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Suffering from solipsism ocd where I think that everything around me is fake and that I’m stuck in a simulation as the only conscious being. I also have thoughts that there is a higher power that is controlling everything around me and that I’m the main character in a video game. Everyone and everything around me is an npc or generated to keep me in the “game”. This is the worst ocd theme that I’ve had to deal with thus far. Is there anybody else that has had this? and what ERP techniques can I use? Need some ideas. Thanks.

I’m seeking some support and guidance on existential OCD. I’m not diagnosed with OCD, but am just this year realizing I definitely have it and that my thoughts are not normal. My very first memory is when I was around 3/4, saying “I don’t want to die” and crying and running into my parents room, and this was an issue I had for quite awhile, and in my child/teen years it would come back in the form of a panic attack usually at night, and now, I’m 25, and after an abusive marriage, having to disown mg father and my mothers disappearing, basically to a world of her own possible drug usage, I haven’t heard from her since February; which may be normal for some but not for me, as she is in an abusive relationship, and any minute could be her last if it’s not already. This has all happened in this last same year, and it’s got me ruminating on existence from the moment I wake up to the moment I fall back asleep. I AM currently seeking psychological help, as of last week after an extremely bad panic attack, and thanks to my current partner for helping me find the courage and helping me be more aware of what’s going on with me. I tell him my thoughts, then ask him “do those things not make you uncomfortable or scared?” He just says “no, and for most people it’s the same, that’s why you need to seek help”. I won’t share my specific thoughts as to not trigger anyone but if you suffer from Existential OCD I’m sure you’re aware enough😅 Is there anything anyone has learned through this to make existing easier, to cope with being here and feeling like a normal person, like I used to 95% of the time before all these things happened? (Thought you’d enjoy seeing my boy, dogs are my rocks)

Does anyone feel like they’re fighting a war inside of them? I’ve slowly opened up to people about my past and things that happened ( I never thought I would ) but at times, I value truth and honesty and wanting to be a good person and this is something I just want to let go of because I’ve suffered with the guilt and shame and regret but my mind keeps on dwelling on it and bringing it back. Like I’m a fraud. This implies to all my mistakes that I’ve learned from. I normally tell my mom things but I don’t want to tell her these things. I love her and don’t want to bring shame upon my family or for this to be brought up over and over again. I did stupid things without logically thinking and I have the best mom ever and she trusted me with things when I was younger. I made mistakes with that trust and it makes me upset. I now feel like I’m ideally the “ideal” kid for my family and I wish to stay like that no matter my age. I’ve been trying to mange with my childhood mistakes. The shame and guilt. I’m trying to be a bit more compassionate but there’s always the thought that scares me, what if I was really evil? I used to hate looking at pictures of myself when I was younger but now when I do, I finally realize what they meant by “you aren’t your worst mistake” because I’ve done good and I’ve also screwed up. But I feel like I’m fighting a war with myself because I value justice and truth and so but I don’t even wanna talk about this or bring it up and my mind keeps targeting it and it’s exhausting.

(21+ ONLY: TRIGGER WARNING) I honestly feel so overwhelmed by my thoughts—so overwhelmed that I honestly don’t care anymore. I feel like I’m accepting the fact that I’m a monster and have always been a monster. I broke down last night because of these thoughts but I wouldn’t tell anyone if they asked. It wouldn’t make sense to them. This morning, I was watching a body cam video and the person that was arrested was traumadumping about their past SA. I felt like I liked the thoughts and images I got from it. And instead of being disgusted, I let it happen. What does this mean? Does this mean that I’m a monster? Am I a just a monster in disguise?

So I’ve noticed that my OCD has calmed down, I’m getting less intrusive thoughts but I feel more uncertain than ever. Is this normal for recovery?

Been struggling with existential OCD lately. Very hard to describe the thoughts/feelings, but it is a constant feeling of being stuck in my head. Like what is consciousness and where do I think from? Like I think it’s OCD, maybe it is maybe it isn’t. But if it is, what would be good ERP exercises? Just existing (lol)? And what would be my response prevention? I’m not even sure what mental compulsions I may be doing.

TW: Philosophical, Worry Does anyone else start to feel anxious at the thought of “what if OCD becomes fake one day?” In other words, “what if OCD gets debunked in the future?” Not trying to scary one just curious

I turned 20 years old today. Ive been reflecting a lot. Since ive joined this app ive been an ever changing person. Which is good i want to change i want to be good but i still feel the same inside. Especially when i feel like this. Feel of dread an anxiety. This sense of foreboding i hate. I just feel so sad. I didn’t have good teenage years. Ive just been sad since it began and now thats its over i dont know what to expect. Im scared. Im no longer a child im a full fledged adult. Everything feels so far away but everything still hurts. Im scared for my future but looking ahead at the same time. What do i do now that im 20? Do i drop my interests? Move out? I dont know i feel like i need to do something. I dont want to spiral but i feel so much dread. I dont know what to do.

Hey fellow OCD warriors! Wanted to ask if anyone else’s OCD tends to latch onto change and catastrophize with all kinds of worst-case scenarios. There’s a lot going on in my life, and even though they are all exciting things that I truly want and am happy about, I’ve had moments of deep fear at so much change happening and even a sadness that I can only think is a kind of grief of entering a new stage of life/a new me and leaving the old one behind. I am in my mid-20s and a lot of this centers around nostalgia and fear and intrusive thoughts of changes like my parents getting older, myself aging, friendships growing apart leading to loneliness, etc. I know I need to treat it as any other OCD flare-up and do ERP, but it also feels different than other OCD themes because I feel blue and like existentially sad. Even as a young kid, I always hated change and the thought of growing up (even if exciting things were happening) - like I cried when I turned 10 because I was leaving the single digits behind forever! 🤦‍♀️ I feel like I’m preemptively mourning things like losing my parents or my health even though I am healthy and my parents are too. I don’t want to waste the time I have ruminating about the future. I haven’t heard this kind of theme mentioned a lot so just wanted to see if any others could relate.

I am so scared of everything .Of my thoughts.If I am a good person.Years ago I didnt help a kid who was in danger.Since then I started to have terrible thoughts :( i am so terrified.I still have these thoughts and I am scared it means something about me .I really dont want to hurt anyone and I want to help that kid now but idk how I can now.Also I am scared I betray everyone.I still have terrible thoughts and when I am with someone I care is worse...idk why.For example I started to talk with a collegue and he is really nice to me.I told him some things abt me( not the intrusive thoughts) and he was supportive.I have no idea if I will tell anyone abt my thoughts..and bcs of that I feel like I lie to them and betray them.I really want to enjoy my life and be happy and support people( especially because I didnt help that kid then).I want to live up to my morals now but I feel like I lie and manipulate people bcs I am a monster.Is this normal? To feel this way? What can I do? What if I am my worst fear and just cant accept it?!

I feel like I’ve had a lot of different categories of ocd. Some categories stick with me more and are repetitive. I’ve been doing well with mental health - not having anxiety stick around. When the physical feeling of anxiety sticks around, every thought is horrible, but when the feeling of anxiety is gone the obsessions don’t really impact me. If I can keep anxiety at bay, my life is good. I’ve been doing well lately, although this week I was scrolling through tictok and watched a video about someone in a coma and wondered if I was in a coma right now and didn’t know it. I had a panic attack for about 15 minutes. Anxiety, sweating, etc. It didn’t take ahold of me and it quickly lost its impact on me. It still shook me and I was just like “wow” where did that come from. Now I am staying away from social media. Is that avoidance? Should I make myself keep watching social media? Many ocd problems have come from social media or watching a movie or show that triggers something and then spirals. I am limiting what I watch, which I believe is good because I shouldn’t be watching that stuff anyway. What do you think?

like not bad dreams but not good dreams if that makes sense? i had one last night where i was imagining my entire family being at our house or something but i mean it was like this whole thing like a holiday maybe? i can’t remember exactly. anyways—then, before i woke up i started seeing and hearing things/people in my dream and then i died somehow..? and then all what i was seeing and hearing changed to ghosts.. not sure if this means anything or not but thank you for listening i really do appreciate it! 🩷🩷 has anyone else had dreams like this? or just randomly start to have constant dreams and then they go away for a little while then come back again?

Sorry, I know I keep posting on here but it’s like a diary for me. The people on here seem to be the only people that understand what I’m going through. With my obsession about death, the afterlife, and whether or not there is a God, I’ve been going crazy with the compulsions lately. My brain keeps saying things like “If [insert random insignificant event, ex: a red car drives by] within the next 30 seconds, it‘s a sign from God that he is real.” Or there’s the ruminating, where I try to comfort myself by saying that there has to be a God, and that we have to have a greater purpose, and I’ll think about it for hours. I know it’s illogical and ridiculous but regardless it’s absolutely dreadful to feel this way. I have hope after seeing some people say they’ve learned to cope with and have recovered from that feeling of existential dread and the compulsions that can come with it and still be able to find joy in their lives. I hope that soon I can find that joy again. The past three days I’ve lived in a constant state of anxiety and misery. I’ve completely lost my appetite and I physically have to force myself to eat (and I’m a big binge eater that only recently went into recovery for BED so that’s saying a LOT.) The only time I feel at peace is literally when I’m sleeping, or those rare fleeting moments where I somehow am not thinking about it. I haven’t really felt any emotions in depth except for this feeling of utter hopelessness. I hope I can move past this, find comfort in restoring my relationship with religion again without using it as a compulsion, and just live my life accepting that there are some things we’ll simply never know without letting it ruin my life.

At first, it just started as harmless questions, curiously exploring the universe and what life and death mean as a human. Then it became an obsession about death and the afterlife. I’m a Catholic-turned-agnostic who recently took an interest in religion again, trying to redevelop a relationship with God without letting the fear of not being good enough and possibly going to Hell taking over me. Instead, my brain latched onto the possibility that there is no God, that there’s eternal nothingness after the short time we have here on earth and that everything means nothing. My love for my friends and family. My desire to achieve my goals, and to be happy for the people I love achieving theirs. I’m haunted by the feeling that it will all be for nothing, that I will never be reunited with those that I love, that the people I love who have passed on have ceased to exist and one day, so will I and everyone else. I can’t function now. I’ve made myself physically ill over this. I’ve lost my appetite. As someone who once took pride in how much love I have for my job as a daycare teacher, I come into work and feel numb. I go home and feel numb. I’ve obsessively started telling the people in my life how much I love and appreciate them because for the past three days, I’ve been sick thinking about how one day, either I’ll leave them or they’ll leave me. It feels like nothing matters. It feels like everything is in vain. I’ve tried so hard to reframe my mindset, to rewire my brain to not think that way. I’ve tried ERP techniques of allowing myself to sit with the discomfort that the fear brings. To try and desensitize myself to this fear. Nothing seems to work. I’m so lost. I’ve been this way for three days, with yesterday and today being worse than the day it started. It’s like the obsession is morphing into depression in a way. I’m scared I’ll never feel enjoyment in any form again. I don’t know what to do anymore.

I’m new to treatment and only realized I have OCD a few months ago. I went through a tough and abusive marriage and ended up getting divorced. I had my first panic attack several years ago and ended up needing to go on Lexapro. This helped me significantly and allowed me to leave my partner. Several years later and I decided to stop Lexapro because I thought I was good to go. I’m in a very healthy relationship, have a great job, friends/family, go to the gym and have a wonderful life. It’s been about a year off the meds and I’ve had some panic, but I’ve been able to manage it. For some reason, the last three weeks has been really difficult for me. I have different spirals and different thought processes: what if I’m schizophrenic? What if I have a deeper mental disorder? What if I hurt someone? What if I need to leave my partner? What if I end up becoming so depressed that I end up hurting myself? My brain just goes from one what if to the next and once I conquer one, the next one pops up with even more intensity. I started taking NAC and inositol and I’m taking saffron during the day because I really don’t wanna go on back on medication but sometimes my thoughts scare me and I’m convinced that I’m not gonna get better and I know that’s just the OCD loop, but I’m wondering if this resonates with anyone else!

So this past week I’ve had a really bad ocd spiral. I can’t stop thinking about death and what happens after. Because of this, I’ve felt no motivation to get out of bed. I don’t know if it’s burnout from school, depression, or just existential ocd. I can’t focus on the present,and I feel like I’m in a dream like state. I went through a similar time a few years ago, and was able to get out of it. Even if I do accept that death is inevitable, how do I get motivation to do anything when I know it won’t matter in the end? Any tips?

I’m struggling with something I’m afraid to even admit out loud. I’ve been in a long-term relationship with someone I love deeply. He’s kind, safe, and emotionally close to me — and we’ve built a life together. But I keep obsessing over the fact that I don’t feel much sexual attraction anymore. Or maybe… I never truly did? At the beginning, I felt butterflies, excitement, connection — and I assumed that meant I was also attracted to him physically. But now, after reading so much and reflecting more deeply, I’m starting to wonder if I ever truly felt sexual desire in the way I was “supposed to.” Maybe my feelings were more about emotional longing, comfort, and romantic closeness — but not sexual chemistry. And now I don’t know what that means. OCD makes it so much worse. It constantly tells me: – “If you really loved him, you’d want him.” – “You’re leading him on.” – “What if you’re lying to yourself?” – “If you try to fix this and fail, you’ll have to leave.” I feel stuck between wanting to fight for this relationship — and being terrified that trying will just prove it’s hopeless. Has anyone experienced something like this? Can OCD really make you question something so deeply personal? And how do you move forward when even trying feels terrifying? Any thoughts or support would mean the world right now.

So I know I've talked about my fear of being hacked/watched without my knowledge and at the same time that same fear has also made me scared that i've said incriminating things or confessed to a crime I didn't commit out loud without realizing and that this person (who probably doesn't even exist) is going to use it against me in the future and ruin my life. To the point where I've covered all my device cameras. Yeah, I know. Incredibly outlandish. Anyways. The past few months it's just been my brain convincing me that my life is over or that it's going to end and not just end, but like I'm going to lose everyone that I love because of said "incriminating things" though I know I haven't done anything wrong. Of course, there's a part of me that realises that this is really unlikely because I'm not that important of a person for someone to lie in wait for decades and decide to ruin my life just because though I don't doubt that there are people like that out there (i really hope they're few and far between). However, there's another part of me that also really believes that this is all true. And sometimes I wonder if I'm going insane. Coupled with what I believe are false memories, the anxiety has been taxing every day. And I find it hard to sit with uncertainty because this worst case scenario terrifies me. I'm scared of being unloved and abandoned and also deathly afraid of being perceived as a bad person. And of course, also scared of being a bad person and my brain is convinced that I must be. Anyways. Who knows. Maybe. Maybe not. I wanted to share because I know that OCD or I guess any kind of mental illness (whatever it is I'm suffering from if it isn't OCD) likes to convince us that our fears are too niche and that this worry wouldn't be present if it wasn't real. OCD likes to use that as proof. I've learnt though that there are many people like me on this app, and even though it's still scary, it makes me feel less alone. It can be very tiring and honestly sometimes I ask myself how I'm still here even though it's been a few months and some people on here have experienced episodes like this for years or even decades. I keep hoping I'll wake up one day and it will be like this never happened. If you've taken the time to read this incredibly long waffle session of mine that's more like a drawn-pit diary entry, thank you. And if you feel comfortable with sharing, please do :)

can i turn gay? and suddenly start liking gay and men sexual parts even though i never liked them before i scared i will start doing it and lose my attraction to females

Around 10 years ago when I started getting violent OCD intrusive thoughts, I also started fearing that I was a sociopath. I began overanalyzing everything — especially my emotions. It's like if I could prove I had emotions it proved I wasn't a sociopath. I care deeply about my family — I worry about them, I want them to be safe and happy, I want them to get theit deepest desires — but I don’t know what love "feels" like, if its supposed to feel like anything. People describe love as this warm, obvious, fuzzy emotion, but I don’t experience it the way I think I’m supposed to. Is it supposed to be intense? Constant? Loud? Because I’m not sure I’ve ever felt that. My family isn’t very emotionally expressive either. I cherish hugs from them when I get them, I initiate most hugs with my parents (but I don't like hugs from other people, like co workers) but overall my family doesnt show affection much, and that’s made me question if I’m even capable of love. I overanalyze my feelings constantly — especially after realizing I don’t feel connected to God in the way my old church said I should. I don’t love God. I don’t feel anything toward Him — we’ve never met obviously so I just never got a connection with Him. But growing up, that felt like a sin in itself. As a teen, I felt ashamed knowing I cared more for my parents than for God, especially when church messages said God had to come first. There’s a song by Mary Mary that says, “I love you more than my mother, my father…” and it used to make me feel broken. My feelings were in direct contradiction with what I was taught, and that shame never fully left me. OCD latched onto that hard. It’s only after a coworker passed away — and I found myself crying multiple times over it — that I realized I do care deeply for people. But even that realization felt pathetic. Why did I need such an extreme moment to feel something “real”? & why didn't I care for another creepy bigoted co worker when his son was sick? I felt nothing. I’m scared my OCD is convincing me that I’m heartless, even though I want connection. I crave love. I like hugs. It’s exhausting and terrifying to doubt my own humanity like this. I hate this fear. I hate that I don’t trust myself. I hate that OCD makes me question my morality, my emotions — everything that makes me me. Has anyone else experienced anything like this? How do I even explain this to a therapist