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  • #115557
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear Midnight:

    You are welcome and thank you for being here. Hope you post again-
    anita

    #116675
    Midnight
    Participant

    So I’ve been feeling better since I last wrote here and now I’m pretty much back to square one again.
    Feeling worried that I might have settled and compromised, and my partner is not a good enough match for me on an intellectual level. A week ago I was very happy to be with him but now the doubts again. All because I read something silly online about people who feel that they have an intellectual gap with their partner. And because we had a somewhat philosophical discussion lately and I felt that he wasn’t very advanced/deep in his thinking. I’m so scared now that maybe all of this is true and I’m in the wrong relationship for me and could’ve been happier and more fulfilled with someone else.

    Please help:/

    #116681
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear Midnight:

    I re-read through your thread to refresh my memory.

    I also read since you started your thread, I read replies you posted on other people’s threads. I was very impressed with your intellect, your approach: you are a very intelligent, reasonable, wider- perspective person.

    Back to your thread: did you talk to your therapist about having been bullied by your brother, since you wrote on this thread that you will bring it up with him?

    It seems to me that the origin of your ROCD type anxiety is in your early relationships- the one with your brother and those with your parents. There is some compromise you made at a very early age, I am thinking, a compromise with reality. Something hurt to much to keep in awareness so you closed your eyes to it best you can, removed it from your awareness so to minimize your distress (an automatic process).

    And so, as intelligent, reasonable and wider- perspective as you are, you cannot integrate some crucial information so to heal, because it involves feeling that distress that was once too much to bear.

    If you’d like, share next about your relationship with your mother (you mentioned having had issues with her). Just write whatever comes to your mind about her and your relationship with her through the years. If you run out of things to write, write about your father and your relationship with him.

    anita

    #116685
    Midnight
    Participant

    Dear Anita,

    Thank you for your response and for your kind words, I really appreciate it.

    Your post left me a bit perplexed. At first I felt a surge of anxiety when I read it, because it seemed to me that you were implying that I was compromising, that I was closing my eyes to the reality in which I am living – meaning, that my relationship cannot be truly satisfying.

    I am not sure if you meant that and would much appreciate it if you could clarify a little, as it seems that you have something specific in mind.

    I would especially like to know what you meant by the following: “And so, as intelligent, reasonable and wider- perspective as you are, you cannot integrate some crucial information so to heal, because it involves feeling that distress that was once too much to bear.”

    I have spoken to my therapist about my brother. He seems to think that there are indeed some subconscious issues involving my family which are haunting me. I didn’t know how to develop this further, because I don’t remember anything which seems relevant other than what I already told him (some dreams, a few old memories, too personal to share here). I guess I just don’t really understand how any of that could relate to what seems to me (right now at least) a very concrete issue with the person I am with and the gap that there might be between us? Yes I have anxiety, but that doesn’t mean that there can’t be something that’s actually wrong in my relationship. Maybe I have always compromised somewhere in my relationships and deep down I know it and am anxious about it? Is this what you meant? At any rate I have not always had the anxiety and stress over this specific point, with other partners it was about attraction or not feeling “in love”, or about other things, sometimes I didn’t even know what bothered me. Which I guess could mean that the issue always repeats itself, but I think it latches itself to stuff that really bother me in reality, it’s not just made-up stuff. That’s what’s troubling me.

    Sorry if my message is confused, I am quite anxious right now and trying to express my thoughts as they come.

    I would have like to share further about my family but I’m afraid this feels too exposed for me, I already feel that I gave out too much information on this forum, I am usually a very discreet person.

    Again thank you for being there.

    #116691
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear Midnight:

    No, I didn’t at all mean that you were “compromising, that I was closing my eyes to the reality in which I am living – meaning, that my relationship cannot be truly satisfying.” I meant that as a child you compromised with reality, as children do.

    I want to send this tid bit before I read the rest of your last post and reply. Once again: there is no evidence I detected that your husband is not good enough to be your husband and that your relationship with him is lacking other than your ROCD symptoms which predate your relationship with him and have nothing to do with him.

    anita

    #116692
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear Midnight:

    I know your ROCD thoughts are connected to real-life facts and experiences. For example, you really had a “somewhat philosophical discussion lately” with your husband, in real life. And he probably didn’t express as much of an intellectual insight into the discussion as you have, in real life, maybe less than other men have in your life experience.

    So there are always real life facts that trigger the ROCD thinking.

    But the core of the ROCD, the cause of the anxiety fueling the ROCD is not in the real life lack of adequate intellect in that particular discussion you had lately.

    I asked you questions about your childhood because I believe the core of your ROCD is there.

    If you feel uncomfortable sharing more about your childhood here, do not. You may want to share without giving identifiable information like ages and timelines which could be connected to you by someone reading your thread, if that helps.

    Thing is in two years of therapy, with the therapist’s legal obligation to not share your shares with anyone, no insight has been made regarding your childhood-and your ROCD.

    Proceed as you choose.

    anita

    #116693
    Midnight
    Participant

    Dear Anita,

    Thank you so much for your reassuring response. It does help to know that you believe that my core issues are not related to my husband.

    Because sometimes it feels as though if only I hadn’t been in this relationship things would be better, more peaceful. But when I do get some perspective back on it, I don’t really believe it’s true. Because I have always had this feeling of dread, stress and distance from my partner in any long relationship (by long I mean, more than 2-3 dates). Sometimes even very early on.

    I will consider sharing more about my family but I am not sure how comfortable I would feel about that, even if I omit some details as you suggested. It just feels too public for me, when I have no idea who might be reading and how many people will see this.

    I understand what you are saying about the therapy. Maybe it is because I have been too defensive with my therapist, or because I do not know how to access these more ancient layers of my psyche. Or maybe because there are no deep, dark secrets there to be revealed? I really don’t know. He responds to what I bring to the sessions but does not suggest methods, or asks questions, usually.

    #116695
    Midnight
    Participant

    Another thing that came up with my therapist: he was trying to help me look into the possibility that there have been sexual experiences, real or imagined by me, in my childhood that might be the origin of some of my anxieties today. He seemed to suggest that I might present some symptoms, but I don’t really agree. I have not been sexually active at an early age, or had extensive knowledge of sex as a child, or presented other kinds of symptoms (I do have an issue with pain during intercourse but I have reasons to believe is a physical issue in my case. He seems to think it is more of a psychological one).

    So I believe he does try to subtly point me in the direction of exploring my sexual experiences or imaginations as a child, but I have my own view about that and don’t really think it’s the source of my anxiety. It sounds a bit too Freudian for my taste but he is a Freudian therapist so I guess it’s not his fault:-)

    #116706
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear Midnight:

    I am thinking, from my experience with incompetent and one competent therapist that yours is not competent enough, not good enough, too vague, too not directive and well, so different than my own one good experience with a therapist. Mine started with a free session, followed a few he gave me a typed diagnosis as a starting point of therapy, with a list of objectives he intended to meet in our therapy and how to get there. I still have those papers. After a few months he revisited those and re-evaluated.

    His sessions with me often went longer than any set time. I don’t remember there being a set time except when he had a session with another client right after.

    He gave me homework from one session to the next, checked homework next. Part of the therapy was psycho-education. There was nothing mysterious, no vague suggestions; everything was clear. He gave me all he had, all the information, all his understanding. When my two years with him were over, I had the education and the tools to continue on my own.

    He was honest, hard working and committed to my well being with no motivation or intent to prolong the process so he can guarantee his income from me.

    Another point: I believe there are probably no earth shattering sexual abuse in your childhood- often this is what people try to find- the forgotten, repressed sexual abuse. What happens is that sexual experiences later in life are of the affected by injuries in childhood, but those injuries are most often not sexual.

    Also, there may very well be no physical abuse or an earth shattering, movie-worthy revelation. The injuries in childhood, looking back as adults, don’t look “that bad”- but for a child, they were that bad! A child sees things from a very fresh perspective, a “beginner’s mind”, a perspective o a child whose brain is just beginning to be formed. What you see from here, as an adult, is not what you saw then.

    You wrote: ” I have always had this feeling of dread, stress and distance from my partner in any long relationship”- what you think now that you need to uproot, hidden memories or feelings you felt as a child, those feelings never left you. You are still feeling “dread, stress and distance from..” This is what you felt then, as a child, and still feeling. As a matter of fact, you wrote “I have always”- and I agree, always as from a very early age.

    So it is the dread, stress and distance that you experienced as a child, in your relationship with every care taker: both your parents, and your older brother, that I believe is the root for your ROCD.

    anita

    #116708
    Midnight
    Participant

    Dear Anita,

    Thank you so much for your detailed reply. A lot to think about there.

    I guess for some reason it’s still hard for me to believe that these issues stem from my childhood experiences. Maybe because I am under the influence of these thoughts at the moment and so I tend to think that these are all “excuses”, and the issue is much simpler – that the relationship is not right.

    I understand what you are saying about the child’s perspective and the adult perspective though. This rings very true. But I wonder how do you go back to things that you experienced as a child and use them to feel better in the present, do you just try to remember more about these experiences somehow? I really don’t know how to approach this, how to go from here and explore this further. Do you try to get in touch with more memories, that you have forgotten about? And if so, how?

    Please don’t feel obliged to answer my questions about this, I realize this is probably stuff that cannot really be addressed so much in this format. I was just wondering if you had some general idea of how these things are accessed or processed in a therapy such as the one you underwent.

    I do take into consideration your thoughts about my current therapist. You might very well be right. I think I will gave him a few more chances, in the hope that my sharing my experiences with my brother did open up some new path. Also, I will try to speak to him about my need of clarity and direction from him, I have not really spoken to him about this but accepted this as being his style, as this was also the way it was with other therapists I have been to. Maybe he will adapt his style a bit if I bring it up in a more outspoken way.

    I do believe that the therapist you have been to used a different method to Freudian ones though, so maybe it’s more a question of trying something else if this doesn’t work out. I have been wary of CBT because from reading about it it felt to me a bit simplistic, like training your mind to ignore or control specific thoughts. Not an in-depth approach, but more like a training of sorts. I was afraid that if I try that it will only help for a while, and then my issues might evolve into a new form because they would not have been addressed under the surface.

    I admit that lately I have started viewing therapy as a place for me to share thoughts and ideas that I can’t share with my partner for obvious reasons (because it’s mostly regarding my feelings for him), and to vent off my feelings without hurting him. I have pretty much accepted the idea that I would just need to see a therapist forever (not necessarily this one, but someone). Because I’m just an anxious person and I need this support.

    Thank you so much for reading and for taking the time to respond. It really is a big help.

    #116729
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear Midnight:

    Bed time for me but will reply to you tomorrow morning. I did read your first few lines thought (will read the rest tomorrow). You wrote “it’s still hard for me to believe that these issues stem from my childhood experiences.”

    We are formed during our childhood, as a result of our childhood experiences. Those childhood years are called our Formative Years because our brains are formed then, connections made. Your first relationships were the ones in your childhood, with your care takers and the people you spent a lot of time with.

    Till the-morrow, take care:

    anita

    #116739
    Midnight
    Participant

    Thank you so much for taking the time to respond so late.

    I look forward to reading anything you would like to add, when you have a moment.

    #116747
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear Midnight:

    The effectiveness of your current therapy depends on your goal. If your goal continues to be what you mentioned that it is: a place to vent your feelings about your husband (ROCD) so that you can manage to stay with your husband and maintain a reasonable relationship- then your therapy has been effective so far.

    If your goal is to heal from your ROCD, then your therapy is ineffective. An effective therapy for healing is not a wing-it kind of therapy, a place where you go to vent. A professional therapist, as I see it, is like the one I had. He was flexible enough to attend to what I brought up to each session but he also prepared from one session to the next. He set goals to my therapy, a strategy regarding meeting those goals; he responded to me via email and phone in between sessions (no extra charge!). He often emailed me a homework assignment via email after a session. He thought about me, as his patient/ client in between sessions. This is very unlike my other experiences with therapists who seemed to think about me only for the fifty minutes I was there, at best.

    Did I mention to you that I too had ROCD? I no longer do following my therapy which I shared with you here.

    Regarding the connection between your childhood experiences and ROCD and how to access childhood memories, this is what I learned from experience (and I mentioned this principle to you already):

    You currently, in the present time, are feeling what you felt as a child. So you don’t need to go back but instead, notice what you are feeling now, “this feeling of dread, stress and distance”- that you are currently feeling IS the feeling you had as a child. So there is the access. Here is another thing you have access to in the present: your present relationships with your parents and older brother.

    The goal of the ROCD is to focus on what is less distressing for you to focus on (your relationship with your husband, and before him, other boyfriends) instead of what is more distressing (your relationships with your parents and older brother).

    Again: it is up to you what your goal is, if it is to maintain your relationship with your husband as is; manage the ROCD via venting so it doesn’t destroy your relationship with your husband, then your therapy is so far adequate. Unfortunately, you are likely to continue to be distressed throughout your relationship and otherwise.

    If your goal is healing, so that you are no longer distressed- then your therapy has been inadequate.

    anita

    #116760
    Midnight
    Participant

    Dear Anita,

    Thank you for taking the time and the effort to writing back to me in such detail.

    I am very glad to hear that you have managed to heal from your ROCD and have had such a good experience with your therapist. It is very encouraging for me to hear that. From what you told, it seems it might have been this specific person, rather than a specific method, which helped you so much. I believe it is quite rare for a therapist to put in extra time or allow communication in between sessions in this way, he must have been very committed to your process and maybe a bit more flexible about the “rules”. All in all, he sounds like a rare find.

    My goal is obviously to heal completely from this, not just vent, because it is making my life miserable. And the venting itself does not bring much relief at all. But thinking back, I guess I have always had some level of anxiety at times in my life, maybe not as a very young child but I believe it started around age 9-10. So this makes me wonder – maybe I’m just “like that”. Maybe this is my character, my physiology even, and there’s nothing to be done. Although I would have much preferred having anxiety about any other issue, or just general anxiety, instead of having it evolve around the one person I am closest to. I saw you wrote on another thread that you are still dealing with anxiety. From what you told here, you have managed to break the link between your anxiety and your partner, and this is a goal I would give anything to achieve. So to answer what you were saying – my goal IS to heal from this completely, I’m just not sure that this is possible anymore.

    I do wonder as well about leaving my therapist – will that not be similar to finding him inadequate and “breaking up”, like I oftendid with my relationships? I had intended to remain with him and try to trust him, also as a way to break this pattern of leaving relationships.

    I have two questions for you about your therapist if you don’t mind – did he diagnose you with ROCD? Or did he prefer not to label you or your feelings? And also – I suppose you live in the US? Because reading about him made me wonder if I could not see him myself:) I hope these questions were not too impertinent…

    I really don’t know how to thank you for being here, it’s such a big help, you have no idea.

    #116765
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Dear Midnight:

    I saw my therapist when I lived in Southern California. If you do too, let me know. He cannot legally treat a person who lives in another state (as I do for the past three years), via skype or such.

    Regarding your concern about terminating your relationship with your therapist as being congruent with ROCD behavior: your therapist is not- or shouldn’t be- your friend or boyfriend-like in any way. He is supposed to be a professional, much like a medical doctor would be. He is paid for a purpose- to promote your healing. He has this professional obligation to you- to help you heal (or manage, as long as the goal is clear to both of you).

    It is not your job to understand him, to reach out to him, to be liked by him, to figure his limitations and be understanding. It is his job to help you heal/ manage. This is why he is paid.

    So, no- terminating your supposed professional relationship with him because he has not fulfilled his professional obligation to you does not fall within your ROCD.

    My therapist’s initial diagnosis of me was not ROCD. I let him know from the beginning that I was already diagnosed with OCD. The diagnosis he started with was Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)- and I no longer fit the criteria for that diagnosis. Anxiety- yes, still healing, in the process.

    Regarding your thoughts: ” maybe I’m just ‘like that’. Maybe this is my character, my physiology even, and there’s nothing to be done.” This is what I thought too, for the longest time. Not completely: I was conflicted regarding Nature vs Nurture. After my therapy and my healing process of more than five years, ongoing, Nurture wins. As I communicate with other people online and in person, again and again, I see Nurture being most influential.

    Nature is the case in animals that act strictly by instincts, like bees. Nurture plays more in animals that have emotions, like fear, attachment, anger, etc. And Nurture is most influential in animals that have emotions and a heavy duty ability to think, aka humans. A bee doesn’t need to learn anything, it instinctively knows what to do. A lioness cub has to be shown how to hunt, has to learn via watching a care taker. A person has a much more complicated life than a lioness, a complicated society, so a child learns a whole lot from caretakers, needs to learn to function effectively. Hence Nurture is very powerful.

    anita

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