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“I wondered how you would react when i revealed to you my hidden parts, my ugly parts that don't do well in the sunlight”
― Ashley Berry, Separate Things: A Memoir

“I was at the bottom.
And instead of telling me how sorry you were that I felt this way, you climbed down to the bottom with me, and we were feeling this together.”
― Ashley Marie Berry, Separate Things: A Memoir

“Sometimes, I think about what would happen if you were gone. If I woke up from charging overnight and you weren't here. I would look around for you, calling your name. I wouldn't find you. I would be alone. that would make me sad. ... I know you would never leave me behind, but I think about it. I don't mean to. Why am I like that?”
― T.J. Klune, In the Lives of Puppets

“The tight ball of muck inside me—I opened it. I opened the shame, and it crumbled next to yours. This connection—the one I didn’t think we were going to have—let some of my muck go. And when it left my body, it evaporated into nothing. It had been living in me, but as soon as it was exposed, it disappeared.”
― Ashley Marie Berry, Separate Things: A Memoir

“I really didn’t want to see a horror flick, even a stupid one. I didn’t need any more fodder for my already gory imagination.”
― Shala Nicely, Is Fred in the Refrigerator?: Taming OCD and Reclaiming My Life

“Important things come in threes.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven Boys

“Most people say "I'd do anything for my child," but the Harm OCD sufferer has to do more than just show up for the job. You have to show up to this amazing beautiful being even knowing that it aggravates your disorder. You have to do exposure to the darkest, most terrifying corners of the mind. You have to cope with extreme love, often reminding you of extreme fear. You have to tolerate the uncertainty that your child may have a short or painful life in order to maximize the possibility that she has a happy one. To love your children is to be vulnerable to them and to see their vulnerability. You have to risk being harmed and you have to risk harming in order to be close to anyone. OCD can make you think you're too crazy to deserve this closeness with a child. But you're not crazy. You got this.”
― Jon Hershfield, Overcoming Harm OCD: Mindfulness and CBT Tools for Coping with Unwanted Violent Thoughts

“Recuerdo que patinaba cerca de la grieta, y que iba con cuidado de no pisarla porque si no nuestra madre se rompería la espalda”
― Shirley Jackson

“Sweating 'you already have it.' nothing hurts like this 'you’ve already got it.' stop please God stop 'you’ll never be free of this.' you’ll never be free of this. 'you’ll never get your self back.' you’ll never get your self back 'do you want to die of this' do you want to die of this because you will' youwillyouwillyouwillyou
willyouwill.”
― John Green

“I wanted to be a normal teenager who talked with her best friend about normal things like friends and boys and school. But the pas de deux was always there, reminding me that my pretense was just that: a final act before the curtain fell on my life.”
― Shala Nicely, Is Fred in the Refrigerator?: Taming OCD and Reclaiming My Life

“Ginny told me that, like Dr. Wisner's patients, her problem was not so much that she had an urge to kill her grandchildren, but rather a fear that she might somehow lose control of her senses. She put it this way: "The fear is not that in my current state I could do these things, but that I might slip into a state where I could do it. Right now, when I am thinking about it, I know it won't happen. But still it festers, it festers and lingers, and it keeps beating on you and beating on - like it's the villain, the enemy, the monster, the demon - it's a faceless devil."

With my encouragement, Ginny told her husband about the thoughts. She was relieved that his reaction was "he just couldn't even believe what he was hearing - he knew I'd never do these things, they were just bad thoughts." When I asked Ginny why she thought he has so much faith in her, she replied, "Because he sees me with people daily. He said he fell in love with me because I am kind. For example, he reminded me of a time when we were together in a cabin, and I noticed a bee trapped behind a screen and I told him I didn't want the bee to die, so he spent the first hour of our first weekend together undoing the screen to free the bee. He asked me, does that sound like someone who would kill her grandchildren? He also reminded me that I am soft and warm and very loving, and he would never worry about me doing the awful things I was thinking of." Needless to say, Ginny was relieved by her husband's reaction, since she had feared he would think she was crazy.”
― Lee Baer, The Imp of the Mind: Exploring the Silent Epidemic of Obsessive Bad Thoughts

“Self-harm OCD can come at you from multiple angles at the same time. It says that you will hurt yourself when you don't want to. But thinking about hurting yourself all day is likely to make you unhappy. It doesn't have to if you can view thoughts as meaningless objects of attention, but we're not born naturally adept at this. We're born to seek out threats to ourselves and eliminate them, perhaps even if the so-called threats are just our thoughts. Never forget how brave you are for living with OCD and trying to cope with someone in your head that keeps threatening to kill you.

This means that to be self-compassionate about self-harm obsessions, you have to start by understanding that this really just is hard. You may think of yourself as weak or foolish for worrying about your intrusive harm thoughts. Or maybe you think you're crazy or going to lose it. The truth is the opposite. You're not crazy. By recognizing how much of you there is to love, you simultaneously create an environment where your OCD is just OCD, your thoughts are just thoughts, and your ability to overcome your challenges is without limits. Interacting compassionately with your mind means talking to yourself as you would to a good friend. Teasing is allowed as long as it isn't mean-spirited. If you can use humor to relate to the darkest of thoughts, you can help yourself through the darkest of times.”
― Jon Hershfield, Overcoming Harm OCD: Mindfulness and CBT Tools for Coping with Unwanted Violent Thoughts

“When my first child was born, I thought it quite hilarious that within seconds of her arrival, she was placed before me on a tray and a doctor put a sharp pair of scissors in my hand. It was to cut the umbilical cord. I had an advantage over potential Harm OCD with my children, which is that I always knew full well that I would have intrusive violent thoughts about them. Because I always assumed I'd have thoughts of cutting, smothering, strangling, microwaving them, and so on, I never responded to any individual thought of that nature like it was particularly interesting. If anything, I welcomed such thoughts as useful reminders of why I became a therapist.”
― Jon Hershfield, Overcoming Harm OCD: Mindfulness and CBT Tools for Coping with Unwanted Violent Thoughts

“Being a parent is hard. It's way harder than people assume it will be before it happens to them. It causes stress, overstimulation, sleep-deprivation, and worst of all, the sense that people are watching to see how good you are at it and how good a person you are in general. It may seem as if people care about you more, focus on you more, now that you are responsible for children. And children will press your buttons and try to make you frustrated, because making you /anything/ is fascinating to them. But what your children can't understand yet is that if you have OCD and you're stressed, exhausted, frustrated and over-stimulated, your disorder flares up. And when your disorder flares up, it targets everything you care about the most and tries to bind it to a living nightmare.

This disorder can trick you into thinking you're the worst of the worst. But you are not the best or worst parent who ever lived. You are just a person with thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Remember, being self-compassionate mostly just means being honest. When you make a mindful statement about fearing harming your children, you are being honest about your experience. When you criticize yourself for having thoughts and for being afraid, you are essentially lying to yourself about what is evident. You have OCD. Commentary about how good a person you are is a distraction from the important work of keeping your OCD from commandeering your family. Similarly, it's important to remember that all healthy parents have "unhealthy" thoughts about their kids and have doubts about their abilities to raise them. They're supposed to. Treating yourself fairly and compassionately is the only rational way to navigate parenthood, with or without having OCD.”
― Jon Hershfield, Overcoming Harm OCD: Mindfulness and CBT Tools for Coping with Unwanted Violent Thoughts

“You're not crazy. I'm going to remind you of this throughout the book. "Crazy" is a nonsense word we use to put ourselves down when we don't like what we see in the mind. You have a common, diagnosable, treatable disorder.”
― Jon Hershfield, Overcoming Harm OCD: Mindfulness and CBT Tools for Coping with Unwanted Violent Thoughts

“When you have Harm OCD, it can often feel like you're repeatedly being accused of a terrible crime. OCD is your accuser, but it also acts like a high-powered defense attorney who says, "Look, I can get you a not-guilty plea, guaranteed. I'm going to get all the witnesses and all the evidence and bring it all up in your trial and if you stick with me, the jury will acquit you. 100%." You hear this and think, Great, let's do this. I know I'm not guilty. Let's make sure it's official. Then the OCD says, "Sure thing. By the way, I cost $1000/hour, I bill 24 hours a day, and the case will take a few years, maybe more. In the end, you'll get your not-guilty verdict, probably, but I should tell you, the long trial will decimate you and the verdict might not make that much of a difference. But never mind that, let's get to that evidence of your innocence."

An OCD therapist like me is no high-powered attorney. I'm more like a public defender and my advice is simple: Plead the fifth. In an American court, when you plead the fifth amendment to the U.S. constitution, you are saying that you will not answer a question that could incriminate you. In other words, no matter what OCD asks, just don't answer. You're probably thinking, "No, that makes me look really guilty." Then I explain, "If you don't take the bait and answer OCD's questions, this thing will go to mistrial in a week. No one will remember it. It might as well have been just a forgettable fluke." This approach is what it means to accept uncertainty, and it is indeed scary. It doesn't come with that shiny promise of complete vindication. But it also doesn't cost you a lifetime of obsessing. Accepting uncertainty about your violent thoughts means allowing the possibility that they could be true by not trying to prove otherwise.”
― Jon Hershfield, Overcoming Harm OCD: Mindfulness and CBT Tools for Coping with Unwanted Violent Thoughts

“Not only can you not predict the future, you can never be certain what your intentions were in the past. We only ever know what our intentions are right now in this exact moment.”
― Jon Hershfield, Overcoming Harm OCD: Mindfulness and CBT Tools for Coping with Unwanted Violent Thoughts

“The first thing to remember about...OCD is that the horrible and disgusting "abnormal" thoughts are actually totally normal. The problem has to do with how the thoughts are presented and how they are responded to, not with their existence or absence. The OCD mind is a wide open mind, highlighting extreme potentials in any given context. To cherish something is to also be aware of the horror of losing something that you cherish. In other words, as an OCD sufferer, you can't /not/ think about this stuff.”
― Jon Hershfield, Overcoming Harm OCD: Mindfulness and CBT Tools for Coping with Unwanted Violent Thoughts

“Despite the noises,
Despite the compulsions,
Despite the lack of silver spoon,
Despite all third world obstructions -
If a dropout vagabond could do so much,
What holds you back from expansion!”
― Abhijit Naskar, AÅŸk Mafia: Armor of The World

“You’re not insane,â€� he says again.
“Then what’s wrong with me?� I ask. “Why do I have these . . . these thoughts?� The word doesn’t feel like enough; it’s too airy, and implies I am capable of telling them apart from reality.
“Is it fear?� Felicity asks. “Though I suppose fear is elicited by an immediate threat, and it sounds as though often there isn’t one. Except those created inside your mind. So it’s fear looking for a source? Does that sound right?�
I press my fists against my forehead. “It feels like someone is shouting at me all the time, all these lies that I know are lies but I’m so terrified of what will happen if I don’t listen, and then it just gets louder and louder so that I can’t hear anything else over it all and I can’t make them stop.â€� I look up at Monty. “Does everyone feel this way?”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“Better isn't always a feeling.”
― starbeyy, frankenstein's monster

“Trying to achieve certainty was the domain of fools, and I was no longer the court jester.”
― Shala Nicely, Is Fred in the Refrigerator?: Taming OCD and Reclaiming My Life

“Humans are obsessed with ceremony. In some cases, this fixation can even become pathological. Obsessive-Compulsive-Disorder (OCD) is a condition characterized by intrusive thoughts and fears and the urge to perform highly ritualized actions in order to alleviate those worries. These actions have some of the core attributes of cultural rituals: they are characterized by rigidity, repetition and redundancy, and they have no obvious purpose. Nonetheless, those who suffer from OCD feel the compulsion to perform them and become intensely anxious if they are unable to do so.”
― Dimitris Xygalatas, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living

“We are all made of liquid and slippery organs. Life was improbable. Fragile. It was only a matter of time before something ripped us up and ruined us and we died. It didn't take anything for me to kill the shrimp. Soft, terrible.”
― Maria Ingrande Mora, The Immeasurable Depth of You

“My newest novel, Tiny House of God is now available as an audiobook through Audible! It was so much fun (and work) to record.”
― Sara Zavacki-Moore

“He begins to pull the photos, one by one, from their slots.
“My best friends,� he says softly. “My partner. Our daughter. My favorite teacher. The
neighbor who took me in and gave me home cooked meals when classes got too much. There’s
nothing more terrifying than letting your starving heart be loved, and that’s why they’re the
heaviest weight I carry.”
― S.J. Blasko, Growing Things

“I knew I could get help and, more importantly, get better. Because suddenly I wasn’t bad, it was bad. It was no longer me, it was something else. I wasn’t schizophrenic, or psychotic, or any of the other things I thought I was. I had Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, or OCD. In that unforgettable moment, I took back some of my power â€� chunks of it flooding into my psyche, called in from afar, returning home to me.”
― Dana Da Silva, The Shift: A Memoir

“At the Chinese restaurant, I stared out the window overlooking a tranquil garden with water features, ponds covered in lily pads, and koi fish. Amid the serenity and smell of dumplings, I struggled to breathe. It seemed the walls were closing in, and everyone was looking at me. Words danced around on the menu. I didn’t want the waiter near us. I wanted to shrink until I popped and disappeared.”
― Dana Da Silva, The Shift: A Memoir

“In only a few months, I acquired an arsenal of weapons to help me combat my OCD. I became a strong opponent against the enemy. Some days, I was still left bruised and bloodied on the battlefield. But other times, I was victorious, guns blazing, blowing heads off, brains splattered across the sky.”
― Dana Da Silva, The Shift: A Memoir

“Mój przyjaciel chodziÅ‚ na terapię parę miesiÄ™cy, kiedy jego terapeutka przeprosiÅ‚a go za krzywo doklejoną listwÄ™ przy podÅ‚osze. "CaÅ‚y dzieÅ„ myÅ›laÅ‚am, że pan przyjdzie i zwróci mi uwagÄ™ - powiedziaÅ‚a - pan tak nie lubi nieporzÄ…dku." Maciek uÅ›miechnÄ…Å‚ się swoim najcieplejszym uÅ›miechem: "Nie ma problemu, pani Aniu, nawet nie spojrzaÅ‚am." OdczekaÅ‚ do koÅ„ca wizyty, wziÄ…Å‚ Å‚aszcz i nigdy już tam nie wróciÅ‚. Po co, pytaÅ‚ mnie, przecież wygraÅ‚em.”
― Emilia DÅ‚użewska, Jak pÅ‚akać w miejscach publicznych