ROCD.

Usually my ROCD just gives me such bad intrusive thoughts and anxiety around relationship. Mostly because of my abandonment issues and fear of getting hurt, I guess. As well as worrying about hurting my partner somehow or picking the wrong person to date. It's a mixture of everything. My ROCD always tells me something new and scarier every day when I try to pursue relationships. It's happened three times and the anxiety is so bad I can't sleep, sometimes I can't eat and most of my day is consumed by it with very few moments of relief. I get compulsions to break up and i get anxious committing. Everytime I move on from one ovsession another happens in ROCD. Even If i wanted to try and fight it ... I dont want to put someone else through that or have to have them put up with my mental health. I know I have to work on my ROCD first but I don't know if I'll ever be ... healthy enough to have a good relationship. On top of that, who knows how long it'll take until I'm in a place where I can date? .. im gonna be so lonely. I'm glad someone can relate, though. I'm like you, my inner critic is negative, and mean. I self sabotage and everyone knows it, lol ..

@Northern_Downpour I think a cruical first step for both of us is to learn compassion, and unconditional love and kindness for ourselves. We're struggling with OCD and it's really tough. We have had our ups and downs with experiences in life and we both have trouble with thinking positivity about ourselves, believing in ourselves, and treating ourselves like we would other people around us. ROCD is really tough for you, so that's something you could definitely tell your therapist about to get a better perspective of things. But the main thing we have to do is learn self compassion and thinking of ourselves better. I think something that can help you is thinking about what lowers your confidence, what keeps you down, and what holds you back. We already have a good example, which is relationships. You think that you aren't good enough for one, while pretty much everyone on here including me and close people in your life would say otherwise. You've written with clarity how it makes you feel, and how you feel about yourself in regards to it. You just have to take it step by step to turn that around to a positive outlook. I know it's difficult, probably even uncomfortable because of how used you are to telling yourself the negatives of these things. Here's an example: "I'm single and there's nothing wrong with that. I liked someone but they didn't like me back. I stayed supportive of what they want with this person and while it sucks that they didn't like me back, I'll try my best to move on from this" I'm still trying to do this for myself, and it's really not easy, but it's something that we really should do for the better of our emotional and mental health. You will get to a place where you can date. I know you can. We just have to put our obstacles into perspective and do our best to overcome them with the help of our therapists. I just know that you'll look back on this one day and be really proud at how far you've come and that you'll be able to date with confidence and no ROCD related thoughts bothering you. Another absolutely huge thing we have to look over is our comparisons to others. This is something we can't help but do and it sucks, but trying our best to put the comparison thoughts into words and then shifting it into compassion and understanding can help. I can try with an example: "I may have friends that are in relationships while I'm not. And that's okay. They were single at one point and they've met someone. I (you and me) have met someone and know what it's like to really be attracted to someone, which is good. Everyone's time is different and we all just go at our own pace. That's totally okay." I hate to sound like a broken record but even if we don't feel the truth in this by any means, and we just can't believe in those perspectives, I think it still helps that we try to say this to ourselves. You really don't deserve any self sabotage, of self criticisms of any nature. You don't have to deal with this by yourself either. Relationships can be complicated altogether. Really, we shouldn't be upset that they happen often or that we will get everything right in relationships, but the comparing aspect is what makes it a challenging issue.