Anxiety & OCD

Generalized Anxiety

It is not uncommon for the stressors of daily living to make us feel overwhelmed, stressed, and tired. Most often, the topics of stress may be related to work, school, finances, and relationships, which then manifest as frequent worries, difficulty sleeping, physical tension, poor focus, and/or irritability and conflicts with others. Therapy can help when the level of stress begins to impact you in these areas more than you'd like, and anxiety starts to hold you back from the things you truly care about. 

In therapy, we'll start by exploring and understanding the specific reasons contributing to and maintaining your unique experiences of anxiety, how you would like it to change, as well as strategies and steps you can take to better manage stress and find peace and relaxation. 

Social Anxiety & Phobias

For others, anxiety crops up under more specific circumstances. You may find interacting with people, especially in public places or new situations, to be particularly stressful due to worries about how others may view or judge you, fear of doing something embarrassing, or concerns about annoying someone. Yet other specific fears may relate to objects, situations, and activities, typically known as phobias. 

While specific anxieties may benefit from stress management skills as well, therapy can more effectively target these fears by guiding you through systematic desensitization that is unique to your fears, so you can safely challenge and confront them. 

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)

OCD has been increasingly used as a label to describe tendencies to be rigid, perfectionistic, or even neat and hygienic. In reality, checking the locks one too many times, washing your hands repeatedly, or needing things to be arranged in a certain way, only scratch the surface of what OCD is and how it can look like for each person. While it is beneficial to raise awareness about OCD, with only superficial understanding, we run the risk of over-identifying with this diagnosis, maintaining the stigma associated with it, and minimizing the suffering of those who have it. 

It may be helpful to consider that many of us may exist on the obsessive-compulsive spectrum, exhibiting obsessive-compulsive traits to varying degrees. A smaller group of us may have stronger OC-tendencies, and yet fewer others may meet full criteria for the diagnosis. OCD is a disorder that presents uniquely for each individual. It can sometimes be misdiagnosed as generalized anxiety, and potentially be improperly treated. This is often because the intrusive, repetitive thoughts and ruminations (i.e., obsessions) can be difficult to differentiate from other types of worries, and the effective treatments for each may differ. 

I specialize in OCD treatment using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Exposure/Response Prevention (ERP), the gold standard of treatment according to the International OCD Foundation (IOCDF). This approach helps you gain a better understanding of how OCD works to sometimes take over your life and how you can challenge it step-by-step, so you can start to feel better and reclaim your life.