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Tag: ROCD

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

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in OCD, Podcast Episode.

In this episode, Carrie talks about Relationship OCD and how it distorts normal relationship doubts into obsessive thoughts. She shares valuable insights and practical tools for overcoming ROCD while maintaining faith in God’s plan for your relationships.

Episode Highlights:

  • How Relationship OCD (ROCD) impacts relationships and leads to constant doubt and reassurance-seeking behaviors.
  • The connection between past experiences, childhood, and past relationships in fueling ROCD obsessions.
  • How trauma-informed therapy and OCD-specific strategies can help address underlying issues in Relationship OCD for deeper healing.
  • How ICBT (Inference Based  Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) can be an effective approach to challenge and reframe the irrational thoughts that drive Relationship OCD.

Episode Summary:

Today, we’re diving into a topic that many of you struggle with: Relationship OCD. I know this because we’ve addressed it before in episodes 88 and 131, where Samara Lane and Pierre shared their personal experiences with relationship OCD. These episodes have been incredibly popular, and for good reason. Relationship OCD can be especially challenging to navigate because, in normal relationships, there are naturally occurring uncertainties.

You may have had a conversation that seemed fine at first, only to later realize that the other person was upset by something you said. These moments of doubt are normal, but when OCD takes over, it causes you to obsess about these interactions, seeking constant reassurance or replaying them in your mind. But even after you get that reassurance, OCD convinces you that it’s still not enough. It’s a never-ending cycle.

If you’re struggling with Relationship OCD, it’s important to recognize that it’s not just about social anxiety or insecurity; it’s about the compulsive need for certainty. It’s easy to fall into the trap of googling relationship advice or asking others for validation. However, this only fuels the OCD cycle. Instead, I encourage you to reflect on your past experiences and how they might be influencing your current fears and doubts. Sometimes, past trauma or unhealthy relationships can set the stage for OCD to take over. Understanding where these feelings are coming from is the first step toward healing.

I also highly recommend seeking a trauma-informed therapist who is familiar with OCD. Stay with me through this episode, as we explore practical steps for moving past the doubt and embracing the freedom that comes with trusting in yourself and in God’s guidance. You are not alone, and with the right tools, you can move forward in your relationships with confidence and peace.

If you’re struggling with Relationship OCD or any aspect of OCD, I encourage you to listen to the full episode and explore the practical steps I discuss to help you break free. Visit carriebock.com for more resources to support your healing journey. 

Explore Related Episode:

Transcript

 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.

To receive weekly encouragement, find out about our monthly Meet the Podcast host Zoom meetings and receive information on exclusive sales. Become an email insider today. All you have to do is go to  kiribach. com and scroll towards the bottom of the page. You’ll find a spot to put in your email and receive a free download in your inbox from us.

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. 

88. Relationship OCD and Anxiety with Samara Lane

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, OCD, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode.

On today’s episode, Samara Lane, shares her healing journey through relationship OCD. We also talk about how to overcome anxiety and OCD in relationships.

Episode Highlights:

  • How does OCD manifest in relationships?
  • How to distinguish OCD from real feelings?
  • What can cause OCD to develop in relationships?
  • Some helpful ways to help you cope with anxiety and OCD in your relationship. 

Episode Summary:

In Episode 88 of Christian Faith and OCD, released just in time for Valentine’s Day, I sit down with Samara Lane, a relationship anxiety and ROCD coach, to dive into a topic that often goes unnoticed—relationship OCD (ROCD). This episode sheds light on how obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors can show up in relationships, like constantly seeking reassurance from your partner or endlessly Googling whether your relationship is “right.”

Samara shares her personal battle with ROCD, which became especially intense during her engagement. Even though she was in a healthy relationship, she found herself overwhelmed by doubts and intrusive thoughts that made decision-making incredibly difficult. Her story is one of perseverance—after years of trial and error, she developed a system to manage her ROCD and now coaches others who are going through the same struggles.

Samara also shares how childhood wounds, insecure attachment styles, and relationship trauma can contribute to ROCD. We touch on how OCD is often rooted in a desire for safety, and how past hurts can lead us to project our fears onto current relationships.

If you’ve ever dealt with relationship anxiety or wonder if you might be struggling with ROCD, this episode is packed with helpful insights and practical advice to help you break free from the cycle of doubt.

Related Links and Resources:

www.samaralane.com

More Episodes To Listen To:

Transcript

Carrie: Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD episode 88. I didn’t plan it this way, but it just so happens that this episode is coming out around Valentine’s Day, and it’s on anxiety and relationship OCD, so that seemed to gel together well. I have on the show with me today Samara Lane, who is a relationship anxiety and ROCD coach.

Been wanting to, for a little while, have this episode about relationship OCD because it’s a very hot topic. First of all, a lot of people don’t even know that it exists. Am I correct?

Samara: That is very correct, including the people who start experiencing all the symptoms and wondering what’s wrong with them.

Carrie: Right. There’s this very stereotypical view of OCD that it’s somebody like Monk that you see on TV concerned about germs and concerned with order and cleanliness of things, but that’s really only one subtype of OCD. There are several different subtypes, so it’s often that people will believe, “Hey, I have anxiety,” and certainly, anxiety in OCD is very related.

But often, I have people come to me and say, “Hey, I have this anxiety.” They start telling their story, and then I realize, do you know that you’re actually having obsessions? These types of thoughts and, do you know that what you’re doing, intense Googling on the internet that’s actually a compulsion or seeking reassurance from your partner all the time is a compulsion, and they don’t realize that until somebody kind of puts a name and a label to things and it helps so much being able to know kind of how to move forward with that.

Samara’s Personal Relationship Story

You have your own personal relationship story about what led you to become an anxiety and relationship OCD coach. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Samara: Yeah, for sure. I mean, it was my own journey through Helen back, really, because I’ve never experienced suffering as much as I have with really intense spikes of OCD.

I’m sure all of your listeners can relate to that. For me, it comes on differently for everyone. It came on the worst; the biggest initial spike that made me realize something was going on here was right before and during my partner’s proposal. I could tell, I just knew that he was about to propose, and I had this wave of anxiety.

We were at this beautiful, lovely dinner he’d planned for us. Many years ago, I remember being flooded with thoughts like, oh no, I have to decide the rest of my life right now, and what if this is the wrong choice? Or what if I’m settling? There are some things that aren’t perfect in the relationship—so much pressure.

I felt I was hyperventilating, going to have a panic attack, while he pulled out the ring and popped the question, and I said yes at the moment. And I think also because the anxiety was so intense now in hindsight, the OCD thoughts were so intense, I felt really guilty and like I was faking it when I said yes because so many doubts were coming up.

So I felt like I was lying and just saying what he wanted to hear, but I was like, yes, and then I was like, I need to go home and sit down. It really our engagement; our proposal ended with both of us sitting on the kitchen floor, and I was crying and doing all the compulsions without realizing it, seeking reassurance, confessing everything, telling him all of my nitpicking, intrusive thoughts, all of my doubt.

That, of course, didn’t feel good to him. I don’t recommend doing that. And it wasn’t really the romantic engagement experience that either of us had planned on, and up until this point, we’d been together for over two years and lived together. And the relationship was great, right? We wanted to be together, but it felt such; it just whew flooded me with most people.

Yes, it was an unconscious compulsion. I just started Googling. I was like, what the heck is wrong with? Fortunately, at least the one good thing that can come from our initial Googling is finding help and education and realizing that we’re not crazy; we’re not alone. This is a thing. Relationship anxiety and relationship OCD are a thing.

I’m so grateful that relationship OCD is now even a term and is even recognized by so many more people as a subtype because for me, this was 12 or more years ago, I don’t even remember, 13 years ago, maybe now, I didn’t see anything on relationship OCD back then. It was one person was talking about relationship anxiety and had a blog, and that was it.

But yeah, that really started my journey, and I cut a long story short, I felt like I tried everything under the sun to feel better. I read books, and I saw therapy and counseling. I took courses and really was through trial and error because I didn’t have a set system that was proven that I knew would work. And frankly, I didn’t know what resources were available to me, even if there were any back then.

So, just doing my best, I pieced together a system that really freed me. It takes time, of course, and it takes a lot of practice cause we’ve been having these OCD tendencies for so long. But that’s the practice I now teach my clients. I certainly wish that I had known then what I know now, right? It would’ve saved me years of suffering because it was years; it was many years that I suffered without really knowing how to handle it. And now it’s night and day different, of course, but it was really hard.

How Does OCD Show Up in Relationships?

Carrie: I’m curious: before this manifested in terms of your relationship with your fiance, did you have other concerns about other relationships? Like close friends, teachers, or family members?

Samara: Yeah, like anxiety with other types of relationships? Great question, and one that I’ve done a lot of reflection on, and in hindsight, absolutely. I never thought of it this way because I think it stayed mild or moderate enough that I just kind of coped and worked, tried to cope, if that makes sense. But yeah, I look back and see now there have always been tendencies to, like, oh, my best friend gets me really angry.

Well, maybe I don’t want to be her friend anymore. Running away and avoiding the things that are triggering, upsetting, or make me feel bad. And I also did this in many romantic relationships with past partners.

Carrie: Avoidance is definitely a big piece of anxiety and OCD that people have to work through. And it’s hard because the natural tendency when we feel discomfort is to say, “Hey, let me pull away from that.” But it only feeds and heightens anxiety and OCD more to avoid things. I call it the avoidance cycle. It’s like the avoidance confirms that you really do have something to be afraid of versus facing that fear and walking into it, even though you feel uncomfortable, helps you know, I really can do this.

I can handle this situation that I don’t feel I can handle. I’m curious as far as when you’re talking with somebody because it’s normal. Everyone who’s been in a romantic relationship knows that maybe if you’re looking at getting married, it’s normal to have what people cold feet before the wedding and have some trepidation.

It is a big commitment, and we should take that seriously. Now, how does somebody know? Is it at a level where it’s problematic versus this is just kind of normal relationship concerns that everybody goes through?

Samara: Such a good question and one that we really struggle with when we’re trying to discern what’s the anxiety and what are legitimate issues or challenges that we’re having.

I think you’re absolutely correct when making a big life choice, especially for those of us who are prone to OCD tendencies or anxiety. of course we tend to overthink, but even anyone without OCD or anxiety is going to possibly, potentially have a cold feet, like you said there. And all relationships have challenges.

My partner and I have had to work a lot on communication and how to navigate a relationship and a partnership. How do we navigate conflict? So those are really common challenges that aren’t red flags. They’re just part of being in a relationship, and it tends to happen when there’s anxiety triggers us.

It spikes something within us. It could be thoughts without sensations. It could be sensations without thoughts. It could be both together—sensations, meaning facing heart, panic, fear, and things like that. Our body is different in the sense of how we respond to it. It’s not just like, oh yeah, we had an argument earlier.

I think we’ll revisit that soon and maybe continue talking about it and working through it together. The average non-OCD mind might think it’s more common if we’re in the ROCD to go immediately into, oh, it’s a bad sign. Maybe I don’t love them anymore, or maybe we’ll never make it work.

Maybe I’ve made a terrible mistake. Maybe I’ve already wasted the best years of my life trying to be with the wrong person. Maybe we need to break up, even though I don’t want to. There’s a part of me that really doesn’t want to, even though there’s also a part of me that feels that the only answer is to break up.

And so it’s this back and forth, this inner war within ourselves. I hate to use the word red flag because I think that alone can be overused, misconstrued, and highly triggering. The things we would want to take really seriously are untreated addiction, any kind of true abuse, ongoing, repeated dishonesty or cheating or something like that, of course, and anyone would want to take those seriously. But those aren’t the things that relationship anxiety glows onto the minutiae. Another thing I can share about this real quick is that there are two sides to the relationship anxiety to the ROCD coin. One side is the I’m not enough, and that’s how it’s expressed. It’s a little more obvious, in a way, easier to tell. This is a “me” thing. This is about my relationship with myself.

For those who have ever experienced it, my partner hasn’t texted me back. Do they like me? Do they love me? Something changed. For example, on the other side of the relationship, the anxiety coin expresses itself as What if my partner’s not enough? Or what if my relationship isn’t enough? What if this life choice isn’t enough?

And at the root of it, it still actually is an us thing, and it’s very clever how the ROCD is expressing itself, but that’s when we have intrusive thoughts like, am I settling? Is there someone I’d be a better match with? Am I really attracted to them? Do I really love them? I don’t feel the way I thought I should feel courageous enough to keep going within and practicing our mindfulness and our awareness; we’ll see underneath this is really, again, the same, oftentimes the same core issue. Am I enough? Is my choice enough? Am I safe? Is there danger? I must protect myself.

How People with OCD View Conflict in Relationships

Carrie: The need for safety, getting down to the root of the issue, and feeling unsafe. Not necessarily because your relationship is unsafe like you talked about; we’re not talking about abusive and unsafe relationships. We’re talking about safe relationships, but our perception due to intrusive thoughts can get that shaken up and make it feel unsafe when it’s okay. For example, conflict, all relationships have conflict, but if you have this high level of anxiety and intrusive thoughts, conflict can feel 10 times more threatening than it does to the average person. So you have to learn how to deal with those things and how to navigate them.

How long have you been together with your husband now?

Samara: It’s starting to be easy to lose count. We became a couple 13 years ago, almost 12 and a half years ago. We’ve been married for over eight of those years now.

Carrie: Was it a big learning curve for him to learn kind of how to navigate some of these issues?

Samara: Oh yes, absolutely. And bless him. Not everyone has his experience, but he was so confident in us and remained so confident and committed to us that even if I was in the early days of it, seeking reassurance or doubts.

“I don’t know about this. Are you sure he’d? Oh, I’m positive. We’re great. We’re going to do wonderful.” And of course, then my OCD just, instead of feeling grateful, it was just, well, he’s too confident. I don’t really trust his judgment. But he has been such really forgiving.

There have been times when what I expressed was really hurtful and really hurt him deeply and emotionally, and he has just stayed committed. I’ve done a beautiful job of just trying not to take it personally, acknowledging this is a thing, and being honest with me about his feelings and how it affects him, right?

I definitely learned early on not to divulge all the things anymore.

Carrie: I’m curious about your process, and I also have some thoughts about this. How do you feel this develops, or where does it come from, the bent towards relationship OCD specifically and anxiety?

Samara: Totally. Yes. I would say I have a predisposition to OCD. Not all of my clients, but I know for me, as an example, when I was little, in hindsight, I didn’t know what was going on, but I was ruminating and , really worried about moral scrupulosity if I’m saying that term correctly, something wrong, oh, I have to confess to my mom right away, and then I’d get immediate relief from it.

So, I see those tendencies in me from a young age. So, just in general, it can be a predisposition to OCD. In general, oftentimes people have had other OCD themes, and then it switches to ROCD or vice versa, or maybe they just always had social anxiety, and now suddenly it’s expressing as a more severe form of OCD or more noticeable form, other things that it can come from.

So again, just like biology, how are we wired right? Do we have anxiety in our history? Do we have any predisposition to this? I also often see that there is some wounding, some emotional wounding, that could be trauma, big or small, even things that we don’t necessarily think of as trauma. Sometimes, they’re very clear-cut and dry, but it could be when you got teased on the school bus, and that is still this unhealed part of our shadow self, right?

Our inner child really needs that love, compassion, and healing. It can also be wounds in our adulthood if our last relationship or one of our prior relationships ended badly or painfully. That can certainly affect things: attachment styles, anxious attachment, avoidant attachment, disorganized, and any kind of insecure attachment.

We sometimes see it as a factor. Also, just general life stressors, right? If we have a predisposition to OCD, then if we’re in college and it’s really stressful, or we’re moving or switching careers. Life stressors can bring up this feeling of being unsafe, unsettled, or in limbo. And then, often, it just wants to glom onto something outside of ourselves.

Oh, it’s the relationship. I know it is. It must be the relationship. I’ve had a moment of clarity. So there’s a lot of different things. And then, even when we are struggling with our self-esteem, self-trust, or self-worth, I have seen that play a role in it. It could be one, it could be a variety of those things.

Carrie: I’m glad that you brought up a few different things there in terms of working with many people with OCD and a trauma overlap connection. Yes, there is that propensity towards OCD, but then there are also these wounding childhood experiences. Sometimes it’s not as dramatic as abuse, or sometimes it is.

Sometimes, it’s not as big as being physically or emotionally abused or something like that. Sometimes, it’s more what you didn’t get. It’s more the lack of somewhat of emotional neglect or the lack of engagement by caregivers or others when you need it the most. And we’re looking at not just what people received but what they did not receive in relationships.

And there can be a fear of vulnerability of getting too close to somebody. And then, if I have to find a way, my brain’s trying to protect me and find a way that I won’t get hurt again. So I’ve gotta kind of push back against that and, oh, there must be something wrong or must be something nitpicky about this relationship that needs to be fixed or worked on. It also can be a perfectionistic tendency because we think, oh, well, this happened, or they did this small thing to hurt us, and they may hurt us in a really big way. Or maybe it means they’re not faithful in the future because of this one little thing they did to hurt my feelings. That type of thing kind of blows up. So, I think we have to conceptualize that anxiety in any form is trying to keep us safe from hurt. And that’s especially true in the relationship OCD aspect and past romantic relationships, whether it was a divorce. Whether it was a bad breakup or a toxic, narcissistic relationship you got out of. Those deep wounds can last for much longer than we would like them to.

That needs some healing and needs some attention. We can’t just gloss over that and say, well, now I’m with Joe over here, and he’s nothing like Bob. He’s not hurting me, or he’s not abusing me. You can tell your brain that, but your body may still be going haywire. This is unsafe. I know from our conversations before you said I’m not a Christian, but I have a lot of coaching clients who are Christian.

What have you seen in Christian clients, specifically those struggling with this relationship? Anxiety, OCD?

Samara: It can feel; the number one that comes to mind is this fear and this feeling or belief that this is God saying that they’re not the right person. And how do you know? Sometimes, there can also be a lot of guilt.

I seem to have lots of clients that find me, not all, but some of them may be exploring. They’re doing their religion, they’re practicing their faith maybe a little differently than how they were raised. They can also feel this guilt and shame, and is this relationship bad? Or if they have premarital sex.

Then, they can really feel a lot of guilt and shame around that. It can really fuel a lot of the OCD if that’s not something that they believe is right. But the number one that I see is, how do I discern between is this God telling me this isn’t my person, versus this is just anxiety.

Carrie: That’s a really huge one that I run into and hear a lot is people say, is this God, or is this OCD, or is it the devil?

What is this that’s going on in my mind? How do you help people discern some of that?

Samara: I think each of us, it’s really coming to our own discernment and understanding and what resonates with us, what my clients have found most helpful, and what I personally believe is God doesn’t communicate through OCD.

Carrie: That’s not God.

Samara: It is different. And the more we learn about the OCD mind, as I’m sure so many amazing listeners here learn from you all the time and how it works and the signs that we’re having intrusive thoughts, signs that we’re doing compulsions and feeding the cycle, the more easily it’s we’re able to identify this is the pattern, this is the thing, and that’s not God.

I believe that God communicates. God can communicate in a firm way sometimes, but not through riddling us with crippling fear. And I believe that God is a really loving being and forces there to meet us with compassion as we go through these things, not to beat ourselves up. That’s really the mind.

Carrie: Absolutely. I like how you put that. I know you mentioned mindfulness a little bit earlier. Is that something that you practiced as part of your process?

Samara: Absolutely. Yes. It’s such a critical part of it. The way that I love to think about it and describe it is when we’re in active OCD thoughts and panic, it’s we have forgotten that there’s just a story playing in our mind.

It might as well be a movie that we’re watching, but we’ve gotten so sucked in and hooked by it that we feel like we’re a character. We think the movie is real, right? It’s like a bad dream. Like, oh no, all these bad things are true or might be happening or might happen in the future, and we forget that we’ve just fallen into this story that’s totally made up.

It’s just a story, and we have the choice and the ability to step back and really look at the thoughts, watch what the mind is doing, observe the judgments that it’s making, observe the sensations and emotions in our bodies and just let the movie play without hooking into it.

Carrie: Almost like you fall down into this Alice Wonderland world, but everything feels super real when you’re in the midst of the OCD thought storm. That’s definitely relatable, I think, to a lot of our listeners who have experienced that. I think this has been very informative for us because a lot of people may be listening to this and realizing I didn’t realize that those were OCD obsessions that I was actually having about my relationship, and now this will be able to help them kind of find a pathway towards healing as I think is really important.

Samara: Absolutely. I mean, I suppose the good news, if there is any, is ROCD is a subtype of OCD like you said, and so we heal it in a lot of ways, just like we would other types of OCD. It can, and I think one of the trickier parts about it is all the societal conditioning that is so perpetuated and prevalent in movies and media, Hollywood and fairytale stories that we grew up with, and social media memes all over the place.

So weeding through the relationship myths and unlearning and debunking those along with, like you said, any trauma or wounding, whether around relationships or anything that’s coming up around this. Usually, it is related to other people. In my opinion, these are what make ROCD one of the most, if not the most, complex OCD subtypes to weed through because we’re also sent all these messages that no doubt mean don’t you really do have to leave. You should leave. I would leave, right?

And that’s a lot to weed through, but it’s a beautiful invitation and doorway to breaking free, recognizing and breaking free from the OCD cycle, and practicing deeper and greater levels of self-trust because no one knows what’s best for you, better than you do.

Carrie: At the end of the podcast, I like to ask our guests to share a story of hope, which is a time in which you received hope from God or another person since we’re called Hope for Anxiety and OCD.

Samara: I’d be happy to share. I’m sure there are so many that I could, but the one that’s coming to my mind really has to do with my relationship, but not necessarily the ROCD because it happened after I had really come to a level of mastery around the ROCD.

But a while back, my husband was diagnosed with OCD and ADHD. We’re a fun bunch over here sometimes, and he had a really rough mental health year after just a trying time in his life, and his mental health was really struggling. I noticed the toll it was taking on me and our family, and there was a point at which I just felt some hopelessness as a part of me knew.

Of course, we’re going to get through this. Of course, as a resilient human, everything will work out and be okay. But it’s almost it was more of a surrender. I don’t know how to solve this. I’ve tried everything I can. It’s really many ways out of my control. And I wrote a letter to God, and I just journaled and wrote out in present tense words like how I was deciding my life was now, and the ease around it and the joy around it.

Not that it was perfect at all, but there was a lot of connection, and it felt healthy and grounded for me, him, and a kid for everyone. I believe that this wasn’t a coincidence. Literally, two or three weeks later, his prescription had changed. This was a prescription that was really common.

It’s always been known about his psychiatrist already knew about it. And he just got on this prescription that managed it to the extent that it was night and day different. He was then able to, and the tools he used to manage and regulate himself finally worked. I’m not saying medication is for everyone, but I felt my letter had been received and then just kind of forgot I even wrote the letter.

The energy of practicing that surrender and being it’s, I can’t do this alone. I need help. Our family needs help. My husband is in pain and struggling, and just seeing the difference night and day and feeling so much better. It’s been a gift and a blessing.

Carrie: Thank you for sharing that.

Glad that your husband is doing better, too. Well, it was great having you on the show today, sharing your wisdom, and having a dialogue about this. I think it’s an important conversation. And what better time to put it out than around Valentine’s Day?

Samara: Exactly. A triggering time here for many.

Carrie: Yes.

I’m glad we were able to have this episode because relationship OCD doesn’t get talked about enough, and probably more people struggle with it than they actually realize.

Regardless of your relationship status this Valentine’s Day, I want you to know that you are fully and completely loved by God regardless of what you’re struggling with or how you feel about yourself. He’s absolutely crazy in love with you.

As always, thank you so much for listening. If you haven’t received our free download yet, Five Things Every Christian Struggling with OCD Needs to Know, please check it out at hopeforanxietyandocd/free.

Hope for Anxiety and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the use of myself or By the Well Counseling.

Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.