Living with OCD
Living with OCD can feel like being trapped in an exhausting internal debate with a hyperactive internal alarm system. You may spend immense energy trying to neutralize unsettling thoughts, achieve absolute certainty, or prevent something terrible from happening—all while trying to maintain your day-to-day life.
OCD is not about neatness, organization, or being detail-oriented. It is a complex, neurobiologically driven loop centered on doubt and the brain's overwhelming urge to protect you from harm or distress. Through a neuroscience and feminist lens, we view these patterns not as personality defects or moral failures, but as adaptive threat-response systems that have gotten stuck on high alert.
OCD can feel like:
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Intrusive Thoughts & Obsessions: Experiencing sudden, unwanted, or disturbing thoughts, images, or urges that feel completely out of alignment with your true values and character.
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Compulsive Loops & Neutralizing: Feeling an urgent drive to perform physical actions, mentally review events, check, research, or repeat behaviors to temporarily soothe distress or prevent bad outcomes.
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The Trap of Reassurance & Doubt: Seeking repeated reassurance from loved ones, professionals, or the internet to gain certainty, only to find the relief is fleeting.
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Profound Shame & Secrecy: Carrying heavy guilt or moral distress about the nature of your intrusive thoughts, leading to isolation and self-doubt.
Common OCD Themes I Work With
OCD can attach itself to whatever matters most to you. While obsessions and compulsions manifest uniquely for everyone, I regularly support clients navigating:
- Contamination OCD: Intense fears of illness, germs, or physical contamination, accompanied by repetitive washing, sanitizing, cleaning, or avoidance of specific triggers.
- Hyper-Responsibility & Fear of Blame: An intense need to confirm you haven't made a mistake, caused harm, or done anything wrong. This often leads to over-explaining, mentally reviewing past interactions, and constantly seeking reassurance to soothe fear of fault or guilt.
- "Just Right" & Perfectionism OCD: a persistent sense that something is incomplete, incorrect, or "off." This leads to repeating actions, rewriting, reordering, or mental checking until you achieve an internal sense of exactness or balance.
- Checking & Certainty-Seeking: Persistent, doubt-fueled urges to repeatedly verify locks, appliances, health symptoms, emails, or past memories to prevent catastrophic outcomes.
How OCD Therapy Can Help
My approach to OCD therapy combines gold-standard interventions with a non-judgmental environment. We work to break the cycle of obsessions and compulsions, not by fighting your thoughts, but by changing how you respond to them—allowing you to reclaim your time, mental freedom, and vitality.
In our sessions, we might:
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Understand the Neuroscience & Unpack Shame: Demystify how the brain's alarm system gets hijacked by OCD, de-pathologizing your symptoms and helping you realize that your intrusive thoughts do not reflect your true character or morals.
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Connect Exposures to What Matters (ACT + ERP): Use Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) to anchor your work in your deepest values. Clarifying why you want to recover provides the purpose and motivation needed to engage in Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP).
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Engage in Evidence-Based ERP: Safely and gradually face feared thoughts, uncertainty, or triggers without relying on compulsions, helping your nervous system learn through inhibitory learning that you can handle discomfort.
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Build Psychological Flexibility: Learn to sit with doubt and ambiguity without getting pulled into mental rituals, checking, or reassurance-seeking.
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Reclaim Your Agency & Compassion: Grounded in a trauma-informed, feminist framework, we contextualize internal self-blame, dismantle perfectionistic standards, and rebuild a compassionate, trusting relationship with yourself.
I draw from Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Polyvagal Theory, and trauma-informed, feminist frameworks when working with OCD.
