Danielle Thornton (anxiety and OCD recovery coach) discusses Relationship OCD (ROCD) and intrusive thoughts about being attracted to people other than one’s partner. She explains common underlying beliefs (e.g., “I should always be attracted to my partner”), normalizes occasional attraction to others, and recommends acceptance and ERP (exposure and response prevention) while avoiding compulsions (rumination, checking, searching). The video closes with a call-to-action offering coaching, a course, and a free planning call.
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Welcome. My name is Danielle Thornton. I am an anxiety and OCD recovery coach. And today we're going to talk about a theme of relationship ocd. That it's very common, which is, what if I'm attracted to other people and maybe not feeling attraction towards my partner? So essentially, this is an intrusive thought. Whether you are noticing someone else that's attractive and you get the thought of, oh, my gosh, you know, I'm not attracted to my partner. What if I fell out of love with my partner? Or you're noticing that you're not attracted to your partner in one particular moment. These are all intrusive thoughts that OCD is giving you. Very common for a lot of people with OCD and not present in others with relationship ocd. So it very much depends on the person. There's no right or wrong answer here, but this is super common. And again, OCD wants to keep you safe. It wants to keep you out of relationships. That's its goal. And it's going to give you any thought or get you attached to any particular subject or theme that is going to increase that anxiety and essentially get to you. Right? It wants you to be safe. It wants you to get out of the relationship. So it's going to give you all kinds of crazy thoughts. And it's important to know that. It's important to know what OCD's purpose is. It's important to know that it's just fear. And then it's important to know what to do about it. And we will talk about that in just a few minutes. But first, I want to just stick with this particular intrusive thought. And the beliefs that underlie this is that I should always be attracted to my partner, or. Or I should never be attracted to anybody besides my partner. Okay? These are underlying beliefs that sometimes show up. Essentially, they are just intrusive thoughts, too. Okay? But when we look at the beliefs around relationships, we can start to decode some of those intrusive thoughts to really challenge whether or not these are things that are serving us or not. And so it's important to know that it's okay to be attracted to other people. It's okay to find somebody else attractive. It's normal. It's. It is normal to not always find your partner attractive. Now, when you have relationship OCD and you're checking the attractiveness of your partner or maybe other people, then of course this particular compulsion is going to lead to more intrusive thoughts and more anxiety, because that's what compulsions do. The compulsions are the coping mechanisms that you have created to ease the anxiety in the short term. But the problem is they reinforce the other OCD and that fear cycle in your brain and they give you more intrusive thoughts long term. So what is the solution to this? What do you do when you're noticing that you find somebody else attractive? What do you do when you notice that you are not attracted to your partner? There's a lot of acceptance here, right? We talk a lot about ERP exposure and response prevention. Acceptance is another big tool for those with ocd, and essentially it's very similar to exposure. You're going to accept that you're not attracted to your partner in that moment. You're going to accept that you might be more attracted to someone else, that there are more attractive people out there than your partner. There's always going to be somebody that's more or less of whatever, fill in the blank than your partner, than you. And what we do with that is that we accept it. Because if we were always focused on everybody else who's prettier, smarter, faster, whatever that thing is than us or other people, we'd create a lot of suffering. And that's what happens when we are focused on these intrusive thoughts that relationship OCD is giving you. So it's very important to just sit in the uncertainty and sit with acceptance that, yeah, okay, I find that person very attractive, or, yep, my partner isn't looking so attractive today. Maybe they didn't get a haircut or maybe they don't have makeup on. Who knows what it is, right? But there are times where you are going to have to just sit with this and accept it for what it is. And when you do that, what happens is you're not feeding into the ocd, right? Like a bully. OCD wants you to react. It wants you to do something about it because it wants you to take action.
Take action. You quiet that OCD bully. Just like a bully in school. If you don't react, they're going to go pick on somebody else and OCD is going to quiet down when you don't react to the intrusive thoughts that it's giving. This is only one tool of acceptance when it comes to ocd, but it's a very effective one that works with this particular theme of attraction. So see how this works for you. Sit with the acceptance that, okay, I don't find my partner attractive today, or okay, that person is really, really attractive. I'm just going to accept that and live with that. And I'm going to move on with my life anyway. Okay? So this is a very effective tool for this one. The key is you don't want to do any other compulsions. You don't want to start ruminating or analyzing. You don't want to start checking your partner's attractiveness. Even more, you don't want to start looking for other attractive people. You don't want to start getting in your head about it. Okay? Because every time you do a compulsion, remember that just feeds the ocd. So you either need to sit with the acceptance, go into an exposure and then practice response prevention, which is not doing the compulsions. So try this one. Let me know how it's going down below. If you're looking for more help with your relationship ocd. I help people get to the recovery stage for relationship OCD and other forms of OCD every single day. It is very, very possible. Please check out the information below. There's a link to my site where you can schedule a free call with me where I will go through a recovery plan with you and we will talk about everything that you need in order to get to that recovery stage, whether that's with me or elsewhere. I will help you plan that. You can look at my coaching programs. You can look at my relationship OCD course. There there's a lot of information that's going to help you on your journey to recovery from a relationship ocd.
