Step out of the mental loops and reclaim your time, energy, and focus.
Therapy for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
Get help with contamination obsessions, existential fears, relationship OCD, “Pure O,” and more.
Do you get stuck in mental loops or rituals that you can’t stop?
OCD is one of the most misunderstood mental health conditions. It’s not just about being clean or organized — it’s about intrusive, unwanted, or distressing thoughts and the exhausting mental or behavioral rituals that follow.
Does this sound familiar?
Being stuck in spirals of doubt, fears, or what-if’s
Overwhelming fear or urgency about things that others don’t see as an emergency
Spending an excessive amount of time wondering, researching, and planning
Trying to do everything just right to feel safe, certain, or okay
Experiencing brief moments of relief followed by even more doubt and anxiety
It can feel like there’s a voice in your head questioning everything, and dictating your life.
OCD can attach to any topic, and often it goes after things you care about the most. It can also change topics, so something that used to bother you might not anymore. Or you might find yourself obsessing and worrying over new thoughts and fears. You might be struggling with:
Fear of harming others, even though you never would want to
Constant checking or seeking reassurance
Mental reviewing or repeating rituals
Difficult to answer questions about morality, identity, or relationships
Contamination fears or compulsive cleaning
Needing things to feel “just right”
I can help you break the exhausting cycle of OCD.
You can get freedom from OCD. But it may look different than you imagine. I know you might be wishing to finally get the answers to your intrusive or distressing thoughts. Or maybe it feels like if you could just get rid of your thoughts all together you’d feel permanent relief. But that’s not quite how it works.
Uncertainty and doubt are a normal part of life; there are some questions we may never be able to answer. Thoughts will come and go. With the proper tools and support, you can learn to relate differently to your obsessive thoughts. I’ll teach you about the cycle of OCD and help you identify what could be making it worse.
We’ll focus on your thinking patterns, avoidance, and other behaviors that fuel the fire of OCD and deplete your energy. Then we’ll give you alternatives to teach you that you can handle anxiety and uncertainty. We’ll also explore your values, who you want to be, and the life you want to live so you can make the most of your newfound time and energy.
HOW IT WORKS
Understanding OCD
Obsessions
Obsessions are unwanted or intrusive thoughts, images, or urges that cause emotional distress (usually anxiety, uncertainty, or doubt). They can be about literally anything, from fears of accidentally harming or offending others to urges to confess, check, or straighten something until it feels ‘even.’
Compulsions
Compulsions are observable or mental behaviors or rituals that are excessive—like repeatedly checking whether a stove is off or a door is locked, hand-washing, counting, asking for reassurance, mental reviewing, or extensively researching on Google or ChatGPT. Anything can become a compulsion.
The Cycle
Many people have intrusive thoughts. What makes OCD different are the repeated attempts to alleviate the emotional distress caused by obsessions by doing rituals. Rituals feel like something you must do. But doing rituals is like itching a mosquito bite, it offers only temporary relief, and actually makes it worse.
OCD Therapy can help you:
Break the cycle of OCD
Quit mental loops and spirals
Learn to handle uncertainty and doubt
Reclaim your time and energy
Live based on your values, not fears
My approach to OCD is a blend of ERP & ACT
Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), often paired with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), is the most effective way we know to help people break the cycle of OCD.
Exposure
Exposure is effective for treating all kinds of anxiety. It works by doing the opposite of what OCD wants you to do. Instead of avoiding or doing something to alleviate your anxiety, you do pre-planned exposures to trigger emotional distress. It sounds unpleasant (and it’s not always fun) but it’s always with your agreement and at your pace. Before we get started, you’ll understand why exposure works and exactly what it will look like.
Response Prevention
Response prevention is arguably the most important part of therapy for OCD. After you do an exposure, you will resist engaging in specific rituals that we agree upon ahead of time. You’ll sit through the emotional discomfort until it alleviates on its own (often it does) or until a pre-planned stopping point. Eventually the goal is to resist rituals all together, but we work up to that point. Like exposures, it happens with your willingness and at your capacity.
Acceptance & Commitment
ERP is effective on its own, but I love to mix in ACT because it’s about learning to accept what we can’t control (hey, obsessions!) and committing to our values (maybe you want to be more present, engaged, focused, or carefree). Committing to values is not always easy. It means making hard choices, like starting ERP. But living based on your values is very likely to lead to a fuller and more interesting life than living based on avoiding fears and placating OCD.
Common questions about OCD therapy:
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Absolutely. It’s not uncommon for people to go many years before getting a proper diagnosis, so even if you’ve been in therapy before and haven’t received a diagnosis it’s totally possible you have OCD.
If you’ve come across blog articles, videos, or reels about OCD that you found relatable, I’d love to talk more about it.
Before we begin therapy, I’ll also have you complete a self-report assessment to help us identify obsessions and compulsions.
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Great question! I’d want to know what I was getting myself into too.
ERP can sound scary if you’ve spent any time on social media or online. And that makes sense, because exposure literally means facing your fears rather than avoiding them like you may have done up to this point.
But let me reassure you, which I won’t do very often in ERP. ;) You are in the driver’s seat. Not me. Not OCD. You. I’ll help design exposures and then we’ll discuss together which ones to try in and outside of sessions.
I’ll be there to coach and gently nudge you to do more than you might think you’re capable of, but I will never push you to do something you don’t want to do.
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Therapy for OCD is a little different than talk therapy. It’s active. We spend time in each session reviewing homework and troubleshooting any stuck points, practicing exposures and response prevention together, and assigning more practice for outside of session.
Therapy is tailored to your specific obsessions and compulsions so it can look many different ways. Below are a few examples of exposures I’ve done with clients:
-Writing an exposure script (e.g., “My job is replaced by AI and my skill set becomes obsolete…”)
-Reading an article about someone getting fired for misconduct at work
-Listening to a song with themes about sexual assault
-Touching something “contaminated” like an elevator button or public door handle
If these sound too big or scary, remember therapy is a process and we start with smaller exposures and build our way up to harder ones as you’re ready.
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Not necessarily. I definitely don’t promise that. The Cycle of OCD is maintained by your attempts to get relief from those distressing thoughts by doing things to disprove or prevent them from happening. If that method was working for you, you wouldn’t be searching for another solution right now.
Therapy with me is about learning you can handle the distress without doing compulsions or rituals. It’s about getting your time, energy, and life back for more important things.
If you’re willing to accept that your obsessive thoughts may come and go, and commit to living your values and doing what matters, you’ll find you have more control over your life than OCD tells you.
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Not really. “Pure O” is just OCD with mostly mental compulsions instead of obvious ones like handwashing or checking. Even when compulsions are invisible (like replaying a memory, analyzing feelings, or seeking reassurance from ChatGPT) they still keep the OCD cycle going.
The majority of my clients with OCD fall into this category, and we use the same methods for therapy.