The ROCD Dilemma: Why Do My Intrusive Thoughts Feel So Real?
One of the most painful and confusing things about relationship anxiety and relationship OCD is not being able to sort fact from fiction.
When we’re constantly swimming in a sea of intrusive thoughts, we start to think, “Wait… Is this my anxiety, or is this how I really feel?” It’s even possible you’re reading this article right now because you just Googled “why do my ROCD thoughts feel so real?” or something along those lines.
If so, you’re in the right place.
At Healing Embodied, one of the most common questions we get from our clients is, “How do I tell the difference between my anxiety and my intuition? Why do my thoughts sometimes feel like my truth?”
In this article, we’re diving deep into these questions so you can understand once and for all why intrusive thoughts from relationship anxiety and ROCD feel so terrifyingly real and how you can reframe your thinking to move beyond the looping doubts.
Why Your ROCD Thoughts Feel So Convincing
The reason intrusive thoughts feel so real is complex. The answer involves the brain, the body, the nervous system, our ingrained thoughts and beliefs… Everyone experiences intrusive thoughts, anxiety, and ROCD differently.
But there are some overarching reasons intrusive thoughts end up feeling real or true. In this section, we’re looking at how the brain and nervous system can make it so difficult for us to connect to the truth.
First things first, let’s talk about the difference between real thoughts and true thoughts…
A thought can be real without being true.
In the most obvious sense, your intrusive thoughts about your relationship feel real because they are real. But don’t worry — there’s a difference between something being real and something being true.
The parts of you that constantly worry your relationship might not be “enough” or that you might fall out of love one day are real parts of you that feel afraid — afraid of uncertainty, afraid of the unknown, maybe even afraid of commitment. Those parts of you (which are trying to keep you safe from pain, loss, and heartbreak) kick your anxious mind into gear, and you start thinking, “Oh no! What if these thoughts mean I don’t actually want to be in this relationship?” And the overthinking begins.
In an instant, you go from having a passing thought about your partner, to worrying your thoughts are revealing some deep, dreaded truth you don’t want to face.
This leads us to the next reason intrusive thoughts can become so tied up with our sense of reality…
You’re telling yourself a story about what your anxious thoughts “mean.”
When we latch onto our anxious thoughts and try to analyze their deeper meanings, we can easily get caught up in stories that lead us further away from (not closer to) reality. One moment, you’re noticing you don’t totally love the way your partner’s hair looks today, and the next moment, you’re wondering if you should break up and re-enter the dating world.
But attaching meaning to your intrusive thoughts can intensify the feeling that they’re connected to some deep truth or intuition you’re secretly ignoring. Instead of just thinking, “Okay, whatever,” when you have a passing negative thought about your partner or relationship, do you latch on? Do you weave it into a story about how your partner isn’t right for you, your relationship isn’t enough for you, and that you’re probably doomed to break up?
The more time you spend following your intrusive thoughts and building stories from them, the more real they will feel. Instead, using conscious embodiment techniques to start detangling your thoughts from the stories you tell yourself about them can help you loosen the grip of your fears and anxieties. This is one of the things we help our clients do as relationship anxiety experts at Healing Embodied.
The more times you think a certain thought, the more convincing it becomes.
When we latch onto our intrusive thoughts over and over, we actually strengthen the neural pathways in our brains that house those thoughts, making it more likely that we’ll continue having them. And the more often we think a certain thought, the more likely we are to start seeing it as a part of our truth.
Intrusive relationship doubts feel real because they’re extremely persistent. The more a thought comes in, the more “real” it feels. And the more real it feels, the more likely we are to dwell on it, which keeps the anxiety spiral going and heightens the body’s fear response.
Now let’s look at why our brains are so determined to convince us of our intrusive thoughts…
Your protective parts are trying to keep you safe from pain and loss.
When your anxious thoughts start to feel less intrusive and more “real,” your protective parts could be trying to hijack the situation in the name of safety.
By scaring you into wondering if you should leave, your internal protective mechanisms are actually doing exactly what they’re designed to do — convince you to run away from potential sources of danger or pain.
But relationships are full of risk and uncertainty. Even for people who say they “just know” their partner is perfect for them, there is always a chance of heartbreak, betrayal, and unexpected loss.
This is the difficult truth about love: No matter how careful we are, we inevitably open ourselves up to pain and other challenging emotions when we decide to love and share our vulnerability with another person. The word “vulnerable” literally means “to be capable of being wounded.” When we choose the vulnerability of love, we choose to open ourselves up to the possibility of getting hurt.
And that sh*t is scary!
So, the fearful parts of us swoop in to try to keep us safe, especially if we’ve been hurt before. They scan, nitpick, and overanalyze, looking for any possible reason to justify why we should throw in the towel and leave.
But we sense somewhere deep down (even if it’s just a flicker) that that’s not what we actually want.
Past experiences have made you hypervigilant about potential threats.
If you’ve experienced deep relational hurt in the past — anything from childhood trauma to heartbreak and betrayal — entering into relationships might send your threat sensors into hyperdrive. Those protective mechanisms we mentioned earlier are designed to learn from past experiences to help us avoid similar experiences in the future. Unfortunately, if you’ve been hurt in intimate relationships, this most likely means you’ve learned to feel on guard any time you get close to someone.
Sometimes called “hypervigilance,” this means your brain is constantly scanning for threats in your environment (without you even knowing), because it’s trying to keep you safe from future pain. But if you’re constantly over-analyzing and overthinking, you might detect threats that aren’t actually there, causing you to respond to triggers as if you’re in real danger.
When it comes to trauma and emotional wounding, our brains can’t tell the difference between the past and the present. So, we end up mistaking present-moment triggers (like imperfections in our relationships) for past threats, pain, and heartbreak.
Depending on what you’ve been through, you might be especially sensitive to (normal, healthy) conflict, perceived rejection or abandonment, or differences within your relationship. Whatever the trigger may be, when it arises, your brain thinks, “Alert! We’ve seen this before. We know where this kind of thing leads, and it’s not good. Better cut and run now to stay safe.”
Because the trigger “confirms” something you’ve experienced in the past (and because your threat-detection system is turned ALL the way up), a relatively small trigger can leave you feeling convinced you’re in a bad situation.
This brings us to the root causes of why anxious thoughts can be so convincing… The amygdala and the sympathetic nervous system, also known as the body’s fear-response system.
Your brain and nervous system can’t tell the difference between a real threat and an imagined one.
When we have fear-based thoughts about our relationship (especially ones that leave us worrying about a potential breakup or divorce), we feel scared. When we feel scared, this means our amygdala (the fear center of the brain) has been activated. When the amygdala starts registering that we’re in a fear state, it sends a signal to the sympathetic nervous system, creating the physical experience of fear throughout the body.
Your heart rate might speed up. Your palms might get sweaty. You might feel a knot in your gut.
This response in the nervous system is the biggest reason your thoughts feel so real. Because while the threat might not be real, the response in the body is. The body experiences fear the same way, whether you’re running from a mountain lion or ruminating on thoughts like, “What if my partner isn’t good enough for me?”
But the role of fear doesn’t stop there. Our minds and bodies are constantly interacting (something we love digging into here at Healing Embodied), and many people who struggle with ROCD and relationship anxiety get caught in something called the mind-body feedback loop.
Your brain and body are stuck in a feedback loop of fear.
Picture this: You have an intrusive thought about your relationship, and you latch onto it. You start thinking, “Oh no… I’m having that thought again. What does this mean? What if this means I actually want to break up?”
As you start worrying, your amygdala comes online and sends a signal to your body that you’re afraid of something. Then, your nervous system starts preparing your body to fight off a threat. You enter fight/flight/freeze.
As your body enters this fear state, you start feeling physical sensations you might associate with your intuition — like that familiar “gut feeling.” But as medical researcher Peter Holz says in his 2022 paper Gut Signals and Gut Feelings: Science at the Interface of Data and Beliefs, “Feelings or emotions do not originate in the gut but are generated in the brain, and the term ‘gut feelings’ is a scientifically ill-defined and misleading expression.” In other words, your gut isn’t telling your brain something all on its own — the brain started it.
Signals are then carried back to your brain that you’re still experiencing fear, so the amygdala thinks, “Okay, we’re still afraid. Clearly the threat hasn’t passed, so I’ll continue sending more signals to the body so that we don’t let our guard down yet.”
And on and on… The brain tells the body, “We’re afraid!” And the body says, “Yup! Still afraid down here.” And the two keep confirming the presence of the fear… until we shift the pattern.
For some, this loop can lead to a chronic state of nervous system activation, keeping you on constant alert and never letting you relax and connect. Not only can this exhaust you physically and emotionally, but it can also prevent you from experiencing a sense of connection, love, and safety with your partner. As you struggle to experience connection with your partner due to your activated nervous system, this lack of connection will further convince you of your fears, making everything feel that much more real.
The longer this feedback loop goes on, the more convinced you will feel that you’re “ignoring your truth.”
Shifting the Pattern of Fear and Intrusive Thoughts
To break free from your anxious thoughts and interrupt this never-ending feedback loop of fear, you will need to learn to shift away from the analytical mind and into the realm of the body.
Because we can’t think our way out of an activated nervous system. We can’t rationalize our way out of fight/flight/freeze.
If you’re ready to drop into your body, establish a sense of safety and inner-trust, and connect to the life that’s right in front of you, our team at Healing Embodied is here for you. We are a collective of relationship-focused embodiment coaches with decades of combined experience helping people just like you find freedom from debilitating relationship doubts and fear.
To connect with us, explore our services page or apply for a free clarity call today.