This isn't explicitly OCD related, but my OCD sure makes the experience way worse. Has anyone experienced ghosting before? By friends, a potential partner, your partner? Or has anyone been the one doing this to others? It has happened to me several times and it makes my head spin with self-doubt, questioning my actions, checking if there was anything I should have done differently. It's soo hard letting go if everything seems perfectly fine and the next day you cease to exist for that person. I just cannot understand it at all. I'd appreciate if you could share your thoughts and experience on that topic.

Had this experience a few years ago and OCD made me obsess on it. I never did get an explanation but he is still insistent that it wasn't ghosting, he just got busy and also went through a trauma, which I can understand. He was warm, friendly and engaged one day, distant and kinda aloof the next. We are still friends. I spent a long time worried about him and wanting the old version of him back. I'm friends with his new girlfriend and she says when he's in his comfort zone he is like the guy he was before, it's just that his comfort zone is smaller now. I'm sad that I was part of what got shut out, but I probably didn't help myself- OCD made me neurotic and autism got me reacting badly when it started to change, he had been my rock and I didn't have anything else to hold onto even though it wasn't his responsibility. I had to adapt fast. This was a friend and potential-sexual-partner type mixed situation, sometimes a romantic tinge but not a lot, I wasn't putting a label on it in my head but I'd been very happy and he helped me a lot. I think he just felt like he wasn't in a fit state to help me much anymore, he just didn't come out and say as much for ages, I guess he hoped he could go away and come back and pick it up eventually. Even though this wasn't a situation with an imaginary future attached like a typical love interest, it still hurt very much, he's the most compassionate person I've ever met, so feeling suddenly rejected and unimportant had an almost existential element, he used to have space for everyone and now he had none. The lack of any coherent explanation hurt too, and so did the early attempts to insist everything was fine and normal, as he waited months to mention the trauma. So I guess what I learned is that even though it feels intensely like it's about you, it's probably not about you. I also learned that that fact doesn't help much. Letting go of the expectations you had and adapting to the new situation is going to be painful and it takes time. I do think in these situations there should be an explanation if someone asks for it, but it's important to take most of the responsibility for your own expectations. That may seem unfair because they did 50% of the job of creating them and then dropped you, but nothing is promised to us in life. I feel best about the situation I had when I'm appreciating the time and care he did give me, which I wasn't owed, I try to think of it like a gift. But first I definitely had to go through being angry for a while. You don't need to rush that, just let yourself be angry. I loved and love my friend very much and I'm also very much allowed to be angry with him, you can have both those feelings at once too. My recommendation is definitely to focus on making space for all your feelings rather than letting your amygdala try to solve the problem or make sure it doesn't happen again. Whether you did contribute to what happened or not, it's very unlikely that there is some hidden lesson in there about your behaviour. I've been ghosted by my first boyfriend for around 7 years, I know perfectly well why. Ghosting is quite a severe action, if it's something you did wrong then you'd know it, and if it's something else which is remotely important then it's their job to tell you, not your job to figure it out. If you didn't do something overtly wrong, most likely it's not about you. You can't control their behaviour, you can't prevent future friends or partners from potentially ghosting you either. There's no need to adapt your personality to try to make you safe from abandonment, you'd just end up walked all over, it's already this easy to make you feel responsible: someone else ghosts you harshly and your instinct is that you did something wrong. How other people treat you is about them, not about you.