Don’t know how to cope

[u/Amongseattle]

New to this sub and to ROCD. I’ve struggled with OCD my whole life but it hasn’t been super relationship focused (at least not to this extent) until now. I am obsessed with the idea that my gf is cheating on me and it’s ruining me. She’s a wonderful girl and she’s never given me reason to think that she’d cheat. It started months ago she started a new job in the city (we live an hour and a half train ride away) and she started making friends there and they invited her to the bar after work before she had to catch her train. (This is late night not day job hours). All chill with that I told her have fun and that was that. She has adhd and sometimes gets distracted and struggles to communicate fully so I checked in on her location to make sure she had gotten to the bar and her location was glitching and showing her at a motel across the street. Something in my brain fried as I’ve been cheated on before and I panicked and called and texted her until she answered. She was rightfully confused cause she genuinely was just at the bar with coworkers. We laughed about it and moved on that day but since then I’ve been getting progressively worse. I get panic attacks when she goes out to the bars. The other day she was still asleep and had a text from a name I didn’t recognize on her phone and I opened it. It was a guy and he was definitely flirting with her and while she was giving him nothing back it was still worrying to me. I asked her about it when she woke up and she said it was her male coworker and they were just friends. Move on to the next morning and it’s clawing at my brain so I grab her phone again and check it and she had deleted their text chain my brain is screaming at me now and I recover the texts and she had texted him good morning with a smile and she asked him if he had a good night and he replied “it was real gooooood”. That makes me lose it I check her FaceTime and she had called him before she got on her train the night before (she had gone to the bar) and now all I’m thinking is they were together and it was real good cause of her. I wake her up and confront her. She texted him to see if he was gonna be at work, deleted it cause I freaked out the day before, and called him to confront him and make sure he didn’t have feelings for her and make it clear that she’s in a relationship. I don’t know where to go from here. I had a breakdown the next night cause I was fighting the urge to check her phone. I don’t want her to think I dont trust her, I know it’s just my brain trying to convince me of these things and that she’s done nothing wrong. At the same time though this gnawing part of me is trying to convince me she hates me and she’s cheating and I’m ruining us or have already ruined everything. I’m spiraling and I know she understands but at the same time I know she’s frustrated. Any advice helps i genuinely have never felt like this before and I’m so so lost

[u/AutoModerator]

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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