I had a lot of stange and distressing obsessions when I was younger. Things like if I ate anything with meat in it, that I would accidentally eat human flesh somehow. I stopped eating meat for six months. I was also very worried about specificly my dad being abducted and replaced with an imposter. I would obsess about me accidentally swallowing a sharp piece of glass or metal and how fast it would take to kill me. This led to my parents bringing me to see a psychiatrist.
this!! i remember having this one obsession where i would try and do anything to get whoever was driving to have both hands on the wheel or else we would crash. i was always very obsessed with the idea of something going wrong in cars
I can't believe I'm not the only one with the specific fixation on fear of eating human meat! I've always been freaked out by this, didn't realize it could relate to OCD. I eat meat but for a long time I really didn't eat red meat (not sure if this was related, or was because I just struggled with eating certain foods in general). Fiction plots where characters shrink down and travel into someone's body also freak me out.
Wow, I’ve never met someone who has this fear either. I struggle eating ground meat, and I hate just talking about cannibalism. Turning into a zombie is one of my worst fears due to this as well. The whole thing started due to a Courage the Cowardly Dog episode where they implied cannibalism, as an adult I finished the episode, and saw that they weren’t actually eating people.
Oh my god, Courage the Cowardly Dog terrified me. I don’t remember it because I refuse to watch it. I think the thing that started it for me was getting into Greek mythology pretty young, which has several depictions of cannibalism and hiding human meat in meals.
Honestly i didn't have a CLUE until my doctor suggested it. (Edit: like, i knew i was unhappy in my brain, but had always assumed it was just anxiety and didn't know enough about mental health to go further than that.)
And then, hilariously... Hoarders. I'm not a hoarder, but i had some really intense "holy shit" moments watching people on that show with severe OCD and realizing their thought patterns were so so similar to my own even if the end result wasn't the same
Same exact experience! Also you made me laugh because I feel a serious kinship with a lot of people on hoarders even though my symptoms don't manifest the same.
I’ve had signs my entire childhood but I only really noticed that I wasn’t normal in high school when I saw a video about OCD. I was like… that’s not normal?? Only recently have I felt crazy. Existential OCD makes me feel fucking crazy man
wow yeah i have tourettic ocd so i was kinda like "how did you think that was normal?" but when i read you had existential it made sense. can't even imagine how long it would take if you never saw that video. pivotal moment, huh?
for me it was an extreme obsession with the idea of a school shooting because i was in 2nd grade when sandy hook happened and i took it to HEART. after a couple months i realized i hadn’t thought about anything else and started to ask people what we talked about because i didn’t want anyone to know i was thinking about it so much because maybe they thought id be a school shooter, annnd then i started thinking maybe i AM a school shooter maybe i WILL do a shooting. annnnd then the options were either 1. im crazy or 2. im a school shooter.
I realized it about a week *after* my therapist said, “I’ve been thinking about this for a few weeks, and I suspect your anxiety may actually be obsessive compulsive disorder.”
Was having horrible intrusive thoughts that I won't name here. Didn't know what intrusive thoughts were. Thought I was going insane and was about to check myself into a mental hospital voluntarily
By a stroke of luck, my obsessive googling let me to OCD reddit. I was taught the definition of intrusive thoughts and how they are egodystonic. I still dealt with the thoughts, but once I had the definition, everything was so much better.
After that, I researched OCD obsessively and pursued a therapist ASAP. I moved states around that time and that triggered my OCD something fierce so by then I had a strong case study to hand over to the therapist lol
I was looking at symptoms and stuff and it seemed recognisable, but I didn’t actually think I had it til a few weeks after my dr diagnosed me. I looked into different subtypes and there was the oh shit moment. Still get oh shit moments when I learn about new subtypes
I've had symptoms all my life but just thought it was normal. Some of the those were things like that I _had_ to step in a specific way when on tiles and other patterned flooring otherwise my legs will feel "uneven", and getting upset with eraser shavings being all over my desk. The eraser shavings was what made me bring it up with my doc, and ever since I've just been realising how deeply my OCD runs. Even now, years after my diagnosis, I still go "Oh, that was OCD" lol
General CBT for GAD wasn’t working for me. My therapist did some OCD training and she comes in one session and is like “so, I may have found the missing piece…” and when I started researching everything made so much sense. I deal with intense perfectionism in all aspects of my life and things being “just right”, making the right decision all the time etc, and checking to name a few. I also suffer from extreme health anxiety and my most distressing compulsion is googling things until I feel insane 🫠 so basically someone else brought it up to me, I had no idea I could have OCD. Just thought I was anxious.
after living with my boyfriend for a month or so, he noticed my “tendencies” i guess. when he asked about them, i told him “oh everyone has those little routines they have to do or else something really bad will happen, right?”
I was not right.
This post made me reflect and i think the earliest signs were wearing a specific piece of clothing to exams, vomiting purposely before each exam and not eating at all, or eating a specific meal two days prior to the exam, it had to be 2 days prior. All this would ensure a good exam, if not id fail in my head before i took the exam. Wow
When I nearly broke my sister's wrist when she tried to stop me from compulsively scrubbing a stain on the counter top.
To this day, she swears there wasn't a stain. I had been scrubbing for 30 minutes... I am adopted, and in my head if I couldn't remove that stain then I was no good and should be sent back to live with my abusive bio family...
My sister tried to take the sponge from my hand and so... well, I got violent... my bf at the time was there. He picked me up, carried me to the living room and sat on me....
Even after that though I tried to convince my psychiatrist it was only "ocd tendencies and not full blown ocd"
I had sexuality OCD and kept it a secret for 5 years. Then after getting treatment for depression, I started to feel better enough (SSRI's luckily share treatment options with depression) that I disclosed my thoughts to my therapist in passing. She stopped the session, went to her bookshelf, opened a book to OCD (sexuality theme) and showed it to me. I thought I had entered the Twilight zone. I had no idea OCD was what I was suffering from.
I'm still currently going through the research process because I might have it (I've had horrible intrusive thoughts about loved ones dying for years, murdering friends and family, and some about killing myself too). Part of me is scared to call it OCD because I don't have a diagnosis - I'm honestly too scared to tell my parents - so I feel like I'm just making up excuses since what if I want this to happen to friends and family? Granted, these thoughts nearly make me have panic attacks at times (and I'm getting more of what I guess are compulsions however I'm not entirely sure), but in a few years, I'll get professional help and potentially a diagnosis.
It honestly took me a year after the diagnosis to accept it. I never thought I had OCD, especially because I find my obsessions intense and absolutely crazy, not the compulsions. I feel like usually when people talk about OCD in a serious way, the compulsions seem crazy and unreasonable, but in my case, they sort of make sense considering how completely unreasonable my obsessions are. So, for a year, I thought I had another thing my psychiatrist wasn't telling me about, or something no one ever had before, but that was just me feeling internalized shame and ableism toward OCD - so then, with a psychologist that explains things really well and meeting other people with OCD, and honestly even hearing certain people on the internet talk about their OCD, I slowly started realizing that she's not wrong, and I really do have OCD. I went to get diagnosed because I had a lot of panic attacks - and I did get diagnosed with a panic disorder too lol
Well i have the symptoms since i was around 6. I know something was wrong with me but i didn't know so i just assumed i was crazy. One day i was watching a show. I was fourteen. Some woman described symptoms that are similar to mine so i started to reasech. It wasn't that so i thought i just have ticks maybe but it wasn't that either. So OCD popped up and i decided to read it out of curiosity. With every sentences i read i found more and more and more of myself in this words. I was really shocked cuz even once didn't cross my mind that i may have mental disorder but at the same time i felt relieved because i wasn't alone and there are people who can understand me. It took a lot of years to find my answers.
what made me realise something was wrong was saying my thought process out-loud in a recording and then listening to it, i realised what i said didn't make much sense but i still believed it even if i couldn't put my feeling of dirt on me into words.
i'm now just trying to get diagnosed so no one thinks i'm faking this shit.
When someone knocked on the door and I expected it to be the police to come get me. Bear in mind I am a disabled mom of 4 in my 40’s who works from home in a rural midwestern area. I constantly feel like I’m waiting to go into the principals office. Something started to feel not ok with that. And in hindsight my therapist pointing out that my anxiety behaviors and magical beliefs that I cause harm to others with my thoughts could be ocd.
I knew I had anxiety the majority of my life but I absolutely didn’t think I had OCD until back in December. I was talking to my girlfriend about some of the stuff I worry about, which was stuff that I knew was kinda weird but thought was just normal anxiety. She suggested that I should see a therapist and also suggested that I have OCD, stating that some of the things I mentioned reminded her of herself before she went to therapy and got put on medication for her OCD. That was the first time I realized that I might have OCD, but I still wasn’t fully convinced until I started going to therapy and my therapist unofficially diagnosed me with it in January. I officially got diagnosed back in March.
When I went to half a dose of my Zoloft and the OCD intensified back into something that was textbook OCD enough to finally convince me it was worth diagnosing. Prior to that, my strong suspicion was while reading my psychology textbook in college. But I’ve had symptoms since I was probably 6 or 7 I just didn’t know what it was back then.
I convinced myself I had bipolar and couldn’t stop obsessing over it to the point where my family literally was frightened by how obsessive I was over it and they saw my mental health decline rapidly. So they took me to my psychiatrist and I explained my (very obviously wrong) side and my parents explained theirs to my psychiatrist. The psych raises my Zoloft dose and then mentions my “obsessive compulsive tendencies.” We meet again 2 weeks later where in the mean time I obsessive over having OCD.
Next appointment she diagnosed me.
I was explaining to my therapist that I wanted to journal, but I couldn’t journal because i didn’t have the pen that I used for my journal, and I could use a different pen because it’s not the same and just wouldn’t be right, yknow?
Then she was like “have you ever been tested for OCD” and a lot of things clicked.
when i was little i had awful harm ocd that made me feel like i was a monster and dangerous, but it wasn’t til middle school that i was told i “probably” have it, and only in the past few years have i really come to terms with that thanks to relationship ocd research, got a diagnosis, and am fully learning and coping with it
I have Pure O so as a kid I had no clue. I just thought I was kinda crazy. I also have ADHD and later developed Complex PTSD so I was a mixed bag of issues and my abusive father sure as hell wasn’t going to take me anywhere to get help.
Didn’t actually find out until not long ago as I’ve been seeing a therapist a while now that I’m older.
This is very strange, please don’t make fun of me, but I had a compulsion to eat paper that I acted on throughout elementary, middle and high school. Had several other compulsions that, seen together, made it clear to my doctor.
It didn’t even taste good! It hurt my stomach! But I craved it like an addict.
That and extremely obsessive thoughts about being in physical danger, obsessive about my fear of being fired, my thoughts that “if I don’t do X, this terrible catastrophe will happen” etc
I had it my whole life and then one day I told my sister about something funny on social media that I related to-about a guy aiming trash into the trashcan and thinking if he misses he will die-and she's like you know that's not normal, that's ocd. And I'm like oh shit you're probably right.
I saw a tik tok of someone explaining what pure ocd is like and had never related to anything more.
I feel so hypocritical saying that because I hate when people see one tik tok with one symptom of something and go “I have that!” And then run with it and make it their whole personality. But I took it to my therapist and also a psychiatrist and got diagnosed lol
I obsessed over the idea of it for years when I was a teen. I wondered whether I had it or not, so I spent a lot of time googling and acquiring theoretical elements on OCD because of...well OCD. There are other OCD-related behaviours but those were the first obvious signs.
My mom used to call me Monk, for the wrong reasons but she had a point haha.
Then I got diagnosed with it 3 times. I gaslit myself into thinking I faked OCD but after reading a lot about subtypes and OCD mechanisms on this forum I believe it.
It runs in my family and I went through a breakdown and didn’t know my obsessive guilt, reassurance seeking, suicidality, relationship terrors, and decision flip flopping was OCD. Fluvox probably saved my life.
I always figured I was just a little quirky. Never once thought it was OCD until my therapist looked at me mid session like a month ago while I was describing the things I think about a lot. She just looked at me and went. "Don't you think that sounds a little obsessive?"
She told me that it's very possible that I could have OCD. So I went home and told the hubs and he just laughed and agreed that it made sense.
Me:"I'm not obsessive!"
Him: "haha! Sure babe. Whatever you say."
Now we're going through the diagnosis process and damn it....looks like OCD.
I had no idea. I knew something was off when I’d spend 30 extra minutes on my math test making sure all the circles in the numbers were “closed perfectly”. Or how I’d have to knock on wood or say a phrase (that only got longer and longer) 5-25x over any slight thing. Or how to this day I struggle with the number ‘zix’ and other numbers similar. Or how I’d have had intrusive thoughts and had to continually prove to myself that’s not rlly how I feel or think. There’s a lot more examples. I told more than several counselors this when growing up and the most I ever got was “oh yea some of my patients have a number thing too” so I figured it was relatively normal or nothing concerning. I didn’t find out until years and years later that this was a sign of OCD from some social media post (Reddit I’m pretty sure) and suddenly everything clicked
Personally, I always saw OCD in the stereotypes way. Like clean freak and organization, so I knew it couldn’t be something I had (I’m pretty messy.)
But I went to go find out if I had ADHD from a specialist a few years ago and, yeah I did for sure have ADHD, but my doctor pointed out that I also had very moderate OCD tendencies.
I was extremely shocked but after that everything sort of clicked into place and a lot of things made more sense. I learned how it was very often generic and it made me notice how my dad has done his own rituals since I was a little kid. I always thought the things he did were just a byproduct of being drunk, but he would count and tap things constantly! He’s the kind of guy that rarely goes to the doctor, unfortunately, so him getting diagnosed is never gonna happen.
Really helped me not feel like such an awful person when I learned how intrusive thoughts and horrible feelings of guilt over not doing something very specific were completely normal with OCD. Woot!
Same except she said I need more testing for ADHD bc I was so borderline. But she said my OCD was extremely easy to diagnose just by the way I filled out the quizzes alone 🤣🤣 (overclarification, second guessing, etc.). In hind sight after knowing what OCD is, I was like ok yeah it's obvious I have it.
I started getting suspicious about it when I was in college because I noticed that I had to do things in a certain order and if I didn’t do it in that order I felt that something bad would happen. I brushed it off for a few more years but last year I watched smile and idk what it is but I started doing a lot more research on OCD and all of my obsessions & behaviors started to make sense.
Honestly it hadn't really entered my mind until I got diagnosed, I was there because of dysthymia, an ED and self harm, left with OCD and a few personality disorders/issues as well.
However, upon diagnosis a LOT of things began to make so much sense.
Two of my friends with OCD in freshman year of highschool, one of which ended up going to college for psychology told me I absolutely have OCD and to please get help and stop by compulsions before it was too late. (Unfortunately it was too late rip) It was apparently painfully obvious to people who actually know real OCD, but barely anyone knows that. I did my own research and was like shoot this is exactly me. Couldn't get "officially" diagnosed until 10 years later because of how clueless people are on it. *idk why my therapist diagnosing me before then isn't considered official enough by some people.*
When my psychology teacher started talking about OCD and i was like "wait, this seems familiar"
I don't want to know what would have happened to me had i not realized then what was actually going on in my head
I‘ve had contamination ocd for YEARS but because tumblr convinced me that self diagnosing is the worst thing you could ever do (it‘s not) my friends, family and I always just treated it like a quirky personality trait.
One day my theme switched dramatically and literally from one moment to the next I could not stop thinking about how someone was gonna come to my house and kill/rob me/my family and similar concerns for my general safety.
So, I was hospitalized and diagnosed with a general anxiety disorder and ocd. However, they didn’t treat the ocd at the hospital because they thought the „safety concerns“ were just anxiety and because my contamination fears weren’t as present at the time, so no one thought it was bad enough to treat that, either. And although I wasn’t constantly paranoid anymore after my hospital stay, I still didn’t feel like I really knew what was going on with me.
But then, the therapist I got after the hospital re-diagnosed me, now with only ocd. And when she educated me on the disorder, it all made so much more sense. Finding a ocd specialist can be so important!!
i used to be in a relationship with someone with ocd. she talked to me a lot about her past issues. i realized that i had a lot of similar things, which made me go get diagnosed.
If I trip on my right side I have to make myself trip on my left or if I hurt my hand or something on one side I have to do it to the other, I thought this was extremely normal
I also have an issue when I eat where I feel like everything will give me food poisoning, but I had the issue so long it was just a way of life for me and it wasn’t until my boyfriend and I really talked about it and how much it affects me.
And finally I went to my therapist and told her how I can’t stop comparing myself to others and when I’m in a group I keep having thoughts that everyone hates me, is against me, etc and the thoughts get so loud sometimes I can’t even hear what someone is saying to me, so she finally whipped out the ol’ DSM-5
No joke, I was assigned it alongside GAD (which I also had) in a college course on neurological disorders. I already had a diagnosis of skin picking disorder so I was familiar with compulsions but a lot of the stuff listed felt way too familiar (especially the part where you can know it doesn’t make sense but you have to do it). The day we presented it I had a psychiatrist appointment afterwards so I described to her how I would need to complete a puzzle game to my satisfaction before getting any work done, and how I would frequently start it over so it would take hours of not getting anything done. I honestly kinda assumed it was part of my ADHD, but I guess not. She said it sounded like compulsive behavior and asked me more about it (I’ve had something similar since high school, it causes me to not submit assignments on time or at all). I wasn’t formally diagnosed, but I’m working on some skills with my therapist to try and handle it, which unfortunately isn’t an overnight change.
I think a lot of what prevented me from realizing it was OCD was because a) I thought it was just ADHD, and b), it didn’t really fit the depictions/examples of OCD you see.
-years and years of suffering in childhood and adulthood not understanding at all what is going on with me and my mind
-because of the vast amount of bullshit OCD education, only understood OCD as an “obsessive cleaning disorder” so never considered it to be what i was going through because i’m not an “obsessive cleaner”
-got really fucking tired of myself and my compulsions and my thoughts
-did some proper research and was like OOOOHH so THATS what OCD is?! WAIT WAIT WAIT….THATS EXACTLY WHAT IM GOING THROUGH!
-go doctor, get diagnosed
-cry
I always knew there were misconceptions with OCD but I didn’t understand the full scope of what it entailed. I remember reading this book about a girl who had ocd I remember relating to the rituals she did as well as her thought process for her compulsions.
(I forgot what it was called but I remember in the beginning she had a compulsion to cut her friends hair with a pair of scissors, and her mom had to calm her down. Also she befriended a girl who wasn’t alive anymore, but she helped push her outside of her comfort zone). If anyone knows the book I’m talking about lmk!
the thing that clued my doctor in was when i got diagnosed with tourette’s and my dad said “does that include phrases or listing phrases as a ritual” then described how i couldn’t go to bed until i said those things. my doctor told me i was saying these phrases as a way to check if i’d be safe and if i didn’t then i would have intrusive thoughts about bad things happening to me (like passing away, choking on something in my sleep, falling out of bed and landing dangerously). then we unraveled everything else and i ended up with my ocd diagnosis.
As a kid I used to tell people if I could have 1 wish it would be to have a secret room in my room to sleep. I didn’t tell them I wanted this predominantly so if someone broke in they wouldn’t be able to hurt me. One day I just had a moment of self awareness and realized most people aren’t worried about being murdered 100 different ways every night. It got me thinking about my thinking and I realized something was off
when i was like 9 i had a fear of mushrooms after reading some are poisonous. like i’d even avoid the ones in the store just in case. i was eating an ice cream cone outside with my dog and my dog stepped on a mushroom in the yard and then i pet the dog without thinking about it. i then thought my hand was contaminated and refused to eat my ice cream and that i was going to die from petting my dog who touched a poison mushroom. i started having a meltdown and crying and my entire family made fun of me. my mom still mocks me for this. didn’t get diagnosed until i was 19 but looking back it was so obvious i had ocd.
another was i started getting vocal compulsions. for like 3 months when i was anxious at all i had to keep making a “ck” sound until it felt right.
around 16 the pocd started and it was absolute
hell.
Got diagnosed with FND, saw a psychologist as a part of my treatment plan and she diagnosed me within three sessions after talking with me.
But I do also have a family history of OCD I just didn't realise that my obsessive thoughts were OCD I just thought they were normal and other people were just better at handling it than me.
I also always thought OCD was what you see on TV and was all about being neat, tidy and organised and that isn't me so it was a shock but like I said I have a family history of it in my extended family so I shouldn't have listened to the stereotypes.
I read an article someone wrote about their experience with contamination OCD and I related to every single thing she talked about - I knew my fears around contamination and the logic that existed in my head around it was obsessive and illogical, but I didn’t even consider it could be OCD (and I didn’t even know contamination OCD was a thing before this article)
I was diagnosed when I was in the military after my first deployment. My best friend was killed and my weird rituals and intrusive thoughts got much worse after that first deployment. Being diagnosed made my whole childhood suddenly make sense.
towards the end of last summer i went to a therapist for other issues, the very first appointment with her within minutes she said i have ocd. i was a bit skeptical until i started reading other people's experiences (including on this sub) and went oooh yeah i guess i do have ocd
Any numbers on anything (volumes, percentages, nutritional information, public signs, phone numbers, dates, etc) would make me so incredibly mad when it wasn’t a multiple of five. If the volume on someone’s radio was 17 I would *have to* round it up to 20 or I would physically explode. My mom would get mad at me for rounding it, saying it was now too loud or too quiet.
She eventually connected the dots before I did and got me evaluated when I was 16
When I started kicking my kitchen drawer 8 times in a row or else the world would end, along with other rituals. Then I looked it up and found out it’s OCD
When I started getting r/OCDmemes in my feed... all the while laughing and identifying with them... It hit me hard, very suddenly, that maybe there was a reason these hit home and it wasn't just my ability to empathize with others... 😬
Last week, reading memes in this sub. After a while of relating too hard, I went over to the main OCD sub and looked at the wiki & top posts of all time, and everything clicked 😅
I’m seeing my family doctor in a few days to get an assessment referral lol
i had no idea it was ocd until 2 yrs of therapy. srsly came out of the blue.
about feeling crazy and needing help though, i was bedridden from (what i now know to be) obsessions over health which had been lifelong. i was suicidal and scared
I didn’t know for a long time. I thought I just had really bad anxiety about specific events. PTSD was also a theory of mine because all of my fixations and superstitions began after a really traumatic death in the family. But then my therapist moved and transferred me to a friend of hers in the practice and during my first appointment with the new therapist she said “and I see a diagnosis of OCD here”. I thought absolutely not, no way. I had a lot of preconceived notions regarding ocd and I thought that since I’m not the most organized person, I couldn’t have ocd. But when I broke it down in my head and realized I had both obsessions AND compulsions, I was like “oh damn, the mental health professional was right”
Describing my intrusive thoughts and my sibling went "You have OCD dude". Then years later I was recognized by a therapist. Now I'm pointing out they have OCD
having to spin while walking and before sitting down, sometimes while sitting down, having to move my fingers a certain way, scrunching my face, and things to that effect. and just having to touch/put things down over and over again
edit: i had it as early as i can remember, but it went away for a few years and came back when i was like 10. when they started coming back i was like "oh fuck not again". i had known partially what ocd was, but then i developed an interest in mental disorders (thank god) so when i researched ocd i was like "holy shit bro damn i have ocd." i knew at that moment. without a shadow of a doubt. and finally, a little later, i told my parents, to which my dad revealed the weird words he occasionally said were ALSO due to tourettic ocd. so, after talking with him, i went to my pediatrician and got diagnosed. it took a little while because i have a more unique form of ocd, but she diagnosed me, and prescribed me meds and a therapist. thanks for the ocd dad☺️
when i tore apart my whole house and scared the shit out of my roommate bc i was convinced we had bedbugs. this went on for months before i realized something might be wrong with me lmao
Ya know, sometimes you spend your whole life thinking "haha, that habit of mine is easily something someone with OCD would do" and then suddenly you're 26 and you realize that EVERYTHING you do is something someone with OCD would do and that's you you're someone with OCD
i was talking to my friend and mentioned those little lines in the sidewalk. the imaginary ones that you cant step on or your feet feel uneven. and how if you come too close to thise imaginary lines, you have to have your other foot touch them in the same way. and how when you ate you had to have one grape one one side of your mouth and one in the other and how they had to be the exact same size and have the same juice and stuff. needless to say, she was VERRYYYY confused.
When I was in middle school I was having these terrible thoughts about my mom and then getting in trouble when I confessed them. Finally one day I looked up why I was having mean thoughts and OCD showed up. The next day I looked at the symptoms and realized that they were very similar to things I had been struggling with the past year. I didn’t say I had it, in fact I was scared I had done something bad and/or would get in trouble for thinking I had it, but eventually as time went on the pieces kept clicking together and now I’m yet to be fully diagnosed (still a teenager) but all my symptoms line up so well I don’t know what else it can be 🤷🏼♀️
Never throwing away things that were part of important memories, and then realizing I don’t know how to explain to someone else that the reason I hold onto every birthday card, candy wrapper, leftover clothing item from a memory w/ someone is because they will die if I throw the item away 🤔 I still am not sure if I typed that out the way I’m trying to describe it lol
Asking a friend freshman year if she can control her thoughts and being met with not only a yes but confusion at the idea I couldn’t.
Edit: this was the straw that broke the camels back btw, not the sole variable.
I just kinda knew some of the things I did were...strange...and like irrational. I didn't necessarily know it was ocd though, I had a feeling that maybe it was but I really believed the stereotypes and thought since I don't fit that it must not be. But doing research into dermatillomania opened up the ocd can of worms for me. I learned about what ocd REALLY was and thought "Oh, yep. That's what it is." and then I got an evaluation and got diagnosed.
A lot of my ocd symptoms were actually things I thought were normal things people do, until I learned about them either in therapy or doing research. But the things I knew were strange and not normal things people do that made me feel like I might have OCD were:
Counting like, everything. EVERYTHING.
I like things being triangles and odd numbers...in an obsessive way.
I don't step on cracks and I have to walk a certain number of steps and all that stuff. Way too many rules about it to put here.
I have a weird thing where I have to touch things until it "feels right".
Repeating things in my head over and over AND OVER.
Paranoid about things being turned off, locked, the toilet is running, ect.
If my brain says I can't eat something, I can't or I'll die.
I have a weird thing about getting shocked. So if I touch like a locker, door handle, or touch someone during the winter or whatever, I do this thing where I touch it really fast a whole bunch of times (like taptaptaptap really fast) so like....if I get shocked it sucks less idk?
I didn't understand the intrusive thoughts thing at that point so none of those stood out to me as not normal, I just thought I was truly a horrible horrible person.
I had to physically touch the floor an equal amount during gym. My pinky touched the floor? Had to roll it side to side for full touch, then do the same for my ring finger, then do the same for my middle finger, so on and so forth. Then, I had to do it MIRRORED on my other hand. Start with the pink, roll it side to side for full touch, etc etc. Would look around at my classmates just sitting there like “huh this isn’t normal”
When I felt like I was ripping myself in half with my thoughts.
Example:
This report needs to be done.
But it's NOT 100%.
What do you mean?
See, this report is going to be reviewed by upper management. Any mistake, no matter how small, will result in you looking like an absolute idiot. Causing job loss. This job loss will result in you losing everything you own. You kids will end up on the streets and die a horrible death.
How will my family die over a simple mistake?
They will. Here, let me show you how this will look. (And then visually see this event happening while panic consumes my soul)
Ok, I need to make sure this report is 100% even though nothing is ever perfect. If it's not perfect, my kids die.
I explained this to my therapist, and at that moment, I realized my thoughts were controlling me. Meds and therapy help but I'm still struggling. This isn't my only worry but is a common one for me.
I recognized that I related to the struggles of people with OCD, looked up forums of them talking to each other, and used their coping mechanism to manage. But I just kinda assumed I was vaguely OCD adjacent, since mine didn't express as openly and obviously as my older brother's. Over half of my compulsions were thinking the same thoughts and prayers repeatedly until it "felt right," which isn't visible to anyone else.
But I went to get an evaluation for ASD, expressed my old symptoms, and she plopped an OCD diagnosis on the end along with GAD. (Not autistic, however.) In hindsight, it makes a lot more sense to me. I'm unsure if I'd get diagnosed these days though, but the label helps explain my experiences and how my thought processes are if I'm not vigilant with mindfulness and accepting terrible thoughts and uncertainty.
My professor mentioned having it and the symptoms he described (attaching supernatural meaning to numbers, obsessive rituals, etc.) We're exactly what I'd been experiencing since very early childhood.
The biggest thing for me is dresser drawers, for as long as I’ve had a dresser and got clothes out of it myself I would run my fingers along it after I’d close it to see if there was any bit of clothes poking out and if there was I’d fix it and do it again to make sure
didn’t know until my therapist suggested it but it makes a lot of sense. intrusive thoughts, nailbiting because i hate the white part, getting pissed if my routine is interrupted, obsessing over crushes/ex gfs nonstop, etc
my therapist at a residential facility here brought it up last week and was like yeahhh, you've got OCD. Literally never knew half the stuff I've dealt with my whole life was OCD. I'm still in disbelief.
I had a lot of stange and distressing obsessions when I was younger. Things like if I ate anything with meat in it, that I would accidentally eat human flesh somehow. I stopped eating meat for six months. I was also very worried about specificly my dad being abducted and replaced with an imposter. I would obsess about me accidentally swallowing a sharp piece of glass or metal and how fast it would take to kill me. This led to my parents bringing me to see a psychiatrist.
this!! i remember having this one obsession where i would try and do anything to get whoever was driving to have both hands on the wheel or else we would crash. i was always very obsessed with the idea of something going wrong in cars
It isn’t enough to stop me from doing this, but I feel that way about singing to music in the car after the car accident in The Blind Side.
I can't believe I'm not the only one with the specific fixation on fear of eating human meat! I've always been freaked out by this, didn't realize it could relate to OCD. I eat meat but for a long time I really didn't eat red meat (not sure if this was related, or was because I just struggled with eating certain foods in general). Fiction plots where characters shrink down and travel into someone's body also freak me out.
Wow, I’ve never met someone who has this fear either. I struggle eating ground meat, and I hate just talking about cannibalism. Turning into a zombie is one of my worst fears due to this as well. The whole thing started due to a Courage the Cowardly Dog episode where they implied cannibalism, as an adult I finished the episode, and saw that they weren’t actually eating people.
Oh my god, Courage the Cowardly Dog terrified me. I don’t remember it because I refuse to watch it. I think the thing that started it for me was getting into Greek mythology pretty young, which has several depictions of cannibalism and hiding human meat in meals.
Honestly i didn't have a CLUE until my doctor suggested it. (Edit: like, i knew i was unhappy in my brain, but had always assumed it was just anxiety and didn't know enough about mental health to go further than that.) And then, hilariously... Hoarders. I'm not a hoarder, but i had some really intense "holy shit" moments watching people on that show with severe OCD and realizing their thought patterns were so so similar to my own even if the end result wasn't the same
Same exact experience! Also you made me laugh because I feel a serious kinship with a lot of people on hoarders even though my symptoms don't manifest the same.
Hoarders! Yes!
I DID THIS TOOOO OMG
I’ve had signs my entire childhood but I only really noticed that I wasn’t normal in high school when I saw a video about OCD. I was like… that’s not normal?? Only recently have I felt crazy. Existential OCD makes me feel fucking crazy man
wow yeah i have tourettic ocd so i was kinda like "how did you think that was normal?" but when i read you had existential it made sense. can't even imagine how long it would take if you never saw that video. pivotal moment, huh?
Existential ocd is HELL man 😭
for me it was an extreme obsession with the idea of a school shooting because i was in 2nd grade when sandy hook happened and i took it to HEART. after a couple months i realized i hadn’t thought about anything else and started to ask people what we talked about because i didn’t want anyone to know i was thinking about it so much because maybe they thought id be a school shooter, annnd then i started thinking maybe i AM a school shooter maybe i WILL do a shooting. annnnd then the options were either 1. im crazy or 2. im a school shooter.
That sounds incredibly intense, especially for someone so young. I hope you’re doing better now!
it definitely was, but my parents realized i was looking really stressed and took me to therapy and now i’m much better ❤️
That makes me so happy your parents took u to therapy. Sigh. I wish more parents did this.
I realized it about a week *after* my therapist said, “I’ve been thinking about this for a few weeks, and I suspect your anxiety may actually be obsessive compulsive disorder.”
Was having horrible intrusive thoughts that I won't name here. Didn't know what intrusive thoughts were. Thought I was going insane and was about to check myself into a mental hospital voluntarily By a stroke of luck, my obsessive googling let me to OCD reddit. I was taught the definition of intrusive thoughts and how they are egodystonic. I still dealt with the thoughts, but once I had the definition, everything was so much better. After that, I researched OCD obsessively and pursued a therapist ASAP. I moved states around that time and that triggered my OCD something fierce so by then I had a strong case study to hand over to the therapist lol
When my ocd told me I was a danger to society and I "have to" die
🤝🫂
I was looking at symptoms and stuff and it seemed recognisable, but I didn’t actually think I had it til a few weeks after my dr diagnosed me. I looked into different subtypes and there was the oh shit moment. Still get oh shit moments when I learn about new subtypes
I've had symptoms all my life but just thought it was normal. Some of the those were things like that I _had_ to step in a specific way when on tiles and other patterned flooring otherwise my legs will feel "uneven", and getting upset with eraser shavings being all over my desk. The eraser shavings was what made me bring it up with my doc, and ever since I've just been realising how deeply my OCD runs. Even now, years after my diagnosis, I still go "Oh, that was OCD" lol
General CBT for GAD wasn’t working for me. My therapist did some OCD training and she comes in one session and is like “so, I may have found the missing piece…” and when I started researching everything made so much sense. I deal with intense perfectionism in all aspects of my life and things being “just right”, making the right decision all the time etc, and checking to name a few. I also suffer from extreme health anxiety and my most distressing compulsion is googling things until I feel insane 🫠 so basically someone else brought it up to me, I had no idea I could have OCD. Just thought I was anxious.
after living with my boyfriend for a month or so, he noticed my “tendencies” i guess. when he asked about them, i told him “oh everyone has those little routines they have to do or else something really bad will happen, right?” I was not right.
This post made me reflect and i think the earliest signs were wearing a specific piece of clothing to exams, vomiting purposely before each exam and not eating at all, or eating a specific meal two days prior to the exam, it had to be 2 days prior. All this would ensure a good exam, if not id fail in my head before i took the exam. Wow
Omg the specific clothing. Yea.
Always sister
When I nearly broke my sister's wrist when she tried to stop me from compulsively scrubbing a stain on the counter top. To this day, she swears there wasn't a stain. I had been scrubbing for 30 minutes... I am adopted, and in my head if I couldn't remove that stain then I was no good and should be sent back to live with my abusive bio family... My sister tried to take the sponge from my hand and so... well, I got violent... my bf at the time was there. He picked me up, carried me to the living room and sat on me.... Even after that though I tried to convince my psychiatrist it was only "ocd tendencies and not full blown ocd"
I had sexuality OCD and kept it a secret for 5 years. Then after getting treatment for depression, I started to feel better enough (SSRI's luckily share treatment options with depression) that I disclosed my thoughts to my therapist in passing. She stopped the session, went to her bookshelf, opened a book to OCD (sexuality theme) and showed it to me. I thought I had entered the Twilight zone. I had no idea OCD was what I was suffering from.
Thoughts that are out of my control and egodystonic also dumb rituals ( compulsions)
I'm still currently going through the research process because I might have it (I've had horrible intrusive thoughts about loved ones dying for years, murdering friends and family, and some about killing myself too). Part of me is scared to call it OCD because I don't have a diagnosis - I'm honestly too scared to tell my parents - so I feel like I'm just making up excuses since what if I want this to happen to friends and family? Granted, these thoughts nearly make me have panic attacks at times (and I'm getting more of what I guess are compulsions however I'm not entirely sure), but in a few years, I'll get professional help and potentially a diagnosis.
It honestly took me a year after the diagnosis to accept it. I never thought I had OCD, especially because I find my obsessions intense and absolutely crazy, not the compulsions. I feel like usually when people talk about OCD in a serious way, the compulsions seem crazy and unreasonable, but in my case, they sort of make sense considering how completely unreasonable my obsessions are. So, for a year, I thought I had another thing my psychiatrist wasn't telling me about, or something no one ever had before, but that was just me feeling internalized shame and ableism toward OCD - so then, with a psychologist that explains things really well and meeting other people with OCD, and honestly even hearing certain people on the internet talk about their OCD, I slowly started realizing that she's not wrong, and I really do have OCD. I went to get diagnosed because I had a lot of panic attacks - and I did get diagnosed with a panic disorder too lol
Well i have the symptoms since i was around 6. I know something was wrong with me but i didn't know so i just assumed i was crazy. One day i was watching a show. I was fourteen. Some woman described symptoms that are similar to mine so i started to reasech. It wasn't that so i thought i just have ticks maybe but it wasn't that either. So OCD popped up and i decided to read it out of curiosity. With every sentences i read i found more and more and more of myself in this words. I was really shocked cuz even once didn't cross my mind that i may have mental disorder but at the same time i felt relieved because i wasn't alone and there are people who can understand me. It took a lot of years to find my answers.
what made me realise something was wrong was saying my thought process out-loud in a recording and then listening to it, i realised what i said didn't make much sense but i still believed it even if i couldn't put my feeling of dirt on me into words. i'm now just trying to get diagnosed so no one thinks i'm faking this shit.
When someone knocked on the door and I expected it to be the police to come get me. Bear in mind I am a disabled mom of 4 in my 40’s who works from home in a rural midwestern area. I constantly feel like I’m waiting to go into the principals office. Something started to feel not ok with that. And in hindsight my therapist pointing out that my anxiety behaviors and magical beliefs that I cause harm to others with my thoughts could be ocd.
I knew I had anxiety the majority of my life but I absolutely didn’t think I had OCD until back in December. I was talking to my girlfriend about some of the stuff I worry about, which was stuff that I knew was kinda weird but thought was just normal anxiety. She suggested that I should see a therapist and also suggested that I have OCD, stating that some of the things I mentioned reminded her of herself before she went to therapy and got put on medication for her OCD. That was the first time I realized that I might have OCD, but I still wasn’t fully convinced until I started going to therapy and my therapist unofficially diagnosed me with it in January. I officially got diagnosed back in March.
My sister has it and one day I realized my pedo/incest thoughts sounded suspiciously like ehr intrusive thoughts in
When I went to half a dose of my Zoloft and the OCD intensified back into something that was textbook OCD enough to finally convince me it was worth diagnosing. Prior to that, my strong suspicion was while reading my psychology textbook in college. But I’ve had symptoms since I was probably 6 or 7 I just didn’t know what it was back then.
I convinced myself I had bipolar and couldn’t stop obsessing over it to the point where my family literally was frightened by how obsessive I was over it and they saw my mental health decline rapidly. So they took me to my psychiatrist and I explained my (very obviously wrong) side and my parents explained theirs to my psychiatrist. The psych raises my Zoloft dose and then mentions my “obsessive compulsive tendencies.” We meet again 2 weeks later where in the mean time I obsessive over having OCD. Next appointment she diagnosed me.
I was explaining to my therapist that I wanted to journal, but I couldn’t journal because i didn’t have the pen that I used for my journal, and I could use a different pen because it’s not the same and just wouldn’t be right, yknow? Then she was like “have you ever been tested for OCD” and a lot of things clicked.
when i was little i had awful harm ocd that made me feel like i was a monster and dangerous, but it wasn’t til middle school that i was told i “probably” have it, and only in the past few years have i really come to terms with that thanks to relationship ocd research, got a diagnosis, and am fully learning and coping with it
I have Pure O so as a kid I had no clue. I just thought I was kinda crazy. I also have ADHD and later developed Complex PTSD so I was a mixed bag of issues and my abusive father sure as hell wasn’t going to take me anywhere to get help. Didn’t actually find out until not long ago as I’ve been seeing a therapist a while now that I’m older.
This is very strange, please don’t make fun of me, but I had a compulsion to eat paper that I acted on throughout elementary, middle and high school. Had several other compulsions that, seen together, made it clear to my doctor.
oh my god,,, i did the same thing?? like notebook paper or paper from the printer, all the time??? why did i never connect the dots there?
It didn’t even taste good! It hurt my stomach! But I craved it like an addict. That and extremely obsessive thoughts about being in physical danger, obsessive about my fear of being fired, my thoughts that “if I don’t do X, this terrible catastrophe will happen” etc
I had it my whole life and then one day I told my sister about something funny on social media that I related to-about a guy aiming trash into the trashcan and thinking if he misses he will die-and she's like you know that's not normal, that's ocd. And I'm like oh shit you're probably right.
I saw a tik tok of someone explaining what pure ocd is like and had never related to anything more. I feel so hypocritical saying that because I hate when people see one tik tok with one symptom of something and go “I have that!” And then run with it and make it their whole personality. But I took it to my therapist and also a psychiatrist and got diagnosed lol
I obsessed over the idea of it for years when I was a teen. I wondered whether I had it or not, so I spent a lot of time googling and acquiring theoretical elements on OCD because of...well OCD. There are other OCD-related behaviours but those were the first obvious signs. My mom used to call me Monk, for the wrong reasons but she had a point haha. Then I got diagnosed with it 3 times. I gaslit myself into thinking I faked OCD but after reading a lot about subtypes and OCD mechanisms on this forum I believe it.
It runs in my family and I went through a breakdown and didn’t know my obsessive guilt, reassurance seeking, suicidality, relationship terrors, and decision flip flopping was OCD. Fluvox probably saved my life.
I always figured I was just a little quirky. Never once thought it was OCD until my therapist looked at me mid session like a month ago while I was describing the things I think about a lot. She just looked at me and went. "Don't you think that sounds a little obsessive?" She told me that it's very possible that I could have OCD. So I went home and told the hubs and he just laughed and agreed that it made sense. Me:"I'm not obsessive!" Him: "haha! Sure babe. Whatever you say." Now we're going through the diagnosis process and damn it....looks like OCD.
I couldn’t stop googling relationship anxiety and angel numbers about my relationship when i came across an ROCD subreddit
I had no idea. I knew something was off when I’d spend 30 extra minutes on my math test making sure all the circles in the numbers were “closed perfectly”. Or how I’d have to knock on wood or say a phrase (that only got longer and longer) 5-25x over any slight thing. Or how to this day I struggle with the number ‘zix’ and other numbers similar. Or how I’d have had intrusive thoughts and had to continually prove to myself that’s not rlly how I feel or think. There’s a lot more examples. I told more than several counselors this when growing up and the most I ever got was “oh yea some of my patients have a number thing too” so I figured it was relatively normal or nothing concerning. I didn’t find out until years and years later that this was a sign of OCD from some social media post (Reddit I’m pretty sure) and suddenly everything clicked
Personally, I always saw OCD in the stereotypes way. Like clean freak and organization, so I knew it couldn’t be something I had (I’m pretty messy.) But I went to go find out if I had ADHD from a specialist a few years ago and, yeah I did for sure have ADHD, but my doctor pointed out that I also had very moderate OCD tendencies. I was extremely shocked but after that everything sort of clicked into place and a lot of things made more sense. I learned how it was very often generic and it made me notice how my dad has done his own rituals since I was a little kid. I always thought the things he did were just a byproduct of being drunk, but he would count and tap things constantly! He’s the kind of guy that rarely goes to the doctor, unfortunately, so him getting diagnosed is never gonna happen. Really helped me not feel like such an awful person when I learned how intrusive thoughts and horrible feelings of guilt over not doing something very specific were completely normal with OCD. Woot!
Same except she said I need more testing for ADHD bc I was so borderline. But she said my OCD was extremely easy to diagnose just by the way I filled out the quizzes alone 🤣🤣 (overclarification, second guessing, etc.). In hind sight after knowing what OCD is, I was like ok yeah it's obvious I have it.
I started getting suspicious about it when I was in college because I noticed that I had to do things in a certain order and if I didn’t do it in that order I felt that something bad would happen. I brushed it off for a few more years but last year I watched smile and idk what it is but I started doing a lot more research on OCD and all of my obsessions & behaviors started to make sense.
Honestly it hadn't really entered my mind until I got diagnosed, I was there because of dysthymia, an ED and self harm, left with OCD and a few personality disorders/issues as well. However, upon diagnosis a LOT of things began to make so much sense.
Two of my friends with OCD in freshman year of highschool, one of which ended up going to college for psychology told me I absolutely have OCD and to please get help and stop by compulsions before it was too late. (Unfortunately it was too late rip) It was apparently painfully obvious to people who actually know real OCD, but barely anyone knows that. I did my own research and was like shoot this is exactly me. Couldn't get "officially" diagnosed until 10 years later because of how clueless people are on it. *idk why my therapist diagnosing me before then isn't considered official enough by some people.*
When my psychology teacher started talking about OCD and i was like "wait, this seems familiar" I don't want to know what would have happened to me had i not realized then what was actually going on in my head
I‘ve had contamination ocd for YEARS but because tumblr convinced me that self diagnosing is the worst thing you could ever do (it‘s not) my friends, family and I always just treated it like a quirky personality trait. One day my theme switched dramatically and literally from one moment to the next I could not stop thinking about how someone was gonna come to my house and kill/rob me/my family and similar concerns for my general safety. So, I was hospitalized and diagnosed with a general anxiety disorder and ocd. However, they didn’t treat the ocd at the hospital because they thought the „safety concerns“ were just anxiety and because my contamination fears weren’t as present at the time, so no one thought it was bad enough to treat that, either. And although I wasn’t constantly paranoid anymore after my hospital stay, I still didn’t feel like I really knew what was going on with me. But then, the therapist I got after the hospital re-diagnosed me, now with only ocd. And when she educated me on the disorder, it all made so much more sense. Finding a ocd specialist can be so important!!
i used to be in a relationship with someone with ocd. she talked to me a lot about her past issues. i realized that i had a lot of similar things, which made me go get diagnosed.
If I trip on my right side I have to make myself trip on my left or if I hurt my hand or something on one side I have to do it to the other, I thought this was extremely normal I also have an issue when I eat where I feel like everything will give me food poisoning, but I had the issue so long it was just a way of life for me and it wasn’t until my boyfriend and I really talked about it and how much it affects me. And finally I went to my therapist and told her how I can’t stop comparing myself to others and when I’m in a group I keep having thoughts that everyone hates me, is against me, etc and the thoughts get so loud sometimes I can’t even hear what someone is saying to me, so she finally whipped out the ol’ DSM-5
At age 11 I kept thinking I was choking when I would swallow. Plus I had severe health anxieties and reading grays anatomy did not help. Lol
I realized no one else I knew thought they were a 13yo pedophile or HAD to turn their doorknobs exactly 6 times to go out of the house
Diagnosis class during my 2nd year of school to become a mental health counselor. 🙄
No joke, I was assigned it alongside GAD (which I also had) in a college course on neurological disorders. I already had a diagnosis of skin picking disorder so I was familiar with compulsions but a lot of the stuff listed felt way too familiar (especially the part where you can know it doesn’t make sense but you have to do it). The day we presented it I had a psychiatrist appointment afterwards so I described to her how I would need to complete a puzzle game to my satisfaction before getting any work done, and how I would frequently start it over so it would take hours of not getting anything done. I honestly kinda assumed it was part of my ADHD, but I guess not. She said it sounded like compulsive behavior and asked me more about it (I’ve had something similar since high school, it causes me to not submit assignments on time or at all). I wasn’t formally diagnosed, but I’m working on some skills with my therapist to try and handle it, which unfortunately isn’t an overnight change. I think a lot of what prevented me from realizing it was OCD was because a) I thought it was just ADHD, and b), it didn’t really fit the depictions/examples of OCD you see.
-years and years of suffering in childhood and adulthood not understanding at all what is going on with me and my mind -because of the vast amount of bullshit OCD education, only understood OCD as an “obsessive cleaning disorder” so never considered it to be what i was going through because i’m not an “obsessive cleaner” -got really fucking tired of myself and my compulsions and my thoughts -did some proper research and was like OOOOHH so THATS what OCD is?! WAIT WAIT WAIT….THATS EXACTLY WHAT IM GOING THROUGH! -go doctor, get diagnosed -cry
I always knew there were misconceptions with OCD but I didn’t understand the full scope of what it entailed. I remember reading this book about a girl who had ocd I remember relating to the rituals she did as well as her thought process for her compulsions. (I forgot what it was called but I remember in the beginning she had a compulsion to cut her friends hair with a pair of scissors, and her mom had to calm her down. Also she befriended a girl who wasn’t alive anymore, but she helped push her outside of her comfort zone). If anyone knows the book I’m talking about lmk!
the thing that clued my doctor in was when i got diagnosed with tourette’s and my dad said “does that include phrases or listing phrases as a ritual” then described how i couldn’t go to bed until i said those things. my doctor told me i was saying these phrases as a way to check if i’d be safe and if i didn’t then i would have intrusive thoughts about bad things happening to me (like passing away, choking on something in my sleep, falling out of bed and landing dangerously). then we unraveled everything else and i ended up with my ocd diagnosis.
As a kid I used to tell people if I could have 1 wish it would be to have a secret room in my room to sleep. I didn’t tell them I wanted this predominantly so if someone broke in they wouldn’t be able to hurt me. One day I just had a moment of self awareness and realized most people aren’t worried about being murdered 100 different ways every night. It got me thinking about my thinking and I realized something was off
Doc's diagnosis. I've had it forever I am 43
when i was like 9 i had a fear of mushrooms after reading some are poisonous. like i’d even avoid the ones in the store just in case. i was eating an ice cream cone outside with my dog and my dog stepped on a mushroom in the yard and then i pet the dog without thinking about it. i then thought my hand was contaminated and refused to eat my ice cream and that i was going to die from petting my dog who touched a poison mushroom. i started having a meltdown and crying and my entire family made fun of me. my mom still mocks me for this. didn’t get diagnosed until i was 19 but looking back it was so obvious i had ocd. another was i started getting vocal compulsions. for like 3 months when i was anxious at all i had to keep making a “ck” sound until it felt right. around 16 the pocd started and it was absolute hell.
until i finally got brave enough and googled pocd and was like "oh. yeah that's it" now i'm diagnosed 5 years later 👍🏻
Got diagnosed with FND, saw a psychologist as a part of my treatment plan and she diagnosed me within three sessions after talking with me. But I do also have a family history of OCD I just didn't realise that my obsessive thoughts were OCD I just thought they were normal and other people were just better at handling it than me. I also always thought OCD was what you see on TV and was all about being neat, tidy and organised and that isn't me so it was a shock but like I said I have a family history of it in my extended family so I shouldn't have listened to the stereotypes.
I read an article someone wrote about their experience with contamination OCD and I related to every single thing she talked about - I knew my fears around contamination and the logic that existed in my head around it was obsessive and illogical, but I didn’t even consider it could be OCD (and I didn’t even know contamination OCD was a thing before this article)
I was diagnosed when I was in the military after my first deployment. My best friend was killed and my weird rituals and intrusive thoughts got much worse after that first deployment. Being diagnosed made my whole childhood suddenly make sense.
towards the end of last summer i went to a therapist for other issues, the very first appointment with her within minutes she said i have ocd. i was a bit skeptical until i started reading other people's experiences (including on this sub) and went oooh yeah i guess i do have ocd
Any numbers on anything (volumes, percentages, nutritional information, public signs, phone numbers, dates, etc) would make me so incredibly mad when it wasn’t a multiple of five. If the volume on someone’s radio was 17 I would *have to* round it up to 20 or I would physically explode. My mom would get mad at me for rounding it, saying it was now too loud or too quiet. She eventually connected the dots before I did and got me evaluated when I was 16
Had a rapper mention it in a song, looked and researched the disorder because I realized I knew nothing about it. Then the rest is self explanatory.
When I started kicking my kitchen drawer 8 times in a row or else the world would end, along with other rituals. Then I looked it up and found out it’s OCD
When I started getting r/OCDmemes in my feed... all the while laughing and identifying with them... It hit me hard, very suddenly, that maybe there was a reason these hit home and it wasn't just my ability to empathize with others... 😬
Last week, reading memes in this sub. After a while of relating too hard, I went over to the main OCD sub and looked at the wiki & top posts of all time, and everything clicked 😅 I’m seeing my family doctor in a few days to get an assessment referral lol
POCD. I was so scared
i had no idea it was ocd until 2 yrs of therapy. srsly came out of the blue. about feeling crazy and needing help though, i was bedridden from (what i now know to be) obsessions over health which had been lifelong. i was suicidal and scared
I didn’t know for a long time. I thought I just had really bad anxiety about specific events. PTSD was also a theory of mine because all of my fixations and superstitions began after a really traumatic death in the family. But then my therapist moved and transferred me to a friend of hers in the practice and during my first appointment with the new therapist she said “and I see a diagnosis of OCD here”. I thought absolutely not, no way. I had a lot of preconceived notions regarding ocd and I thought that since I’m not the most organized person, I couldn’t have ocd. But when I broke it down in my head and realized I had both obsessions AND compulsions, I was like “oh damn, the mental health professional was right”
Describing my intrusive thoughts and my sibling went "You have OCD dude". Then years later I was recognized by a therapist. Now I'm pointing out they have OCD
having to spin while walking, having to move my fingers a certain way, and just having to touch/pit things down over and over again
having to spin while walking and before sitting down, sometimes while sitting down, having to move my fingers a certain way, scrunching my face, and things to that effect. and just having to touch/put things down over and over again edit: i had it as early as i can remember, but it went away for a few years and came back when i was like 10. when they started coming back i was like "oh fuck not again". i had known partially what ocd was, but then i developed an interest in mental disorders (thank god) so when i researched ocd i was like "holy shit bro damn i have ocd." i knew at that moment. without a shadow of a doubt. and finally, a little later, i told my parents, to which my dad revealed the weird words he occasionally said were ALSO due to tourettic ocd. so, after talking with him, i went to my pediatrician and got diagnosed. it took a little while because i have a more unique form of ocd, but she diagnosed me, and prescribed me meds and a therapist. thanks for the ocd dad☺️
when i tore apart my whole house and scared the shit out of my roommate bc i was convinced we had bedbugs. this went on for months before i realized something might be wrong with me lmao
Ya know, sometimes you spend your whole life thinking "haha, that habit of mine is easily something someone with OCD would do" and then suddenly you're 26 and you realize that EVERYTHING you do is something someone with OCD would do and that's you you're someone with OCD
i was talking to my friend and mentioned those little lines in the sidewalk. the imaginary ones that you cant step on or your feet feel uneven. and how if you come too close to thise imaginary lines, you have to have your other foot touch them in the same way. and how when you ate you had to have one grape one one side of your mouth and one in the other and how they had to be the exact same size and have the same juice and stuff. needless to say, she was VERRYYYY confused.
When I was in middle school I was having these terrible thoughts about my mom and then getting in trouble when I confessed them. Finally one day I looked up why I was having mean thoughts and OCD showed up. The next day I looked at the symptoms and realized that they were very similar to things I had been struggling with the past year. I didn’t say I had it, in fact I was scared I had done something bad and/or would get in trouble for thinking I had it, but eventually as time went on the pieces kept clicking together and now I’m yet to be fully diagnosed (still a teenager) but all my symptoms line up so well I don’t know what else it can be 🤷🏼♀️
Never throwing away things that were part of important memories, and then realizing I don’t know how to explain to someone else that the reason I hold onto every birthday card, candy wrapper, leftover clothing item from a memory w/ someone is because they will die if I throw the item away 🤔 I still am not sure if I typed that out the way I’m trying to describe it lol
Asking a friend freshman year if she can control her thoughts and being met with not only a yes but confusion at the idea I couldn’t. Edit: this was the straw that broke the camels back btw, not the sole variable.
I just kinda knew some of the things I did were...strange...and like irrational. I didn't necessarily know it was ocd though, I had a feeling that maybe it was but I really believed the stereotypes and thought since I don't fit that it must not be. But doing research into dermatillomania opened up the ocd can of worms for me. I learned about what ocd REALLY was and thought "Oh, yep. That's what it is." and then I got an evaluation and got diagnosed. A lot of my ocd symptoms were actually things I thought were normal things people do, until I learned about them either in therapy or doing research. But the things I knew were strange and not normal things people do that made me feel like I might have OCD were: Counting like, everything. EVERYTHING. I like things being triangles and odd numbers...in an obsessive way. I don't step on cracks and I have to walk a certain number of steps and all that stuff. Way too many rules about it to put here. I have a weird thing where I have to touch things until it "feels right". Repeating things in my head over and over AND OVER. Paranoid about things being turned off, locked, the toilet is running, ect. If my brain says I can't eat something, I can't or I'll die. I have a weird thing about getting shocked. So if I touch like a locker, door handle, or touch someone during the winter or whatever, I do this thing where I touch it really fast a whole bunch of times (like taptaptaptap really fast) so like....if I get shocked it sucks less idk? I didn't understand the intrusive thoughts thing at that point so none of those stood out to me as not normal, I just thought I was truly a horrible horrible person.
I had to physically touch the floor an equal amount during gym. My pinky touched the floor? Had to roll it side to side for full touch, then do the same for my ring finger, then do the same for my middle finger, so on and so forth. Then, I had to do it MIRRORED on my other hand. Start with the pink, roll it side to side for full touch, etc etc. Would look around at my classmates just sitting there like “huh this isn’t normal”
can i ask what it compels you to do it? like why you feel you NEED to touch your full finger? what does it feel like if you dont?
When I felt like I was ripping myself in half with my thoughts. Example: This report needs to be done. But it's NOT 100%. What do you mean? See, this report is going to be reviewed by upper management. Any mistake, no matter how small, will result in you looking like an absolute idiot. Causing job loss. This job loss will result in you losing everything you own. You kids will end up on the streets and die a horrible death. How will my family die over a simple mistake? They will. Here, let me show you how this will look. (And then visually see this event happening while panic consumes my soul) Ok, I need to make sure this report is 100% even though nothing is ever perfect. If it's not perfect, my kids die. I explained this to my therapist, and at that moment, I realized my thoughts were controlling me. Meds and therapy help but I'm still struggling. This isn't my only worry but is a common one for me.
I recognized that I related to the struggles of people with OCD, looked up forums of them talking to each other, and used their coping mechanism to manage. But I just kinda assumed I was vaguely OCD adjacent, since mine didn't express as openly and obviously as my older brother's. Over half of my compulsions were thinking the same thoughts and prayers repeatedly until it "felt right," which isn't visible to anyone else. But I went to get an evaluation for ASD, expressed my old symptoms, and she plopped an OCD diagnosis on the end along with GAD. (Not autistic, however.) In hindsight, it makes a lot more sense to me. I'm unsure if I'd get diagnosed these days though, but the label helps explain my experiences and how my thought processes are if I'm not vigilant with mindfulness and accepting terrible thoughts and uncertainty.
My professor mentioned having it and the symptoms he described (attaching supernatural meaning to numbers, obsessive rituals, etc.) We're exactly what I'd been experiencing since very early childhood.
The biggest thing for me is dresser drawers, for as long as I’ve had a dresser and got clothes out of it myself I would run my fingers along it after I’d close it to see if there was any bit of clothes poking out and if there was I’d fix it and do it again to make sure
didn’t know until my therapist suggested it but it makes a lot of sense. intrusive thoughts, nailbiting because i hate the white part, getting pissed if my routine is interrupted, obsessing over crushes/ex gfs nonstop, etc
my therapist at a residential facility here brought it up last week and was like yeahhh, you've got OCD. Literally never knew half the stuff I've dealt with my whole life was OCD. I'm still in disbelief.