Danielle Thornton, an anxiety and OCD recovery coach, explains how OCD and fear-based anxiety can distort perception of a partner, leading to hyper-focus on negatives, doubts about attraction, and reduced sexual arousal. She emphasizes that these reactions are driven by fight-or-flight processes and unrealistic demands for certainty/perfection, and recommends exposure and response prevention (ERP) as the primary effective treatment for Relationship OCD (ROCD). The video closes with practical recovery encouragement and a call-to-action for coaching, courses, and a 30-minute consultation.
Chapters
Foreign.
Welcome. My name is Danielle Thornton. I'm an anxiety and OCD recovery coach and I help people recover long term from anxiety and ocd. No matter what OCD subset you are struggling with, recovery is possible. I've done it from multiple OCD subsets and with the right tools and the right help, you can too. I see people do it every day. So today we're going to talk about whether or not OCD can affect your feelings, your attraction, or even your level of arousal during intimacy with your partner. And the answer is definitely yes. It does this with a lot of people. Whether you're struggling with relationship OCD or even maybe just anxiety around relationships, it doesn't even have to be on the OCD spectrum. This is extremely common. And here's why. Anxiety and OCD are both fear based. Right? OCD is an anxiety disorder. When your brain's fight or flight center is turned on, what's gonna happen is your brain is extremely hypersensitive. It is searching for danger everywhere. Okay? And so, as you might notice, when you're struggling with anxiety in relationships, you might find yourself hyper, focusing on their flaws, on what might go wrong in the relationship. What might be wrong in the relationship? Okay. It can even focus on specific physical features of your partner that may not be your favorite. And this is because your brain is trying to keep you safe. It wants you to make sure that you notice what's wrong so you can get out quickly so that you don't get hurt. Okay? And the problem with this is fear is highly exaggerated. And when you're in fight or flight mode, your perception is highly exaggerated. So we all love certain things about our partners, and then there's certain things that we don't love, right? Nobody's perfect. No relationship's Perfect. No relationship's 100% compatible. And someone without anxiety or OCD in relationships is going to essentially overlook the things they don't like and focus on what they do like. Unless the things that they don't like start to stack up more. But when you have anxiety or OCD in relationships, your brain is hypersensitive and it's only seeing the negative. And if something may not have bothered you without OCD or anxiety, when you have OCD or anxiety, it might really bother you. Okay? What I want you to know is that anxiety and OCD is not rational. Now, notice I didn't say it's true or not true. That is a compulsion, trying to figure out if it's true or not true. Because life is very gray. You may not absolutely love your partner's nose, but without anxiety or no cd, you're not going to focus on your nose. OCD may be focusing on the nose. So whether it's true or not does not matter. What we have to do is focus on eliminating the OCD and anxiety, and that's when your perception will be more normal. The fear and the negativity and the hyper focusing will calm down and you're going to see things from a more realistic point of view. It doesn't mean that you're going to start to love your partner's nose or you're going to start to love every single thing about your partner. None of us do. We all sometimes get annoyed sometimes, but we're going to start seeing things from a more realistic and balanced perspective. So when it comes to feelings, it's the same scenario. You, your brain might be hyper focusing on the moments where you're not feeling in love or you're not feeling certain feelings that you want to. Again, OCD wants certainty and perfection. And if OCD had its way, you would be feeling in love 100% of the time. The problem with this is that's not realistic. Normal relationships come with a combination of feelings, and most of the time, those feelings are in that middle area. The neutral area is where our feelings are most of the time. And sometimes they're more positive, sometimes they're more negative. Right? So we have to come down to a more rational, realistic place if we want to eliminate OCD and quiet it down. And we have to understand that OCD is telling you that things should be a certain way. It should look like a perfect picture. Again, that's where the certainty comes in. But that doesn't exist. So OCD's plight is perfection and certainty, and none of those exist. Which is why if you continue to stay in the OCD cycle, you will continue to feel worse and worse and worse. Because OCD's goal is not realistic, what we need to do is focus on the big picture. So we may not like everything about our partners, but do they give us the important things? Do our goals align essentially with each other? Are they trustworthy? Are they honest? Those are the important things to focus on. Not what OCD is telling you might happen. Right? But the reality of the picture. We all want to be with somebody who has more pros than cons, but in order to see that big picture, we have to take care of the ocd. So how do we do that? Exposure and response prevention is the best treatment for ocd, including relationship OCD Relationship OCD is one of the OCD subsets that I have been in the recovery stage with. And I promise you it works. It works with everybody that I work with. The important thing is learning it properly, getting the right guidance and support with it, and also not giving up too soon. Not okay, because a lot of people go into erp, but they don't take it far enough and they don't fully learn the ins and outs of erp. But it works for every single OCD subset. The different OCD subsets that have come up. For me, it works with every single one of them. And I work with clients with all different OCD subsets as well. And believe it or not, a lot of people with relationship OCD struggle with OCD subsets at some point in their life and sometimes just different OCD tendencies. But knowing all of this and understanding OCD and then what to do with it is extremely important. Now, when it comes to just arousal with sex, again, the problem with arousal when we have OCD is we're hyper focusing on the negative. So we're focused on negative thoughts, we're going to have negative feelings. When we have negative feelings, we're not feeling very romantic or attracted or even wanting to have sex with somebody. When you think about life, when you're going through stressful situations or you're not connected to your partner, then of course you're not going to feel like having sex at times. Okay, but most of the problem is the overthinking before you have sex, the avoidance of sex itself, and then the rumination during sex. Those are the things that are really affecting your sex life the most. All of the symptoms of OCD are affecting your sex life the most. So no matter where you're at in the recovery process with relationship ocd, you can get there. I see people do it every day. I've done it myself. I know what it takes, but it takes time. The recovery process is a journey and it takes time and support and knowledge. So making sure that you are patient with yourself, you have the right support and you're learning about your OCD and allowing the ups and downs of the recovery process is extremely important. So if you're looking for help, I have a couple of different options for you. I have a membership program, I have a course which is included in the membership program and I have one on one coaching sessions which is also an option if you're a member, but whichever one works for you. If you check out the link in the description below, you can find my site the different options and pick an option that fits best for you. If you have any additional questions, you can also sign up for a 30 minute call with me or where I can answer all of your questions about the recovery process. I am here to help as many people recover from OCD as I can and I will be doing this for the rest of my life. So I hope to talk to you soon. I hope this was helpful. Make sure that you subscribe, comment like and share so I know this was good and I will definitely do more. I will talk to you guys soon.
