Welcome to
the NOCD Community

One thing I’m scared of is that I get through all the exposures and then I still believe the false memories are real.. can anyone relate or share an experience?

It feels like I have internalized homophobia but I don’t want that 😭

Hi, I've struggling with R-OCD for 6 months now. I love my beautiful boyfriend so much, but this constant anxiety in my stomach is so tiring, I also have mood disorder and dissociative syndrome. I would never break up with him, I just don't want to. But I'm slowly relapsing in sh and dark thoughts... Anyway please help me 🙏

I’ll have thoughts that randomly pop into my head that stem from things I see or hear so I get how that’s intrusive. But sometimes I struggle with thoughts that I feel I like, I don’t WANT to like them but I might so is it still intrusive? And sometimes I’ll purposely think of things just to check so those are 100% on me and I’ll feel like I like them but again I don’t want to and then the compulsions start. So does that still count as intrusive?

Whenever I think about a girl I try to brush it off but it keeps on coming back then I think I may like these thoughts. I avoid using gay words because I would never want to be gay. I use to enjoy watching couple videos but not anymore. All my life I’ve been straight and only liked guys who I planned to have kids with. Now I’m scared because this thought goes away and comes back once in a while. My body keeps on telling me Im in denial and deep down I might be gay. But I don’t like this I’ve spent countless hours just thinking and thinking that what if it’s true? Every time I look at a straight couple I don’t like it but I use to love looking at them but neither do I like gay couples. I always wanted a future with a man. What do I do? Is this HOCD??

I don’t know how to even properly word my thoughts on this. I turn 18 in 4 months, I am a senior in high school and have an art project due which is supposed to represent how I feel I’ve grown or what I want to do with my future as an adult. I don’t feel like I’ve even grown at all, it’s like I’m on autopilot with my life and I don’t care about what I become in my future or how I’ll get there. I visited what everyone around me thought would be my dream college but I didn’t feel anything at all. I can’t see myself as anything but a kid, I don’t have any more passion for my original stories, they just give me a headache to work on and I get sent into compulsive loops trying to make sure it’s perfect. I feel like turning 18 is an expiration date but everyone around me tells me it is the complete opposite, that I should look forward to being something other than a high school student, but I just don’t care. I have no real emotions on it besides fear and general apathy, I don’t want to become “old” or not a teenager, I still feel like such a child, like I haven’t lived a complete teen life. Articulating emotions has gotten harder too, sorry if this post sounds really rambley and confusing. Point is I’m scared to become an adult and start a life because I don’t feel like I care enough to do that, I feel like I’m just going along with whatever the adults in my life tell me to do and I don’t feel a sense of desire to be responsible or grow up or create art anymore. I don’t wanna say I’m depressed because I do feel happy, especially when I’m doing things I like to do or speaking with people I like, but I just don’t feel like life matters much in a future lense. I’m tired.

My therapist told me today that if I get intrusive thoughts of other people: friends/randoms/children/pets, to put them in the corner of the room. I can try that but I feel like I’ll still be focusing a lot on the intrusive thoughts during such a vulnerable time. It makes me feel like if I focus on intrusive thoughts, and I reach a point where I am feeling good physically, I’m scared I’ll associate those thoughts with feeling good or feel like I “got off” to them. ***TW*** Apart from that I have creative intrusive thoughts like imagining my bf isn’t a grown man which repulses me to even type. Or that he’s a family member. Those drives me absolutely insane. Those I don’t know how to handle. How would you handle this? How do y’all handle this?

Hi! I am young and undiagnosed, I'm gonna get an appointment set up to start that process. Right now though, I feel like this came almost out of nowhere. I've been diagnosed with GAD and emetophobia for many years, and I realized a couple years ago I had some symptoms similar to OCD and even briefly considered that I may have had POCD just before highschool. However, because of what I suspect to be scrupulosity OCD, I was so deeply afraid I was faking and didn't say anything else. But a few days ago it really hit me that OCD actually aligns with my experience like.. a bit too much? And since then I've been driven absolutely mad. I spend an hour or more a day anxiously researching and the intrusive thoughts have gotten so much worse because I just can't get out of my head. I feel like I have to constantly research to make 100% sure my symptoms actually line up because if I'm faking that would make me a bad person. It's a constant stream of thoughts telling me I'm a bad person. I freak out and just repeat "no, no, no" or "stop, stop, stop" or try and think of something else. This is very ramble-ish and vent-ish, I know. I'm just so afraid. Did anyone else's OCD come out of seemingly nowhere? Or maybe this is just my first bad flare-up and I spent so long thinking my behavior was normal I never thought about it till now?? I'm not sure. Talking to a doctor ASAP because I can't take being undiagnosed, it gives the anxiety too much ammo to call me a bad person with.

My therapist asked that I reach out to the community for feedback. I have checking compulsions and one is for checking a car that has to be monitored for oil use. This car does need to be checked weekly to know whether oil should be added or not. We’ve been working to frame this as a maintenance item instead of a daily compulsion but have hit a stall in progress. One suggestion was to have my wife check every week or someone else (brother in law). I don’t know if it is something she would be comfortable with and it could be a lot to ask of someone else outside the house. I feel bad about this situation bc I am in a tough spot and new compulsions will come up in the future and I can’t keep pushing off the triggers to someone else as the solution. I’m looking forward to the communities suggestions.

how are groinal responses supposed to feel. every time i get an intrusive thought or image or even see something in real life that could trigger me i do get groinal responses. the problem is is that sometimes i feel it directly in my groin or sometimes its like in my lower stomach like my stomach drops in a way? does this mean that im actually attracted to these things? i never would be attracted to these things just the thought of it is debilitating and stresses me out so much. i’ve struggled with groinal responses for nearly 6 months now and its very debilitating and i just want it to stop. i want to get help but i dont know how to get help im only 18 and im a student and these things really affect my life on a day to day basis. is there a way out of this? am i a bad person? please help

i don’t really have a theme going in my head right now. i’m not having intrusive thoughts, but im so anxious and my mind is going through all of my themes i ever had and every moment of anxiety for me and trying to get me to stick to one because im not on a theme right now and i guess my OCD is convinced i need to be. i have this off feeling and it’s causing me so much stress. i can’t rest with this at all.

I’m really struggling right now. My mind is racing and I’m panicking about the content that I watched in the past because I don’t have a way to ‘prove’ that it was safe and consensual. I stupidly caved in and googled “what happens if an accidentally saw illegal porn” and I ended up making my anxiety so much worse. What if the images I saw in the past had underage people in them? Am I going to jail? Will my ip address be tracked? My brain is making all sorts of scenarios up and they feel so real. At this point I don’t know if I’m a bad person or not, I just feel like something terrible is about to happen. Although I know I’d never intentionally look for that kind of stuff there’s still a chance that I could have seen things without realising, and I actually don’t know what to do. I’m in total panic mode

I’ve dealt with SOOCD for a while, but does anyone else who is straight, have their obsessions go from being gay to being bisexual or bi-curious? How do you deal with this?

Hi, Sorry for the short title and reduction on words, it’s just you can only use 50 characters, Now what confuses me is I have been diagnosed with HOCD and told I am not gay or bisexual, but then people keep responding saying it doesn’t mean you are not gay and slightly confused as my therapist said it does, Now what’s confused me is a girl called Ellen Warren was diagnosed by NOCD with sOCd and realised she was actually a lesbian. I am freaking out. https://iocdf.org/blog/2021/06/21/bisexuality-sexual-orientation-ocd-double-invalidation/ https://www.treatmyocd.com/blog/bisexuality-so-ocd-the-invisible-so-ocd https://www.treatmyocd.com/my-ocd-journey/is-it-really-poison

Recently, my brother moved back in after losing his job. I now share my bathroom, which used to be mine and mine alone, with him and his constant company. All I ask is that he close the toilet lid before he flushes, and leave it down when it’s not in use. Just in case it’s difficult to remember— I have a decal on the inside of the toilet that says to put the lid down. I also have various signs in every single direction in the bathroom that ask to put the lid down. I do not feel like it is a difficult or crazy request. But whenever I calmly ask him and his many, many guests (he is always inviting his friends and girlfriend over— and they also refuse to follow this rule) to please be mindful of this, they just laugh at me or outright ignore me. My whole family thinks my OCD is just a joke. Even though I have been professionally diagnosed and dealing with the symptoms since I was in elementary school, I didn’t find out I had this diagnosis until my 20s. My whole life, they constantly tell me I’m dramatic and use OCD as an insult for me. They think OCD is not real and that it’s just my excuse to be a burden to other people. I learned not to ever talk about my symptoms so that they won’t humiliate me. Every time I enter the bathroom and see the lid open, I get severe anxiety and intrusive thoughts about contamination that keep me from sleeping sometimes all night because I'm just thinking about how everything is contaminated. Every single surface and even my skin. And then I start getting intrusive thoughts and compulsions about cutting my skin off or worse because the air in the bathroom contaminated me and even if I take a shower it won't be clean because the shower is also contaminated by the same air. Just now, he used the bathroom with the door open and flushed with the lid open. My bedroom door, which is right next to the bathroom, was open. Now I can’t stop thinking about how the air is contaminated and I need to cut my lungs out to be clean. I’m not going to do it. But I can’t stop thinking about it. I’m so sick of living like this. I understand I can’t control others. I don’t ask others to make accommodations for me ever. For example, at work in the work bathroom. I just quietly suffer with my thoughts. But. This is my home. This bathroom used to be mine only. And yet even at home, I am powerless and nobody respects me or follows my one rule. I can’t take it anymore. Why can’t they just listen? Why do they do this to me?

Every time I go to bed late and I’m falling asleep, I suddenly get an intrusive thought of a child’s face and my groinal area always responds to it. It’s such an uncomfortable experience. I am way too tired to try and freak out so I end up falling asleep. The next morning I’m always trying to figure out whether I had the groinal response first or after the thought. I start giving OCD power but it feels like If I let it go, then I’m in denial or whatever. I don’t want to ever do anything sexual with a child. I don’t even feel comfortable talking platonically with people who are 17, much less a child. My therapist says that I have a deep rooted fear that I’m this horrible person and that OCD loves to feed off of it. When you get a groinal response, it makes the thought that much more real. I never want these things to happen. I want to only be into adults. It’s so discomforting and stressful. Especially since I’m hyper checking how anxious I am, and if I find I didn’t really have much anxiety, then I’m like “well if I didn’t have anxiety, what does this mean?” And more questions occur til I end up in a rabbit hole

I keep overthinking of me being a bad gf for having guy friends is because everytime i made a guy friend or met a random guy i would get random thoughts about them but i wouldn’t think about them romantically and then i would start to have intrusive thoughts about them that what if i liked them or what if I’m think about them bc i have a crush on them or i want to be with them but then i would get disgusted of thinking about liking them or being with them it wouldn’t make me happy all i would want is my boyfriend so i knew it wasn’t a crush or i knew i didn’t like them like that at all and so then i would always remind myself why i dont like them and that i love my boyfriend but i also did like talking to them but not like that like its cool that they talk to me but then i would stop being there friend bc they would just disgust me and i felt like a bad gf and bc i kept getting intrusive thoughts but then latly ever since august i started to get scared again what if all this happen bc i liked them but i knew i didn’t still deep down in my heart i know i didn’t like them like but re searching stuff on google or tiktok just made me even more scared saying that if u think about somebody it means u like them or if u think somebody is cool that means u have a crush on them like i dont get it how dose that mean i like them idk but it just all made me scared. And i tell my boyfriend my boyfriend seems to be understanding and that its nothing to worry about and then i feel fine for a little bit and start to worry again.

So a long time ago, I made a wish at 11:11 that unexpectedly came true. Since then I have been terrified of that time of day and it’s power to grant wishes. This morning and tonight I accidentally made a really bad wish. It’s not something I want to happen. The words just strang together cause I was freaking out. I don’t know what to do. I’ve had 11:11 wishes not come true in the past, but… I’m scared. Help?

Does anyone else’s ocd cause physical things? Like I pee a lot and idk if it’s a health thing or a physical thing. I can’t sleep if I have to use the bathroom and I go to the bathroom sooo many times before bed. Also I have to pop my knuckles if I can feel my bones if that makes sense. Like I can feel each area in my fingers that needs to be popped until I pop them.

Anyone struggle with this with having ocd?