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Hey guys. I’m having a really hard time. Everything feels so hopeless right now. My girlfriend and I just broke up and it was the first time that I felt like I actually saw a future with someone. I hate that my OCD turns me into this insecure person and someone who constantly second guesses myself. I know it’s not the sole reason for the break up, but I hate that I can see the person I want to be, but can’t see to get there. Anyone else struggle with this? I feel like I’m stuck behind a chain link fence, and can see the good on the other side but can’t get there. I just wanna know I’m capable of getting there. Sorry everyone, just venting and looking for some support :/.

I feel so alone

I have to keep cleaning my iPhone screen I can’t stand it to be greasy or have fingerprints on it. Anyone else have this? How do I stop?

TW pocd This is really hard to explain but I’ll try. Struggle with POCD. I find the thoughts absolutely revolting but I think? A compulsion of mine is replaying the thought to check as the unwanted thought makes me feel like I “enjoy” the thought? It’s sickening. Anyway, the thought came, then another thought / temptation? Came to rethink the thought and “check” it. I resisted but then got this sickening feeling like my mind was telling me “awwww you’re disappointed you couldn’t enjoy the thought and at the same time find it repulsive” and know I feel like I’m just in denial that I secretly like the thought. My biggest fear is that I’m secretly attracted. Can anyone shed this light? Is this still OCD or temptation / unrepentant sin? ( I’m Christian. ) Thanks guys, struggling so much.

Does anyone else suffer from ‘Real life events’ OCD? I constantly worry about things I did as a teenager (from ages 15-19) I wasn’t a very nice person and think I was quite a toxic girlfriend in my first relationship. I’m always terrified that people are going to find out and that I’m going to lose my job or something awful. I also think that a lot of people would be so shocked if they knew some of the things that I’d done, and that they would think so much less of me. I feel a constant need to confess or apologise, and wish more than anything that I could erase that whole chapter of my life. Previously in counselling, we looked at ‘black and white thinking’, and I managed to rationalise that everyone makes mistakes and nothing I did was that bad, but I have this horrible feeling that one day this will all catch up with me. Is this just genuine guilt and remorse or is this a symptom of OCD? Thanks in advance.

Recommendations on meds? Right now I’m on 30mg of Vyvamse because I also had slight ADD. I know there are better medicines out that are geared a little more toward OCD if anyone has tried and liked the results? I’ve been on lexapro that did nothing and something similar to Ritalin, but less strong, that gave me pains Just curious. Thanks :)

Does anyone else have trouble simply standing up to walk somewhere in the house? I’ll stand up, start walking, and get caught in a thought-loop that will prevent me from continuing on with whatever I was going to do unless I go sit back down and stand up again. That’s probably my biggest problem in general — doing something only one time is excruciating and will eat away at me until I do it again. If anyone has any tips on how to prevent this from happening so often, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Lately every bathroom trip takes me four hours. Sigh.

Any tips on how to stop feeling anxious about the next day last week I had something come to mind and I panicked and cried it happened at work and now I’m scared to go tomorrow because of what happened last Monday I don’t want it to come back to my mind again and have a bad week

ok so i’m going to therapy soon and i’m scared the therapist will tell me i don’t have OCD/HOCD and that i’m young and i need to do some soul searching or that i just need to learn to accept myself as bi and to know that it’s ok to be that way. i really hope i have OCD?

this is going to be very very TMI. but i feel like i need to let it out bc it is one of the biggest triggers of my Homosexual OCD. i’ve liked boys my whole life , even though i was very shy with it i always did. whether it be on tv, movies, my older brother’s friends, my guy friends, guys in school, etc. u get the point. always loved guys always will even though OCD likes to tell me otherwise. however, when i was little say age 7, one of my older friends by a year she was 8, introduced me to porn. yeah i know i was really really young. i had a clue on what “sex” was (not really but i knew it was something adults did and had something to do with kissing). so when she showed me we would masturbate to it together and that was that. i would do this every so often alone on my computer from age 7. insanely young to even know about that i know. and then when me and her would practice kissing together. and we would dry hump each other. but the thing is we would take turns pretending to be “the boy”. like i would “be the boy” so she could practice and then she would “be the boy” so then i could. i know it’s normal for young girls even guys to engage in same sex experimentation because of curiousity. but i feel like my HOCD always picks at this telling me i’m gay. she and i are still such close friends and i never thought about our younger years until i got HOCD. i don’t have any attraction towards her and never did when i was younger. i always would pretend she was a boy. sometimes she’d even ask me and i would just get so uncomfortable kissing her it was all weird to me and not right. at a young age i knew that. i still have never been sexually attracted to a woman or had a desire to be with one . idk why i’m writing this. to let it out i guess. if u made it this far thanks

Help me, POCD gets triggered when I hear news or words associated with it. Recently, I saw a news where in a guy raped an 8 year old month baby. And because of curiosity and the disbelief on how .. idk people DO THAT to children, it made me sad and disgusted but also curious? How do they make their genitals fit? Images came up in my head and it disgusts me but why do i feel like i need to see or my brain tells me i have to visuals just for me to understand or stop being curious about it? Even with kiddie porn, i never want to see one bc those shit are supposed to be STOPPED, :( i love children, i love my baby cousins, it makes me sad there are people exploiting their innocence but my curiosity is making me overthink. it makes me think somehow, i do wanna see? Maybe i actually do? Out of curiousity? Like i dont want to google it because its wrong and i dont wanan give them more audiences but its just really, how? How do they do that? Where do they get the children? Are there ways we can also save them from that environment? I dont know. Imm so scared. I feel so wrong and bad for being curious and wanting to see but also torn because i also dont wanna see, i just want those perverts to burn in hell. But what if im one of them? Im a pervert? Its just so controversial :( someone please help i feel like a mean person and im horrible

Trigger warning: Does anyone have fear of hantavirus? I’m trying to do imaginary exposure but it’s still to intense. In my old apartment, we had mouse/rat problems-visible mouse/rat poo. In the city, roaches and mice are common and it didn’t bother me then. Now it’s a different story. I’m in a building where there’s mice/rat problems. The thing is I hate killing them. It’s really not their fault for carrying the virus. And humane traps mean I need to go out and release but I can’t get out of bed. It was easy for me to help out a trapped mouse from an empty garbage bin but burying a dead mouse was difficult. Fortunately I don’t think there’s any in my apartment but...I “hear” when I’m half asleep/half awake. And that’s enough for me to be anxious. And because of the past apartments, I feel like I’m covered in their poo. I had to do a lot of disinfection with my stuff from my old apartment but you can’t do everything 100% which is causing me anxiety and exhaustion. And you don’t know what things were touched. I try to throw stuff out but I have a fear of losing things. So when I throw stuff out I need to check to make sure nothing important is being thrown away. This fear was a lot stronger than my contamination but now it’s slightly stronger. That’s because my contamination fear escalated. I also do compulsions in the middle of my sleep several times which causes tiredness and exhaustion. Without proper sleep and having the urge to have to check and decontaminate, the thought of the process is exhausting. Thinking the best way to do these compulsions is exhausting. So by the time I get to checking I’m so tired I start to lose focus and because my anxiety is high I experience depersonalization. Going on autopilot, I’m not paying attention to what I’m doing so I have to repeat. Unless I’m recording myself. And then I question if I missed anything while checking. In the past I would be looking for something and while it’s right in front of me I don’t see it until someone points it out to me. So now I’m just avoiding a lot of things but it’s not right. I don’t know where to begin or how to tackle my fears. How to tailor my erp. I’m scared I’ll do it wrong. Like no one in their right mind would touch mouse poo for exposure. But then how do I expose my fear of hantavirus? There are bags I need to throw out but the longer I go without checking and throwing them out the more it’s contaminated. I can’t even say for certain there are mice but if I start throwing these bags out and come across poo, I know how anxious and tired I would be. And that thought alone is exhausting. I tried playing out the possible scenarios in my head as an exposure and it makes me cry. There are places in my apartment where I need to decontaminate but have to check first but just so tired. Tired from the anxiety of the hantavirus, mouse poo, checking, and all these thoughts. I’m sorry if I’m all over the place. I’m also scared of forgetting things and right now I feel like I’m missing an important information to get help for this.

After being sexually assaulted I developed a fear of sex and as a protection my OCD became obsessed with STDs and I’ve been tested a million times for everything they will test me for (they strongly recommended against testing me for herpes because everyone has it in some form and if you’re not showing symptoms and using protection it is near impossible to pass on so it doesn’t matter until you want to settle down and there is a big stigma) I’ve always come back clean, even for the random shit I googled like mycoplasma that I begged to be to be tested for. I still freak out. And now since I am starting to believe I am ok I don’t want to have sex with someone else Incase they infect me (even though if we use condoms and they get the routine test for HIV, Hep, Syphillis, Gonnorhea , and Chlymidia) the odds are slim. What do I do!!! And I agonize over whether I should disclose I have HPV even though my gyno says no because everyone has it (literally the CDC says that) and it goes away on its own almost always and dude to the lack of education it would do more harm than good. I think I am just finding reasons to avoid intimacy at this point and my OCD is making me intensely fearful about my sexual health in a very painful way to distract me, and I can’t deal. I’d rather just confront my issues.

How to stop rumination? I have existential OCD, a type of purely obsessive OCD, and rumination feels automatic. Has anyone tried meditation? Did it help? What did you do?

I was crying over my ocd symptoms this afternoon and my husband said “it’s so strange because really bad people like hitler think they are good people and you and other ocd sufferers think you are bad people when you are really good people” Strangely comforting- everyone on this app are really good people ??

How is everyone today?

I think I've had a breakthrough. (Long post, TL;DR; at the end) When I was 20 I fell in love with this girl, lets call her Mary. I had liked Mary from when I was young. I remember us playing and talking to each other. I remember I'd think about her throughout school. She lived in a different town and I didn't see her often, but she was one of the first girls I had wanted a physical relationship with. Fast forward to when I was 20: We reconnected when she came to visit me and my family. We had a little date where I took her out for a walk around my town, we had coffee and shared some biscuits. She even wrote me a list of places I should see in her town, which I later moved to. I began thinking of her day and night. I wanted to be with her. For a long time I had fantasized about her a lot and had a major crush on her always, but I can't say I loved her. When I moved to her town, I tried asking her out again. We hung out a few times, but never a date. I started seeing this other girl (lets call her Jennifer), but we broke it off after a while. I think it was mostly the physical aspect that I looked for in that relationship. After her there was another girl, who I didn't feel attracted to, so that ended. After all this I tried again with Mary and we did end up going out once, but she ghosted on me. I got the message and didn't bother her again. My friendship with her, I felt, was important and didn't want to lose her. It was more important for me that she was happy the was she chose to be happy. The thing is that, by that time (about 5 years in) in my eyes she was kind of... The "one". Also, I was still - theoretically - a virgin. Between work and school, there was not much time left for my personal life. I got depression because I couldn't find love and started comparing myself to other men and was eventually lead to impotence and 0 sex drive. I couldn't even fall in love because there was something blocking me. A year later was when my HOCD kicked in and the time since then has been hell. I'm getting all these intrusive thoughts. I'm reminded of all the stupid shit I did when I was a kid. And I even get flashbacks that don't even seem real. TL;DR; Fell in love with a girl who I had a crush on since I was 11. I considered her to be my "one". I pursued her for a long time, but nothing ever happened. I ended up heart borken, depressed and lonely. Question Could it be that Mary was indeed my "one" and I have lost the desire to harbor feelings for another woman? Could it be that my brain created this OCD theme to keep me from pursuing another love to protect me from a potential heart-break?

my doctor said to me yesterday “ you know it’s ok to my gay or bi but u don’t know that “ that really hit me hard but now all i can think about is i think being bi is wrong and i’m scared to come out and i’m just in denial. i hate it so much?

Hello with everyone, as you know people with HOCD, generally consume great deal of our time questioning about our sexual orientation, having intrusive thoughts and suffering with this disorder. All of us, search information that can help us, and in some cases there isn't relevant to share but I found something that tells about the therapy EPR. I hope it could help you in any way. Some of these techniques include: Listening to 2-3 minute audio tapes or tape loops about the feared subject. Leaving cell phone voice-mail messages for yourself about the feared subject. Writing 2-page compositions about a particular obsession (and then taping them in your own voice). Writing feared sentences repetitively. Hanging signs in your room or house with feared statements. Wearing T-shirts with feared slogans. Visiting locations that will stimulate thoughts. Being around people who will stimulate thoughts. Agreeing with all feared thoughts and telling yourself they are true and represent your real desires. Reading books on the subject of your thoughts. Visiting websites that relate to your thoughts. These are some typical exposure therapy homework assignments I have assigned to people over the years: Reading books by or about gay persons. Watching videos on gay themes or about gay characters. Visiting gay meetings shops, browsing in gay bookstores, or visiting areas of town that are more predominantly gay. Wearing a T-shirt at home with the word ‘gay’ on it. Wearing clothes in fit, color, or style that could possibly look effeminate for a man or masculine for a woman. Looking at pictures of good-looking people of your own sex and rating them on attractiveness. Reading magazines, such as Playboy, if you are a woman, or Playgirl, if you are a man. Standing close to members of your own sex. Doing a series of writing assignments of a couple of pages each that suggest more and more that you actually are gay or wish to be. Making a series of three-minute tapes that based on the writings gradually suggest more and more that you are gay, and listening to them several times a day changing them when they no longer bother you). Some typical response prevention exercises might include: Not checking your reactions to attractive members of your own sex. Not imagining yourself in sexual situations with same-sex individuals to check on your own reactions. Not behaving sexually with members of the opposite sex just to check your own reactions. Resist reviewing previous situations where you were with members of the same or opposite sex, or where things were ambiguous to see if you did anything questionable. Avoid observing yourself to see if you behaved in a way you imagine a homosexual or member of the opposite sex would. Some typical exposure homework for those with doubts about their own sexual identity might include: Reading about people who are sexually confused. Reading about people who are transgendered. Looking at pictures of people who are transgendered or are transvestites. Telling yourself and listening to tapes telling you that you will never really know what you are. Some corresponding response prevention exercises to go along with the above would be: Not checking your reactions when viewing members of either sex. Not acting sexually to simply test your reactions. Avoiding reviewing thoughts or situations you have uncertainty about. Many of the above therapy tasks can sound scary and intimidating. Obviously you don’t do these things all at once. Behavioral change is gradual change. Recovering from OCD is certainly not an easy task. We rarely use the word ‘easy’ at our clinic. It takes persistence and determination but it can be done. People do it all the time especially, with proper help and advice. My own advice to those of you reading this would be to get yourself out of the compulsion trap and get yourself into treatment with qualified people.