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the NOCD Community

How do y’all keep going? Especially when there’s work to do

OCD and ERP so difficult. ERP is so difficult, I want to try so hard. As I do not want to waste these sessions but as some days I feel like I cannot do it. Like how do I change my mindset.

Does anyone else feel not as triggered during your exposures vs when the intrusive thoughts come up out of nowhere???? I am starting back in on the ERP sessions for my subtypes that hold the most power over me. It is very uncomfortable. Feels so awkward and silly TBH to even entertain these thoughts and yet... HERE I AM! Thanks OCD. I am going go commit to the homework that my therapist has sent and hoping for the noise to quiet down soon

scared I hurt a younger cousin during childhood and growing up and I just don’t remember. scared he is traumatized by something I don’t remember doing. me and him would hangout here and there because he is like 9 years younger so I would treat him like a baby brother. I have videos of me showering him with kisses to be annoying and he was like eeeeeeee stop, I’m scared since in that video I was pushing his boundaries, that I did something much worse and I just “forgot”. and then I feel worse because my brain tells me I’m only worrying abt this because I did it. when I was a kid I was very hypersexual and did really weird things (nothing with my baby cousin) but I’m scared that I did something because of that also. I’m going to go see his mom, my aunt, my ocd is like what if she knows u did something and u don’t because u forgot. I’m so sad. I just want this to go away. I’ve been crying everyday, I’m so depressed.

Has anyone found a correlation in their OCD / Intrusive thoughts getting WAY worse during their cycle. I am doing fine with medication any other time but when I have my cycle it is debilitating… And have you found anything that helps?

Hi guys, so yesterday and the day before I was really doing well with my HOCD and I thought it would go. However today, I was stressed and ended up watching porn, I went down the wormhole and ended up on trans porn. Some parts I felt were quite hot but I can’t tell if I am into that or it was certain acts or the because I was already watching porn but it’s made me ruminate over those scenes to see if I like it and I couldn’t tell. I then went online to search up if porn can change your sexuality and ended up on Quora and found a page dedicated to gay experiences. They were encouraging and talking how nice gay sex is and whilst reading these stories it felt like it was quite hot and it’s disturbed me quite more. One guy who was similar to my age was curious and had sex with a guy and I’m scared it’ll happen to me. Now it feels like because it wasn’t a random instructive thought and there’s not much anxiety that maybe I am just curious and the only to know if i’m gay is to act these acts out and id enjoy it and become gay. I’m not sure, if it’s just the porn because I can’t imagine myself having a relationship with a guy. I’m also scared if I try to move on from this and these thoughts, Im just avoiding and suppressing who I am.

So my parents used to fight a lot because my mom didn't like what my dad was doing. She was a yeller, and pack up the kids and leave in the middle of the night. She swears it was once or twice but I remember several different tines that she had done this. I remember waking up and hearing her yelling at my dad. My dad was the type who rarely yelled back, he would just go silent till my mom got over herself. I almost wonder if watching/hearing what she did is a cause to my own relationship problems leading to rocd. Sometimes I yell like her and sometimes I shut down like my dad. But is she correct on it being twice or is this like a real event ocd?

hi i’ve been struggling with religion recently. when i was younger i went to a catholic school that was very poorly run and as a result i decided to not follow a religion when i left. within the past few months dealing with my ocd made me feel like there was no hope other than turning back to religion. i have been praying more frequently and i talk to God a lot abt my ocd. however i just bought a new cross necklace and have been wearing it for the past few days. however i got the intrusive thought this morning that if i wear a cross it means i am a hardcore conservative christian. and although there’s nothing wrong with that if you are, it is most definitely not who i am. so now i don’t know if i should still wear it. bc i also feel like if i take it off God will be mad at me and i’ll go to hell. i don’t go to church or read the bible or anything my religious journey to me is just the relationship between me and God and i am extremely private about it bc it’s extremely person to me. i just don’t know if following a religion is a good thing for me to do with ocd idk if lost

I am really struggling. I love my partner, she's wonderful, highly compatible, we have a lot of fun and she's beautiful! However, in the midst of a flare up, I keep being triggered by attractive women. Making me doubt my feelings. Or worry I a missing out on my 'dream woman' physically. My girfriend is genuinely beautiful, and she really knocked me over when we were dating. When flare ups subside I feel exceptionally lucky to have someone beautiful inside and out. But flareups give me serious fear of missing out, or making wrong choice. I try to remind myself than women on TV or dressed to impress don't look like this 24/7. My partner is a knock out with makeup, but I see her comfortable and content, in sportswear with no makeup. That illusion of perfection has been broken - I see the reality of a naturally beautiful woman. But those strangers I see... the illusion is still there. At that moment they're perfect, and for all I knoe, they're perfect all the time (although I really know thats not true). This triggers me really bad. Any tips on curbing it? I don't have desire to act on my attractions, the mere realisation of feeling attracted is what triggers me! It's awful.

Now that I’m over real event ocd I have talked about it so much I feel I have made my mistakes seem so much grander than they actually are and now my current paranoia ocd is latching on to that and saying that someone out to get me is going to make it seem like I did something I didn’t do and bc I made my real event ocd mistakes seem bad when they aren’t even that bad then it’s going to somehow seem true and framing me will be easy? Is this a gut feeling that this will happen or just fear because I think the world is filled with malicious people? Also is it normal with real event OCD to talk about your mistakes like they’re something horrible and then when you have a clear head you realize you’re fine? And is it normal that with paranoi ocd I fear that because I talked about real event ocd that now it’s easier to frame me even though I didn’t do anything actually?

Im feeling really low, im scared and sad that im here despite all the work i did for years, and i went to the same place i did before. I cant find help for this cause everyone is pushing this idea that "if you want to face panic and recover from it, you have to get checked by a doctor to know that EVERY symptom you have is not a big problem". This is very anxiety fueled, its not possible and its time consuming. I know cause i did that when i started to have anxiety and panic back in 2019. I went to every doctor to se if my symptoms are safe, it consumed time cause symptoms do change alot and its not like you just have one or two. I went to doctors alot, and here is the funny thing, i know that people appreciate doctors, i do too, and people really trust in what they say, but even that my symptoms were caused by anxiety and panic, i still got meds prescribed sometimes or they said something that still made me afraid of my health. One good exemple is that one of my friends has panic now and she went to get checked and its panic but the doctor said if she will have panic in the future it will worsen her health and she can develop hearth problems. True or not i dont care, but how do you face with panic if you think that everytime i have its making me prone to hearth issues? Either they say something that makes you spin more or they find something else that makes you spin. This is my experience. Now im having panic attacks again and the problem is that when i have it, im afraid that there might be a problem and i avoid it to get checked, but i was checked before, it was a long time ago, but bc of these experiences i dont want to go, cause i know it wont solve the problem, then i will get obsessed to check all my symptoms. This doesnt means that i always avoid doctors, not so long ago i had a back pain and i knew that thats not normal and without question i went to get treatment. But with this is different, its lot of symptoms, i know it wont solve it if i just get one done, and theres the possibility that they say something that makes me afraid more. I have alot of bad experiences with doctors,there are good too, but the anxiety related ones are really bad. Not to mention once i got diagnosed with lung fibrosis by a doctor and i was depressed for a whole week until i went to another one and they said im okay... When theres a serious problem i go to get checked but when theres signs that might be anxiety i wont cause they will just tell me things that will make me spin more. So yeah im stuck and spin over my panic, what if im its a real problem, even if its panic what if it will worsen my health, make me develop hearth issues, and i notice too that i want to get reassured cause im sure its panic but i get these what if thoughts and i want to know they arent true... but it will shift to another symptom. So can you share me something that can help me?

cheating has been always against my morals, most of the people i love the most got cheated on, including my boyfriend in his past relationship. i never wanted to cheat on him or hurt him. i have this classmate that i really wanna be friends with, she's fun to be around with, everyone in the class likes to tease her bc of her personality, and she's pretty too. she's one of the unproblematic person in my class that's why i wanna be friends with her so bad. fortunately, i became her friend, and we will be classmates for upcoming school year along with my bf. on the last week of may i started having thoughts about being attracted to her but i just ignored it. on june 3, she messaged on our gc jokingly wanting us to get her a boyfriend, i felt jealous that time but i never wanted to feel that way. i ignored it until june 5, we went to the university we will be enrolling for along with my bf. i acted normal around her, i always tease her a lot. june 5 at night the thoughts took over me, i felt so guilty thinking i cheated and my energy went from 100 to 0, my bf even asked me if i'm fine. i convinced myself that it's just a false attraction, but maybe it is a real attraction. now i'm wondering if i'm a cheater or not, because all this time i thought it's just a false attraction that's why i still treated her the same despite having those thoughts that i like her. i am still not sure if i am really attracted to her but the jealousy feeling is making me believe that i'm really is. i'm terrified that i am attracted to my friend while i'm in a relationship, i don't have any control over this feeling and i know to myself that i will forever choose my boyfriend over anyone. i just couldn't get the guiltness out of my head, thinking that maybe i cheated on him because i thought it's just a false attraction so i just continued to be friend with that girl despite having the thoughts, but as soon as the thoughts got severe i put a boundaries between us and my bf knows about it. all this time i believed that it's just a false attraction but i read in reddit that it's normal to feel attraction to others while in a relationship, but freaking out and worrying about it means OCD, that's when i realized that maybe i am really attracted to her and i'm just terrified that i'm cheating. i just want an answer if i cheated for not putting boundaries as soon as i got the thoughts, because i thought it was just a false attraction at first. send help pls.

I never had much of a problem with germs and stuff when I was younger but after co-opting in a elementary school and working at a nursing home I’m overly sensitive to germs now and for 1. Am wondering if OCD can effects this or is this is even OCD 2. Is a story how I was out with friends and we went to the lake and I got water it my mouth but when I was a kid I would go so far as to open my eyes in the water without a care but this occasion and lately it’s been gotten worse to the point I want to cut open my skin to pour bleach and soap and antibacterial spray inside me or drink it to get the germs and bacteria and parasites or human piss and vomit it decomposed body cuz who knows what happens in a lake. I thankfully didn’t and talked with one of my friends there who has OCD and she said all this was OCD but I truly wonder if it is since I wasn’t like this before????

I downloaded this app a few days ago but this is my first time using it because idk I feel uncomfortable talking about what I’m going through. Whenever I’m on TikTok and I see videos about rape and children who are raped, it makes me really uncomfortable of course but the thing that makes me uncomfortable is when I hear about it, I’d think about it explicitly. Like a man’s body part being forced into a woman’s or a child’s and it makes me feel weird. Like when you watch porn and you feel some kind of way, idk how to explain it because I don’t wanna say it turns me on cs that would be insensitive, but like it’s weird and I hate it. The thought of it clouds my mind and it makes me cry, I feel sick and like I should talk to someone about that but I don’t wanna feel like a pedophile or labeled as someone who likes when people get raped because I really don’t, I think it’s awful that happens but it’s just the way it makes me feel.

I wrote this post earlier but I put it again because I need some advice otherwise I will be ruminating all night and suffering. I feel quite numb to everything now but I’ve got a bad habit of everytime I get a horrible/gory thought I start deliberately imagining it/playing it out like a scenario in my head and I don’t get anxiety and sometimes it feels like I ‘like it’ or almost like ‘i want to do that horrible thing’ I think drinking caffeine effects me but I drink Diet Coke before and last night it was really bad like I also keep doing this thing where I keep pulling faces in the mirror like I saw this thing where it said evil killers or psychos you can see the whites of their eyes at the top and I keep pulling that face in the mirror and sometimes it feels like I’m actually evil or look evil and I had this weird horrible dream and in the dream I got like adrenaline anxiety and I was smiling about being evil or doing something bad and last night I had a Diet Coke and was up really late and I went to brush my teeth and started pulling those faces in the mirror and suddenly I felt like adrenaline or soemthing and was pulling like evil smiles in the mirror like ‘imagine you killed/stabbed your mum right now and it felt real they I ‘wanted it’ or ‘liked it’ or I’ve got this horrible thing in my head I heard before that evil people enjoy doing that and get adrenaline excited and I’m thinking why am I believing that about myself or almost thinking I could be like that and I feel numb but I’m worried I’m scared but at the same time feel nothing I’m scared I will become evil or would give in or when i start deliberately imagining the thoughts it feels like I’m being hypnotised in that moment or that it could actually happen because of they way I’m thinking I can’t explain it but I’m scared and don’t know what if I’m secretly evil why do I keep deliberately imagining things before it was to test myself but now it feels almost like instead of denying it I’m almost trying to convince myself I am evil and I’m worried what if I’m curious about being evil that’s why I’m imagining sick things I’m worried, I do things that show that I care for others but at the same time I’m thinking what if someone could still be evil even though they do good things? And someone on here once said they think you can become evil if you keep thinking you are and sometimes it feels like when I’m imagining those thoughts almost like so real like I’m being influenced or it could happen and I don’t know what To do I can’t even cry over things anymore I’m scared

Hey.. How do y’all experience m*******tion with OCD? For me it’s been really hard to manage lately. I enjoy doing it but I feel so guilty and nasty after… Plus, my Sexual Orientation thoughts get in the way and it’s so complicated to manage…

Does anyone else have emetophobia along with their OCD? Mine kicked everything off when I was 8 years old, but I was recently diagnosed with OCD about a year ago at 26 years old. Every therapist I went to just said I have anxiety and phobias, but it wasn’t until I was diagnosed and began treatment for OCD that I found relief.

I wanted to take a moment to share how ERP has given me freedom back, which I’ve been reflecting on lately. I used to have terrible driving anxiety. I didn’t like driving more than 15 miles on the freeway, and avoided doing so. Forget driving at night or when it was raining-so out of the question. While I really didn’t want to work on this, I told my therapist, and she gave me some exposure work. I watched videos of car crashes, and wrote a worry script with my worst case scenario. Prior to ERP, I preferred other people drive to the far off places, and if I drove by myself, I was constantly checking my body, in case I got light headed or lost control of my ability to focus and steer and brake. Which truthfully just caused more anxiety, which didn’t help. So, for several weeks, I worked on this fear until it got easier to manage. And yesterday, I drove 45 minutes away, so I could attend an OCD walk hosted by the IOCDF. I met someone in real life that I’ve seen in my support groups, I walked with a friend who was recently diagnosed herself, and I was surrounded by people who have OCD, a disorder that can be so invisible and isolating, so terribly isolating. To be in a community of people with similar struggles to mine, after I struggled with feeling isolated for so long, was beautiful. There are many wins and struggles that led me here, but being able to drive again, to take the reins back from a fear that controlled me, is more wonderful than I can say. I can drive alone now, I can go to favorite cities and beaches that are farther from home to do some self care. If my friend is tired, I can drive instead of hoping she would. The thoughts aren’t gone, and I know they don’t disappear. I do sometimes think “I’m going to die on the freeway today,” or “there’s going to be an earthquake on this bridge as I drive over it.” But the thoughts are more like whispers now, easier to manage and talk back to. Today my anxiety was going up, I feel like I don’t have control over my upcoming work week, I know I needed to relax but I didn’t know how to relax in just the “right way.” But I can breathe through the things that used to drown me. So if your ERP feels like a nightmare, or hard, keep going. It’s so worth it, even if you’re clawing your way through like I was early on. ❤️

I had OCD as a child and then my symptoms became less noticeable and easier to manage as I got older. Now I am in my 30’s with my first dog and am constantly terrified he is sick or dying. Any abnormal behavior triggers it- a cough, not eating as much as usual, excessive sleeping. I monitor how many times he goes to the bathroom. It’s exhausting. I know logically that he’s okay, but I just can’t seem to shake the anxiety and OCD pattern of calling his vet, asking my husband if the dog is okay, or taking him to the urgent care. Anyone have any advice? This is my first post here. Thank you in advance.

So I have hocd, I don't want to he gay, just wanted make sure people knew what my goals are lol .so whenever i say,"i want to date women," or,"or I want to be straight" or il say that women is cute or attractive ,ect basically anything heterosexual at this point. i get this sensation on my face that gives me this tense feelings as if im going to make a cringe face. is this normal with HOCD and how do i get rid of this one specificlaly?I'm also trying to fantisize about girls romantically like I use to before hocd came it because now it makes it sound bad and I hate because it wasn't bad before you know? I'm trying to do erp focusing on it with judgment or response but it's not going away, ive only done it for two days but still