Mental Health

As an OCD therapist in San Diego, CA, my clients often ask me what OCD recovery looks like. Yes, that’s right-you can recover from OCD-but what does that mean? It doesn’t mean you won’t have OCD thoughts anymore or that you won’t have an urge to do a compulsion. In my opinion, you could even…

In my last couple of posts, I’ve been discussing Inference-Based Cognitive Therapy (ICBT) for OCD. You can read those posts here: What Is Inference-Based CBT (ICBT) for OCD? Insights from an OCD Therapist Inference-Based CBT (ICBT) for OCD: What You Need to Know As an OCD therapist, I like to offer my clients a variety…

In my last post, I discussed Inference-Based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (ICBT) for OCD. I reviewed how this approach does not require exposures, which I have found to be really helpful for more taboo OCD themes. For example, if you’re obsessed with the idea that you could snap one day and hurt the people you care…

For a long time, OCD was treated primarily with one intervention called Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP). And yes, ERP is a very effective modality for OCD, but it’s not perfect. I have seen ERP be life-changing for most of my clients, but I’ve also seen some clients get stuck in the midst of ERP…

In my last post, I talked about the idea of surrendering control and learning to do nothing-not more-when you have anxiety. I discussed how this is a paradoxical approach to managing anxiety, rumination, and OCD in a world that is (no pun intended) obsessed with “emotional regulation.” I also talked about how tools used to…

In my last post, I talked about why people with OCD tend to ruminate and why it can feel impossible to stop, and even necessary, to keep ruminating. In this post, I’m going to talk about ways to reduce rumination. I’ve written about this topic a lot and keep coming back to it because rumination…