Welcome to
the NOCD Community

Every time I look at a child now I have these feelings and groinials and thoughts that I just can’t tell if they’re real or not bc it feels like it’s real it feels like I’m denying I’m attracted to them or something when I just notice that they are cute and have like attractive faces/feautures? And sometimes it feels like I notice them like an adult :/ but sometimes like if it’s like a vid or something sometimes I think it’s someone older but then I see longer and I’m like oof it’s not 🫠 like ughhh I just hate this idk what to do and I don’t want to be become an abuser I’m scared like I’ll be like my abuser and i don’t feel anxious like before bc I had these thoughts come up since 2020

I keep having unwanted sexual thoughts or images in my mind and its really stressing me and my compulsion is to avoid and block the tought the thing is that i am a believer i dont and if do erp i am supposed to facd my thought and let myself think abt it but my rocd male me feel that i will have sins and that i can not let myself think such things so idk what to do abt this sexual thoughts

How do I overcome false memory pocd. The thoughts make me sick to my stomach, cause me distress and a lot of anxiety. I know we are supposed to practice acceptance of uncertainty but the thoughts or actions are too evil to deal with if it were true. Its not who I am.

This is the worst my OCD has gotten! I’ve freaked out many times about harming my children, touching them inappropriately, etc. the other night I got blackout drunk and woke up and had thoughts of something specifically that I did to my 5 year old. It’s horrendous. Do you think it’s possible to become our worst fear when drunk? Do you think my son would wake up if I did something? This is awful! And I’ve been very suicidal since. I’m not sure how I can accept the uncertainty of this and move on. Yes, I’m in therapy.

Anyone else get groinal responses when they see a child in public and get fears something might happen? That happened to me earlier at work today. I felt super uncomfortable and my mind is telling me I like children. I don’t even know how I got ocd. I’m a bodybuilder and I don’t understand etc this is happening

Hi, I have never posted on a forum before because I’m scared someone will come back and say ‘it’s not OCD’. Anyway, I have always had obsessional thoughts. Always obsessed about my health and if I was going to die. I have always had intrusive thoughts and when I was around 16 I had my first awful one HOCD. This made me feel so sick and I couldn’t leave my bed. Would look at women and get groinal responses and would avoid anything LGBTQ. I then suffered with POCD, which I nearly asked to be sectioned over. Now, I am with my current partner (2months) and we are moving in together in 2 weeks. I have known him since I was 14 and have always had a thing for him. Anyway, last year there was this person at work who I forced and convinced myself to ‘like’ don’t even know if I even did to be honest. But his background is awful and everyone around me said it was a bad decision and I knew this too. We used to talk all the time but yeah, anyway… I said I didn’t want a relationship and distanced myself from him and never really thought about him. I’m now in my relationship with my current partner and I adore him. He is fully aware of what is going on in my head. I have also just started therapy. My head is comparing him to this guy at work. Makes me think they look alike, but this all stemmed from when my current partner was talking about his family past and I instantly thought oh no, I hope my family doesn’t think this is bad (they love him). So now, my head is saying ‘what if you love this other guy’ what if the reason you can’t get this out your head is because the universe is giving you a sign’ ‘what if everyone told you not to go there, then what’ the thoughts are endless and honestly, I can’t stop crying, it is making me physically sick, have panic attacks. I confess to my partner all the time and he is honestly so supportive! I feel like I’m mentally cheating or what if I’m denial. When we first got together I was fine. No thoughts and then bang I’m consumed. My head is filled with them. I feel congested with him. I feel disgusting. I look for reassurance. I constantly look on Quora and Reddit. I can’t cope. I love my current partner! And we tried getting together years ago but it wasn’t our time and since, I thought about him every now and again and now my brain is saying ‘oh see, what if it’s the same situation with this guy a work’ I just want coping mechanisms and relief. This honestly feels like torture.!!! oh and my head says ‘what if you go to therapy and discover your true desires and it turns out that it isn’t ocd’

I've had this theme for 25 years and have worked with children for 20 of them. It's striking how many on here now admit to having it. That's not the way it was even a few years ago on this app. I suspect the focus on the issue in the news and especially online/social media has a lot to do with it.

Hey , I feel like I’m alone with getting intrusive and unwanted thoughts during sex / mast3rbation and when I’m finishing and it makes me feel disgusted and that I’m a disgusting person and that I agree with the thoughts I get and I get really upset after and guilty and regret doing it Please can someone tell me if they experience things like this and if it’s not just me It’s something I’ve been really struggling with but I try not to let it get in the way of me having a sex life

Just wanted to let you guys know . I hop in from time to time to read and check in and wanted to let you guys know that I’ve dealt with a lot of the things mentioned here if not all . I am not a trained therapist. I’m just telling my own testimony in hopes to help others. 1. It’s not the thoughts that are the problem …. It’s the relationship we have with the thoughts. The more we realize that OCD thoughts have absolutely no meaning , the quicker you can move forward. The anxiety will lessen once your relationship changes and you’ll be able to overcome. 2. There’s not a different regime for each subtype . ERP is the best approach ..Don’t run from these thoughts …. Sit with them And retrain your brain to learn that they don’t mean a thing. If you’re having SOCD about a particular friend , have the courage to go out and hang with them. It’s tough but the more you expose yourself to the environment that you’re afraid of …. The more your brain realizes that these fears are irrational. If you’re having self harm OCD . Expose yourself to the things that you fear … At the root of OCD is fear and doubt….. it’s not the subtype itself …. Approach them all in the same manner. OCD hit me like a ton of bricks 4 years ago …..I struggled tremendously about 2 years before knowing how to handle it or even what it was. I lost my Job due to OCD and almost admitted myself in a hospital several times because I thought I was going crazy. It was almost two years of debilitating anxiety until I learned what I was dealing with was OCD. A few subtypes to name : health anxiety, sexual orientation ocd, self harm ocd, sleep anxiety , fear of being a pedophile. It’s like once I got over one ….the next would come until I realized they were all coming from the same thing ….that’s when my life started to change Fast forward, with the help of God, I learned to retrain my brain and not to worry about intrusive thoughts when they come in from time to time. actually learned to take them as the joke they are . The more I exposed myself … the more I trusted myself . Nobody else can reassure you … better yet you don’t need reassurance because it’s actually what keeps you in the cycle. Just Trust God Now I’m a Middle school teacher , in graduate school working towards my degree in counseling with a bright future ahead. I say this to say that, if I can do it , you can do it too …. I’m no different from any of you … I didn’t have a therapist at the time so take advantage if you do. Don’t view OCD as bad ….. it’s apart of you that you will learn to manage. I don’t regret OCD cause it has made me a less fearful person …. I’ve fixed fear and doubt that rooted from my childhood through the struggles of OCD . So it was a blessing in disguise. This is a temporary phase for all of you , trust me . And I know how hard it is to believe that when you’re in the middle of it . But remember. Once your relationship with the thoughts changes that’s when you Free yourself Love all 🙏🏾

Why tho i get sexual images of my family members with my friends and random people , with ocd is this and why and how i recover

I’ve been doing good by not posting but I’m hoping that someone can validate me a bit… I know I don’t feel sexual feelings towards anyone but my partner, but the thought of intentionally imagining someone’s body intentionally makes me so anxious, even my own family including my little daughter… I guess what I’m asking is do people without ocd experience that same discomfort of not wanting to intentionally imagine anyone’s body regardless of the context or who it is? I feel like depending on the person and context, maybe imagining someone as a whole person may not be bad? But I feel uncomfortable about intentionally imagining just peoples body even though there’s no sexual meaning? Does that make people without ocd uncomfortable too? I don’t want to feel like I have to do things like that to become “normal”… sometimes I’ll have intrusive thoughts saying to intentionally do something and then it’s like the image just comes in my head when I don’t actually want it to?? It’s really confusing and upsetting. Can someone please give me a bit of clarity? The AI thing on Snapchat said that it’s normal for people without ocd to feel uncomfortable by that… and I understand you could have a thought and an image just comes in on it’s own without you trying…

i’m very aware that one of my main compulsions is confessing/seeking repentance, specifically from my boyfriend. however i can never seem to get past this one specific event from my past. to sum it up, i remember while having me time (if yk what i mean) i kept having random ppl that i know in my daily life popping into my head and sexual images of them kept coming in as well. i felt like i couldn’t fully control it which makes me think it was OCD and i didn’t know it at the time. however, a specific person that kept coming to mind is now standing out to me. i would be lying if i said he was not an attractive person, but i would never in a million years actually want to be with him in any way. i love my boyfriend with every fiber in me and i am confident i would never do anything to jeopardize that. the thing is that since i know i found him attractive at the time i am struggling with my intentions behind those thoughts i was having about him. although its out of character i wonder if it was real thoughts and not just intrusive. it feels like a cycle of me trying to figure it out and i feel so incredibly guilty at times over it that i feel as though i should confess this to my boyfriend. this happened over a year ago and this person is no longer even in my life but i still can’t shake it. is this something i would need to confess to him or is it just my OCD taking? also, something that feeds into my obsessing over this is that i remember distinctly trying to make sure i looked okay when i was around this person in the past. not in a way that i wanted him, but just that i didn’t want him to think i was ugly or anything. i don’t think this is uncommon to want to look good in front of an attractive person, but at the same time i wonder if i was seeking attention for the wrong reasons or something. it’s just so conflicting bc it’s very out of character for me.

I’m 29 weeks pregnant and keep having intrusive thoughts about my husband sexually abusing my husband. And what’s worse is that I’m having groinal responses. It makes it so confusing. These thoughts are obviously repulsive and make me horrified. But the groinal response makes me question if I am turned on by something so awful??? I mostly have pocd. What can be done about this? Also, I have handled my ocd in the past successfully. This feels like if I am aroused by this then maybe I need help. It’s also making me like freaked out even when I am aroused by normal things, like my husband.

At what point do you actually start feeling like you AREN’T that person when you’re trying to heal from POCD? Im still dealing with the thoughts and I just want to not FEEL like it’s the who I am anymore. That’s literally all I need rn.

My ocd always makes me think the worst and tells me that the only explanation for things is that I did something horrible. I had an incident many years ago that has made my life miserable. I guess it’s a real event and possibly false memory as well. When my son was little he would crawl into bed with me alot. One morning I got up and he was still asleep. I put my daughter on the school bus and went back upstairs to my room and he was awake sitting up wrapped in the blanket. I said good morning and told him to come downstairs with me and get breakfast like I always did but when he got out of bed he didn’t have his underwear on. I yelled at him demanding to know why he took his underwear off. He was 2 or 3 and he pointed at me and yelled “You!”. My ocd immediately kicked in and made me think the worst that I must have done something horrible to him in my sleep. Why would he say that? 😪. At the time I didn’t think too much of it though because toddlers randomly do weird things and take their clothes off and they yell back or blame you because they don’t like getting in trouble or getting yelled at so I shrugged it off but out of nowhere all these years later my ocd brought this back up. Since it’s been so long my memory has faded so my ocd adds more “evidence” and tells me things like maybe I was drinking and did something to him and just don’t remember. I try to think of all the scenarios that could have happened as to why he took his underwear off but my ocd won’t let anything make sense except that I did something horrible and I can’t live with that uncertainty like other people can. It makes me not want to be alive anymore 😞

I need some advice. Now since we all know about ERP please don’t provide reassurance or anything like that. I find that one of the things I struggle with the most is fear of my loved ones finding out I have OCD specifically POCD. If any of you have POCD & experienced this please let me know how you deal with this. It’s not so bad that I can’t move on with my day to day life whenever I get a thought I simply move on , but my mind instantly jumps to them finding out whenever I think someone is mad at me or something. Sorry for the long vent lol!!! Goodnight 💞

So I study film in high school and decided to make a film for my class on awarness on ocd and it's informative and covers many subtypes, mostly taboo thoughts. I covered probably every taboo subtype you can imagine on there, one of them being pocd. There's a part when I set examples of intrusive thoughts that feel more like urges and commands and I put an example saying "I'm going to grope the first child that walks past me". I got reported by a student to the counselors of my school and the counselors called me in not only for my safety but the safety of others. They said that they wanted to know if I was ok and then they wanted my therapist's information to make sure I would be ok after graduation. I gladly gave them her info knowing that this was for my own good and to inform them on ocd's scary reality. I got a call from my therapist last night telling me that the counselors shared my script with her and they were considering removing me from being of reach of children in my internship which is also my job. This is a huge deal for me not only because that job is my only form of income that I've been using to support my family but because I plan on majoring in education and becoming a teacher and have been working with children for years and I want to be a good teacher. This could literally run the risk of me being reported to the police and could open up a criminal record, possibly preventing me from moving forward in my career in child caretaking and education. I'm reasonably freaking out and she tells me that they will talk to me in the morning at school so I out of fear of losing my job and fucking future get to the main office to speak to them. I had made a gc with people that ik that have ocd that will be in my film and told them that I had been reported and needed back up and one offered to go with me to the office. When we get there the counselors tell us that I'm the only one allowed and speak to me in private. I'm angry and horrified bc they literally believed me on Monday when we met and then go behind my back to tell my therapist that I'm not supposed to be around kids bc I'm dangerous for sharing an informative example of pocd. Above all of this, in the script I never stated what MY obsessions were so they were the ones assuming that I had pocd of all the subtypes that I had mentioned. That was when they told me that my therapist had seen the example on pocd and told them that the fact I'm around children in a situation that can be triggering is BAD FOR ME EVEN THOUGH IT'S AN EXPOSURE AND HAS HELPED ME AND SHE WAS THE ONE THAT TOLD THEM TO GET ME AWAY FROM KIDS. She therefore implied to them that I have pocd WITHOUT my consent and this made the school remove me from my internship at my job. I go to get paid outside of school hours but for the time I'm in school I'm not allowed to be there bc my therapist shared information that I never gave them permission to share AND must think that all the exposures mean nothing bc they're too "triggering" for me and it can "make me suffer more". I met up during lunch with my film cast with ocd and they listened to most of it before I could finish but they kept telling me to report her to the medical board and to the conpany she works for because she broke confidentiality. How do I go about this?

I’ve suddenly developed these obsessive thoughts not even 2 days ago. “What if I’m a pedophile” “what if I want to harm children” I’ve been researching a lot seeing the differences, I can’t sleep or eat because it’s keeping me up. I’ve never had thoughts like these, I’ve never had/don’t have intentions of harming a child or anything like that. But I still have an irrational fear and I don’t know what to do. I just want this to be over and to have reassurance that I’m not and that I’m a normal person but I know that if I do It’s just going to get worst. I’ve never even had thoughts like these before but I question if I did in the past and I didn’t remember. I don’t have access to therapy either I feel like I’m going crazy and I don’t think I’ll get better. I want it to be like how it was before being normal and living my life without this.

I always get images of things that I severely don’t want to have. It gets better as the day goes on but I feel that whenever I make mistakes or there’s an accident (for instance my fingers accidentally grazed a students “area” when I was trying to get my pen) make me feel insanely guilty and that I want to hurt myself to compensate. For that instance I told my boss right away and she didn’t make it a big deal because it was such a swift and accidental occurrence, but that moment kept/keeps replaying in my head and I feel like a monster. Also, when I let a student use my phone to look at a picture for reference (art project) there was a search I made about birth control and how to know when to take a pregnancy test. I didn’t think much of it because I have absolutely nothing bad in my phone, but now I feel like I might be some groomer or monster. I definitely should go back to therapy but I just want to see if anybody had similar experiences/fears.

Does anyone else see someone attractive of the same sex and start intrusively thinking things like “cute” or something beyond just acknowledging them as good looking? I avoid looking at good looking same sex people on tv shows because I get those intrusive thoughts and it makes me question what does that mean of me. I don’t want to be gay and I feel so uncomfortable and it feels like denial every time I try and do a compulsion. It’s hard to look at men on TV shows because my mind comes up crazy stuff and I don’t know what it means