The Journal
“What If This Isn’t Really OCD?” Understanding Meta OCD
Sometimes OCD targets the disorder itself. Learn how meta OCD can create endless doubt about whether your symptoms, treatment, or diagnosis are “really OCD” and why trying to find certainty often keeps the cycle going.
What Is Relationship OCD (ROCD)?
People with Relationship OCD (ROCD) often feel trapped in an endless search for certainty about their relationship. Learn how ROCD affects relationship doubts, attraction concerns, reassurance-seeking, and obsessive questioning.
What Is Hit-and-Run OCD?
Hit-and-run OCD involves persistent fears about accidentally injuring or killing someone while driving and not realizing it. Although the fear centers on driving, the core issue is often a need for certainty and repeated attempts to determine whether harm occurred.
Understanding Moral Scrupulosity: When OCD Targets Morality and Responsibility
Moral scrupulosity is a form of OCD characterized by excessive guilt, moral doubt, and a relentless need for certainty about being a good person. People may become trapped in cycles of rumination, reassurance-seeking, confession, and compulsive self-evaluation that never fully resolve their doubts.
Understanding False Memory OCD
False memory OCD is a form of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder involving obsessive doubt about past events, actions, or memories.
The person becomes preoccupied with the possibility that they forgot something terrible, misremembered events, caused harm unknowingly, behaved immorally, or committed a serious mistake without realizing it. The fears often feel vivid and emotionally convincing, even when objective evidence is limited or absent.
Understanding Real Event OCD
Most people can look back on mistakes, awkward moments, poor decisions, or times they hurt someone and eventually place those experiences into a broader context of being human.
In real event OCD, however, the mind becomes trapped in obsessive guilt, doubt, reviewing, and self-punishment surrounding something that actually happened.
Understanding Harm OCD
Many people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) experience intrusive thoughts about harming themselves or other people.
These thoughts are often deeply unwanted, frightening, and emotionally devastating. People may become terrified that the thoughts mean something dangerous about who they are or what they might do.
This presentation is commonly referred to as harm OCD.