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Who supports you in your OCD recovery? How do they help?

it is currently 4am when im writing this but i stumbled across a video again while looking at OCD recovery stories and realising how much this content helped me. when i was nearing therapy was struggling with probably one of my worst ever relapses of OCD, the themes engulfed me, incest, paeodophilia, homosexuality, sadistic thoughts, and blasphemous. i couldnt control anything, i was constantly crying every single hour, i often went into states of numbness and confusion. i was a mess and i had to be treated. there was a day i got so bad i had to call the ocd phone consultant and finally tell her, she said she would quicken the date of my therapy sessions, and two weeks later i was being treated. at first i walked out that door with a grin on my face, knowing he knew what i was talking about, extreme relief that he never judged me, he knew what my intrusive thoughts were, he had even been through it, but still obviously some doubts like (is he good?) (does he know how to properly treat me) occured. the second session occured and i felt helped. third, fourth, fifth and by the sixth i was gaining beneficial relief from symptoms of ocd. i only have one session left of therapy which is the final review session. but i feel alot better. ive been doing my ERP, and i did my homework when needed. ive started to worry and doubt less and overall my anxiety has been sought, im happier now. even if i get a thought, i bite my teeth and let it go. i understand the bodily sensations better now too and can let them pass aswell. but thinking how i was in the past i was extremely trapped of course i still struggle with the thoughts, just not to as big of a degree. this is embarrassing but for the longest time the thoughts would stop me from masturbating, id get multiple of intrusive thoughts which just caused me to never do it again. now even with the images i masturbate, i just let the image pass and know not to feel bad about them, i dont enjoy them and never will enjoy them, but at least i know they arent me anymore and at least im able to control it. ive learnt that no matter how bad the thought is it doesnt mean anything and i shouldnt let it take over me, i know my desires, and my intrusive thoughts ARE NOT them. it only took me a total of 6 weeks to recover even a little bit. the ERP with the therapist was tough, as it started with my worst thought, my pocd. i cried alot. i felt horrible after, but only for a while. i became abit inconsistent but went back on top of it again, im still struggling with inconsistency though, and praying. i thought until a couple of days ago that i didnt deserve to pray, that god didnt love me. and even if i get better i still had the thoughts and it was a punishment from god. i really feel loved and that i wasnt meant to be guilty for the thoughts, that after all they dont conclude me, they arent my beginning or my end and they never will be. i am me, not my intrusive thoughts. and thats what my belief system is taking in now. i cant thank you enough for the work you do, im going to buy your book soon, and im going to try working at my ERP even harder. my ocd is probably one that will never completely go im realising, and thats okay. thank you for helping me learn that. one day i hope to be advocating for mental health and helping people who are experiencing such things. this is a debilitating illness that only deserves love and affection. we have the most strife because we are the most good hearted people, and i firmly believe it. through all those urges, thoughts and feelings, and panic attacks, i stayed strong! i stayed here! im still living even through immense suicidal thoughts. i am strong, i love myself. my speaking is more important than my ocd’s speaking. and now i know. so, everyone with ocd, stay strong. you are here and striving. ? xoxo

Moment of honesty here: I’ve been resisting compulsions pretty consistently the last day or so and I feel absolutely terrible. I’ve been doing ERP and I feel absolutely terrible. Plus my OCD is telling me that, since the things that the things I’m told will help me aren’t yet, I must actually be trans. Though it’s a slightly different kind of terrible. Of course this makes sense. With ERP you’re triggering yourself on purpose, and by refusing compulsions you’re cutting yourself off from the thing that would give you (very short term) relief. I just have to sit with the doubt, the uncertainty, the fear, the possibility, and try to accept it. The near constant anxiety, of always having that vague feeling of being on the verge of tears, or like I’ve been crying even though I haven’t. Of course I feel terrible. But it’s also hard not to be discouraged. Especially when I hear people say they felt some manner of relief from the start of therapy. I’m told that this will eventually subside, that I’ll feel normal again, but that feels like a very long way off, if it ever even comes.

Thought I’d just make one last post before I go: Tips For Recovery • The key to OCD is to accept the uncertainty. You will never know for 100% certain if you’re gay, if your hands are contaminated, if your relationship is doomed, or if you could stab someone or molest a child. Sound scary? Good. Fear is your friend now. Seek it out and face it down • ERP does work, but its not a quick fix. You have to do it repeatedly every day for increasing amounts of time. Remember, fear is your friend. • Stop avoiding situations that make you uncomfortable. When I was deep into OCD I was too afraid to be near dogs. Fortunately, I’m also a dog minder. Being around dogs all the time was an excellent exposure, and helped me recover really quickly. • Medication is a band-aid, not a cure. Using it to relieve your symptoms while you undergo therapy is fine. Staying on it forever is unhelpful and unnecessary. • You don’t need to make sure your intrusive thoughts are a specific subtype of OCD. Your OCD might not match anybody else’s. Mine didn’t, and that’s okay. • Remain positive! If you start thinking you won’t get better, you won’t. • Take care of yourself! You put your body through tremendous strain just by worrying. Eat well, drink plenty of water, do gentle exercise. And get a good amount of sleep. • ACCEPTANCE! You have a mental illness. If you could think yourself out of this, you’d have done it already. If your compulsions were going to fix the problem forever, it would have happened by now. Stop fighting and feeding the cycle. • You have an anxiety disorder. Part of recovery is being responsible about this disorder. Getting drunk and smoking weed is going to make you feel better for a short time, and make you feel like crap in the long term. Same goes for caffeine and excess sugar. We have to be those annoying health nuts now, sorry. • Stop obsessing over your recovery. It won’t happen overnight, its not a linear process, and you won’t feel better tomorrow, or even the day after. You’re making the effort to improve yourself in the long term, and that takes time and commitment. That’s all I could think of! Thank you guys again! Recovery is possible for all of you, I know it!

What’s the most ignorant thing you’ve ever heard someone say about mental illness or OCD? Last week I was in a meeting at school with my teachers. We were discussing how bad my OCD is currently and that we need an action plan for school. I told them that, at the moment, I can’t touch pens, which is obviously an issue in a school environment. It seriously took courage to open up to a room full of practical strangers about my OCD. Do you want to know one of the teachers response? Here it is: “Oh I’m sooo OCD about the pens I use, I have like a million in my office because I change my mind all the time.” Yeah, cool. Thanks for completely invalidating my illness. d a i s y

I have schiz ocd and philosophical ocd. I hear so many great stories about Clomipramine and I really badly want to try it, but I’m so terrified of taking any drugs as my ocd convinces me I have hidden signs of psychosis and the drugs will make it worse. I get weird thoughts like what if everything turns into stone or everything starts shrinking or what if I am in a dream that I can’t wake up from. Stupid meaningless thoughts that I see in my minds eye, but they give me lots of panic because they can feel so real. I always think I’m hearing voices but it always tends to be sounds in my environment. I’m just so scared I’ll lose it completely if I take this drug as I’ve read some people experienced psychosis on this drug, and I just need help seeing the brighter side of things really. Any advice?

I scared. I’m just scared. I have major OCD over germs and illness. I cut my leg days ago. Actually, an allergic relation to the adhesive on Band-aids peeled off a piece of my skin with it. Just peeled right off like a sunburn. I couldn’t get it to stop bleeding for 10 minutes. Ever since, I’ve been washing it with soap and water thoroughly, applying Neosporin and a clean bandage every 24-hours. It’s been about 4 days, but every time I remove the old bandage to change it, there’s some old, brown, crusted blood on it. Why is it still bleeding ever so slightly? Why is it still open? Why is it not scabbing over at all? It looks more and more red, but not in an infected way. More like blood forming to try and scab, if that makes sense. I have no signs of infection. No soreness, no red streaks, no swelling, no fever, no drainage. I just keep hearing this nurse in my head from the ER months ago when I had to have my hand glue closed. She told me about cellulitis, which I never knew about. Obesity can you more susceptible, which I’m overweight. And it’s mostly seen on the lower leg, where my cut is. I keep obsessing over it, though I have no symptoms. I constantly worry about it. It’s wrecking my whole nervous system. I keep using clean towels, clean clothes—especially socks. I’ve gone through hundreds—and I mean HUNDREDS of Bandaids. I had a cut on my hand on September 1st that healed in 7 days. But my legs seem to take weeks to heal. Probably poor circulation. I just want it to heal. I feel like I can’t do anything until it does.

TO EVERYONE SUFFERING W HOCD: i haven’t been on here in like a week and i just checked the app again to see how everyone was doing and i was very very surprised to see a huge amount of posts about HOCD. sounds like we all could use some hope, and some help!!! 1. if you check online or read stories about people with HOCD, or gay people, trying to find the difference or trying to see what symptoms of HOCD you have or don’t have, STOP!!!!!!!!!!!! this is a huge compulsion. i used to do it all the time and my therapist literally had to ban me from doing it bc it was causing me so much anxiety. reassurance is my biggest compulsion and it never helps you!!! it just gives you fake relief. the only way to get over this is to deal with the anxiety until you’re not scared of it anymore. 2. finding someone of the same sex attractive is totally okay. sexuality is not one or the other. i’m sure there are some people who are dead set on being 100% straight or 100% gay, but the truth is that no one is 100% one thing or the other. it’s a spectrum and everyone varies on it. 3. don’t try to rationalize or check or have mental dialogues with yourself in your head. another reallyyyyyyyy bad compulsion. i.e. “omg i just checked that girl/guy out. they’re attractive. does that mean i’m gay? well since i did it that means i have to be gay. let me look at someone of the opposite sex who i think is attractive now to see if i get aroused. if i get aroused that means i’m straight but if i don’t i have to be gay there’s no other answer. why am i not aroused? was i aroused with the person of the same sex?” etc. stuff like this. it’s never good. DONT DO IT!! just ignore it the best you can. 4. do things that make you happy. whether that be hanging out with your friends, staying at home and reading a book, going to a park, whatever it is. just because your OCD is part of you doesn’t mean it has to be all of you. don’t let it take over your life. you have more power than you think. 5. be patient. easier said than done, i know. but HOCD, or any type of OCD, doesn’t go away overnight. (as much as i wish that i did lol) my HOCD was really bad in june-july that i would have panic attacks so bad that i would almost pass out and couldn’t leave my house, but now with lots of therapy and some light exposure i’m able to do things that i wouldn’t even consider doing back in july. patience is key. if you’re patient and hopeful, you will get the results you need and the results you deserve. you guys are all so strong!! we’ve made it this far despite millions of bumps in the road and we’re doing just fine. be happy!! don’t let your OCD take over. it is making you think it can control you when you can actually control it. good luck to all of you, i hope this helps!!! ❤️❤️❤️

Newly married / OCD anxiety around cheating I wanted to discuss some major life events and how theyve been affected by OCD. First off, I got married last Saturday. I love my wife more than anything in the world. She is, and our relationship is, a common target of my OCD. We’ve been together three years and I proposed to her last year. I’ve been dealing with issues of scrupulosity and honesty as well as confession rituals. The trouble is, that I tend to confess all of my perceived, or maybe actual, wrongdoings to her all the time. The scrupulosity thing means that I have to be completely 100% honest all of the time. I know this sounds like a good thing, but it makes me analyze every single word I say. For instance, about a month ago, something came between us one night and I remember being upset her about something. She told me that she loved me And even though I’ve been telling her that I love her for two years and that I continue to tell her all the time, something in my mind told me that if I were to say, “I love you” right now that it would be untrue and I would be a liar. So, in that moment I couldn’t say it. I was also just having little doubts about our relationship even the night before our wedding. But the thing is, I love my wife more than anything in the entire world. I would have never dreamed of calling off the wedding. I never want to be without her. I think that I was just annoyed or upset with her about something, and my OCD ran with it. I felt guilt for experiencing these feelings the night before our wedding. Our actual wedding day was perfect. I am truly so lucky to have her as my wife. She’s the love of my life. Which is why the OCD stuff targets her so much. I know I’ve talk to you about a lot of the sexual OCD hangups I have. Another fear that I have is that I have somehow committed act of infidelity. This came up early in our relationship. I would feel bad if I even made eye contact with a person that I found attractive. I still suffer from this fixation. The OCD part of my brain tells me that I have to confess every time I may have a fleeting fantasy about someone else or if I look at someone else in a way that is driven by attraction. I think the thing that terrifies me is the fear of committing some small act of “cheating” merely by looking or acting a certain way around someone. Today, I was riddled with guilt. I have a coworker who is a very attractive girl. I would never in a million years cheat on my wife. But the other day I remember having sexual thoughts about this coworker and even though I was trying to shut them down, I am worried that I may have indulged them for just a moment. I also worry that I may have “acted on”this desire by making a joke in front of this person. I feel as if I told this joke to make this person think that I’m funny. I am not 100% sure why said the joke, but my brain tells me That if I told the joke to make her think that I’m funny, that that is as bad as cheating and that I have already cheated on my wife. This kind of thing happens all the time and I end up confessing to my wife that I found someone else or that I looked at another Woman a way that may not have been completely innocent. This act of confession feels like it frees me. I do it all the time. I hate telling her anything about having thoughts about other women, but my brain tells me that it’s the right thing to do.

To the HOCD people please name some compulsions and obsessions you all get/do

I missed a lecture this morning because my alarm didn’t go off. However I would have only been about 20 minutes late if (funnily enough) I didn’t have a panic attack due to me panicking about missing the lecture. I haven’t had a panic attack in weeks because I’ve been on medication for my OCD and anxiety but I feel like I’ve been sent back weeks.

Does anyone have advice for magical thinking OCD? For instance i can’t have an intrusive thought while doing something because then i have to go back and do it while having a good / safe thought to counteract the bad one. Anyone else struggle with this? Some input would be great.

Does anyone have a way of overcoming fear of going crazy. This has been a fear of mine for 6 years ever since my first panic attack. It eventually developed into schiz ocd. I just have the strongest imagination and such deep thoughts. I used to love this about myself before I knew what schizophrenia was. Now I just associate every bizarre thought I have as a sign or delusion. It’s been such torture that I get the most abstract intrusive thoughts. Like one that kept me up was “isn’t it weird how were always in this reality.” I started to think like everything we see is always part of this reality. Just weird stuff like that. How do I just not let these thoughts affect me. How do I overcome my fear of insanity? It’s so hard. I literally research all day of organic causes of psychosis like low blood sugar or vitamin deficiency just to reassure myself if it’s happening to me at least it could be a physical cause and it will never happen again. I just want to be okay with the worst possibility in my mind. Which would be schizophrenia. I just want to not be afraid of this illness already. My heart skips a beat every time I see that word.

Does harm/serial killer thoughts actually go away?

Hi, I’m new here. I am a checker. I need to check the stove and other household appliances before I leave the house. I think I am afraid that I will burn the house down with my dog In it. I know this is not rational and the chances of it happening are incredibly low but I worry. I get stuck In loops while I’m checking things over and over. Sometimes things are better and I can get out of my house relatively easy. Other times it takes me 10-30 minutes to leave. I am seeing a therapist but I am not taking medication. Does anyone deal with similar issues? Has anyone found any strategies that help them cope?

I’ve just spent the past 30minutes researching does God watch us have sex, read our minds and know our sexual thoughts. :( I don’t want him to but clearly he does. I feel so embarrassed and disgusted. I have suppressed everything for months. Don’t know how I’ll ever be comfortable with sexuality again

Its been about four months since I decided to actually take charge of my OCD & DP/DR and take serious steps towards recovery, other than complaining to my therapist and googling symptoms online. I’m gonna be honest, its been hard going. Recovery has rarely been easy or pleasant, and sometimes still isn’t. But its no more unpleasant than the two and a half years I spent gripped with worry, consumed by doubt and my need for certainty, terrified to change my routine in case the important things in my life slipped away and I was consumed by unreality. In the past few months, I’ve made some amazing discoveries about myself, things I didn’t know before I made my first hesitant attempts to get well. I can be likeable and well liked, friendly and approachable. I’ve learned that kindness and positivity are important, and kindness to others is the greatest gift you can give. I’ve learned that I have the ability to make friends easily and smoothly, simply by being polite. I’ve learned that writing is the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do with my life, a hobby pursued but not seriously considered as a genuine option until I stopped taking myself so seriously. I’ve learned that patience and acceptance are virtues that can be obtained through gradual practise, and sometimes all you can do is make yourself a cup of tea and wait for the pain to pass. It does, if you let it. I’ve learned that the world is a wide and wonderful place, and I want to see all of it. And I learned that Im worth more than the harsh expectations I place on myself. Worth more than the way the toxic people in my life have made me feel. And sometimes, if I’m swept up in other things and able to focus on something beyond my anxious mental state, I feel moments of peace. Where I’m real, present, and unconcerned by the thoughts passing through my mind. Sometimes I wonder if I’d be able to appreciate those moments so deeply if they were a given, a sure thing. I doubt it. And I’m sure that once I’m entirely recovered I won’t be able to appreciate them with the same intensity. Its like a blocked nose. When you’re offered a brief relief from it you’re incredibly grateful, and swear you’ll never take breathing from your nose for granted again. But then it unblocks for good and you take it for granted almost instantly. Maybe part of me will miss those moments of intense belonging and certainty, and my profound gratitude to be nothing more than alive and normal and okay. What I’m trying to say is that with effort and work, self love and positivity, you will see improvements. Slow at first, maybe. Riddled with setbacks and frustrations. You’ll have nights of ERP where you stare desperately at the clock, wondering how much longer you can resist a compulsion that you know will give you instant relief, like a small hit of heroin to an addict whose been trying to quit cold turkey. Be kind. Your brain’s been trained into patterns that are hard to break first try. You need to teach it all over again. But there will one day be a morning when you wake up, climb out of bed, and the OCD isn’t your first thought the second you open your eyes. It might occur to you in the shower, while eating breakfast, or on the way to work or school. You’ll be surprised at this brief period of time where you were present and unconcerned. You might obsess for the rest of the day, keep yourself up with the worry. But it won’t matter because you’ll be able to remember that morning, how it felt to be free. You’ll have a goal to work towards, a piece of encouragement during an impossible journey. It will be the breakthrough that leads to your eventual recovery. But chances are you won’t notice when you recover, and this is true for OCD and DP/DR. You just will. And it won’t occur to you until a few days or weeks or months later. A thought will occur to you and you’ll brace yourself for panic that never arrives. You’ll realise it doesn’t bother you anymore. You’ll tempt fate, think it again, just to see if you can. And it won’t bother you then either. You’re free. This is possible for all of you, I promise. If you haven’t tried ERP yet, try it. If you are, keep at it. Be kind to yourself and be patient and reward yourself whenever you can. You’re in a strange, crappy part of your life that probably won’t be over tomorrow, or even the day after. Treat it as a journey. Life is short - you know that better than anyone. Listen to your heart, stop caring about what others think and figure out what YOU want. Give yourself a goal, a focus point, a purpose. It can be as simple and unimportant as learning a card trick or finishing a jigsaw puzzle. It doesn’t have to matter to anyone but you. Give yourself something to do that means you have to get out of bed in the morning. Something so you can look back on this time in your life and see more than an empty hole. You can see strength, determination, and a slight glimmer of the person you were destined to be come. Be brave, be persistent. I believe in you all ❤️

Everytime before I used to masturbate or when i have sex my compulsion is telling God that if anything crosses my mind he knows its not me so I ask for forgiveness in case intrusive thoughts pop in but even then I end up feeling so guilty when they do because I confuse the fact that I'm trying to ignore the thoughts coming at me with encouraging ?

I have contamination OCD. Any ideas on exposures I could do? Maybe some easier and harder ones? Thanks!

Any one have any examples of ERP with health ocd / hypochondria?