Does anyone have any advice for helping your partner deal with your ocd? Mine is getting frustrated feeling it's stupid and finds intrusive thoughts I try and share hurtful.

Exactly

That's alright. I have been in a relationship and had severe OCD at the time but I didn't know it, and I didn't get the same urges to get reassurance etc other than always asking my partner if he was ok and what he was doing when I wasn't with him, and I'm sure that was annoying enough. It's important to make the distinction that it's all OCD and that the content of the fear or worry doesn't matter and can't be alleviated by other people, despite it feeling so important.

You can do it!

@Louw Just wanted to say my partner is actually a boy, didnt want me correcting you to get in the way of your advice:)

@smolbean Oh yes sorry I was trying to keep gender neutral as you didn't specify but I must have slipped into heteronormativity based on your profile pic, gah

@Louw I mean I'm a gender neutral female, I just liked the dog hehe oop

@smolbean I just realised the dog does look masculine wow

@smolbean Hah I didn't even realise it was a dog I thought that one was a bearded man with a funny hat ?

@Louw Oh that's brilliant hehe. I think it's a shibe

@smolbean I'm agender myself, maybe I should start using the dog ?

Well, the app ERP just asks you to imagine that the idea is true and sit with all the feelings that the idea causes for 5 minutes or as long as possible, without trying to figure it out even once more thoughts come which are disagreeing with the intrusive thought or offering other evidence. And it offers suggestions like focusing on your physical feelings and taking deep breaths. It should be possible to do it without the SOS as a guide, your memory is perfectly functional even if you have a worry about doing it on the go. The idea is to notice the thoughts but not spiral down intro trying to untangle them. Over time you'll find that sitting with the feelings doesn't kill you or make it true, and eventually it will reduce the emotional response you get to the thoughts. If you feel up to it, you can trigger the thoughts deliberately when you don't have them to do the ERP. This can usually be done by remembering occasions which have triggered the thoughts before, or looking at exposures about the topic on the internet in order to get that spike of anxiety. It's going to feel counterproductive to deliberately name yourself anxious but so long as your response to the anxiety and fear is to sit with it rather than avoiding using compulsions like problem-solving/ruminating or asking for reassurance or confessing, then it's a good thing to do.

Try to remember- don't push the thoughts away or berate yourself for having them. Just don't try to weigh them up or figure out if they're true, because that is the compulsion and that is the thing which is hurting our lives, not the initial thought. Just feel the anxiety they cause. It can't hurt you.

@Louw That's really helpful

So you know which things and situations tend to bring up those thoughts? Perhaps you can think of a time when your partner wasn't as responsive as you'd like and it triggered these feelings. It seems by your post that her not wanting to comfort you about the feelings can be a trigger, assuming that you were feeling quite bad about yourself when you wrote this post.

Thank you :)