Hi everyone, I wanted to share my story and hopefully get some insight as I've never actually been diagnosed with OCD but am pretty certain I have it. I would love to know more about the treatments and how you cope!
So, lately I have been obsessing over the idea of having herpes (it's a long story), but I posted in the herpes forum and started browsing and it brought me here! So many of the posts reminded me of myself.
For most of my life that I can remember I was obsessed with even numbers when I was younger and would count everything I did to ensure there was nothing in odd. Everything from touching things to eating things, you name it. I also had the obsessive fear of something happening to my family members even at that age. I would be hysterical if my parents were home 1 minute later than expected.
In my adult life so far (I'm in my early 20s) my main obsessive thoughts still come from this fear of something bad happening to my family or boyfriend. And health issues for myself. I cannot rationalize these thoughts no matter how hard I try. It is hard to watch the news or certain TV shows because I am either afraid the tragedy I hear about will happen to my family or I will hear of someone dying from a rare illness and think I have it. This also moves into the existential nature of things. I start wondering why it happened to that person and not me? What did they do? How can there be someone looking over us when that is happening? What is stopping it from happening to me? The thought process goes on, and on, and on. I am already scared to have kids because I don't know if I will be able to mentally cope.
Now reading about HOCD I relate to that as well as those thoughts have crossed my mind many times. This comes in short bouts for me of a month or so at a time though, where as the other fears are much more constant. It is interesting because right now I'm not in a period of time where I'm fearing that, and I can see how ridiculous it is, but there are times when I'm thrown into those panic states and it seems so much more rational at the time. I believe the focus of my OCD shifts based on what is going on around me - if there is no pressing health issue (definitely my main obsession), I'll go to worrying about harm coming to my family, then I'll start worrying about sexuality, body image, and so forth, but there always has to be something in my mind that I am obsessively worrying about. Is this typical of OCD sufferers?
Thanks so much!