What is OCD?
OCD is a common condition that can affect your life much more significantly than many people realize. Most people with OCD experience unwanted obsessions, which are intrusive thoughts, images, or impulses that repeat over and over again. These can cause intensely uncomfortable feelings including fear, anxiety, doubt, persistent worry, shame, and disgust.
As a result, people with OCD often find themselves engaging in compulsions, which are the rituals or behaviors done in order to reduce, satisfy, or otherwise address the obsessions and the uncomfortable feelings that come along with them. Compulsions can include doing things over and over again in very specific ways, thinking certain words or thoughts to counteract obsessions, seeking reassurance by repetitively asking people questions or looking things up, and more.
How OCD
Can Affect You
Spending too much time on your OCD
You may spend hours engaging in compulsions, repeating things, washing and showering, deliberating choices, imagining danger, researching possibilities, asking the same questions, and more.
Avoiding things
Because of OCD’s rules and worries, you may avoid relationships, job opportunities, certain people or places, making decisions, new projects or activities, cleaning, leaving the house, and other situations where your intrusive thoughts are likely to come up.
Exhausted
Terrified that there is something wrong with you
You may judge yourself for seeming to have more trouble getting things done than other people do, or you may worry that the intrusive thoughts themselves are unusual, shameful, or dangerous.
Stuck in life
How NYCBT Can Help
Exposure and Response
Prevention (ERP)
This specialized form of CBT has been the gold standard of OCD treatment for decades. You and your therapist will work together to confront the thoughts, fears, people, and situations that trigger your OCD while learning to respond differently than you have before. This process will help you feel less overwhelmed by your obsessions, increase your ability to tolerate the feelings that come up, and leave you more empowered and in control of your reactions.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
This newer form of CBT focuses on increasing mindfulness and acceptance of your life, including the aspects that can be uncomfortable or painful. By focusing on what matters most to you in life rather than satisfying or avoiding OCD’s demands, you will become better able to build the life that you want rather than one ruled by your OCD.
Intensive
Therapy
In some cases, you and your therapist may agree that longer or more frequent therapy sessions may be a good fit for you in order to devote more time to engaging in ERP, to accelerate the process, or to address the many different ways that OCD impacts your life.