Hi all this is my first post. I have a very specific, unique, debilitating ocd. I feel I am in control of what happens to family members. I don’t care about myself dying but I am constantly redoing things in order for my family to stay alive. especially my mom. Right now I feel if I don’t rewatch something on the television and think a specific thing, then my mom and I can’t be close or “normal” with each other or she will die. How can I let go of this? I have been in therapy for years. I am almost 30 and finally am done giving in to every compulsion. But I’m terrified of the risk of living day to day and risking my mom dying because I didn’t rewatch something on tv. Please help if you can.

Hi and welcome ? I'm glad you found the community here and I hope we can be helpful to you. First, I want you to know that you aren't alone. The symptoms you're struggling with are called "magical thinking" or "superstitions" and they are VERY common in people with OCD. Can you say a bit about the type of therapy you've tried?

Don't worry, it's not unique and niche and especially hard to treat or anything. I have the same feelings of responsibility for what happens to my family and had the same thing for a boyfriend. I don't have magical thinking but sometimes I do get a bit delusional in my fears, and imagine scenarios where something could happen to them and respond to them by trying to prevent the situations I imagine. I say I "have" this OCD but actually it only flares up from time to time. When it does, I do a combination of humour and ERP. Sometimes I deliberately exaggerate the fear so that I can laugh at it and get a moment of seeing how silly it is. Like I had a sudden thought that if I had coronavirus and ate some ice cream, then maybe the virus could get frozen on the ice cream and end up infecting them. So I imagined funny newspaper headlines from people all around the world being dramatically struck down because of ice cream, like "Rum and Regret!" and "Chocolate chip contagion!". That made me laugh enough that I felt a bit less fear and I realised that if this was a real likelihood then it would already be in the newspapers, and would be common knowledge about other coronaviruses like a cold. So instead of googling how long a virus can live at freezing temperatures, I reminded myself that it's not all my responsibility just because I thought of the idea, and just let myself be anxious for a bit before deciding whether it was sensible to act on it. After I felt better from processing the anxiety, I didn't do any googling. I did decide to finish the ice cream rather than putting it back in the freezer, though. Baby steps.