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I have a close friend who suffers with pretty severe OCD which impinges on just about every aspect of his life and centres around an obsessive fear for a) his personal safety b) cleanliness (his own very unique definition of it) and c) his lack of confidence in his own ability to handle 'things'. Things like putting the trash out, having the landlord inspect the appartment once a year, a plumber coming to fix the heating, etc, these things cause him extreme anxiety so that he obsesses over them completely and utterly from the moment he's aware it's coming to often days after they've happened.

From what I can gather from his opening up to me and what he's told me about his sessions with psychiatrists, it seems this stems largely from an incredibly overbearing and critical father who seems to have instilled in him an impression that it's actually MORALLY wrong to be incorrect, to make a mistake. So he lives in total fear of making mistakes and becomes inert, and transfers all of the stress and guilt this causes him to 'trivial' worries and magnifies them out of all proportion. Little things that he can 'control', like if turning around three times in the doorway before he leaves makes him feel he's 'safe' against the possibility of there being dog turd on his doorstep that he doesn't notice, that's a lot easier than facing his fear of DOING something - anything at all, literally, even getting out of bed some days.

I can't think of any instance of myself ever being obsessed with anything, only in the colloquial sense of short-lived enthusiasms for a certain TV series, musician, author, whatever. I've never experienced this feeling of something taking over my life the way my friend does with his obsessive anxieties.