Suicidal OCD
Heyy,
I am struggling with ocd thoughts and am wondering if anyone has some advice.
Ever since I was 12 years old, I began having OCD thoughts. However, they were not just thoughts that came and went. The thoughts usually lasted at least a week, sometimes even longer. My first intrusive thought that really created an impact on me emotionally and bothered me every single day for about four months consistently was about being transgender.
I'm a cis 18-year-old female at birth, and I've never had thoughts about being trans. I've never wanted to be a guy. So when the thought first came up, it seemed really irrational, but for some reason it stuck with me. Every single day, my mind was filled with what-if questions, like what if I want to be a boy? What if in the future I will have urges to be a boy and transition? What if people won't accept me? How will my family react? And so on. However, this thought has passed now and I've learnt to not stress about such a thing.
Now I'm struggling with different thoughts. Recently, I've been really struggling with suicidal OCD, and it really surprised me because I've never been suicidal. No matter how hard my life got, I've never had intentions. I've never had a plan. Never wrote notes to my loved ones, never gave my personal things away. I never showed any signs of suicide. Yet, the thought of suicide suddenly appeared when I was watching a YouTube video about a person committing suicide.
It triggered me, and somehow I got stuck in a loop of what-ifs again. And now it's the second time that this suicidal OCD has occurred. First time it happened about three weeks ago and lasted for about a week, and then I just stopped thinking about it. It's really scary and is causing me a lot of distress because I genuinely don't want to kill myself. I want to live my life. I want to commit to being healthy and happy, I want to find ways to be stress free. But when these type of thoughts come in, I'm really scared that this state that I'm in will last forever and I'll have no choice but to kill myself because every single day I'll be surrounded by suicide thoughts.
This includes questions like, what if I get hospitalised because of it? What if my parents get really worried about me and put me in a psych ward? What if I go insane because of these thoughts? What if something inside of me forces me to commit suicide, even though I have no suicide ideation right now? And the thought of suicide really scares me. I don't know if anybody else has gone through such a thing and can give me hope that this will go away and just calm me down because it's been really bothering me for the past couple of days.
And yes, I do have a therapist that is helping me unpack these thoughts. And three weeks ago, she really helped me get rid of them. However, they came back, and now I feel like the stress is even higher than before. I'm unable to do any activity without thinking about it. I don't have any intentions or any wishes to do it. So I don't want anybody to be alarmed, and it frightens me when people are alarmed because it makes me feel that maybe I am suicidal, when deep down I know I'm not.