- Date posted
- 2y
What I’m dealing with - does it sound like OCD?
Hello everyone, I apologise for how long this is. I’m not sure if this is the right place to make this post, but I just want to start by saying that I really hope I won’t cause any offence with this post, and I apologise if I do. I don’t want to seem like I’m self-diagnosing or being insensitive to the struggles of people who have diagnosed OCD and deal with it severely, but I’ve been wondering whether I might have OCD, or if I’m dealing with potential OCD symptoms. For a bit of context, I’m 20 and have struggled with my mental health for around eight years, with mostly depression/low mood, self harm (though I’m almost a year clean now), anxiety and struggles with food/exercise (but no diagnoses for anything). When I was still at school I saw a counsellor there regularly for three years, and since leaving school over the pandemic I had some CBT and last year saw a therapist for a couple of months. Within these, a few times they mentioned “magical thinking” in relation to some of my anxieties where I feel like if I do/don’t do or say a certain thing, it will prevent something from happening or make something happen. These have mostly applied to my relationship, which I’ve been in for five years now, with me thinking that doing/not doing or saying a certain thing will keep my boyfriend safe and healthy. Since the pandemic and being in lockdown unable to see him, I have a behaviour where whenever I close a door, I feel like I have to open and close it five times first while mentally saying the five letters of my boyfriend’s name. Last year we had a rough patch where my boyfriend wanted us to break up, but it ended up only lasting for a month or so. This was partly due to general issues we’d been having, somewhat caused by my behaviour due to my mental health, but also he’s got an old friend who used to like him and he used to like her, and their feelings came up again and he was questioning whether he wanted to be with me or her. Within the time that we were struggling, he was talking to her a lot and flirting and having deep chats, which made me really insecure and anxious, and then while we were broken up he spent a lot of time with her and they kissed. He didn’t tell me about this until six months after it happened, when we were already back together, but at that point said it had made him realise she wasn’t who he wanted to be with. It’s been a year since that time now and we’ve been a lot more communicative and dedicated more time to us and our relationship is much better than it was. Despite this, and despite the fact that there’s now no evidence of him liking her or even speaking to her anymore really, and him reassuring me every day that he wants to be with me, I feel like I obsessively think about what happened last year and what I did that contributed to it happening, and it feels like by thinking about it and going over it again and again I can prevent it happening again by being aware, because I’m so scared of it happening again because it was so awful. But this thinking over/ruminating just makes me feel the emotions again and feel awful and anxious. As well as this, the behaviour with opening and closing doors five times has become more intense, and I do lots of other random things in factors of five while mentally saying the five letters of my boyfriend’s name, feeling like it will keep him safe and keep him wanting to be with me and keep our relationship good. These behaviours don’t take up a lot of time in my day, but I do occasionally get stuck doing something five times until it feels “right” and the mental rumination over last year is very present throughout pretty much the entire day because I feel like I need to be on guard to stop the same things happening again. Thank you for reading all this if you’ve got this far. I’ve read online a lot about OCD and parts of these things I’m dealing with sort of fit within it, but other parts don’t. I’d basically just appreciate anyone’s thoughts on whether it seems like OCD or not, because I’m really feeling like it’s getting too much to deal with on my own but I’m not sure what kind of help to seek.