Evidence-based OCD therapy that's collaborative, paced, and accounts for everything else that's going on.
ERP is the most effective treatment we have for OCD. But how it's delivered matters a lot. If your previous experience with exposure therapy felt like torture, that's a sign something was off about the delivery, not about you.
I trained at the OCD and Anxiety Treatment Center in Salt Lake City. Good ERP is collaborative. We build the hierarchy together. You understand why you're doing each exposure before you do it. We start at a level that's hard but manageable — a 3 or 4 out of 10 — not at a 9 just to see if you can survive it. You have tools to get through the exposure without doing the compulsion, and I'm with you in real time.
Done well, ERP is still hard. I won't pretend otherwise. But it can also feel collaborative and hopeful, not grim. Over weeks, the exposures that used to feel like 8s start feeling like 4s. The compulsions lose their grip. Life gets bigger.
OCD rarely shows up alone. It often comes paired with autism, anxiety, trauma, or depression, and treating it in isolation usually fails. A client with OCD and trauma may need some stabilization work before exposures can really land. A client with OCD and autism often needs different pacing and sensory accommodations. A client with OCD and demand sensitivity needs exposures framed completely differently so their nervous system doesn't shut the whole thing down.
That's where experience across multiple levels of care matters. I've worked with OCD inside residential, inpatient, PHP/IOP, and outpatient settings, which means I've seen the full range of presentations and I know how to adapt the model without losing the mechanism that makes it work.
A lot of the OCD clients I work with have tried ERP before with a provider who either didn't explain the rationale, skipped straight to the hardest exposures, or treated the anxiety as the problem instead of the compulsions. If that was your experience, you are not untreatable. The treatment just wasn't delivered well. We can reset, rebuild trust, and do it in a way that actually respects your capacity.
Book your first session through Tava Health. You can verify your insurance in about 30 seconds and see my real availability. If you want to read more first, the OCD Treatment That Actually Works: What ERP Is and Isn't article on my blog goes deeper into how I think about this work. The specialties page covers everything else I work with.