OCD converts messy feelings into Anxiety…Can I unsubscribe?
OCD is often misunderstood as just a problem of anxiety or fear. But when we look more closely, we see that OCD isn’t just about the themes and stories of OCD, it’s really about the process. The mind engaging in OCD is trying to protect itself - usually from overwhelm. One of the ways OCD does this is through a process I call “anxiety conversion.”
What is Anxiety Conversion?
Anxiety conversion is what happens when a difficult feeling (ie, grief, anger, guilt, sadness, or even love) starts to rise to the surface, and OCD steps in to intercept it. The original emotion never fully forms in conscious awareness. Instead, it gets rerouted through the obsessive-compulsive system. In effect, OCD becomes a kind of emotional avoidance strategy.
Here’s how that might look in practice:
A person experiences a surge of anger in a relationship—but instead of processing that anger, they suddenly become preoccupied with a fear that they’ve harmed the other person in some subtle or irreversible way.
A person starts to feel grief over a loss—but instead of feeling sadness, they get stuck on whether they are responsible for the loss, launching into mental review or confession compulsions.
A person with scrupulosity might be feeling shame about an early, formative experience of rejection—but instead of being with that tender feeling, their OCD wraps the mind and nervous system in moral panic and initiates a quest to investigate if they are “a bad person.”
In each of these examples, the content of the obsession appears to be the problem—but the function of the obsession is to pull the person away from a vulnerable emotional state.
Why convert?
The human mind is wired for protection. For people with OCD, certain emotions may feel especially unsafe or intolerable—not just because of the feeling itself, but because of what it might mean. It is common for people with OCD to have sensitive nervous systems or to overwhelm easily. In a complicated, stressful world, these sensitivities become vulnerabilities.
In particular, these feelings may be the cause of some avoidance:
Anger might feel dangerous, or morally unacceptable.
Grief might be too ambiguous, unpredictable or threatening.
Longing or envy might disrupt one’s sense of identity or control.
So the brain does what it thinks is safest: it converts the uncomfortable emotion into an anxiety loop. The loop is painful, but at least it’s familiar. It offers a false sense of control.
The Cost of Conversion
OCD’s protective maneuver is unconscious and automatic. It starts with a doubt, and the doubt has such a high risk association that it becomes very compelling to engage in. It sweeps us deep into our imagination and out of our bodies, where feelings are most readily accessible. The original emotion is still there, but now it’s dissociated from. It isn’t given a chance to dissipate and give important information. Instead, it smoulders, to reemerge in the future. OCD’s job has just become endless.
Most people avoid feelings because there is a sense that the feelings will overtake them, or last forever. Until you test this hypothesis, you can’t really be sure that a big nasty feeling actually has a shelf life. Over time, emotional avoidance reinforces a belief that the emotion itself is dangerous and endless. The more we try to escape, the scarier it feels to stop.
Working with Emotional Avoidance in OCD
Recognizing anxiety conversion is an important step in treatment. It opens the door to more targeted, compassionate interventions. Here are a few clinical tools that help:
Curiosity about context: When did the obsession start? What was happening emotionally around that time? What might the OCD be protecting against?
ACT - Feeling acceptance in Exposure therapy: Once the emotional avoidance is identified, the work shifts toward making space for the original emotion—not just resisting compulsions, but welcoming the grief, anger, or shame that’s been avoided. Allowing it to be so, inform, and pass.
ICBT (Inference-Based CBT): This model helps clients see how obsessional doubt can hijack attention when emotion feels unsafe. By targeting the formulaic nature of OCD, we can see through it and re-anchor in present reality.
Compassion-based work: When we can hold ourselves with curiosity and care, we can do that with our feelings. Compassion isn’t something that we need transformation to achieve - it is a matter of practice. Today you can practice allowing your feelings to unfold.
IFS: Internal Family Systems helps us understand the multiplicity of our internal parts, including protector parts who serve specific roles. By better understanding how protective parts think and feel, we can increase harmony between these parts and others, and get permission to approach things like difficult feelings that protectors usually step in to stop us from doing.
Exposure and Response Prevention: last but not least, the ERP process is all about learning through experience that feared situations are not as toxic as we predict, and that our emotional experiences have much to tell us that we could not have predicted with our minds.
Onward
Recognizing anxiety conversion can help shift the therapeutic frame. Instead of asking “how do we stop the thoughts?” we start to ask, “what is this protecting you from feeling?” That shift can bring new clarity, deepen the work, and open a path to healing—not just from OCD, but from the deeper emotional wounds it’s been guarding.
