Dear Midnight:

Regarding my ex therapist in California: he continued his treatment of me in between sessions via phone and email because I saw him primarily in person and he was generous that way. He will not treat a person who he does not see in-person. He is a very ethical person and will not operate unethically.

Also, I am in no way here to promote his business, to suggest people attend therapy with him. I told you about his work only so to give you an alternative idea regarding what is possible for a therapist to be. My sharing about how he treated me can give you information you can use so to better evaluate a future therapist!

You wrote last: ” But he never openly said it was OCD or ROCD.”- this is a point I made before: it is important to me that a therapist is open, does say things openly, clearly, directly and not vaguely. My goodness, how can you make progress in vagueness. The light, so to speak, in the therapy process should be ON. The therapist should turn on the light, not keep it off via vagueness and double talk.

anita

Dear Midnight:

You are welcome and I appreciate your expressed gratitude to me.

As to diagnoses being labels that limit people: only if the diagnosis is misunderstood. A diagnosis is a set combination of symptoms, that is all. For example I HAD ROCD, not anymore. But the core issue is my anxiety. When a competent professional therapist comes up with a diagnosis, it is for the purpose of having a road map to start navigating: to manage the most troubling, harmful behaviors first, before dealing with the core issue.

Please do post anytime and best to you!

anita

Hi all

I’m sorry to jump onto the back of this conversation but I came across this website and this page in particular and I was hoping I could share my story and get some words of advice from you all.

About 2 months ago I came across a website on rOCD and it felt like such a lightbulb moment and I don’t know what to do now. I’ve been in and out of relationships for a long time. I meet someone, I get on with them amazingly and then one day I wake up and feel like everything is changed. I look at them in a different way, I question whether I want to be with them, whether I ever felt anything for them and wonder where the feelings went that I only had the previous day. This questions go over and over in my mind, taking over from everything else, making me feel sick, tired, emotional. The only thing I can seem to do is to run away from these relationships, to end it there and then because I don’t have the answer, and if I don’t have the answer then that must be the answer in itself. If I was in love with them then I would know it right? I would feel it? There wouldn’t be any questions because that would be the person that I was meant to be with and everything would be different to how it was in previous relationships.

So fast forward and now I am in a 5 month relationship. And its happening all over again. I took things slow with this new man. Mainly because I was scared of the same thing happening and maybe because he was different to the rest I had dated. I felt different about him and our time together. More relaxed, more calm, more able to be myself. I had such intense feelings of love for him I couldn’t hold it in anymore and finally told him. Thankfully he feels the same way. Since then we have spent a lot of time together but every now and again I question everything…. is he actually right for me? When he says he loves me it doesnt sound like I want it to sound, or how I believe it should sound. It doesnt feel as wonderful as I believe it should. He doesnt text as much as I would like. Does this mean he’s not into me….. and so on! At the moment its terrible. Can’t stop thinking about what I should do.

So my mind then goes into freefall again. Is he the one for me? Do I actually love him like I thought I did? And in my habit of googling to try and understand how I felt I came across pages on rOCD, and the more I read the more I felt like it could be what I am experiencing. Now of course I also understand there is a chance that I actually don’t love this man and he isn’t right for me and actually I don’t have rOCD at all, but I want to give all possibilities a chance to stop me from repeating the same patterns over and over and walking away from relationships before seeing if they lead to something. I’m also terrified that I have this almost hope that ROCD is what I am dealing with so I can start to work on it, but what if it isn’t…

It doesn’t help that the guy I’m dating is also in a bad place. He recently lost a family member and is grieving. He has told me that his head is all over the place and he needs to sort it out. So whilst he loves me and wants to be with me and can see us having a future together, he’s not “in love” with me and excited about the relationship or about life in general at the moment. Ah as I write this it sounds bad!

So I suppose after all this I am looking for advice, words of wisdom, any one with similar experiences and guidance on how I can look into this and see if this is what is going on for me.

Thank you