dksea

This is false. OCD exists, we have evidence which proves this. Regardless of whether its caused by whatever psychobabble you used to describe it above, or the actual researched and documented evidence most scientists and doctors use, it exists. Look, if you are happy I have no problem with that. But unless you can provide evidence which backs up your claim of a cure, why should any of us believe you? Its trivial to claim this kind of "solution" to OCD. Many before you have made the same claim, and sadly none of them have been able to produce results when it comes right down to it. If you can, by all means, get people together, due a methodical study, demonstrate that your method works and we'll all HAPPILY jump on it. Thats literally one of the points of CBT...

Hi @SarahW, sorry you are having a rough time, OCD is no fun at all. This is an unpleasant experience, but also at the very core of the problem of how OCD affects us. The not feeling "right" is the whole problem in fact. With OCD, something in our brains doesn't register correctly some of the time and it causes us to get that "not right" feeling (or rather to NOT get the "ok, things are fine" feeling, but same outcome). Part of why we do compulsions is for exactly that reason, to try and make things feel "right". Its also part of why stopping compulsions is hard, because of course we want to feel right! Unfortunately, compulsions provide only temporary relief AND actually make things worse in the long run, because they teach our brain "hey this thing I'm worried about/this bad feeling I'm having must be important, otherwise why would I be doing this compulsion all the time!". Its a real crappy situation. You are doing the right thing by fighting the urge to do compulsions. Part of fighting the urge is learning to live with the "not right" feeling. Eventually it will fade. You are basically re-training your brain to behave more "normally" and in time it will learn to disassociate feeling "ok" from doing compulsions. Its like breaking a bad habit, hard at first, but it does get easier over time. As I mention above, the more you can resist engaging in the compulsive behavior, the weaker the links will become. For some people medication can help weaken/prevent those feelings, but not everyone feels comfortable taking medication and many people manage the recovery using CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, the standard treatment for OCD) alone. It can be tough, because our brains are naturally designed to make links and connections, but if you keep at it, you can break these specific links. You are also experiencing one of the paradoxes of being an OCD sufferer, knowing on the one hand that there is no actual connection, but still having to deal with a brain where part of it keeps making the connection. Frustrating for sure, but know that you aren't alone AND more importantly that it can be done. Its great that you are pursuing therapy, it can make such a huge difference in recovery. And thats a really good book that should teach you a lot of good things about recovery as well. One thing that can help is to remind yourself that the reason for these anxieties and irrational thoughts stick around is because of the OCD. I'd also recommend looking up the Four Steps Method for dealing with intrusive thoughts. Its originally from the book "Brain Lock" by Dr. Jeffrey M. Schwartz, an American OCD expert, but you can find the description online as well. Its a CBT tool for dealing with intrusive thoughts and has been very helpful for me personal and for many others. At the end of the day OCD recovery is basically about learning what behaviors to avoid, what behaviors to do instead, and repeating the good choices and avoiding the not so good ones over and over and over again. Best of luck in your recovery journey and welcome to the forums.

answers

Oh Dave, you’re still doing it! It’s another “Ok, but...”. You keep tryin f to convince us your situation, your fear, etc. is special or different, and I promise you it’s not. You’re trying to nit pick my example and in doing so missing the point. Let me try and break it down for you: Your fear: That you are secretly gay and living in denial. Your argument: Gay denial is a real thing. My fear: That I’ll vomit, particular in public. My argument: People throw up, including in public The denial is part of your fear, it wasn’t part of mine, but in both our cases what we feared is a real thing that can happen. Heck, in my case it was something that HAD happened to me multiple times in my life, probably will happen again, and happens to other people all the time. My fear was far more likely to be true. But that doesn’t even matter because the problem was never the fear, the problem was how massively I was overreacting to the mere possibility and how that overreaction was destroying my life. Now you are in exactly the same situation. You’ve built up gay denial into this massive boogie man/ultimate doomsday scenario, that is such a threat that the mere theoretical possibility of it being true means your life would be ruined. Except that’s already happening because of the OCD. Your worst fear doesn’t need to come true to mess up your life, OCD is already doing it. It’s like you’re in a jungle, afraid to walk in to the next valley because you are afraid of alligators only your currently sinking in quicksand! Yes, gay denial is a real thing that happens. So is cancer. So are car accidents. So is food poisoning. So is getting fired. So are many many bad things both big and small that can happen in our lives. The fact that something CAN really happen doesn’t mean it’s likely to happen or, more importantly, that your current reaction to the mere possibility of it happening is reasonable, realistic, or healthy. Again, you have a choice to make, do you want to be able to get back to enjoying life and being more in control, or do you want to continue living in fear? It does not matter that gay denial is a real thing anymore than it matters that heart attacks are a real thing. That’s not the issue. The issue is your overreactions, your fear, your panic. I understand it’s hard, I’ve been there, so have the others. Your situation is painful and scary and hard, but as much as you think it’s different, it’s really really not. We’ve all had those same moments of “yeah but MY fear is rational because...” or “yeah but WHAT IF ...” etc. We could play and endless game of you telling me why your fear is different or why item A or evidence X means your reactions are reasonable and I guarantee you I could explain why they aren’t each and every time and it wouldn’t change a thing because you aren’t going to argue your way out of the fear, unfortunately OCD doesn’t work that way. If you want to get better you have to stop playing OCDs game. You have to start making different, better, choices in how you respond. You are absolutely going to want to respond to this comment by explaining why your situation is different, why your fear is reasonable, and I urge you not to. Not because it’ll hurt my feelings (it won’t and it hasn’t, trust me) but because it won’t help you. It’s a compulsion, it’s feeding the OCD. If you want to change you need to start making the right choices and you can start today, right here, with this post. Decide “ok, I’m going to treat this as OCD. Maybe I’ll be wrong, maybe it’s gay denial, I can’t be 100% sure, but it’s PROBABLY OCD so that’s what I’m going to go with.”

Hi again @Robin43 You are engaged in a common OCD behavior, one I’ve been guilty of many a time in the past, as are probably all of us. It’s the “OK, but...” pattern. We ask for advice/help/reassurance, someone offers it, we listen hoping it will make the doubt vanish (wouldn’t that be nice) but OCD is tricky and it doesn’t. So we fall back on the what if’s... “OK, you say I don’t have to worry about this but what IF the radiation leaked out. Radiation can cause cancer! I don’t want to get cancer!” Cue anxiety. Trust me, I understand, as I said I’ve been guilty of falling in to the same trap many a time myself, it’s hard to push back against the OCD. Can you or I or someone imagine a possible scenario where you get sufficient radiation poisoning from the smoke detector to get cancer? Sure. But lots of scenarios are imaginable. I could imagine a scenario where I become Pope and you become the Queen of England! But those things aren’t likely just because we can imagine them. “But DKSea,” you say “this is totally different! I actually TOUCHED the smoke detector! And I read online where this physicist guy said...” So first, a reminder that just because you read something on the internet doesn’t mean it’s true, and even if it’s true it doesn’t mean you fully understand the likelihood of it happening. Second, yes, right now this fear SEEMS reasonable to you, after all you keep having it, but feeling fear and actually being in danger are different things. Imagine you are walking in the woods one day and you hear a noise in the bushes. “Oh no! It’s a bear!” you think and start to panic. Just as you are about to run, screaming in terror as fear rushes over you, a nice cute little bunny rabbit hops out of the bushes. There is no bear. There never WAS a bear. You later find out bears don’t even live in those woods or anywhere near it. The fear you felt was genuine, you WERE afraid. But you weren’t at risk (well from the bear at least, it COULD have been a vampire rabbit after all). Just because you feel fear about something doesn’t mean it’s actually a real threat. Yes you have the fear of radiation right now. It’s hard to shake, pops up when you really don’t want it too, hurts a lot. But you have to make a choice in spite all of that to start treating that fear as unnecessary, to accept that continuing to ruminate on this, to research about radiation on the internet, etc isn’t going to help. Learning how to properly respond to OCD will though. I hope you are able to connect with a therapist again soon, and to understand that part of recovery involves doing things you don’t like but are ultimately for your benefit (kinda like exercise). It’s definitely not always a smooth ride, but it’s worthwhile. Way better than spending the rest of your life increasingly under the control of the fears

Metal

Sorry you are struggling @Robin43. OCD is a total nightmare for sure, but that’s the actual problem you are facing believe it or not, not radiation. You are right when you say you panicked, but that doesn’t mean you panicked for a good reason. It certainly feels that way to you, but that’s what OCD does to us, it takes unreasonable reactions and tries to convince us they are reasonable. Your therapist did not mislead you, you were perfectly fine to touch the smoke detecto, including the ionization chamber. I could go in to various details about the type of radiation involved, the safe guards in place, etc but trust me, your mind would imagine more scenarios to worry about. Working on OCD recovery with a therapist and especially not running away when there are bad moments is how you’ll get better. Panicking, unnecessarily in particular, won’t help. Consider what you say here: Think about this for a minute. Your fear is you’ll die early right? But because the OCD has spiraled out of control you are basically already living your worst fear. You say you’ve lost interest in life, convinced you’ve destroyed yourself. Well heck, what more can happen in that case? The whole reason we don’t want to die is so we can ENJOY life. Right now the OCD is (fortunately temporarily) taking that joy away anyway! Radiation or no radiation, you’re already suffering! OCD is the real problem because OCD is what’s ruining your life! Look, as much as it sucks to think about, the reality is someday you’re going to die. Ok MAYBE you’re a Highlander, born to be immortal (cue Queen music), etc etc. But probably not. Like all other living things you will die. Hopefully not for many years but eventually. It could happen tomorrow. An aneurysm. A meteorite. Alien invasion. Who knows. Or it could happen 50 years from now. We don’t know. Again, it sucks to think about BUT what is important is to make the most of the time we do have. And trust me when I tell you that living under the thumb of OCD is the opposite of that. The sooner you get a handle on OCD, the more time you’ll have to enjoy life, the better off you’ll be. OCD is far and away a much bigger threat to your life and happiness than your smoke detector. It sucks that right now the idea of radiation causes you such anxiety, I understand really, but if you want to beat that fear you need to beat the OCD. All the radiation research and worry about radiation etc in the world won’t help. Beating OCD will.

So have mine, so do basically everyone’s. We are not robots, we change, the world around us changes. Change is perfectly normal. Including what and how we worry. You’ve spent a long time being consumed by your fears of being gay, that is going to affect how you interpret everything around you. (Again, we aren’t robots). When you treat those fears as important it reinforces that in your mind. You start seeing triggers for those fears everywhere. Same thing happened to me. My major OCD fear when I started was throwing up, especially in public. Slightest stomach ache? Uh oh, probably gonna get sick. Strange smell? Uh oh, probably gonna get sick. Slight feeling of discomfort on a bus? Must be motion sickness, gonna get sick. Starting to notice a pattern yet? All around me I was seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling things that triggered my fear. Things that otherwise I would have ignored or not associated at all. It consumed me, it drove me to avoid going out. To avoid any good I might be unfamiliar with. I had to sit at the front of any bus when I had to use them. I had to sit on the outside of the aisle at church JUST in case I needed to rush to the bathroom. And more than once I did panic and leave situations thinking I had to throw up. Wanna hear the crazy part? The last time I threw up was in 1993. 28 years ago. It’s been almost THREE DECADES and that fear that ruled about a decade of my life has never even come to pass. Set aside that even if it did happen it’s really not that big a deal. Set aside that people do it all the time and are fine (I mean it’s not great but it’s far from the end of the world). It hasn’t even happened to me! All that fear and avoidance and pain and doubt for nothing! Every single time I let the fear overwhelm me it seemed like the worst thing in the world. I had panic attacks. I suffered significantly at the hands of OCD. Because I was not doing the right things. I was not following the CBT guidelines. I was giving in to my compulsions and feeding the beast. I never physically threw up but OCD was emotionally throwing up on me all the time! I feel like I lost a decade of my life. Thankfully I’m in a MUCH better place now. Not perfect, I still have bad moments from time to time but not like then. I can watch tv shows where people get sick. I can talk about it. I can ride busses without issue. It didn’t just go away. I had to do the work. I had to change how I responded. I had to stop saying “yeah but...”. “I’m Dave and my fear is that I don’t have OCD, but I’m gay”. “Dave you have OCD, that’s the problem.” ”Yeah but when I watch Baywatch...” NO. Enough. You’re done. No more “Yeah but.” You need to make a choice to accept that this is OCD. Then you need to keep making that choice. Whenever the worry that it’s not OCD but that you are really gay comes up, you make the choice again to accept that it’s OCD. When you mess up and start thinking the OCD isn’t real, you stop, and you remake the choice to accept that it’s OCD. Over and over and over again until you don’t even have to think about it, until it’s just automatic. Yup, there goes my OCD again should be your response. Will you feel uncomfortable when you see a shirtless guy? Yup, probably for awhile. I felt uncomfortable riding a bus for YEARS. Now I don’t because I changed how I responded to those thoughts. I stopped playing OCDs game. You can too. I am not telling you to do something that I haven’t already done myself, same with the others. You need to understand we have all been there. We have all suffered. We have wasted years, decades in some cases, of our lives living in fear like you are now. That changed when we made a choice and kept making that choice, when we started doing the right things and stopped doing the wrong things. It took time, it took effort, but anyone can do it. It’s not magic. We’ve all been where you are, afraid it would never change, afraid it would get worse, afraid our worst fears would come true. We came out the other side and are better for it. What have you got to lose by doing the same?

Ruminating is a big problem but I’d say your biggest is refusing to forgive yourself for such a minor event. Was your comment in poor taste? Yes. Was it worth years of torment? No. I can answer your other question by the way, why you didn’t have a major panic attack: Because what you said wasn’t worth the panicking over. It wasn’t then, it isn’t now. You need to decide not to torture yourself over it anymore. Because of OCD unfortunately you’ll likely still feel bad for some time, but you don’t have to keep telling yourself you deserve it or “it’s karma” (btw that’s not even how karma supposedly works).

Shimmer

@Tulip46 I am so sorry to hear about your struggles with your husbands behavior. Mental illness doesn't just impact the person who has it but the people around them as well. It sounds like you have become very well informed about OCD (how wonderful that his mother shared information with you from her own experience) and what is necessary to treat it. In my opinion you are doing all the right things, so as frustrated as you must feel right now, from this OCD sufferer I want to say thank you, thank you so much for the kindness and patience you are showing. I wish it could be your husband offering it to you because I don't think he knows just how lucky he is to have someone like you in his life. A lot of people would not take the time and effort to do what you are doing. Thank you for that on his behalf. Unfortunately, whether or not to change their behavior and accept help is a decision your husband has to make. I know you said that you don't want to walk away and that is laudable, but it may become necessary at some point if he is not willing to start doing the necessary work. Hopefully it does not get to that point, however your own mental well being and happiness are just as important as his and its ok for you to stand up for yourself. Thats not being selfish, its not being uncaring, its being a good person. Before it gets to that point however here are some thoughts I had. First, while your husband may not be willing to talk to a therapist at this time, maybe you can. Caring for your own mental well being and having someone to talk to about your concerns and get professional advice might be worth exploring. If possible someone who has experience dealing with relationships and also mental illness would be ideal, but it will depend on what is available in your area and what you are able to access. I'm not sure to what degree you are already doing this, but you might also consider setting some more strict boundaries for your husbands behavior around you, but also I think letting him know why you are doing so. Not just because its impacting him, but because it is hurting you. Perhaps if he is able to more clearly see the impact of what's happening on you it will eventually get through to him what the cost could be for his continued obstinance. Another thing to consider is asking someone else to speak with your husband, a friend, another family member, someone who he also might listen to who could warn him that he is risking a lot for his future (such as you) by refusing to make changes. Sometimes an outside voice can break through where a spouses can't. They might be willing to say things more directly that you aren't/can't and willing to endure his anger since they don't have to live with him. This would allow you to not be "the bad guy" in his mind and thus not face his emotional response, but he'd still be confronted with the truths he needs to be. Finally, while I can appreciate both his and your reluctance to try medication again, I think it would be worth considering. A bad experience on one medication does not necessarily translate to the same experience on another, and trying a different medication is a temporary commitment, something that he can always stop if it becomes more trouble than its worth. Emphasize the potential positives for both of you. I wish there was some magic answer or solution I could give that would solve all of this for you (and for all of us affected by OCD), but unfortunately I can't. All I can offer is my advice and some positive words to thank you for all that you have and continue to do for someone you clearly love. I sincerely hope you are able to find a way forward that is more positive for both of you.

Getting easier to be in situations that previously caused you anxiety is the goal of recovery, thats what you want to happen Getting easier means your brain is learning how to handle these situations more properly, its a good thing. This is an understandable worry and quite a common one. But feeling better doesn't mean you made it up, feeling better is, as I mentioned above, what recovery is all about. When you have a cold, you feel bad, then you feel better as you recover. It doesn't mean you didn't have a cold to begin with right? Same with OCD. You don't have to be miserable for the rest of your life in order for the OCD to be real. Getting better is what you want to happen. ERP can take many forms. Active behavior can be harder to do, but it can also yield much greater improvement, like running helps you lose weight faster than walking, etc. But more passive behavior can be helpful in confronting and dealing with your OCD as well. There isn't one and only one right approach to ERP. And when you do ERP you don't (and likely won't) be perfect at it, and thats ok. As long as you move forward over time, you will get better. How quickly and in what way will depend on what you are willing and what you are capable of doing, not on being perfect. Recovery is a long process, you don't need to get it right every time and definitely not the first time. You'll learn, you'll get better, you'll improve your skills, just like any other situation where you have to practice to get better. Gradual, step by step improvement is the norm for OCD.

As a religious person I'll confirm what PB said, there is no way I would take that seriously. And I don't believe any loving God would either. I could dig in to a some deep theological arguments about prayer and sin and forgiveness, but thats not really the issue here (and would mostly be reassurance anyway). The issue here is OCD. You need to treat these thoughts/moments as OCD. You don't need to be sure, though the OCD tries to make you feel like you do. Remember, if you think it might be OCD, it probably is.

Cancer is absolutely a thing. Groups of other things are also things. Cats are a thing even though there are many sub-types of cats. Colors are a thing even though there are many different colors. I swear Handy, its like you intentionally try to post false information...

Sure, Branding is important, but that doesn't mean a particular color is necessarily the best/only choice. A popular coffee chain from my hometown of Seattle went with green for their key color for example, but they could have gone with red, or blue, or yellow. In the United States the three (formerly four) big cell service providers each have a key color (ATT = blue, Verizon = red, T-Mobile = pink, former brand Sprint = yellow). Whats important in most cases is consistent use of the branding and colors once they have been established. To that end I think the Orange of OCDUK is just fine. I like that it stands out, orange is a very noticeable color.

Literally the only place I ever hear people use this terminology is on OCD forums. Think about that. What is more likely: 1. You have a condition (OCD) that explains all the anxiety and fears you have about being gay, a condition that millions of other people experience, a subset of whom have exactly the same fears and "symptoms" as you do OR 2. You have managed, without any special training or skills, to completely bamboozle not only multiple members of this forum, but also trained and highly educated medical professionals for YEARS. I know which scenario I would bet on

Sure, people might think its unpleasant, but do you think they would react the same way you are? Its important to remember that situations aren't black and white, there's a whole range of grays in between. In this case the question is not "is semen wonderful or terrible", the question is "is my reaction proportional/appropriate in this situation".

Here's the thing, you only have one brain, and your brain is the only part of you that can have thoughts. That means every thought you have comes from that brain. When you have an intrusive thought, it comes from your brain. When you have a non-intrusive thought, it also comes from your brain. All the thoughts you have are "real" in the sense that you have them, or else they don't exist. But just because your brain has a thought doesn't mean that thought is important or meaningful. Our brains are fantastically complex thought machines that generate far more thoughts than our conscious minds can ever hope to comprehend. That fantastical brain of yours is constantly processing information, every sight, every sound, every smell, etc. and trying to make sense of it. And its doing so in the frame of all the other experiences you've ever had. Its really quite amazing when you you stop to think about it (and doing THAT adds even more thoughts to the pile!, how meta :D). Anyway, the point is, your brain is taking all that input, trying to make sense of it, decide what's important, what's not, what your higher brain (aka your conscious mind, aka YOU) need to be aware of, what it doesn't, etc. So how do intrusive thoughts fit in? Well they are just thoughts that happen that we don't like. Everyone gets them. They are normal. Non-OCD people get them the same as we do. The only difference is non-OCD peoples brains treat them as unimportant more easily than ours do. Which sucks for us of course, but the key point to realize is it means having these unpleasant thoughts is, again, normal. It does NOT mean you like them, or want them to be true, or anything like that. Right now you have an obsession about harming children, and of course that bothers you. Unfortunately because you have OCD it means you are thinking about it a lot, and unfortunately THAT means that many (if not every) thought you have is going to be affected by it. Its like buying a new car. Suddenly you start noticing your same make/model of car all around you. Why? Because thats the topic thats important in your mind right now so it colors how you react to the world. If you're worried about something you're more likely to notice things related to that topic, or filter things that happen to you through that lens. Which, unfortunately again, in the case of OCD feeds in to a cycle where we have these thoughts we don't want, it causes more related thoughts to happen, it makes us more anxious, and the cycle repeats itself. So what do you do about it? Simple (though not easy), you act as if you are feeling anxious because of OCD. Assume thats the reason rather than that your worst fear is true. "But what if I really AM a monster whose out to hurt children?! Surely I MUST do something, that would be awful!". Yes, IF its true it would be awful, but we have ample reason to believe its OCD so lets go with that option instead. As the saying goes: If you think it MIGHT be OCD, it probably is. Live your life by that mantra and things will get a lot better.

Living with and dealing with OCD is difficult and I am sorry for the pain you are going through. Basically all of us here can relate to it, we've been (or in some cases still are) where you are. Aside from the good advice PolarBear has already offered, I want you to consider something: Why are you afraid of getting cancer? Because it means you would get sick and could die right? Well what happens if you get sick and/or die? It means you won't get to do things you might enjoy and stop doing things you enjoy now, right? OK, but what is worrying about getting cancer doing now? Its doing the same thing. Its taking up your time and preventing you from doing the things you would rather do or might do instead. This is one of the tragedies of OCD, we often suffer more from the worrying than we would/might from the thing we worry about. Maybe you will get cancer in the future, maybe you won't, no one can say for sure. But we can say for sure that worrying about it isn't helping. The best thing you can do for yourself is to work on dealing with the OCD, not spending time researching about cancer.

I can understand why that thought bothers you, it would bother me too. And I know what its like to be scared because of OCD. Let me share with you one very important lesson I have learned during my OCD journey: Feeling fear does not mean there is an actual reason to be afraid. Right now you are probably trapped in a loop of fear. Part of the reason you are trapped is because, whether you realize it or not, the fact that you feel afraid makes you think you have a REASON to feel afraid. I've been there, its hard to deal with, but you can learn to separate the fact you are feeling fear from the idea you have something to be afraid of. Meanwhile, yes your worst case scenario would be quite unpleasant and could make your life difficult if it were true. But its also possible (and I would say likely) that its NOT true. As PolarBear said, 90% of the campus doesn't think you are racist. 99% of the campus probably doesn't even think about you. So even if you have done some offensive or racist things, most people aren't going to know or care. Now, telling you that isn't going to just make the fear stop, if it did you wouldn't be here, because it would mean you don't have OCD. Its a bit of reassurance, and normally I would try not to give it to you. The reason I'm doing so is part of a bigger lesson, which is this: People, in general, are bad at judging risk. Think about it, people are more afraid to fly than to ride in a car, despite the fact that objectively the plane is safer! Cars are just more commonplace in our daily lives, we are used to them, so we treat them differently. We are bad at evaluating actual risk. And people with OCD are even worse when it comes to our obsessions. Right now you are massively overrating the risk and danger of this situation. It FEELS super scary to you, but that doesn't mean it actually is. The likelihood of your worst case scenario is, in your mind, much much MUCH bigger than it actually is. Thats part of the reason we struggle with OCD. The good news is you can take that knowledge and use it to help change things. You can remind yourself that even though you feel afraid (which sucks) it does not mean the risk is as bad as it seems. Its hard at first to apply this knowledge, you'll want to panic, you'll want to give in to "yeah but what if...", you'll want to try and make the anxiety go away with compulsions. I wish it were easier, but it is what is is. However if you work at it, if you apply that knowledge, that fear != risk, that your brain is probably over exaggerating the risk, you can, in time, retrain your brain to respond more normally and overcome the OCD. Thats what recovery is, training yourself to react differently when the OCD causes your brain to react poorly. You have to do manually what most people do automatically. But in time it because more automatic for you too. Assuming the worst case scenario, that you really did do something that offended someone, intentionally or not, the thing is, life goes on. Yes there may be unpleasant situations. Yes some people may not like you or may misjudge you. Yes some people may think you are lying. None of those things are great, and I get that you don't want people to think that way. But you don't have to explain your behavior, you don't have to convince them to like you, you don't have to make them realize you aren't bizarre. Its perfectly ok to just go on with your life. You are never going to be perfect. People may not like you. People may get the wrong idea about you. I promise you life goes on. Its happened to me, I've had people not like me. I've had people get the wrong idea about me. I've said or done things I latter regret. Sometimes I've been able to make up for it, or resolve the misunderstanding, sometimes I haven't. Life goes on. Your brain is screaming at you that this is serious, you need to fix it, and its the most important thing in the world. I promise you its not. OCD lies. Its lied to you in the past, its lying to you now, it'll lie to you in the future. Its OK not to do what it wants, in fact its the best thing you can do. You have to accept that things happen in life you can't control, that people might get the wrong impression of you, you might do something that gives people the wrong impression, even if you didn't mean to. Sometimes you can make up for it, sometimes you can't. But if you spend the rest of your life worrying about whether or not anyone has ever thought you might be racist, well, you'll find that you've spent your entire life worrying and none of it living. As Polarbear said, you don't have to explain, you don't have to undo whatever misunderstanding happened. But you SHOULD get help from a professional for your OCD. More than anything else I encourage you to do that.

You are allowed to have a different opinion about this kind of behavior than the therapists or OCD advisors you talk to, but its important to realize that if you continue to treat these situations as so important, as worth worrying about, its going to be much harder for you to go about your daily life and spend your energy on other things, things you might enjoy instead. We live in a world with other people, and unfortunately that means they are sometimes going to do things we don't like or would prefer they not do. Sometimes these things are so disruptive that we get together as a society and make rules about them, such as "its wrong to murder people". Other times these things are a smaller problem and we just have to live with it, such as someone whistling while they walk down the street. I think most of us would agree with you that doing things like leaving cigarettes on the ground, or spitting on the ground is unpleasant. However the part where we disagree is how much energy to put in to dealing with it. Certainly having to deal with these types of situations while having OCD can make it harder, but at the end of the day you have to make the decision over where to focus your time and energy. You don't have to decide that such behavior is acceptable or pleasant, but you do have to decide what priority to give it and your reaction to it.

Tree

Its also a fact that you could be struck by lightning, or a meteor could hit the earth, or any number of bad things CAN happen. However it does not mean they are LIKELY to happen. OCD causes us to ignore/struggle with likelihood and focus on worst case scenarios. Is it unpleasant to feel the anxiety? Absolutely. But fearing something doesn't mean its actually dangerous. PolarBear is right (as usual), the right thing to do is keep eating nuts as normal. Especially store bought nuts, those have been inspected and checked already.

Hi Anasd, sorry to hear about your difficulties. I can understand why you might feel like you need to talk to a religious advisor about your worries, but as someone who is also religious, I have to agree with PolarBear, that dealing with OCD doesn't require an expert in your specific topic of worries, but someone who knows how to treat OCD. Here's a tricky thing about OCD and our brains. OCD doesn't create independent thoughts. We only have one brain, and all the thoughts our brains have come from that one brain. OCD affects how we respond to thoughts, it makes it harder to dismiss certain thoughts or to recognize them as not important or already solved. Any thought you have is "genuine" in the sense that your brain had the thought. But that doesn't mean its important or meaningful. So how do we determine whether we are worrying about something because of OCD, or because its reasonable and normal to worry about? Unfortunately there is no 100% way to do so, HOWEVER there is a good rule of thumb you can apply: If you think it MIGHT be OCD, it probably is. in other words, if you aren't sure whether you are worrying about something because of OCD, assume you are. Treat it as OCD. "What if I'm wrong? What if it isn't OCD causing me to worry?" In that case you'll eventually stop wondering if its OCD and you can deal with it as you would any non-OCD situation, but trust me, if it isn't OCD, you probably aren't going to be worrying about it so much to begin with.

Hi HD, OCD can strike us using any fear, you never need to feel ashamed of what you worry about! Seriously, no matter how embarrassing you think it might be, not only have we probably seen it here on the forums before, even if we haven't its OK because we all know how OCD is. Existential fears are one of those topics that comes up on the forum regularly. Its a perfectly understandable worry to have, but like any OCD worry its frustrating and painful to have to deal with it. Of course it feels so important to your mind right now, and its hard to deal with, but as much as the OCD screams at you that you MUST figure this out, you need to remind yourself that you actually don't. You can (and should) just continue to go about your life as much as possible. What if everything isn't "real"? Well you don't have any particular way of knowing if it is, or changing things if it isn't. Worrying won't change anything (as is usually the case). If its all a dream, then well, its all a dream. If its not, its not. Its ok not to try and figure things out, to not know the answer 100%. Live your life and remind yourself when these worries pop up that despite what OCD tells you, you don't have to solve the problem.