Ok so I’ve been reading up on OCD and intrusive thoughts, and everything seems to come back to intrusive thoughts always being either a) bad things that you want to physically do (like hurt someone) or b) being scared that bad things will happen to people you love (like being petrified your parents will die in a car crash). So, my question is, what about when the thoughts are about bad things happening to people you love but not being scared about it and instead quickly going down a thought track of all the sympathy and caring support you would receive from others if that happened. So, for example, thinking ‘what if my entire immediately family were to die in a plane crash right now?’ but instead of worry or fear about that happening, I’d imagine how sad I’d be at the funeral and the fact that everyone else would see me upset and feel so sympathetic of me and give me so much love and support. Is this an intrusive thought? And are intrusive thoughts always OCD related? For the record, when this happens I do very quickly ‘snap out of it’ and then feel the sadness and guilt kick in.

*Editing to add this isn’t the only example, it’s often things like imagining If I were to get beaten up or raped (being my genuine biggest fear in life) but then immediately thinking of how much sympathy and I would get from everyone feeling so sorry for me. I’ve had thoughts like this as long as I can remember…

As far as I can remember I have had intrusive thoughts but they never bothered me cause they were never about anything bad. But about a month ago I had disgusting sexual thoughts about my little sister. Also I am STRAIGHT. Ever since then my life has spiralled. I was bombarded with awful images of hurting my sister and was so scared to be left around her. And to note she doesn’t even live where I am. These thoughts would pop up in the most random ways. Mind you I am a very sexual person and HAVE NEVER had thoughts like this in my entire life. But now every time I masturbate or try to my fantasies get replaced by her even when I try so hard not to think about it. I read a book on unwanted intrusive thoughts which gave me insight into Exposures so I have been trying to just let these thoughts come and go but sometimes that makes me feel even worse. As if I am accepting them. In the past week or so my thoughts have gotten better and my anxiety has also gotten better but now I am scared that that means I actually want these thoughts. Every time I FaceTime my family + sister I get so scared and have so much fear that I’m gonna have bad thoughts or what if I find her attractive?? What’s if I WANT to those things? Sometimes I look at her picture on purpose to see if am feeling any thing.

And then my thoughts spiral, I try talking to myself to call me down or looking back on other interactions. It feels even worse when the anxiety is lowered and I am feeling nothing cause that makes me think that this is truly what I want and I’m just fucked up. Sometime I masturbate multiple times just to make sure that I don’t think about that. Nowadays every time I read romance novels and want to imagine the sex scenes her image pops up and I try so hard to push past that I am so confused and terrified . I love my sister and have always said that she is the best gift ever and now I don’t know what to think. I am trying to “accept” the thoughts as they comes and not interact with them but that scares me even more

Im posting this to see if anyone can relate to my experience, ive noticed that sometimes i question the reality of a situation, for example im hanging out with a friend and walking back to their car i question "is this my friend or am i just delusional and im going back to the car with a stranger right now?", then i have to look at my friend and try to see distinctive things that make them themselves and analyse it three times to be satisfied, it's a really weird experience to say the least, even when i get home from a hangout my brain goes " I was at a strangers house all along not my friends" and makes me doubt reality and i have to analyse the hangout in my head, i don't know if this is part of false memory OCD or not, please if anyone can relate let me know.

Just to see if what i'm going through is "normal" or it's just me

Tonight I have had quite vivid thoughts of me having a razorblade in my mouth and about to swallow it. I'm able to tell myself that it's not real and keep calm, but at times it feels as if I actually had the blade in my mouth. My stomach drops a bit every time I even for a fraction of a second think I've swallowed one.

These thoughts are quite similar to what I had last Autumn. I was practicing needlework and embroidery, but kept having to stop myself. I constantly felt like I had accidentally swallowed a needle and had to count my needles numerous time to convince myself that I hadn't infact eaten one. At one point I was kneeling on the ground away from my desk and repeating outloud "I did not swallow one, they are all there, I did not do it" haha.

Though one casual one I keep getting is the image of invisible, thin but strong strings being stretched across pathways, roads, halways, etc. Sometimes I feel the urge to walk slower, carefully, just so these strings won't cut me. These thoughts used to be so strong that I wasn't able to get up from bed at night because I was afraid someone had stretched some just above me.

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These days my intrusive thoughts aren't that vivid or strong as they used to, thankfully. But in the past I've had such strong images of something happening, enough so that they felt entirely real for that one moment.

E.g. once I was walking on a trail and there were a couple of workers doing some digging, construction etc. One of them was holding a mallet. As I approached them, I kept feeling as if they were going to harm me. When I finally was about to walk past the two men, the one with the mallet just happened to walk across the path, being behind me for a couple of seconds. At that moment I had a vivid image of him swinging the mallet and cracking the back of my head open. My pulse rose and I got chills from it, but managed to act inconspicuous for the most part.

When I was younger, I kept seeing scenarios of people attacking me or people around me, stabbing us etc. That was an odd time for to walk around in public.

Does anyone else's intrusive thoughts go away and you start to really feel good about yourself and have faith in yourself again and then Bam! An intrusive thought like, "plan on hurting people". Not really looking for advice, but I wanna see if others can relate.

I(19M) live with my family, including my brother (17M). My brother treats me like human garbage and I don’t know why. He’s been like this ever since he was a kid, he’s had his biting phase, his slapping phase, and know he’s in his throwing shit at me phase. Along with being just racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic in general, he’s just a real POS. I’m autistic, not as good socially as he is, and generally more forgiving than he is. I usually forgive him for his actions in the hopes that he will grow out of it, which he takes advantage of.

Today he particularly irked me today and it really has sent me into a frenzy of emotions. For context we work at the same movie theater. He is an usher and I work the concessions stand. Today I was in a bit overwhelmed since I just got back from a 6 hour chess tournament and a 1 hour drive and had to go straight to work for a 6 hour shift. Needless to say, I was very tired and annoyed with the rude customers. I had this one interaction that I thought was particularly amusing and I saw the group of on-shift ushers, including my brother, walking by. So when they come over to talk I start telling them about the customer, when suddenly, and without warning, My brother balls up a handfull of napkins, throws it at me, and starts laughing at me. I was fine when it was just us two around because I knew he was bad but at least it wasn’t in public, but now he’s straight up embarrassed me in front of people I consider to be nice. And the rest of my coworkers seem fine with it.

My brain is now straight up ready to fight this kid and put him in the fucking hospital. If he wants to embarrass me in my place of work, the my brain wants him to see how it feels. I’ve even had homicidal thoughts, feeling the relief of finally putting myself out my misery once and for all. But I don’t want to have these thoughts, I want to go about this like an adult. What should I do?

did anyone’s intrusive thoughts or pocd get affected by this?

I just joined this page and it makes me feel not crazy. these thoughts make me feel so awful.

I am a victim of SA and child abuse

I used to think I developed intrusive thoughts at 13 but I remember being worried that ppl might hurt/kill/hate/r@p3 me at 10-12 so now I'm confused if it was anxiety, paranoid thoughts or intrusive thoughts and I want to know the difference, thank you.

Scream "why aren't you all aware of existence wake up" in the grocery store. I hate OCD

Go berserk , smash my phone on the ground not once but multiple times then pick it up smash it on the wall , throw all my books around , tear them shatter glasses , break chairs , take a knife slit open every one of my family members neck .

I ofc have never acted upon any of it , but its annoying I am annoyed by everything just wanna end this bullshit.

I have what i think are called intrusive thoughts. Whenever i look at someone or do anything (family members, kids, animals), every second of my day, my mind is filled with horrible thoughts. And not just the run of the mill “murdering people”, worse. Just the most disturbing shit you can imagine. PM more for further explanation if it would help someone figure out whats going on because i dont know what this is. It’s not just OCD or anxiety, it’s bad shit. I dont think i would ever act on it but i want to know why this has been happening to me my whole life. I have ptsd and was abused as a kid in pretty much every way. I am too scared to go to a therapist in fear of them reporting me to the police for the things i say.

I'm 25M and single and now that I'm trying to find a partner my mind is playing games with me to try and keep me single. I've had sleep anxiety in the past, so the fear of not falling asleep due to the symptoms of insomnia I suffered. So everytime I go to propose to a girl, i get these intrusive thoughts which my mind uses to put me in to shame and back off. They are negative thoughts about the girl's parents,: that her mother is a slut and that I want her father to die.

It is so disgusting yet it isnt me, I would never want this even though it seems real and my mind would threaten me to not let me sleep if I dont back off or confess to this to the girl, to ultimately put her off and stop me from having her, and staying single.

Please can people advice. This is causing me great anxiety and stress

Hello Reddit, thanks for reading and replying. I have always struggled with my "movie mind" as I call it, where I suddenly have a film playing in my head of the world around me going terribly awry. For example, any time I drive over a bridge since I was a child I vividly see myself careening over the rails and crashing and I feel the panic. I also struggle with intense empathy and I am overly aware of suffering in the world. I feel highly connected to all living beings and it's become a compulsion for me to memorialize and mourn people whose lives are lost tragically. What i mean by a compulsion is how I am thrown into it, for example I have a one year old child and when she smiles at me lately it's of course the most beautiful feeling, but I almost see the moment as if she is a child in Gaza or Ukraine or anywhere else there is suffering and i suddenly feel so overcome with grief that they cannot feel my love. The other day the most horrible crime occurred in my town and ever since my intrusive thoughts are constantly making me think of the innocent life lost and see terrible imagery. This compulsion stems from my true desire to extend love,compassion and healing to all but it is very exhausting at my expense when I cannot control my empathic connection and blur lines with my intrusive thoughts and anxiety. Does anyone else experience this? I feel as if I am disrespecting people's memory if I don't give them space in my mind and heart, I want to send their spirit peace, but my spirit is hurting.

Even if you found the thoughts repulsive when sobber ?

I’ve been dealing with one intrusive thought sticked to my mind for years and lately it is ongoing every second of my day and i cant get rid of it at all , the only way to get rid of it is to kill my self i guess.

I didn’t know I could inherit this from my dad but here I am thinking I was just weird. Anyway here are my recent ones:

• I was making tea for someone and had to walk past them with the kettle and thought about dumping it on their neck

• Seeing kids playing on a lake and thinking ‘don’t look or it will be suspicious’ (no I’m not a pedophile)

• Lying on bed and fearing the ceiling will fall on me

• If I think good things, certain person won’t have an accident

• If I touch this fruit in the supermarket it’s now dirty so I will take a different one

• I just vacuumed but can’t walk without slippers because it’s obviously dirty

• I give feelings to inanimate objects more than I want to admit

• If I don’t look at people in the eye in public transport they won’t feel threatened by me

• the sudden urge to yell at someone to make them feel like crap

Having a life goal and a specific antidepressant helped me big time reducing these lil asshats in my brain. Big thanks to antidepressants, you are the heroes, I wish I could give you a trophy

Does anyone else have dreams about their intrusive thoughts? I’ve had intrusive thoughts probably all my life and whenever the thoughts I have during the day chill out they seem to start coming through in my dreams. But the thing is in my dreams I do things I wouldn’t usually do, because my dreams are wacky and don’t really make any sense. So when I have a dream with my intrusive thoughts, typically in the dream I actually act on the thoughts, and then I wake up feeling so disgusted and wanting to throw up. I don’t know if this is normal. I know they are just dreams and I always think the thoughts are awful and something I’d never do when I’m awake but it still hurts so much more than regular intrusive thoughts since I usually act on them in the dream state.

And how are they?Your intrusive thoughts.

I have good numbers and bad numbers and if I see bad numbers I have to change it into a good number and write over and cover it and I'm gonna fail math and poa becos of it pls tell me I'm not going insane I hate THIS

NO ONE ELSE DOES THIS???????

Why are my intrusive thoughts so varied in range to "am I attracted to fictional characters?" To "you should jab a pencil into your eye or into the eye of someone you love :) " I hate OCD so much

I have recently had a couple of people message me I response to a comment I made on another thread regarding HOCD. After around 7-8 years of struggling with multiple themes I finally discovered a way that worked for me to overcome this waking nightmare.

First of all you have to stop looking for reassurance, stop checking to see if you're experiencing arousal, stop looking back into your past for clues that would suggest that you are what you fear, stop asking friends and relatives questions regarding your fears.

Your brain is NEVER going to be satisfied despite the temporary relief that reassurance yeilds, it will always come back more intense. As OCD sufferers we are constantly seeking concrete evidence to find the truth in something.

I am not a therapist in any shape or form and I do not claim to be, I am just sharing my own personal experience with OCD, what I learned and the outcomes.

My ordeal with HOCD (I'm male) started when I was watching a random YouTube video one day and I thought to myself wow this dude's voice is quite feminine and it's kind of cute. From that moment on my world began to start crashing around me, I was filled with dread and little did I know for the next 7 years I would be bombarded with almost constant intrusive thoughts about being gay, followed by being transgender and then a pedophile and finally thoughts of harming my loved ones.

HOCD felt REAL, I genuinely felt and believed that I was in denial, it felt as real as the sun feels real on your skin on a warm day.

I went through a number of different therapists but evidently I just couldn't find one that specialized in OCD intrusive thoughts.

They all rotated around at different times and when one theme stopped another one started, it was pure hell. I had a massive breakdown, I was signed off from work and I checked myself into the hospital, I was placed on the medication Zoloft and began to see a therapist again.

I thought the medication had made me begin to feel better as the thoughts slowly started to dissapate, within time I managed to live a somewhat OCD life, I got married and we had three children. However the thoughts soon came back and I went into spiral of depression. It seems that the Zoloft I was taking had run out of gas and so back to the hospital I went to get a medication review.

The put me on another medication which I forget the name of now but it idn't work.

One night I was lying in bed when my OCD theme was HOCD again, I was exhausted, broken and I couldn't sleep, the thoughts just would not stop and my mind felt like it was about to explode.

Then it hit me..

I thought to myself if I were truly gay, at least a small aspect of these thoughts I am having would feel good and make me happy, even if I didn't want to be gay, deep down I would surely have enjoyed it had it been true. None of my thoughts were ever enjoyable or felt good, despite groinal responses, feelings of arousal, everything!

I was so tired and drained by all of these thoughts that I just thought to myself you know what.. fuck it, I literally do not care anymore. If I really am gay then I'm gay, that's me and I cannot do anything about the way I was born.

I had to fully ACCEPT that I could truly become what I feared the most which was obviously the scariest part of this whole process. Nonetheless I leaned into the wind and just accepted everything. I don't mean I said to myself 'yes that's me the thoughts I'm having are true'. I literally accepted it in my heart.

Following this my mind went silent, I was relieved that I had taken the power away from these thoughts and I could finally get some sleep.

I kept applying this method over the next few days and weeks and guess what, I didn't all of a sudden become gay, I didn't become transgender or a pedophile or whatever bullshit my brain tried to convince be about. After around two weeks the thoughts eventually became comical and I was easily able to brush them away as just an intrusive thought.

You have just got to be really brave and commit to the unknown, I have seen people say that they know that they are not what they fear they might be. Because if they were, why would you be scared?

OCD will latch on to anything that you hold close to you and throw it into doubt, it doesn't matter what the theme is. The process is always the same (for me anyway and I'm sure it will help you).

It doesn't matter what the theme of your OCD, in my experience, this method works for everything. It's all OCD regardless of the nature of your thoughts.

Acceptance, allow the thoughts in, try and envision them washing over you or even floating by, a thought is just a thought, it means nothing. When you attach the emotion of worry and fear to a thought your brain will go into protective mode to check if you still think this thought is a threat. By not responding with compulsions, not seeking reassurance and commiting to accepting that you have these thoughts and they say nothing about you - you will steadily allow your brain to realize that those thoughts are not a threat at all and they will lose all power over you.

This method worked very well for me and I wanted to share it with you all in the hopes that I may help you in future too. Like I said before - I am not a therapist and I do not claim to be. I have just had a lot of experience with OCD, I've done a lot of research, been on medication, seen therapists and gone through multiple themes.

You can do this, I believe in you all, you are strong and you deserve to live a happy life free of all this bullshit 💪🏻

DM ME IF YOU WANT - I AM HAPPY TO HELP

What I’m looking for

Has anyone ever…

• had an intrusive image

• That’s vivid

• In first person and felt “close” but you know it’s imagination

• But you can still see/maintain awareness of the room you’re in at the same time

• has all 4 of these points ever happened to anyone else at the same time??

I have a sensitive stomach and I remember this time in middle school I was handed this poorly made slime from one of my friends...it was like clear and it was SO dirty and I could feel the dirt and like weird pieces of...rocks? I think? in it...but it was kinda wet too.

Now I can't stop thinking about it while my stomach hurts the thought of just putting it in my mouth and feeling the weird texture it makes me almost throw up wtf. It's been happening for like 4 days now.

I haven't puked mind you...just been can't stop the intrusive thoughts of disgusting slime...ugh I hate this so much.

So it was in October when I stated to get the intrusive thoughts. They were so bad that I didn’t even wanna open my mount because I thought if I said the thought in my head with my mouth open I would worry people heard it. I had that for a couple months then I February I started get violent thoughts. Last week I started to feel like the thoughts were going away but now I’m scared again of saying the thoughts out loud. It’s about random people or people that I love. I worry that is they heard them they think I’m weird or that I hate them.

Some intrusive thoughts are not terribly harmful. For example, one person from this sub was thinking about crushing a potato in the kitchen. For no reason at all.

I have reoccurring intrusive thoughts about my current relationship and they make me so upset. I’m with this great guy, he makes me happy and he’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me. My intrusive thoughts seem to say differently and make me think I don’t feel that way. For example I’ll be like “I love him so much” or “He’s so handsome” and my thoughts will be like you don’t think that etc etc. I feel horrible and don’t like it. It spirals a lot because I try to tell myself I don’t feel like that and then my thoughts are like, you do, etc etc.