ROCD challenges

The hardest part of my ROCD that i’m facing right now is trying to not let that “what if you ignore this right now because it’s “OCD” but it actually ends up being true in the future” thought. Like for instance, If i’m worried about If i truly love my partner or not, my ocd will say “why are you ignoring this thought? This could actually be true and what if you end up marrying this man and completely regret it because you didn’t listen to that thought.” I’m not sure if that makes sense, but it’s making it harder to push away my intrusive thoughts. Anyone have any advice?

Anonymous

Date posted: 17h

Maybe write all the worries down. Once they're recorded, your brain can stop trying to hold onto them in constant loops. And there are a lot of techniques for making choices and evaluating risks and such that involve writing things down. So maybe allow yourself to follow a risk assessment process ONCE, for example writing down all your fears and rating them by likelyhood, and then commit to stopping and distracting yourself with a movie or something once you've done it. AFAIK, OCD is in the repeated looping, not in catastrophizing once and then moving on to something else.

diyaa

Date posted: 17h

This is my exact issue! Just starting my journey so I have no therapist-backed advice but my ROCD started about 3 weeks ago and only this week I’ve slowed down on my daily panic attacks. What helped me was rerouting the thoughts to “Let’s deal with this one day at a time and get some help first. THEN after the help of a professional, I can reassess the relationship itself when I have developed a better system of handling the thoughts.” I mean, I can spare a few weeks or months of my life to getting better before I make a life-altering decision. Patience, my friend. I have to remind myself of this as well. As kids, none of us learned how to read and write in a day.

diyaa

Date posted: 16h

@diyaa I also have both moments of freak out and moments of peace. During freak out, I try to remember my moments of peace are possible and with time I’ll get better. My evidence being that I used to have worse anxiety about other things in life and after receiving therapy, I got better at managing it. And now for the first time in my life - I’m addressing OCD. I also collect other pieces of evidence - for example, I’ve noticed when I’m stressed at work, my brain starts attacking my relationship again. How silly and completely unrelated. It definitely takes me a moment to recognize that trend. Whether or not something is my gut feeling can be addressed when I get more help because the one certainty I have right now is I am mentally unwell. The drastic flipping between being okay and not okay at random times shows me that.

Anonymous

Date posted: 19h

Wow... I've never heard my internal dialogue explained so well by someone else. That is exactly the same fears I've been plagued with. I call it my "loop." I'm so afraid of pouring my time and years into the person, going on to marry them one day, and then regretting everything cause I didn't listen to that "gut instinct/ROCD" loop

Julia Bridges

Date posted: 19h

@Anonymous YES it’s horrible 😭

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