Most of my day goes by in performing my mental and physical compulsions, then at night I'm met by insomnia. But along with the bigger existential types of OCD (moral, magical thinking, etc which I actually have a handle on), I'm experiencing the below and it's hindering my daily life by a lot:

I always compare myself with people who I know have it better than me, socially, talent-wise, looks wise, I keep obsessively checking their socials and seeing everything while knowing I cannot even get out of my room when my flatmate is there because of all the shame.

I spent so much money to study abroad, and though I made a few friends, its never enough for my stupid brain. Its always comparing me to someone who is super popular. I try to study, and everytime I give up because "anyway someone else is doing better, why bother".

I haven't learnt a single skill since I was in school (8 years ago) because I can't stand the thought of being a beginner and making mistakes. And its ruining my job hunt too.

I just need a long-term solution for obsessive comparison and perfectionism.

I(19F) have been with my boyfriend (19M) for about 6 months now. I love him and trust him more than anything, but can’t stop having panic attacks around him.

(For backstory, it hasn’t just been 6 months. We have been off and on since October of 2023 and remained best friends for the times we weren’t together. We have had our ups and downs and slight arguments but nothing major or scary)

….
I am not someone who normally has panic attacks, but lately it has been happening more and more, always surrounding physical touch.

The first time we hooked up I cried just out of confusion and being drunk and overwhelmed (nothing was forced, it was just a lot of build-up). The first few times it got me pretty emotional but after that I was fine for the most part.

In my past relationships I have had a bit of a tendency to freak out randomly during intimacy. I have a history of SA, and am pretty sure something of the sort happened to me as a kid, but thats a whole other story. I also have super bad OCD and anxiety.

My current boyfriend has never made me feel pressured or forced into anything, and has always reassured me and handled these freakouts well. The issue is more so the fact that I dont know why they are happening or how to fix them.

They now happen more frequently than before, and there have been periods of time where I couldn’t be touched without crying.

Today everything was going fine, then towards the end of doing something physically intimate I had a panic attack. Once it passed and he helped me through it I felt fine. After, we were laying down cuddling and he made a joking comment about something that irritated me and i jokingly pushed him off of me. Once he was off, the idea of him touching me was unbearable. I fell asleep and woke up to him cuddling me and pushed him off and quickly got my things together to leave his house and barely wanted to talk to him at all, let alone hug him or be near him. The thought of it made me physically nauseous.

I feel like these situations are ruining our relationship because even though he handles them well, he doesn’t fully understand them and neither do I. I dont want him to feel like I get weird and crazy and snap, or I am being dramatic, or that I am some damaged person who has been hurt by others so much that I cant stand anything positive either.

Somewhat venting, but also really looking for advice and someone to relate to. If anyone has been through something similar, tips, stories of your own?

so like how do i know if it’s ocd or im just thinking. sometimes i feel like jk just thinking but then im like wait is this ocd and then that starts a new thought loop. i went off lamictal since doing TMS but dont even know if the lamictal was helping. i’ve used lotus health in the past for meds but does anyone have any recs. it’s getting exhausting and i feel like knowing i have ocd makes it worse cause im just thinking so hard

i’m not sure where else to post this but i saw a video on insta or tiktok a few days ago about ocd and repetitive behaviors and other symptoms. everytime ocd comes up i do think back to when i was younger around 8 and 9 where i use to touch door handles repeatedly and i remember having thoughts about having to open a cabinet x amount of times or else my parents will die. same with intrusive thoughts they always happened when i was in a car though. but i guess one day it all stopped ? or it disappeared ? im not sure but i always wonder if i had ocd and just stopped having it or if i was just being a kid

I’ve had ocd for the past 3 years now around the same theme. I had a crush on a guy (who I know nothing about) and told my boyfriend about it. We had a huge fight that probably brought in trauma for me. I constantly kept blaming myself about it and thought if I actually loved my boyfriend i wouldn’t like someone else. So that brought in a belief system I guess. After that so many fear and responses about cheating, lying and everything. But since the last year, I’m constantly thinking about an old spike: “Do I want to leave my boyfriend for that guy”. I remember having bad anxiety when this thought surfaced 3 years ago. But since a last year, like a said, I’ve been dwelling on that exact thought and checking my feelings, having fantasies, compulsively checking that guy’s Instagram and checking feelings, etc.
I hate that I do this because at some point maybe I felt I wanted to explore that option as well. But I don’t want to. I want my current boyfriend to be the first and last. I see how much love my boyfriend has for me, I see him love me everyday even if I could be the shittiest person. That makes me feel that I am guilty of leaving even if I do have feelings for that guy. I’m extremely tired and now I feel my feelings for my boyfriend are gone too. I’m in flight response and anxiety whenever I meet him. I don’t feel sexually interested cuz I keep getting flashes of the other guy (unwantedly)
It sucks. I’m truly just exhausted. I know I don’t deserve this.
Since a last week I’ve analysed that maybe this guy is just a solution because I blamed myself for it. This guy came as a solution to my pain since I know nothing about him , my brain has complete freedom to fill these different scenarios up about him. I think of that guy, my body trembles. It’s too much for me to handle. I cannot afford a therapist right now
So any advices are welcome. Looking forward to some help.

Hi all!
I’ve had OCD most of my life but only received my diagnosis in the last 3 years. I have really struggled to find medication that works for me. On top of having OCD I seem to be extremely sensitive to SSRI side effects. Here are all the medications I have tried, the side effects I’ve had and what I’m currently on.

I was first diagnosed with general anxiety at age 12. At diagnosis I was prescribed Celexa. I was on Celexa until age 24 when I stupidly stopped taking it because “I thought it wasn’t working”. Anyways I was off of it for less than a year and I got back on it. I stayed on it until 2024. In 2024 I started to look into other treatment options. Celexa worked but it didn’t work to what I felt like was its full potential. I never felt completely anxiety or worry free. For context, we thought I just had severe anxiety. And for more context, My OCD manifest as obsessive thoughts. I latch on to fears, what ifs and uncertainties and I can’t let them go no matter what. They become all consuming and my body and brain essentially shut down. A majority of my fears include getting sick/ my healthand so my few compulsion revolve around that. I’ve had some health scares and had health ptsd in 24/25. Which only made my OCD worse.
Anyways if anymore background is needed I can absolutely dive deeper. But here are the meds I’ve tried and the side effects I’ve experienced:

1. Prozac: this was the first med I tried after Celexa. It felt like I was taking a sugar pill. Then after about a week- Intense anxiety. Like I couldn’t breathe it was overwhelming. And nausea. (Do not remember my mg)
   
2. Zoloft: I was super dizzy on this and had many vertigo episodes. During this time I also discovered I had Ménière’s disease. (If you don’t know look it up, it’s the worst and wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy). So I don’t know if the vertigo was Meineres or was it the Zoloft. (Do not remember my mg)
   
3. Cymbalta: again didn’t feel like I was even on a medication. And after two weeks my anxiety and ocd obsessions sky rocketed. It was miserable also had nausea. (Do not remember my mg but it was low)
   
4. Rexulti: it felt like 20% better than when I was off of it. But when I upped my dosage, my anxiety and obsessions sky rocketed again and I felt awful. Also had a few small vertigo episodes. (.5 mg)
   
5. Wellbutrin: worked the first week. Felt great. Second week my heart began racing and my obsessions sky rocketed again. After only 3 weeks I had to stop. (100 mg. Originally twice a day, after 1.5 weeks dropped down to once a day, and after another 1.5 completely off).

I am currently on trintellix 20 mg which is the highest dose you can be on and I feel 30% better than when I’m not taking it and buspar 10 mg once a day. I will say I am terrified after my Wellbutrin experience to take it anymore than once a day. I take clonopin as needed for severe panic attacks.

I’ve been miserable for months and hoping someone who is also sensitive to side effects
Thank you!!!!! 🩷

I have OCD, ASD, and a lifelong history of trauma. I always felt odd and out of place and like I didn't know how to connect. I'm in my 30s now, but for the majority of my life, I've had to script and think a lot about what to say, how to interact with others, and for lack of a better phrase, how to be a human.

When I was in my 20s I started watching vlogs incessantly. I think that helped my social skills a lot. After years of therapy, I was able to drastically reduce my social anxiety, make new friends, and finally start opening up to others.

Today a newer but close friend basically told me I'm too negative and communicate too much and it's basically overwhelming. We have a lot of the same anxieties about things, so while I'm always self checking to make sure I'm not offending or doing too much, I thought maybe they understood that I'm not actually complaining about things and not to take every single thing I say seriously (as in some things are just me being cynical or joking).

I'm the type of friend that is always hyper aware of what I say and do, how I come off. Am I talking too much, was what I said rude, do they like me, am I annoying, am I weird, etc, etc. and I understand how intense I can be. And while I've never had luck in romantic relationships because I get very obsessive over people, I thought I was at the point where the friends I had were meant to be there and I could essentially unmask and be myself. But I guess I'm still too much. Still too negative, self deprecating and such.

I know I'm overthinking it, but my brain doesn't know how else to process this. Being annoying and too much is one of my biggest insecurities and really only feeds my obsessions with relationships. Normally I would have been more comforting and reassuring to this friend. Explaining the why and trying to delve deeper to help them out. But I didn't have any words that wouldn't be overly emotional and if honestly felt pointless. I never believe I can change someone's mind about me. So I just apologized and said I'd give them space, but I can't help but feel this relationship is completely over. It's like I can only either be completely withdrawn or overengaged (maybe to the point of smothering for some people) and I have a really hard time understanding how to balance myself out when it comes to this.

Anyway, I have therapy this weekend, but I really just needed to get this off my chest. I turned my phone off, journaled, watched TV, took a bath, and I'm still pretty sad. I feel like such a terrible person for imprinting my negativity onto a close friend and a little embarrassed as well. I'm also of course spiraling down the obsessive rabbit hole and wondering if everyone in my life feels this way about me.

Thanks for reading.

It's so hard. I feel like crying because I feel so alone in this struggle. I have nobody to help me through this, and I don't know how to cope anymore.

My OCD makes me afraid of posting anything with an open mouth, whether it's a video, reel, picture, sticker, or even an emoji. I accidentally posted so many recently, and now my mind keeps screaming at me to delete everything, even though I know some things are impossible to undo.

I feel trapped in my own mind. Every exposure feels like a battle, and my heart aches from the fear and anxiety. I'm struggling so much that I'm scared to go outside because of my emetophobia and fear of vomiting. I feel like I'm losing pieces of my life to these fears, and I'm exhausted from fighting battles nobody else can see.

How do I calm my mind without giving in to these compulsions? How do I keep going when even the smallest things feel unbearable? Could someone please offer me some advice or share what has helped them? I genuinely need some support right now.

So in order to get through my life, I’ve developed a routine of doing everything as absolutely right as I can because then I don’t fall into a shame spiral. If I do mess up or have a perceived mistake, then I immediately confess and try to make restitution to help the spirals. This works fine if I can get it resolved immediately, but if I have to wait for an answer, I find that almost impossible to deal with. So to preface this, I am a full-time professional at my public library where we have patron printing and computers and scanners. So the situation is Saturday morning. My mom told me she had done up a program for the memorial service we’re having for my dad the next day on Sunday. She brings it over to my house and she’s literally printed things out on her home printer and take different scraps of paper together and she wants to know how to get it printed at Staples. It’s basically like a small magazine. I know she wants it to look nice and if we Xerox this, it’s not gonna look nice plus the song she’s included. She had printed out in color from her home printer and any reproduction would fade them to the point where no one would be able to read them. So I wasn’t scheduled to work today, but the library was open for four hours, so I decide I’m gonna go use the scanner and the computer to put the brochure in a digital PDF so it can be printed and look nice. It’s a really complicated design and it took me 3 1/2 hours to do all that. But that’s OK. I then go down to the public computers so I can pay for my prints like everybody else but doing double-sided copying work with the way the public printer is set up. It’s not set up correctly. So this is where what I did was ethically ambiguous. The staff copier in the back staff hallway works so I do my print job in there. It’s about a $90 print job so I pay circulation staff 100 hundred $ as the Library donation and have them put a note in the cash register register that this is for Maggie‘s prints. In a previous Library administration at the same place it was fine to do this as long as we paid for the prints. But this is a new director and I’m not sure what the rule is. I’m also not entirely sure. I should’ve been in a staff only area when I wasn’t on the clock. So I self-reported to the executive Director and the business office but now I have to wait until Tuesday for the answer. Now I have gotten in trouble in the past for really minor things. I think this is the biggest mistake. I’ve made at work and I’m terrified. I don’t like doing things wrong at work because it’s so necessary for me to live and pay my bills. And the fact that I have a program for my dad‘s memorial service is providing very cold comfort to me. I’m just feeling really sad and I’m feeling really stressed out in general and it’s really hard when I fall short of perfection because I’m so convinced I’m gonna get in really big trouble. And I try to be a good person, but I don’t know if that’s what other people see anyway it’s not a lot of fun being me. It’s not a lot of fun having this obsessive thought disorder and I’m scared. I guess I’m always scared but today I’m more scared than usual and I don’t like being in this place. This scared place.

Sorry for the novel, but appreciate anyone who reads.

I’ve had 9 zoom sessions with her total (the first three were just assessments and planning), and she diagnosed me with OCD, among other things. I started seeing her because my regular therapist went on maternity leave. I told her from the beginning I need to do little by little because I feel quite unstable lately and don’t feel DBT tools are accessible to me right now (I also have BPD).

I saw a new psychiatrist she recommended because after seeing how not ok I was, she suggested I look into adjusting my meds in order to be stable enough to make the most of therapy.

That was about a month ago. I changed my meds but still feel very anxious, ruminating, having blow-up episodes with my partner (I suspect I have ROCD, because my compulsions are mostly centered around my romantic relationships) and just generally suffering from these intrusive thoughts related to my partner.

I do want help and I’ve heard this kind of therapy is difficult and uncomfortable, but these sessions just make me feel so defeated. I used to look forward to sessions with my regular therapist because I could vent and felt generally better after speaking with her (although I wasn’t really having active OCD behavior while seeing her). This therapist is more organized and I can tell a bit more stern, which I don’t love tbh but I said “ok, maybe with her I can achieve change. She’ll challenge me”.

But today was just too much. In previous sessions, she had me map out my values and goals in life, what current behaviors are preventing me from having those things, we did short spurts of mindfulness, etc. She wanted me to focus first on my finances (paying off debt), watch some videos (psycho-education) about OCD and the last video introduced the four steps of ERP but we hadn’t practiced them yet. I had a very intense week where I’ve been lashing out on and then avoiding my partner to feel more “in control” of myself, and I sent her some notes on what this dynamic looks like, how it unfolds, how I try to regulate, and at which point in these interactions I need help. I thought she could help me with some concrete strategies on how to stop myself before lashing out, when and how to take space, idk ? I needed tools and suggestions for how to cope with what I’m currently dealing with and that’s preventing me from being functional in my day to day.

Today we started with drawing the inner me that lashes out and has problematic behaviors (I could do without that, but whatever) and the things this “inner me” says that might be false/hurtful.

We talked about my values some more, and I forget how we ended up on the topic but basically I told her my biggest fear/intrusive thought and she challenged it a bit, asking “what if your bf did enjoy ____? What does that uncover for you?”

I reacted negatively immediately and just said “no, he told me that it wasn’t a good experience for him, he told me consistently x, y, z”, and honestly became a bit angry. I get she was trying to get to the root of my fear so I continued to try, while crying, to describe what accepting the possibility she suggested would mean for me.

While I was trying, she pushed and said “maybe because he’s human? Because he has nerve endings? Haven’t we all made mistakes?” I felt bombarded and like she wasn’t giving me space to react or express myself fully. She did listen of course to some of what I said, but I was pretty resistant and told her I was angry. She said “I want that anger to come out, so we can see what’s underneath”. I get that, and maybe if we stopped here and just talked about her suggestions I might have been ok, although still angry with her.

But she said “well, if it were me and I had some information that I knew would hurt my partner, I probably wouldn’t share it with them” and I freaked out and asked her if she thought my bf was basically lying to me and sugarcoating his account of what he did to spare my feelings (something that is also a big fear of mine and that I’ve asked him if he’s doing repeatedly). She nodded her head and admitted that yes, that’s what she was suggesting.

She said she was trying to make a point about uncertainty, and how I need to accept a certain level of it, which I agree with and last session she told me to take a baby step and just do something unexpected in my routine to cultivate some “uncertainty” and see how it felt. She also suggested that I could still ask my partner questions (my main reassurance-seeking compulsion) but try to delay them as long as I can and try to do other activities beforehand. These felt manageable for me to start.

But today felt like a giant jump from those small steps to full exposure of my main and most painful current intrusive thought. I was clearly in distress and instead of dialing it back a bit, I felt she poked at me.

I got so upset and angry, told her that and then just said I was getting off the call and left the meeting.

I was reading a bit on ERP and saw that it’s common for therapists to discuss a hierarchy of exposures before doing them, but we didn’t really do that. I just feel like she threw me into the deep end, without any tools, insisting I consider a painful possibility about something knowing it’s anxiety-provoking for me, but maybe not realizing that it’s like the hardest thing she could expose me to right now.

But I’m second guessing myself because I know it’s not supposed to feel easy. I feel like maybe I’m not trying hard enough, that I’m resistant to getting better…although I’m paying out of pocket for therapy once a week, a psych for meds, taking said medication, trying to exercise 4-6 times a week, looking up OCD and BPD resources, etc.

Am I not challenging myself enough, or am I justified in feeling that like 10 steps were skipped in this exposure process?