my intent wasn't to take advantage of this person. Only to help them. Again, I don't know what made me go with it but I went with it.

How much time did you need?

I always see self doubt in relationship ocd where the person doubts they love their person, but I feel like I more often struggle with believing my person loves me. Is anyone else this way?

I got diagnozed with OCD two years ago. Since my teenage years, I suffered from recurrent depressive episodes and also OCD related themes. I am currently doing ERP with NOCD but I feel I need to address my depressive moods as well. Is anyone doing ERP and CBT or talk therapy or anything else in parallel or has experience in treating both in parallel?

Has anyone experienced OCD and the fear of having a cancerous tumor in their stomach? I was struggling with believing I had skin cancer (still do a little) but over the last few days I started to notice things moving around in my stomach and my brain immediately went to stomach cancer. I’ve been feeling like very heavily bloated and now pain in my right side. I don’t know if I should get it checked out or if this is common with OCD still? Anyone’s help would be appreciated.

Hey, I've been diagnosed with OCD 4 years ago... I did CBT therapy twice, now I start schema therapy. However I learnt some CBT skills and how to journal my thoughts, I still don't know a lot of times how to handle OCD alone when something bothers me... My thoughts are hard to recognize because it's mostly ruminating and comparing, my head hurts from it. I see it's not recommended to do ERP without a therapist, but what if I did CBT therapy twice already? Will it be good if I'm trying with ERP technics alone? Unfortunately, there is no "ERP therapist" in my country specifically. How should I handle my thoughts? There is a lot of time when I can let them alone, but I don't know which thoughts are bad or is it a compulsion if I directly DON'T think about something, or is that a compulsion if I DO think about it... So confusing. I'm so sad and lost.

As a high schooler, I hung out with the wrong crowd... while I wasnt the type of student to vape or drink or get myself arrested, I would listen to my friends and laughed when they talked about making fun of people who didn't deserve it... or listening in on, or looking at dirty secrets about people we interacted with... as an adult, as someone who has grown and matured, I feel bad for participating in this type of behavior, and while i didn't initiate or partake in these behaviors that my friends personally did, i feel like me listening in or laughing makes me feel like a bad human being... im about to be 23 now, and these events occured when i was 16-17... i feel like a bad human being and my intrusive thoughts love to tell me how horrible of a person i am now... i genuinely regret it... i want to be a good person who does good things...

I strangely woke up early, from an unexpectedly nice dream. I felt good. This wasn't what usually happens, so I was a bit worried. I was waiting for intrusive images to appear but they didn't. So then I willingly remembered about bad things, about previous traumatic triggers and I was reminded of the horrible impression they left on me and I got in a bad mood. It seems like that to all the happiness in the world I'm going to have to confront myself with all the traumatic triggers I have encountered throughout my life. You can't forget about triggers, they will always be stored in your memory and I'm sad about that. I remembered that time where I had a horrible intrusive image, it was a n*ked image, and I was afraid of my mind associating it to something real, so my brain obviously did that. It gave the intrusive image the face of a girl I used to babysit when I was younger. And it was different from usual intusive images, because it was associated to reality. It was the first time something like that happened to me. I can't shake off the innocent face of her and the fact that my brain did something like that. And after that I was thinking why intrusive images about real individuals that I knew in my life would leave me such an unusual stronger effect than other intrusive images, of vaguer triggers, so I remembered this triggering ad that kept appearing on youtube and I did something horrible: I used her as an example to see if it would leave me the same traumatic impression as the other one, I pictured her n*ked. So it wasn't an intrusive image but something that I willingly did and that makes me feel guilty and not innocent like a victim of OCD, I'm not "justified". For some reason it didn't trigger me, maybe because the image was vague, not vivid, it was more of a vague idea with a random not visible triggering element in it, so it wasn't like graphic like past intrusive images. But the fact that it didn't trigger me and that I got worried about what I did a bit too late for my liking bothers me a lot. I didn't realise it at first, but maybe because I was being rational. It doesn't trigger me still, the image that know has become a memory that persists currently unwanted in my mind is vague, but it bothers me a lot that it wasn't an intrusive image and that I thought about it. I didn't have ill intentions obviously, I didn't think about that because I liked it, I was trying to have an explanation. But still why would I do that? I didn't have the permission to do something like that at all, not that I would need it in the first place because it shouldn't happen in the first place. I feel horrible. The follow up questions are not me asking for reassurance but questions that I want to know to not feel like the exception, to see if it a relatable experience, because it doesn't feel like it. Has something like this happened to you? If so how do you deal with these type of intrusive images that take things from real life and make them feel more triggering? What about the ethics and morals of the last part? It wasn't an intrusive image, I did that thing, and it's clear that I didn't like it, but how does that change what I did? I don't think this is normal at all, or did this happen you as well?

Does anyone on here struggle with same extreme urge to pick their face because in doing so they feel like it keeps it cleaner? I feel alone in this and upset

Hi, I have been having extreme stress for years and after my brother's diagnosis of his MS i started to develop physical symptoms like tingling in legs. I became restless and scared that I have the same. I ended up doing MRI which were all clean but I wasn't able to stop the body checking. Then I was put on Zoloft 50mg and nobody told me about the side effects and I had all of them including first time panic attack and visit to psychiatric hospital. Been told I have to ride out the worsening before it gets better. I struggled but I managed to continue until I started to get better. I saw light end of tunnel and out of blue first time i started having obsessive thoughts in graphical form of hurting my family and people on the street. Everything I see appeared in my mind destroyed. ( See a window it will break, see peoples neck graphic images of it getting cut) this keeps repeating constantly. I thought it will stop due med adjustments but it didn't. It started cause me so huge distress that I developed tinnitus that is constantly there. I got scared of any meds and with talking to my doctor i tapered off the med but the obsessions and the tinnitus sadly remained. I am being tortured by the fear of having OCD and those thoughts that don't let me in peace for the rest of my life and that I will never be myself again. When they leave me in peace for short time I ask myself "where are they" and ofc they reappear. If I will visit my parents the first thing I think of are this thoughts and not something beautiful or positive and that really keeps me from losing joy of visiting people I like.I accepted it that this are thoughts and that they pose no harm to anyone but since it's constantly there i can't focus on my life and i feel like sitting in the cinema and watching images or videos that I don't like and the actual fear isn't from the content but the fear that my life got ruined. The most distressing feeling is actually how my brain is repeating everything that is against me at that moment. If i try to meditate and try to imagine a nice and beautiful place with a tree that is green my mind turns it to burning. Same is with a house or if i imagine a person it endsup being killed. Can it be OCD or this sounds more like severe GAD? Has anyone with similar experiences an advice for me?

is catastrophizing when you’re going through a panic or anxiety attack a compulsion? i do this all of the time and it makes my anxiety so much worse, but it’s so hard to not do

I am starting to finally come to terms with my SOOCD thoughts and give them less power. I’ve been getting them less and less, but now I’m feeling numb towards my boyfriend. I’ve had ROCD and SOOCD for awhile now, and I just feel so numb and confused about what if I don’t actually love him? I hate this. I can’t picture myself with anyone else in this world and I just am constantly questioning this feeling of doubt. 😣

I recently got massively triggered by something at work that put me into a real bad spiral regarding harm OCD and contamination OCD oriented towards other people for the most part. I worked in a grocery store which sells perishable foods and makes fresh food as well so food safety and chemical safety are extremely important. Long story short after seeing other people doing things wrong I started to examine my own job and noticed I've been doing lots of the job wrong for years and never got proper training for a lot of things or corrected, and I failed to speak up about it and ended up training other people in my position. I never worked with making food but was tasked with returning perishable items to the coolers if they were unwanted. So the lack of cut and dry policy on what exactly can or cannot go back and it being mostly based of a sense of touch feeling if the item is still cold or frozen made me get worried that we were potentially putting items away that were no longer safe to consume, that and I saw some more things that needed genuine fixing and brought them up to management. But I lost confidence that I was ever doing things right in any part of my job, including the cleaning parts of it as I had janitorial duties and was never shown how to do that part of the job. And the fact I trained other people who would also be doing those same things incorrectly made me panic. I've been sending endless lists of things to my boss that I think need fixing, of things that should be disinfected, things that could contribute to cross contamination, things that could cause chemical exposure, things that could cause food poisoning. I can't stop myself as just as I think that I've said everything that can be said, I'll wake up in the middle of the night with new things that need fixing. I massively fear the butterfly effect, that my actions working there have contributed directly or indirectly in the harm of others. They are taking the genuine concerns into account but even then I fear that me bringing things up and potentially causing changes could cause something bad to happen and that something's should just be left alone. The thought of someone's kids or other loved ones getting sick or dying because of mistakes I've made and trained into others due to not being properly trained myself is unbearable. I had to get medicated and take benzos because the anxiety and guilt made me barely able to eat, drink, or sleep. I'm not even planning on going back, I've been there so long just coasting in life and need to get things in order and actually do something. I just fear leaving that place without bringing up every possible issue, mistakes I've made or things I've seen throughout the years will result in people being harmed. I don't know if I can ever get to the point where I feel I've "said my piece" and can walk away without worrying about it. Too many things were going wrong for too many years for me to feel confident at all that I've done all I can go help them fix their mistakes and mine. I've genuinely probably written a small book worth of things and sent them to my boss at this point. It's exhausting, embarrassing, etc. but I feel if I don't do all that I can that my inaction is going to cause people to get harmed by these unfixed problems. Has anyone else dealt with anything similar? This is the biggest struggle I've ever faced in my life...

i am dealing with SOOCD at the moment im married and have 3 kids this theme has been coming and going for months now and makes me question even more if i am gay ,my thing is when i look at my husband i feel nothing no attraction which makes me so anxious and i am constantly looking at him and checking how i feel and makes me even more anxious because i then think ok then you are gay and are indenial the feelings just seem sooo real though i have even tried accepting that i am gay which gives me panic attacks any help on this theme please?🥲

my mom shared a post with me about someone we knew being arrested for cp things. i’ve been obsessing over it for like 30 min now. i feel like i want to watch those things and i would like it. would i actually do it? no. do i feel like i would like it? yes. what if this isn’t ocd and i’m actually like that. i’ve done things in my past as a kid that could make me believe i’m a pdo and i just think what if i’m still like that or what if i am that. i feel like i don’t deserve to live. i’ve been imagining these types of things to test if i really like it and i feel like i do, i feel gross.

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I have alot of problems with this, this has been my main obsessions. The biggest trigger for me is this bible verse: “whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is a sin” (James4:17) Alot of times I feel like what i do is a sin, joking or laughing at something, but then i feel angry cause i cant enjoy my life and i always criticize myself that what i do is sin, but maybe im just legalistic, and maybe its not a sin, but then i feel like im just trying to talk myself into continuing the sin. I feel like im really a fraud, cause i talk myself into thinking im not sinned. Then this verse comes in my mind and i feel worse. So i tell you what happened now. Someone in my workplace came to me and asked if i have credit card to send him money and he will give me the money in cash, and basically lied and said no i dont have, i dont use my credit card. Then i felt really bad that im a sinner and i dont help others, im selfish, I knew i shouldve helped but i decided to not and im a bad person for that. For me i had an explanation why i lied. I use my credit card to save money, i really dont like spendig that money, or even if i do i know how much i spend, every month i know how much money i will spend take out from there. Sometimes i let myself spend more like this month, but im really sensitive about this, cause i want to buy a car and i know if i will spend money i will not have that car as soon as i want. So if i have cash, i know i will spend that, i wont save that cause i use my credit card for that, so i dont want to take out money from my credit card to get cash cause i will spend that cash. And i have a story to, cause this happened before with another person, i gave him money from my credit card, he gave me cash, and the next day, he came again, and the third day be came again. So 3 times i took out money from my card and i got cash, some would say you shouldve saved that cash, but things happened and i had to spend that money... i know myself, if i dont have cash then i know i wont spend money, but if i have then i will spend it. Credit card is for saving money and sometimes spending it but i have a limit, and cash is for spendig it. But i feel like im just selfish that i lied and i didnt helped him, i feel like im a bad person for that. This was just an exemple but everyday i battle with this, did i commit a sin, i feel like i did, or i feel like what im doing is a sin, but i still contonue it and i feel bad cause of this bible verse...

I’ve recently been on my period and it’s like hell I’ve been having 3-4 panic attacks each day and I wonder if it’s my OCD getting worse or if it’s my period since I tend to get very sensitive during my week.. do you also go through heightened stress/anxiety when on your period? I’ve notice this happens a lot when it’s my time of the month. I’ve also been very paranoid.