- Date posted
- 2y
Vent, help? Scared of liking someone else
I‘m sorry for the really long text. There is something I have been struggling with for a while now and I never talked about my current situation with anyone so far. :( I would appreciate any responses like advice and/or own experiences. Anything. I‘ve been together with my partner for over three months now and I feel like ever since the first day of our relationship I have been struggling with ROCD. It is my second relationship as well as the second time I’m experiencing it. So far I‘ve had a few different fears in my current one but there is one in particular that I haven’t been able to get over since around almost three months now. It all started when my boyfriend asked me to tell him if I ever liked someone else. I promised I would but I felt uneasy at the idea of it because in my last relationship I experienced extreme distress after I felt butterflies because of a classmate I used to have a big crush on years ago which led to me obsessing over it for months until I eventually stopped being scared of it. I got over that fear by spending time with that guy and being around him, the butterflies faded away too, they were only there twice before the obsession started. After that it was just extreme anxiety. Before all of that, I never paid any attention to him, never noticed him or even cared when he walked past me. The „butterflies“ might have only been excitement though because I got them after I was seated near him in class. A few years before that, we sat next to each other and it was really fun because we kept joking around during class and laughed a lot. On top of that, when I got that sensation, I don’t remember having any romantic thoughts. I was just excited at the thought of it maybe being just like a few years ago. The next day after my boyfriend asked me to do that, the obsession started once again about the exact same guy. This time it started because a random thought popped up in my head: what if he confessed his love to me? (he used to have a crush on me too) Before that happened, I again rarely noticed him, didn’t feel anything for him and I was sure I didn’t like him ever since I got over that fear the first time. The fear started all over again just because of that one random thought. I instantly started questioning myself why I thought that, if I liked the thought and if I still liked that guy. I *promised* my boyfriend I would tell him something like that so I felt the urge to find out what it meant. I started panicking, felt extremely anxious and I‘ve been doing compulsions ever since. Not soon after, I started feeling sensations on my cheeks whenever I got an intrusive thought and it makes me scared, although I don’t always get it. Sometimes even when I’m not anxious I get it. I’m worried. What if it’s actually true I‘m still not over him, after all those years? Or what if this obsession caused this to be true? What makes it also complicated is that sometimes I can tell for sure that I don’t like him anymore but then sometimes I doubt it and I‘m scared it’s true. After some time, I managed to reduce the anxiety, intrusive thoughts and sensations by a lot but it’s still not fully gone. I did that by constantly telling myself it is OCD and not real. Almost everyday I would explain to myself how it is OCD and how the whole current situation doesn’t make any sense logically, compare myself to OCD symptoms etc. I can not say that for sure though because I never actually talked to a therapist. Thank you for reading. It really means a lot <3 I really just wanted to get all of that out of my chest after all this time.