Supporting a Partner with OCD

OCD is tough enough to manage alone, let alone when another person is involved. For both partners, the experience can feel overwhelming and confusing. You may want to help your partner but feel unsure how to do so without making things worse. It’s important to approach support with understanding and the right strategies. Here are some ways you can help your partner cope with OCD.

 

Identify Their Compulsions

The first step to supporting your partner is understanding the compulsions they experience. This is something you can do together if they’re comfortable. Ask questions like: What specific compulsions do they engage in? Do they feel the need to repeat actions until things are “just right”? Do they struggle with constant reassurance-seeking?

Identifying these compulsions allows both of you to stay mindful of the triggers and patterns. This awareness is crucial for being proactive about how OCD impacts the relationship and everyday life.

 

Learn How You Can Be Helpful

As a partner, you can play an important role in your loved one’s recovery, but it requires intentionality. For instance, if your partner seeks constant reassurance, it can be tempting to provide answers just to ease their discomfort. However, as hard as it is, giving in to reassurance-seeking actually reinforces the compulsion and keeps them trapped in the cycle.

Instead, encourage them to work with a therapist (particularly one experienced in Exposure and Response Prevention, or ERP), who can help determine the best approach for diminishing compulsions. One helpful tactic you can adopt is responding to reassurance-seeking with “maybe, maybe not.” This response may feel uncomfortable at first, but it forces your partner to sit with the uncertainty, which is a key part of breaking the OCD cycle. Over time, this discomfort will decrease as they learn that they can tolerate it.

 

Provide Emotional Support

This journey is incredibly tough for your partner, and your emotional support will mean the world to them. Simply being there during moments of distress, when they’re resisting their compulsions or sitting with uncertainty, can be invaluable.

Offer reassurance not about their specific fears, but about your love and belief in their ability to manage OCD. Support them during therapy, celebrate their small wins, and remind them that their worth is not defined by OCD. Your steady presence can be a source of strength as they navigate these challenges.

 

Be Patient

Healing from OCD doesn’t happen overnight. There will be setbacks, moments of frustration, and times when it feels overwhelming for both of you. Patience and compassion are essential during this time. Recognize that OCD is a disorder, not a personal choice, and that overcoming it requires time and effort.

 

Encourage Professional Help

If you or your partner are struggling with OCD and would like professional guidance, we’re here to help. Our team specializes in helping individuals and couples manage OCD and build stronger, healthier relationships. Schedule an appointment today.

How to Support a Partner with Anxiety

Being in a relationship with someone who has anxiety can sometimes be challenging. As a partner, you want nothing more than to see them happy and thriving. Witnessing their struggles can be heart-wrenching, especially when you feel powerless to help. However, your support can make a significant difference. Here are some effective ways to support your partner:

Ask How You Can Help

Before jumping in to help, ask your partner what they need. Anxiety can make unsolicited assistance feel overwhelming. Phrases like, “How can I support you right now?” or “Is there something specific I can do to help?” show respect for their boundaries and allow them to guide you on how to be most effective.

Be Present

Instead of immediately offering advice, be present and listen. Your partner may just need a compassionate ear rather than solutions. Advice like “Just breathe” or “Calm down” might seem helpful but can be frustrating for someone dealing with anxiety. These phrases can make them feel misunderstood or alone. Focus on providing a non-judgmental space where they can express their feelings without fear of dismissal.

 

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Ask Them How They’re Feeling

Encourage your partner to share their emotions. Ask open-ended questions like, “How are you feeling today?” or “What’s on your mind?” This invites them to open up about their experiences and feelings. Sometimes, simply acknowledging and validating their emotions can provide immense relief.

Learn About Their Triggers

Understanding what triggers your partner’s anxiety can help you avoid inadvertently causing distress. Talk to your partner about their specific triggers and work together to create strategies to manage them.

Encourage Professional Help

Support your partner in seeking professional help if they aren’t already. Therapy, such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), can be incredibly beneficial for managing anxiety. Offer to help them find a therapist or accompany them to appointments if they find it supportive. Schedule an appointment today.

How Couples Can Alleviate Stress on Their Relationship

“If to change is what you need, you can change right next to me.”

As Ben Platt beautifully illustrates in his song “Grow As We Go”, you don’t need to leave a relationship just because it hits rocky waters. Our society looks up to long-lasting relationships, not because we applaud their ability to stay the same forever, but because they could make it through each other’s lifetime of changes and still find love for them.

Your entire relationship can suffer even if only one person is dealing with stress. How can you better your relationship’s chances of survival? Follow these steps to help ease stress on your relationship.

Acknowledge the Problem and the Solution

If your relationship is feeling the consequences of outside stress, it’s probably because one or all partners are acting emotionally distant. Emotional distance is when one partner shuts out the other to deal with stress outside the relationship. This is normally not done intentionally, but can have a heavy effect on the partnership.

Emotional distance can look like sleeping in separate beds, keeping conversations intellectual instead of emotional, using harsh words to cut conversations short, or being entirely silent towards the other person.

You will need to introduce functional ways to cope with stress (whether on an individual or couple’s level) to regain a sense of intimacy and romance.

Identifying Your Stressors

Having too many external stressors can interfere with a couple’s ability to communicate well, connect intimately, and resolve conflict. You can try the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale to help identify where your stress is and how stressed you are, especially if you have a bad habit of denying or downplaying your stressors.

Compare your list with your partners and see how and where they might interact.

Share How You’re Feeling with Honesty

Sit down with your partner and go over these questions:

  • How has stress affected your emotions recently?
  • What are you trying to help cope?
  • Are there any coping mechanisms that have a positive effect on this relationship?
  • Any that have a negative effect?
  • What actions will you take to cope better in the future?

Take turns answering until each partner has felt fully heard by the other. When one person finishes, re-explain what they said in your own words to make sure you understand each other correctly.

Connecting with each other in this way will help you feel lighter, like the stress isn’t all your own anymore, and it will help to know for certain that your partner is supporting you through it.

Build Psychological Resilience

Psychological resilience is our ability to bounce back from stress and trauma. Everyone has psychological resilience, but its strength varies between people. The stronger one’s psychological resilience, the better they cope with stress that arises. It’s like a muscle you can work out over time through self-awareness and practice.

Here’s a list of things you can do to enhance your psychological resiliency…

    • Reflect on your strengths and talents. Ask yourself, how am I using these strengths in my everyday life? How can I create opportunities for me to use them more often? Consider strengths assessments like VIA Strengths to identify and start building on these skills. Even better: ask your friends and family what they think your strengths are! This will also help build your sense of gratitude, which is linked to improving mental health.
    • Expand your social circle. Being socially distant can weaken your psychological resiliency, as socialization is something all humans need to survive and thrive. Think of a hobby you love doing and see how you can build community around it. You could also perform random acts of kindness—this will bring more positivity into your life and leave you feeling like you helped someone today, which contributes to your sense of purpose.
    • Acknowledge each other’s “bids”. According to Dr. John Gottman, emotional “bids” are ways we ask for attention or affirmation from our partner. These could be straight-up, like asking your partner, “Can you help me clean out the car?” or more subtle, like a sigh from across the room, indicating that they need to vent. In a study comparing couples’ first six years of marriage, the ones that stayed together answered each other’s bids 86% of the time, while couples that divorced only answered bids 33% of the time. Talking about each other’s bids is important to building a lasting, healthy relationship.

By following these steps, you can watch stress float away from your relationship like songbirds off into the sunset. Sometimes though, it helps to have an outside perspective that knows every detail. Schedule an appointment with our couples counselors in Los Gatos today for a more catered approach to building stress-coping skills as an individual or as a couple.

3 Ingredients to a Happy Marriage