When people come to me for help, they’re often caught in the middle of a long lasting painful spiral, overwhelmed by obsessive thoughts, stuck in loops of doubt, fear, and mental checking about their partner’s past. In these moments, it’s nearly impossible to start working on long-term goals, values, or personal growth. First, you need relief.
That’s what this kit is for.
This First Aid Kit is designed to give you immediate tools to deal with Retroactive Jealousy OCD (RJOCD). You’ll learn how to recognize and name OCD thoughts, let them pass without engaging, and sit with the discomfort (shortly) instead of reacting to it. You’ll also learn about RJOCD itself, where it comes from and what its function is and that knowledge alone can already create space in your mind and shift your focus away from your partner’s past.
Even just working through this free RJOCD First Aid Kit is part of your healing process.
Keep in mind: repetition is key. You are training your brain to respond in a new, healthier way. That takes time and practice. The more often you use these tools, even when it feels boring, useless or hard, the more natural they’ll become. Every attempt is a step away from compulsions and toward clarity. Use it whenever the spiral hits, and come back to it as often as you need.
You don’t have to stay stuck.
Let’s begin.
RJOCD is a sub form of Pure OCD. Pure OCD is special form of obsessive compulsive disorder where we see less physical compulsions and more mental compulsions. The compulsions can be compared to coping mechanism that you evolved in difficult times in your life. Most often (but not always) in childhood. Maybe when you were little you had moments where you felt unsafe, or unloved or you didn't get much emotional support. It probably wasn't just one thing in your childhood but things that happened over a long period of time. Do you recognize any of that?
When people feel unsafe they have a fight, flight or freeze response. The compulsions that you experience from Pure OCD are also such a response but it happens in your head mostly, or when asking questions and seeking reassurance.
When your nervous system perceives a threat, even an imagined one, it responds automatically with a fight, flight, or freeze response. In RJOCD, the "threat" is often emotional: fear of not being good enough, betrayal, or uncertainty about your partner’s past or your own feelings. These responses play out mentally and emotionally. Here’s how:
The fight response says: "I need to take control of this threat, now." In RJOCD, that threat is emotional uncertainty, fear, anxiety and severe jealousy. Your brain goes into mental overdrive, trying to fix, analyze, or force clarity.
Common fight behaviors:
Why it doesn't work: The more you engage with the OCD thoughts, the more power they gain.
The flight response says: "Get me away from this feeling or situation." In RJOCD, flight looks like mental and emotional avoidance.
Common flight behaviors:
Why it doesn't work: Avoidance reinforces the fear and keeps OCD alive.
The freeze response says: "I can’t handle this, better shut down." In RJOCD, freeze can feel like mental paralysis or emotional numbness.
Common freeze behaviors:
Why it doesn't work: It keeps you trapped, unable to move forward or break the cycle.
When you can recognize which response you're in, you gain choice. You can step out of the automatic pattern and begin using tools from this First Aid Kit:
Having a relationship and being in love is scary to most people but when you have learned that people close to you that are supposed to love you, can hurt you, harm you or desert you, relationships get even more scary.
When your body is experiencing fear, it doesn't know if that fear is real or imagined. So things start to happen in your body and brain (a fast heartbeat or a warm face) and you get the urge to protect yourself from that fear (with fight, flight, or freeze). So your compulsions are your protection against those fears. You could see them as coping mechanisms, your responses to fear that you developed in difficult times when nobody was protecting you or teaching you how to protect yourself in a healthy way. So you have taught yourself these coping mechanism that don’t really make you feel better.
Acting on your compulsions can give a short moment of relief but the thoughts always come back. And if those goes on for a long time, the thoughts come more and more and your OCd gets worse. Every time you act on a compulsion, you worsen your OCD.
Even when you repeatedly feel the need to know which thoughts are OCD and which are "normal", that is very likely a compulsion. Because it is a way to find certainty in situations where it would be better to learn that we can’t always be certain, and that is okay. Often the topic that you want to have an answer too is something you shouldn't be thinking about in the first place. Because it doesn't serve you in any way.
Learning to stop acting on your compulsions means you need to learn to be uncomfortable. You need to learn to accept a certain level of not knowing or a certain level of pain. Sometimes something just doesn’t feel good. That doesn’t mean you have to fix it. When someone you love dies it feels terrible but you can’t fix it and you have to learn to live with the loss. The same goes for your partner’s past: they have a past and you don’t like it at all. You can’t fix it though, nothing you say or do will undo the past or make you like it. You can't fix this feeling, but you also don't have to let it ruin all of your days. So what you have to do is stop obsessing about it, by learning to stop acting on your compulsions. You will have to practice this again and again.
Everybody has intrusive thoughts. But the difference with people like us who have OCD is that we have a hard time letting the thoughts go. Why? Because we don’t want to feel the anxiety, pain or fear those thoughts bring. Feeling insecure or not good enough is hard. And honestly? That is hard for everyone. Nobody enjoys feeling afraid or upset. So we try to solve the thought, get rid of it, make it feel better. But in doing that, we get caught in a loop. We’re the ones who keep spinning it around in our minds because we’re trying to protect ourselves.. But the thoughts are actually harming us and we can learn to not engage with them anymore. And when we stop enganing, the thoughts will come less and less. And they will lose meaning and power. They will become unimportant.
We can learn new ways to deal with these feelings and thoughts. Ways that don’t make the fears worse. Ways that set us free. Just like people without OCD we can have intrusive thoughts without letting them impact us. It takes a lot of willpower, work and it’s not easy, but it’s definitely possible! You have to really want it.
Sometimes people with OCD, including those struggling with Retroactive Jealousy, also have one or more phobias, like fear of contamination, heights, dogs or social situations. When I learned that OCD and phobias are closely connected, something clicked deep inside me. For the first time, I could see that my fear of contamination in hotel beds, and even my rare phobia, kosmemophobia (fear of jewelry), weren’t strange, separate parts of me. They were all connected by similar patterns of dealing with fear. That realization brought so much relief. It was a confirmation that working on my OCD was the right path for me.
OCD itself functions kind of like a internal phobia: a fear not of an object or situation, but of a thought, feeling, or inner experience. In Retroactive Jealousy, that might be the fear that your partner once loved someone else and that you won’t be able to live with that. Or the fear that they find their ex better looking, or better at sex. These fears feel urgent and emotionally threatening, even if you know rationally that they don’t make sense.
Just like with a phobia, OCD leads you to avoid the feared thing. In this case mostly by ruminating, checking, analyzing, asking questions, repeating conversations or replaying mental videos. And just like with a phobia, these reactions actually make the fear stronger over time. Understanding OCD as a form of internal phobia can be a turning point. Because it shifts the focus from:
“How do I make this thought go away?”
to
“How can I experience this feeling without reacting to it?”
This is a shift from control to acceptance. You don't have to accept their past and be ok with it. What you will learn is to accept that you don't like their past and there is nothing you can or need to do about it. "I am jealous and there’s nothing I can do to change that. But I don’t have to let it rule my every day life." If you manage to do that for a longer period of time, you will eventually stop caring. Don't expect to stop caring first so you can stop doing all the compulsions. It doesn't work like that. First you change your actions, then your feelings will follow.
Fears usually shrink when we stop avoiding them. Take spiders, for example. Maybe you’re not fully phobic, but they still make you uncomfortable. Now imagine you start living somewhere where you see spiders every day. Which is exactly what happened to me. I lived on a house boat for five years. It didn’t matter how often we cleaned our walls inside and the boat from the outside, there were always spiders, and not just a few. At first, it felt overwhelming. But over time the fear dulled. I stopped reacting strongly. My nervous system got used to the spiders. Of course, I still don’t like spiders (what is there to like?) but they don’t scare me anymore. Of course it matters how I acted every time I saw a spider. If I had consistently screamed and yelled for my husband to kill it, the fear would have grown. I didn’t do that, I stayed calm and killed it myself. Because I understood that making the situation even bigger than it was, was not going to make my life on the boat easier. This is sort of what’s happening in your brain in one way or another: it’s constantly yelling at you: ‘I am so jealous!! I hate this feeling! I hate my partner’s past, make it stop!’ Well, if you keep giving it so much passion and attention it will never stop.
ERP uses a similar principle: repeated exposure without avoidance leads to a reduction in fear over time. Instead of trying to get rid of the uncomfortable thoughts or feelings, you let them be there, again and again, without doing the usual rituals (like checking, confessing, analyzing, or seeking reassurance).
At first, it’s hard. But with repetition, the brain learns: this is uncomfortable, but it’s not dangerous. And when your brain stops treating the thought like a threat, it loses its power. And it stops being a threat.
In short: the more safely exposed you are to the fear, the less intense it becomes. Just like the spiders.
Anytime Coach offers ERP but we don't start with it.
Before we begin with the exercises, I want you to know one thing: this First Aid Kit is not a complete guide to overcome your retroactieve jealousy and it doesn’t introduce you with ERP. ERP is an important part of OCD recovery, but it’s hard, and it usually requires guidance and support. You have to feel ready for it. And it’s totally okay if you’re not there yet.
This kit is here to help you prepare for that next step. To give you some mental space, understanding, and tools you can reach for in the tough moments. The exercises you’ll find here are based on ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) and mindfulness. They’re not magic, and they won’t make your thoughts disappear. But they can help you find relief when the noise in your head gets loud.
Sometimes these exercises will feel easy. Other times, they’ll feel almost impossible, because resisting compulsions, whether mental or physical, takes real strength. That’s why I want you to know: it’s okay to mess up. That’s part of the process. You’re not doing it wrong if it doesn’t work every time. Some days, it’ll click. Other days, it won’t. Just keep showing up. The more you practice, the more space you’ll create in your mind. It will get easier.
Sometimes when you're caught in a loop of obsessive thoughts, it can feel like you're completely in them, as if the thought and you are one and the same. The Cloud Exercise is something that’s helped me and many of my clients take a small but powerful step back. This exercise teaches you to not engage with the thoughts and eventually they lose their grip. It’s important that you always do the same exercise because when your brain is flooded by OCD thoughts and you are panicking, it is hard to think of what to do. That’s why you need simple exercises, that you can remember easily, to prevent you from acting on your OCD thoughts.
Here’s how it goes:
You might feel the urge to pull the thought back, to check it, analyze it, dig into it “just one more time”. You are not going to do that. Instead you are going to do the Labelling exercise.
This exercise is also very simple so that you can always remember it and have it ready in difficult times. After letting the cloud go by from your left to your right you want to get back in the here and now and avoid acting on any compulsion. You can do that by labelling what you see around you. If you can, do it out loud, that is even better.
So you name what you see: “Desk, pen, laptop, phone, my favorite hoodie, window, tv, my dog Donut, sun glasses, etc, etc.
And you keep going until you have calmed down and are able to go back to what you were doing before the thoughts came.
You have calmed down when your heart beat slows down and you don’t feel the need to go back to the OCD thought. Practice breathing slowly to make it easier to calm down. You can breath in for 4 seconds and breathe out for 6 seconds. The OCD thought might still be with you, somewhere in the back of your head. That’s ok, you didn’t engage with it and you can go back to what you were doing.
If this isn’t enough for you, you can add your other senses into the mix:
And when a new thought comes, do both exercises (cloud exercise and labeling) again. In the beginning you will need them often. That will become less frequent over time.
Being happy takes effort. Being unhappy is often the easier road. It’s easier to binge-watch Netflix, eat junk food, and spiral in negative thoughts. It’s harder to make choices that are good for you like going to the gym, eating well, or stepping away from an intrusive thought. But which of these choices makes you feel better in the long run? When you choose not to act on your compulsions, you are choosing long-term peace. When you shift your attention away from an intrusive thought and instead do an exercise or something healthy, you are taking your power back.
But your intrusive thoughts won’t just let you do that without a fight. They will scream for your attention. They will try to convince you that it is urgent and absolutely necessary to engage with them. That’s why it’s so hard to resist them and why you need a clear strategy. That strategy is the Power Pause.
Hold your right hand up, like a stop signal. This is your 15 minute Power Pause. You are choosing to be strong, to not act on the thought, not engage, not go to the OCD thought for 15 minutes.
You’re not promising to be strong forever. You’re not committing to resist every compulsion for life. You’re just pausing, for now. You don’t need to set a timer. Just notice what happens while you focus on something else.
Get up, move around, do an exercise from this kit, take a walk, drink a glass of water. Whatever helps you reconnect to the present moment.
If after 15 minutes the thoughts come back, you can check in with yourself: Do I want to go back to the compulsion? Or am I doing another power pause? Or have the thoughts gone to the background enough for me to continue with my day?
You can do this and you want to do this because you’ve realized something: acting on compulsions never works in the long run. Let this be the moment you choose power. One pause at a time.
The goal is not to feel good right away, but to not act on the intrusive thoughts and to not let the fear or pain determine your actions. It’s okay to feel anxious during the pause, that’s not a sign you’re doing it wrong. If you practice Power Pausing regularly, it will get easier.
So maybe… don’t go to your suitcase. Leave your RJ in there, just for tonight. And if any new RJ thoughts come up, which they probably will, send them to your suitcase and into the pocket. Imagine in your head the thought flying to the hotel room, through the door, into the pocket of your suit case. When it’s in there, do the labelling exercise to get back in the moment.
I know this is hard. But you don’t have to be this strong forever. This exercise only lasts one day. Tomorrow morning, you can decide whether to take it out and carry it with you, risking a bad day and another argument.
So when you wake up the next day, I want you to look at that side pocket with the closed zipper and decide:
Am I leaving it in there for another day?
Or am I taking it out and carrying my RJ around again?
If you do take it out, I get it. You were already so strong yesterday, and RJ is painful and can feel so big.
Or… you can try just one more day.
There are times when you really want your Retroactive Jealousy to leave you alone. Special events like vacations, weekend trips, date nights, weddings or family outings should be fun positive experiences for everyone involved. You don’t want to ruin the experience for yourself or your company by acting on your compulsions. But that can be hard, as we all know. This travel kit helps you with that.
When your RJ starts acting up at a time when you’re supposed to have fun, be good company, and live in the moment, I want you to go to your suitcase, any travel bag that you won’t be using during the day, and open the zipper of a side pocket, preferably an empty one. Now I don’t mean this metaphorically, I want you to actually open the zipper. Then, I want you to put all your worries, thoughts, fears, anxiety, or anger into this side pocket. Use your hands. Grab your invisible thoughts and place them inside. Does it feel silly? Good! These thoughts aren’t as serious as you usually treat them, so laughing at the process is perfect. Crying is fine too, by the way. Push them all in, make sure they’re deep in the pocket, and none are left lingering. Then close the zipper.
Now, I want you to set a rule for yourself: Your RJ stays in the pocket. If you miss it and want it back, you’ll have to go to your bag and physically open the zipper to get it. Let’s say you’re at dinner with your partner and you get a huge urge to make a passive-aggressive remark about their past or you feel the need to ask another question. Your RJ is in your suitcase. You can’t take it out from a distance. That’s your rule.
You’re a strong and capable person, and you can choose to follow this rule because it’s important for you to create new, positive memories on this trip, without arguments or hurtful moments. So if you’re absolutely sure you want to ruin the night by bringing up your RJ, you’ll need to go back to your room, open the side pocket, and take it out. And while storming off to go get your RJ out of the pocket, ask yourself: what will the consequences be if I go through with this? Yet another evening ruined.
You will only overcome your OCD if you keep trying. Again and again and again. There will be ups and downs, successes and failures. It is all part of the journey. The most important thing is to not act on your compulsions and to keep doing the exercises that help you. They aren’t miracle solutions, but they do work, if you’re ready to make a change. Your OCD will keep trying to convince you to pay attention to the OCD thoughts. But they are nonsense, they don’t deserve your time.
You can make variations of these exercises and adjust them to what works best for you. I started out with the cloud exercise because that's what the thoughts felt like for me: dark clouds coming over my day and it was easy for me to imagine them floating by and out of sight. You could also choose a wave or something else. When the thoughts started to come less often and felt less dark I changed the exercise. I would say the RJ thoughts were like a TV in the other room where commercials would come on suddenly, because tv commercials are always louder than the show you're watching. And in my mind I would turn the TV off after which I would do the labeling exercise. At the moment the thoughts are more like little tennis table balls and I smash them away with an imaginary tennis table bat.
It might feel weird to use these metaphores but changing your thought patterns can be difficult and these are just ways to make it a little easier for your brain. You need to be consistent in your actions to heal. Even giving into your compulsions just one time can set you back for months so you need simple exercises that you can do again and again.
You should not suppress or fight your OCD thoughts, but you do have to fight your compulsions. You don't have to punish yourself for your thoughts, and you don’t have to be afraid of your thoughts. The goal is always to recognize and identify the thought and practice to be ok while they come and go, but they do nothing. They have no effect But compulsions (ruminating, worrying, analyzing, etc), that's something else. It feels like you need to do these things to protect yourself, but they actually make your fears grow. You can learn to recognize that tendency and to not automatically respond to it. It's time to start acting like the person you want to become and tell yourself: This no longer works for me. For many years I have tried to solve my pain with my compulsions, and it never worked. I am trying something else now.
When you start acting like the person you want to be, not the person your brain is telling you that you are, your brain will start to recognize that you don't need protection from your old stories anymore and it will stop throwing them at you. It will be a conscious effort and it's not going to be easy. Don't expect that you will some day enjoy thinking about your partner's past, that is not the goal. Most people, also people that don't have RJ, don't love thinking about their partner's romantic or sexual past and that's why you shouldn't be thinking about it at all. Any topic that you put under a magnifying glass and analyze and obsess over every day, will eventually become huge. That means if you have the power to create this fear, you also have the power to end this fear.
I love the online support groups. I use support groups on Facebook but they can also be found on other platforms. Without those groups I wouldn’t be where I am today: in recovery from Relationship OCD and Retroactive Jealousy OCD. People from all over the world have chatted with me in my worst moments. They have stood by me, given me advice or shared their own experiences, which pulled me out of the dark hole that I was in. I also help out other group members whenever I can. Group members all know the immense pain RJ sufferers feel and that creates a bond. This is a great power that we need to keep using to help each other achieve freedom from our OCD.
We do also have to be cautious when we are active in these online support groups because posts can be triggering and can bring you down on days where you woke up feeling good.
In many RJOCD support groups, I see a pattern that really worries me. People post about their partner’s sexual past and seem to be mostly looking for confirmation that what their partner did was “wrong.” Often the comments are full of validation like “yes, that’s disgusting” or “no one would be okay with that,” especially when the partner has had many sexual experiences or a high body count. But I find that very problematic. Most of these situations are about past sexual experiences, not betrayals, not abuse, not anything unethical, just consensual experiences between adults that happened before the current relationship.
And to label someone as disgusting or damaged for having had many partners? That’s not a mental health issue, that’s moral judgment based on fear, insecurity, and cultural conditioning. I don’t believe there’s anything inherently wrong with having 20 or even a 100 sexual partners. You can enjoy sex in a healthy, respectful way with different people and still be a loving, trustworthy, committed partner today.
When we validate people’s moralistic fears or anger we reinforce their OCD, we’re not helping them heal, we’re just helping the OCD grow stronger. So help yourself and other RJ sufferer’s by not seeking for this sort of validation or giving it to others.
This First Aid Kit offers several exercises and plenty of knowledge on RJOCD. Learning details about your disorder is just as important as repeating the exercises, so come back to this First Aid Kit when you don’t feel great, and reread it. It will help you find back your motivation to not act on your compulsions. This Kit is meant to give you a little breathing space, so you can focus on your recovery and get ready for the next step toward freedom.
The next steps toward freedom from OCD look different for everyone. Here is a list of choices that Anytime Coach offers:
Usually, we begin with chat coaching only. It’s a great way to get to know each other, start exploring what’s going on, build some momentum and start practicing to live without the compulsions. From there, we can see together whether video calls would be helpful, and how often. This approach keeps things flexible, while still giving you the depth and clarity you need to really move forward.
Chat coaching with Anytime Coach has proven to be effective thanks to the daily support it provides in the moments you need it most, along with the therapy-based tools shared through chat. It also allows you to revisit past conversations, reflect on what you’ve learned, and track your own progress over time.
Start today. Explore the options available through Anytime Coach, and take that first step. We’ve got this, together.
Recommendations from clients:
Thank you. I wouldn’t be doing so well if you would not have been advising me. You changed my life.
Marloes is a very skilled therapist. She provided me with clear, practical strategies that directly addressed my struggles. Her approach was always well-structured, goal-oriented, and tailored to my needs, which made a significant difference in my recovery.
Your expertise, professionalism, and genuine care for your clients set you apart. I highly recommend Anytime Coach to anyone suffering from Pure OCD.
Marloes used a combination of cognitive strategies, trauma-informed techniques, and critical thinking approaches to help me manage depression, and anxiety. She guided me in recognizing and reframing negative thought patterns, which gave me long-term tools to handle stress and emotional challenges more effectively.
During our conversations, her observations were very accurate. I felt that she truly understood my pain and difficulties. In her therapeutic approach, she introduced practical and engaging strategies that I was able to apply in my routine. She is friendly, attentive, kind and helpful. I am very grateful to have met Marloes.
Marloes is a warm, insightful therapist who helps clients feel truly seen and understood. She combines deep knowledge of anxiety, self-doubt, and relationship issues with practical tools that empower clients to grow. Through her unique blend of online video sessions and daily chat support, she offers guidance that fits into everyday life — making real change possible.