ROCD?

Hi, I am new to this, and have never posted on any online forums.

Last year after a bad relationship/job situation and just a few troubles I went to the doctors to discover I was suffering from Generalised Anxiety Disorder. I am now pretty positive I have a slight problem with OCD. My issue is OBSESSING over things. When my anxiety first came up I struggled with ideas that I was going to hurt my family and these feelings were unbearable. I thought there was something wrong with me and that I was definitely going insane. I have completely toned these thoughts down after a few visits to the doctors and I have completely stayed away from anti-depressants. However this year I feel I am very unable to relax. Even in situations where I there is absolutely nothing wrong, on the couch watching tv, i just have a constant feeling of unease. I do not get silly thoughts anymore really and when I do get the odd thought I can cope with it and learn to ignore it. However I have recently been obsessing over my relationship. I have been with my boyfriend for nearly a year and he has been extremely supportive. We are passed our honeymoon stage and are getting very comfortable with eachother and i have started to obsess about my feelings for him. It is really causing me distress. Recently we got really close to breaking up and I was on my knees sobbing, I ended phoning him to come back. I can't help but wonder if I don't actually love him or if it's just my anxiety? We do have a lot of problems in our relationship but I have never walked away and when we fight i do everything in my power to keep in contact with him. Im scared that i don't love him, i Dont want him not to be the one, i dont want it to be anyone else! He is the best thing thats happened to me and are these true feelings i need to accept or just my mind playing up as usual?

Any help would be really appreciated.

Hello and welcome! And also welcome to ROCD...

I have a long history of intrusive harm thoughts- I'm glad you've learned to cope with yours. Relationship OCD themes, like sexual ones, seem a bit more pernicious. Putting it mildly. As frightening as intrusive harm thoughts can be, they're pretty binary. You either is doing something heinous, or you isn't. Stuff like this? ai.... can be a mess, can't it?

Well first things first- I'd argue that the GAD you've been diagnosed with is more than sufficient for a general feeling of unease. You mentioned not being on antidepressants, are you taking anything at all for the general anxiety? I'm on Lexapro for anxiety (not my OCD) taking a maintenance dose and it doesn't keep it all from me, but it does take the edge off things. Less so, now- I'm entering a period of time that anyone would find stressful in my personal life- but before that drew near, it definitely helped me to at least 'not care' about things.

It also might have helped my OCD some but I didn't expect it to do much in that regard, I'm not sure there's a Silver Bullet for OCD other than retraining your mind.

I've known I've gone through times that I doubted my love for, well, anyone. I don't know if I can say it's become a major obsessional fear, but it's tickled my brain on occasion. In my case there are extenuating circumstances enough to warrant introspection about me and my partner, but I don't want to give the OCD something to chew on, so I'll just leave it at that.

I think a lot of times, we have to fall back on historical attitudes and how we act. Do you act as if you love him? How have you felt about him in the past before you started worrying about it? For me, things like that establish Reality. Using harm OCD as an example I can get thoughts all day long about oh let's say killing my partner- a common harm OCD thought people have. Have I killed anyone before? Nope. Do I actually plot such an act? No.... well okay then Reality is I'm not likely to do that and that thought loses its fangs, so to speak- I've had over four decades of such kinds of thoughts and have failed/refused to act on a single one of them. And, well, OCD is OCD no matter what the obsession is over. Technically it should work the same, since it's all OCD....

But as noted, some things are just 'fuzzier' and not so black/white. It's so easy to doubt one's own romantic ardor, or one's sexual proclivities. Because it's not so binary it's more analog, I think.

And that's another problem- the OCD brain screams for binary. Black/white. On/off. 1000% certainty of the thing in question, when nowhere near that is to be had, in the real world. It's perfectly imaginable in my brain to see ROCD driving a person to thinking they don't love someone unless they are madly in love with them, Romance Novel style. Anything less, and well why of course you have to doubt whether you really love your romantic interest at all! Been there, done that. When Reality I don't think works that way- call me a cynic, but I have a hard time swallowing any assertion that someone has eyes/thinks of their love interest 100% of the time with no thoughts of anyone else- much less the thousand percent proof/certainty OCD is going to demand of a person.

As if OCD would be satisfied with 1000% without cranking up the mental volume to needing 1001%....

I think it's a good thing for folks (and I do this, myself) is to remind themselves that feelings change over time- the honeymoon doesn't last forever, things settle down, the initial ardor fades. Would I want to be 'in love' all the time? Heck no I'm a little nuts when I'm 'in love' I couldn't take that emotional roller-coaster for more than a short period of time. In the end, I have to judge myself by how I behave towards the other person- within reason and taking into account that my shows of affection may not fit some preconceived norm.

On a side note, a question I have, is have you been tested or taken any self-tests (with a grain of salt!) for anything else besides anxiety? Since we're talking about relationships. Have you a history of worrying about your relationships? Not suggesting you actually have like a personality disorder or anything, but it might do to rule such stuff out- keeping in mind that folks with OCD tend to want to read more into the results of personality tests than perhaps is good for them- I mean we obsess, after all! Personally, I test out as borderline Borderline- I mean to say I have Borderline Personality Disorder traits and even though I do act all cool about well I can do without so-and-so no actually I do do a wee little bit of idealizing then devaluating and I don't know it just seems like a good idea, if this is bothering you that bad, to talk to someone and rule out anything else. But I guess that depends on the exact details of your fears of this relationship...