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How can I know if I am saved? If God will save me? This is a reassurance and I just dont want to do it. I am tired from feeling this way, for fearing apocalypse/end of days

Hello, friends with contamination obsessions. I had some thoughts today about the experience that I hope you’ll find helpful. Hopefully it’s not too rambling or irrelevant! To elaborate a bit on your experience. So you’re engaging in compulsions (hand washing) because of some obsessional content. From current research, we know compulsions work for alleviating anxiety, at least for some time. But because compulsions are a form of suppression—trying to eliminate, reduce, or avoid the thoughts—they tend to come back with more intensity. So, paradoxically, compulsions actually feed your obsession rather than alleviate it. So where does that leave you? Well, exposure is about reconditioning your mind to respond differently. Assuming this is a contamination obsession, you may touch something “dirty” while not engaging in a compulsion like handwashing. You may start small, with something that doesn’t trigger you as much, while working your way up to whatever is most triggering for you. A couple notes here: this is going to be extremely difficult and distressing. Which is totally normal, because your brain is so habituated to a certain response (compulsion) that when you do ERP it actually, at least temporarily, feels worse. The compulsion has been your “safety net” in a sense, and your OCD may respond intensely in their absence. It may not feel like anything is happening. It’s going to take willingness and courage on your part to continue on in spite of how it feels. That’s the real and messy work of recovery. Do an exposure for at minimum 30 minutes. Most therapists recommend an hour if you can. Give the exposure your full attention. The idea is once you’re bored with that exposure, you move up the hierarchy. But as you may be noticing, your compulsions are only escalating. OCD cannot be satisfied by a compulsion. It will always crave more, and you will watch your world become smaller and smaller. This is where ACT or acceptance/commitment approaches are so helpful. We spend so much of our life avoiding any uncomfortable feeling. This works in our external world. Say if you touch a hot stove, then avoiding the stove or moving away from it helps you. This is not the case for your internal world. Humans have the ability to connect things via association. So if an animal, say a cat, touches a stove it will get burned and learn to avoid that stove. It won’t reflect on the experience, avoid anything that’s hot even if it’s not a stove, and wonder if something is wrong with it for touching the stove. Your brain goes, “This thing is dirty. What else is dirty? Are people dirty? Is the outside world dirty? I’m noticing dirty things all the time, so maybe everything is dirty. I washed my hands, ok, good. Did I wash them enough? Ok, I’ll do it again. That feels better. Maybe it didn’t work. I saw something that someone got contaminated from their food. Why am I doing this? I don’t want to do this? Please, I don’t want to think about this? If I use bleach, I know that’s clean that’ll work. Yes! Thankfully, I can rest. Wait, maybe I didn’t get all my hands, I’ll do it again. Why can’t I stop? I need someone to help. Just anyone. Let me get online. I’ll ask if anyone else has this, they do! But maybe I’m not like them. How did they stop? Why can’t I do what they did? Maybe I’m broken? Someone please help. Okay, I have to wash again.” That one experience can associate and morph and grow. Unlike the cat, the hot stove follows you everywhere. ACT, or acceptance, isn’t accepting that every thing is contaminated. It’s watching that war in your mind, laying down your weapon, and letting the battle rage while you’re off the field. The fighting may or may not end, but it’s immaterial to your life.

i came across this thing on twitter with this checklist of things you think/say/do if you’re a closeted lesbian and I read through it and I’m freaking out. my hocd hasn’t been bad recently but that just made me go insane somebody PLEASE PLEASE help me I’m going to cry I don’t know what to do

Im in a tough spot. I have pocd and ive had hocd i havent been diagnosed by anyone but im positive im right. Im also not trying to type this out for reassurance but i dont know if this is,on top of that i had a disgusting addiction to transgender pornography. It didnt feel good after i watched it but i couldnt stop, i always told myself this is it no more but would always do it again. After This i questioned my sexuality i knew i wasnt attracted to the same sex but why was i watching this then. I really felt the affects of this january this year when one night my mind just kept repeating to me you are a pedophile, this really destroyed me i couldnt sleep and at times almost threw up because of this fear of becoming one. I started remembering moments in my life when i would watch hentai and looking back on it now i could consider it cp even though many people wouldnt to me it still feels like it. I know im not attracted to any of this stuff but i feel so broken and disconnected, i dont feel like i can tell anyone but i feel like i should i just dont know how. Sometimes i get urges to watch transgender porn again to prove that im not a pedo but i dont think any porn is good for anyone. Recently i became a christian and i keep praying that these thoughts will go away, going to church really helped me and theres a girl that i have a crush on there but now that im in isolation and my church isnt on things are really tough. I hope i can get through this time and come out stronger and mentaly better. I hope this is ocd. I am currently doing nofap which i feel is really helping me and im on a very long streak. However i really dont want to watch transgender porn again but i keep feeling like if i do the thoughts will go away. I know i must not give up and fight through these thoughts to become the best possible me. Im sorry about this jumbled up mess but i needed to get this out there to someone.

I literally feel like OCD is the worst mental illness someone could have. I thought OCD was something that only weird people had. Now I am starting to realize That's Not true. I am trying to figure out how to get better. I saw a therapist for the first time last Monday. Of course it was virtual. I don't know what to ask him.I also smoke and I feel that that just reinforces my obsession to do compulsions. I am not trying to seek reassurance. I realize I do a lot of checking. I just need someone to tell me that I will be okay Because This is hurting every relationship I've ever had with the people closest to me.I just want to get better. Is there anybody know What I should do? I am open to any suggestion. Please be kind though

I really don't feel good right now. It's always something with me

Does anyone here struggle with substance abuse like drinking alcohol?

So.. I’m scared. I think I’m going to start blocking covid and corona on twitter. I think I may have corona but I’m not sure. I have a very small cough and I’ve had other issues from diarrhea to being tired all the time to even having some trouble breathing at times. But most of the time I’ve been ok. My doctor simply recommended to me just isolating myself in my room for a few days. Which I’ve been doing. But I keep seeing on twitter people who say they just lost someone to corona and everytime I read it I can feel my breathing get bad again. I also have health ocd. So I don’t know. I do know I haven’t felt well this last week and I’m under a lot of stress. I think it’s possibly plausible for me to have corona. But the recovered cases numbers don’t do it for me when I keep hearing about all the bodies in hospitals and all the deaths on twitter. I’m scared of like... dying. Alone. And I keep seeing people talk about others dying alone on twitter and that’s what triggers this health ocd. I don’t know what is and isn’t real.

I hope everyone is doing really well today! I’m curious: how does your menstrual cycle affect your OCD spikes? I went off birth control a few months ago, which REALLY helped me mentally, but now in the week or so before my “natural” period and during, all those intense intrusive thoughts come back. Does anyone else struggle with this, and how do y’all deal with it? Thank you in advance - y’all are the best !!!!!!! :-)

Hey guys, I’ve been thinking and have come to a conclusion about my current relationship and I want to see what you think of it. With my previous relationship, I used to get excited about having sex. When I was going to see him in the evening, I would think “I get to have sex tonight!”. He was a bit of a dick and I always questioned whether or not I actually liked him or found him attractive. Although occasionally, I initiated sex and we’d have it quite often. Now, with my current relationship, I’m very happy. He’s absolutely amazing and I’m so lucky to have found him. I don’t question his attractiveness and he has never once caused me to have a panic attack or even made me cry, which happened so often with my last boyfriend. However, I’ve found myself not wanting sex as much. Instead, I feel like I crave just cuddling him and spending time with him and whilst I do like the sex, I often want to just go to sleep, but with him next to me. I don’t quite know why my sex drive is so low, as it could be a multitude of things from my mental health and the medication I’m on to the fact that I’m exhausted all the time at the moment, but I feel like I love my current boyfriend and prefer being with him whereas with my previous boyfriend, I was more in it for the sex, especially since he was my first so it was all new and exciting. Does this sound right? I hope that I’m in a much better relationship now, but I feel like even though I love spending time with my boyfriend, my lowered sex drive is causing some problems and obviously this is making me worry about whether or not I’m actually happy and with the right person. Can I have a little advice?

i have a problem with constantly needing reassurance. i cant make decisions for myself anymore, it makes me really anxious, and i’m not sure why. ive been in bad/abusive relationships in the past where they have hit me or told me that i’m weak and not being myself, and it always happened when i decided to try and make my own decisions. my therapist has tried to help me, telling me to start with just making one decision a day, but i can’t stick to it because i’m afraid. what do i do?

My OCD has latched onto my partner and I can’t stop thinking he’s lying to me. I’m convinced he has had feelings for another girl even thought he says he hasn’t. My therapist believes my ocd has latched onto this but everyday I feel like something’s wrong. We’ve been together for five years and since this episode he’s broken up with me because of the obsessions but got back with me. About a year ago I told him something I was keeping to myself because I felt so guilty We were not doing to good due to recently moving in together and general arguments (not cause of ocd) and I was scared and wanted him to know this thing. I was in the wrong and after a break he forgave me, but because he had become friends with this girl at work over the past few months we were bad, I became obsessed he has something was going on. For context she has a partner and they mainly went out in a group. After what I told him he was very upset and we broke up, we decided to get back together after a short while, having been together for four years we really wanted to make it work. Since then I became obsessed with this girl from work and he has become increasingly annoyed that I was questioning him about this girl, saying it’s unfair and he trusts me and he’s done nothing wrong. Originally after I told him my secret and accused him, he deleted some texts from her to avoid an argument. He apologised and said it was because he was scared of causing another argument. It’s been a year now and he maintains his innocence but my ocd will not stop. I was cheated on in the past and now I’m terrified my partner is lying to me. We had never had any issues before this, never broken up and I’d not been worried about his fidelity. My ocd just won’t let go. I constantly want to ask stuff about last year and analyse specific texts. I feel like I’m fighting myself everyday but ocd is not intuition and I’m so confused. I know him and I know and believe him but another part of me thinks He’s lying and I shouldn’t trust him. It’s tearing my life apart. I’ve asked him for months and he’s even spoken to my therapist

hey guys, PLEASE read this. so i haven’t been on in a while cause i was doing really well. but recently i started talking to this guy and he’s really sweet and a really good guy. but every time we text or anything all he does is compliment me and it’s just kinda getting old and boring. don’t get me wrong it’s sweet. but i’m getting bored of it. and because i’m starting to lose feelings for him it’s making my hocd bad again. i honestly think i’m just not ready for a relationship because i have to work on myself and it’s just not a good time. and also everytime i see a masculine lesbian (mostly on social media) i think i’m attracted to them. and i just keep analyzing and wondering if i’m attracted or not and i hate it. and also last night after realizing all this i found myself thinking what my life would be like if i was bi and then almost as if i was trying to convince myself it wouldn’t be that bad and to stop worrying which made my hocd worse because it made me think once again that i’m bi and i don’t want to admit it. i don’t even know what to do anymore someone comment some tips on how they helped their hocd

OCD and improved performance? (Study) So I was looking at some research papers about information gathering in OCD because of a user here rationalising canvassing others (with and without their type of OCD) for experiences of a symptom (enjoying an intrusive thought) which they found distressing as not being a compulsion/not part of reassurance seeking. But a few things really caught my eye! https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5406001/ This was an experiment run using participants with a range of diagnoses, to see how much information they would gather before making a decision in the task. They found that people with high levels of compulsiveness, whether they had OCD or not, gathered more information before making a decision, and subsequently performed *better* on the task- fewer errors, more points accumulated. In the discussion, the authors say: "The findings lead us to propose that compulsivity is a phenotypic spectrum that is characterised by an increased need for certainty." So compulsivity is needing to be absolutely sure before making a decision or making progress. For us, it could be checking a lot that we didn't say something rude before being able to get on with our day, or being sure that we aren't really a pedophile before treating our POCD. "Here we use computational modelling... of young people to demonstrate that excessive information gathering is a defining feature of an obsessive-compulsive spectrum, going beyond the clinical manifestation of OCD." That part means that people without OCD may have the same tendency to need more information to feel satisfied/complete/reassured/confident. OCD might be more of a spectrum than a clear-cut condition! The part I found really interesting was this: "increased sampling led to a better performance for subjects with high compulsivity scores in both studies, suggesting increased information gathering can be task beneficial (a feature rarely observed as consequence of a psychiatric symptom). Indeed, the fact that subjects with high compulsivity scores perform more proficiently on this task raises interesting questions, especially as indecisiveness is thought of as incapacitating." Where those people with more compulsivity collected more information before making a decision, they scored better on this task. They actually DID make better decisions. I really feel this. Whilst my OCD frankly caused 50% of the problems in my life in the first place, rumination has also, on occasion, brought me practical answers when the problem is a practical situation (an external problem/real event OCD). When it's not a practical issue, just a hypothetical proposed by my brain which is about me or about something I have no control over, it doesn't help even when I think I found a conclusion. Rumination is the internal version of information-gathering, it goes along with memory checking etc. That's what makes it so hard to give up, I think. But I know that when my OCD is bad, like a lot of other people, I ruminate well beyond that point of getting my well-reasoned, sensible answer. I question whether it really was the optimal solution. Our compulsivity goes beyond that point of getting a good answer which would satisfy other people, and throws up new doubts and questions and possibilities because we are always driven by a need to test it. I suspect we cause a lot of our own intrusive thoughts out of habit during recovery, by getting anxiety just like anyone else and responding to that by needing it to be gone, so we attach one of our obsessions to it immediately so we can have the opportunity to test. It would be so great to be able to see how much thinking and gathering information is done by other people who have just the RIGHT "decision thresholds". But of course, putting too much positive emotional weight on getting our answers right and too much negative emotional weight on making mistakes is another feature of compulsivity identified in the study.

Please don't report me just listen. Today by far has been the worst day of ocd in a long, long time. I'm literally losing it and spiraling so hard. I don't want to do it to my family because I couldn't do that to them. But I literally want to die. I truly do I'm trying my hardest to hold on and hope for a silver lining but the only option that even makes me remotely happy is going to sleep and hoping I don't wake up. I want to scream and cry yet all i can do is stay in silence praying for a reprieve or something. It feels so much like I'm bisexual like all the feelings, thoughts, etc. Feel like me like this is who I am it feels like there is no separation no hope. I'm tired and help doesn't look like it is likely as no one will call me back and I need help desperately. I don't want to talk to my Mom as she is so worried about money, food, her job, etc. And i have absolutely zero friends and no one to talk too. I have anxiety attacks almost daily I'm suffering yet my brain still tells me I dont have it bad enough to even complain and that im faking I'm sorry if I'm annoying I know I have been posting a lot and I'm sorry if I'm triggering anybody I so badly want help and to get better I really do but I've literally never felt like this much shit before like I don't know what has happened in these past few days but I feel worthless and disgusting and I hate myself

I'd really like help with this. I know its it's long but I'd be grateful if you read it. Last year my OCD was VERY bad. I was so ill I couldn't get of bed, I was suffering with responsibility ocd/moral ocd and some POCD. I was absolutely terrified of my own brain. I have no pocd now, I still have aspects of the other two though. Anyway, on FB from an OCD group I started speaking to another sufferer. We had a very reassurance seeking online friendship, it was so unhealthy. I'd give him reassure and vice versa. His obsessions included obsessive online reporting things, worrying about the age of a pornstar and contacted her himself to confirm her age (she was over 18), he sought therapy for all this and told his therapist all this etc. His conversations became triggering to me, so one day when I was really distressed I told him I couldn't speak to him anymore and ended up blocking him. I deleted all the conversations as it was triggering to read back on all my horrific intrusive thoughts and his aswell. I feel very, very distressed thinking about how he has all my conversations with him. All those horrible intrusive thoughts that tormented me are there. My brain keeps wondering, what if he was truly a bad person and lied about his OCD? (I know its ridiculous, he even gave me the name of the place he got therapy and insisted I rang them). My brain is like "what if he shares those messages somewhere?". We were clearly both distressed OCD sufferers, I'm sure this happens a lot. I just feel distressed for some reason about this even though all those messages are a back and fourth between us telling eachother how it's okay, it's just OCD and nothing about these horrible intrusive thoughts is real or true. I find this very distressing and I'm not sure how to get over this to be honest.

At what point in dating do you let your (potential) partner know that you have OCD? I’d like to start dating this year but sometimes I feel like I need to be in a better place to do that? Also I feel like if I actually get into a relationship and I don’t say anything about it that I’m hiding some dark secret. Any thoughts/experiences?

I know people are stressed given the world situation at the moment but can we make more of an effort to be civil please? I'm getting very close to deleting the app.

I'm very far into recovery from my severe OCD. I've been going to therapy for seven years now, since I was in middle school. I can pretty much function normally in everyday life now, which I'm very proud of. The reason I decided to join the NOCD community now is that the coronavirus epidemic is reenforcing many of my compulsions. I have contamination OCD, but it's not about getting sick, it's purely about not being clean. So normally, if I go out and touch something that other people have touched, I feel the intense need to wash my hands or sanitize. Usually this is very noticeable to other people as unusual behavior, but now I can sanitize as much as I want without anyone questioning me. Usually I do not like to bring things that have been outside the house inside the house without wiping it down with an alcohol wipe or washing it in some way; usually this appears unusual to everyone else, but now this is normal. I am using the coronavirus as an excuse to indulge in my compulsions, and I don't know if I'll be able to stop when the epidemic is over. How can I continue my road to recovery in this challenging time?

I have hocd , tocd and obsessive thoughts about having mental disorders. Hocd and tocd are under control but these thoughts about mental disorders is going out of my control. The problem is that whichever mental disorder I see , I get obsessions about developing it. I have a question that when iam using youtube , if I get a recommendation about a video which is about mental disorders should I avoid it or watch it to expose my fear. This the biggest question iam concerned about right now . And one more question is that which self help therapy should I use ERP or CBT . Iam very confused due to this question . And please tell me how can I do erp for this mental disorder fear . Because it is ruining my life . Thank you.