Understanding OCD and Getting the Right Treatment

You feel stuck in a cycle of distressing, unwanted thoughts and the exhausting strategies you’ve developed to neutralize them. Maybe you ruminate for hours, seek reassurance, replay conversations in your mind, avoid certain situations entirely, or repeat rituals until things feel “right.” You know it doesn’t actually help long-term, but the discomfort feels unbearable otherwise.

OCD is a master of doubt. It latches onto what matters most to you: your relationships, your safety, your identity, your integrity. It turns those values into sources of fear and mental noise. It’s isolating, exhausting, and difficult to explain to others. But it’s treatable.

Effective Treatment for OCD Requires Specialized Care

General talk therapy and reassurance-based support may feel helpful in the short term, but these approaches can unintentionally reinforce OCD’s grip. Research consistently shows that Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), often integrated with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) or Inference-Based CBT (I-CBT), is the most effective treatment for OCD.

I provide evidence-based therapy specifically designed to disrupt the OCD cycle, not soothe it temporarily. As a licensed clinician with specialized training in OCD treatment, I work with adults across Michigan who are ready to step out of the loop and reclaim their lives.

How OCD Shows Up: Common Subtypes

While OCD is a process issue, defined by how you respond to thoughts, not what the thoughts are about, recognizing your subtype can be validating and help guide targeted treatment. Many people feel isolated by their experience until they learn that others have similar struggles.

Common OCD themes include:

• Contamination and Cleaning: Fears of germs, illness, chemicals, body fluids, or emotional “contamination”

• Harm and Responsibility: Fear of accidentally or intentionally harming others, or failing to prevent disaster

• Taboo or Unacceptable Thoughts: Intrusive thoughts related to violence, sexuality, religion, or morality

• Perfectionism, Symmetry, and “Just Right”: A need for things to feel exact, ordered, or correct

• Relationship OCD (ROCD): Persistent doubts about your partner, your feelings, or the “rightness” of your relationship

• Sexual Orientation OCD (SO-OCD): Intrusive doubts about your orientation, often accompanied by checking or mental review

• Scrupulosity: Fears about being immoral, sinful, or spiritually impure

• Existential, Memory, or Reality Obsessions: Doubts about what’s real, whether events actually happened, or the meaning of existence

OCD can shift themes over time, but the underlying patterns remain the same and so does the path to recovery.

What OCD Therapy Looks Like

I provide structured, individualized treatment for OCD through secure telehealth sessions. Therapy includes:

• Assessment: We identify your obsessions, compulsions, avoidance patterns, and how they’re affecting your life

• Psychoeducation: You’ll learn how OCD operates and why certain coping strategies (like avoidance or reassurance seeking) keep you stuck

• ERP (Exposure and Response Prevention): We’ll work together to gradually face feared situations or thoughts without engaging in compulsions. This helps retrain your brain to tolerate discomfort without falling back into the cycle

• Additional Tools: Depending on your needs, I may also integrate principles from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Inference-Based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (I-CBT).

  • ACT helps you stay grounded, reduce mental struggle, and make choices that align with your values—even in the presence of anxiety

  • I-CBT focuses on how obsessional doubt forms in the first place. You’ll learn to recognize when your imagination has started to override your direct experience, creating a false sense of danger or uncertainty

  • These approaches complement ERP by offering insight into the patterns that drive compulsive thinking and helping you respond more flexibly to intrusive thoughts.

• Support between sessions: You’ll develop the tools to practice between sessions and make meaningful, sustainable progress
  

Inclusive, Nonjudgmental Care

OCD often targets the things that matter most: your values, identity, relationships, or sense of morality. Many of the thoughts and fears people experience are ego-dystonic, meaning they feel deeply out of sync with who you are. In my practice, no thought is too disturbing, strange, or shameful to talk about. You will not be judged for the content of your obsessions.

Whether your fears involve harm, identity, sexuality, relationships, religion, or health, we will approach them with clarity, skill, and compassion.

You Don’t Have to Do This Alone

Reaching out for help when OCD is in control takes strength. You’ve likely been working incredibly hard just to manage day to day. You don’t have to keep doing this by yourself. I offer free consultations to help us determine whether my approach is the right fit for your needs.