Recently I was diagnosed with OCD after a solid year of battling extremely distracting and aggressive, violent, gory thoughts about the death of myself and my loved ones, in some cases I would think about myself hurting them. I loved to think about falling down the stairs, jumping off a bridge, falling or impaling objects, and my personal favorite, car accidents.

Eventually I could no longer drive because I became fearful that all these thoughts about car accidents would cause it to actually happen. I went into a state of depression and believed that these thoughts
were actually suicidal thoughts. I had no one to talk to about this because I started thinking that perhaps I was suicidal because why else would I think of dying this much?

Eventually I decided to tell my Dr and she referred me to a therapist who I am still seeing. My therapist and I uncovered my history of OCD and dated it back to when I was 11 and believed I was possessed by the devil. Today I am relieved to know that I was not going through a state of psychosis or schizophrenia then. Anytime I had a second to think I was telling the devil I wouldn’t sell him my soul. For months this was happening to me, and I’d even dreamt about the devil (dreams which I still have today). Now I know it was my obsessive thoughts.

The obsessive thoughts are the majority of my OCD but they are dramatic enough to leave me feeling powerless and out of control all the time (though people say I am a control freak). I have a tendency towards symmetry in my body (ie: finger tapping, kicking, scratching on both sides of my body to make it feel ‘even’).

Now I recognize other things I do because of my OCD (usually religious obsessions… I was raised a hardcore Catholic). For example, making the sign of the cross when I get into my car to bless my drive, flipping over shoes (when I was younger my mother told me that shoes that were facing the ground meant I was stepping on God instead of the devil… to this day I think something bad will happen), not stepping on cracks, counting stairs, etc.

As you can see a good amount of my obsessive thoughts and some compulsions are religious in nature.

The worst part of having OCD is hearing people say they think they have it. This part really hurts me because they don’t understand the real anguish that came from my obsessive thoughts. It isn’t fun for
me to spend 10 minutes thinking about stabbing my mother and which knives would be most effective. These thoughts happen several times a day and cause me a great deal of anxiety.

I am still in weekly therapy and recently began medication with Zoloft.

I’m grateful for this website and wish you all the best.

I am a lifer. 45 years of the disease. A ruined life (or should I say a severely compromised life). How good it could have been, if only. . .

I function in society, run a business, but feel pain and anguish most of the time. I won’t even try to go through the evolution of my OCD, as I have had probably every conceivable configuration and iteration
of the disease, since age 13. Medicine and cognitive therapy have provided occasional relief, but it cycles in and out, affixing itself to my most difficult times in life, as my constant companion. It
knows how to maneuver in such a way as to attach itself, as a leach attaches to the skin on your body and sucks your blood. Instead it attaches to and sucks your brain. It sucks out the rationality and
intelligence of reason and composure. It works its way into your deepest desires and potential triumphs, and preys upon your fears so as to overcome and counteract the joys that you may have. That is
the goal of this insidious disease, and it can succeed if allowed to flourish on its own. OCD is a villain, a rapist, a murderer, a molester, a monster of the worst kind. It selects innocent people and distorts their sense of intellectual well-being, causing doubt and uncertainty to pervade one’s mind, until there is nothing more than doubt and pain. It competes with good thoughts and normal feelings to sabotage one’s intellect and sense of being alive; it is a fierce enemy.

I know you well, OCD. I feel your constant efforts to create havoc with my mind. As a youth, you played with my immature brain and attempted to destroy it, just as I was trying to create a sense of self-value. In my most formative stages, you attacked. As an adult, you convinced me that I was dying and didn’t have a basis to be comfortable with each day of my life. You eroded my sense of self, my enjoyment of life. You deprecated and depreciated the good things that I had, by forcing a behavioral pattern of fear and defeat. There were not even drugs or therapy for OCD for the first twenty years of my disease, so I was left to work through it on my own, too embarrassed to tell anyone in the world what my mind was doing to me, all the while attempting to fight this enemy by myself.

As a mature male, I fear everything, I distort the reality of what I have, I find faults and constant defects in myself and those near and dear to me, and I obsess about all of these things constantly. After ruining my marriage, now in separation, I fear having contracted HIV from heterosexual safe sex partners, and even from kissing women, attractive, healthy women. The fears are overwhelming. Thanks OCD for so cleverly working your way into every crevasse of my life, so as to make it as unbearable, even the parts that are supposed to be good. And the sad part is that my life could be pretty good, were I to lose this miserable partner – my OCD companion.

I will continue to fight, saddened by the length of time that this killer has engaged me. I will attempt to be strong and beat this thing, and I will not give up. Even on the worst of mornings when I do not want to get out of bed, and when I want to check myself into a hospital, I will endure the agony and I will survive; no I will conquer, for the alternative is to allow this miserable disease to have triumphed over me, to gloat and wallow in its defeat of good and well-meaning people. None of us should let that happen. Fight for
your life!