Danielle Jhiani explains why relationship doubts often come from anxiety and fear, not from actually wanting to leave. She breaks down how avoidance and reassurance-seeking make it worse, and recommends exposure and response prevention: noticing doubts without acting on them.
Feeling doubt and anxiety in your relationship or about your partner doesn't actually mean that you really doubt or don't want to be in that relationship. Stay tuned to hear why and stay to the end to learn how you can rewire your brain and stop these fears, doubts and avoidance in relationships.
My name is Danielle Thornton Gianni. I am an anxiety and OCD recovery coach who has recovered from insecure attachment anxiety and ocd and I help others do the same. Today I'm going to explain to you why you might be experiencing thoughts of doubt, discomfort, avoidance or anxiety in your relationships, even when you really want to be there. The reason that this is happening is very simple. It's fear. You may not feel afraid, it may not feel like high anxiety. For some people, it's just the brain makes excuses to avoid and run away. For other people, there are very high levels of anxiety and discomfort. What's happening in the brain is the brain is trying to protect us. The amygdala is the fear center of the brain that tries to warn us to keep us safe. The brain is always seeking comfort and wanting to avoid discomfort. And many times this is a very healthy thing that the brain is doing. But sometimes it becomes too overactive and starts to negatively affect our lives. So the brain starts giving you doubts. It starts to hyper focus on what might be wrong or what might go wrong. It starts to hyper focus on the negatives, overriding or overlooking the positives. Sometimes this is very, very subtle and you just find that you don't feel attracted to people. This might become a pattern for you, or maybe you were once attracted and you're not feeling that way anymore. Now you may have a parent with anxiety, which is why we're predispositioned towards having anxiety. Or we just don't learn the proper coping mechanisms to deal with doubt and discomfort, whether that's our feelings or our real life situations. As this goes untreated, it actually gets worse and worse and worse because we start doing these negative coping mechanisms more and more versus the healthy ones and we start to unconsciously teach the brain that yes, this is scary, there is something wrong here. We continue to avoid and run away from those things and it gets worse over time. I experienced this a lot throughout my whole life and it did continue to get worse and worse until I finally realized that I was the common denominator in my life. Late 30s. The problem wasn't my relationships. Now, if you're experiencing attachment issues, you might have low levels of anxiety, you might get subtle doubts, or you might just Find yourself making avoidant choices a lot, again, more subconsciously than consciously. If this goes into OCD territory, which is an anxiety disorder, you're going to find yourself getting a lot of really uncomfortable, intrusive thoughts, followed by a lot of desire and need to get rid of these thoughts. High levels of anxiety, high levels of discomfort, and this starting to very greatly impact your life. Now, some people, for me, it started out as attachment issues and went into ocd. For some people, this can happen. For others, it won't. Someone with attachment issues may seek a little bit more reassurance. They may have a little bit of anxiety, a little bit of avoidance. But with relationship ocd, this is a constant issue. You find yourself doing these things every day. There's a real pull and urge to do them. The great news is the solution for this is the same for both. And one thing that I have found that a lot of attachment therapists are missing is what's necessary for relationship ocd, which is exponent. Now, someone with relationship OCD is going to need very specific treatment called exposure and response prevention. With attachment styles, ERP is actually very effective, and it's a very underutilized tool. Essentially, you need to learn to recognize when these moments are showing up, when you have these thoughts or situations that are causing discomfort and doubt or avoidance and start to react to them differently. Because when you react to them the way that you are right now, with avoidance and anxiety and running away from that thing, you're actually reinforcing the fear. You're reinforcing this pattern in the brain. When you start to recognize these patterns and you start to react differently, you're going to be retraining your brain that, hey, this thing really isn't scary. Yes, there are risks in relationships, but I can handle it. I can handle doubt, I can handle uncertainty. And you need to train yourself to stop avoiding. This is the number one thing that's really, really important. Because every time you run away in any way due to fear or discomfort, you are reinforcing that fear. And it's only going to get worse and worse and harder and harder to move towards that thing. And if you think about a phobia, this is really the exact same thing. Somebody has a phobia of snakes. And of course, we can live our whole lives with a phobia with snakes, and it doesn't really affect our lives very much. It's very different with relationships. But in order to get over that phobia of snakes, they have to actually start to face that fear. And yes, it's uncomfortable, but it's no more uncomfortable than what they're already experiencing. And as they continue to face that fear, they build confidence. The fear lessons, the discomfort lessens and eventually the fear is gone. So even though it may not feel the same as a phobia, or maybe it does, the solution is still the same. And there's a lot of people out there teaching a lot of things that are very, very helpful. But one of the big missing pieces is the exposure to the thing, to not running away, recognizing every single time these little micro moments show up, learning how to respond differently. When we do that, your brain stops being afraid of that thing. Your feelings and your emotions and the positive feelings around that thing start to return. The fear, the discomfort, the avoidance starts to fade. You build comfort. And all of a sudden you can have a happy, secure, healthy relationship and feel really good about it. Make sure you check out the link in the description below, which will give you options for OCD recovery or join my email list for my upcoming program on and secure attachment. I've done it, you can do it and we'll talk to you really soon.
