Danielle Jhiani, an anxiety and OCD recovery coach, explains why people may 'lack feelings' in relationships: fear, discomfort, OCD-driven perfectionism, and avoidant attachment can blunt attraction, responsiveness, intimacy, and commitment. She advises leaning into engagement rather than avoidance, resisting reassurance-seeking, allowing discomfort to be processed in the present, and practicing these skills to build secure, healthy relationships.
Chapters
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Welcome back. My name is Danielle Thornton Gianni. I'm an anxiety and OCD recovery coach. Helping people fully recover from anxiety and OCD just like I have. So you can have amazing relationships and a happy life. Let's talk a little bit about feelings in our relationship. A lot of people with OCD really struggle with their feelings. The thing is, fear, discomfort and even low level avoidance can really shut down our feelings. In relationships, if there are underlying fears and insecurities, your brain may be recognizing that fear and changing your perception and how you actually feel. It can affect your attraction level, it can affect how you show up in relationships, how responsive you are, how involved you are and how far you go in your relationships. If you have ocd, this can manifest as the need for perfection and the intrusive thoughts telling you that I should feel in love all the time and, and a lot of anxiety and discomfort when you don't. For people who are more avoidant, they may not feel the feelings that they really want to, or those feelings come and go. They may have a tendency to allow their brain to give them excuses to run away or not engage in committed relationships, even affecting intimacy. For many people, this can manifest in a lot of different ways and it can actually flip from one to the other. Sometimes you're more avoidant and running away, and other times you're more needy and looking for certainty. In relationships, the great thing is, once we learn what's going on in the brain, we learn that it's fear or discomfort that's really causing us to shut down or to panic and have anxiety. We can start to work with this to return things to a much more healthy, normal level. So, so you can have happy, healthy, secure relationships. I've actually done this personally after a lot of struggles for almost two decades. And there are some specific things that you need to do that we help you do. And here's a couple of tips. Number one, when you find yourself pulling away or avoiding, whether that's due to just a low level discomfort or whether it's anxiety that you're experiencing, I want you to force yourself to not pull away and engage in the way that you would without that discomfort. Every time we avoid or run away from something, it actually just reinforces that discomfort and it gets that much more uncomfortable to push forward. So you start doing those things anyway, even though you feel like avoiding. When you do that consistently, you build comfort and it will can become very comfortable if not enjoyable over time. The second thing I want you to do is recognize when you're Feeling anxious and you're feeling like you really need to get reassurance, get certainty, reach out. You're feeling the urgency to get answers or reassurance from people. Giving into that urgent need for reassurance or certainty is actually reinforcing that anxiety. And you may feel some comfort when you do that. You get the reassurance you want. But what happens over time is you need more and more of that reassurance to be okay. You're never going to have 100% certainty and no healthy person is going to be able to meet that need for you. So what you need to do is learn to allow yourself to have some discomfort in these moments. And if you don't give that discomfort so much attention and you focus on the present moment, what's going to happen is your body's going to process through that emotion and that anxiety and that discomfort and it's going to fade away. And, and you're going to teach yourself that I didn't need this outside certainty or reassurance to feel better. You give that person in that relationship time to show you that it is consistent, that it is reliable, that that person can be there for you. But if there's over expectations from you to manage your own uncertainties and anxieties, then that's not healthy either. And you need to learn to do that while also allowing your relationship to build and trust. These things take practice. They take time. Recognizing when you are either underreacting or overreacting and learning to find that balance within yourself. And when you heal yourself, you're showing up in the relationship in a much more healthy way. And no matter which end of the spectrum you come from or whether you end up on both sides of the spectrum, you can work through this and change so that that you can have happy, healthy, secure relationships without anxiety or ocd. If you need help with this, check out the link in the description below and we will talk to you very soon.
