Therapy for Adults

What a convincing and compelling story OCD can tell us. Often, it has taken over our entire field of vision without us realizing it, like wearing a pair of distorted glasses. What we usually can notice is that we may feel trapped, exhausted, tormented, anxious, and that our lives have had to fit inside of specific constraints.

I offer two forms of treatment for OCD, either separately or in succession, depending on the preference of each client. ERP, or exposure and response prevention, is the most established form of evidenced based treatment for OCD. With ERP, we will focus on one area of obsessions and compulsions at a time and find ways to gradually reduce actions driven by compulsions while simultaneously increasing time spent doing things that you value or enjoy. Often, the learning that comes from this process will start to generalize to other areas of obsessions and compulsions as we go.

The other form of treatment is I-CBT, or Inference-based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. This is a meta-cognitive approach where we learn the particular thinking patterns which OCD relies on and gradually learn to release these (we’ll see how they are even irrelevant!) in favor of present-mindedness. 

I have some lived experience with OCD and am so grateful for contributions of both of these treatments in my own recovery. I find that, equipped with what I have learned from these models over the years, I am free from OCD.