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Disclaimer: if you are experiencing tinnitus, this may be triggering. Hello everyone, I could use some advice. I developed tinnitus when I was very young. It started out very mild, but the intensity of the ringing has slowly increased over the years. I don't know what the culprit is for this, maybe loud music, maybe ear infections, maybe the Zoloft I took for 8 years. I will never now. The tinnitus is a recurring OCD topic for me. My biggest fear is that the tinnitus will become worse, and that I will also develop hyperacusis and hearing loss and that I won't be able to take it anymore. Recently my worries about tinnitus resurfaced when I switched my antidepressants from Zoloft to Clomipramine (Zoloft stopped working for me after 8 years). I read that (increased) tinnitus is a possible side effect of clomipramine. I've been taking it for a couple of weeks now and I'm afraid that my tinnitus has worsened, but I'm not 100% sure. It could also seem worse because I'm so focused on it. Not knowing the answer is fuel for my OCD. My compulsions involve googling, doing online hearing tests, asking for reassurance and continuously listening to the tinnitus to see if it has gotten worse. Now the first things I mentioned I can try to stop doing when doing ERP sessions. But I just can't stop listening to the tinnitus, because it's always there. Trying to ignore it only makes it worse. What also doesn't help is that I feel like I still have a choice to stop with the medicine. I feel like I have to constantly check the tinnitus in order to decide if I should stop taking the meds. Does anyone know how to deal with this? What exercises would be helpful for me?

A little „guide“ how I handle my intrusive thoughts/ocd/rocd based on cognitive behavioral therapy, ACT and mindfulness (if you are interested) -disclaimer- You do not have to do this this way! for others this might not be the best way to handle ocd. nevertheless, I have put this way to handle my ocd together with my therapist and it works for me and I wanted to share it because when I was on this side I always searched for something like this... intrusive thought: my boyfriend of two years shares a lot of traits with my ex my obsessive reaction: oh my god no this can‘t be! if they are alike this means I chose my current boyfriend because I was filling the void my ex left! This means we cannot be together anymore because our getting together was not perfect! I need to leave! my bodily reaction: panic, an unpleasent tingling sensation in my arms and legs, feeling dizzy my compulsions that I didn‘t do (yeeeay?): I wanted to check on the internet if this is indeed a red flag, what it means, if there is hope or if the relationship is doomed. I also wanted to phone my boyfriend and ask him if this is okay (again asking for reassurance) and I wanted to confess that I had these „bad“ thoughts and wanted to apologise -> all these behaviors to lessen the anxiety what I did instead: I recognized my want for reassurance (which I know is a compulsion) and stoped myself from doing it. I then asked myself „hm I wanted to ask some advise that some person I don‘t even know put on the internet... what is my opinion about such a matter, if a friend of mine asked me this question what would I say? (my answer would be: maybe yes your chioce would have been based on the void your ex left, but you cannot know for sure. does this really change the situation you are in? You do still love your boyfriend and you want to be together with him right? so this is something uncertain and let this uncertainty be and try not to do your compulsions -> your opinion matters more than what some random dude wrote about it in the internet other things I did: I looked back at my obsessive reaction and searched for some common patterns in my and also other persons‘ ocd patterns. overreacting, catastrophizing (because of this random thought everything is doomed, there is no room for any positivity and I cannot see any positive traits my boyfriend has), and most common in my ocd perfectionism (everything needs to be perfect if it is not, I need to leave so I realized jup seems like the same ocd pattern I always have so I let the anxiety be in my body. If I catch myself ruminating or doing other compulsions I stop myself and choose (this is important) „it‘s okay I can choose if I want to follow this anxious/ocd thought pattern or I can let the uncertainty be present and focus on the here and now“ than I usually let my focus fall on a certain body part (I like to focus on my toes because normally I would not focus much on them) but pick whatever you feel most comfortable with -> mindfulness and at some point the anxiety/ocd will lessen what I like to do after I had such a thought: I write it done, similar to how I‘ve written it done now, even after writing this I feel better and I memorize this one intrusive thought to use it in a little ERP session when I feel better/have more ressources to actually do the work of ERP I hoped this helped a few of you✨

Is it common for OCD to manifest as a fear of being attracted to someone? I literally fear I could be attracted to kids, family members, friends, roommates, animals, and it’s so horrible. I don’t know who I am anymore, I feel like these thoughts reflect who I am, I don’t WANT to feel attracted to anyone except my long term boyfriend who I love SO much. If I really was just a normal person why would I have all these disgusting thoughts? This post could be reassurance seeking but I just feel like such a freak and I don’t even know if this is OCD. I just want to know that someone else feels this way so we can help each other to get better ?

all of my old memories are popping back up. this is starting to fuel a new theme: incest ocd. a couple years ago my parents were sleeping in the same bed as me and my brother because that was our living arrangement since we were staying at someone else’s house. my parents started doing sexual things while they were in the bed and i felt my self get aroused by them and i started touching my self. the amount of shame disgust and regret i feel isn’t even describable. this is shaking me to my core. i feel so ashamed of my self. although this was a couple years ago, i have changed. i cannot describe the amount of disgust i have for this. i am not into incest. i don’t know what i was thinking.

When I was younger, about ten, I watched porn. A lot of it, actually. Idk how it started exactly, but I was a curious kid. This led to me playing doctor with my younger sister... I'd get her to touch me (not in my privates, just the rest of my body) and we'd laugh at each others naked bodies etc. I feel terrible about this later on. Complete shit. I even made her touch my breast one night while she was sleeping because I was curious what it felt like (I saw it on porn). I stopped though. My parents are hardcore catholic and I was afraid they would find us doing it, so I freaked out. This all happened when I was 10, and I regret everything now. I brought it up to my sister a few years ago, and she said not to talk of it again. She seemed weirded out and had no memory of what happened... my mother was even brought in and asked me if I did something wrong. I think she talked to my sister too, but none of us have ever brought it up again. I cant get over it though.

so i have a question, before my real event ocd started, i would maybe get thoughts about the memory like once a month if that. after recovery, will it go back to being that way or will i always have the thought pop up

What is the difference between shyness and social anxiety ? Can anybody explain. I just had anxiety due to a thought that I may have social anxiety disorder. This happened because since I was a kid I was shy of doing certain things like speaking in front of whole class etc. And I am always shy in front of girls. I don't know why but when I talk to girls I feel shy. So I googled it and social anxiety disorder came . So I know that if a person even searches about chest pain google says it is cancer. So I don't know theater I have social anxiety disorder or it is just shyness. Please help.

Can watching a movie trigger and start sexual orientation ocd? Please comment if u had the same or similar reason sexual orientation ocd started

My ocd has randomly become so bad this past week that i cant even get dressed. I constantly feel like i have bugs on me, i have started to hit myself when i get frustrated. Its never been so bad and i have no idea what to do. Every second im on edge i cant relax. Does anyone experience this or have any advice?

Checking: any tips? My OCD is usually under control, and when it gets bad and throws up new stuff or old themes, I use a couple of methods (somatic processing and the "worry later" technique) to quickly get on top of my rumination and panic etc (I have pure O) and get back to other things. What I've realised seems to trip me up is that I want to check on my themes. Like, "it would still be bad if I was a zoophile so seeing as I haven't been obsessing about it, I should probably try to make an assessment". As soon as I check, I just encounter all the same thoughts and beliefs. Much lower anxiety, but the same trains of probably-faulty logic and "what if"s. I get through life by telling myself that if something is going to go wrong, I'll deal with it as and when it happens, and reminding myself that the worst outcomes don't need to be 100% bad or to last forever, and that I'm probably better equipped to deal with them IRL than it feels like in my brain. So I'm not totally sure what to do. It's only been extremely rare that an OCD theme has turned out to have any meaningful relationship to what ends up happening. But does anybody have suggestions about how to think problems though a normal amount without it becoming OCD? I am guessing CBT might be able to help me unpick some of my own unhelpful logic, and EMDR for some of the underlying feelings of being a bad person. It's just that having a theme you're treating feels so much like having an itch you're not allowed to scratch. I still REALLY want to know and am worried about the consequences of not knowing. In particular it's hard to make decisions in my life because I would make different choices about things depending on what's likely to happen or be true, but I have so little clarity on what actually is likely or real. That makes me end up paralysed. People talk about ACT and making the decisions you'd make as if you don't have OCD, but it seems like such a risk. A lot of my OCD is real event type stuff, and I don't want to take that advice on the assumption that all my fears will definitely never come true. I ruminate on this way too much. So yep... Anybody relate? Any advice about decision making when you have OCD?

when i was 7 years old, i sexually experimented but with my brother who was three years younger than me. nothing terrible happened and nothing was forced. i sat on his lap and i moved my hips in a sexual way for like 5 seconds. i didn’t know that it was wrong at the time, i was just a very curious child. that was 12 years ago and ever since then i’ve regretted it with every ounce of my being and it made me feel disgusting because it doesn’t align with my values at all. but recently, it has turned into real event ocd. i cant stop feeling immense guilt over this thinking i molested my brother and how shameful i feel about it. i feel so disgusting and i don’t think i’ve ever felt more suicidal than i do now.

my ocd journey has been absolutely mental to say the least. it’s changed a lot from when i was a child to now, and there’s even been times where it’s gotten worse or better. i started showing signs when i was around four years old. i remember i couldn’t leave the room until my shoes were perfectly straight, and i would sit there for about five minutes until it felt right. and when i played games, i had to audibly confirm when the game was starting and when it was finishing otherwise i felt as if my life “wouldn’t be real”. it was like that for years, and as a child who knew nothing of ocd, i believed that this was normality. and for years after that, i kept believing that this was “normal”. there’s been a lot of things that i’ve gone through which have made it gotten worse. both my best friends died: i watched my nan die at 8 and my grandad die at 10 (my luck... i was in the same room as them at each of their deaths and saw their dead bodies). i saw my grandad battle cancer, my mum fight a rare kidney problem to then have her undergo surgery quite literally the day of my first GCSE. my kitchen caught fire, i’ve been to god knows how many more funerals, etc etc. point is, i understand now that my ocd got so much worse because i sat back and watched those i loved go through so much. as i grew older, the dominating compulsion of my ocd that was having to retouch objects until they felt “just right” and having to repeat phrases in my head morphed into more internalised intrusive thoughts. i still carry out many compulsions, but i never used to get thoughts like i do now. there was a period of my life where my ocd seemed to be fine though. and that was sometime around 2017. i still had it, but it seemed to be manageable. now i realise that was just a calm before the storm because starting school again that year made my ocd go spiralling downhill. at this point, i already knew that it was ocd, but it had become so normal to me that there was always a part of me that said nothing was wrong because i had lived this way my whole life. it wasn’t until the end of that year that i realised how much i needed help. besides knowing that i needed help, i never asked for it. it took me two more years of it spiralling downwards worryingly fast that i decided to finally tell my mum. i sat with her for two hours and blurted out everything. and this was only a few months ago! it was only back in october of 2019 that i managed to speak up. one thing that kept me from speaking up was the fact that i wasn’t diagnosed. i had tried to bring it up to my friends in ways that didn’t specifically say “i have ocd!!” because i knew that there was a chance that it might not have been. i stayed silent for around 12 years of my life. i kept it all hidden because i simply thought this was a normal thing. and what’s scary is it took me 10 of those 12 years suffering to even realise how bad i had gotten. so now i’m here at 17 years old and on the waiting list for CBT. things have been happening lately and i’m possibly at the lowest point i’ll ever be. but i keep reminding myself that pain is only temporary and that at some point in my life i will be able to go about my day unbothered by my ocd. i hope that one day everyone will be that way too ?

Psychedelic question for people who have used lsd. So I’ve been in ocd recovery for about 2 months and have ocd since February. Since then I’ve improved a great amount and basically beat my hocd which was my main. My secondary was “what If I never recover” which is super common in everyone and is what I have at the moment. My ocd is quite mild as well. Anyway, I took 100ug in March when I was first recovering and thought it was terrible because I just got soooooo deep into my thoughts and I barely had any skills to handle thoughts. So I waited until yesterday and took 100ug again and felt a lot different. Like I was having normal deep thoughts mixed in with ocd thoughts popping up. I got really deep into my thoughts again but none really bothered me and I was agreeing sarcastically when I could. After yesterday I’m feeling very good and am still having ocd thoughts ofc but still no bothering me. I told myself I’m going to wait until I’m fully recovered to ever do this again. I don’t think people who take lsd while are recovering is the best idea which my wise mind is now telling me and its telling me to conquer ocd and then come back to this if and only if you are strong enough. Does anyone with psychedelic experience have any different thoughts or anything related to lsd while recovering from ocd? Because I think it’s quite important to be in a strong place in your mind before taking lsd again.

Why is it the only think I think about?????????? How can I convince myself it isn’t true when it feels so real??????

Help! :( I'm freaking out. So I probably do have an eating disorder (not diagnosed), I have been stuck in binge eating (without purging) cycle for a couple of months now, before that I was purging/throwing up . Anyway I just now I threw up pizza I binged on, and I didnt SEE any blood unless it was blood but I thought it was pizza sauce.. But after I was done I tasted a metallic bloody taste. I didnt strain very hard, it wasnt painful but I'm scared I've cut something open and now I'll internally bleed to death or something. I'm freaking out :( I drank water and most of the taste went. Idk :( I'm scared :(

Do you ever get stuck trying to figure out whether your thinking is a compulsion,obsession or normal thinking. Im stuck for the last 3 hours. The question keeps posing itself. Question is how do i do erp for this?

It feels like I will never get better and be like this forever. It’s so hard to shake this feeling. I have never been so depressed and scared. I have POCD and have seen many therapist about it and have been told it’s a chemical imbalance or I need to start dating before I loose control also been told it’s my inner child that is hurting and needs to heal. All of these explanations have made me worse and have gotten to this point where I am feeling suicidal consistently comparing myself to others thinking they have such better lives and have never experienced this I feel so alone. I am on medication that worked for awhile the thoughts were there but not so intense. I feel the thoughts still effected my day to day relationships as I avoided relationships due to fear and the what ifs I was attracted to children. This just makes life not worth living. I see my siblings and friends in happy relationships and I’m stuck in this mind set. I started with an OCD specialist two weeks ago and for the first time someone understands what I’m really going through. It just feels like it’s too late.

False memories and false confessions. Can anyone relate? I'm feeling disturbed.

My new boss has a toddler that he brings into work sometimes, and I know for the past week (it’s a very new job) I haven’t wanted to have sex because I know my brain will want to start something funny. My brain has already been flashing the toddler’s face when I’m randomly eating lunch or working, so I know it’ll do the same when I’m having sex with my husband. Then (not completely sure why) the toddler’s mom changed him when we were all eating lunch together a day ago, so now I have that image in my head— plus the smell of a poopy diaper. Any advice? Do I just push through with sex even though this is happening?

Idk...what just happened but...I just got a groinal from...a female child. What the fuck?? First I got hocd and now pocd too? God no...