How unfair is it

The OCD just doesn't stop from robbing you of your happiness… and even after you think you've found an answer it just keeps morphing and evolving to latch onto ur brain. I'm 18. I'm moving into college on Saturday. I should be excited, happy and a little nervous but my mind is on my OCD. I'm so young and I should feel carefree, but disorders like OCD just rob people of that feeling.

**TRIGGER WARNING**

I don't expect life to be fair, I never did, and that's probably good advice. It prevented a lot of depression when the OCD hit me at 16.

There is treatment and hope you know. There is always hope. That's one thing I do believe however, and my experience has shown it to be true for everyone.

Life is a pendulum. It swings from left to right. Now is a left swing. It will swing back again.

Here is some of that hope: obsessive-compulsive/topic144944.html
And another chunk: obsessive-compulsive/topic103176.html

So i read some of your articles and it said to expose yourself to the obsessions without doing compulsions so anxiety will gradually fade. Remember how I told you I was afraid i might be affecting strangers with my "rituals?" I decided to test my rituals out on myself, prove them to be a hoax. Telling myself that my house would burn down or i would die in my sleep, nothing happened. I did the rituals 8 times. The next morning my OCD morphed around… telling me that, "Maybe I didn't do the rituals correctly." and created new obsessions like, "If the clock stops ticking that means I didn't do the rituals correctly." Is this natural?

If by natural you mean OCD, then yes. It's OCD. Don't be fooled into thinking you are the one out of millions of OCD sufferers whose fears bad things will happen are real. They aren't.

Your rituals are what's keeping this alive. You can't try and figure out an OCD obsession by rationalising it or proving it to be false, that just makes it a lot worse because it will morph and morph over and over again. The only way past this is through exposure, acceptance of uncertainty and stopping rituals/compulsions.

I had the same dilemma in college. If I don't do this ritual....then something bad will happen. Then a new ritual forms out of the old ones. The stress was unbelievable.

Recommendations...

1. Don't skip appointments.
2. Medication takes time to work. If you have side effects request a change in your medication.
3. Don't give up. You will get better.