OCD Therapy
A loop of intrusive thoughts you don’t want, followed by rituals you don’t like—just to feel OK for a minute. With targeted, compassionate care, OCD is treatable. At Transcendent Self Therapy, we pair gold-standard methods with a warm, creative, human approach so you can reclaim your day—and your peace.
With OCD, a person can experience obsessions (recurrent thoughts, urges, or images that are experienced as intrusive and unwanted) and/or compulsions (repetitive behaviors such as hand washing or mental acts such as counting), that feels out of control. These obsessions and compulsions cause significant distress and negatively impact your ability to function.
While the impulse you may have with any of the above struggles is to avoid whatever it is that is causing the distress, the key to healing is actually to face it and work through it. Avoidance actually makes the stressor worse. This may sound counterintuitive and scary, and it is! This is why working with a therapist with specific training to help you with these concerns is imperative — so you’re not alone, watching your life become smaller and smaller as you hide from these fears. We will work with you collaboratively to understand the root cause of your fear and develop specific interventions to address it. This may take the form of an exposure therapy, development of coping skills, and building self-compassion and empathy for your struggle. These issues did not in fact come just out of nowhere. The key is that by getting to know them better, they no longer will hold such power over you and control your life!
What OCD can look like
Intrusive thoughts/images/urges that feel taboo, alarming, or “not me”
Compulsions/rituals: checking, counting, washing, mental reviewing, reassurance seeking
Common themes: contamination, harm, relationship (ROCD), sexual orientation, morality/scrupulosity, health (“Do I have ___?”), perfectionism/“just right,” symmetry, “Pure O” (primarily mental rituals)