Danielle Jhiani explains why cheating worries spiral in relationship anxiety and ROCD. Checking your partner's phone, seeking reassurance, and mentally reviewing the relationship are compulsions that temporarily ease anxiety but reinforce the intrusive thoughts. Exposure and response prevention with an OCD specialist is the evidence-based path to recovery.
Welcome. My name is Danielle. I am an anxiety and OCD recovery coach. And today I want to talk about why you might be worrying that your partner might cheat. So it's not uncommon for someone to maybe think about or worry that their partner may cheat. But if you have relationship anxiety or relationship ocd, this thought may really get stuck in your head and you may not be able to stop thinking about it for hours in a day, days in a week, or even months sometimes. Then, to ease the anxiety and discomfort that you feel, you might find the real desire to start doing some of these things to help ease your anxiety. The first one is checking. You might feel like checking your partner's phone, their computer, their email, their pockets, whatever this might be. But there's a lot of different checking behaviors that go along with this. The next one is asking your friends or family for reassurance. So you might be asking them what they feel about your partner, what they've experienced in their relationships, anything to get these feelings off your chest, get answers, or anything to help ease this anxiety. The next one is you might start asking your partner questions. Something doesn't feel right. You might feel the need to ask them where they were, why they are doing a particular behavior, who the person was that they were just texting with this overwhelming urgency and urge to find answers. The last one is very mental, but mentally reviewing your relationship, reviewing past situations, thinking about future situations, and what you might say or do in a certain scenario, usually to get clarity on that subject or the worry that you're having in that moment.
These are all very common compulsions related to ocd. While they might be present with anxiety, with relationship OCD or any form of ocd, these types of compulsions feel very urgent. We feel like we have to do them or that it's something that has to be done in order to ease that anxiety or feel better in that moment. When in reality they're just coping mechanisms and they help us in the short term. But. But unfortunately with ocd, they actually fuel the anxiety and more intrusive thoughts in the long term. This is because you're stuck in what's called an OCD cycle. So first you get the intrusive thought, right, that brings the anxiety and the discomfort, and then you do that thing in the moment that's going to ease that anxiety. You might be searching for answers, getting reassurance. It might be something physical that you do in that moment to ease the anxiety, but what then happens is that just reinforces that intrusive thought that you've gotten and reinforces the ocd, which leads to more intrusive thoughts. The way to break this cycle is two things. This is where exposure and response prevention comes into play. The ERP treatment that's necessary to get freedom from your ocd. You have to start to expose yourself to the uncertainty because all of these compulsions that you're actually doing are just feeding the need for certainty and which again, is fueling the ocd. The ocd. So what you need to do is get comfortable with uncertainty and get comfortable with not knowing and the possibility that your fears might be true. So that's where the exposure part comes in. And then the response prevention entails not doing the compulsions.
So it seems pretty simple. And a lot of people try to do this themselves, but it's very difficult to do on your own. So I really, really highly recommend finding an OCD specialist that will help walk you through this process. Not only because there is a bright way to go through this process, but also there's a lot of hidden compulsions and things that you're going to need guidance on in order to get better. But the good news is that you can fully recover from ocd. You can get to a place where you are not experiencing this anxiety, you're not experiencing the intrus of thoughts, and you know how to handle it when you're triggered in the future. I have been able to get here myself. It is very freeing and very possible and it's why I dedicated my life to helping other people with relationship OCD and other forms of OCD get to the full recovery stage. So if you want more help with this, please see the comments below. I will provide you a link to my website where you can sign up for a free call and learn more about how I can help you get.
