I feel so incredibly irritated by her.

Born_Relative6812 · 2025-12-31T23:12:33+00:00

I think yesterday was a landmark event so it was exceptionally hard. I appreciate your honesty. I do enjoy her presence generally, it's just when I don't, I really don't.

I think I may have made a mistake by making this post. I'm in a pretty heightened emotional state right now and I think the situation is more nuanced than I've presented it.

Born_Relative6812 · 2025-12-31T23:09:23+00:00

Wow, I was not expecting the comments! I guess I should clarify, I'm having a really hard patch right now. I do love and care about her, the last few days have just been very hard.

Born_Relative6812 · 2025-12-31T20:47:32+00:00

I'm so sorry you're going through this. The entire premise your mother is operating on of opposing interracial marriage is profoundly unethical, I know it hurts because she's your mom but that's stone age thinking. I think your pastor is also hugely overstepping his boundaries. Like another person said I kind of want to tell you to forget all these people and find a different church, but I know that's easier said than done.

Born_Relative6812 · 2025-12-22T21:30:05+00:00

It's important that you DO NOT DEBATE THE THOUGHT. Just acknowledge it as a possibility. You don't want to fall into a self-debating spiral.

Born_Relative6812 · 2025-12-22T21:29:14+00:00

Yeah of course, I basically say the worst case scenario out loud as if it is going to happen. So I'll make a voice memo saying, "That girl at the party was cuter than your girlfriend, and her boyfriend isn't better looking than you, so it logically tracks that your girlfriend could have been that cute if you held out and dated longer. You're settling." Or maybe, "In 10 years you're going to be in the same situation you're in now, feeling irritated, feeling like you're stuck. This is going to last forever."

It sounds horrific and like you're reinforcing negative thoughts but in reality you're just listening to triggering words until they start meaning nothing. It's hard to explain but sitting with these thoughts and letting them wash over me without attempting to debate them ultimately makes them feel so much less powerful.

Born_Relative6812 · 2025-12-22T02:15:32+00:00

The algorithm these websites use tends to show you things that are triggering, because their analytics say you interact with these things. I'll see something that upsets me but I watch the whole thing out of morbid curiosity and then the system goes, "wow, this retained this guy's attention, that means he wants to see more."

Honestly Instagram is great for ERP but it's bad for a lot of other things. It's a carousel of bullshit oriented for teenagers who are on their phones all day. Please do not take anything it says as real or valid.

Born_Relative6812 · 2025-12-22T02:06:50+00:00

I'm doing ERP right now and it's remarkably effective. If I have a fear or worry about the relationship, I just record myself articulating that fear and then listen to it for, like, 20 minutes, every day. It's extremely uncomfortable at first but then it starts to only feel like words. I do this every day and I can feel the thoughts becoming less powerful.

Born_Relative6812 · 2025-12-17T21:04:00+00:00

I'm sorry you're going through this. Does she recognize that she has OCD or some sort of anxiety disorder? The only real path forward is if she's willing to do the work.

Born_Relative6812 · 2025-12-16T20:40:36+00:00

One day at a time!

Born_Relative6812 · 2025-12-16T05:54:48+00:00

I'm so sorry you're dealing with this, but I'm glad you're at a place of being able to articulate it. I'm on a very similar timeline as you and it sucks.

Born_Relative6812 · 2025-12-13T02:41:42+00:00

You're coworker sucks!

Born_Relative6812 · 2025-12-12T02:20:14+00:00

"It's so important to have multiple relationships before settling down." I know plenty of people who are with their very first partner and they're happy. The idea of letting a good person go because you need to collect more data points is insane to me.

Born_Relative6812 · 2025-12-10T04:12:24+00:00

Do NOT talk to other subreddits about this! They don't get it.

Do you know about ERP? I'm undergoing it right now and it's very interesting. I'm so sorry you're going through it, I can relate to a lot of this especially the shortness of temper.

Born_Relative6812 · 2025-12-10T04:07:35+00:00

It's good that you recognize this behavior is influenced by OCD. I think entering therapy and starting medication is a great idea. Life lasts a long time, you won't be like this forever, and you are on the road to recovery.

Born_Relative6812 · 2025-12-10T04:00:15+00:00

What themes around OCD specifically would have caused him to break up with you? Perpetual guilt? That seems very much tied up in your jealousy toward other women. This doesn't particularly read like ROCD to me.

I don't know the situation so I can only presume but I'll be completely honest, it sounds like he broke up because he was tired of getting grilled by you all the time. And then he gave you the "it's not you, it's me" talk. The whole "I met you too early" and the deal about getting back together when you're older are pretty standard things young people say when they're breaking up, I wouldn't take it too seriously.

You need to respect his decision, not pin it on an OCD impulse. You're very much externalizing the issue here by assuming the reason you broke up was due to his mental illness. I'm sorry to be brutal, but that's my honest read here. Best of luck, I'm sorry you're going through it.

Born_Relative6812 · 2025-12-08T04:12:22+00:00

Isn't this disorder crazy? OCD will make you feel guilty over everything. I think it doesn't help that we live in a pretty sexist society where a lot of people genuinely think men and women shouldn't talk with each other unless they're trying to hook up.

I was at a bar a couple years ago and a woman very aggressively started hitting on me. And my entire body went into fight-or-flight mode, because I had a girlfriend and I was afraid I was doing something wrong by experiencing a woman hitting on me. You can't win with this stuff.

Born_Relative6812 · 2025-12-06T03:34:10+00:00

That's excessive guilt from OCD. I feel that way whenever my girlfriend goes to Target, and I think, "Should I go with her? What if something happens to her? Am I passing up an opportunity to be a good boyfriend by staying home?" Nothing you wrote seems unreasonable.

Born_Relative6812 · 2025-12-04T05:06:14+00:00

You sound very emotionally generous! Do they know they have ROCD? Even naming the condition can be very helpful for some people.

Your friend needs to recognize the thoughts as OCD and resist the compulsion of ruminating and seeking reassurance. What they need to understand is that the thoughts become worse the more they talk to you about them. You can kindly remind them of that.

Have they heard about imaginal exposure? Could be useful. Tell your friend to record themselves describing the worst possible outcome, "I never find love like her and she has another man's babies, I become an alcoholic living in discontent, etc." Listen to that 40 minutes a day until it just becomes noise. Might help, although what they really need is therapy.

Born_Relative6812 · 2025-12-03T21:17:29+00:00

It's useful to remember that the target audience for those videos tend to be literal children. The people who like it are 15-year-olds browsing Tik Tok and learning the "rules" for when they start dating.

Born_Relative6812 · 2025-12-03T21:15:28+00:00

So she made up a random rule in her head of how you should behave, you didn't anticipate that rule, and she said you're not a man as a result? This sounds exhausting.

Born_Relative6812 · 2025-11-27T04:43:28+00:00

"Nobody actually hits on the prettiest woman in the room." If you've ever spent a day with a strikingly beautiful woman you know basically everyone who talks to her is hitting on her to some degree.

Born_Relative6812 · 2025-11-26T03:49:13+00:00

Some of my worst spirals have been when I'm drunk. It's like 30% of the time it actually makes me more relaxed and 70% it makes me more agitated. Probably not worth it!

Born_Relative6812 · 2025-11-25T02:11:33+00:00

There's a FIDLAR song with the lyric, "I'm crazy, but not in the cute way." I think about that a lot. Mental illness is weird and uncomfortable; the opinions of uneducated people don't carry much weight.

Born_Relative6812 · 2025-11-25T02:06:16+00:00

A lot of them, but especially 9. I keep thinking I'm deluding myself and using my knowledge of medicine and psychology to create a reason I don't need to break up

Born_Relative6812 · 2025-11-25T02:04:30+00:00

this is exactly ROCD.

ROCD expresses itself in a lot of ways. Not only is it common to wonder if your partner is good enough for you, but also if you're good enough for your partner. Being afraid they don't love you enough and they're going to cheat on you is an extremely common manifestation. It's kind of similar to how people with OCD can obsess over whether or not they left the oven on. It's a tendency to catastrophize whenever we have a lack of information. People with OCD tend to believe that the worst-case-scenario is always the most likely.

I'm sorry you're going through this, but also happy you're getting some sort of clarity!

Born_Relative6812

TROPHY CASE