YouTube video by Danielle Jhiani (certified life coach specializing in anxiety, OCD, and attachment) explaining why intrusive thoughts and OCD do not make someone a bad person. The speaker normalizes intrusive thoughts, emphasizes self-compassion, outlines that OCD-driven hyper-focus and compulsions cause guilt and relationship/career impact, and promises recovery techniques (her programs) can reduce or eliminate intrusive thoughts.
Chapters
Foreign.
Welcome back. My name is Danielle Thornton Gianni. I'm a certified life coach and anxiety, OCD and attachment specialist. Helping people live happy, healthy lives with wonderful relationships free of anxiety, avoidance, and ocd. Today we're going to talk about why you feel like you're a bad person, either because of the thoughts that you're getting or because of the way that your OCD is affecting your relationships. Guilt is a really common feeling for people with ocd, mostly because you're getting constant intrusive thoughts and fears and doubts and even strange, uncomfortable thoughts about harming others and people that you love or care for. And oftentimes this is affecting your relationships, it's affecting your career, it's affecting your life greatly. And if you're doing compulsions and telling maybe your partner about these thoughts, or you're just feeling guilty about the thoughts that you're having in general about your loved ones, this is common. But what I want you to understand is you cannot help that you have ocd. You cannot fully control these intrusive thoughts that you're getting. So you need to practice compassion with yourself and remind yourself that I can't control this. These are just thoughts. They're intrusive thoughts and they don't have to mean anything. They don't mean anything about me. And everybody gets strange, weird, negative, uncomfortable, positive thoughts. It's just that people without ocd, they don't give them attention. If they get a negative thought about someone they love, they go, hmm, that was weird. But not giving that one attention, and it fades away and they don't make it mean anything about them. When we have ocd, we tend to hyper focus on these thoughts, think that they mean something, and then we can start to feel guilty about even having them, especially when they affect our loved ones, either the thoughts themselves or the compulsions and the ocd. Now, I said that you can't fully control your thoughts because we cannot stop ourselves from getting negative thoughts. That's very normal, but with recovery techniques, you can stop intrusive thoughts from coming. I haven't had an intrusive thought for years. And sure I get negative thoughts, I get doubts, I get uncertain thoughts, But I've learned how to respond to them in a way that they just don't bother me. They don't feel intrusive, they don't give me anxiety. There's some that are a little uncomfortable if it's a fear about something happening to somebody that I love. But the way that I respond to them, they fade away quickly. And I Don't give them too much meaning or attention, and there's little to no discomfort there. So they're part of life. But the intrusive thoughts that feel really uncomfortable are not normal. And you can learn to recover from, from this so that you don't get them, or at the very minimum, so they don't bother you. You need to quit blaming yourself and feeling like there's something wrong with you. Even if you do have ocd, there's nothing wrong with you. This is something that's very treatable. It's something that you can do something about. It's just a matter of finding the right help and learning the right techniques to respond to these thoughts differently. So that you train your brain that it doesn't need to hyper focus on this thing anymore, it doesn't need to be afraid of it. And then these thoughts reduce and disappear. Eventually, my programs are going to teach you this through the real method, exactly, step by step, what to do with these intrusive thoughts so that you can eliminate anxiety and OCD from your life. But for now, what I want you to do is start to remind yourself that I can't help that I have ocd. I can't help that I get intrusive thoughts and, and I can't help that this might be affecting my life, relationships and career to some extent. But what you can do is get the proper help to get better over time and to eliminate OCD from your life. To learn how to respond differently to negative thoughts, fears and discomfort so that you retrain your brain out of this habit. And if you want to learn this, check out the link in the description below. Look at our recovery programs. I promise you this can get better. It's not your fault, but it is your responsibility to do the work to get better. We'll talk to you very soon.
