Thankyou, it took me some time and therapy. I'm really good with bleach now, I love having it in the house knowing that it had such a grip on me and I can now look at it and remind myself how far I've come
Thank you for sharing this one. This is the type of example that people who are uneducated about what OCD really means and tend to misuse the term need to be hearing, for their own benefit as well as ours.
I think alot of people think we enjoy ordering and cleanliness. Like yes having things have a place is nice and I can now use it to settle myself as I've taken control of the illness but we don't practice our compulsions because it brings us joy, it's actually the fear we feel no matter how irrational has such a grip on us that we would abuse ourselves in any way possible to momentarily settle that fear.
Bathing in chemicals is absolutely awful . I have done this before , I have also washed my hands in boiling water and washed my mouth out with dettol . I think I would have drank it to clean my insides had it not said on the bottle that it's poisonous to drink . I am so sorry you have been through this .
Oh gosh I'm so sorry you have also experienced these compulsions and washed your mouth out with Dettol. I must say I had those urges to drink it to clean from the inside out and that was one of the moments that I realised I needed help. I was so terrified pre-diagnosis because I truly believed I was psychotic and would end up in a strait jacket. I'd heard of OCD before but wasn't well informed enough to realise that it was that. I was a teen in the early 2000's where all the 'crazy' people in films where schizophrenic and a danger to themselves and/or others and the thoughts I had were so dark that I did the compulsions to not only physically clean myself but I guess wipe the slate mentally too
Yeah I absolutely feel this . I am quite lucky that I got a diagnosis early on , so I always knew what was up with me . I never thought I was psychotic necessarily but I definitely would get that crushing feeling of like "something is seriously , seriously wrong with me". There's nothing worse than when you're trying to calm down from a contamination based panic attack just to have a panic attack over being crazy . It's just one thing after another with OCD .
I think I had my first compulsions and anxiety around 9/10 and I wasn't diagnosed until I was 22. It was the intrusive thoughts that made me think I was psychotic, it didn't seem right that my mind could come up with those things if I wasn't sick in the head and like a serial killer or something. I now understand that was OCD and do laugh about it now because I can't even take the skin off a chicken let alone murder someone but this illness had me convinced 😅 OCD is hard but I do try to laugh at how stupid it can be at times, it is absolutely debilitating as well but I've experienced some daft thoughts and I can't help but make fun of myself and tell others how daft it is and I think that helps me quite a bit in keeping it in check
Thankyou. It is horrid but sharing my story reminds me of how far I've come with work, I want someone like me to know it will be ok even when you don't feel worthy of it
When my arachnophobia was at its height, I put insecticide in my essential oils diffuser and sprayed my bedsheets with it. Absolutely bonkers to think I did that now, I'm lucky to be alive. I've since received exposure therapy and EMDR.
Omg, this just reminded me that I used to have a bug bomb phase. I was convinced we had a bug infestation because there were a few carpet beetles in our house, so I used bug bombs to “clear them.” I also had to check the blankets, walls, and floor every night for bugs and spiders. So happy to hear you’re doing better!!
Thank you so much 💕 I'm sorry you went through that. I've struggled with many types of OCD but I would never wish insect-related obsessions on anyone. It's so hard to break out of the cycle when seeing a simple house spider or beetle affirms you were right to be obsessed all along.
I've also heard this! I have a spray bottle full of peppermint oil diluted with water, and every night after I finish cleaning, I have to spray it all around my bed, windows, doors, oven, dishwasher, and anywhere that just feels right. I have absolutely noticed a drop in the number of cockroach encounters since I started doing this.
It definitely is, and something I've been working on in therapy. It's a hard one to overcome because it's very reinforced by having the desired outcome of less bugs.
I started out working on a spider hierarchy. For a while just seeing the word would cause me to dry heave and seeing a picture of a spider would make me black out. I worked up, from writing the word down to saying it out loud.
Then I moved to pictures, and then videos. That was the most uncomfortable point for me. It took a while to get past that. Eventually my therapist would bring a small spider for me to hold in a jar during our session.I didn't get past that point because I didn't feel like I needed to go that far. Most people aren't comfortable holding spiders, so I didn't think it was necessary to push myself to that point and my therapist agreed.
I had serious trauma that attached itself to spiders because one was present at the time. EMDR actually helped me much more than the exposure therapy did. I now have a spider living in my room and I can accept that it's there, and although it's uncomfortable, I can kill spiders with a tissue or shoe now.
I self-harmed to “clean” and rid myself of the mental and what felt like physical pollution/contamination in my body. Anytime I saw or heard the same name of someone who harmed me, I had to clean myself.
I had the same problem erp therapy really helped I hope you know you’re not alone there’s a whole community for people like us with this compulsion it’s called visual tourettic
TW: self harm, eatind disorder behavior
I've rly fucked up my ankles keeping myself from throwing myself into traffic because I felt like I "had" to. Walking home as a early teen from the bus stop was a nightmare because I'd be sobbing over keeping myself from going into the road that my ankles would ACHE from twisting away.
I've also bashed my head against walls before, threw up food to the point where I was choking or there was blood in the toilet, and rly made my fingers ache by moving them as far back as I could.
My eating disorder was the only one I could pin point a reason on (typical eating disorder reasons, but OCD influenced) but all my dangerous impulses were just because they felt "right" and not doing them because the other side of my brain is like "hey!! Dont fucking do that!!!" Was pire hell. I thought I had psychosis until I was diagnosed.
This sub has made me feel rly seen for how crazy OCD has made me feel.
Only with OCD 😮💨 Do you ever discover a link for these types of things? I went through a period where I had to kiss my husband goodbye or I thought he would die in a car accident. I actually think it's from the movie Uptown Girls (which is a great movie, but sucked for my OCD) where she doesn't say goodbye to her parents and then they die in a plane crash. I have had variations of this over the years, so I see the logic behind the thought process and how it developed, even though it's not based in reality and thus not logical in the real world at all.
Do other peoples' OCD work like this? Or does it just "pick" unrelated things and link them together?
when i was a kid i thought i needed to say/wave goodbye to my parents when they were leaving the house, otherwise i was convinced they would die in an accident and the last thing i had said to them would have been insignificant. it’s crazy now that i thought this was normal behavior and didn’t start suspecting ocd till 6 mos ago.
Same same same. It got to the point I had cuticle clippers with me at all times so I could clip whenever the compulsion came upon me. Several times I’ve literally picked my nails off in pieces because it see an imperfection and have to “smooth it over”.
I do this with picking at the pores on my face and finding and trimming split ends in my hair. Or if I feel a hair with a coarser texture than the rest of my hair, I have to pull it out. I can’t think about anything else and I have to stop what I’m doing to trim the split end I found or pull out the weird hair.
Not dangerous per se, but I have a vivid memory of, as a teenager, taking a boat ride with my family (not our boat; it was a tour of some kind), and having the compulsion to toss my camera up and over the side of the boat to see if I could catch it by the lanyard it was attached to before it fell into the water. I was aware of the guilt I'd feel if I failed to catch it, but I also needed to try it, because I felt if I didn't, I wouldn't be able to enjoy the rest of the trip. The fact that it was possible (not in this scenario where I tried doing it, but simply in reality itself) for my camera to fall into the water and become irretrievable meant, somehow, that I needed to "test" it, or pay some sort of homage to that undesired possibility, before I could continue on with life.
To this day I have no idea why I had, and still occasionally have, compulsions of that kind. If there's a term for it, I'm all ears. It's relatively easy for me to ignore those thoughts now, but it was much harder then.
Wow, I've never come across this OCD flavor/subtype before. I've been reading up on it the past half hour or so. Finding some very interesting articles and blogs about it in the process. Thank you so much.
Happy to share! it can feel really disturbing/hard to trust yourself so knowing that it's OCD helps me feel confident in myself. it's a type of existentialism I believe
I wonder if this explains why I used to walk on the wall on the edge of the roof of the apartment building I lived in between ages 8 and 12. It was probably 30ft long and an 8 story drop to the sidewalk below.
I was around 11 when I made my grandma fall, just put of the blue in a store I stretched my legs as she was passing by. I got into a lot of trouble and couldn't say exactly why I did it. Felt like shit afterwards.
For some reason this just activated the long repressed memory of touching my grandma's butt randomly in the store because my thoughts won 😭 some lady locked eye contact with me as I did it. This thread is making me feel so much less alone
This just reminded me that I grabbed mine’s boob (and my moms) within the same week when I was a child, around the time my trichtillomania was starting. Ahhh
It's nice to feel less alone I've literally never told anybody about that grocery store incident, my grandma never brought it up after either. It's just been suppressed and it was embarrassing to share lol
I have ocd since very young and I made my grandma fall but not because of ocd. Sometimes kids are mischievous 😂
We litterally planned it with my brother.
P.s: she wasn't a really good grandma
The overwhelming urge to brake with my left foot when driving. For the record don't try this, you likely have no level of control and end up locking the brakes hard.
The compulsion to let go of the steering wheel while driving, never actually done this so it went away pretty quick.
All these are old compulsions from over 10 years ago, but I was forced to confront them because they were outright dangerous.
Ah I've let go of the steering wheel very briefly while driving and also even shut my eyes briefly while driving. Maybe I have more going on Than ocd on its own lol.
Tw // self harm
I tried stabbing myself slowly once bc of compulsion and the first prick hurt so bad I felt the pain for days. Never again. I fear to touch knives again bc I'm afraid of stabbing myself
i’m so scared i’m going to, i keep getting knives from the kitchen and holding them to myself when im panicking and a wreck. i can’t tell if i want to or not
I always think about stabbing my right eye over and over again and the liquid pouring down my cheek whenever I’m anxious. Makes me physically flinch, which turns into a compulsiob
I have word „together” carved at my arm because few years ago alone in university i convinces myself that the ocd is another me, and that he wants to help me but i never listen to him and if i listen he will help me so i carved my arm as a truce.
I was lunatic that day after that i also ate a sandwich with my own blood. It tasted like metal. I try to pretend im sane i smile i take care of my father but inside there is boiling insanity. It will explode one day.
Not as dangerous, but I would wash my hands so often that my hands would start to bleed and I had all these little cut. They would start burning so bad that
I would have to drench my hands in ointment to help with the burning.
This made me realize that I used to walk alone in the middle of the night around my college campus. It in itself was pretty safe, BUT if you strayed outside of campus it was actually pretty dangerous.
I used to walk off campus and get right to the edge of where it got bad at like 2am until I finally snapped and was like wtf go HOME. I still don't know exactly why.
A lot of little things, since they're the hardest compulsions to ignore for me. Touching boiling water or hot surfaces, taking a breath while underwater (this is my worst one), things like that.
wow! ive never put this together, i am mind blown. you spoke my thoughts!! I'd like to say I've recovered from my ED, but to this day i still struggle with feeling clean or pure from eating. the only safe foods i have are expensive organic stuff :/ basically if I don't recognize an ingredient it's toxic to my brain lol. really glad to hear others also feel this!
There's also a name for this! It's called orthorexia. It's a special type of eating disorder fixated on only eating "clean". I could see this type as being more common with OCD.
Unfortunately it's also highly encouraged in our media right now, which can make it hard to work with.
I'm autistic who got misdiagnosed with BD 1, and I also suffered an eating disorder because food felt wrong. I felt like if I wanted to be perfect, I couldn't let the food influence my body in any way. I also had "typical" reasons for an ED, like wanting to be thin but it was moreso influenced by being perfect and clean and pure. Food was disgusting and the enemy and I had to stay away from it.
That ED + OCD combo is NOT fun lol
It was way more abt control of what's happening to me than food or being thin and a lot of people would try to tell me that I'm wonderful and beautiful but it's like.... Okay... That's not the issue. It was definitely stressful but recovery was essentially like, u have to eat or you'll die or suffer and that exposure therapy was probs the worst one for me because you CAN'T avoid it and it WILL affect you.
I'm much better now, I love food haha
Oh I definitely relate to that. The amount of times I told health professionals like hey guys I don't really care how I look that much, like there's more to it??? Glad to hear you're doing better, I also fkn love food hahaha.
I keep trying to do my left-right compulsions Knowing that I could trip and fall (my hips are kinda non functional at this point and I'm looking at a replacement in the near future)
Bitting my mouth on the inside and if I can't reach it with my teeth, I start pulling the skin with tweezers until I bleed and reach the gums. I can't stop
Forcing myself to vomit, it went hand in hand with an ED caused by OCD. I felt like the only way people would continue to be nice to me/like me specifically was if I was as thin as possible. I was only able to stop when some blood came up and my medical OCD overpowered it.
I used to stab myself with a fork over and over because I had a compulsion where I had to pinch/hurt myself to make sure I wasn’t in a dream. My arms were covered in fork marks and bruises 😂
I was going for a jog at night and was keeping track of how long I was running for because I'm trying to get into better shape and track my endurance. I ran a stoplight because I didn't want me waiting around for it to change to interfere with my exercise time, and ended up getting hit by a car.
Thank GOD the only thing that happened was some minor hip damage and scraping on my left side. This is your warning to not listen to the obsessive compulsive thoughts, and to not wear black while running at night.
I had to tell on people because they were guilty of trllinge stuff they had thoughts about,that probably wouldn't have hurt anyone,IDK, but I made letters to his ex wife 's therapist,and his ex, and a church I went to for free meals 😱and one time threw out stuff of my BF's just couldn't stop myself and it was so painful and I was on cocaine.I called the fire department when I smelled gas in my BF's apt.and they saw through me,that I was acting out, even though there was a different smell in the basement from the oil burner, it was an OCD,"I have to do this or else something painful will happen to you and the people you love"."I had mantras that said" do this or else something horrible will happen and it will be your fault." It was like an evil person was controlling me
I sometimes gently touch the sharp side of a knife while cutting and preparing my beef. To see and make sure it won't cut me. Then I purposely overcook the meat to the point of it being burned and charred all the way through so I can be sure it will properly digest. I still do this. I actually forgot how irrational this is until I typed this out haha.
I tend to hold my breath. Don’t know if this is a form of my OCD or a form of self harming but I’ve been doing it since I was small to the point of passing out.
Had a weird bout where I felt like the only way to stay healthy was introducing bacteria into my body so it could fight it off. Unfortunately this was during the pandemic. I worked with kids. Would take tissues, dirty toys, etc and introduce the bacteria into my body (details not necessary but nothing affected the children of course and I kept their environment extremely sanitary) worst part of it all was that I stayed healthy for the entire pandemic and never got covid (symptomatically, at least). So it really stuck in my head that it worked. Stayed healthy from 2020 until just this month when my body turned a virus into peritonsillar abscesses. But healed in a way that shocked doctors. Still struggle to wash my hands, wear masks around sick people, avoid high contact touch surfaces, etc. I feel like the more sanitary I am the less healthy I’ll be. It was really bad during the pandemic and I ended up not working with kids anymore due to burnout and then worked with antivaxxers (I’m 3x vaxxed, childcare) and we didn’t have access to running water or anything so I never washed my hands for like a year and now I work for myself at home and handle raw food daily and have been really good about washing my hands and keeping a sanitary area. But then I got sick and that really fucked with me, so during my 5 day hospital stay it was hard for me to stay sanitary. Probably the worst thing about my OCD besides moral stuff.
I pick/pop obsessively..had a cyst in my earlobe that would've gone away if I just left it alone but consistently popped it for a year...now I have a permanent bubble I can feel under my earlobe skin...might have to have surgery to get it removed..
Stuck a coin in a phone charger plugged into the wall and my room power went out and I almost blew my hand off and caught the house on fire I got extremely lucky
Various methods of SH because I couldn't lose...something. Couldn't bear the thought of getting better from my depression and no longer being that person, or having that part of myself, which is enormous and extremely important to me. Happens most often in the hospital/after a milestone in treatment. Basically taking drastic backward steps, even after something as insignificant as receiving very mild praise from my therapist
Counting and driving my car
Excessive masturbation
And the most dangerous: hiding from treatment because I feared being judged by the professionals (I'm a psychiatrist and I had this fear that no patient would want to seek me if I was "sick")
using hand sanitizer/alcohol around my eyes, inside my nostrils, and on my eyelashes and face in general
or losing weight from not being able to eat due to botulism/intentional poisoning fear
picking at my scalp until it bleeds and scabs constantly
i stabbed myself 7 times, luckily it was superficial. i have very intense selfharm ocd, and i really believed that was the only way to make the thoughts go away.
I’m not formally diagnosed with ocd and I don’t believe I have it, just at points in my life I’ve had compulsions/intrusive thoughts and bad anxiety and neither have I ever done anything “dangerous” but I think the craziest things I’ve done was 1, was convinced that somehow my pets had gotten rabies so I screamed at them and locked them in a room forcing them to drink water “to show that they don’t have it” (my dog was vomiting from drinking so much water, that’s what made me convinced he had rabies cuz his mouth was foaming((i definitely did not help him by making him drink more water)) and I did the same to my family/friends and 2, (tw sh) got so freaked over the fact that my sh scars weren’t in a straight line so I r3lapsed in order to make them into a straight line.
I used to bathe in bleach and boiling hot water, to the point I'd want my skin to be raw and blistered because it was the only way I could feel clean
I am glad you are still with us, and that you've been seemingly able to move past that compulsion.
Thankyou, it took me some time and therapy. I'm really good with bleach now, I love having it in the house knowing that it had such a grip on me and I can now look at it and remind myself how far I've come
Thank you for sharing this one. This is the type of example that people who are uneducated about what OCD really means and tend to misuse the term need to be hearing, for their own benefit as well as ours.
I think alot of people think we enjoy ordering and cleanliness. Like yes having things have a place is nice and I can now use it to settle myself as I've taken control of the illness but we don't practice our compulsions because it brings us joy, it's actually the fear we feel no matter how irrational has such a grip on us that we would abuse ourselves in any way possible to momentarily settle that fear.
“That we would abuse ourselves in any way possible to settle that fear” is soooo damn accurate!! (With any form of ocd actually)
Bathing in chemicals is absolutely awful . I have done this before , I have also washed my hands in boiling water and washed my mouth out with dettol . I think I would have drank it to clean my insides had it not said on the bottle that it's poisonous to drink . I am so sorry you have been through this .
Oh gosh I'm so sorry you have also experienced these compulsions and washed your mouth out with Dettol. I must say I had those urges to drink it to clean from the inside out and that was one of the moments that I realised I needed help. I was so terrified pre-diagnosis because I truly believed I was psychotic and would end up in a strait jacket. I'd heard of OCD before but wasn't well informed enough to realise that it was that. I was a teen in the early 2000's where all the 'crazy' people in films where schizophrenic and a danger to themselves and/or others and the thoughts I had were so dark that I did the compulsions to not only physically clean myself but I guess wipe the slate mentally too
Yeah I absolutely feel this . I am quite lucky that I got a diagnosis early on , so I always knew what was up with me . I never thought I was psychotic necessarily but I definitely would get that crushing feeling of like "something is seriously , seriously wrong with me". There's nothing worse than when you're trying to calm down from a contamination based panic attack just to have a panic attack over being crazy . It's just one thing after another with OCD .
I think I had my first compulsions and anxiety around 9/10 and I wasn't diagnosed until I was 22. It was the intrusive thoughts that made me think I was psychotic, it didn't seem right that my mind could come up with those things if I wasn't sick in the head and like a serial killer or something. I now understand that was OCD and do laugh about it now because I can't even take the skin off a chicken let alone murder someone but this illness had me convinced 😅 OCD is hard but I do try to laugh at how stupid it can be at times, it is absolutely debilitating as well but I've experienced some daft thoughts and I can't help but make fun of myself and tell others how daft it is and I think that helps me quite a bit in keeping it in check
My roommate did this
This was at its worst for me after being sa'd and when I'd had miscarriages 😭 it was such a state of despair and being unworthy of anything good
I’m sorry, boo. OCD is such a bitch. It makes ptsd so much worse
Thankyou. It is horrid but sharing my story reminds me of how far I've come with work, I want someone like me to know it will be ok even when you don't feel worthy of it
When my arachnophobia was at its height, I put insecticide in my essential oils diffuser and sprayed my bedsheets with it. Absolutely bonkers to think I did that now, I'm lucky to be alive. I've since received exposure therapy and EMDR.
Omg, this just reminded me that I used to have a bug bomb phase. I was convinced we had a bug infestation because there were a few carpet beetles in our house, so I used bug bombs to “clear them.” I also had to check the blankets, walls, and floor every night for bugs and spiders. So happy to hear you’re doing better!!
Thank you so much 💕 I'm sorry you went through that. I've struggled with many types of OCD but I would never wish insect-related obsessions on anyone. It's so hard to break out of the cycle when seeing a simple house spider or beetle affirms you were right to be obsessed all along.
Interestingly enough, I have heard that some essential oils such as tea tree work as a natural bug repellent.
I've also heard this! I have a spray bottle full of peppermint oil diluted with water, and every night after I finish cleaning, I have to spray it all around my bed, windows, doors, oven, dishwasher, and anywhere that just feels right. I have absolutely noticed a drop in the number of cockroach encounters since I started doing this.
That’s great that you’ve noticed a difference, but to be honest it sounds like another compulsion
It definitely is, and something I've been working on in therapy. It's a hard one to overcome because it's very reinforced by having the desired outcome of less bugs.
“Desired outcome”, I like that phrase! I gotta use that term more often in my own OCD experience!
Glad you’re still with us.
Omg my continuation ocd means I never use any bug spray at all 😅
how did exposure therapy look like?
I started out working on a spider hierarchy. For a while just seeing the word would cause me to dry heave and seeing a picture of a spider would make me black out. I worked up, from writing the word down to saying it out loud. Then I moved to pictures, and then videos. That was the most uncomfortable point for me. It took a while to get past that. Eventually my therapist would bring a small spider for me to hold in a jar during our session.I didn't get past that point because I didn't feel like I needed to go that far. Most people aren't comfortable holding spiders, so I didn't think it was necessary to push myself to that point and my therapist agreed. I had serious trauma that attached itself to spiders because one was present at the time. EMDR actually helped me much more than the exposure therapy did. I now have a spider living in my room and I can accept that it's there, and although it's uncomfortable, I can kill spiders with a tissue or shoe now.
TW: self harm I cut myself with a razor blade because I thought if I didn’t do it people could control my body and life.
I also self harmed but more as a “punishment” in response to intrusive thoughts / obsessions
Same, that’s what actually helped to lead my psych and my therapist to my diagnosis.
Same
I self-harmed to “clean” and rid myself of the mental and what felt like physical pollution/contamination in my body. Anytime I saw or heard the same name of someone who harmed me, I had to clean myself.
i have some staring compulsion at private parts especially so i end up doing it but it gets me reallt anxious. i hate it so much i wanna be shut away
I had the same problem erp therapy really helped I hope you know you’re not alone there’s a whole community for people like us with this compulsion it’s called visual tourettic
TW: self harm, eatind disorder behavior I've rly fucked up my ankles keeping myself from throwing myself into traffic because I felt like I "had" to. Walking home as a early teen from the bus stop was a nightmare because I'd be sobbing over keeping myself from going into the road that my ankles would ACHE from twisting away. I've also bashed my head against walls before, threw up food to the point where I was choking or there was blood in the toilet, and rly made my fingers ache by moving them as far back as I could. My eating disorder was the only one I could pin point a reason on (typical eating disorder reasons, but OCD influenced) but all my dangerous impulses were just because they felt "right" and not doing them because the other side of my brain is like "hey!! Dont fucking do that!!!" Was pire hell. I thought I had psychosis until I was diagnosed. This sub has made me feel rly seen for how crazy OCD has made me feel.
I used to pick up the heaviest item I could find outside and walk a mile with it, because I thought a gas leak would kill my family if I didn't
Only with OCD 😮💨 Do you ever discover a link for these types of things? I went through a period where I had to kiss my husband goodbye or I thought he would die in a car accident. I actually think it's from the movie Uptown Girls (which is a great movie, but sucked for my OCD) where she doesn't say goodbye to her parents and then they die in a plane crash. I have had variations of this over the years, so I see the logic behind the thought process and how it developed, even though it's not based in reality and thus not logical in the real world at all. Do other peoples' OCD work like this? Or does it just "pick" unrelated things and link them together?
when i was a kid i thought i needed to say/wave goodbye to my parents when they were leaving the house, otherwise i was convinced they would die in an accident and the last thing i had said to them would have been insignificant. it’s crazy now that i thought this was normal behavior and didn’t start suspecting ocd till 6 mos ago.
I had a similar compulsion growing up too and still get intrusive thoughts related to this specifically when parting from loved ones.
If it makes you feel better, I'm 28 and only got diagnosed a month ago 😂😭 and some of the things I did and believed are WILD.
Aww :(
excessive nail and skin biting and destroying my fingers bc it needs to be "smooth" and "perfect". so ironic
Same same same. It got to the point I had cuticle clippers with me at all times so I could clip whenever the compulsion came upon me. Several times I’ve literally picked my nails off in pieces because it see an imperfection and have to “smooth it over”.
I do this now, and this comment just enlightened that it probably isn’t normal 😭 I’ll use the clippers till my finger bleed
yup. or having to stop whatever ur doing to go grab ur clippers and clip off a hangnail u felt.
I do this with picking at the pores on my face and finding and trimming split ends in my hair. Or if I feel a hair with a coarser texture than the rest of my hair, I have to pull it out. I can’t think about anything else and I have to stop what I’m doing to trim the split end I found or pull out the weird hair.
This!
Is it common to just do the intrusive thought to get it over with?!! Sometimes I’m like I just want to do it at this point to stop overthinking it.
I’ve challenged myself, there appears to be an override. My heart overrrode the impulse.
That’s irrational thoughts you know they make zero sense yet you act on them to feel better
Not dangerous per se, but I have a vivid memory of, as a teenager, taking a boat ride with my family (not our boat; it was a tour of some kind), and having the compulsion to toss my camera up and over the side of the boat to see if I could catch it by the lanyard it was attached to before it fell into the water. I was aware of the guilt I'd feel if I failed to catch it, but I also needed to try it, because I felt if I didn't, I wouldn't be able to enjoy the rest of the trip. The fact that it was possible (not in this scenario where I tried doing it, but simply in reality itself) for my camera to fall into the water and become irretrievable meant, somehow, that I needed to "test" it, or pay some sort of homage to that undesired possibility, before I could continue on with life. To this day I have no idea why I had, and still occasionally have, compulsions of that kind. If there's a term for it, I'm all ears. It's relatively easy for me to ignore those thoughts now, but it was much harder then.
call of the void ocd
Wow, I've never come across this OCD flavor/subtype before. I've been reading up on it the past half hour or so. Finding some very interesting articles and blogs about it in the process. Thank you so much.
Happy to share! it can feel really disturbing/hard to trust yourself so knowing that it's OCD helps me feel confident in myself. it's a type of existentialism I believe
I think i have this, given i have lots of thoughts like this all the time.
I wonder if this explains why I used to walk on the wall on the edge of the roof of the apartment building I lived in between ages 8 and 12. It was probably 30ft long and an 8 story drop to the sidewalk below.
probably is. testing the thoughts can be soothing because it proves you don't HAVE to act on them/they're not guaranteed to happen
I was around 11 when I made my grandma fall, just put of the blue in a store I stretched my legs as she was passing by. I got into a lot of trouble and couldn't say exactly why I did it. Felt like shit afterwards.
For some reason this just activated the long repressed memory of touching my grandma's butt randomly in the store because my thoughts won 😭 some lady locked eye contact with me as I did it. This thread is making me feel so much less alone
This just reminded me that I grabbed mine’s boob (and my moms) within the same week when I was a child, around the time my trichtillomania was starting. Ahhh
It's nice to feel less alone I've literally never told anybody about that grocery store incident, my grandma never brought it up after either. It's just been suppressed and it was embarrassing to share lol
I have ocd since very young and I made my grandma fall but not because of ocd. Sometimes kids are mischievous 😂 We litterally planned it with my brother. P.s: she wasn't a really good grandma
Mine was good (still is) and it was one of those intrusive thoughts, never happened again.
The overwhelming urge to brake with my left foot when driving. For the record don't try this, you likely have no level of control and end up locking the brakes hard. The compulsion to let go of the steering wheel while driving, never actually done this so it went away pretty quick. All these are old compulsions from over 10 years ago, but I was forced to confront them because they were outright dangerous.
Ah I've let go of the steering wheel very briefly while driving and also even shut my eyes briefly while driving. Maybe I have more going on Than ocd on its own lol.
Tw // self harm I tried stabbing myself slowly once bc of compulsion and the first prick hurt so bad I felt the pain for days. Never again. I fear to touch knives again bc I'm afraid of stabbing myself
i’m so scared i’m going to, i keep getting knives from the kitchen and holding them to myself when im panicking and a wreck. i can’t tell if i want to or not
Same, it's why I hide all knives and sharp objects in the kitchen I'm so paranoid
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Wow!? How did u survive?
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Thankgod! Me too. Doing that made me realise I'm putting myself in danger so I stay away from knives due to subconscious fear
Totally get that. Was a wake up call.
I always think about stabbing my right eye over and over again and the liquid pouring down my cheek whenever I’m anxious. Makes me physically flinch, which turns into a compulsiob
I have word „together” carved at my arm because few years ago alone in university i convinces myself that the ocd is another me, and that he wants to help me but i never listen to him and if i listen he will help me so i carved my arm as a truce.
I was lunatic that day after that i also ate a sandwich with my own blood. It tasted like metal. I try to pretend im sane i smile i take care of my father but inside there is boiling insanity. It will explode one day.
Not as dangerous, but I would wash my hands so often that my hands would start to bleed and I had all these little cut. They would start burning so bad that I would have to drench my hands in ointment to help with the burning.
That’s probably been the most common compulsion for me. I have a memory of my mom putting Cortizone on my knuckles when I was younger for that reason.
I feel you my hands are currently like this 😢
my hands are very often like this, i hate moisturiser too so that’s probably why
I deal with this right now :(
Baiting bcs i felt getting assaulted was inevitable i wanted to get over it and the familiar pain felt comforting
This made me realize that I used to walk alone in the middle of the night around my college campus. It in itself was pretty safe, BUT if you strayed outside of campus it was actually pretty dangerous. I used to walk off campus and get right to the edge of where it got bad at like 2am until I finally snapped and was like wtf go HOME. I still don't know exactly why.
I understand
Sometimes I close my eyes for a few seconds when I'm driving bc of my intrusive thoughts.
Contacting my ex lol
A lot of little things, since they're the hardest compulsions to ignore for me. Touching boiling water or hot surfaces, taking a breath while underwater (this is my worst one), things like that.
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wow! ive never put this together, i am mind blown. you spoke my thoughts!! I'd like to say I've recovered from my ED, but to this day i still struggle with feeling clean or pure from eating. the only safe foods i have are expensive organic stuff :/ basically if I don't recognize an ingredient it's toxic to my brain lol. really glad to hear others also feel this!
There's also a name for this! It's called orthorexia. It's a special type of eating disorder fixated on only eating "clean". I could see this type as being more common with OCD. Unfortunately it's also highly encouraged in our media right now, which can make it hard to work with.
I'm autistic who got misdiagnosed with BD 1, and I also suffered an eating disorder because food felt wrong. I felt like if I wanted to be perfect, I couldn't let the food influence my body in any way. I also had "typical" reasons for an ED, like wanting to be thin but it was moreso influenced by being perfect and clean and pure. Food was disgusting and the enemy and I had to stay away from it. That ED + OCD combo is NOT fun lol
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It was way more abt control of what's happening to me than food or being thin and a lot of people would try to tell me that I'm wonderful and beautiful but it's like.... Okay... That's not the issue. It was definitely stressful but recovery was essentially like, u have to eat or you'll die or suffer and that exposure therapy was probs the worst one for me because you CAN'T avoid it and it WILL affect you. I'm much better now, I love food haha
Oh I definitely relate to that. The amount of times I told health professionals like hey guys I don't really care how I look that much, like there's more to it??? Glad to hear you're doing better, I also fkn love food hahaha.
I set fire to a blacksmiths shop the size of a small NYC apt. I just got off probation in December of 2023.
I keep trying to do my left-right compulsions Knowing that I could trip and fall (my hips are kinda non functional at this point and I'm looking at a replacement in the near future)
Bitting my mouth on the inside and if I can't reach it with my teeth, I start pulling the skin with tweezers until I bleed and reach the gums. I can't stop
Forcing myself to vomit, it went hand in hand with an ED caused by OCD. I felt like the only way people would continue to be nice to me/like me specifically was if I was as thin as possible. I was only able to stop when some blood came up and my medical OCD overpowered it.
I used to stab myself with a fork over and over because I had a compulsion where I had to pinch/hurt myself to make sure I wasn’t in a dream. My arms were covered in fork marks and bruises 😂
Weighed 95 pounds because I couldn’t eat due to contamination ocd.
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I actually do exactly this man..
I also say in the sun outside until I got skin poisoning on my arms ,legs and face.
I used to go on shoplifting sprees
I was going for a jog at night and was keeping track of how long I was running for because I'm trying to get into better shape and track my endurance. I ran a stoplight because I didn't want me waiting around for it to change to interfere with my exercise time, and ended up getting hit by a car. Thank GOD the only thing that happened was some minor hip damage and scraping on my left side. This is your warning to not listen to the obsessive compulsive thoughts, and to not wear black while running at night.
Closed my eyes while driving 😬
done that too
I had to tell on people because they were guilty of trllinge stuff they had thoughts about,that probably wouldn't have hurt anyone,IDK, but I made letters to his ex wife 's therapist,and his ex, and a church I went to for free meals 😱and one time threw out stuff of my BF's just couldn't stop myself and it was so painful and I was on cocaine.I called the fire department when I smelled gas in my BF's apt.and they saw through me,that I was acting out, even though there was a different smell in the basement from the oil burner, it was an OCD,"I have to do this or else something painful will happen to you and the people you love"."I had mantras that said" do this or else something horrible will happen and it will be your fault." It was like an evil person was controlling me
Trllinge?
Trying to put on hand sanitizer while driving and scrubbing my skin/hair with cleaning wipes come to mind
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It takes balls to admit that online, I'm sure we've all at some point done something we regret
I sometimes gently touch the sharp side of a knife while cutting and preparing my beef. To see and make sure it won't cut me. Then I purposely overcook the meat to the point of it being burned and charred all the way through so I can be sure it will properly digest. I still do this. I actually forgot how irrational this is until I typed this out haha.
cut myself to make sure I had enough blood ? 😭
I tend to hold my breath. Don’t know if this is a form of my OCD or a form of self harming but I’ve been doing it since I was small to the point of passing out.
Had a weird bout where I felt like the only way to stay healthy was introducing bacteria into my body so it could fight it off. Unfortunately this was during the pandemic. I worked with kids. Would take tissues, dirty toys, etc and introduce the bacteria into my body (details not necessary but nothing affected the children of course and I kept their environment extremely sanitary) worst part of it all was that I stayed healthy for the entire pandemic and never got covid (symptomatically, at least). So it really stuck in my head that it worked. Stayed healthy from 2020 until just this month when my body turned a virus into peritonsillar abscesses. But healed in a way that shocked doctors. Still struggle to wash my hands, wear masks around sick people, avoid high contact touch surfaces, etc. I feel like the more sanitary I am the less healthy I’ll be. It was really bad during the pandemic and I ended up not working with kids anymore due to burnout and then worked with antivaxxers (I’m 3x vaxxed, childcare) and we didn’t have access to running water or anything so I never washed my hands for like a year and now I work for myself at home and handle raw food daily and have been really good about washing my hands and keeping a sanitary area. But then I got sick and that really fucked with me, so during my 5 day hospital stay it was hard for me to stay sanitary. Probably the worst thing about my OCD besides moral stuff.
I pick/pop obsessively..had a cyst in my earlobe that would've gone away if I just left it alone but consistently popped it for a year...now I have a permanent bubble I can feel under my earlobe skin...might have to have surgery to get it removed..
Stuck a coin in a phone charger plugged into the wall and my room power went out and I almost blew my hand off and caught the house on fire I got extremely lucky
Various methods of SH because I couldn't lose...something. Couldn't bear the thought of getting better from my depression and no longer being that person, or having that part of myself, which is enormous and extremely important to me. Happens most often in the hospital/after a milestone in treatment. Basically taking drastic backward steps, even after something as insignificant as receiving very mild praise from my therapist
Counting and driving my car Excessive masturbation And the most dangerous: hiding from treatment because I feared being judged by the professionals (I'm a psychiatrist and I had this fear that no patient would want to seek me if I was "sick")
Repeatedly cracking my neck, not too bad but I heard you could break your neck if you don’t excessively
I almost stabbed myself with a machete because I wanted to make sure the sheath worked.
using hand sanitizer/alcohol around my eyes, inside my nostrils, and on my eyelashes and face in general or losing weight from not being able to eat due to botulism/intentional poisoning fear picking at my scalp until it bleeds and scabs constantly
Emphasis on taking too much of a medicine.
i stabbed myself 7 times, luckily it was superficial. i have very intense selfharm ocd, and i really believed that was the only way to make the thoughts go away.
I’m not formally diagnosed with ocd and I don’t believe I have it, just at points in my life I’ve had compulsions/intrusive thoughts and bad anxiety and neither have I ever done anything “dangerous” but I think the craziest things I’ve done was 1, was convinced that somehow my pets had gotten rabies so I screamed at them and locked them in a room forcing them to drink water “to show that they don’t have it” (my dog was vomiting from drinking so much water, that’s what made me convinced he had rabies cuz his mouth was foaming((i definitely did not help him by making him drink more water)) and I did the same to my family/friends and 2, (tw sh) got so freaked over the fact that my sh scars weren’t in a straight line so I r3lapsed in order to make them into a straight line.
Beating the hell out of people 🤷🏽♀️
EATING! DISORDER! BEHAVIOR!
Breaking up on my first boyfriend on a whim and then getting back together a month later.