Relationship Anxiety

Relationships are to be experienced, not calculated. OCD will use the argument that without proof, there’s no love, and without love, there’s no relationship. This is just another of the disorder’s tricks designed to get you to act on compulsions. Acceptance of relationship fears doesn’t mean that you should accept abuse or force yourself to stay with a person you despise. To accept intrusive thoughts about your partner and the legitimacy of your relationship is to accept that part of the experience of connecting your life with that of another person necessarily involves discomfort.

Remaining steadfast in the not-knowing stance is quite challenging, especially when the OCD is bullying you to investigate, analyze, figure out what you need to do, and make sure it gets done now before catastrophe occurs. Without OCD, people doubt, fight, worry, and sometimes choose to go separate ways. OCD demands the impossible by asking you to decide right now what to do, while blocking you from staying present with what’s happening in your relationship long enough to have any sense of what to do! In that state of urgent uncertainty, you are a slave to the OCD, and will do compulsion after compulsion to attempt escape.

Making matters worse, another human being is directly involved. There’s a sense of responsibility for how the other person’s life turns out. The fear that you stayed with the wrong person not only makes you hate what you’ve allowed yourself to become, but also makes you feel fully responsible for the choice your partner made to be with you.

As in other forms of OCD that don’t display a high frequency of physical compulsions, mindfulness skills are an important part of separating the presence of the unwanted thought from the urge to review or seek reassurance. Part of mindful acceptance for ROCD is sitting with the discomfort that your partner and others may perceive you as being something quite different from what you are. For example, you may obsess about the image of your partner with his or her ex, thereby appearing to others to be a jealous person. But it’s not the feeling of jealousy that drives your constant need for reassurance and mental review. It’s the feeling that something is off that could somehow be made right if only you could get that last compulsion satisfied! It just looks like jealousy on the outside.

If you find yourself avoiding things that remind you of your relationship fears, then exposure strategies that focus on these things would be helpful. It’s important to always stick to the plan of exposure with response prevention. Stay in contact with the thing that causes you discomfort, but mindfully accept the thoughts and feelings that get triggered. Don’t tell yourself over and over that it’s okay. Don’t tell yourself anything. Have the thoughts and feelings without trying to neutralize them. The key here is to encounter your fear without mental reviewing or acting on other compulsions. Here are some examples of activities that might be effective exposures for ROCD sufferers: • Watching triggering movies or listening to triggering songs • Looking at pictures that remind you of the triggering obsession • Visiting places that trigger the relationship obsession • Resisting the urge to abandon or manipulate conversations that are heading into uncomfortable territory • Resisting the urge to avoid being alone with a triggering person (for example, riding in the elevator with an attractive coworker) • Resisting the urge to seek reassurance or confess triggering thoughts to your partner

Compulsions • All-or-nothing: I must always feel 100 percent in love with my partner, or else we’re wrong for each other. The reason this is a complete OCD setup is that no one is capable of doing this. Feelings aren’t set in stone for all time. They are fluid. They evolve, expand, shrink, and shift constantly, as they are supposed to. • Catastrophizing: If I don’t know for certain that I’m with the right person, my life and my partner’s life will be ruined. Here again, you need to remember that the end or changing of a relationship isn’t the end of the world, even if it’s the biggest fear your mind is presented with. So not only is the future of a relationship unpredictable, but the worst predictions would be experienced in ways that are unknown. • Selective abstraction: I can’t look at that mole forever! Mindfulness, like love itself, is about taking in the bigger picture of yourself, not picking at the details. When you fall into a romance, you actively ignore the negative details that may be thrown at you. When you actually fall in love, you begin to see those negative details, but they are no longer negatives. You love these details for being a part of the person you love. • Mind reading and personalizing: She doesn’t think I’m smart. She didn’t respond to my text message, because she knows our relationship is a sham. Here you fall for the trap of assuming that others’ thoughts are accessible and knowable, and that others’ behavior has intrinsic meaning. Neither of these things is true. • Hyperresponsibility: I have to tell my partner that I would have considered cheating on him if the opportunity presented itself, even if I can’t prove this. I have to do this, because if I don’t, he will spend the rest of his life married to a person who may not be worthy of his love, and I’ll be responsible for his wasting his chance to be with the right person. As in other forms of hyperresponsible thinking, the OCD makes it look as if you are charged with the task of ensuring that your partner makes the right choices in life, which isn’t something you can control.

The imaginal script for ROCD should focus on the idea that you have failed to see certain signs, and that the relationship is doomed to fail, you are doomed to hurt your partner emotionally beyond repair, or you are doomed to remain in the relationship unhappily obsessing about it until death or divorce. The script should include frank statements about things that your OCD has been telling you are wrong with your partner and the relationship, cruel admissions about attraction to other people, and sinister negative fantasies about each of your lives being ruined by your failure to act immediately on your thoughts and feelings. If you feel ready to use this technique, use the following questions as an outline for your script: Why is this relationship doomed? Now that you’ve admitted it, what will you do about it? How will your partner be affected by this choice? How will you respond to this? If you break up, what will your life look like moving forward? If you stay together, how will the relationship be intolerable to you? What will others think about the relationship choices you made? What will you think or feel upon reflection of these choices in your old age?

There’s no perfect way to describe your OCD to someone. Here are some ideas:“I get stuck on certain details about things, and I play them over and over until theyseem really important; then I have difficulty moving on from them.”“My brain is highly attuned to potential risks from certain things, and it makes mereally want to avoid them and be sure I haven’t come in contact with them.”“Sometimes my mind gets flooded with thoughts about not being the kind of person Iwant to be, and it makes me really uncomfortable. So I spend a lot of time trying tomake things seem right to me, and it takes a lot of energy.”Notice how none of the previous examples requires any disclosure of the actual contentof your thoughts. That level of disclosure is up to you, not the person who is asking. ​-- —-oooO—- —-(—)—- —–\–(– ——\_)- ———–Oooo— ———–(—-)— ————)–/—- ————(_/- —-oooO—- —-(—)—- —–\–(– ——\_)-

Sent with Mailtrack