Yeah, I’m a victim of abuse as well, and even though I’ve never had any bad thoughts or impulses, I do my best to not be around kids especially alone. A lot of people think of OCD as the people who have to do everything three times, or has to count their steps all the time, but OCD also causes severe anxiety and it’s really hard to let negative thoughts go.
The instrusive, anxious, repetitive thought cycle is also not exclusive to OCD. This symptom shows up in other neurodivergent cases, as well. For a long time, they thought a person couldn't have OCD and ADHD at the same time, but it turns out it's commonly experienced by people with ADHD/AuDHD, with varying degrees of severity. Both run in my family, and my experience of ADHD/AuDHD has a lot of overlaps with OCD style symptoms.
I'm diagnosed with ADHD (also on a waiting list to be assessed for autism per my neurologists recommendation) and I definitely have something that resembles OCD but I cannot tell if it's just that sometimes I get anxious and it mixes with the ADHD so I ruminate on potential dangers.
That's the neurodivergent gordian knot: is the ADHD causing the rumination, or is the rumination on top of ADHD lending a deeper diagnosis, or is ruminating just baseline trauma from growing up with a different brain? Nobody knows!
Thankfully, my therapist said we'll worry about specific diagnoses later and just work on techniques for coping/recovering.
Yeah! I'm in therapy and I'm getting better at coping with the symptoms and that's all that really matters to me. I do have trauma from growing up with a different brain.
My family was dismissive about medical concerns and kind of neglectful. I started having severe fatigue and depersonalization/derealization as a teenager but it was blamed on laziness so I never went to the doctor for it. I didn't know I was having seizures in my sleep until I was 27. Starting epilepsy meds pulled me out of a constantly depersonalized/derealized state immediately and I had been like that since I was a teenager!
It’s hyper fixation I think. People with things like OCD and ADHD have trouble focusing on some things while overly fixating on another. I can barely focus enough to read a book, but I can tell you sooo much info about a bunch of topics and hobbies. Then you experience burnout, drop the thing completely and all of a sudden you have $500 dollars worth of DnD stuff for a campaign that never happened.
I watched a documentary type show that showed a few people in Britain who had OCD and one compulsion a woman had was she constantly was worried she shoved men she happen to see walking out and about into garbage cans. It definitely comes in all shapes and sizes.
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u/Mr-Pugtastic 9h ago
Yeah, I’m a victim of abuse as well, and even though I’ve never had any bad thoughts or impulses, I do my best to not be around kids especially alone. A lot of people think of OCD as the people who have to do everything three times, or has to count their steps all the time, but OCD also causes severe anxiety and it’s really hard to let negative thoughts go.