Relationship OCD (Written by my Amazing Partner)
My Beautiful Partner wrote this last night and she has made me feel good about myself, knowing i dont have to feel like i`m a bad person
The Indescribable shoes
How does one describe the indescribable? A life where there is never a certainty, but forever a continuation of torturous doubt.
A life where Love cannot be felt without pain. A simple thought cannot be had with a compulsion to analyse....A smile cannot come without guilt... and a lifetime of loneliness feels the same as never being alone.
Trapped in a world where you are never certain if a thought is really your own....A world where the illogical merges into the Logical...
Sweating, Panic, guts twisting and Fear....A never ending Fear.
A fear of the unknown....But the unknown is you.
Take a moment, any moment in your life with the one you Love, a moment that fills you with happiness...... Now think about that moment.
Were you really happy on that day? Did you pretend to be someone your not to make that person happy? Where you really in love on that day or did you just say it? Did you question anything on that day? Are you sure you felt love or was it just lust? Were you relieved when the day was over? Are you supposed to be relieved for a day to be over if your in love? Do you still feel that way about them now? Are you in love or out of love? Do you feel trapped or anxious when they ask you to do something which you really don’t fancy doing? Do you make up excuses? Do you lie? Should you lie when your in love with someone? Does that make you fake? Was that day really all that happy or are you just remembering it that way?......Are you Sure?
Heart starts to race, stomach feels a little knotted, you keep looking at those questions, becoming a bit panicky and in comes fear....because your not sure anymore....One beautiful moment in time, in love... that you now no longer have the certainty in your mind of what you felt....and it’ll eat at you. If you were so sure before, but now you’re questioning it....is everything else Real anymore?
And now you begin to think of other moments....What about the disagreements? What about that time they irritated you?....Are you really sure this is the ONE for you?
You wake in the morning, they are coming over tonight....anxiety sets in, have you been a fake all this time? How can you look at them in the eye? How can you tell them you love them when your not sure? How can you be affectionate...when you look at them and just see questions? Is this fair on them when you don’t know how you feel? Should you just get through this and hope the right feeling comes.....?
They leave, it was wonderful.... so beautiful, so amazing, so IN LOVE.... Now you can just chill out, relieved they’ve left.... Wait, if you’re in love, should you be relieved it’s over with? You told them you loved them, you made love....it was amazing.... but now your relieved they’ve left...Well are you in love with them or not? You don’t know.
Now you feel guilt..... Why are you so scared of not knowing how you feel? You don’t know.... You don’t know anything any more....Maybe it would be better if you just ended it? All these feelings would go away...The pain of the twisting knotted gut, the need to crawl out of your own head, away from these constant questions, that now seem to spoil every single moment that your with them, that you think of them, that you remember being with them.... But you don’t want to, you love them your sure you do!
But are you certain?
You’ve just spent 10minutes in the life of a person with ROCD.
Now imagine having those ten minutes last, for years....throughout every single relationship you’ve ever been in. An ever growing hate of your own mind, your own thoughts...Trapped in a never ending cycle of uncertainty. Not knowing if you can ever be just happy.
Obsessing over the questions in your mind, analysing over and over to the point of exhaustion, Ruminating over every past moment, every past relationship.... from the moment you wake till the moment your mind finally switches off for sleep... A constant compulsion to find the answers, to find a certainty... A constant fear of never finding those answers, of the questions never stopping, of waking everyday with the same pain....that it’ll never get better.
Your bed is wet from the night sweats, the anxiety that’s even found you in your sleep, tired from the restlessness, unable to get away from your thoughts even in the darkness....you wake up knowing the day is going to be just the same..
Knowing that feeling a brief moment of Euphoria will be shattered by the gremlin that enters your mind, the one that makes the questions.....
Knowing that even in a moment of peace, anything can trigger a Spike...A reference to a relationship, seeing a happy couple, a photo of a girl you once knew, a song about love....anything can bring that gremlin back.... The knots, the sweating, the nervous swallowing....
You end the relationship, this will make the gremlin go away.... Your filled with emptiness, loneliness and heart break... for a brief moment you know you were in love.
Devestation that you’ve broken off a relationship, when you were finally in love....you miss them, you can’t bare to be without them....it hurts.
You want to go back, you want to take it all back, you do love them, you do want them...It was just your mind telling you differently....
You hate being you, you want to take all the thoughts away, you want to be in love without constantly fighting your own mind, your own thoughts....They’re not yours they’re someone else’s. Without constantly being tortured....by something that you can’t even see, something that’s inside of you, that you can’t escape from, something that never goes away.....
And then the Obsessing, the Ruminating begins....Analysis of that relationship, you want to let it go, you need to but the torture carries on.
The gremlin hasn’t left you, the tactics have simply changed.... Now you’re filled with hurt and heartbreak, analysing the relationship, obsession over the thoughts, compulsion to find the answers.
You talk, you have to talk...it makes you feel better, you have to let it out.
You have to ask people for the answers and.... back comes the Spike....They weren’t the right one for you, your afraid of commitment...
But how can you be afraid of commitment when all you’ve ever wanted is to love, to be loved, to have a family and just be ‘Normal’.
But if i get all these feelings when i’m with someone, then i must be? If those people have told me that’s what it is then they must be right? ..... right?
Your doomed to live a life of loneliness, you can’t be with anyone because of the Gremlin....your only going to end up hurting innocent people that have no idea...you can’t live with the guilt.
You lay in your bed through night and day, you see the sunrise and the sunset,
The gremlin never goes away...
What day or the week is it? You don’t know, you don’t care.
What’s the point in being here....you’ll never find the answers anywhere.
OCD affects 60% of the population, when people hear the name they associate it with obsessive cleaning, lining up pencils, washing your hands....
The core basics are all the same Obsession Compulsion... With the form of OCD you see on the TV most days following people who have a constant fear of germs, obsessing over germs, a Compulsion to clean to get rid of the irrational fear.
It’s easier to understand, you can see it with your eyes.... but the thoughts in the persons head are still there, the gremlin is still there... are they certain they’ve got rid of all the germs?
If i clean again the gremlin will go away.
If i end the relationship the gremlin will go away.
OCD is a neurological disorder, that is fuelled on Irrational fear and Compulsions to make it go away.
Having ROCD as you can see above is based soley on relationships.
*final note*
Having ROCD does not mean a person cannot love, in fact suffers of ROCD tend to be much more considerate, sensitive, loyal and loving compared to one without ROCD. This is due to their extreme awareness of emotion. They will also often fall much more deeply in love due to their own extreme emotions.
A person with ROCD is likely to want to be loved and feel loved more than anything else.
It has been said that the better the relationship, the worse the ROCD symptoms.
The thoughts which an ROCD suffer has are called ‘Intrusive Thoughts’ This means that the sufferer has no control over them.
A partner of an ROCD sufferer can learn to understand, that the ROCD has absolutely no reflection on how the sufferer feels about them and that the relationship itself is not at fault....it is the symptoms of a neurological disease only.
Relationship Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, otherwise known as "ROCD" or "Relationship OCD", is an unofficial term for a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder that is defined by the behavior of "relationship substantiation".
Regardless of the form of OCD, it will involve both obsessions and compulsions which are the problems that need addressing, and they are all equally as treatable through Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and Medications
Further reading:
http://www.sleeping-with-rocd.com/
http://www.ocduk.org/rocd
http://www.ocdsymptoms.co.uk/symptoms-category.html
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