Good morning. Anyone struggle with ROCD? When I think about what I have done in the past, I feel immense guilty (I feel the tightness in my chest) and have the urge to tell my partner about it, even if my partner says she doesn’t need to know if it is going to hurt her and that I need to talk to my therapist about it first. Any suggestions on how to manage the urge/urgency? Thanks!
Try to delay your urgency. If you have an urge to confess in that moment, tell yourself you’ll confess tomorrow, or hours later. Remind yourself that OCD is attacking your values and is driving the desire to confess, but it doesn’t mean you have to listen to OCD. And try to remember that giving in to compulsions keeps you in the cycle, but learning to tolerate the distress and doubt is what will get you free. Your therapist may also have some tools you can use.
@MichelleV But how to figure what needs to be confessed and what doesn’t? I’m in a pickle. I’m obsessed with my partner’s career. And I have social conditioning/bias towards it meaning I have thoughts like it’s not prestigious enough etc. but I support him and will be with him no matter what. I’m also actively journaling to unlearn those biases. But I feel so guilty to have them, and I don’t want them. So do I have to confess this? Like how do I tell if I need to confess or not?
I have this but I fixate on what my partners done in the past
I try to remind myself that the shared growth and our behaviors in the present are what matter most
Hi truespartan48! I'm a little late to this, but I just wanted to add - that discomfort you feel, along with immense guilt, is actually a vital ingredient in ERP treatment. This discomfort is what you learn to sit with, while making the active decision to practice response prevention (what MichelleV is referring to!) Here are some resources that may be helpful... https://www.treatmyocd.com/blog/how-do-i-move-forward-from-the-guilt-of-not-doing-compulsions | https://www.treatmyocd.com/blog/why-managing-ocd-means-managing-your-emotions
Feel guilty for not giving into compulsions like rumination and confessing? I feel guilt for having an intrusive thought, trying to shrug it off or just giving it a few seconds of thought and moving along. This sounds like improvement but I still struggle with the anxiety and the guilt. The shame. I’ll be okay and then I’ll remember I have OCD and my stomach will drop and I just want to curl up and cry.
So, I know my capacity to get fixated on things. And it's normally something that's relatively remote but, my latest issue is really getting to me and I was wondering if people have any advice. I'm avoiding getting too into specifics, as I don't want this to get reassurance-y but, in essence.. I came to the realisation recently that people who I'd been "friends" (feels like the wrong term now) when I was younger were not very nice people, and normalized a lot of very unpleasant behaviour towards other members of the group. They really normalized it, sold themselves as figures of authority, as older and more responsible and grown-up than others, and looking back, they acted horribly. And coming to this realisation, that I'd been manipulated into just accepting their behaviour has just... broken me. My OCD has latched onto it and I can't stop feeling irreversibly tainted by it. I've talked to others about it, and they've reassured me, told me it's not a big deal and that I hold myself to too high a standard, but none of that sticks. I feel better for a bit, then think 'Maybe when you told them you were skewing it to make yourself look better' or 'Did you leave out a crucial detail'. I keep ruminating over and over, trying to remember exactly how everything played out, trying to figure out if I fed into the behaviour, if I did something bad myself (because y'know, I feel like I was accepting of it at the time, so what does it say about my own values?). I know I need to stop doing all this if I want to improve, but then some part of me keeps saying 'So, you're just going to let yourself off the hook then?' Normally, I can rationalize my own fears to some degree, assure myself something won't happen, but the realness of the situation, and the fact I only came to understand the reality of it because the thought had been bothering me means it feels so much more all-encompassing. I know confessing in itself is a compulsion, but I keep feeling that if I'm not I'm somehow concealing what I 'really am' from others around me, and any positive interactions are me deceiving them in some way. I feel like I can't enjoy anything in life right now, and a good part of me feels I should not enjoy it ever again. If anybody has any advice on it, I'm all ears. Or even hearing if you relate to these feelings, I might appreciate the solidarity at least.
Last night I had a fucked up intrusive thought/urge about harming my partner and I'm spinning out today. I let them know I had an intrusive thought and was struggling with compulsions around it and future repercussions, but did not tell them exactly what the thought/urge was, which they accepted. Do y'all share details with your partners about harm ocd? How can we healthily ask for support from people we are having horrible thoughts about?
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