i just want to mow hay

if anyone needs help identifying things that can become moral scrupulosity OCD obsessions/compulsions, heres a list of some i've experienced:

some of these bullet points are not inherently bad on their own, but if you find yourself having this kind of anxiety very often, that's not normal, and it's time to get offline or even seek professional help if it's impacting your life

this list is catered to how online culture influences moral scrupulosity, it is not indicative of how everybody's moral scrupulosity functions, and it is not exhaustive

I feel like I would have been diagnosed with OCD a lot earlier if the vast majority of screening questions (for mental illnesses in general) weren't based on the person's perception of their own behavior, in isolation. and what i mean by that is asking someone with OCD "do you wash your hands excessively?" is not a good question.

a person with OCD believes they are washing their hands the correct number of times. it's not excessive. we believe we're exhibiting best practices and helping to keep everything clean.

better questions might be, "does it seem like you wash your hands a lot more than your friends or family?" "do you get dry patches or cuts on your hands from washing your hands?" "do you find it deeply distressing, more so than how you've seen other people react, when you get something on your hands that you can't clean off right away?"

being asked "are you overly preoccupied with bugs, symmetry, and contamination?" also got "no" responses from me years ago in my life. what they didn't ask for, and didn't know, was what *exactly* I was doing in my day to day life that genuinely ate up my time and mental space to a concerning degree, but I *didn't know* that other people don't do this.

"do you spend a lot of time cleaning?" -> no, it's not a lot. it's a good amount. why?

"do you become frustrated because it seems like no one else meets your organizational and cleanliness standards - do you often 'take over' for other people because they can't do it right - do new friends seem surprised by how strict you can be about your living space?" -> oh. yeah. yeah I get it now.

thay one post that was like 'tumblr is like if they made a circle of hell for people with moral ocd' is why im medicated and its literally working i can now navigate dilemmas and just 'think' something instead of 6 hours i spend spiralling down the hypothetical situation my opinion is wrong enough to kill every baby and kitten on earth

'if i dont know the exact right answer to this extremely nuanced moral hypothetical what happens if an anonymous stranger grills me passive aggressively for my opinion on it online in a way thats indiscernible from bait but if i dont answer then theyll think i dont care and i cant change what i say and ill be expected to believe it forever' you are 20 years old and need to fucking calm down. and turn off your anon messages now

everybody thinks having ocd is all about touching stoves or hand washing when in reality it’s really about having this guy inside your brain

the worst and saddest reaction to pocd I see is if a mother with a baby or young child talks about it. because people are DISGUSTED. except this is a situation where awareness is very important, because mothers with pocd may isolate themselves from their children due to (false) belief they are a threat. it's a really fucking sad situation for someone to be in and the last thing you'd need is someone confirming your disgust towards yourself...and I think the association with 'woman/mother' with 'kind/nurturing' only worsens the stigma because it appears that you're a disgrace to women and mothers if you have mental health issues that appear to contradict the traditional narrative. there was one mother who discussed pocd on tiktok and the hate comments were mostly from other mothers saying she shouldn't be able to call herself a mother or whatever. anyway I guess this post turned into a rant about gender roles and gendering of mental illness lol but overall shoutout to anyone who does openly discuss this stuff regardless of backlash because there will always be people with the same experience who can quietly feel less alone

Idk why but as a kid I used to get hysterically upset everytime I would imagine a gif of a rotating cow because I could never stop the cow from rotating no matter how hard I tried and I would be crying and no one knew why

This is probably an unnecessary addition, but OCD is missed in cases like these because it's deeply misunderstood by most people.

It's talked about like being obsessively neat or repeating pointless tasks is the main part of it, when really those are just potential symptoms.

The main thing behind OCD is not being about to turn off a thought. There's a thing where most people can just stop thinking about something. If it's over, it's not relevant, it doesn't matter anymore, people can turn their attention away. For OCD, that mechanism can get stuck. And some thought that was supposed to just temporarily pass through your head just stays there. An image of an object rotating. An anxiety about something bad happening. A wish that you made on a dandelion. These are all things that have at some point gotten stuck in my head, sometimes for years at a time.

The compulsions, the rituals, are the person trying to address the thought so it can go away. After all, if you're worried about the door not being locked you can check the lock. But for someone with OCD, that doesn't make the stuck thought go away. So they check it again. And again. And they made a ritual, maybe if I check it exactly five times, I'll know that it's locked and I can let this worry go.

It helps a little. It feels like you're doing something. But it doesn't solve the problem. Actual therapy for OCD involves not doing the compulsion. Instead, you ignore the thought, move around it, try not to give it space in your life. Your mind won't let the thought go normally, so instead you fill yourself with other thoughts. Other parts of your life.

It's not easy at first. Your mind fights you on it. But as you get practice, it gets easier. You learn tricks around your own mind, ways to look at the thought and go, hm. I guess I'll go distract myself now. It does get better. I promise

You know, other people have pointed out that ADHD is perversely named for the ways in which it affects others, rather than for what it actually feels like to have ("are you always worried that your friends hate you and incapable of achieving your goals specifically because they are your goals? you may have 'trouble sitting still in class' syndrome!) – but I think that OCD is in many ways a similar case, especially because "primarily obsessional" OCD (that is, OCD without compulsions) absolutely exists, and is likely under-diagnosed. If people with OCD were naming the condition from scratch, we'd probably call it "Persistent Thought Disorder" or something similar, and consider the rituals that people assume character OCD to be common but non-universal symptoms.

if you have violent intrusive thoughts I love you. if you have sexual intrusive thoughts I love you. if you have bigoted intrusive thoughts I love you. you are not your thoughts and you are worthy of love and care and help and affection. you are not a monster you’re a person going through it and that’s okay

I have OCD and with that comes quasi-hallucinations, and I grew up watching a ton of horror films so some of the worst of mine are the standard white skin/black hair demon girl type shit.

However, because a lot of them are based on horror film I have found comfort in doing things that “go against” horror films and being like “see? This could never happen.”

(It’s irrational. I know that. But shut up. This is how I cope.)

For example: I started hearing garbled whispering from beneath my table, so I started playing the muppets sound track. Because they would never play Movin’ Right Along when the protagonist is about to get attacked. That won’t happen. Disney, who owns the muppets, wouldn’t give them the rights.

And it fucking worked.

[ID: PIcture of a Tiktok where a person stares wide-eyed into the camera, one hand over the mouth in pretend-shock, with text that says, "People on tiktok without OCD when they find out intrusive thoughts aren’t about dying your hair but are actually unrelenting and unwanted thoughts that also include morally reprehensible and violent thoughts." End ID]

You can’t let intrusive thoughts “win” because there isn’t a fight to win. There is no fight. There is no danger to contain. The “fight” is punching yourself in the face and telling yourself that if you don’t do this, you’re going to accidentally act on something that terrifies you to your core. That’s the biggest reason why I hate that phrase so much. Not just because it creates misunderstandings and stigma in the minds of the unaffected, but also because it literally encourages the “O” in “OCD” for the affected. “Haha you gotta fight them! Fight it so much it ruins your life! You wouldn’t want them to win, do you?” Even when people are trying to dunk on how stupid that idea is, they still make jokes like “haha if I let my intrusive thoughts win I would be in jail” and it’s like…no you won’t. If you let your intrusive thoughts “win” nothing would happen because it’s just an unpleasant thought with no power. You let the intrusive thought wash over you, you let it “win” by letting it slither over your open palm, you say “that was weird”, and you continue with life. You don’t put it under a microscope. You don’t clench onto it trying to kill it, you just let it go. And then it’s fine.

I don’t know who needs to hear this today, but intrusive thoughts are basically your brain’s (sometimes very upsetting) way of saying “If there were two guys on the moon and one of them killed the other with a rock would that be fucked up or what?”

I’ve personally found that adding the “would that be fucked or what?” part in myself really helps put the more disturbing thoughts we sometimes get into perspective. Helps me say “yeah thar sure would be fucked up” and move on with my day.

It’s not not a secret desire, it’s not something that only occurs to you because you’re a bad person. It’s just your brain deciding to process the fact that it knows an uncomfortable thing exists in the world by feeding it to you in an absurd “what if” with you as the main character.

Words cannot describe how happy I am that this resonated with so many people.

POCD awareness post because I get a TON of people telling me they are relieved they're not alone, and there is a lot of stigma about it. However, if you are uncomfortable hearing about the topic, I put everything under a readmore so kindly scroll by instead of getting mad.

Keep reading

Honestly while I 100% agree with the pushback against the misuse/misunderstanding/watering-down of "intrusive thoughts" as a term, i think on some level it's also misrepresentative when the only kind of counter to "lol I had an intrusive thought to jump on the table" is stuff like "real intrusive thoughts are terrible and involve stuff that's gory or morally repulsive like 'you should stab your mom' and are things no one would ever ever talk about"

Cause like, gory and morally repulsive thoughts like that are definitely examples of forms intrusive thoughts can take, but a lot of times it seems like the implication/vocal consensus of a lot of these counter-posts is that intrusive thoughts are things that are all Objectively horrible/terrifying/gruesome/immoral, when that's not actually the case

Like, the core thing about intrusive thoughts is that they're thoughts/images/"urges"/ideas that are unwanted and distressing to the person having them, and are generally repetitive/reoccurring. So while repeated thoughts of "what if I want to kill my mom" that cause distress to the person having them are definitely intrusive thoughts, basically any theme of worry can be the focus of intrusive thoughts, as long as the thoughts are distressing.

Stuff like "what if I don't actually believe in God", "what if I'm not actually an atheist", "what if I'm actually gay/straight/bi/etc", "what if i left the oven on", "what if I'm living in an alternate reality", "what if I forgot to submit my assignments", etc are all themes that intrusive thoughts can have that aren't Objectively Horrible or Immoral, and many are stuff that a lot of people wouldn't consider an Issue. But like even stuff like "I keep counting things in my head" can be an example of intrusive thoughts if the counting is causing distress.

And like idk it just seems like boiling down intrusive thoughts to "horrible things you could never talk about to other people and that fundamentally go against your own morality" does a disservice to a lot of people with different "themes", and can lead to dismissing the distress of those who have more "speakable" intrusive thoughts, or with these people not recognizing their thoughts as intrusive ones bc it doesn't fit what they've seen talked about.

Plus like off the top of my head, I've personally seen the idea that intrusive thoughts are always about things that are Morally Repugnant to the person experiencing them end up in someone being dog-piled on a reddit thread, when a poster (a straight guy) talked about having intrusive thoughts that he was "actually gay" and was met with people accusing him of being homophobic for "being disgusted by the idea of gay people" (and also with people telling him he was repressed and in the closet, which is also definitely not something that would help with said intrusive thoughts)

And just I don't super know where I'm going with this or how to wrap it up nicely but I think in the pushback against the misuse and infantilization of "intrusive thoughts" I think there should also be effort to make sure that we're not just replacing one misunderstanding with another

since im awake and talking about ocd again - something not a lot of people know is compulsions can be completely mental, it doesnt always manifest in a way another person could notice from the outside

you’ll have an intrusive thought; you’ll try to analyze it and logic it away, mentally reassuring yourself. “I would never do [x thing]”, “[y thing] would not happen”, “[other person] wouldnt do [thing]” or even just “don’t think about that”. things like that.

but no matter how much logic or reason you use, it doesnt go away, ‘cause thats not how it works. So you keep repeating whats now become like, a frenzied mantra of re-assurance unable to think about anything else. 

and this can go on for hours. or on and off for days (or even longer, unfortunately)

here’s more examples of mental compulsions for the curious: 

ppl without ocd will literally be like ‘yeah i have intrusive thoughts…… like one time i kept thinking about garlic bread when i was trying to focus in class’ 

‘wait you people have violent intrusive thoughts??? isnt that kinda…. problematic idk :/’ 

ppl without ocd will literally be like ‘yeah i have intrusive thoughts…… like one time i kept thinking about garlic bread when i was trying to focus in class’ 

‘wait you people have violent intrusive thoughts??? isnt that kinda…. problematic idk :/’