165. Is He Really The One for Me? Relationship OCD 

 Hello and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD  with Carrie Bock. I’m a Christ follower. wife and mother, licensed professional counselor who helps Christians struggling with OCD get to a deeper level of healing. When I couldn’t find resources for my clients with OCD, God called me to bring this podcast to you with practical tools for developing greater peace.

We’re here to bust through the shame and stigma surrounding struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories of healing and helping you replace uncertainty with faith. I’m here to help you let go of the past and future to walk in the present abundant life God has for you. So let’s dive right in to today’s episode. 

Today we are covering Relationship OCD. I know this is a topic that many of you struggle with. How do I know that? It’s because way back in episode 88, we did an episode on relationship OCD and anxiety with Samara Lane, where she shared some of her own personal story of relationship OCD and how that impacted her when she was dating and engaged to her now husband.

That episode has been incredibly popular. We also had an episode back in 131 of another personal story of relationship obsessions where Pierre talked with us about how he would ask every visiting pastor whether or not it was okay to get married again because he had had a divorce in his past. Just know if you’re curious about specific topics like this one, you can always search our episodes on the website at  carriebock.com. There is a tab called podcast breakdown with a great search feature on it that will lead you to those episodes. Relationship OCD can be really tough to work through because in the natural state of affairs there are a lot of uncertainties in our relationships. There may be times where you felt like a particular conversation or interaction went well only to find out that you came back and that that person was actually upset about something that you said and now there’s a riff that you didn’t know that was there.

Conversely, we can also probably have all had the experience of we have a social interaction and we think, oh, I was totally awkward, that was really weird, people didn’t like me, whatever the case was that we told ourselves about this relationship or social interaction and we were completely wrong, that wasn’t how people saw it at all, it was fine, everything was good to go.

I can think of a few different interactions that I’ve had with clients even and I have to at times tame my direct nature when it comes to therapy because I can feel very passionate about something and I do really care about the people that I work with and sometimes that comes out a little sideways or I come off too strong and there definitely have been situations where that’s I’ve come back and apologized to people or checked in and said, Hey, I know that we had this intense conversation last time where basically I was getting on to you about how you haven’t done your homework or how this is a serious issue in your life that you need to take care of, whatever the situation was.

And sometimes people were like, No, I really appreciate that. That was exactly how I needed you to be in that moment. That was what I really needed to hear, even though it was probably hard for me to hear. And in the course of many years, I am sure there probably have been some people that I’ve scared off from being too direct.

I’ll just say not every therapist is a good fit for every person, because sometimes personalities just don’t gel very well. And someone can be really, really skilled, but if you don’t feel that sense of connection with them, then you may not be able to progress forward. And that’s why we talk about the therapeutic relationship being so crucial.

Unfortunately, in the case of OCD, oftentimes what I see is that people have a great relationship with their therapist. The therapist is lacking the skills to be able to help them effectively. With relationship OCD, if that’s the only theme that’s going on, you’re probably not going to recognize it as OCD right away, or you may be in denial that this is actually an OCD issue.

You may just be thinking, no, I have social anxiety, or I feel insecure in my relationships, or I just really need to know this one thing. I need to know if I’m supposed to marry this person or not. And if I get the answer to that question, then everything will be better. The problem is that if it’s OCD, we know that everything won’t just be magically better once you answer that one question.

Even if you get some relative certainty about it, OCD will then come in with some other doubt. Let’s talk about typical obsessions and compulsions. You may obsess about past social interactions, how they went. You may have the compulsion to replay certain social interactions in your mind. You may start to question or doubt what was actually said in the interaction as you’re playing it back.

There may be concerns about whether or not you have offended someone. Of course, these types of situations can lead to a lot of reassurance seeking. So you may be asking that person, Hey, did you get offended in our conversation? Are we okay? Is our relationship alright? Things like that. You may be thinking to yourself, Well, Carrie, you just told us that you went back and checked in about some of your relationship interactions and whether or not the relationship was okay after those interactions.

Does that mean that it’s always OCD? No, absolutely not. The problem with OCD is that even after you get that reassurance, you’re still going to be questioning it, or you’re still going to be doubting whether or not your relationship is okay, even if someone just told you, yes, things are fine. The very thing that you’re trying to prevent, though, a rift in the relationship, can actually be caused by seeking reassurance too much.

If you’re struggling with relationship OCD, you also might read a lot of articles online. You might be googling information on relationships, or how do I know if I’ve offended someone? I would say relationships with your significant other probably get most impacted. So if you’re dating, it will be, how do I know if I should marry this person or not?

You might be googling that or asking a lot of different people, how do I know if this person really loves me? There are so many different things relationship wise that you can get stuck on and understand that ruminating is a big compulsion in this area as well. You don’t want to just be sitting there thinking about this over and over.

Or providing some type of self reassurance. This can take a massive amount of time for you that you’re not wanting to spend only on this. Might be important, but it might not be the only important thing in your life. OCD causes you to laser focus on one thing when you’re in that OCD bubble, and it really closes out the other things that are important to you.

Of all the themes of OCD, I really believe that relationship OCD is probably most connected to earlier experiences in life. Oftentimes, as we get into the story surrounding the relationship OCD, It either goes back to something in childhood or it goes back to a past relationship that could have been a relationship that was abusive, either verbally, physically, mentally, or it could have just been unhealthy in different ways, maybe not full blown abuse, but you know, it wasn’t a good situation.

And also, people may reflect back and recognize that they weren’t in the best place in their relationship with God while they were in that unhealthy relationship. That may cause you to be more concerned about your next relationship. Well, I want to make sure that this one I do the right way because that other relationship was unhealthy or toxic, and I don’t want to go down that road again.

That’s a good desire to have. However, OCD takes over and then you’re spending a ton of time on this instead of just slowing down and waiting out the process. It takes time to get to know someone, obviously, and to see them in different settings and environments. As you’re going along a dating relationship, for example, it’s going to take you time to know whether or not this is a godly person.

Whether or not this is somebody that you would want to marry, but that can be a really big obsession that you get stuck on. You might even have obsessions about getting divorced before you even get married. I think this one is pretty common as well. Once again, this is something that can be traced back to family of origin experiences.

Maybe your parents argued all the time, had a contested divorce. Maybe they didn’t get divorced, but they were miserable and it wasn’t a relationship that you would ever want to emulate in the future. What if you don’t have a picture of what a healthy relationship or marriage looks like because you haven’t seen it?

Maybe you haven’t seen it in your family, or you haven’t seen it with other friends. This is one area where I believe that the church can be incredibly healing potentially is to have these pillars or individuals who have been married a long time that can pour into the younger generation or the generation maybe that feels broken coming out of a divorce, coming out of a negative relationship situation.

Or maybe who stayed single for a long time, like, there should be other people that we can look to, even if our own families were unhealthy, to be able to say, hey, I know that this couple has something that I would want to emulate, like, these two people are following the Lord and they really do love each other, I see them love sacrificially.

If you don’t have that, I would really encourage you to pray that God will show you who those mentors can be in your life. Everyone has some type of relationship baggage, whether that’s from a broken friendship, broken romantic relationship, broken family of origin relationships. And we all have a place in our heart that needs healing from these broken relationships.

So the first step is really breaking it down and identifying how did this story get built up to where I’m obsessing about relationships? Am I struggling with fear of abandonment? Am I struggling with a fear of conflict because I haven’t seen healthy conflict in a relationship? There are some couples that don’t fight and that’s not healthy to never have an argument or never fight because it usually means that someone, one or both parties, is stuffing their feelings or holding things in to a point that things never get addressed until there’s all of a sudden this big wall of resentment.

It’s important to have a healthy level of assertiveness in your relationship where you’re able to share wants and needs that may not have been modeled for you, or you may have felt like it just didn’t matter what I needed growing up, I wasn’t going to receive it, and then that translates over into your relationships.

I would really encourage you to sit down with a journal or a piece of paper sometime if you’re struggling with relationship OCD, and map some of these relationship issues out that you believe that you’re struggling with. If you have a hard time identifying them, you may have a close friend, family member, Someone that you’re in a romantic relationship who can help you see some of those things that are hard to see on your own.

I talked way back in episode 10 about my anxiety dating my husband currently. I definitely had a fear of abandonment because I had been abandoned by my first husband and I knew how that felt and did not want to go through that again. I knew that consciously, but that was also manifesting in my body in a very physiological level, trying to keep me safe from getting too close to anyone or from opening myself up and making myself vulnerable.

That’s a huge and important piece in relationships, to be able to be vulnerable. So if that’s something that you’re struggling with, I really would encourage you to find those pieces that are blocking you from being able to do that. If you have Relationship OCD and are seeking therapy, I would really encourage you to seek someone who is trauma informed as well as OCD informed.

If your past is affecting your present, you’ve got to deal with it in order to have a better future. I have a variety of options for helping people that you can find on my website. I have Christian’s Learning ICBT, which will walk you through the ICBT process to apply to your situation. I have multi day intensives if you’re struggling with trauma and OCD.

together that can be super helpful for you. All of that is on karybach. com. Let’s talk about a few things that you can do if you’re struggling with relationship OCD. The first step that we’ve already talked about is really to build awareness of how this came to be and how you came to be stuck on these specific issues.

What type of things from your past are feeding into this story that we need to be so obsessed about this and so super careful. That we don’t somehow mess up this relationship or these relationships that are in our lives. Definitely walk away from reassurance seeking, googling, reddit, all of those things that we’ve talked about in the past.

It’s only going to reinforce that obsessive compulsive loop for you and you’re going to continue to go around in that cycle. Being able to recognize when you’re starting to ruminate on something is super important so that you can detach from that and start thinking about something different, go do something else that’s important to you.

We talk a lot in ICBT about relying on sensory information. And that can be hard in relationship OCD, right, because we are going to have what we call sensory gaps where you may not exactly know what that person is thinking. Does this person really love me? I may not know that yet. I may not have been in the relationship long enough to have a sense of that.

Now, if I have been in a relationship with somebody for quite some time, and there’s been all of this evidence that they do really love me, or they have made sacrifices for me, then I can go back and look at that, and that can potentially be sense data. What OCD does is that it doubts the senses that are clear and already here.

And so being able to identify that is helpful. Like, oh, I actually do have some sensory evidence that this person has made sacrifices for me, that they do really care about me, that they’re not perfect. And I think that’s a big piece of relationship OCD, recognizing that. All relationships are going to have issues, and all relationships are going to have imperfections.

You’re not going to find the perfect spouse. You’re not going to find the perfect friendship, and knowing that that’s okay. And, that if you are in a healthy relationship, that it can survive conflict. It’s actually not the amount of conflict that is the issue, it’s what we do with that conflict. How we move forward, how we make repairs.

When repairs need to be made, that’s another thing that we didn’t talk about earlier, is that you can have all kinds of ideas about relationships, like conflict is bad, that may not be true at all, but you might need to work on realigning, especially if you’re beating yourself up over mistakes maybe that you feel like you’re making in the relationship.

So just to recap a little bit, how has my story led me to this point, building the awareness over what pieces are OCD, the ruminating, the reassurance seeking, what type of rules have I set up for relationships, how is this Relationship OCD, is it getting blended with other forms of OCD, are they coming in, so it may start out as like a perfectionism OCD that’s bleeding over into the relationship OCD, and I’m getting super hyper fixated on any time I make a mistake or hurt the other person’s feelings.

Or any time that we get into conflict, I’m getting hyperfixated on any time that my need is not met, and then questioning the validity of the whole relationship by one or two instances. And that’s the biggest thing that I would tell you about relationships, is that it takes time to notice relational patterns.

So do we have enough external sensory information to make a judgment about this relationship, or don’t we? If you don’t have enough information about the relationship, you’re going to have to hang in there and wait, and resist the temptation to make snap judgments. If you have actually vetted this person, if other people are coming to you and saying, Wow, this is a really great guy.

You definitely should marry him. He’s exactly the man that you’ve been praying for. And you’re still doubting that? It sounds like OCD is causing you to doubt the sensory information that you already have. You may not doubt that the other person loves you, but you may then start to doubt if you love the other person.

And for that, you need to really get in touch with your internal sense data. How do you know that you love someone else? Are you doubting that you love anyone else in your life? Are you doubting that you love your mother? How do you know that you love your mother? When you’re good tuning into and identifying, trusting that internal sense data, that really helps you be able to move forward in some of these areas.

I know relationship OCD can be sticky and tricky, it’s a little less straightforward than some things that feel really tangible. The important thing is for you to know that there is absolutely hope for you and help is available. You can find me at kerrybach. com. Thank you so much for hanging out with me today, and until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.

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Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you. Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By The Well Counseling. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area.