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My eleven year old son has recently been diagnosed with OCD and I'm wondering if you have any advice for me as a mother raising someone with OCD. Thank you in advance.

I wonder what people think about having SOOCD as a straight person and simultaneously striving to be queer-positive and affirming. I feel most “myself”, most free, when I don’t feel pressure from my subconscious to act out on gay impulses and become a flamboyant personality, and when I don’t even have to think about “being straight” because I just am who I am. Even though I’d like to be free from gay obsessions and false attractions that feel like they’ve evolved into real attractions (even though i still don’t feel like I truly want men), I feel guilty that I am choosing not to let this flamboyant “alternate” personality develop. I feel like I’m not a true ally if I’m saying it’s beautiful for other people to experience queer sexuality, but when I experience obsessions and therefore feelings of a queer nature I dismiss it as “not me”. I know we can’t defeat OCD with neat forms of reassurance or ways of explaining the pressure away, but I’m having a hard time not embracing obsessive gay thoughts because I feel bad not actively affirming them. But then accepting them as real makes me super anxious and untrue to myself. Thoughts?

My psychologist told me that I was a “empath” does anyone know about picking up peoples feelings and emotions that makes you hyper-aware and sensitive and is it really just linked to being OCD or is empathic people experiencing something different?

Does anyone else ever feel like you have to have a mindset for everything? You could label it as a controlling behavior. If I’m in conversation the whole time I’ll have to have one thing that my mind is focused on weather it’s (the image of Jesus) (listening to the other person) (connection with the other person) (God loves me- Saying this constantly in my head) (Being fun) (Giving) Also while I’m by myself it’s like I have to have a goal that I’m heading towards or else more intrusive thoughts are going to come in. It’s like my mind does not want to improvise/ go with the flow of life but to have a sincere direction that I’m going to all of the time.

When I my eyes are open I do not feel like myself. Could it be the weed I smoked two weeks again? Or just stress from school and all the aneixty I am having.

Has switching to a healthier diet helped anyone’s anxiety symptoms?

So I had my therapy session where my therapist told me to try to seek less reassurance. Basically she told me to do it little by little and not to stop reassurance cold turkey . Of course now I’m trying to do it cold turkey and I’m in a state of anxiety bc I want to do a compulsion right now . Can anyone respond to this .

Im scared i have internalized homophobia after reading it on here

Took my first dose of inositol today. Bought a jar at Vitamin Shoppe for 50 bucks. I just drank my first 20g dose about 20 mins ago. A post I saw here inspired me to read up on its effectiveness for treating OCD and other anxiety disorders and apparently it’s backed by double blind studies. Here’s to hoping it does *something 🤷🏽‍♂️. I don’t have acces to medication yet, and I could use all the help I can get. I’ll report back with a post here in the future with my results. If anyone has any input or feedback on their experience with it, it would be greatly appreciated!

So my mate showed me a picture of his dick and i got all hot and botherd and said look at that in my mind. And this morning all i could think about is naked men in the shower and certain attractive celebrities naked and i will say stuff in my head 😞. Please tell me im not alone ?

Hey everyone, I really need help since it seems I can't go foward. I'm a man from Brazil so apologizes if I write something wrong. I have always been heterossexual and It seems I have HOCD for almost 10 years. At the beginning, it wasn't so hard to deal. Some thoughts used to pop up but not so frequently, it caused me panic a few times and the anxiety used to increase too. But I was able to keep having a normal life. Unfortunately at the end of last year, the thoughts started to appear again but much more stronger that I couldn't handle them. The anxiety increased much more, the pressure in my forehead increase a lot too and I started to heave some weird sensations. A heavy weight on my chest, groinal responses and started to have sexual arousal towards every single guy that appeared in front of me. And to get things worst, it seemed so real that I wasn't even able to recognize myseld. Every compulsion that I tried to do, suddenly wasn't working anymore. I started to doubt about my sexuality, about the soccer/football team I've been fan my entire life and also made me think about changing my gender to become a women, and some other stuff. Nowadays, the attraction that I had for women is almost 100% gone and the groinal responses and the sexual arousal feelings increased a lot more and my mind makes me thing that I'm liking and it's so real. Is it really HOCD? Thanks in advance.

Hey everyone, I got diagnosed with hocd over a month ago, my first episode of hocd thoughts started August 23rd and I just got into a relationship with a girl who I crushed on the entire summer. I was watching a tv show that night that had a gay scene in it and I suddenly started questioning if I was gay. That question has gotten so deep that I feel like I am gay now. Every time I am with my girlfriend I feel like I need to break up with her because I am gay now. Whenever I’m with her my thoughts are saying to me “break up with her, you will like it”, “I don’t deserve her”, “you never actually cared about her”. Also I feel like I get annoyed with her now and I’m finding all of her flaws and stuff I don’t like about her, before this I never had any of these thoughts and I liked her so much. These thoughts feel so real that I’m worried I actually will break up with her. But I don’t have any reason too. I get really scared because I feel like I’m going to lose her and I have the fear that I end up being gay in the end and it completely tears her apart. Sorry for it being so long.

After I started doing ERP-excersises and trying to prevent doing compulsions all day long it feels like Im worse. I realise it feels that way beacuse I am more attentive to it all. While before I just didnt have or do anything in my life so the anxiety would shut up a little. And I was so deep in conpulsing I didnt really notice 6 hours passing. It was more annoyance and apathy that my llfe was empty. Now its just terror all the time. Everything is going off. But still I have done things I havent done in years! I have done things I never thought Id do. Small things, but still. But now at 2.22 am lying in bed not being able to sleep because my friends hate me, Im worried Im gonna kill myself by accident, Im should die if I dont get an A, maybe I shouldnt be with my boyfriend, and what if Im not even real!? Well then it just feels like maybe standing up to OCD isnt so smart. I wanna cry. But I dont know how. Havent been able to cry for a long time. Im scared and worried and I dont think I can do it anymore. I need to check! Need to confess! Need to figure out everything. Im so so tired.

Think I'm gonna keep this as my last post for now: I know that I made mistakes, they weren't my proudest moments, but the mistakes don't define me. I know they're mistakes because I didn't have any intent on such harm for anyone else. One of my mistakes involved exploring sexually with others my age and other mistakes involve coming across shocking content I know I didn't want to see. My thoughts keep acting like the opposite, but it's not. I'm keeping it as this, and I'm taking a break from this app. It just adds onto further compulsions I've been constantly told not to feed. Think I'll be back around the end of the month. Need a break from the usual routine to see if it changes anything.

My porn escalation since I was 11 years old (first time watching porn/hentai) has made me realize that it’s because of porn itself that my occasional POCD exists, and how my HOCD has kept a grasp on me. I’m trying to stop watching porn so that I can heal my mind from this. I will get better. I know I’m not gay/bisexual or a pedo. I know I’m better than this. I know I am.

I’m so done. I have been doing okay these past couple weeks. I’ve been obsessing, but trying not to perform compulsions. Yesterday my boyfriend and I had a fight. He made a joke about our sex life, not meaning to offend me but he did. We were literally talking about underwear, and he said “well it’s not like I see down there that often anyways” and he said it in a jokingly way, not in a hurtful tone. But it still hurt my feelings because he knows that our sex life has not always been the best. We haven’t had sex in a little over two weeks while we agreed to try once a week to work on our sex life. Of course he is understanding and never is mean about that.. but he did make that joke and it hurt my feelings. We were literally heading out to go somewhere but I refused to go, and just sat on the couch. We then started arguing, and now we are coming up on the part I’m obsessing about. He said “you’re getting so defensive it was just a joke” but I told him “it’s not just a joke to me! It hurts my feelings when you joke about that subject.” Then he said “well I didn’t know you couldn’t take a joke” and I said “Don’t gaslight me! You have never done that wtf!” And he said “it was an accident okay. I didn’t mean to say that joke. I’m sorry.” But at that point I said “and don’t gaslight me saying I’m defensive and that I can’t take a joke! That’s the literal definition of gaslighting!” And he said “I didn’t mean to gaslight you. I’m sorry.” He then proceeded to wait in the car for me. That’s also probably not the exact order of the argument, but I tried to type it lol. We then made up, and I told him at the end “I don’t want gaslighting to become a thing. You have never done that (we have been together for 4.5 years), what’s up?” And he said “I didn’t know I was gaslighting you. Now that I know I won’t say those things, I’m sorry.” Now I’m obsessing that I’m with a gas lighter. Or a manipulator. I was doing so good until an argument triggered me. What should I do? I’m trying not to ask for reassurance. But my boyfriend is honestly so amazing and I love him so much. Yesterday I just started crying in bed about everything going on in my life (I’m just stressed with school and work) and he held me, and cuddled me until I felt better. Then right as we were heading out for him to take me to get ice cream, this happened. It just seems like every time I’m doing okay something happens for me to obsess about, or I have a thought and I obsess about it. I’m so tired. I just want to be happy with him. Not get anxious about something. I’ve obsessed about this before, but in a different way. It was completely out of context, saying he was being “narcissistic” but he absolutely was not. I looked up the definition and nothing really matched up. So I let go of that. But now it’s this and I’m obsessing whether or not I’m with a gas lighter. What do I do? How do I expose this? These past couple months I have commented on everything he does wrong.. all of his flaws in our relationship.. I have done so many things wrong.. but he does one thing wrong in an argument and ocd makes a catastrophe out of it. Thanks for reading this far.

I am surprised by how many people have sexual orientation ocd issues. I don't know if it helps or hinders but as someone who is gay and trans (and out), its alright to be queer. I understand the fears associated; I mean its of course more challenging to go through life as a gay person, but its also more rewarding. Not necessarily more rewarding to be gay/queer than it is to be straight but its more rewarding to be your authentic self whatever that may mean. So like even if you are gay its okay. You will survive. You might even thrive. Queer communities tend to be really focused on personal truths and being authentic with yourself and that can be a positive environment. Not to say that its not valid to have that fear or anything. Its perfectly understandable. I dunno just late night thoughts I guess.

Feel like my ocd causes me to go through rituals more hours out of my day. I don’t have rituals all day but mainly anytime I use the bathroom expecially when I go number 2 and sometimes it gives me stress to think about for an hour after I go to the bathroom I will be doing rituals in the bathroom. Sometimes I can’t even walk out my front door without doing a ritual. These all came on worse when the pandemic started. I have told me dr and he said I should take more Prozac (40mg) but I’m only willing to do 30mg a day. I don’t know why I have these rituals it’s like it’s in my mind or something. Sometimes they cause me stress even thinking about having to do them.

I'm beginning to feel that real event OCD is something that's much harder to tackle on here for people including myself. I'm frantically switching from being okay with my past mistakes to not being okay with the mistakes at all. I've posted about these mistakes and I was told that I could just move on from the mistakes from people on here and friends online. I even enlisted in extensive research saying that my mistakes really are mistakes. It's complicated. I feel I'd be better if my mind just stuck to one perspective and kept it that way.

Hi all, I have relationship OCD since May 2019. It's incredibly painful but I'll never forget the moment I was searching youtube and Google for answers about my relationship and I came across someone who brought up rOCD. It was an entirely new concept for me . When I read into it, I can't even describe the wave of relief I felt and that I wasn't alone with these thoughts and feelings. And so that's when I started reading books and blogs. I've been seeing a therapist and I really like her. I've fallen in love with this app as well. It feels nice to have more sources of knowledge and connection. My main question currently (and I know it's a compulsion, but i just need to know): Does anyone with rOCD experience fear about having kids with their significant other? It's always the same questions- what if we divorce? What if I'm not excited to be pregnant? What if I don't feel joy being a mother with my partner? What if I'm not happy and I need to divorce? Watching movies with families, babies, pregnancies, first dates/love- are extremely difficult. We've been together for ~9 years now. I've always been excited to start a family with him. Since rOCD manifested, i feel like all of the things that brought me joy were robbed from me, eg. Kids, pregnancy etc. I feel fear and uncertainty now. I even fear that someone/therapist might say "yea, idk those kinds of thoughts don't seem normal. You probably should leave that relationship." Anyway- may everyone keep getting stronger. Wishing everyone the best. We can do this! ❤️🦖