As someone who has OCD, I have some bad habits that I don’t necessarily have control over. One of them is compulsively texting people, especially dudes, when I am feeling emotional or insecure. This can be a deterrent in romantic relationships. In the long term relationships that I’ve had I get triggered by certain things the guy does and then I cannot stop texting them how I feel.

I’m sure there is a way that I can stop compulsively text messaging my intense emotional feelings. However, I have yet to discover what that way is. I want to work with my psychiatrist and therapist to create a behavioral aversion to texting motional content. There is no tone in text messages so they can easily be misinterpreted.

I am lucky in the sense that the men that I’ve been relationships with tolerate my excessive texting because they know that is a part of my OCD. At times they ignore the plentiful messages they get from me.  In the moment I feel invalidated by being ignored, however I do understand that it must be so overwhelming and anxiety provoking to receive a multitude of text messages that jump from topic to topic because of my emotionality and ADHD symptoms.

I try to manage my emotions the best way that I can but it’s overwhelming for me as well. So I have asked my psychiatrist
how to deal with the urge to compulsively emote via text message. She told me to turn my phone off put it down for an hour. This is exceedingly difficult when I have emotional response I want to communicate to the man that I love.

I need to listen to her advice, however I find it challenging because placing my phone down and not interacting with it for even an hour requires this intense level of patience that I currently do not possess.

It’s unfortunate that you can just pick up patience on Amazon have it mailed to your house. Believe me I wish however, finding the ability to stay in the moment, even when feeling emotional distress, is extremely hard for me.

That is why I could possibly text person  I am in a relationship with. I want to get my feelings out so I can stop feelings such intense pain. Nevertheless this is still painful for the other person to read on the other end of the tiny cell phone screen. One incentive to stop this behavior is that it puts a strain on the relationship. This is an example of an aversion to deter someone (like me) from compulsive texting and can be talked
about in therapy.

There are so many elements to my as anxiety and compulsive texting. For
example I have an iPhone and the other person has an Android so I don’t know if they read my emotional stream of novels length texts because there is no read receipt. This causes more emotional stress, and so I continue to text.

I want to break his habit. I am working on doing so but I know that it’s going to take some time to get more emotional insight as to why I engage in this behavior. I believe it has to do with PTSD in romantic relationships. I realized  that one of my triggers is from not feeling heard as a child and in other romantic relationships. However it is not fair to take my past out on my new partner. I am working on my triggers and hopefully soon enough I won’t find the need to text message people I’m in relationships with.

How about you? How do you feel about texting.