Help OCD is wearing me away quicker and quicker by the day - I need help

[hematomatema]

I've had OCD themes centred around a shit ton of things over the past year or two and I've not been able to deal with it. This includes moral issues, pedophilia, fear I'm a psycho/sociopath, health-related OCD, existential dread, you name it, I've probably had it. At first I thought I could cope because I thought these themes would go away on their own, given other people's accounts, but they just haven't.

My days at the moment are about 10% me doing any sort of useful work, 30% sitting/laying/sleeping/scrolling through TikTok to try and distract myself from my thoughts, and 60% me ruminating on my themes, and by that, I mean all of them. It's literally just a constant cycle. "Am I a sociopath?" goes straight into Google. As soon as I forget about that line of questioning or come to a conclusion that, no, I'm probably not be/it doesn't matter, then I move onto the next one. Rinse-repeat for the majority of my day. It is draining me completely. I'm starting to fail at school because instead of revising, I'm just ruminating and Googling and trying to comfort myself any way I can just so I can get the thoughts to stop. I've had to start getting extensions on my browser because basic words like 'sociopath', any mentions of people being pedophiles or whatever, disorders or syndromes I'm scared of, all trigger me into a state of trying to reassure myself for sometimes double-digits hours at a time.

I'm genuinely at my wit's end. I don't know what to do. I've been to therapy before and it didn't work at all. The counsellor I had was a lovely lady and I loved chatting to her but she didn't understand the issues plaguing me at all, nor could I open up to her about them as much as I should've because I know she would have judged me or thought me insane. I have another therapy thing coming up but I'm planning on cancelling it because it's clear they can't help me with this anymore. I can't even go to see a psychiatrist about this because, as I've mentioned, I've got OCD about being a pedophile, triggered by looking at R34 of characters who were probably/visibly underage (not mainly, mostly just scrolling through normal stuff) for a while which made me feel disgusted by my own actions. Where I live, any mention of having seen or owned illicit pictures of even fictional minors is enough to get you prosecuted, even if you're not a pedophile. I don't even think I am one since I'm not attracted to kids IRL in any way shape or form, but my brain's convinced I am.

Please, can someone help me. I'm stuck with this and I don't know what to do. I've already started telling myself that if I get worse or don't improve by July I'll probably do something drastic. I just hate this stupid fucking disorder. My life has been nothing but miserable ever since it started affecting me and I would give the world just to live a normal life. At this rate I'm not even sure medication will work. Not that I could get it, anyways.

 

[Davey36000]

ocd is just anxiety... about this or that...i have it too. I dunno what helps, in my case lack of stability beacuse atm I'm unemaployed, causes me stress, among other things which can't rly do anything about (uncertainties about the future, etc)...

Some people deal with it in different ways, like "let God take care of it" or w/e, but I find that for me it personally doesn't help.

Some try meditation, anti-anxiety medication, or just trying to solve one's problems because ocd really wears your brain out, nervous system, etc.

Dunno if there's a really good solution for this.

For them it's "don't worry, be happy", but unfortunately all these techniques work for some, but not for me.

 

[todienomore]

Do the opposite of all of those things. Turn your phone off, go for walks, give your attention to one thing for a long period of time, like a book or creative project. Stop overthinking. Stop doing the same thing over and over and expecting things to change.

 

[Endisclose]

I've had OCD themes centred around a shit ton of things over the past year or two and I've not been able to deal with it. This includes moral issues, pedophilia, fear I'm a psycho/sociopath, health-related OCD, existential dread, you name it, I've probably had it. At first I thought I could cope because I thought these themes would go away on their own, given other people's accounts, but they just haven't.

My days at the moment are about 10% me doing any sort of useful work, 30% sitting/laying/sleeping/scrolling through TikTok to try and distract myself from my thoughts, and 60% me ruminating on my themes, and by that, I mean all of them. It's literally just a constant cycle. "Am I a sociopath?" goes straight into Google. As soon as I forget about that line of questioning or come to a conclusion that, no, I'm probably not be/it doesn't matter, then I move onto the next one. Rinse-repeat for the majority of my day. It is draining me completely. I'm starting to fail at school because instead of revising, I'm just ruminating and Googling and trying to comfort myself any way I can just so I can get the thoughts to stop. I've had to start getting extensions on my browser because basic words like 'sociopath', any mentions of people being pedophiles or whatever, disorders or syndromes I'm scared of, all trigger me into a state of trying to reassure myself for sometimes double-digits hours at a time.

I'm genuinely at my wit's end. I don't know what to do. I've been to therapy before and it didn't work at all. The counsellor I had was a lovely lady and I loved chatting to her but she didn't understand the issues plaguing me at all, nor could I open up to her about them as much as I should've because I know she would have judged me or thought me insane. I have another therapy thing coming up but I'm planning on cancelling it because it's clear they can't help me with this anymore. I can't even go to see a psychiatrist about this because, as I've mentioned, I've got OCD about being a pedophile, triggered by looking at R34 of characters who were probably/visibly underage (not mainly, mostly just scrolling through normal stuff) for a while which made me feel disgusted by my own actions. Where I live, any mention of having seen or owned illicit pictures of even fictional minors is enough to get you prosecuted, even if you're not a pedophile. I don't even think I am one since I'm not attracted to kids IRL in any way shape or form, but my brain's convinced I am.

Please, can someone help me. I'm stuck with this and I don't know what to do. I've already started telling myself that if I get worse or don't improve by July I'll probably do something drastic. I just hate this stupid fucking disorder. My life has been nothing but miserable ever since it started affecting me and I would give the world just to live a normal life. At this rate I'm not even sure medication will work. Not that I could get it, anyways.

I'd second what @todienomore says. Would it be possible to get away from any phones or digital devices and spend time outside surrounded by nature for say a month or so.. Just go camping or something.. Live close by a river or in a forest.. Take up something to actively occupy the mind like painting perhaps? I think that's probably the best way to beat this.. Closed spaces, being near phones, tablets having idle time will only aggravate it.

 

[XCZ966]

Hi, I'm not sure if you're still actively checking this, but I decided to bite the bullet and make an account here after a couple days of lurking specifically because I saw this thread. This is hard to explain to those who don't experience it, highly uncomfortable to talk about with almost anyone, and one of the most isolating components of severe OCD that can bring out the worst of it. Inside, we know we aren't like this, but it's almost like you have that feeling of both knowing you're not and also being unable to pass the road block in your mind that leaves you with some semblance of doubt, or makes you ruminate on your past to think about moments that suggest you might be like this, or makes you question if you've ever had thoughts along those lines.

I have all the same habits - the repeated web searches for reassurance, the rigorous thought cycle until I reach a weird "agreement" or conclusion in my mind that lets me leave that thought for the time in hopes that I'm finally content with where I ended up, and reading things online about people's sentiments on people who have done whatever bad thing, which subsequently sets off the thought chain again about how I feel I could possibly be subject to similar label(s) even if logically it's completely untrue. This doesn't even feel like it covers the half of it, but as I'm sure we both know, the real demon here is that it's just constant. It almost never stops, and being alone with your thoughts is the absolute worst for this even though often you feel like you need to be alone anyways so that you can attempt to reach your internal resolutions.

It's horrible. A lot of what you mentioned here about this & other ways OCD manifests itself for you resonate strongly with me. For so long I have felt so stupid and weak saying that something with the stigma of being so simplistic like OCD is borderline debilitating for me, but the reality is that there is a wide range of severity when it comes to this, like many disorders... and it's been the backbone of the vast majority of problems in life, whether I like it or not. It completely consumes me at this point. It sparked the battle with Anorexia that almost killed me at age 12, it's commonly the driver behind why I wouldn't always get classwork done on time despite being a hard worker and, now that I've just graduated university and entered the workforce, is carrying over there too. It's led me to say embarrassing things, and I've had several days where, like you, I can spend up to double digit hours and beyond just ruminating over the thought(s) on my mind in a given day and feeding into the reassurance cycle so I can hit a point where I feel like I'm temporarily content with my landing point... just for it to start back up again shortly after. Medications were only ever mild relief at best, and nothing I tried throughout my childhood had a significant impact despite me BS'ing to my psychiatrist so they'd stop all of the futile attempts to find one that does anything.

This has all led me towards my end, there's just nowhere left to turn and hide from my constant thought stream. I at least want you to know that I understand exactly what you're going through, and you captured the essence of how this can feel like better than I've seen anyone do before, which definitely shows it's spoken from the heart. Existential dread and moral issues are, broadly speaking, major parts of this all for me too. I want to be a "good person" more than anything else, but thoughts about moments where I made dumb fucking decisions in the past or did anything that led me to deem myself as incapable of ever achieving that status are enough to override any positives. I feel disgusted by myself, and thoughts like "everyone has bad moments" are so terribly useless because none of that matters to me, I don't play the comparison game, it's like my own internal benchmark that OCD has the majority of control over. I have never met a single person in my life who can accurately reach the level of understanding of how much of a life-draining parasite this can be, but that's probably just because I internalize everything I can until I reach a breaking point.

The advice in this thread is fine and I know you're all just trying to help, so thank you for that. But this is all so, so much easier said than done, unfortunately. While the distractions alleviate things temporarily, often the cycles of ruminating are so powerful that they prevent you from clicking play on that video, or getting out the door and going on that walk, or even finishing half a page in a damn book because all you can do is cycle back to needing to reassure yourself one more time that you're not an [insert most vile description of a person imagineable here]. Maybe I'm just weak-willed, I don't know, but I have been trying for over a decade to get some sort of a stronghold on this to no avail. It will lead me to the finish line unless something else kills me first, and that's something I have come to terms with. This is not living.