rocd

@Tea and Honey By the way, I still struggle with the thoughts and feelings that I ruined my marriage. I am needing to learn to ignore them

@Tea and Honey what if i rlly did lose feelings bcs im tryna picture myself gaining them back and i want to so badly but i feel like my ocd is blocking me from having that vision and now im scared that that rough patch made me like process a vreak up before it even happened and that now i cant love him anymore even tho we r trying to fix things but i dont want to feel that way idk what happened like i hate thus feeling so much :((

@Anonymous One big thing I have learned about OCD. It can mess with your feelings. Therefore, we can’t really rely on our feelings as a measure to make decisions. Ultimately, our feelings are fickle. We are not about to control our feelings. We need to let our FEELINGS do whatever they are going to do. But you can forward based on your rational DECISIONS, not your feelings. This way, even if you have NO feelings, you can still go forward with the relationship if you want to. I have learned I can’t control my feelings at all. Feelings can come and go. They can disappear and come back. They are not reliable. My best advice (when you have OCD) is to make all your decisions with your non-OCD mind, and not feelings at all. It might be best for you to just WAIT and DELAY any changes right now. It seems that you want to keep this relationship. So just keep dating him for a few more months. That can’t hurt anything. Don’t worry about how your feelings might go up and down during those months. Just let the drinks feelings do whatever they are going to do. Just decide to date him for a few more months, and you can decide to if you want to stay with him after that. That way you won’t feel rushed or pressured, and you have time to sort things out later. OCD comes in waves and might go down with time. Maybe you could talk through the situation with someone

@Tea and Honey ya the thing is i had rocd abt losing feels for him earlier and for the most part it did come back like it felt lwk different bcs my ocd was in my head and before it ever came in my head the love felt ecstatic and now its more mellow which i rlly hope is bcs like my ocd just blocks off a lot of my feelings bcs i fixate on what im feeling in the moment and if i dont feel anything then i am convinced im over him and then if i do feel something im convinced its forced cuz my thoughts r still there. regardless it came bsck but this time it feels diff cuz i had that idea that we had such bad problems we werent gonna work it out and i started being less fazed by the bad treatment (tho i was also treating him badly we were just in a bad place) bcs i was super mentally exhausted so i thought i j completely lost feelings that i cant regain back which terrifies me bcs i honestly dont want my future w anyone else and i want to love him so im ultimately just rlly scared.

@Anonymous It seems like you love him and want to be with him! If that’s what you want, then do that! Give it lots of time first before you ever decide to break up (if ever). OCD brings a lot of confusion.

@Tea and Honey thank u sm i think ive seen u comment on my posts before and its always been super helpful !! pls reach out to me if u ever need similar advice thank u :)) i might reply to ur comment chain if i face more confusion / stress if thats ok

@Anonymous Thank you so much! Yes, I would love to hear from you any time you are having a hard time !!

@Tea and Honey 😀😀😀

@Tea and Honey i just recently talked to my friend abt her new situationship and i feel like im reminiscing abt the beginning stage and i keep wondering if the love i have w my bf is j gone or forced cuz itll never be like that or if its like not as good anymore and if i j want someone completely new to relive that honeymoon stage even tho i want to love my bf and i know i do i j dont want these thoughts and idk how to live w that uncertainty cuz whenever i even think abt any of it i emotionally disassociate like i cant feel anything then it leads to me a cycle of "if i feel nothing then i dont love him anymore" like i dont want to think that i want to feel as ecstatic as before and i keep noticing other guys that r attractive and it makes me feel so weird and uncomfortable bcs why do i even do that??

@Anonymous Hi, I hear you. I am middle-aged and have been married a long time. I can tell you that real love is different than people think when they are young. After you are married a few years, the “bubble” of love can kind of go away. But it is replaced by a deeper, unshakable love that is not dependent on feelings. When we have OCD, our feelings are highly unreliable. Like you said, we are so used to our feelings going all over place up and down that sometimes we have to disassociate to keep our sanity. So I don’t think your feelings for your bf are necessarily a reliable measure of how you want to make your decisions—especially when we have OCD. Our OCD will play tricks on us. It will say, “Now you have no feelings, so therefore you don’t love him.” OCD will say, “If you don’t feel like you did at the beginning, you don’t love him.” But you can’t trust OCD. But doing fight it either. That is one of the components of ERP. We don’t try to fight off intrusive thoughts or intrusive feelings. We should allow our feelings to go all over the place. We don’t have to try to control our feelings. You can let the feelings be like the intrusive thoughts. In ERP therapy, we are trained to just let the intrusive thoughts pass through us. We don’t try to control them or change them or fix them. But we don’t listen to what they are saying either. I think you should listen to what you really want instead of the OCD. In other words, what do you really want? If you didn’t have OCD, what do you want to do? Do you want to stay or not? I know it can be hard to tell what we want when we have OCD because our thoughts confuse us so much. But I think, deep down in our gut, we know what is really true, and we know how the OCD is trying to confuse us. I am not trying to tell you what to do because the choice of staying with him or not is yours. Just don’t let OCD keep you from what you want to do!! :):)