My OCD story - you are not alone Today my husband and I went to see my psychologist and showed him a diagram to help explain it better. I think this helped. I did feel very vulnerable afterwards because I did think he would reject me afterwards. How could he not? After our session I went to speak to my husband and I said that I felt like I had lied about my ocd for the entirety of our relationship. He said I hadn’t lied but couldn’t tell him and who can blame me. I can’t tell you how accepted that made me feel. Later on today I was walking around home bargains and it felt like a received a universal truth. I suffer from intrusive thoughts: I have always suffered from intrusive thoughts. As a teenager I would pray every night that my family would be kept “happy, safe and healthy” and if I didn’t do it right or felt like I didn’t mean it, I would have to do it again until it felt right. I remember the first time it really escalated. I was in a nightclub in Sheffield and all of a sudden nothing felt real. I didn’t feel real. I felt in a goldfish bowl and I never recovered from that moment. From then on I felt I had to check if everything around me felt “real” enough continually. This ran side by side with deep fear something would happen to my parents now I wasn’t living at home. I would ring every day without fail, sometimes a couple of times a day. If the conversation or if our goodbye wasn’t done just right then that was it - I didn’t appreciate them enough and so they were going to die and it was my fault. This coupled with intrusive thoughts of “you keep thinking about their death, you must secretly want it” which I would perform rituals of praying as I have done before in order to “neutralise” that irrational and intrusive thought. The intrusive thoughts told me that after the death of my brother that I wanted my parents to die too and that was soul destroying. This continued until 2010.. Early 2010 I got engaged. Within 4 weeks of this an intrusive thought came into my mind: “What if I don’t love him?” “What if he’s wrong for me?” “How do I know if we will be together forever?” Cue praying rituals again, severe panic attacks, 2 stone weight loss and suicidal thoughts.. Sadly through no fault of our own the relationship wasn’t solid enough to survive that. May 2011 I moved home and the intrusive thoughts quietened for a few months until my ex got in contact and I began to get low level anxiety that he was in contact as was a “threat” to this new life I had created. So I began logging into his social media to see if was in a relationship or seeing anyone to check there was no “threat” I was genuinely relieved when I would see he had a girlfriend and even when he got engaged and married. I had met someone and the guilt lifted when I knew he was happy. But then the guilt shifted to what I had done. Logging in maybe once every 3 months turned into every day - frantically checking that there was so sign that I’d logged in. I didn’t feel safe for the day until I knew this. As soon as I had kids and had the extra stress this became unmanageable. After 18 months or so of doing this I finally bit the bullet and changed his password in the hope that now this meant I couldn’t check anymore and I would be free of intrusive thoughts. Not so, it then went to other social media sites to rid myself of the anxiety.....now I’m at the stage where my intrusive thoughts tell me I have to check every single website and phone number I use and this is where I am at now. But what is different today is that I am truly beginning to believe myself when I say they are intrusive thoughts...before I was convinced they weren’t intrusive thoughts but my real desires and felt a deep sense of shame. I hope that by writing this I can look back on it and remind myself - my intrusive thoughts are not important.