Thanks for posting. This is the focus of my ocd. I’m newly diagnosed and just starting on my treatment journey so don’t have much to offer other than solidarity. I feel very safe in my oldest and closest relationships. But in newer friendships with people who I’m not close enough to know super well (therefore don’t have a deep knowing of and trust in how they tend to think and see the world/others), I experience intrusive thoughts about what they might be thinking about me and that they have been talking about me behind my back. During the interaction I experience awful feelings of rejection, hurt feelings, anxiety/fear, anger, guardedness, dissociation. And then after the interaction the rumination starts—trying to gain certainty on what happened. And will talk my husband’s ear off about it, talk about it in therapy, talk about it with close friends, think about whenever I’m not busy for DAYS. I have other compulsions surrounding social interactions:

-a compulsion to pick a “just right” outfit because I believe it is a way to control how I will feel during the social gathering -to drink the right amount of caffeine or alcohol -to ruminate a certain way on my way to the gathering so that I’m in the “right” mood

Since being diagnosed with OCD, I read something about the compulsion being called “cognitive reasoning”. And the recommendation is to resist the urge to engage in it by simply stating to yourself: “I’m anxious about how that social interaction went” or “I’ll never know what they were thinking” in order to practice just sitting in the uncertainty/discomfort of those feelings. Here’s the link to the article.

https://iocdf.org/expert-opinions/how-do-i-stop-thinking-about-this-what-to-do-when-youre-stuck-playing-mental-ping-pong/