Dear Danielle:

You are welcome. I can understand why your boyfriend is affected by the thoughts/ obsessions you share with him. You can’t realistically expect him to not be affected. This is another reason (besides weakening the obsession-> compulsion link) that you shouldn’t ask him about your obsessions because it doesn’t help you (more than a moment of relief at best) and it harms him and could harm the relationship.

Reads to me that the relationship is okay, for now. He is deeply attached to you, but curb your questions, eliminate best you can; be selective as to what you share with him: he can’t cure your OCD, can’t make it better, so what is the point of sharing your doubts/ OCD with him….?

You mentioned your intuition vs OCD. Intuition is “the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning”- I assure you that for most of my life, I understood a whole LOT immediately, without conscious reasoning, that was NOT true. And since my healing process, I witness a whole lot of people’s intuition being incorrect.

You clearly love your boyfriend. You wouldn’t be able to spend as much time with him as you do if you didn’t love him.

Regarding ruining your own happiness with OCD, it flaring up when something good happens or is about to happen-

maybe it is like someone looking at a mountain and getting really excited about being on top where the air is cool and fresh and the view is magnificent. As you look up, you think: what if I fall on the climb up there, or what if the view is not that great and the air is too cold.

The anxiety increase can be because your brain is looking for all the possibilities things will not work out well. If so, it does that because in the past, when you were a child, you were excited about things, but then bad things happened. And so, now, your brain is trying to prepare you for those bad things.

What do you think?

anita