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the NOCD Community

I am taking doxycycline for an ear infection and have bad OCD and anxiety about it. I google and read reviews about the worst case scenarios and am now worry about this condition I’ve read about called indiopathic intracranial hypertension which affects the pressure in your brain and gives you bad headaches and vision. It’s rare apparently but some people who have taken doxycycline have gotten it . My ocd has convinced me it’s going to happen to me. :(

Hi does anyone else have the pure o, I’m 61 and have had ocd since I was about 13 and on the whole I’ve delt with this dreadful disorder fairly well. Does anybody have any advice or tips when I do struggle as with this lockdown it’s not helping as I’m sure other people are to......difficult times. Cheers kevin

Anyone here with religious ocd?

I just saw a video on YouTube about how people with schizophrenia see things . I got really triggered . And the worst part is that there was a comment on the video which said that it starts with thoughts . And after sometime people start to see things . And it really scared me. Because from the day I came to know about schizophrenia. I think I have it. I know I don't have it but my mind tells me maybe . So whenever I do something a fear comes into my mind . What if iam schizophrenic . It can morph onto anything . I started doing erp and it relly helped. But today I got triggered due to that video and that comment. Please help me !!.

Help..it feels so irresponsible to ignore scary "what if " thoughts!

Can anyone offer some advice for existential OCD? It's the theme that has gotten to me the most and is the only one I'm dealing with currently. I'm in therapy now with someone who understands OCD and ERP, so I'm treating it in the proper ways. I'm struggling a bit and would love to hear what has helped some others.

My ocd keeps going from one thing to another today. Now I’m scared I’m a narcissist because I have bpd and I’m attention deprived and love attention and I’ve done manipulative things in the past but I’m unlearning my manipulative behaviors and trying to be better and I’m so scared I’m a narcissist or a sociopath. I feel so terrible but my brain is like what if you’re just doing all this because you don’t feel terrible. I don’t know man I’m scared constantly that I’m faking. That I really am a sociopath or narc deep down. I don’t want to be one. I’ve made mistakes in the past I’m not proud of but I’d never want to hurt anyone. I hate having bpd and ocd combo. I only ever started getting this fear once I got diagnosed with bpd.

Saying “maybe I am maybe I’m not” hasn’t helped me yet because I’m in a relationship and I just want to know 100% because I want to marry my boyfriend and not have to leave him in the future because of it but I know it’s impossible to know anything 100%. And HOCD is so so debilitating and it makes me so sad and I just want to know so badly so I can be free and I want to be straight and not have to worry about this ever again and just laugh at it in the future

Ugh SOS :( I’m a nursing student and I really enjoy learning about diseases and how to treat them. I am also a Christian. Soooo, I am having this intrusive thought - “what if the devil made diseases and it’s wrong for me to like learning about them.” Then that makes me feel like I shouldn’t even be a nurse to avoid enjoying something I shouldn’t ??‍♀️ (I’m still gonna be a nurse, I’m graduating next summer, I’m in too deep ?) but idk what to do with this thought. Idk if it’s wrong to enjoy learning about disease and I don’t know if something evil even made them!! Ugh

My "hocd" doesn't feel like hocd anymore. It feels more real, everyday I feel like I'm in denial or just not accepting. I'm numb to my thought and have no emotions to anything but I'm still worried. Have no aesthetic, sexual and romantic attraction. My imagination and thinking is distorted to the point I can't remember what it felt like to fantasize. I can now only remember my past where I loved guys so much. I feel like I have turned gay. All the things that I feel can't be just OCD. I feel like I'm pretending to have OCD and hide my true self :(:(

Lately I've been having intrusive racist thoughts and its driving me insane. I get triggered everytime my sister comes over (she says the n word a lot) and I get pissed off and yell at her but then the word will replay in my mind and I cant make it stop. I feel terrible. Every time i look at a poc now my brain will point out their race and keep telling me to look at their skin color as if it's something of importance. How do you treat this subset of ocd? I havent seen a lot of people with it :(

Hi! I feel like I have no one close to me that is around my age that has ocd!! So I just wanted to know some more people who have ocd! I’m Kay from the US! I’m 18 and am going to college and just applied for honors! I am getting a degree to teach kindergarten and also am wanting to get a second degree, either to become a math professor or a dermatologist one day! I have had different types of ocd but for the past few months, it has been scrupulously, and I have been fully diagnosed and am using lexapro, and want to start therapy after everything is safe to do again!! Comment and let me know some stuff about you!

So I am openly bi-sexual. I am comfortable admitting my attraction toward both sexes. I guess my OBSESSION or BIGGEST fear is that I’m NOT attracted to women anymore. And proof of this is if I do not get aroused or respond sexually if I’m alone in bed with a women! This is HIGHLY distressing! Any input from anybody would be greatly appreciated. Working with a therapist through this app soon!!

My POCD has been going for 5 months now. I feel like I enjoy it when in reality it is bringing me extreme torment day in and day out. But what if that’s just because it’s unaccepted in society? I don’t want to hurt anyone and I know I WILL not hurt anyone, I just wanna know I’m not what I fear. The OCD is praying on Mistakes I made in high school, though I didn’t actually hurt anyone. I just want these thoughts to be intrusive. I’ve Known I have ocd since 8th grade, so it’s been like 8 years. I’ve had so many themes—perfection, HOCD/fear of being straight, fear of losing my interests, fear of using the wrong pronouns/being the wrong gender —the list is like 2 pages long. I just hope this is OCD. It sounds like I’m starting my NOCD therapy in 9 days. Does anyone who has been through it wanna comment below?

Ok I am OFFICIALLY hopeless! I have bpd on top of ocd but my ocd is worse and I told the ocd specialist this and she said she doesn’t think she can help me! That cbt wouldn’t work for me! I told her about what the psychologist I hope to said that I need to focus on my ocd and erp. I am so done. I’ll never be ok.

For the record, I am someone who’s struggled with OCD since I was 12 years old, I’m 20 years old now. I have recently entered a relationship with someone following my University term ending. I’m going to describe a few events that happened in the beginning of our ‘relationship’. So me and this girl have been friends for some time, since last November. Anyway, around that time I ended up sleeping with her and fell for her pretty quickly but long story short; she didn’t feel the same, which upset me but I got over it pretty quickly. Around February this year, we started sleeping again, and after a few times we agreed this probably wasn’t a good idea so we stopped. I went home for a week from university, but when I came back we started sleeping again. After a few more times, we decided that we were going to keep on sleeping together but where going to be ‘friends with benefits’ which no commitments and so on. The reality of things, was that I probably would have wanted something more at this time and probably would have gone ‘exclusive’ but I didn’t want to scare her away as she has had many bad experiences in the past which ave given her some trauma of her own and trust issues. Anyway, a week or so of being friends with benefits, things seemed to be going well, we were spending a lot of time together as she was living in the same campus building as me but my feelings were growing for her. One night, after I’d had a few drinks with friends she came to my room as she usually did in the evenings and said to me that her ex-boyfriend was coming down to see her. I immediately went on the defensive and said we should stop sleeping with each other even though she said she wasn’t going to sleep with him as he was just stopping by because he was in the area. She reminded me that we were friends with benefits and were never anything else hinting that my reaction was out of order or wrong. Anyway, long story short, it was obvious we weren’t on the same page so we both called it off as I didn’t want to get hurt and realised that a friends with benefits relationship wasn’t something that was good for me. Her ex came down the next day and as I suspected, they had slept together. We stopped sleeping with each other for about a week, and then me and her started sleeping together again, my feelings were too strong for me to resist her and a few weeks later she eventually confessed that she was starting to get feelings for me. Now a few months later, we are in a relationship. Now for the ROCD; around the time when she slept with her ex it didn’t really bother me that much as I didn’t have strong enough feelings to fight for her and I didn’t want to get in her way, she didn’t like me at the time so I wasn’t going to stop her from doing what she wanted. However, about a month or so after she slept with him, I started to get intrusive thoughts about it, and started to feel this sense of betrayal on her part. I recognise that we weren’t together but for some reason I can’t rationalise and leave it at that. I feel like she’s done me wrong even though we were only friends with benefits and had no commitments Can anyone relate to this feeling? It feels like it’s a combination of my own insecurities/low self esteem combined with my ocd and as usual with many ocd cases I’m unsure if it’s me who feels like this or whether it’s my ocd making me feel this way. It’s impacting our relationship with me feeling compulsions to ask her stupidly detailed questions about the time of the event and it’s just making things worse, it feels like I’m hopelessly seeking reassurance in order to find clarity or an ‘answer’, I realise reassurance isn’t the answer but I just don’t know what’s my thoughts or not anymore. My days go from feeling like I should leave her to me feeling like she’s all I want. Anyone have any similar experiences ever advice? Sorry for the long story

Just finished an ERP for HOCD watching videos of people coming out when they are older and it just made me sad not really anxious so idk if that’s good or not. Like it just made me so sad because I don’t want that. My therapist tells me maybe you don’t want that right now but it can happen in the future so it kinda makes me feel a little bit worse so idk if she is trying to have me deal more with the uncertainty or something else like it’s going to happen to me

How do I resist performing a compulsion? When it comes up it genuinely feels like i want to do it so I do and check if I like it and when i don't I move on but then the same thing happens over and over. it feels real and true which is what makes me perform the checking compulsion. I can't tell if it is an urge or something I want so i don't know what to do or how to respond.

Do intrusive thoughts ever feel like urges? What’s the difference?

Hello everyone, I don’t know if any of you follow Florence given on Instagram but she is a feminist illustrator and author and she has recently shed some light on a topic which I feel has greatly influenced my HOCD and I hope by sharing this, this makes someone feel less alone. She asked her followers to write in to her about their earliest memories of pleasure - and thousands of predominantly women wrote in saying that at sleepovers when they were young they use to kiss their friends and “hump” one another or watch babystation or what not - the women reported feeling so ashamed of it and could not believe how many people had also done it! I myself am included in the thousands of young girls that did this before they even knew what sex or sexuality even was! She highlighted that these responses were not just from gay or bisexual women but a large majority of the women were heterosexual and they reported being very ashamed of these memories (myself included) however didn’t really bother them. This highlighted to me that I am not alone and loads of kids did this because we were kids and we “practicing” and didn’t really understand?. Unfortunately I suffer with anxiety on a very high scale and I found that my OCD presents itself when my anxiety is very high and my OCD is often centred around this! For so long I felt so alone in this experience and thought it must mean I’m gay despite not romanticising about women at all and online finding men attractive when I reached a sexually mature age - but it DOESN’T MAKE ME ANYTHING! Today I say no to OCD. I’m sure some of you have had an experience with someone of the same sex whether that be when you were a child or adult but it doesn’t define our sexuality. Sex contact, sexual attraction and sexuality are very different things. I’m proud to say yeah I find girls attractive but that doesn’t make me gay - Today I say fuck you to my HOCD.