u/Green_Star_16

I just have a few basic questions while I wait to talk to a specialist for the first time.

- Is it common for people with ROCD to be so afraid of conflict that it negatively impacts life choices? Does it lie to you about your intuition just to feel better about working against your best interest to appease others?

- If anyone reading this has been diagnosed with both ADHD and ROCD, how has it affected you?

- Does OCD get worse if you continue to give in to all the bad thoughts?

I’d like to share my experience being in a long-term relationship that recently ended: the retrospect of what I know now, after it’s too late. I did not know what ROCD was until after we broke up, very recently. I hope that this will help some of you as well as myself. To avoid confusion, ex’s pronouns are they/them. I have questions about ROCD and if other people with diagnoses can relate to this, but I want to clarify that I am not here to get a diagnosis.

A few months ago, I was diagnosed with ADHD (inattentive; not medicated yet) and have recently figured out that much of my past behavior/thoughts were from my dopamine addiction. After graduating college a couple years ago I began working in the field, which had me living away from home for many days at a time, sometimes all summer. Some of those moments saw me become pretty distant with my partner, as well as nonchalant and uncommunicative with them (we still texted every day but sometimes only a couple texts). When I was doing that, I was simultaneously getting intense crushes on other people and wondering if I was meant to be with someone else (there were many “someone else”s). Then I came back this past fall and was stoked to see them, but I immediately began grad school, and it was very hard. The ADHD kills my time management and I feel like I always have to tell people (including them) that I don’t have time. Recently, after five beautiful years, my partner and I (both in our twenties) broke up. I asked if I could come over to make sure we were still meeting each other’s needs, wondering if we’d break up—and it wasn’t until I planned to come over that I realized they really were the love of my life, just like I felt when we first began dating. But they wanted to break up. I just felt like a friend at this point. Boom, the world ends.

When people say “doubts,” the meaning could vary from person to person. For me, it simply means “is this person really the one? Do I really love them?” Any “flaw” they had, even if they were aware of and wanting to work though them, would sit in my head and always be trying to find their way into my “maybe they’re not the one” folder. I share so many feelings with other people in here, but at the same time, I never felt anxious that my partner was going to leave, or that I was destined to be abandoned, and I never felt like I needed reassurance from them about anything. They never did anything to make me feel like they’d leave and were true to me till the end. I’m noticing that some people with ROCD struggle with needing/asking for reassurance from their partner, but that doesn’t seem to apply to me. Or are their other forms of reassurance? It’s only internal answers that I felt like I needed.

My therapist, who’s been with me the whole duration of my relationship, has been hearing the same thing for years: “Do I really not love them anymore?” | “Why do I think that if I’m so happy whenever I’m with them?” | “why do I keep getting crushes on other people?” … virtually any way of asking why I can never trust my intuition, and why nothing makes sense. The whole time, she’d always respond by telling me that the fact I’ve been questioning it for so long is “telling,” and that it is a matter of “when” I’m going to end the relationship rather than “if,” but that I should take my time to figure out when. I’m still seeing the same therapist. And yet, she never once suggested that it could be ROCD (she barely suggested it could be from ADHD either). Now that I brought it up she’s willing (and enthusiastic) to work with me on exploring it, but given how she didn’t pick up on it before, I’m not sure she’s still the right one for me (see what I did there?).

There were times I thought I knew I was going to break up with them but then did nothing, not even a conversation about my feelings. I stopped saying “I miss you,” I stopped calling them certain things, and I feel like I was slowly breaking their heart—and the whole time, I thought they didn’t notice. Eventually they brought it up, said it was affecting them, and I acted serious about it but kept going on feeling the same. I didn’t realize fully what I was doing, nor where it was truly coming from. I was so happy when we were together and yet I struggled to miss them when we were apart. Well, now that we’re split up, they’re the only thing I ever think about. I miss them more than anything, and we aren’t talking yet so I can’t tell them all the stuff I’ve learned. I just want to explain so bad, but I’m not sure it’d even matter, because I’m assuming they already grieved our relationship before we broke up. All that said, I have questions.

Does anyone else have ADHD and ROCD? I know the symptoms can mimick each other, so how do you delineate between them if you have both? Should I consider getting a new therapist/adding one who’s more learnt in that arena? Do people with ROCD present like this commonly or are there other things in the mix? I am not here to self-diagnose, btw, just to learn.