A short YouTube video transcript by anxiety and OCD recovery coach Danielle Thornton explaining why people with OCD hyper-focus on physical sensations and emotions. She describes how attention amplifies sensations, gives a house-flaw analogy, and introduces Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) as the effective method: allow sensations to occur (exposure) and stop giving them attention (response prevention). She encourages seeking guided, regular support (membership or one-on-one coaching) to learn ERP effectively.
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Welcome back. My name is Danielle Thornton. I'm an anxiety and OCD recovery coach who has personally gotten to the recovery stage for several subsets of ocd and I've been helping others do the same. Today I want to talk about those of you who are hyper focusing on your feelings, whether that be physical feelings and sensations in the body or your emotional feelings. So with the bodily sensations, you might focus on things like breathing or blinking, aches and pains in your body, or twitches, anything that's going on in your body. This can be common with all kinds of OCD subsets, but a lot of times with things like somatic ocd, health, ocd, contamination, OCD is where these fall into. Most likely other people might focus on their physical feelings. With relationship ocd, you might focus on the feeling of love or anxiety or comfort. Attraction is another one that you might be focusing on if you struggle with relationship, relationship OCD or sexual orientation ocd. Even with pocd, we tend to hyper focus, AKA obsessed about things that might be thoughts, feelings or things that are going on around us. This is a symptom of ocd. OCD is characterized by obsessions, things that we obsess about and hyper focus on, whether that be the thoughts, the feelings or the sensations, and then followed by compulsions. These obsessions actually start with thoughts and feelings and things that are quite normal. It might start with a what if thought or noticing something that we're feeling or not feeling. And somebody without OCD is going to not give this a second thought, they're just going to let it be. Because things fluctuate, right? We experience chest pains from time to time. We experience highs and lows in our feelings and relationships. We all experience an aches, experience aches and pains and, and these things happen all the time. They're quite normal. But again, if you have ocd, you might find yourself really latching onto these things, worrying about them and hyper focusing. And the reality is the more you hyper focus on these things, the more you're going to notice them. So let's use an example here. You walk around your house, your apartment, wherever you're at, every single day, right? You walk by a little pile of stuff that you might have left there. You walk by flaws in your home, right? It might be scuffs on the baseboards, cracks in the walls, things that kind of cluttered in certain areas maybe, right? And we go on with life, living, enjoying our home, being thankful that we have a roof above our head, eating dinner, sleeping. And imagine if you were to start Focusing on what's wrong with your home, you start focusing on all of the flaws on the walls than the floor. You start focusing on every little area that isn't perfect. You start focusing on the places where the paint isn't perfect in line with the ceiling or the baseboards. Okay? And you keep focusing on this, and you start just looking for the flaws, looking for the things that aren't perfect. The more you look for this, the more you're going to find it. And this is how OCD works. The more we look for something, the more we're gonna find it in subtle ways. And it just causes more and more and more discomfort, which is why hyper focusing on our feelings and our bodily sensations, aches and pains, are only gonna bring more attention to that. What we focus on grows. You've probably heard that, right? Whatever you water will grow. And that's. That is why these compulsions of hyper focusing does not work and why it makes you feel worse and worse. I didn't believe it when I was struggling with ocd, but these thoughts that we get, these feelings that we get and the things that we experience are very normal. And when we can stop focusing on them, when we can just let them be and not give them our attention, it will fade away. Now, this is an example, a really quick example of how ERP exposure and response prevention works. The exposure here would be letting those things happen, letting them be accepting what is. And the response prevention is no longer giving it attention. And every time I do this, every time I work with somebody and they learn and practice the skills, they feel better. And every time they start going into compulsions again, they feel worse. The key is finding someone that can help you. And I'm here for this, but finding someone that can help you learn this help you learn. When is OCD showing up here and when is it not? When is it something I need to address and when is it not? Right? Because that's the big question for a lot of people working with a specialist who can help teach that to you and help teach you what to do with it, because it may be so bad right now that you can't just not give it attention. Right? That's really difficult for you at this point because you don't have the education, the knowledge and the tools to know what to do with it when it shows up. And you might have learned some things online here and practicing, but it's really hard to learn online. I actually don't teach ERP skills online because it's really important that you have that regular follow up with me, either in the Path, my membership program or in one on one coaching that regular follow up to learn about it, to talk through what's going on and dig deeper so that you can learn ERP effectively. It's really difficult, if not impossible to really do that online. You're not. You're getting little bits of pieces of information and you need that one on one or regular support to learn it and practice it and get better and better and better at it. Because it really does take time. What you'll be doing is learning to do what everybody else does who does not have ocd, what they do with fear, what they do with doubt, what they do with discomfort. Essentially it's this discomfort that is sometimes fear based and sometimes not that we don't know what to do with and we end up coping in a way that actually makes it worse. So if you are struggling with any OCD subset, I really want to encourage you to check out the link in the description below for the options that I have to help you get to that recovery stage. What I see working with people is that when they learn and practice ERP regularly, it works. And when they don't get far enough in the learning or use it consistently, then they're going to go back into compulsions and it's not going to work. So the consistency with it working is really important when we use the skills and we get the support through it. I couldn't have done it without having support myself, so I hope this was helpful. I hope you guys have a great day and we'll talk to you next time.
