Your Attachment Style Might Be ROCD (Relationship OCD) Instead

Hey, it's Danielle Gianni here. I'm an anxiety and OCD coach who's overcome anxious and avoidant attachment and relationship OCD and help others do the same. But before you can overcome your issues, you need to be clear about what they are. And there are a lot of you out there who are not only anxiously or avoidantly attached, you're also experiencing obsession and compulsion. And if this is the case, you'll never get better until you address this properly. Have you ever read a book or watched a video about anxious attachment style and thought, oh my gosh, that's me? Or maybe even avoid an attach attachment style? You read about the fear of abandonment, the need for reassurance, the protest behaviors, and when you feel disconnected, it all just clicks. You start applying the advice. You focus on communicating your needs, you try to heal your attachment wounds, and you work on building more security with your partner. But for some reason it's not working. In fact, you might feel even worse. The anxiety is still there, the obsessive thoughts are still looping, and you feel more confused than ever. There's a very good reason it's not working, and it's because you might be trying to solve the problem with the wrong solution entirely. Today we're going to talk about the critical and often misunderstood difference between having an anxious attachment style and struggling with relationship ocd. Getting this right is the most important step you can take because. Because the solution for one can be the prison for other and stay until the end. Because I'm going to give you the perfect way to find out the answer really quickly. First, let's give anxious attachment its proper due. It's a very real and valid concept. It typically develops in childhood and is rooted in deep seated fear of abandonment or rejection. When someone with an anxious attachment style feels insecure in their relationship, they often engage in what are called activating strategies. Their main goal is to re establish closeness and connection. This can look like needing frequent reassurance that their partner loves them, calling or texting a lot when they feel distant, becoming preoccupied with the relationship, and then protest behavior like trying to make their partner jealous. The key driver here is fear of losing the person. The anxiety is primarily about the connection itself. When they feel securely attached, the anxiety subsides and it makes sense. Right now, let's talk about relationship ocd. I want you to listen very closely because this is where the wires get crossed. Relationship OCD is not an attachment style. It's a clinical behavioral disorder. It's a subtype of OCD where your brain gets stuck in a relentless cycle of obsessions and compulsions all centered around your relationship. The obsessions are the intrusive, unwanted and deeply distressing thoughts. Things like I can't deal with their flaws. What if I'm not attracted enough? Is this the right relationship or am I settling? They can cause you to feel anxious or even panic. The compulsions that follow, or anything you do to try to get rid of the anxiety caused by that thought, feeling or even a real life situation. This is where it starts to look like anxious attachment, but the function is completely different. Common compulsions include, but are definitely not limited to mental reviewing every memory for proof of your love, constantly comparing your partner to others, endless googling of signs that you're in the right or wrong relationship, and yes, seeking reassurance. Often here the key driver is not just a fear of losing the person, which it could be. It's an intolerance of uncertainty and discomfort and a desperate need to neutralize the feelings or thoughts. As you can see, there are a lot of similarities between anxious attachment and relationship ocd. Even avoidant attachment has a lot of similarities with people with relationship ocd. When there's a lot of avoidant tendency of things that cause discomfort and even avoiding relationships and intimacy themselves, they all come with feelings of anxiety triggers, fear based thoughts, and unhelpful coping mechanisms like reassurance seeking. But how do you know if you have relationship ocd? This is the most important part of our conversation today. Recognizing the obsessive compulsive cycle in your thoughts and behavioral responses to uncertainty and distress is a game changer. Because if you're not tackling this, you're never going to get better. In fact, it will just get worse. Recognizing relationship OCD is actually quite easy, which I'll tell you in just a second. But of course it's not black and white. It's a spectrum. One person can have the tendency to obsess or go into compulsive behaviors at times where others are in the full blown OCD cycle on a daily basis. According to the Cleveland Clinic, a few of the criteria for OCD diagnosis include having obsessions and compulsions. The obsessions or compulsions take up more than one hour per day. The obsessions or compulsions cause distress or affect your participation in social activities, work responsibilities or other life events. And the symptoms aren't caused by substances or another medical or mental health condition. To simplify if you can relate to obsessing about a topic regularly and you're doing some or all of the Compulsions we've covered here for more than an hour a day, multiple days a week. You are probably dealing with ocd. Now. Many people ask me on our calls, can I have both insecure attachment style and ocd? And the answer is yes. Absolutely. Many people do. But here's what I want you to know. The OCD recovery tools that I learned and I teach my clients often help with both problems. This is because your responses to anxious attachment are fear based, and OCD recovery tools teach you how to deal with fear in healthy ways, including when to talk about something that's bothering you and when not to because it's compulsive or harmful. This is the part that will save you years of wasted time and Harding Most advice for anxious attachment involves things like learning to express your needs, asking for reassurance to feel more secure, or talking through your fears with your partner. For someone with an anxious attachment style, when you do this, it can be very healing. If you're with a healthy partner, you'll ask once and it will be enough to help you feel more secure and then let go. For someone with relationship ocd, reassurance can often be gasoline on the fire. Asking for reassurance when you have relationship OCD is a compulsion that you'll find that you need to do more and more of to feel better. Talking through the obsessive thought is another compulsion that you'll find doesn't work very well. It's the very thing that keeps the OCD cycle spinning. Every time you get reassurance, you're teaching your brain that the obsessive thought was a real threat but and that it needs to be neutralized. And your brain may quiet down for a minute, but soon it will need more reassurance. You can't use the solution for an attachment issue to solve ocd. You'll only get more stuff once the OCD is quiet and you know how to identify ocd. You can address any other issues that you might see from a healthy mindset and strategy, or work on any lingering attachment issues that remain. For me, there was very little and I'm now securely attached in my relationship. So if attachment programs or therapy isn't the answer, what is for relationship ocd? The solution for relationship OCD is not to get more reassurance. It's to learn to tolerate the uncertainty or discomfort without doing the compulsion, which only feeds the brain's need for more and more. This is the heart of Exposure and Response prevention, or erp, which is the gold standard treatment for ocd. It's about letting the thought what if this isn't the right relationship? Be there? And not choosing to do anything about it. No checking, no analyzing, no asking. Even better, it's learning to lean into the uncertainty to train your brain more permanently that you can handle it versus that you can't. You have to change your relationship with with the thoughts and feelings themselves. This is what I teach in the Real Method. It's about being able to recognize the OCD cycle before it starts, knowing how to stop it or keep it from starting and no longer feeding your need for certainty, comfort and perfection. This is how you retrain your brain. This is how you reach the lifetime recovery stage where OCD no longer affects your life and your relationships. I know it works because I've done it. I know this work is hard. I know it feels completely counterintuitive right now. Your brain is going to scream at you to go back to the old familiar compulsions or coping habits that don't work very well. That's why having a guide, a system and a community so you don't feel so alone is so critical. If you're unsure whether or not your main issue is attachment related or relationship ocd, maybe it's both, check out my Attachment for OCD quiz at the link below in the description. You can find out in just a couple minutes. The most empowering thing you can do today is to get clarity on what you're actually dealing with. It's not about slapping a permanent label on yourself. It's about making sure you're using the right map to get to get to where you want to go. You are not broken. You just need the right tools for the job. I promise you freedom from this cycle is possible. I've done it and I see people do it every single day. If this video brought you some clarity, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe. And in the comments, I'd love to know which part of the critical difference resonated with you the most. Let's talk about it. We'll talk to you really soon.