Welcome to
the NOCD Community

Heya guys. First time poster here. I am a 27 y/o male living in Brooklyn who struggles with pure O. My obsessions are existential. I spend the better part of the day paranoid that everyone and everything is in some way a simulation that’s tricking me. Sort of like a rat in a maze. It’s incredibly distressing and comes with a slew of other obsessions: “am I crazy, is anything real, am I real” etc. just posting on here because it’s cathartic, and also wondering if other people share similar obsessions? I find it pretty uncommon based on what I’ve seen. Also if you’re in Brooklyn, would love to meet up and chat about our woes. Thanks!

Anyone have any tips for dealing with intrusive thoughts?? I don't want to accept them... I'm having such a hard time. POCD is making me doubt if I'm truly attracted to adult men and women... I keep telling myself that I am and I always have been but it doesn't help. The thoughts are horrible. I'm tired from all the anxiety. I can't even enjoy anything anymore..

I am feeling super depressed. My new happy romantic relationship turnt so sour and anxiety provoking. I am afraid to break up because I am afraid to lose the happiness and love I thought I had. They say it is bad if you don’t love the person, and you just love the idea of being with that person. It is very bad. And it is very hard for me. Valentine’s Day this week, and I feel absolutely miserable. I feel like I am letting her down because I can’t hold myself together anymore. And I don’t feel confident in our future. I am scared to confront her and break it off. Every time I do, I cave in to the lust and to the fear of being alone and failing again at love

Very detailed dream!! Deals with illness, insects, needles, suicide and other triggering stuff!! I had a terrifying and disturbing dream in which me and other people had a very rare and new disease. It was already disturbing as that also because the illness was carried by some very strange insects and we had to stay at the hospital with needles in our arms and stuff. At a certain point a girl (who had the most serious form of the illness) started screaming and she was covered in blood, and she was suffering so much that she decided to k*** herself...I woke up covered in sweat and almost had a panic attack. Does someone else have VERY disturbing and triggering dreams like this? They stress me out so much :(

Does someone have a strong interest in Pokémon? I do! I’d love to discuss!

Anyone else feel like they have to try REALLY hard to get people to love them? Or care? I feel like I have to be a little bit false and pretend I don’t have anxiety or people will leave or I have to trick people into liking me or it won’t happen

I’m withdrawing from college on Wednesday. I’m leaving all my friends to go back home and get intensive treatment at the Rogers OCD Center. It was the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make. There was all this fear swarming in my mind. “What if my friends forget about me and stop caring? What about my dnd campaign? What about the guy I like... what if he thinks I’m crazy? What about my classes? I’m supposed to graduate this semester.” All these thoughts terrified me. I couldn’t even imagine living in a world where every possible thing went wrong. However, after a while, things started making sense. I needed to get help. I couldn’t just keep pretending that everything was fine. Today I told my friends that I’m withdrawing. They cared so much. We had an impromptu party and all my friends were there. It was the best day I have had in a very long time. I’ve never felt so loved. I talked about coming to visit in the future and returning for fall semester. I talked to my dm about continuing our dnd campaign. Tomorrow, I’m saying goodbye for good and I’m even gonna work up the guts to ask the guy I like to play guitar with me one more time (we’re in a band together). What I mean to say is this: never scare yourself outta getting the help you need. When you do what you need to do, everything else will fall into place. Who knows, maybe things will be even better than they were before.

To those of you who feel like there’s no escape or feel like this is the end for you trust me it’s not I have been dealing with pocd for about a year now over one small intrusive thought thats felt so real to me and is hard to detach from however little by little I have detached some days are harder than others but please do not give up do not make yourself feel like you’re a bad person because you are not if any one of you wants to talk about your pocd and needs help don’t hesitate to talk to me about whats happening I know it can be a hard thing to handle but together we can overcome this!

Is doubting that I have ocd and that it could be something else Common?

Its nice knowing im not the only one who doesnt enjoys going out and is introverted, the sad truth is just that deep down im not an introvert but hocd made me one. I cant not be an introvert theres too much anxiety for me to enjoy being an extrovert again. It hurts knowing that im missing out of hella fun i wouldve had if i didnt had hocd

Idk if it's a kind of OCD or just normal stuff but have any of you ever believed in psychologic facts or studies? I haven't been to keen about them but ever since I realized I have OCD I kind of started believing them more. Like my brain could go for hours comparing my thoughts and the psychological facts and I now believe them to be true like they claim to be :(

I have missed three college classes because of my depression and anxiety which lead to my OCD being triggered. I did a dumb thing last night. In my haste of getting out of my toxic living situation to spend the night at a loved one’s house, I left a candle burning. I light candles because I am very sensitive to smells and my roommates leave the apartment a mess with trash and dirty dishes. This resulted in the fire alarm going off last night and my roommate had to take care of it. After I take my meds for the night, I am pretty much out of it. I become sedated. She called at 1:30 AM but I didn’t hear it, leaving her to deal with it. Behind a locked door my candle burned, and I was just stupid to not even remember to blow it out before I left. Come the next morning, I apologized profusely. But I can’t help but feel like a total ditz. A waste of space and a neusance to those around me. It’s really hard. I cannot even move a muscle to get to that class. My ocd is keeping me in my room because it smells so bad everywhere else in the apartment. And now that I can’t light a candle out of embarrassment, I’m spraying Mrs. Meyers peony surface cleaning spray on my fan to make my room smell less like trash. It’s all OCD, and I feel worthless and helpless.

Hocd has ruined sex for me and I have not ever tried it :( my anxiety can not take it that what if I don’t like it. Also my hocd is saying I don’t find penis attractive anymore so I can not even fantasize about it because my head says I don’t like it so it’s feels I don’t like it :( with girls it’s feels nothing it’s annoying I don’t get anxious part but I don’t wanna do it in irl but it’s feels like I have to then because it’s almost feels like I want it :(

I've realized I haven't had an intense strong crush in a year and now I'm worried. What if anxiety made an asexual aromantic. What if I'll never meet someone I will love. What if I'll feel like this forever. I don't want to neither asexual, aromantic nor lesbian. I see all these cute guys but I don't feel that dizzy feeling now. Which worries me

OCD is playing with exposure therapy & has turned my life into a twisted game of "let's see how far we can go with exposures until your life is backwards, with everything the way you don't want it to be". Out of all my OCD themes, this is by far the worst & the hardest to shake off. In some ways, I don't understand what's happening. I used to be able to conquer OCD themes by experiencing my obsessions and not doing compulsions. Now, OCD is adding extra nonsense to this technique & it's really hard to ignore the thoughts being thrown my way. First, they come in the form of intrusive thoughts pretending to be exposures. Next, I worry I've followed through with the thoughts, which creates more problems. As an example, if I first get the obsession of "What if dropped some money over there?" And my compulsion is to check to make sure I didn't, my mind quickly jumps to this new thought of "Now go drop $50 and habituate to that. Make it your new reality. Get 100% comfortable with it, or else you're doing treatment incorrectly." It's like the OCD has switched from the initial trigger/obsession/compulsion to this new fear about how to expose and habituate. Basically feeling like I need to prove to myself that I'm 100% comfortable with dropping moderate amounts of money on the go. There's a lot of anxiety, guilt and shame around this new fear. Another example is when I'm taking a shower. Initially my thought is "What if I didn't rinse all the shampoo/soap off", so I go back once or twice to double check it's rinsed. BUT THEN my mind jumps to "Now Everytime you get out of the shower, put pumps of soap/shampoo on yourself, leave it to dry, and never rinse it off. Habituate to it. This is your new reality." I hate this, I don't understand what my mind is doing. Now I'm trying to figure out if I have alot of soap on my body dried because my mind demanded me to do that as an "exposure". Same with the demand to drop $50 and "habituate". This feels like it's never going to stop. I just want to get back to how I've been able to conquer OCD in the past (Experience the Obsession, Don't Perform the Compulsion), but I'm losing hope of getting back to that place.

I need some advice if anyone is willing to listen. So before i met my husband i was in a relationship with this guy who I knew when i was 13, he was 5 years older then me. When i was 17 we started talking and ended up dating it was a pretty toxic situation but i thought i was happy and was really naive. I had the best sex with him and had a lot of passion/infatuation with him. One night we were asleep and he woke up and kinda forced himself on my when i was still asleep i woke up and did nothing was just pissed off and felt horrible that he would do that to me. Eventually i broke things off with him after a few attempts. After that i was so happy to be single. I had a lot of ROCD in my last relationship but it was about him leaving me or him hurting me or cheating. Then i had talked to a few guys but something weird happened anytime a guy wanted to get close to me or wanted to hook up which I typically was not down for anyways. I was almost like numb or locked up inside if that makes sense like i was afraid of getting close with someone, yet i still would try to be close or flirt or want intimacy but when it came to it in person id freeze and change my mind all of a sudden. So about 6 month after that toxic relationship i was invited to hang out with my best friend at her new boyfriends house whom i had a small crush on but got over that quick, i met my now husband. He had just moved in to her bfs house and we all kinda hung out, then she asked me to hang out the next day as well so i came iver again and hours later they all left and her bfs roommate asked me if id like to stay with him and hang out, so i said yes he made me food and we watched tv then he kissed me and started to get kinda touchy and wanted to obviously do stuff i wasn’t going to do anything with him but then I decided why not it. Its not a bad thing and i can chose to do so if i want. So over time he wanted to hang out with me everyday and i was afraid of being in a new relationship and wasn’t sure what his intentions were but over time he grew on me and we fell for each other, but I remember there were time when we would have sex id force myself to think about other people to get turned on i felt unattracted to him a lot of the time and now looking back i keep thinking maybe i just really was not attracted to him. At this time i was not aware of my OCD and wasn’t really experiencing anything i was just annoyed by him and would question whether or not i wanted to be with him even tho there were moments where i loved him a lot. Anyways now i have ROCD towards my husband i have had this for about 2 years now sometimes it just so hard to know if we have no sexual chemistry or if its my stupid brain and OCD picking at his flaws or maybe its a mic of my ex being a shitty person and causing me to be afraid of intimacy like I’m uncomfortable having sex sometimes i just want to love my husband and enjoy sex instead of feeling numb and not having orgasms and wondering about all of this crap. Anyways if anyone has had similar experiences or knows anything about PTSD, ROCD that would be so helpful. I just don’t know sometimes if what i’m feeling is 100% ROCD.

Hey guys I am just wondering how do you guys just stop rumination I really need help someone please

Just applied for a new job and at the end they asked if I had any disabilities and they listed a few :Use of Wheelchair, Autism, Blindness, Deafness, and then they listed PTSD and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I about died. I didn’t know why it hurts to think of OCD as a disability, but it just does. It hurts like it means I don’t deserve a high paying job. Just thinking about something so personal having to be on file: I have a broken brain. It’s a disgusting feeling. I want to rip this out of me. Is this how the world sees us? Disabled?

harm tw I just self-harmed for the first time in probably four years. I always stopped myself by remembering that my body and mind want to keep me safe but today it just didn’t work. When I tried to stop myself with that reasoning, it just made me angrier. It made me want to hurt myself more because I hate my stupid body and mind and they deserve to suffer. Now I’m miserable because in my family pretty much anyone who self-harms goes straight to the psychiatric hospital. I know I’m in a very bad mental space. I think a lot of my friends know that too because they’ve been avoiding and ignoring me. I’m in a residential hall at college and now I’m just hiding in my room. I’m scared though because my intrusive thoughts are a lot worse right now and I’m terrified that I could possible act out on them. I just feel like it’d be better if I die. I hate myself so much right now and I’m realizing my friends don’t like me much either, so I don’t see the point of sticking around.

Do you sometimes feel like you should just came out and that is it