Thought I’d just make one last post before I go: Tips For Recovery • The key to OCD is to accept the uncertainty. You will never know for 100% certain if you’re gay, if your hands are contaminated, if your relationship is doomed, or if you could stab someone or molest a child. Sound scary? Good. Fear is your friend now. Seek it out and face it down • ERP does work, but its not a quick fix. You have to do it repeatedly every day for increasing amounts of time. Remember, fear is your friend. • Stop avoiding situations that make you uncomfortable. When I was deep into OCD I was too afraid to be near dogs. Fortunately, I’m also a dog minder. Being around dogs all the time was an excellent exposure, and helped me recover really quickly. • Medication is a band-aid, not a cure. Using it to relieve your symptoms while you undergo therapy is fine. Staying on it forever is unhelpful and unnecessary. • You don’t need to make sure your intrusive thoughts are a specific subtype of OCD. Your OCD might not match anybody else’s. Mine didn’t, and that’s okay. • Remain positive! If you start thinking you won’t get better, you won’t. • Take care of yourself! You put your body through tremendous strain just by worrying. Eat well, drink plenty of water, do gentle exercise. And get a good amount of sleep. • ACCEPTANCE! You have a mental illness. If you could think yourself out of this, you’d have done it already. If your compulsions were going to fix the problem forever, it would have happened by now. Stop fighting and feeding the cycle. • You have an anxiety disorder. Part of recovery is being responsible about this disorder. Getting drunk and smoking weed is going to make you feel better for a short time, and make you feel like crap in the long term. Same goes for caffeine and excess sugar. We have to be those annoying health nuts now, sorry. • Stop obsessing over your recovery. It won’t happen overnight, its not a linear process, and you won’t feel better tomorrow, or even the day after. You’re making the effort to improve yourself in the long term, and that takes time and commitment. That’s all I could think of! Thank you guys again! Recovery is possible for all of you, I know it!

Looking back, my introverted nature and struggles to find belonging in high school may have set the stage for how OCD would later impact my relationships. I had my first relationship in high school, but OCD wasn’t a major factor then. It wasn’t until my longest relationship—six years from age 18 to 24—that OCD really took hold. The relationship itself wasn’t the issue; it was what happened after. When it ended, I became obsessed with confessing past mistakes, convinced I had to be completely transparent. Even when my partner was willing to work past them, I couldn’t let go of the intrusive thoughts, and that obsession landed me in the hospital. From there, my struggle with ROCD (Relationship OCD) fully emerged. For years, every time I tried to move forward in dating, doubts consumed me. I would start seeing someone and feel fine, but then the questions would creep in: Do I really like her? Do I find her attractive? Is she getting on my nerves? What if I’m with the wrong person? I’d break things off, thinking I was following my true feelings. But then I’d question: Was that really how I felt, or was it just OCD? I tried again and again, each time hoping I could “withstand it this time,” only to fall back into the same cycle. The back and forth hurt both me and the person I was with. By the time I realized it was ROCD, the damage had been done, and I still hadn’t built the tools to manage it. Now, at 28, I know I need to approach dating differently. I recently talked to someone from a dating app, and my OCD still showed up—questioning my every move, making me doubt my own decisions. I haven’t yet done ERP specifically for ROCD, but I know that’s my next step. Just like I’ve learned tools for managing my other OCD subtypes, I need a set of strategies for when intrusive doubts hit in relationships. My goal this year is to stop letting uncertainty control me—to learn how to sit with doubt instead of trying to “figure it out.” I want to break the cycle and be able to build something healthy without my OCD sabotaging it. I know I’m not alone in this, and I know healing is possible. I’m hopeful that working with a therapist will help me develop exposures and thought loops to practice. I don’t expect to eliminate doubt entirely—after all, doubt is a part of every relationship—but I want to reach a place where it doesn’t paralyze me. Where I can move forward without constantly questioning whether I should. And where I can be in a relationship without feeling like OCD is pulling the strings. I would appreciate hearing about your experiences with ROCD. Please share your thoughts or any questions in the comments below. I’d love to connect and offer my perspective. Thanks!

Hello, I unknowingly have lived with ROCD or OCD (not sure what one. I’m new to this). It has ruined so many amazing romantic and platonic relationships and I am so sad that just now I am finding out what the hell is wrong with me. Maybe life would be different if I have known. My OCD and anxiety is at an all time high (ATH) due to some horrible events that have happened in the recent months. I am at the point where paranoia has taken over my life now. I had my first panic attack a few weeks ago where I fainted. My anxiety attacks are so extreme I go thought cognitive distortion that has lasted days. My girlfriend of 3 years is my emotional guardian and she no long has the energy to be that and honestly it’s not her responsibility to be that. She is bi and wanted to have an open relationship and for someone who has OCD this has not been good for me. She also was assaulted in my own home by a good friend of ours when I was out of town but it’s not a clear situation because it sounded consensual at first. I just left my very high paying job. I am financially secure but the job was emotionally abusive and looking back made my OCD worse. I am taking some time off to get my head right…but now, all I have to do during the day is live in my OCD. I’m very happy I finally figured out why I act the way I do but I don’t know if I can get better quick enough to save my relationship. I have never been so worried about myself (M 28 years old). I am a confident young professional and never thought I would be writing on a page like this. Anyway…I hope it gets better.

December 14, 2024, marked two years since my first ERP therapy session with my NOCD therapist, Mixi. And October 2024 marked a year of being free from OCD. It was not an easy journey, confronting my fears face to face. Exposing myself to the images and thoughts my brain kept throwing at me, accepting that I might be the worst mother, that my daughter wouldn’t love me, and that I deserved to be considered a bad person. It was challenging having to say, “Yes, I am those things,” feeling the desire to run, but realizing the thoughts followed me. At the start of my therapy, I remember feeling like I couldn’t do this anymore. Life felt unbearable, and I felt so weak. I longed for a time before the OCD, before the flare-ups, before the anxiety, the daily panic attacks. I thought I’d never be myself again. But I now know that ERP saved my life. The first couple of sessions were tough. I wasn’t fully present. I lied to my therapist about what my actual thoughts were, fearing judgment. I pretended that the exposures were working, but when the sessions ended, I went back to not sleeping, constantly overwhelmed by fear and anxiety. But my therapist never judged me. She made me feel safe to be honest with her. She understood OCD and never faltered in supporting me, even when I admitted I had been lying and still continued my compulsions. My biggest milestone in therapy was being 100% transparent with my therapist. That was when real change began. At first, I started small—simply reading the words that terrified me: "bad mom," "hated," "unloved." Then, I worked on listening to those words while doing dishes—not completely stopping my rumination, but noticing it. Just 15 minutes, my therapist said. It wasn’t easy. At one point, I found myself thinking, “Will I ever feel like myself again?” But I kept pushing through. Slowly, I built tolerance and moved to face-to-face exposures—sitting alone with my daughter, leaning into the thought that my siblings might die, reading articles about my worst fears, and calling myself the things I feared. Each session was challenging, but with time, the thoughts started to lose their grip. By my eleventh session, I started to realize: OCD was here, and it wasn’t going away, but I could keep living my life despite it. I didn’t need to wait for it to be quiet or go away to move on. Slowly, it began to quiet down, and I started to feel like myself again. In fact, I am not my old self anymore—I’m a better version. OCD hasn’t completely disappeared, but it’s quieter now. Most of the time, it doesn’t speak, and when it does, I know how to handle it. The last session with my therapist was emotional. I cried because I was finishing therapy. I remember how, in the beginning, I cried because I thought it was just starting—because I was overwhelmed and terrified. But at the end, I cried because I was sad it was ending. It felt like I had come so far, and part of me wasn’t ready to say goodbye, even though I had already learned so much. It was a bittersweet moment, but I knew I was walking away stronger, equipped with the tools to handle OCD on my own. If I could change anything about my journey, it would be being open and honest from the beginning. It was the key to finding true healing. The transparency, the honesty—it opened the door to lasting change. I’m no longer that person who was stuck in constant panic. I’m someone who has fought and survived, and while OCD still appears from time to time, I know it doesn’t define me. I'd love to hear your thoughts and comments. Have you started therapy, is something holding you back? Is there something you want to know about ERP therapy? I'll be live in the app answering each and every one today from 6-7pm EST. Please drop them below!