IF YOU LIKE A TIDY HOUSE, YOU MIGHT DESCRIBE YOURSELF AS HAVING ‘OCD’. BUT, SAYS IRIS GOLDSZTAJN, OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE DISORDER IS MORE VARIED – AND DISTRESSING – THAN WE OFTEN BELIEVE
In mid-2021, I was a few months into my first serious relationship, and starting to fall in love, when suddenly I began experiencing intrusive thoughts that terrified me: what if this doesn’t last? What if I lose this thing that has become so important to me? Instead of shrugging off these unanswerable questions as an inevitable part of life, I began obsessing over them. I looked for any possible crack in my healthy, loving relationship until I couldn’t tell reality apart from my fears. When I eventually worked up the courage to tell him a jumbled, confused version of how I was feeling, he was supportive, but understandably worried. I was worried, too.
Soon, I was compulsively googling those questions in an attempt to find relief. It was during one of these intense sessions that I came across the term ‘relationship OCD’. ROCD is a subtype of obsessive-compulsive disorder that differs dramatically from most preconceived notions of what the condition looks like – in ROCD, the obsession centres around a relationship and the compulsions can manifest as ruminating, seeking reassurance from friends and family or ‘testing’ the relationship. It has nothing to do with cleanliness or visibly repetitive behaviours. Several weeks later, I was diagnosed by a private OCD specialist.
I started learning more about the realities Iris of OCD and realised it covers a much broader Goldsztajn spectrum of conditions than I previously was thought. The Diagnostic And Statistical Manual Of diagnosed Mental Disorders defines OCD as ‘the presence of with ROCD obsessions, compulsions, or both’, but it’s also determined by the extent to which these obsessions are recurrent, persistent and cause significant distress and anxiety.
Everything began to click into place when I realised I had dealt with obsessive-compulsive behaviours in the past without knowing what they were. For example, during a stressful period in my life, I found myself ‘needing’ to pee up to a dozen times before bed – but I couldn’t actually pee. These symptoms are consistent with sensorimotor OCD, in which obsessions centre around bodily functions such as breathing, swallowing or peeing.
It turns out, OCD manifests in lots of different ways. While hand washing and checking (locks or stoves, for example) are common iterations of OCD, they don’t tell the full story. According to Jordan Vyas-Lee, a psychotherapist and co-founder of mental healthcare clinic Kove, these types of OCD are more well-known because they’re ‘the really clear, explicit things that we can see in people, and they’re often depicted in popular culture’. They’re also the kinds of beh
