Many people who come to me for OCD have spent years trying to think their way out of it — and it hasn't worked. That's not a failure of effort. It's actually the nature of the problem.

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I specialize in Rumination-Focused ERP (RF-ERP), an approach that recognizes what more traditional treatments often miss: in many forms of OCD — especially "Pure O" — the compulsion isn't something you do with your hands. It's something you do with your mind. The analyzing, the reviewing, the searching for certainty or resolution — that mental effort is the compulsion, and it's what keeps the cycle alive.

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Treatment begins with slowing that down — building awareness of what the mind is doing in real time, and learning to respond differently when the urge to ruminate or resolve shows up.

 

OCD symptoms aren't random. Beneath the cycle there are usually real fears, emotional conflicts, and the ways a person has adapted to their circumstances over time. Psychoanalytic thinking makes room for all of that — and that's what allows the work to go somewhere deeper than symptom management.