Hello! New guy here. I was diagnosed with OCD when I was 14 and have put it into almost complete remission from 2012 up until now (I was handling it with medication from 2009 to 2011 and went to therapy for CBT and ERP in college). I thought I had my OCD well under lock and key, but a stressful series of situations including moving from my home of 24 years 4 months ago and starting a new job that is more stressful than my old one (I work in an accounting firm now, subject to the whims of the busy seasons) led me to have a relapse of symptoms starting in early November.
In the past, I have had Pure O obsessions about a wide variety of topics but the ones that stand out the most are P-OCD, becoming a drug addict, obsessions involving characters in my novels, and most notably two flavors of Harm OCD, a short-lived obsession about the fear I might commit suicide (this was when my OCD first manifested) and a longer obsession dealing with the fear of killing my parents that haunted me for more than a year straight in high school.
Now my OCD is back. The obsession du jour is once again suicide. I am an atheist who fears death greatly and loves to think about stuff like transhumanism and the singularity, so you can imagine how the idea of offing myself is very distressing, especially when I keep seeing stuff on ill-advised research binges about how some people with OCD are more likely to have suicidal thoughts/ideation (though I realize now this is most probably in regards to people whose OCD is severe, untreated, or comorbid with other conditions). I kinda messed up my initial attempt at exposure, which was both too drastic and done in an attempt to "prove" I was okay (which I know now is always a big no-no!) and this kind of just made the whole problem snowball.
I really only acknowledged that the sole problem here is my OCD a week or two ago, and I still deal with recurring intrusive thoughts and obsessions about whether or not I'm suffering from depression and simply not realizing it (my OCD loves using this tactic to make the threat of suicide seem more believable). Along with that, I've also experienced fleeting, temporary obsessions involving P-OCD again and some existential OCD, which I liken to planets orbiting the large star of my central suicide obsession.
It's been really difficult, and the more upset I get about it, the more it feeds into my OCD's narrative about me secretly being depressive/suicidal and being in denial about it. I know, rationally, that I am not either of these things (and before anyone gets too concerned, my therapist has told me that I'm not either of these things as well), but it just feels like ERP is taking longer to work than it did in college. The circumstances were different then, since I had a certain baseline level of Prozac already in my system (I was off it for a year and a half without issue and have only just reached week 7 of taking it again) and my obsessions were less, well, distressing in their subject matter, but I hope everyone here understands where I'm coming from when I say that the longer it takes, the more fear becomes difficult to ignore.
I'm currently working with my therapist and doing imaginal scripts once a day along with 5 minutes of meditation and deep breathing/grounding exercises for when I get spiked during the middle of the day. I am also attempting to follow the advice of my therapist from college, which grossly simplified essentially boils down to "ignore your intrusive thoughts, and if ignoring them provokes any distressing feelings, ignore those too until they go away on their own". It DOES feel like I am making progress but I still have these moments of animal panic where it feels like I'm not going to get better the same way I did last time and eventually I WILL crack.
I made myself a flowchart that uses logic to prove why my intrusive thoughts and OCD obsessions could never be "right" when you think about them rationally, but everyone who suffers from OCD knows it doesn't care about rationality, so I've started looking at that as a tool meant to break myself out of loops rather than something that will truly help me recover. I don't really know why I wrote all of this, but I guess after having not seen my therapist for two weeks now due to the holiday season, I feel like I just need somebody to talk to about how I'm feeling and how scary and frustrating this relapse is.
Suicidal OCD - My Brain Won't Stop Thinking Of Suicide
Is this really OCD?
intrusive thoughts / OCD? 
Scrupulosity OCD. ****Trigger Warning***
