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I know started developing a fear that anyone in my life is a pedophile. Okay so this is my situation. One time we were at a party. And a guys comes in with his 2 sisters. His sister are both teens one is 19. The other one is younger but I’m not sure. They look around the same age tho. And we were all there. And they guys says something like “yea they’re ugly and that’s why I’m pretty” & my dad says “oh maybe it’s the other way around”. He said it in a certain way. But I don’t remember exactly. I don’t know if he was trying to be “flirty” or just be nice and give a compliment. Or if he was just being playful/joking around. I also know finding someone “pretty/good looking” doesn’t mean they’re attracted to them. But I got really scared. And I keep wondering about things. Like I know sometimes my dad says things to get a reaction from me (or my cousins). I also know that many men find younger women pretty and good looking but will always stick with women their age. But I’m worried what if my dad is a p3do. Should I talk to him about it?

Did anyone have success doing erp on their own? If so what are your tips? I have tried to seek out therapy but it didn't work out in my favor. (I ll spare you the stories) I have been doing erp on my own for 3 weeks and made some progress. I have done fewer compulsions in general and I start seeing how absurd some of my obsessive my thoughts are. What is the danger in doing erp on my own?

U feel this urge to search gay things for example i go to the instagram search bar and i get this thought what if you search #gay or #lgbt or anything related to that and i wnd up doing when i go to porn sites to test myself i get this thought or urge to go to the gay category and i end up doing it i dont watch gay porn but i watched a gay erotic scene today and i got hard from it and still feel arousal when i think about it please can anyone tell me is this normal or am i just in denial?

Does anyone else struggle with this? To start, I’m not looking for reassurance. I know I have OCD and have a diagnosis. However, I’ve had trouble verbalizing this aspect of my OCD to my care team and haven’t met anyone who struggles with the same thing. I’ll do my best to explain! So pretty much, I spend probably 75% of my day thinking about social “mistakes.” Whenever I talk to someone I keep track of parts of the conversation that don’t feel just right and then afterwards analyze/review to figure out it if the other person misunderstood me, if something I said was offensive or made them uncomfortable, or if I accidentally came off as incompetent. It can be hard to talk to me because I repeat “I don’t know” and use long pauses so that I have time to think through the perfect most exact wording and how what I’m about to say could be interpreted by the other person. These situations where I’ve decided I made a mistake or someone might have misunderstood me then pop into my mind and replay intrusively over and over and causes me a great deal of distress. I will repeat certain phrases aloud to myself to “right” the wrong I made in the interactions and to try to get rid of the thoughts (which of course doesn’t work). I also get these thoughts about situations from years ago that felt fine then but now I think could have been harmful to myself or others. I am usually flipping between reviewing and trying to avoid thinking about like 20-30 different interactions per day. I will think about them for weeks and then as new mistakes come up I may let go of an old one for awhile. This applies to my written communication as well and I also ask for a lot of reassurance and confess to my loved ones. So, I don’t know if this was very clear but I wonder if anyone else deals with this? My therapist always seems to want to put OCD into certain subtypes and symptom dimensions but I’ve struggled to figure out how to explain this to them.

Hii .....i m facing a new problem 3 days ago I had dropped a neighbour boy on my bike to some destination at my town.today I came to know that he is a hiv infected patient....now I m afraid of contracting HIV...this thought troubles me a lot ....

I have my first therapy appointment with NOCD this afternoon. I keep telling myself to be honest and open as I can tend to minimize my OCD and fears in therapy. Here's to going "all in" on getting better.

For the ladies— I’ve had a really rough week, all to discover, “Oh. I was PMSing.” I should just 1) write it out on my calendar 2) don’t plan important stuff that week 3) plan breaks & self care. Stuff like that. Because this happens frequently. I just worry if I put it on a calendar, it’ll become a self-fulfilling prophecy and I’ll train myself to feel and act like crap that week. Thoughts about any of this? Now I need to explain to my male therapist the real reason behind my flurry of emails...

Hi there I feel rather alone with my OCD Iv suffered from contamination OCD for almost 20 years, I have OCD about a unattractive girl who went to the same high school as me, I feel compelled to wash my hands with disinfectant if I come into contact with anything she may have touched I also have a mild dose of intrusive thought OCD and religious OCD I’m just wondering if anyone else has experienced anything similar in regards to the contamination OCD

Does anyone have an issue about wanting to change clothes after being outside (in a restaurant for example) and wanting their partner to do the same? I'm finding it difficult to manage Not changing my clothes. I feel that I'm bringing the virus home and onto everything in my house of we don't. But my partner refuses to and I find it very difficult.

OCD isn’t a separate thing? It’s an integral part of who you are and what you’re experiencing. It’s not something sitting in the corner of your mind, it’s an integral part of your brain and it’s processes. Let’s be real here. You can put lipstick on a pig 🐷 it’s a cute little piggy 🐷, but it still rolls around in caca 💩.

Lately I’m been super obsessed over my body image. I will randomly cry at times when I see myself in the mirror. May I mention I have been working out consistently, or almost everyday, for about a month. I was originally trying to grow my glutes, but now I want a flat stomach It gives me conflicting interests because in order to lose weight you have to restrict and in order to gain muscle you have to have surplus. I’ve always been bad about making decisions, too. Not only this, I used to have a problem with checking in the mirror constantly because I thought I was fat, but I was underweight. It sucks because I’ve started this cycle again. I really don’t know what to do and it’s overwhelming because I have to make this decision for myself. Has anybody had similar experiences??

Hello, I'm new to this group. Ive been dealing with ocd since I was 5 and I am now 25. It's awful. I spend at least 4 and a half hours checking everything in my house (outlets, candles, lights) and it gets 10× worse at night. Does anyone have any words of encouragement or advice? I'm so tired.

ok, last post for today (hopefully) so i’ve kinda been avoiding my friends since my ocd started (about a month ago) and my best friend always wants to hang out , but i would make excuses for why i couldn’t because it was so hard to hide my anxiety around her and i couldn’t sit down and calm down if i needed to when she was around. i felt so bad about avoiding her because we’ve been friends since we were babies and she’s always there for me, but i avoid her. and don’t get me wrong, i loved her to death, but she’s much more open about everything and i kind of hide everything from everyone to deal with myself. i think she realized i was avoiding her so she started hanging out with other people which made me kinda sad (ik that’s kind of toxic of me to feel sad when she has other friends, im sorry). so i went on vacation for 2 weeks maybe a week ago, and she came over to my house with one of her other friends today. i immediately noticed how she had a new style and a new personality (kind of) so i was like okayyy? and then she was talking about how she liked sweater weather to her other friend, and then mentioned how her dad was kinda homophobic, and then said yea i’m never coming out to my parents. then her other friend said omg remember when you wanted to make cupcakes with the bi colors hahaha? and then they started talking about their sexual awakening. i was just sitting there, silently, full of anxiety, just taking in all of this new information. i have felt her start to change this year, but i was shocked. i hung out with her after a month and she had new friends, new clothes, a new personality, and apparently a new sexuality. and i know she doesn’t owe me anything, she doesn’t need to come out to me, and i want to be happy for her, but i’m kind of hurt and jealous that it seems so unimportant to her that she didn’t even need to tell me, while i’m her thinking about it all day, every day, crying and panicking about the possibility of being bi. i’m so ashamed that that’s what i’m afraid of, i wish i could not care if i was, but now i feel like i’m crazy for caring so much. and now it seems like most of my friends are bi, so it’s likely that i am, too, right? and what if i want to be bi because it would help me fit in? i need to stop making it all about me, im happy that she is happy with herself and can accept herself. i’m just scared that i’m loosing my best friend :(

Is being forgetful a normal symptom of ocd? Is there a theme of ocd called "forgetfulness or dementia ocd"? What types of exposures can I do to recover from it?

does anyone else worry that some of their ocd symptoms/ proof of your ocd are invalid because they already knew about their ocd theme, and maybe they copied other people with the same theme and have now adopted other peoples experiences and mimicked them? so they don’t really have ocd, they just convinced themselves that they do and subconsciously copied other peoples compulsions and thoughts? because i’m undiagnosed and i have some symptoms of ocd before i found out about soocd, but after i started researching it, what if i subconsciously copied other people to convince myself i had ocd.

long vent warning ... sorry when describing my death obsession to my therapist they said to me that it probably will turn out to be just extreme anxiety not a full obsession but i feel like thats one of my strongest obsessions besides pocd and sexual oreintation ocd and like ive had moments where i am crying about imagining my loved ones deaths and think about how i cant stop it from happening or my own death grom happening and if i see a death in a movie or someone has died young in the news or if i am looking at my parents at night before bed and noticing their age and my age and how much time weve lived and time is left ... and if its bad enough i have to deep breath and tell myself you dont know when or how you dont know you dont know its going to be okay its going to be okay or get a loved one to say that to me and some days my other obsessions are stronger and i can go a few days where that isnt the focus... and sometimes i can suppress the thought or if i just hold my moms hand i feel comforted and i can distract with well you are here now with your mom its fine... is it normal to feel like you need to prove your ocd to your therapist still like im just really bad at knowing if im downplaying what im feeling or being too dramatic when i give a number im like is 10 right maybe its a 9 i doubt my own understanding of how bad i feel but panic attacks dont lie and crying spells dont lie and thats happened a lot in the past month more than in my whole life when i talk about the death stuff during sessions i dont go into too much detail with my therapist but i did tell them when i was in middle school i had to be the last one to say good night i love you in case something happened to my family before i woke up and if they said it back i had to say it again so id be the last one and that is definitely a death related compulsion and she just seemed like they forgot about that or finds it irrelevant because i dont do that specifically anymore but like when i had my recent panic attack my first serious one ever as an adult and then a few days later another one that led me to go to patient first and get meds because of how scared i was but when those happened it was a spiral of death, sexual orientation, and pocd thought spirals that i couldnt stop or get control of and i hadnt had that death feeling since i was younger and fear of going to sleep because of it and i immediately went wait there is something there ive done something like this before and my memories went to these things i did when i was younger and never understood and the pocd specifically caused me to eventually google my thoughts a few years ago and i remembered ocd popping up and this sense of relief that there was a name for this that im not what i think i am but i still wasnt sure and was scared that i even had to google that and fast forward to when i had these two back to back panic attacks at the start of august i remembered that googling i had done years before and thought shit this could all be ocd this could all be that thing and so i went to the ocd stories podcast eventually and the rest is history after i cried listening to the first episode feeling like there is hope for me this is me this is it ... and only that had given me comfort... but i still was scared because i was like you could say all your thoughts and be told nah actually yeah you have these themes not because of ocd but because you are gay or asexual or bisexual or a pedo and so on but i thoght if there is a chance to feel better than i feel right now then im going to risk it i have to i have to try but since i started sessions all i do is latch onto anything that can be perceived as minimizing my ocd or that i need to get over myself im making this up and the thing is i like my therapist and i trust them and think they are good i just feel like after sessions sometimes i have less assurance about my ocd than i had before my session because i focus on those comments that are probably not meant to make me question everything but i end up doing that... i know there is no reassurance that they are supposed to give me but sometimes i feel like i dont get how saying im on the low end of the ocd spectrum or that my death ocd might just be extreme anxiety is something to tell an ocd patient who is of course gonna spiral in doubt about their ocd from something like that ... i feel guilty typing this like im talking behind my therapists back in the app when i know everything my therapist does is meant to help me get better and i definitely appreciate all the work we have done on my pocd theme so far but these small things are bothering me and i dont know where else to vent... so sorry if i sound whiney i appreciate that i even have this app and a therapist i know that makes me fortunate, i just hope this is just my ocd making mountains out of molehills and that soon this too shall pass?

I know I’m progressing immensely with my ocd but there’s still some challenges that take a little more time and work to overcome. Right now I’m struggling with relapses every time I have a good day. Before, I would rarely get good days during the week, sometimes it would be months before I had a good day. Now I can say I get at least one or two good days out of the week. Sometimes if I’m lucky I get a full good week within the month. However, I’ve noticed when things are good for a full day or a full week, when me and my bf fight I always have a relapse afterwards and get a few bad days after that. It’s usually because I fear that we’ll go back to when we would fight all the time or part of me thinks I’m letting him or myself down. I also think that it has to do with me not feeling safe when I argue with anyone. It’s almost like I also put this chart up and count the days till my next relapse and it’s almost like I have to start all over when I have one bad day and it just makes me feel so bad. The bright side is whenever this happens I reflect on how far I’ve came and makes me feel hopeful again. Has anyone dealt with or is dealing with this? What helped?

Need support- relapse :( today I relapsed with my Horrible Ritual. I did the full thing. Premeditated (partially). I felt just like I used to. When I finished the first half before the seal (cutting) I felt myself sink again. And then I sealed it and it felt exactly how I remembered it. How am I supposed to forgive myself for this. Not just for relapsing - but for the behaviors that make up my ritual. How am I ever supposed to overcome this. I feel hopeless: I just want to sew myself up and kill all my nerve endings. I hate having a body. I feel like complete fucking trash and I can’t fathom anyone looking at my body with anything other than disgust. I have had slip ups in the past but this was my first full massive relapse after a sorta long period of time. Three months has been my longest clean streak and i feel so disappointed in myself. I just want to go to sleep and have nice dreams for once.

Im really in a dark place, I just got my second DUI for alcohol and my mom died in July unexpectedly. I've suffered with HOCD for 7 years now and im losing the will to live. I've almost lost everything. I could possibly go to jail too. I don't think my life is worth living anymore and it would be better if I were just dead. I went to my lawyer today and he wants 7500$ to take my case yet i have no money. I'd love to just talk to anyone, I feel very alone

I’m gonna get real about mental heath really quick: -I struggle with OCD day in and day out as we all do, some days are better than others and today was just terrible. School is one of the biggest stressors and on the FOURTH question of my math homework I just lost it. I snapped and I wasn’t really myself anymore. Not the me that can present as one without any mental handicaps. I threw what is probably best described as a temper tantrum. I never get angry and I was just seeing red. I was punching, kicking, and tearing papers out of my notebook. I was throwing things and just losing it. When I took a step back all I felt was guilt. The guilt that I let it get out of hand, that I didn’t do what I’ve done for years which is just suppress it enough to look normal. Then I thought, “why guilt?” What was so wrong with me just having a bad day. Why did I feel guilty for acting out in a way that didn’t hurt anyone, in that tantrum I was thinking about self harm but was self aware to know that wasn’t an option. So I should be proud of that, why did I feel guilty? I should be absolutely proud of myself that even when I’m not okay and I’m at the lowest, I can still recognize the priorities at hand and I know what consequences things hold. I shouldn’t feel guilty for feeling, I shouldn’t feel guilty for not being able to hold it down sometimes. There’s no reason why I should feel guilty for not being able to suppress it 1/10 times. That’s better than 9/10. I had to recognize that even when you have “control” of your mental illness, if it’s bad it’s still going to be there. It’s still going to show. You’re STILL going to have those days. So I just really wanted to share that because it was a teaching experience for myself. It’s okay to not be in control sometimes, as long as you can still care about the consequences of your actions it’s okay to not be okay. I shouldn’t feel bad for having a bad day, even if it’s worse than some of the others. You shouldn’t either. ♥️