Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a treatable mental health disorder that can affect many parts of your life, including your relationships. When intrusive thoughts, urges, feelings, and/or images begin to attach themselves to your loved ones, it can affect how you perceive your relationships with others.
Relationship OCD (ROCD) is “a variety of obsessions that cause anxiety and fear,” explains Tracie Zinman-Ibrahim, LMFT, CST, and Chief Compliance Officer at NOCD. “In response to feeling so uncomfortable, you do compulsions.” With ROCD, you might seek reassurance by asking questions like, “Am I in the right relationship? Am I attracted enough to my partner? Am I being a good enough friend?”
ROCD is known as a subtype of OCD, although it’s not a diagnosis in and of itself. “OCD is just OCD,” according to Zinman-Ibrahim. “When we diagnose OCD, we don’t say ‘you have this type of OCD’. We have themes like ROCD to help people feel comfortable identifying that these are ways OCD shows up.”
You might initially associate ROCD with romantic relationships, but it can affect platonic relationships, too. This is sometimes referred to with non-medical terms like “friendship OCD” or “obsessive friendship disorder.” Of course, it’s completely normal to feel a bit anxious about your friendships now and then. However, if OCD is causing you significant distress, it could indicate a more serious issue that needs treatment.
Continue reading to learn more about OCD and friendships, and get some tips on how to disclose your mental health challenges to your friends.
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OCD and friendships
OCD has a way of latching itself on to many aspects of your life, including your relationships with your partner(s), family members, co-workers, neighbors, and friends. When it comes to your friendships, your intrusive thoughts and compulsions can change how you perceive your friends and how you think they feel about you.
Here are a few examples of how Relationship OCD manifests in friendships.
Obsessions and friendships
Obsessions are the distressful thoughts, images, urges, and/or feelings that you may have about your friends. This can include:
- Constantly worrying about whether or not you said the “right” thing.
- Questioning if your values match your friends’ values.
- Doubting if someone is really your friend.
- Having rigid and high expectations for friendships.
- Dissecting your friends’ behaviors and/or comparing how you would respond in a similar situation.
- Having intrusive thoughts about friends.
- Comparing your physical appearance to those of your friends.
- Hyper-focusing on certain aspects of your friendship.
- Thinking you may be the “odd one out” in your friendships.
Compulsions and friendships
Compulsions are mental or physical actions you may perform to get rid of the fear and anxiety that obsessions can bring. Here’s what compulsions might look like in friendships:
- Excessive reassurance-seeking. Constantly asking reassurance-seeking questions like, “Do you like me? Do you agree with me? Are you mad at me?”
- Excessive people-pleasing behaviors. Criticizing how you interact with your friends, over-apologizing, and forgoing your own needs to please your friends.
- Avoidance. Avoiding or dropping friends abruptly because of a perceived fault in the friendship or an obsessive thought about it.
- Compulsive confessing. Being overly honest with a friend about your feelings—even when it could hurt them.
- Excessive research. Spending a lot of time Googling topics on OCD and friendships.
Treating relationship OCD
If you think you have friendship OCD, treatment can help. Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) therapy is the gold standard treatment for all OCD subtypes, including ROCD. This evidence-based therapy exposes you to what triggers intrusive thoughts about your friends and helps you learn how to resist performing a compulsion in response. ERP is split into two parts: exposure and response prevention techniques.
Zinman-Ibrahim says ERP sessions start with identifying how OCD is showing up in your life, including obsessive thoughts and compulsions. “From there, we can start to do homework and in-session exercises where we can do exposures,” she says. “We build a hierarchy, or a fear ladder, with small exposures at the bottom. As we go up, we do a little bit more to address the fears in a bigger way so that your brain can learn that those things are not as scary as you thought.”
ERP for Relationship OCD in friendships also involves response prevention techniques, which are exercises that teach you how to resist compulsions. “We might look at pictures of happy friends and watch them and be very careful not to fall into ruminating thoughts,” says Zinman-Ibrahim. “We’ll practice resisting compulsions by sitting with the discomfort and not trying to solve it.”
If you stay consistent with ERP, you can see a significant improvement in your OCD, and possibly in your friendships as well.
4 tips for talking to your friends about OCD
With a better understanding of how OCD affects relationships, you might be ready to talk about your OCD to your closest friends. But how exactly do you tell them about the challenges you face? And should you even share your struggles with them at all? To help you navigate this situation, here are some ways you can disclose friendship OCD to your friends (if you choose to do so):
1. Choose a trusted friend to talk to
Pick a friend that you believe you can be vulnerable with—someone in your friend group who provides a safe space that’s judgment-free. Before you bring up the subject, or send a text to the chosen friend, take some time to decide if you’re even comfortable sharing your OCD. Zinman-Ibrahim notes that you should respect your own boundaries first and foremost. “We don’t have to tell anybody that we have OCD, and that’s not because it’s shameful—it’s because it’s a choice,” she says.
2. Explain what’s going on with your OCD
OCD is a very misunderstood mental health condition. Because of this, your friend may not recognize certain behaviors or know that their responses are actually feeding into your OCD. If possible, educate them on OCD and how it affects your daily life, including your friendships.
As you help your friend understand OCD, Zinman-Ibrahim advises against dumping information on them. While she says it’s okay to share your OCD symptoms, you want to avoid revealing too much about your intrusive thoughts, as it could lead to compulsive confessions. “If you say things like ‘I have to share with you that not only do I have OCD, but it’s coming out right now so you can decide if you want to be friends with me or not.’ This is not sharing your OCD, this is confessing.”
3. Share tools for managing OCD
There’s a plethora of educational resources available on how your friends can support you. From the OCD cycle to compulsive confessions, your friend can gain a wealth of knowledge on various strategies and techniques for managing symptoms of this mental health disorder.
You can also introduce them to non-engagement responses, when to call out reassurance-seeking behaviors, or how they can avoid accommodating your OCD. Ultimately, it’s up to you to decide what you want to share with your friend, but doing so could strengthen the relationship between the two of you.
4. Bring them to therapy
If you’re having trouble explaining your OCD to your friend, consider inviting them to your next therapy session. “You can bring in a really supportive friend who wants to know how to help you and not make your OCD worse,” says Zinman-Ibrahim.
Zinman-Ibrahim provides an example of a NOCD member who constantly asked their roommate certainty-seeking questions. “I asked, ‘Can you get your roommate in a couple of our sessions? She’s accommodating your OCD and making it worse, but she doesn’t know it,’” she says. “I was able to help this friend understand that when you do those things, it actually makes her OCD worse. When your roommate asks, ‘Do you think X, Y, Z?’ I want you to respond with uncertainty, like ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I guess we’ll never know.’”
The intrusive thoughts and compulsions that OCD causes can make it challenging to navigate your friendships. If you think you’re experiencing friendship OCD, the first step is to seek treatment from a licensed therapist specializing in ERP. From there, communicating with your friends about your OCD can be the next step in helping them better understand your struggles and provide support when necessary. Good communication is key to a strong friendship, and getting the right treatment can create an even stronger bond.
