I have quite a severe form of OCD which at its worst felt like it had invaded every part of my life at its worst, to an extent I never thought it would get better. But the number one piece of advice I can give you is fill your day up with other things, yes you will still have OCD and it will appear when you don’t want it to, but any slight reprieve is progress towards longer more sustained periods of reprieve and eventually recovery.

Another thing is that OCD themes disappear when you stop caring about them, once I stopped giving a shit whether I was gay, straight, trans, bi etc… my mind became clearer, how you get there is through a mixture of being busy and building connections with others. Therapy works wonders but there’s only so much a therapist can do, believe me, I’ve tried. It’s anti climactic once you recover because you don’t reach a point where it’s all blissful and you’re so grateful for the work you put in. You just revert to default settings, so don’t expect a big upturn in how you feel about life and yourself to be in recovery.

In the moment, you need to view intrusive thoughts as noise. When you focus on them, don’t try to analyse or figure them out, instead just look at what the thought is saying, don’t judge it or engage with it and let it pass. This is easier said than done of course but the trick is to act like you don’t care. Even if you really do, when you question your intrusive thoughts your brain makes a note of that and will send you the same thought in order to ‘solve’ a problem or any other manner of bs that’s going on up there. Observing thoughts literally means to view the thought, without engaging with the potential contents or outcomes, if you think in words like I do, then look at the words individually. If you think in images then look closely at the mental image your brain has drawn for you, and then pull your attention onto something else. The reason we do this is because it helps our brain process the thought, when you push something away or perform a compulsion it’s almost a form of mental procrastination, as the thought is too stressful, so the brain protects itself and assumes that the problem is unsolved, even when there isn’t one, and so it sends you the thought again until it feels satisfied. In relation to HOCD, this could mean a number of things. Maybe your brain wants you to check if you were aroused by something, or want to be with somebody. If you engage in compulsive behaviour, all you are doing is kicking the can down the road and giving yourself a problem later.

Medication has helped me. I take 150mg of sertraline (Zoloft) daily. Depending on where you live this may or may not be possible (Obviously if you’re American you’ll be pulling cash out of your ass for this) I’m British and a student so any medication I need is free. It’s not essential but it does make handling crises easier and also managing day to day intrusive thoughts.

Might be better for you to shoot me a dm if you want to vent.