Coach Danielle Jhiani explains that ROCD typically starts between childhood and early twenties, though timing varies widely. The disorder is driven by compulsions seeking certainty, not by actual relationship doubts. She distinguishes it from social anxiety and emphasizes that recovery comes from accepting uncertainty and stopping the compulsions.
Welcome back. My name is Danielle Gianni. I'm an anxiety and OCD recovery coach, teaching people how to eliminate OCD from their lives for good. No matter what subset you have, just like I have today. I want to talk about when are ocd? Relationship OCD usually starts for most people. I get this question a lot. It's usually because people are comparing and needing certainty and wanting to know what's normal. And the first thing I want you to know is this is typically a compulsion. It's your brain wanting certainty. Now, there's nothing wrong with also wanting to gather some information and have an understanding of ocd. So I really do try to balance education with not giving people too much reassurance. The thing I want you to know about OCD is it is different for everybody. For some people, OCD starts as a child. For others, it may be in your teens and twenties. Typically it's somewhere between childhood and early twenties. And there's usually at least anxiety present in those times, whether we realize it or not. Some people just have one OCD subset, some people have multiple OCD subsets. So you may struggle with relationship ocd, and maybe you've had other OCD subsets show up in your life. Usually OCD is focusing on one thing at a time, but it can move to different topics, which is why it's so important to get the proper help as early as possible so that you know what to look out for and OCD doesn't start attaching to other things. OCD tendencies do show up all over in your life, which is why the real method teaches you how to recognize and stop that. So you're stopping the pattern, knowing what to do with uncomfortable thoughts and feelings throughout your life, not just in your OCD subset. You may have experienced social anxiety throughout your life. That social anxiety may not have shown up quite like relationship OCD does. It may have just been discomfort in friendships or socially with some avoidance and maybe other times where you push yourself. So there is a little bit of a difference between social anxiety and relationship ocd, because once you get into the relationship OCD territory, you're doing a lot of compulsive behaviors in response. You may have not had any social anxiety or relationship issues. You may have had some good relationships, and then all of a sudden it shows up in a new relationship. Maybe it shows up at the beginning, maybe it doesn't show up until you're already married or anything in between. There really is no right or wrong answer. I've worked with hundreds of people with relationship ocd and it's all over the board. Everybody's story is a little bit different. The one thing that is similar again is a tendency of not knowing how to cope with uncomfortable thoughts, uncomfortable feelings, uncomfortable life situations. And generally most of us had some sort of discomfort or anxiety in relationships in the past. It was just very manageable. Or maybe we avoided a lot prior and OCD hit more when we decided to get into this relationship. Typically, healthier relationships trigger it a little bit more, but unhealthy relationships can also trigger it. Accepting uncertainty with whatever your story is is very important. The one thing I want you to know is that you can have happy, healthy relationships free of fear and doubt and ocd. I used to have severe relationship ocd, among other subsets. It was debilitating. I know how hard it can be. I've been there. But I've also been in the recovery stage for years and I'm now happily married. I'm actually going to be having a baby tomorrow. And this can happen for you. You can be happy. You can be free of doubt and fear and anxiety and intrusive thoughts. It's a matter of learning what's going on in your brain right now, what you're doing that's making it worse, which is the compulsions what to do differently, which I teach you in the real method in my programs, and then using those new skills really consistently, making them a way of life as OCD fades more and more and more from your life and you retrain your brain completely how to respond to doubt, discomfort, uncertainty and imperfection in life, even when it's not ocd, which is a really important part of recovery. I hope this was helpful. Please comment, like and subscribe. Check out the link in the description below to sign up for a recovery program. You can be happy. I promise you. We'll talk to you very soon.
