Is anyone dealing with responsibility OCD? I don’t see it talked about much, but it’s one of the subtypes I struggle with the most. I just feel like everything I do is in order to “protect” my family and friends. That means everything from magical thinking, to repeatedly calling people to make sure they’re ok, to bargaining with god to keep them safe (even though i’m not religious at all). I spend A LOT of my time worrying about other people and trying to control what they do. For example, I’ll try to talk someone out of taking a trip because I feel like something bad will happen, or I’ll stalk someone’s Instagram to make sure they’re posting regularly, because that means they’re ok. Logically I know I have no control over other people, but OCD tells me there’s always at least SOMETHING I can be doing to keep them from getting hurt or sick. And obviously the pandemic has made this 1000x worse. Can anyone relate?

Yes. I had this very badly as a teen, my ex was an addict and I was beyond paranoid about his safety. And this was also partly codependency but I was paranoid about his happiness in general, I never wanted to say or do anything that would upset him because he was very sensitive and would get this look on his face like I hurt him and withdraw and have emotional outbursts. It made it super difficult when I broke up with him (prevented me from doing so for ages) because I talked about some bad stuff he did in the relationship and then felt like I'd done the worst thing in the world by talking about it, esp because I'd promised not to. He just still felt like my responsibility. And I tried to force him to go to therapy because I got paranoid he'd do the same things to his next gf and that it would be my fault. It was bad again when my mother had to go in the hospital for a couple of weeks and I wanted to visit her every day and was googling constantly in case I could find some useful info (they didn't know what was wrong with her) and couldn't stop thinking about it 24/7. We don't even have a great relationship 😂

I have it a bit with contamination ocd. Sometimes I have scared people will contaminate me, but other times I am scared I will contaminate others and make them sick. I have been purchasing my parents various masks like crazy. I've dropped 300 dollars on masks for them because I'm so scared. My mum works in a school and is starting soon and I just dropped 200 dollars on a new bed frame and will be buying her mattress too so that she can sleep in a separate room from my dad who has COPD.

That’s one of my bigger themes, second to scrupulousity for me, though the two themes are probably related for me. Like I constantly need to check in on people, and I think anything bad that happens is my fault. I genuinely struggle to tell the difference between when it’s my responsibility to intervene in a situation and when it isn’t.

But yeah I used to talk my bf out of going out as much as possible and when he wouldn't listen I tagged along 99% of the time instead to try to make sure nothing happened. -_-