Sorry I’ve just come across this thread, but thought I would post incase it’s still helpful to others experiencing similar.
I’m so sorry to hear how you are feeling OP and others posting on this thread. I can recognise myself in your posts. I experienced post natal OCD after my son was born, although I can see I had some anxiety pre-pregnancy but not sufficiently so to warrant going to the GP.
I would google to try and reassure myself that my feelings were normal, but any reassurance gained wouldn’t last long, or there would be something different about the poster’s circumstances to make me doubt whether I could really compare myself to it. I would also seek reassurance from my husband that I was a good enough mum and ‘check’ my feelings towards my baby to ensure they were sufficiently loving towards him.
Turns out my reassurance seeking from the internet and my husband were just feeding the anxiety, giving the thoughts veracity and creating more intrusive thoughts in turn. In the end CBT was a great help, in combination with getting more sleep gradually over time, my birth injury getting resolved with surgery, hormones eventually settling down etc. It’s hard to pinpoint how it all happened when I suspect there were a number of factors involved.
I understand that OCD thoughts tend to go after the very things you care about most - in my case, my relationship with my child and my abilities as a mother. I became so distressed because I actually do care about those things very much, whereas OCD tries to tell you the opposite. If I didn’t actually care, it wouldn’t have induced the anxiety that it did. It was only when the anxiety subsided that there was room to experience positive feelings. Trying to push negative feelings away and force positive ones just didn’t work.
CBT specifically for OCD type anxiety worked wonders for me, combined with meditation. I’m a bit of a cynical person but was surprised how well meditation worked at quieting my mind and learning to not get drawn into the traffic of my thoughts. I used the headspace app on the recommendation of my therapist but I’m sure a variety of options exist online. I’d imagine yoga as has already been mentioned would be great too.
My therapist also had me complete a brief worksheet to chart my anxious thoughts, labelling the ocd thought type (can’t remember the various categories) and then chart on a graph the duration of the anxious feeling and intensity of it. Sounds a bit odd but trying to take an outsider’s perspective on the thoughts and my reaction to them was an effective alternative to reassurance seeking compulsions. When I felt the urge to check online or with my husband, I’d tell myself I would do it tomorrow if I was still worried then - more often than not I wouldn’t be worried about it anymore or I’d have moved on to a new worry by then. The intensity and length of anxiety symptoms began to tail off surprisingly quickly after that and then stopped altogether. I actually feel less anxious in general now than pre-pregnancy and like to think that the whole experience will make me better able to support my child should he ever experience a mental health issue himself.
I’m also so sorry to hear the news about your dad OP. This must be so very stressful and makes it even more important to take good care of yourself. I hope you begin to recover soon x