Danielle Jhiani shares four ways to help people close to you understand your anxiety and OCD: set realistic expectations, explain when and how it shows up, ask for specific support like patience or lower-pressure plans, and acknowledge how it affects them too.
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Welcome back. My name is Danielle Thornton Gianni. I'm an anxiety and OCD recovery coach. Helping people recover from anxiety, OCD, and insecure attachment for life so you can have a wonderful life with happy, healthy relationships. Today we're going to talk about how you get somebody in your life, whether that's your partner, your spouse, your family, your friends, to understand your anxiety and ocd. The first thing to remember is that other people may not understand because they have not been in your shoes. So if you feel this really strong urge and need for somebody to understand exactly how you're feeling, you're probably going to have to let that go and accept that unless somebody has been in your shoes, they're not going to understand 100%. We all want compassion and support in our lives. So if you're looking for a little bit of that from your loved ones, there are some ways that you can express what you're dealing with that will help. The first thing that I want you to do is express to this person that you just really want to feel as heard and understood as possible so that you just want them to listen with an open mind. What this is going to do is it's going to allow them to kind of turn off all of those preconceived notions. Tell them that you don't need them to fix you. You just want them to listen and try to understand the best they can. This will start the conversation off in a more open way. The next thing that you can do is just explain to them as generally as possible when what you're dealing with. You experience anxiety in these particular situations and how you feel when this anxiety shows up. You can even tell them that sometimes it's not rational, that sometimes I know that this fear or this feeling is irrational, but I don't know how to turn it off or stop it. This will help them see that you're trying to do what you can, that it sometimes isn't rational, but it's still there and difficult for you. You. The next thing you can do is ask them for what you need. Again, don't expect them to completely understand. Don't expect them to fix it for you, but let them know that in these moments of anxiety, I just need your patience. I need some understanding. Again, they can't fix it for you, so you've got to tailor that expectation down. I used to be there, I get it. But they cannot fix you. So expecting them to fix the problem for you isn't going to work. But asking for support and compassion and Patience in those moments is really important and that is something that they should be able to do. You can ask for things like, can I have a hug right now? Can we spend some time together tomorrow? Can we just chill instead of going out tonight? Those are things that you can also ask for. But what I would suggest for you is to also be. Be compassionate for your partner or your loved one and how your anxiety may be affecting their life too. When we're dealing with anxiety or OCD or any sort of issues in our life, we can unknowingly become kind of selfish and wrapped up in ourselves and what's going on with ourselves and not really be able to see how it's affecting other people. So if you can take a step back and just acknowledge that that's going to be really helpful for them to be more open and understanding of you. If you can express that I know that this affects you too and that I am working on it. And that leads to my last point. You really need to be getting proper help for this. If you're not working on your own recovery, then you aren't going to get better and it's most likely going to be more difficult for your loved ones. So making sure that you are getting the proper help is going to teach other people that you can take responsibility for yourself and that you're doing the work. But it's also okay to let them know that the recovery process takes time and practice and it has ups and downs. So let them know not to expect perfection, that they should see progress over time. But there may be some difficult times in there. Now, I have courses on this and programs to help you with everything we've talked about today with amazing success. I've never had somebody do the work and not get better, so finding the right help is important. Click on the link in the description here. I hope this video was helpful. Please like subscribe and comment and we will talk to you very soon.
