A short YouTube talk by Danielle Thornton (anxiety and OCD recovery specialist) explaining why people with OCD hyper-focus on feelings and sensations (thought-driven emotional responses, somatic sensations, relationship-related feelings). She links the behavior to a learned avoidance of discomfort from childhood that reinforces OCD's fear/avoidance cycle. Thornton recommends exposure and response prevention (ERP) as the effective treatment because it reduces attention to intrusive feelings and stops the checking cycle, and she emphasizes doing ERP with professional support. The talk includes examples (relationship OCD, somatic OCD), reassurance from personal recovery experience, and a practical tip: stop checking/analyzing sensations to weaken OCD.
Foreign.
Welcome back. My name is Danielle Thornton. I'm an anxiety and OCD recovery specialist, helping people recover from all subsets of OCD long term, just like I have. So today we're going to talk about hyper focusing on your feelings. This is extremely common, so sometimes we're hyper focusing on the thoughts. But here's the thing, our thoughts are what create our feelings. So whether we're talking about emotional feelings that create sensations in the body, or we're talking about even physical sensations in the body that we're focusing on, like pains, aches and other sensations that we might be doing daily, like blinking and swallowing and all kinds of stuff, any thoughts or feelings that we're focusing on is a problem when you have ocd. Here's the thing, the reason why a lot of us develop OCD is this tendency towards running away from discomfort. We don't know what to do with uncomfortable thoughts, we don't know what to do with uncomfortable feelings. So from childhood, a lot of us run away from these things. We learn not to deal with it. And over time, the more we run away from one uncomfortable thing than the next uncomfortable thing that shows up. We've taught ourselves that we can't handle it, that we don't know what to do with it. And it just gets worse and worse and worse.
So focusing on the feelings is extremely common. So a lot of you hear me talking about relationship ocd, and one of the common things is focusing on what our feelings are for our partner, maybe what their feelings are for us, or even our feelings around intimacy. Okay, with somatic ocd, we might hyper focus on certain feelings in our body, certain sensations with a lot of people, the brain is giving you physical sensations in your body. It might be pains, it might be aches, it might be the urge to urinate a lot. The brain is really interesting in what it will do with ocd. So the fear of the thoughts and then the fear of the feelings, it's what's fueling the ocd. And the more you hyper focus on these things, the worse it's going to get. Now, believe me, I know how difficult it is to have a physical sensation, even physical pain or anxious feelings in our body, and not give it attention. It's really difficult. But here's the thing, we have to learn to do this. It takes practice. It used to be so difficult for me and now it doesn't even really show up because I don't give it attention if it tries to. But working through the fear, the basis for all of this is Fear, whether it feels like fear, anxiety, sometimes it just feels like disgust, and avoidance. All of these feelings are extremely common with ocd. But the coping mechanisms that you're using to try to deal with this, it's not your fault. But they're not working. You may or may not know this yet. They don't work and they make it worse. So what do we do with this? The reason why exposure and Response Prevention works so well is because it teaches you not to give these things attention. And of course, the reason why I don't teach you a specific exposure technique right now is because you don't have the support right now for me to help you work through it if you have questions and if you get stuck. So that's why it's so important to be working with somebody who can help you work through the ways that OCD keeps you stuck and answer your questions through the process of learning exposure and response prevention. Sometimes we can get a little bit further on our own, but I promise you, you're going to need somebody to help support you through the process. It works every single time. And so the one tip that I can give you now is when it comes to the feelings, whether we're talking about emotional feelings or physical feelings in your body, the more you cannot give these attention and not let them scare you, the more they are going to lessen and the less often you'll get intrusive thoughts. The more you find yourself checking your feelings, emotional or physical, and analyzing them, the worse it's going to get. You're feeding into the ocd. You're engaging with the ocd. It's going to be like, great, this is working. I'm going to do this again. Okay? So I hope this was helpful. Subscribe Like Comment that helps me know that this content is helpful for you and what to provide more of. If you want help recovering from ocd, please reach out. You can find my link in the description below. Recovery is possible. I promise you can get through this. With the right techniques, with the right skills and the right support, recovery is possible. We'll talk to you next time.
