Danielle Jhiani, an anxiety and OCD recovery coach, explains that OCD stems from genetics plus learned patterns like avoidance and suppression, often modeled by parents. Recovery means retraining your brain through repeated practice facing uncomfortable thoughts instead of fighting them.
Welcome back. Today I'm going to tell you about the potential origins of ocd. And at the end, I'm going to help you understand how you can use this for your recovery. Stay tuned.
If you don't already know me, my name is Danielle Thornton Gianni. I'm an anxiety and OCD recovery coach, a certified life coach, helping people live happy lives and have happy relationships free of anxiety and OCD. Scientifically, we haven't discovered why people have OCD. Why do I have OCD? My sister doesn't. We don't know 100%, but they do believe that it's a combination of potentially genetic factors. Learn behavior. So if you have anxiety or ocd, you may notice that one of your parents had at least an anxiety disorder, maybe ocd, maybe not, but at least some sort of anxiety. And what happens is, as children, we are subconsciously picking up on everything from our parents. We're picking up on the words that they use, the actions that they take. If they had certain fears that's going to come across in their actions and then the words that they use and they are going to project that onto us. So we are going to learn that this particular thing may be scary or unsafe. We also pick up on their thinking patterns, again by the words that they use and the behaviors that they portray. Even if we don't agree consciously, we do pick up on these things, often, often unconsciously. Then we don't really learn how to handle uncomfortable thoughts, feelings and situations in a healthy way because our parents didn't know how to handle it in a healthy way. So we start to behave just the way our parent did with things like avoidance, pushing down our feelings, judging our feelings, running away from scary things, not doing things when they are uncomfortable and scary, procrastinating when things are overwhelming, and when our parent doesn't know how to deal with uncomfortable feelings in a healthy way, or they don't deal with uncomfortable situations in a confident way by facing those fears or overcoming those things. We don't ever learn how to do that ourselves. So what happens is, as we grow up and life gets more complicated, these unhealthy coping mechanisms of avoidance and pushing down our feelings and judging our feelings and running away from uncomfortable thoughts, feelings and situations gets worse and worse and worse until one day we've noticed that our relationships are greatly affected, our happiness is greatly affected, even our career and other things that we want in our life, our goals are greatly affected by the fear, anxiety, discomfort, and lack of knowing what to do with all of those. The good news is no matter how old you are, I was in my 40s when I did most of this work. You can overcome this. You can retrain your brain reacting differently to all of these fear based situations or situations that cause a lot of discomfort. When, when you start to recognize what's going on, learning what you're doing that's actually making it worse or not helping. And then learn what to do differently. The more you practice reacting in this totally different way, you can eliminate anxiety and OCD from your life for good. There is education involved and there's a lot of practice because you're going to recognize these certain situations and your brain is used to going in this direction and you're going to start going in this direction. So it takes practice, but it eventually becomes very automatic. It's just like working on our physical health and getting in the gym and becoming active. You're going to start working brain muscles that are going to help you and you can completely retrain your brain to no longer fear these situations. To know what to do with uncomfortable feelings. To know what to do is when life is uncertain and your brain will stop giving you anxious and intrusive thoughts because it now knows that you can handle it. It doesn't need to protect you. It doesn't need to hyper focus for danger. It doesn't need to make red flags out of pink flags. I have taught hundreds of people to eliminate anxiety and OCD from their lives for good. And you can do it.
