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working to conquer OCD
I feel like OCD has destroyed my brain relative to where I was before it. Headaches, worse memory, brain fog, mental fatigue, etc. How scary is that. Then I think "oh it's just 'cause you're worrying about that and it's temporary" Thing is, what happens when the temporary becomes the new normal? I hate this sh**
I am having a real hard time with meta-ocd and thoughts about feeling depressed and be like this forever. Or the thought I never feel normal again or never feel connected to normal life things and normal people. The intrusive thoughts are here like the whole day and they are all about my mental health. And I obsess about how I feel and what I feel with everything I do. It’s so hard to explain. If someone- a therapist or someone who dealt with this has tips or word of encouragement right now, that would me great. I feel like everything I want to learn myself about ocd and coming to this forum also is a bit compulsive. It is so confusing 🫤
Hi all!! Its been a while since I've been in here and typically I come on here to give advice and encouragement which i still plan to do but i really need encouragement right now. I typically deal with so-ocd but right now its taking a back seat or just disappearing ( which I'm not complaining) but now my rocd is really coming in thick and heavy and Im overly anxious but i have had panic attacks to the thoughts and its just been heavily attack me on my feelings towards my bf. I love this man with my literal whole being and I want to marry him and I know he feels the same cause we have had discussions on marriage. But lately and idk if its because of my period starting (sorry tmi) and all the hormones but i can't feel my emotions all that well, and the thoughts are constantly telling me i don't love him, i don't want to talk to him which are all false me and him are long distance rn which is hard but we push through it. I really hate these thoughts and all it makes me want to do is scream and cry. Like i said not overly anxious but definitely just want to scream and cry and of course cause Im not overly anxious my ocd picks up on that says oh see your not anxious with that so it must be true. I'm just hot mess y'all:( But anyways word of encouragement keep pushing y'all all got this and Im proud of every single one of you!!
I have been really really struggling for the past 3 months and haven’t been able to stop intrusive thoughts/ rumination and confessing. It’s making me question my entire life, my relationship and even who I am as a person. It’s mainly effecting my relationship, I am so afraid that I did something or think things that are definitely hurtful to my partner. I know my brain is contorting my own memory and making things seem so much worse. I also know I haven’t done anything bad, all my things I’ve confessed about have been considered “normal” and I’ve been told that “you’re normal, you didn’t do anything wrong”. But I have felt this intense sense of guilt and shame and it doesn’t go away, I can’t even be a normal person anymore. And I keep searching for “just one more thing I need to tell” and I don’t want to keep searching my brain of every time I’ve said or done anything that I can distort and make seem 1000% worse. I’m isolating myself and just feel like I’m a bad person. I keep confessing my thoughts, feeling, urges, etc. to my partner and while I know I would never do any of these I feel like my ocd is trying to convince me that maybe I would because “why else would you think it or feel guilty” and that makes it so much worse. I really need guidance on how to handle this. What do I do to stop feeling like this and heal?
Regardless of the thought processes I have during therapy that makes sense and will tell me to break away from these overwhelmingly oppressive compulsions, I give in so easily and sink to newer and stranger places that I thought I would never have a business being apart of. Part of it feels like long term self harm. I don't eat well even though I can. I let food go bad and stare at it in the fridge. Wasting money online for absolutely no reason, maybe just to feel a ounce of emotion. Every thought becomes tainted with the obsession to not be here. If I'm not rotting my brain then I'm dousing it in chemicals trying, yet again, to feel and ounce of emotion. I had so much and lost it. Rebuilt myself, and got crushed in a newer, more painful way. I still have a great deal of friends and family that I desperately try to nurture. But I wouldn't be my own friend. I'm so inconsistent it's ridiculous. The only sense of consistency left is my dog, because she's the best. Pic included. I lie constantly trying to guilt myself into doing better things, setting myself up for failure by agreeing to impossible tasks. Pretending like I had a plan the whole time is exhausting. I've worked on it a lot but sometimes I have to fake it and it burdens me. I'm sick of lying but I'm still mortified of people finding out about what I am behind closed doors. A waste of skin. A detriment to society. A cancerous mass that latches onto other more lucrative cells and feeds. At least that's what I think they'd see me as. Which is morbidly irrational and just, false... I realized awhile ago that I am not a bad person. I know that progress not perfection is the way to go. And I know that savoring good intentions is more important than the moments we falter. However I fear that the progress won't progress quickly enough and I won't be able to take it. Suicidal Ideation pours it's vile grease into your brain and it becomes impossible to wipe off or clean as it spreads its muck from thought to thought like a disgusting sponge that hasn't seen soap in years. It's become such a second nature to default to death. The quickest fix. All problems fall away and you get to stop. You don't have to do it anymore. And that allure is so intoxicating it makes your mind salivate in the most infuriating way. The noise would stop, the pain, the spiral, the ideation would become a reality and existence itself would swallow you... Or you live. And see what the next day holds. Feels like a shitty slot machine that you wonder how deep you'll go before you win. If you win. I'm so tired. I need a break from existence. I'll come back when I feel rested. Enjoy the puppy pic.
I am done having characters like this!! I don't ever want to be attracted towards (k/ds) or someone even one year younger than me!!! It just makes me uncomfortable and weird. For example the handsome boy (that's literally what we call him in the manga/anime) from lovesicknees by Junji Ito. Sometimes I want to just enjoy a character with out thinkin they cute or whatever. I'm 18 by the way and I think this guy is stuck in his teens but I don't know what age!!! Age is super Important for me!!! But I highly think he's my age or older (I'm 18). I am fighting every day until I get an answer!!!
these days I feel particularly bad. I can't let the thoughts and those scenes be there without going deeper into it. Everything about my sister has become a trigger for me, and I have the impression that she "turns me on" and creates a big panic. I feel like I can't breathe because I don't know how to let it all go and I don't attach importance... 5 months of ERP and now this, I can't do it, I don't know it...and I don't know what else to do...
i was recently diagnosed with ocd and i think im having a hard time identifying what is my ocd and what isn’t? or im not really sure how to express myself but i feel like i still don’t really know much about ocd and feel like an imposter saying i have it because i don’t know enough about it to really understand it? like all my life these things i would do or say or think or feel were i guess “normal” to me,, so how do i move forward when i don’t know really where to begin?
So recently I have been talking to this guy and I really like him and for the past week I felt really good and happy about it, but then a sneaky intrusive thought popped up about what if in the future when and if the time comes to sleep in the same bed, I inappropriately touch him while he’s sleeping. Now I’ve struggled with sexual intrusive thoughts like that before so my brain just kept reminding me of how that thought felt the last time it came up, and the thoughts of sexually harming this person started snowballing and making me feel worse and worse. I spent most of the day crying and panicking wishing my brain could just shut down, and now all I want to do is hide from this person so I don’t get the chance to hurt him, which makes me feel even worse because I had been feeling so good about him just the other day. I was just wondering if anyone else had experienced this and if they might have any insight
Hi - just for some context, I have OCD and ADHD. I hate bringing this up, but with these diagnoses, when intertwined, there is ALWAYS a thought. I never stop thinking. This is really hard, especially because I feel like I always need to be talking to someone. Whether it’s my friends or family, talking to people brings me down to earth from certain kinds of thought spirals. However, when I’m alone it is the hardest. When my friends don’t reply I have this compulsion to text again or I need to constantly check my notifications so that I have none left to check. But then to them or new people I talk to, this behavior probably comes across as overwhelming or too much. I’m trying to control it and use erp, but also, I have my moments where I’m just vunerable and give into the compulsion. It’s genuinely so embarassing and maybe not as big a deal as I’m making it out to be but, how do I manage? And how do I relax?
It is not the thoughts or urges that scare me anymore. It is the way I feel like I’ve absorbed the compulsions into my identity :( I am doing them so automatically that it feels like I am choosing them freely and they’re me. and because of that, it feels like I AM the OCD now, not just someone with OCD. I think I’m just deeply trapped in a loop. I was trying to survive unbearable fear so I started scanning. Then I started pre-scanning. Then checking if I pre-scanned. Then I check how I feel during all that. I run to beat my OCD to the “punchline” (intrusive thought, urge, sensation) because I’m so scared all the time. So scared that I don’t even feel it anymore. I feel numb and all that’s left is this jittery residue and numbness. Now it’s all tangled together in a huge knot. I feel so extremely lost. I think this may just be meta OCD, but I’ve never ever felt so gone before :( I’m really scared.
i’m trying to not let the thoughts bother me but it’s just so stressful. even me typing that feels like i’m lying when i know i’m not. i’m scared because even my therapist tells me that it’s just ocd, but in the back of my mind i slightly don’t believe her, and its making me scared that i AM like those people and im gonna act on something. sometimes in social moments i get a quick thought of me being an outcast because im like those people who are sick in the head and act on that stuff, and it just makes me feel like i truly am gonna eventually act on something. another thing that bothered me is earlier my mom yelled at me for not doing school work (it was well deserved im really slacking on it) and i had like no reaction to her screaming. it had me thinking what if i have no empathy etc etc, and what if i get mad that she yelled at me and i do something involving those thoughts. how do i TRULY know it’s ocd? like i try to remind myself and be like “dude, your therapist said it’s ocd, she isn’t wrong” but the back of my mind is like “she is wrong, it’s not ocd and she just happened to misdiagnose you. you are gonna act on those thoughts and it’s your fate”. please someone respond if you read all of this, im really struggling
When is ocd so bad that someone can’t deal with it on their own? I honestly don’t know if it’s just my brain telling me I can’t deal with it when I really can, but then I start thinking if I tell myself I can deal with it when I really can’t, then I’ll actually loose it. In my mind, my safe haven has been remembering that I can always go to the hospital if I feel so bad. Because I’m so terrified of getting stress induced psychosis because of this extensive fear. I finally start to feel better and then my mind tells me that I have to worry about it to prevent it from happening. Each hour feels draining to get through and I’m terrified of each thoughts possibility that I know I’d feel better if I was hospitalized and kept away from doing potential harm. I go to therapy every other week but I feel like I need every week and actually more than once a week because each day feels hard to get through and it takes forever to get to therapy.
I used to never have these thoughts it feels like im a different person and im so sad . I watched a TikTok of a girl with her kid and my Brain says how has she not killed her kid yet like wtf cus I get so many thoughts I’m shocked other ppl don’t and now my Brian says how I have I not hurt my dad . I keep posting and I shouldn’t but I feel not normal
I feel like I can’t explain anything to anyone and feel so dumb. I feel like everything that comes out of my mouth doesn’t make sense sometimes. I tried explaining what a vendor was about and couldn’t explain it and fear that I could get fired or won’t be able to move up because of this. I can’t explain things and hate explaining things. I don’t know how to get better and don’t know how to not feel stupid and feel like I have a purpose in this world. I feel like I don’t provide value for my job or at least my new manager who just got hired doesn’t see it and won’t because she’s really tough and doesn’t understand. She’s too blunt and very rude sometimes. I also feel so anxious 24/7. I feel like I need to workout but don’t have the motivation to and just want to be in my bed because I’m exhausted after work and during the weekend. Boredom sucks too. I wish I had someone who could be there for me wish I had a significant other. I don’t like exposure therapy and it’s not working at all. I tried it for a while. Same with Acceptance Respond Therapy.
My brain is saying I shouldn’t watch a movie and I should harm my family
I never wanted to hurt my family Before and now it’s feels like I wanna I’m stressed I even say out loud I wanna ugh I’m so scared I’m gunna hurt them I’m freaking out
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