Being scared that it might not be ROCD, probably means it’s ROCD, right? Like I wouldn’t get scared if it was a sincere doubt versus an OCD doubt.

Ugh, idk how to not do that. :( I wish my OCD compulsions were physical versus mental. I can’t rap my head around doing non physical exposure therapy.

OCD is considered the doubting disease. It makes you doubt things you don’t need to doubt. So that’s what I mean by is it a genuine doubt or is it OCD making me doubt. I go from worrying my partner will cheat on me and coming up with a million scenarios, to worrying if I wanna be with my partner. I KNOW I want to be with her and that I love her. And I think that’s why my OCD is attacking it.

@offbrandlesbian Yes, it's known as the doubting disease. Everybody has relationship fears and doubts. The OCD part is the part where you take them seriously and ruminate on them. OCD doesn't make you do anything, OCD is a thing you do, it's compulsions in response to triggers. It's called the doubter's disease because a symptom of OCD is to dwell excessively on NORMAL doubts and intrusive thoughts. OCD doesn't make you do anything, OCD is something you do. It's incredibly important to understand that distinction. You have a thought "what if my partner cheats on me". Everybody has doubts like that. You then engage in compulsions such as ruminating, analysing, and imagining, in an attempt to forcibly get rid of the discomfort caused by the initial thought. Over time this becomes your habitual pattern of thinking on a daily basis, and so you find that more things in daily life trigger the worry, which you respond to with compulsions. Similarly, people withojt POCD also get occasional intrusive POCD-style accusations. The difference is, some people are unable to tolerate the feelings caused by the question and so they engage in compulsions to try to get rid of the thought, and some people just go 'oh, that was weird', they don't take it very seriously and they don't do compulsions. The person who spent the whole day worrying about the possibility is very likely to wake up the next day and continue questioning it and doing further mental compulsions, and will be on the lookout for "evidence" via checking. Doubts and questions are normal. Compulsions like ruminating, analysing, investigating, checking and reassurance seeking are behaviours which characterise OCD. Every single one of us has control over whether we spend our time doing those compulsions, or tolerate the anxiety instead without doing them, so that the obsession can fade. Again, OCD is behavioural. Mental disorders aren't magic, they can't make you do anything-- that is the fundamental underlying principle to ERP.

@offbrandlesbian Basically- it's a doubt. It's there. The doubt exists. You can't put a doubt on a mental disorder and use that to say the doubt is guaranteed not to be true. We dont get guarantees. It's likely that, if you engage in mental compulsions about the topic and therefore would be considered to have OCD about it, then the particular vividness/intensity etc of the fear has been increased by you doing mental compulsions and catastrophising. The initial doubt you had at the very beginning was either based on something giving a genuine cause for doubt, or was an intrusive thought. Either one of those situations is possible. If you were to stop doing mental compulsions, it wouldn't take away the actual question. We don't treat OCD by convincing ourselves that it's OCD so we should just ignore our feelings- doing that is a compulsion which just leads us to continue to ruminate. If you're able at this point to remember the initial moment that you started having the doubt, then I can tell you that if you stopped doing all your mental compulsions, that's what you'd be left with. Just the initial unanswered question. For example, I had zoophilia OCD, and the very first trigger which led to me developing it was having a thought "I wonder why a year or so ago when I saw those dogs knotted together I was so fascinated by it? That seems kind of shameful, maybe it meant that I'm into dogs so I am a bad person who deserves shame". It doesn't matter whether I call that a regular doubt or an intrusive thought. The fact is, I had the thought. Calling that an "OCD thought" might be useful in helping me to identify other sudden ideas in the future which aren't actually worth my time and energy and happiness to investigate, but other than that, it doesn't matter. The thought doesn't need to say something about me. The memory doesn't need to say anything about me. I got myself into a horrible place of believing I was a zoophile, as bad as being a pedophile and that I deserve to die. All from that one initial thought that made me feel so uncomfortable that I CHOSE to take it seriously. I recovered from that theme by choosing to behave as if the questions aren't worth spending my time investigating. And it went away. I didn't GET a certain answer, I still don't know for sure. I can't know for sure and I don't need to know. Worrying is a mental compulsion- it's a *choice*. It becomes a LOT easier to see what's probably true when you stop doing compulsions, but you also don't get an answer. Sure maybe it's easy to point out that the zoophilia obsession is clearly OCD. That doesn't give me any actual guarantees about the doubt. Other people have the question "omg I wonder if I am into animals" from situations all the time. It makes them feel weird and then they move on with something else instead of revisiting it to look for an answer and closure of the question. Nobody on the planet knows for 100% sure that they're not a zoophile, and they live their lives just fine.

@Scoggy I agree with a lot of what you wrote here. I want to underline that in our society, people often -feel- they're certain about things and express it as such (in example, they say they'll love their partner forever and they'd never cheat) but in reality they aren't certain, and their actions some time from that might actually prove them wrong. Through working with OCD, we face the reality that actually nobody is and can ever be certain about what the future holds, they don't have control over it, they just aren't aware of it - but that kind of expected certainty is part of the problem imho.