Lovescrafts

Thank you so much for responding! You raised some really interesting points and lots for me to think about. We're about 8 months into CBT but there have been some big gaps between some of the sessions (at the request of the therapist apparently). Unfortunately my partner very much sees me as interfering if I ask about homework or areas of focus so it's difficult to know how engaged they're being. I'm glad the transference is not uncommon although it is very disheartening as feels like we are moving sideways rather than forwards. I'm hopeful that things will improve though for all of us. Thanks again for your thoughts, I'm so grateful.

Hi I'm looking for some advice rather desperately. My partner has suffered from health anxiety and OCD related to this for years. It started due to some genuine health issues but we've had near continuous bouts of worries about very serious illnesses (including going through a lot of medical tests since then) which have caused a lot of heartache over many years for us both. Obviously covid has not helped and I finally convinced my partner to go to CBT therapy. Since starting this, the health anxiety and OCD seems to have 'transferred' to other areas of our life - and the obsessive checks and worries are now focussed upon our home and various insurance policies alongside other more seemingly random things. Has anyone else experienced this transfer? The checks and worries are at a similar level just focussed in a new place so there's been no improvement in their quality of life. I've done a lot of research around OCD to try to support my partner. We've put boundaries around the checks and reassurance seeking behaviours which my partner naturally constantly seeks to push. In the meantime, I've gone through a very high risk pregnancy and now am caring for a baby without any support from friends or family. I'm finding that I need help from my partner but that they are just not mentally in a place to offer me any emotional or very much practical support. For example, I've asked for my partner to load the dishwasher before going to bed (their only household job) and this is done maybe twice a week at most. We argue a lot in front of our child because I find my partner can lash out when they feel very anxious or I refuse to participate in a reassurance seeking behaviour. They can also be very controlling of me and accuse me of being cruel/lazy if I don't comply with checks which I most often don't. They spend perhaps an hour or two per day researching or performing checks which I find incredibly difficult when I am desperately trying to care for my child and keep on top of our house work. They need time on top of this to carry out the work for their therapy and they work very long hours which leaves me doing everything for our child. I can see how much pain my partner is in, they look visibly tortured by their worries. However, I don't know how to move forward in a way that a. enables our child to live in and see a functioning parenting relationship and b. allows me to have some of my own emotional and practical needs met. I feel like I am burning out and having to suppress a lot of things which I know is not healthy or sustainable. My question is, does anyone have any experiences of anything similar and any either words of reassurance that things can get better or practical advice? I've tried therapy for myself but this made my partner very angry and they would not look after our child to enable me to attend the virtual sessions. Bit stuck on what else to try and feel like things need to change for all three of us. Really open to anything at this point as it's just awful seeing them be so miserable.