Danielle Jhiani, an anxiety and OCD recovery coach, explains how OCD erodes self-trust through fear-based intrusive thoughts and hypervigilance. She teaches four ways to rebuild it: distinguish quiet intuition from OCD thoughts, stop seeking certainty and perfection, accept uncertainty, and learn ERP skills from a specialist.
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Welcome back. My name is Danielle Thornton Gianni. I'm an anxiety and OCD recovery coach. I help people eliminate anxiety and OCD from their lives for good so you can live an amazing life and have happy, healthy relationships. Today I'm going to help you learn how you can build more self trust when you have OCD and stay to the end because I'm going to give you a really good tip that's going to help you the most to rebuild that self trust in your opinions and your thoughts and in your decisions. The reason why self trust erodes when you have OCD is because your brain, your amygdala is trying to protect you. But it's hyper focusing on anything that might be dangerous. It's overreacting to everything and it's giving you a lot of doubts. It's focusing on any tiny little negative thing that it can find. It's giving you thoughts that make you question your decisions. It makes you question your feelings, it makes you question your reality because again, it's looking for any piece of danger that it can to warn you and try to protect you. It doesn't realize that it's doing more harm than good and it doesn't realize that it's finding things that aren't really dangerous or there's really nothing wrong in many of the things that it's finding or it's exaggerating. You then start to question your own thoughts, your own emotions and your own judgments and your decisions. This can be a real downward spiral that can affect your confidence and your trust in yourself. What I want to teach you today is that you can learn to trust yourself and not these negative fear based thoughts that your brain is giving you. It's important to understand that your thoughts are just thoughts. I know you've probably heard that before, but it's true. It's just the judgment of them. You get thousands of thoughts every day that you're not giving much attention to that you're letting go of. These other thoughts you feel like you need to give them a lot of attention because they might be about something that's important to you or they might be telling you that something is going to go wrong or something is actually scary. The less you give these thoughts attention, they're less they're going to bother you. You do not have to listen to fear based thoughts. The difference between intuition and OCD is OCD gives you fear based thoughts that feel like you have to act upon them. Intuition isn't that way. Intuition is quiet. It's knowing it's not fear based, so you're learning not to listen to fear. Another reason why you're lacking self trust is because you're trying to get rid of these uncomfortable feelings. And your brain and your body are doing this for you. It may not be accurate and it may be over exaggerated, but it's just going to get louder if you don't listen to it. So it's important that you allow yourself to have these thoughts. You allow yourself to have negative feelings, but what you choose to do with them is really important. When we choose to try to get rid of them, push them away, or even hyper focus on them, they're going to get worse. You're also lacking self trust because your coping mechanisms, although you, you didn't know what else to do until now, until you're learning what OCD is and how it works and how to treat it differently, your coping mechanisms are ways to get certainty or get perfection. And neither of these things exist. So always trying to reach the standard that doesn't exist is going to be a spinning wheel for you. You're never going to get there because 100% certainty doesn't exist about anything and either does perfection. And then the compulsions like ruminating or trying to push the thoughts away, all of this is having a negative effect and the effect that you don't want, which is more intrusive thoughts, louder thoughts in the brain, creating more feelings in the body and it is a downward spiral. So how do you learn to trust yourself again? Number one, start responding to the thoughts differently. Either you just don't give them attention at all, or you learn to accept the thoughts, accept the uncertainty and move on with your life. And you move on with your day and being who you want to be that day, that week or that year. You learn to trust yourself and not fear. You learn to trust what you think when you're not afraid. You don't trust the fear based thoughts, you don't trust the fear based feelings, you trust yourself. Outside of that, you learn what the unhelpful coping mechanisms are and then you learn helpful coping mechanisms by finding an ERP specialist like myself or somebody else who can teach those to you, who can help you understand what's going on in the brain, what I'm doing that's making it worse, compulsions and what I do that makes it better. ERP and learning those skills, you learn how to face challenging situations instead of running away from uncomfortable feelings, uncomfortable situations, or things that might be hard. The majority of us with ocd, if not all of us have been running away from those things. You probably tend to run away from uncomfortable feelings, push them away, not know how to deal with them, not face difficult situations, difficult conversations, pushing yourself and moving towards those things. The more you run away from them, the more you're teaching yourself that I can't handle it. And then your brain starts seeing everything as scary and because this pattern gets worse and worse over time. So what I want you to practice today is just noticing those fear based thoughts and choosing not to give it your attention. You may get a hundred of them today, you may get 10 of them. They may be loud, they may be quiet, they may happen a lot more than that. No matter what, I want you to recognize the thought and choose not to engage with it. Don't push it away. Allow it to be there. Allow the uncomfortable feelings to be there and go focus on the present moment taking action. Do this over and over again and see how it works for you and post in the comments and let me know how this worked for you as you did it for a full day. Starting your day, creating the day that you want it to be. Really commit to it. Please like subscribe and comment on this video to let me know how you are doing and we'll talk to you soon.
