Hey @tinybutterfly
The thing that ultimately save my life was a treatment called deep transcranial magnetic stimulation (dTMS). It is usually a treatment to try after you try other treatments that don’t work but I was allowed to do it because I couldn’t tolerate the medication. From memory it is helpful for about 40% of people. Luckily, it worked completely for me and now I’m in remission.
From less medical standpoint it really helped telling people about the obsessions. I felt so guilty being around them and thinking all these terrible things that I didn’t want to think. Knowing that they knew and still were okay with being around me/didn’t view me as horrible gave me a lot a reassurance and made me able to be around them. Unfortunately, a compulsion can be getting reassurance from others so it might not be the best strategy for everyone.
There were also a lot of situations (e.g. someone trying to touch me) where I would overreact, and I couldn’t tell them why it bothered me because the intrusive thought was too graphic to share. Having the person not hold it against me or push me to explain the problem was also helpful.
OCD is really something you need professional help to deal with, whether it be medication, therapy, or a combination (or something like TMS). You’re doing a great job by trying to understand to better support him. He’s lucky to have such a supportive partner!
I think the best way I can explain what OCD feels like is this: imagine you’re walking along the cliff, and you think “jump.” A person without OCD would probably think “that was weird,” and move on with their day. Someone with OCD might start worrying that the thought means that maybe they do want to jump and maybe that means that something is wrong with them and maybe they’ll do it and maybe they need help and so on. It’s this continuous loop of worry and uncertainty that never resolve itself. So, they do something to make it resolve, maybe they think thoughts about how much they want to live to cancel out the other thought, or maybe they blink five times because five is a safe number that means bad things won’t happen, or maybe they confess to someone about the thought to get reassurance that they’re fine. Then everything is good until the next thought happens a few seconds later and the process restarts.
Apologises for the long post. I hope at least some of it is helpful/useful to you 😂
