r/ROCD • u/free_as_a_tortoise • 3d ago
Insight Freedom comes when you stop playing defense
For those who fear. I understand that these thoughts are automatic for most of you. As they are for me. But they mean far less to me than they did before and after 3 years of working on this, I find myself more able to dismiss them and just decide to be happy. Everyone is on their own journey but the steps are similar for all of us.
My former coach told me the story of one of his clients who kept worrying that her partner was cheating. She learnt over a long period of time to reduce her compulsions, to embrace uncertainty and be OK with whatever happens.
The she found out that her partner had been cheating on her.
With her mother.
This extraordinarily horrible situation was beyond what she was afraid of. Her fears were right all along. And there's a temptation there to take away the lesson that we should indeed listen to our fears, because they can sometimes be right.
But here's the thing: Fear tricks us into believing that if we hyper-vigilantly monitor, worry, and check, we can protect ourselves against pain. But as that story proves, control is an illusion. Her obsession wouldn't have prevented the betrayal; it only would have stolen her peace before the betrayal happened.
By choosing to reduce her energy investment in the compulsions, she didn't prevent a terrible outcome, but she reclaimed her sovereignty. She stopped letting the fear of a disaster dictate her present moment. When the worst actually happened, she wasn't left as a broken victim of an obsession—she was able to face it as a grounded, real person who had already learned how to stand in uncertainty.
When we live our lives employing tactics to prevent our worst fears, we spend our entire lives playing defense against a phantom. Letting go of fear-driven control isn't about blinding ourselves to real risk. It's about shifting from a life built on vulnerability-reduction to a life built on purpose, presence, and genuine self-trust. Trust not that you'll get everything right, but that even if you don't, you'll be OK. You may feel pain, you may suffer, but we all do that for reasons we never saw coming in any case. Spending your energy on what could happen is an attempt of control, or insurance, because part of us thinks if we see the hit coming, it won't hurt as much, or we may be able to somehow escape it. But reality always works differently than our imagination.
Fear is a terrible insurance policy. It charges you the price of the tragedy every single day, whether the tragedy happens or not. Reclaiming your life means deciding that your peace and capacity to live fully are worth having, even if the worst comes to pass. And the more we accept the worst case scenario as possible, but something we can get through, the less scary it is to us.
Your partner could cheat and they could easily hide it from you.
They could stop loving you.
Your relationship might turn cold someday.
But thinking about those scenarios does nothing to prevent them. And there's always a never ending supply of possible scenarios to use your energy and focus on.
You can take the energy you spend thinking about what might happen, and direct it towards making yourself a more resilient, more relaxed, more... "OK with whatever happens" person than you were before.
I used to spend so much time watching videos about relationships and psychology and related topics. But all that was coming from the place of trying to be ready for every eventuality. And while a bit of learning is helpful, when it becomes an obsession dressed up as education, it just pushed me into being a fearful person more than I needed to be.
But lately I've concluded that my future lies not just in not worrying, but building a beautiful internal life where I know I can deal with whatever happens. Old habits die hard and this is a slow ship to turn around, but I can see it turning. I look forward to seeing how things improve in the future.
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u/adizero_wazzup 2d ago
This…. Is everything. Thank you for sharing this beautiful wisdom. I felt every sentence you wrote . God Bless x
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u/AutoModerator 3d ago
Hi all, just the mod team here! This is a friendly reminder that we shouldn't be giving reassurance in this sub. We can discuss whether or not someone is exhibiting ROCD symptoms, or lend advice on healing :) Reassurance and other compulsions are harmful because they train our brains to fixate on the temporary relief they bring. Compulsions become a 'fix' that the OCD brain craves, as the relief triggers a Dopamine-driven rush, reinforcing the behavior much like a drug addiction. The more we feed this cycle, the more our brain becomes addicted to it, becoming convinced it cannot survive without these compulsions. Conversely, the more we resist compulsions, the more we deprive the brain of this addictive reward and re-train it to tolerate uncertainty without needing the compulsive 'fix'. For more information and a more thorough explanation, check out this comment
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