- Date posted
- 3y
ROCD is about to ruin a friendship
Hi all! I’ll try to keep this super short so if you need more context, please feel free to ask! My partner and I broke up just over a year ago now. We were together for four years. My ROCD was always partner-focused, with deep fears and triggers about his faithfulness and his morality. Even after breaking up, for almost a full year, my anxiety and constant ruminating is heavily, heavily focused on him. It’s exhausting. After we broke up, he told me he had sent a few flirty messages to a good friend of mine (the messages were sent about 6 months after we had broken up). He apologized, and told me he ended the conversation right away, and felt guilty about it. She never told me. I asked her about it, and she thought it was no big deal. It really caused a huge spiral of anxiety for me and deeply affected my trust towards her (and him of course, but that’s obvious). Anyway, in one of my deep anxiety spirals after this happened, I was knee deep in checking his social media and noticed he and another good friend of mine had also unfollowed each other. When I looked back on their “likes” for each other’s posts, it looks like they dropped off around sept. 2020. So I’m guess the unfollowing happened either then or shortly after. This was almost TWO years ago. But my mind immediately went to “I wonder if he was also flirting with her?!”. This caused an extreme panic attack. This friend of mine has been living abroad for 3 years, there’s no way anything happened between them. I don’t even know if they’ve ever talked privately. But the only reason I can think of them unfollowing each other is if he was inappropriate with her via DM. Anyway, fast forward to today, she’s back in the country and wants to hang out on Thursday. She was one of my best friends and I didn’t ever have a negative thing to say about her. But the thought of seeing her is completely terrifying to me. I have a pit in my stomach that will be there all week. I can’t imagine all the anxiety. And I’m terrified my anxiety will get the best of me and I’ll start asking her or interrogating her about this, asking if anything happened and why they unfollowed each other. I know it sounds crazy. Or maybe it doesn’t. But I’m so sick over this. I love this girl and don’t want to lose a friendship over something that MIGHT have happened years ago. But I can’t see her. I know avoidance is wrong but I honestly don’t feel like I can see her. Any advice is so greatly appreciated.