Danielle Jhiani explains how OCD's fear-based hypervigilance kills sexual attraction through intrusive thoughts, avoidance, and constant checking. The disorder demands certainty and perfection, which shrinks intimacy. Exposure and response prevention (ERP) is the evidence-based way to rebuild comfort and desire.
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Welcome back. Today we're going to talk about if OCD can affect your sex drive or, or your attraction when it comes to your partner. The answer is absolutely yes. And let's talk about why. OCD is fear based, right? And it's looking for danger constantly because it's trying to protect you. Essentially. We don't need it, we don't need the protection, but our brain thinks we do. So it's always hyper focusing on danger, looking for what's wrong, whether that's something that might go wrong, something that might be wrong in your relationship, something that might go wrong in the future, flaws of your partner, flaws of the experience itself, imperfections in the experience as well. And so if you are allowing your brain to go there with this, it's going to continue to hyper focus on those things. And when we have negative thoughts come negative feelings, okay? Same thing for positive thoughts. When we focus on the positive, we feel more positive. When we focus on the negative, we're going to feel more negative. And so this is how our brains work. And what happens is our attraction, our sex drive, and other things start to shut down. Okay? Now, of course, there's other reasons why somebody might have a low sex drive. OCD isn't the only reason. There's all kinds of reasons that someone could be dealing with this. But when we're talking about intrusive thoughts and fear and anxiety and essentially relationship ocd, this is what's likely happening. Now a lot of you might say, well, it feels so real, right? It feels real that I have these fears and these feelings or these lack of feelings. And remember, OCD wants certainty and perfection. So a lot of times OCD is looking for things to look a certain way. And when they don't, our brain is telling us that there is something wrong, which is why to recover from ocd, we have to get very comfortable with uncertainty and imperfection because there is no perfect experience out there or perfect relationship. Now, for some people, this happens very suddenly and their feelings can shift from positive to negative pretty quickly. Other times it's extremely subtle. So I know for me, in a period of time in my life, a long period of time, actually, I was not in a relationship because my brain was finding something wrong with everybody and it felt very subtle. I wasn't anxious, it didn't bother me at the time, but, but I was subconsciously avoiding out of fear. Didn't feel like fear at the time, but I was for a very long time. So our brains are very, very good at getting us to behave in a certain way when it thinks that we need to. So again, sometimes this is a subtle change. Sometimes it's more of a drastic change from positive feelings to negative. Regardless, it is possible to make the shift and change the way our brain is working. That is with exposure and response prevention. Because right now, what you're doing, the compulsions that you might hear about with ocd, for example, avoidance, rumination, or overthinking or overanalyzing, even mentally checking or comparing, these are all typical compulsions. There are things that you're doing as coping mechanisms because they do reduce the anxiety in the short term. A lot of times the problem is they're exactly what is causing your suffering. They're just reinforcing the fear and the ocd. Because when we let the OCD or the fear or the avoidance take over, we are giving it more attention. We're behaving based on the fear, which only reinforces it. We're shrinking our lives. We're teaching ourselves that we can't handle discomfort or imperfection.
Then the discomfort grows. We avoid sex more. We hyper focus on the thoughts and feelings of what we think it should be. And all that does is make everything worse. So how do we make it better? Like I said, exposure and response prevention is the foundation, the number one thing that you need to do with any sort of anxiety, fear, ocd, or even just resistance and avoidance. It works every single time for all of these. And the great thing is that as you practice, you're going to be putting yourself in a discomfort zone, right? You're going to go into the uncomfortable. You're already there anyway, so it's not going to be any different. But instead of constantly seeking certainty and comfort, which you never really get there anyway, you're going to start to put yourself in the uncomfortable situations that you're nervous about. But when you do that, over time, you become more and more and more and more comfortable. And eventually the positive feelings start coming. Let me give you an example of how this works outside of ocd. So you can see, let's say that you are nervous to.
Meet your parent. Let's say you're adopted. You're really nervous to meet this person. You don't know who they are. You don't know what it's going to go like. There's all these stories in your head about what's going to happen, right? And that's how fear works. Negative stories. And you go do that thing anyway. This applies to new jobs and any new situation, really. You go put yourself in that situation, you feel uncomfortable because you don't know what to expect. There's uncertainty there, but you go and do it and all of a sudden you start to get to know this person and things surprise you and positive things happen. And maybe it's not perfect, but a month later you've developed a relationship and you're a lot more comfortable. This is how ERP works with anything anxiety, fear based or avoidance. You have to put yourself in that situation to get to the comfort level because running away from it and is only going to increase the fear. You're staying stuck in negative stories that fear is creating that are almost always way worse than the reality. Right? So there is only one way out of this. And so if you're feeling like your attraction or your sexual desire for your partner or somebody is not where you want it to be, and you find yourself avoiding sex or any sort of intimacy, really, you're just making it worse. And I know it can sound really scary to put ourselves in these uncomfortable situations. I've done it before myself and I've done it with people for four years and it works every single time. So if you want help with this, which often is required help and support, I am here to do that. I have been helping people overcome this for four years. I have overcome it myself and again, it works. So check out the link in the description here in this video for more options on how to get help with this. Recovery is possible with the right help you can get there. And I will see you next time.
Sa.
