When imagining events in their lives, people can use their own first-person visual perspective or an observer’s third-person visual perspective. Prior work shows that first-person imagery prompts people to understand events in relation to their experiential reactions to them, whereas third-person imagery prompts people to understand events in relation to their conceptual beliefs about them. Similar to the thinking style evoked by third-person imagery, people high in obsessive-compulsive (OC) tendencies exhibit attenuated access to their directly-experienced internal states, prompting them to instead rely on proxies for those states. Across two experiments, the current work tests if first-person (vs. third-person) imagery increases reliance on internal states and might thereby serve as a potential tool to help alleviate forms of OC symptomology. Experiment 1 (N = 295) manipulated imagery perspective as participants imagined hypothetical events. With first-person (vs. third-person) imagery, participants reported a greater likelihood of acting in line with their internal states in the imagined events, and relying less on proxies. Experiment 2 (N = 301) manipulated imagery perspective before participants rated normatively-positive and -negative sounds. Consistent with past research, higher OC symptoms predicted larger discrepancies between participants’ ratings and the normed ratings for each sound. Critically, we found that among high OC participants, first-person (vs. third-person) imagery reduced this discrepancy. Thus, across two experiments, we found that first-person (vs. third-person) imagery can increase reliance on internal states, suggesting directions for developing theoretically-driven interventions using first-person imagery to help people increase their reliance on their internal states to alleviate OC symptoms.