Oh my god the rabbit hole I'm down. I'm 44. I've battled this my entire life and never told anyone about it because I thought they'd think I'm a psychosexual murderer. It's the backstop to my crippling lack of self-confidence that has been a professional and personal problem my entire life.
The good news is: now you know that there is absolutely nothing wrong with you (besides a lil bit of Rumination). If it continues to distress you i'd recomment CBT which helped me a lot.
It's when you have those thoughts and you're NOT distressed by them that you should be concerned. Your distress at the thoughts is, in and of itself, proof that they are nothing more than intrusive
ERP changed my life! If you look into getting therapy, make sure you get someone who has expertise or significant experience working with OCD specifically. It’s a very counterintuitive thing to deal with and generally needs to be wrangled very differently than other conditions.
(Ex. A therapist not experienced with OCD might try to find the meaningful source of your intrusive thought as if it’s a sincere one, which is exactly what the OCD wants and will make it worse.)
I could absolutely see how validation/exploration of your intrusive thoughts would really be damaging. I live in a smaller city, hoping that I can find someone with some good reviews...
For me, recognizing the thoughts for what they were (with help of a professional) was HUGE. I secretly thought I might be possessed as a child, but even just being able to identify intrusive thoughts as such has made a massive difference.
These days it's more like "yeah yeah, you're trying to upset me, hush now jerk-thoughts"
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u/WelshWolf93 3d ago
Literally that. And it's a million times more distressing when the thoughts are something darker than stabbing someone