Obsessive thoughts helped during panic attack?

Hi everyone! My name is Emily. This is my first post on this site, but I've been reading here for a while now. That's when all of this started for me. I'll probably make more posts in the future, but to make a long story short, I've been struggling with pure O for almost a year now (December 12 - crazy how I can remember the exact date), specifically HOCD and TOCD, with a little bit of ROCD on the side. Fun!! I've always been an anxious person, but I'd never had obsessive thoughts quite like those. It's been really hard. Ironically, I've mentioned them to my therapist but I haven't been diagnosed with OCD, just GAD, even though all of this started because I was watching a show and my bisexual self went, "wow, every girl on this show is so hot!" Cue brain: "You're gay."

Anyway, in addition to the obsessive thoughts and anxiety, I've also been dealing with depression and more importantly, a ton of depersonalization. Much like the obsessive thoughts that could come and go, before this all hit I'd had days where I felt "outside of myself". But now it's everyday. I walk outside, my eyelids feel heavy, like I'm not experiencing anything. I feel out of my body. I don't know what to do. I notice that my anxiety, as well as my thoughts, spike during times of stress. This week was obviously a big one, between that travesty of an election, my dad having surgery to remove a tumor, and my having a math test on Tuesday that there's no way I'm going to do well on.

So I was taking a study break about an hour or so ago, watching a video on YouTube, and suddenly I thought to myself, "you're not enjoying this, are you?" It was the first time I'd ever felt like that; instead of just feeling tired and detached like behind my eyes, my entire face felt numb. Like I wasn't processing anything, or my brain was just exploding and nothing was happening. I tried listening to my favorite songs and had no emotional reaction to them either. I was okay this morning; much like the obsessive thoughts last December, this literally came out of nowhere. I freaked out and started crying and had my first recognizable panic attack. Gold star for me!

I FaceTimed my mom, who is a psychotherapist, and she did a visualization with me. It was okay, until I thought of myself during the visualization as a man. It wasn't really a thought I enjoyed, it just...happened. Kind of like my brain said, "we are doing this now, and in this, you are a man." And weirdly enough, it helped my panic attack go away. This has not spiked my TOCD; I think I've gotten a lot better at getting a handle on the thoughts, they don't give me that much anxiety anymore. But now I'm just really...confused. Is that a thing? Can obsessive thoughts actually help? Have they just become so familiar to me that I'm using them as a crutch now? I feel like it's kind of like when your compulsion is telling yourself "it's just OCD". Why did I even for a second see myself as a guy in this visualization when that's the same thing that has caused me distress and to lose all sense of self for months now? Ugh.

I don't know who I am anymore, or what my brain is doing to me, and I just want to go back to being the happy, bisexual female I was before December 2015. But I have no idea how. I'm probably going to copy and paste this to the depersonalization forum as well, but I'd love to hear your thoughts. Right now, I'm a lot better than I was an hour ago, but I'm still on edge. This community is so lovely, thanks so much for reading <3

You can have a male component to your personality and not be trans, you know.

To me, OCD seems very much a all-or-nothing disorder. I don't have depersonalization, I'm having a stroke. Someone doesn't become aware of the tiny fraction of bisexuality most people have (in my opinion, I'm very much a sexual continuum kind of theorist), they're full blown gay. One fleeting sexual thought involving a person under 18, someone's a pedophile. Someone becomes aware of a little gender fluidity (and I think we all are a mixture of yin and yang) and then obsessions of being trans develop.

We're such complex creatures, and to me it seems OCD makes mountains out of molehills that nons blissfully go thru life largely unaware of.

Maybe the 'male ’ self that you visualised is the part of your personality you needed to help you cope and calm down, nothing more.

Or maybe you've finally begun to burn that obsession out- I do feel lots of people, including myself, burn ourselves out on one fear, then pick up another- and for a lot of people, realising they're longer afraid of something, makes them scared over not being scared... as if it validated they were their fear... it doesn't do me that way, but I have experienced vague uneasiness- like I know I'm supposed to be afraid of that, and the fact I'm not feels irresponsible. I often compare anxiety to a drug. It's like Winston Smith and his Victory Gin - it's filthy stuff and he hates it, but he can't kick it, either.... at least that's how I view my own anxieties.