Just wanted to share a win. I was prescribed a new medication for my PCOS. I was experiencing health anxiety and going down the rabbit hole of all the possible symptoms and all of the rare side effects and thinking I could be that 1 in a million. However, I told myself that the risks of me not taking it kinda outweighs the risks taking it. So I mustered up my strength and took the medication! So proud of myself 🤧. This is huge for me! Now to resist body checking myself for symptoms, which is a battle within itself. I got this tho. Just thought I'll share that with yall ☺️

My OCD has been crushing me since 2020. Every moment is just pain. The bad part is that it never ends. I'll just have to tolerate it. I will never know what it's like to live a normal life.

Why me? And why this thing? Couldn't I be just a normal person like everybody else?

Maybe medication will help. But no. It makes things worse. OK now try this medicine. Oh it doesn't work either. There's (what I call) "OCD ceasefire" so let's enjoy life for once. Let's see how it feels to breathe the air and enjoy existing. Because soon OCD will come back stronger.

I believe It's a brutal war but it will end. Even though now I'm here struggling for life and going through all of this, I'm sure I can feel alive again. There WILL be a moment in which I'm sitting there, looking at the nature, and enjoy peace.

But no. It's just a mirage. That moment will never come. This thing never ends. It might seem like it's about to get better but that's just not true. Nothing will work. It will not change. Let's not be delusional, I was born with this and I have to struggle with it for life. It's a pitty to be such an unlucky person to suffer from this chronic pain.

I have sexuality OCD about very taboo things. I get genuine feeling groinal responses- tingling erection ect. It’s always miserable always with anxiety and it’s always against my moral. I keep feeling guilty and anxious and disgusted. It’s genuinely taken away a lot of joy in my life. I wish I could live normally and not have this. My ocd keeps telling me it’s real attraction but it’s never been pleasurable but I never know and it’s terrible

Did anyone else experience auditory and visual hallucinations with OCD? How common is that and how were they triggered if you did? For example I saw spiders all the time and it caused me panic attacks… I also heard voices sometimes separate from my inner consciousness voice that were telling me to do compulsions. I used to also “feel” contaminated all the time as a kid, like my hands had something on them, or I had bugs all over me, ect.

I'm still trying to process a huge "rules violation", as I call it. It's really sent me down a hole because it's connected to many other things that I do; it's not just the violation that is the issue. The violation isn't something I could have predicted, but what's eating at me is that I could have been in the right spot for it to be okay if circumstances had been different that day.

When I have a "rules violation", usually I can just do another ritual and it's smooth things out. With this, for reasons I won't go into, absolutely no way will ever exist to redo this, and it has a big effect.

Have you been in a similar situation, and what did you do? Obviously the ideal would be to try to move beyond OCD and beyond these rules, but that's not something I can do at the moment. I'm trying to reason my way out of it, telling myself that I had absolutely no control over it. While my rational mind can accept it, my OCD mind cannot.

Hello, I really need help with this and frankly I don’t know what to do anymore. I’m obsessed with knowing when will I lose my virginity. I’m 20, this has been going on since I was 14, but now it’s way worse cause I thought I would have lost it my now.

I obsessively check transit charts (the transits of the planets) and horary charts (these give an answer to a question when you think it) in hopes of knowing an answer but it has become a real compulsion because I never find the answer. I also do a lot of tarot readings asking this question.

I think i cast around 50 horary charts a week, and most things I spend them analysing astrological transits until I get sick from anxiety. I can’t do this anymore and it doesn’t help that doing all of these things doesn’t even give me any answers. My stomach genuinely hurts and I’m tired. On most days I’m depressed about this, seeing couples genuinely ruins my day and can trigger meltdowns if I’m in a particularly bad time of my cycle such as the luteal phase.

I can’t take this anymore and I really want help.

Been really bad recently. I don't want this to be my life. I don't want to feel like I'm doing everything wrong all the time. I want it gone :( and I feel like a bit of a crybaby for this but god it's so miserable. Evil evil disorder, steals all my little moments of joy. And the worst part is that fighting against it feels like lying to myself. Idk I'm on a waitlist for counselling and hopefully that will help but god I'm tired. I feel so weak for struggling. Just wanted to get it off my chest I suppose. Open to chatting in comments to feel a little less alone.

I used to think that manifestation was just pretty stupid, no matter how much I think about a million dollars I won't suddenly..have..a million dollars. Common sense right, do your erp. Don't listen to your ocd, we know the drill right?? K, cool!! Well!! I don't even know how, most likely because of an intrusive thought or curiosity that led me to finding it, but I stumbled on so many current discussions and new information on the whole manifestation and law of attraction thing..

I am a victim of abuse, years of abuse in childhood and later in marriage..Look. My thoughts are everywhere, and not just my thoughts. My FEELINGS. Everything is transitory, but also Significant feeling because..I am processing my trauma and dealing with lots of feelings coming up all the time!!! I can almost want something bad to happen to myself, and maybe not seriously because then I'll freak out of course.. so yes alot of it is intrusive but also not????

I don't know but I am tired of feeling like I'm screwing myself or someone else over because I felt this way or use to think this thing or what have you. Quick example. Let's say there's a person that's overworking themselves, they might think for a moment to themselves that they rather be sick or hospitalized in a bed over working so much all the time.. see what I mean? Is the desire there? Maybe abit..or on some level. I find all this manifestation sh** very distressing and triggering...

Recently I’ve been worried ++ about how I feel. I started January very tired which made my mood lower than usual and I immediately feared that I might be depressed. I started doing quizzes to see if I was. I started seeking reassurance, asking my friends, searching Reddit post that are similar to mine. I think about it a lot.. If I don’t I feel good, happy with my life.. I’m so scared of depression, I don’t want to be.. anyone can relate ?

i have really bad ocd and anxiety that just makes me focus on my health so much it consumes me everyday, i cant help but check my pulse and my heart rate at least 5 times a day, i have to shake my arms to make sure they arent going numb, i have ti lift my arms up to make sure im not having a stroke. i cant chew food for less than a minute or else i think ill choke, and honestly swallowing food is just so difficult for me. every pain in my body, chest pain, stomach pain, leg pain, back pain, pain in my head, i think its something serious. to make it worse ive been having stabbing chest pains that last for minutes at a time almost everyday, so now im convinced i have a heart disease, and headache or pain in my head automatically makes me think im gonna have a stroke. ive also been getting sharp pains in the right sude of my stomach which makes me think my appendix burst. i feel like im going to die everyday, i feel like my family is going to die everyday too. anytime i see my dad asleep i always think hes dead until he snores, same for the rest of my family too. i wish i could live a better life than this.

Whenever I leave the house, I’m always TERRIFIED I mean absolutely livid that my house is somehow going to catch fire. Even if I double, triple, quadruple check that there are no hazards like appliances being left on or plugs over heating, I still have this feeling of dread that something bad is going to happen. Does anyone have any advice on how I can overcome this? It’s really something I’ve been struggling with for a while now and whatever I do I can’t seem to get it out of my head :((

Hello everyone,

I suffer from contamination OCD and am looking for a specialist practicing CBT in France.

Do you have any contacts to share with me?

Thanks in advance !

Hello everyone!

I’ve had difficulty being around candles for as long as I can remember because I’m convinced that it’s gonna light fire to something, or I think that they have not been blown out when they have been. I’ve managed to get better to a point (I can now sit in a room in someone else’s place where they’re “in charge” of candles), but I still can’t have them in my own. That being said, I love the idea of candles, both the mood and smell that they give off. Does anyone have any alternatives to this? I’ve tried to do my best with setting mood lighting but it doesn’t hit the same.

How many of you have comorbid diagnoses of personality disorders alongside your OCD, how does it affect your OCD, or how does your OCD affect it

Alright, so the last few days were actually going quite good. I should’ve known it would not last. Something happened to me today (or as i can better say, probably didn’t happen) , and because I suffer from false memory I can’t keep letting go of the thoughts that I did something horrible. It’s absolutely destroying me inside. I don’t know how to deal with this anymore. I have absolutely zero interest in hurting or harming other people, so why does this keep popping up in my mind ? I can’t keep living my life like this not knowing if i’m gonna feel okay or not.

Anyway, enough complaining for now. My Question was, what do y’all do when your thoughts are racing & when your ocd is at an all time high? What do you do to relax? Is there something I can do? I need to try to calm myself down and I have run out of options when it comes to doing so. Thanks in advance.

Sadly, I can't cover everything that happened during these big two or three years of pure pain, but I wanted to know your opinions.

Basically, in summary, this is what happened today:
I stopped doing compulsions. Most of my intrusive thoughts are about my intelligence, and they basically say that "if I don't do that, my intelligence and creativity will disappear; do this and do that to not have the same intelligence as that person." And now that I stopped doing it, I feel like I am completely stupid and dumb. What is happening?

And now my OCD is basically telling me not to post this. Any thoughts?

How do I stop thinking that I need to clean everything? My kitten pooped on my bedsheets this morning, and I already threw the sheets to the laundry, but then I noticed a bit of a smell of the poop still on the bed even tho there are no stains, I can only smell it if I put my nose like above it.

I kept thinking that I needed to wash everything since I put my pillow on it and sat on it. I didn't know there was still a bit of poop remaining cause it didn't stain at all on the bed, so I thought it was safe, but my brain kept making me think that now everything was covered with poop.

How do stop thinking like this? I tried exposure, but it only made it worse, it made me reckless and didn't care about hygiene, but then I would go back to panic cause I didn't care about it.

Does anyone here journal and find it helpful? I just got my diagnosis and am doing research and found that some people like journaling! I was wondering if any real life people use it or if it was just a study thing. If you do journal what types of things do you write about? Thank you.

Does anyone else get hit hard with existential OCD when seemingly minor strange things happen?

I am 38F and was diagnosed at 14, but have had symptoms since early childhood. Every few years it flares up pretty badly for a few weeks or months, with smaller flare-ups in between. I have been struggling for the last few weeks. First, I woke up terrified at the thought of dying someday. A few days later I had a spontaneous panic attack (something just felt “off”). I was not feeling the best last week (minor illness or just a terrible migraine, not sure which), but I thought I was doing better today. But then I started feeling a bunch of unpleasant sensations (dizziness, a stitch in my shoulder, nothing too crazy).

As this was happening, I checked out a few books from the library and put them on my passenger seat. I could have sworn one of them fell next to the door while I was driving, but when I got home, I think I picked it up from the seat. There is probably a logical explanation - maybe it never actually fell but rather I just had a thought that it could, OR maybe it did and I leaned over and picked it up without realizing it - but instead of being logical, I started PANICKING, thinking that I am dreaming, dead, etc.

Can anyone relate?

(To clarify, I can read, receive text messages, tell time, turn lights on and off, and my senses seem to be working, but I just cannot stop panicking).

I suffer from real even ocd mostly and can’t stop thinking about a job I had nearly a year and a half ago for some reason.

I am a good employee/ worker but this job did not last long and it was the first ever one I couldn’t give a 2 week notice to as it was that bad.

From what I remember (constantly questioning myself) I finished my shift and then resigned and sent letter.

Well my boss didn’t send it off to HR and so like over a week later I got an email that because I had walked off my shift I am being terminated. After communicating this mishap they changed my status to resigned and wished me luck. That wasn’t enough though.

Since then I’m constantly panicking that something horrible happened after my shift and they think I just walked off. For some reason it’s been sooo bad the last couple months. I’m spiraling. I have an appointment with a doctor and therapist in less than 2 weeks luckily.

Does anyone else get real event ocd like that?

The guy and I that I’ve been seeing just ended things on Thursday but I got more answers for the questions I asked (after basically hsvubg to each for them). I’m so in my head about what I could’ve done to get him to want to be with me. One of the reasons he said he didn’t want a relationship was because he felt that our personalities weren’t compatible he compared my personality to that of his exes, one of which were treated and the other who was extremely manipulative. I can stop thinking about how much that statement has hurt me and how he defined me as a person. I try to be the most caring and giving person I can be. I bought him birthday gifts, Christmas gifts, made his family cookies (2x) and chocolates and even bought his dog a dog toy just because I thought she’d like it. My ocd had only gotten worse while we were “seeing each other” bc he wanted to wait 3 months before making it official. That never happened. I was so obsessed over wanting to be with him that all I did was basically eat, and I gained weight and now feel awful about myself. I can’t stop obsessing about how fat I think I look.

I -18m have watched porn for awhile now probably since 7th grade and never thought I had an addiction or anything. It varies from every other day to every 4 days on how often I watch it. I have recently tried too stop watching it since I have a girlfriend . I don’t have a problem with not watching it like it’s not too much of a struggling like quiting nicotine . I have took over a month breaks from it. The thing is I don’t like taking breaks like I have the urge to watch it and I think it’s just because I’m horny because me and my girlfriend don’t have sexual activities often. When we do I’m not horny the day after or have the need to watch it usually. The problem I have is I have intrusive thought like, what if I can’t stop watching it/ just thinking about it a lot even when I’m not horny and it’s hard too tell if it’s my ocd giving me intrusive thoughts about not being able too quit or thinking I need it. Or it’s an addiction making me want to go back and I don’t know the difference. Has anyone had experience with this?

I've been suffering from false memory/Real Event ocd for a few weeks now but it's been getting better. But yesterday I had to make sure what I did didn't actually happen, so I tried recreating the events...and ended up doing exactly what I was stressing about and now my brain is possibly creating another false memory of something I JUST DID and it's so stressful. I'm so stupid.

I’m interested to know what types of OCD people have as I feel quite alone in mine. Mine has manifested itself in the last couple of months after an 18 month period of going through a huge amount of stress and it all coming up a head. I’ve been trying to remain so strong for my family for so long and am struggling now. Mine is more about needing to know detail/explanations and if I don’t find it out I keep replaying it over and over in my head. Asking lots of unnecessary/annoying questions. I also seem to have developed a resistance to throwing things away as I need to know where things came from and if I can’t remember it drives me crazy. Maybe it’s to do with the loss of control I’ve had over the past 18 months. I have to stop myself from asking excessive questions about stupid things for clarification so people don’t think I’m weird or annoying. Trying my best not to alienate people who love and care about me. I’m at early stages of taking meds and close to getting CBT so really hope that helps. My head just feels so scrambled at the moment and would do anything to feel like myself again.

does anyone else ever feel like this. I don’t know if this an OCD thing. recently was diagnosed with pretty extreme OCD and CTPSD.

I often feel like I am functioning in the real world seem normal to some extent but i’m not really aware or feel real. I can have conversations but don’t feel present or like I am experiencing moments like others.

I remember even when I was younger being like “I don’t feel real right now and saying that to my parents” It would be random and just such a odd feeling

When I do realize it it scares me a lot.

Example: went on vacations this weekend with family. had a great time. but when we’d all talk at dinner or lunch I just felt so disconnected to where I felt like they could almost tell I was off.

I’m just exhausted by OCD and things like this. I see my psychologist this week to talk about going on a med for OCD. I am already on lamictal and wellbutrin which have helped my prior depression a lot.

But wondering if anyone ever feels like this why does this happen? is there like a psychological explanatio

How do you deal with your harmful intrusive thoughts? I don’t often have dangerous intrusive thoughts, mostly disruptive ones. But I do sometimes get the “What would it feel like to touch the red-hot stove?” or “You should stick your hand in the garbage disposal.” I never act on them, but they are uncomfortable and I’ll often avoid activities, cooking and doing the dishes for example, because I’m afraid I’ll trigger them

Is the fear that every porn material i consume might have underage people involved or abuse an actual thing or is it just me? Is the best way to deal with it to just quit porn altogether

Not only is it hell for the person with OCD, but also for the person who is romantically with the person with contamination OCD. It’s almost impossible maintaining a functioning relationship when someone has contamination ocd.

Whenever I watch anything with horror my brain likes to go and think it will happen to me in real life. I started watching Poppy Playtime chapter 4 because I was getting YouTube shorts about it and I just wanted to understand it. Yeah my mom saw me watching it and got mad and told me to stop watching that crap or something. I was at the safe haven part.

My brain does not like horror. Fnaf, poppy playtime, piggy, etc. Even TV shows scare me. Documentaries, Shera, Owl House, shows about hospitals or 911 services.

Basically do you have any tips to deal with the fear and guilt and stuff so my anxiety doesn’t go crazy

I’m struggling a lot with my ocd lately. My brain is going crazy, every night I sit up convincing myself someone is going to die or someone is going to invade my home and take my life. Sometimes I’ll be going on with my day and suddenly a disturbing image or thought will pop in my head. Does anybody else deal with this? How do you manage these disturbing thoughts?