A Proven Approach to Lasting Recovery for OCD and Anxiety Conditions

Our OCD and anxiety treatment goes beyond traditional therapy. We provide a comprehensive, personalized framework designed to address the underlying factors contributing to your symptoms.

This is why we call our approach, More Than ERP™ and More Than CBT™. Through personalized, one-on-one treatment, you’ll receive the dedicated attention, guidance, and support needed to make meaningful progress and build the skills for lasting recovery from OCD and anxiety

You don’t have to treat each concern in isolation.

OCD and anxiety can often occur together, and when they do, symptoms can become more complicated and difficult to manage. You may find yourself dealing with intrusive thoughts, compulsive behaviors, excessive worry, panic, avoidance, perfectionism, or a constant need for reassurance all at the same time.

When multiple OCD and anxiety-related concerns are present, treatment should look at the whole picture. Rather than focusing on one symptom at a time, we work to understand how your symptoms interact and develop a treatment approach tailored to your individual needs.

Co-occurring conditions can relate to multiple different types of OCD that are separate or overlap, along with anxiety-related conditions such as panic disorder, specific phobias, social anxiety, and numerous others.

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Understanding Co-Occurring OCD & Anxiety

OCD and anxiety can overlap in ways that aren’t always easy to recognize. For example, someone experiencing generalized anxiety may spend hours worrying about what could go wrong, while someone with OCD may experience intrusive thoughts and feel driven to perform compulsions to reduce uncertainty.

Sometimes, the two can reinforce one another.

An intrusive thought may trigger anxiety. Anxiety may lead to avoidance, checking, reassurance-seeking, or another compulsive behavior. That behavior may provide temporary relief but over time, it can strengthen the cycle.

Treatment can help you understand these patterns and learn healthier ways of responding to distress, uncertainty, and intrusive thoughts.

Conditions We Commonly Treat

We work with individuals experiencing a range of OCD and anxiety-related concerns, including:

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)
Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD)
Panic disorder and panic attacks
Social anxiety
Health anxiety
Specific phobias
Relationship OCD (ROCD)
Pure-O presentations and primarily obsessional symptoms
Contamination and health-related OCD
Checking and responsibility-related OCD
Perfectionism and fear of making mistakes
Intrusive thoughts and unwanted mental images
Other anxiety-related symptoms that may occur alongside OCD

You may experience more than one of these concerns or your symptoms may not fit neatly into a single category. That’s okay. Treatment begins with understanding your individual experience.

A Personalized Approach to Treatment

There is no single treatment plan that works for everyone with OCD and anxiety. Your treatment should reflect your symptoms, your goals, your history, and the ways your concerns interact.

Depending on your needs, treatment may incorporate evidence-based approaches such as Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), a specialized form of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), as well as other CBT-based strategies and therapeutic approaches.

For OCD, ERP may involve gradually and intentionally facing feared thoughts, situations, sensations, or uncertainties while learning not to rely on compulsions or avoidance for relief.

For anxiety, treatment may focus on reducing avoidance, changing unhelpful patterns of thinking and responding, building tolerance for uncertainty, and developing more flexible ways of engaging with situations that trigger fear or worry.

When OCD and anxiety occur together, these approaches can be thoughtfully integrated rather than treating each symptom as a completely separate problem.

Treatment Methods for Co-Occurring Conditions:

Multiple Therapies for Multiple Symptoms

We provide several different therapy options depending on what clients are experiencing.

Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) and Exposure Therapy
- ERP is the gold standard for clients experiencing OCD. Exposure therapy can also be very helpful for clients experiencing anxiety or panic.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
- CBT can be used to help identify and reframe negative thought patterns
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
- ACT involves accepting difficult thoughts and focusing on the goals and values of the individual
Mindfulness Based Behavioral Therapy
- Mindfulness can be used to help stay in the present moment and manage anxiety symptoms

How We Treat Co-Occurring Conditions

OCD + Relationship OCD (ROCD)

What treatment can work on: Intrusive doubts about the relationship, partner comparison, reassurance seeking, checking feelings, analyzing attraction, mental review, and avoidance.

How treatment helps: Provides frequent, structured opportunities to identify relationship-focused compulsions and practice resisting reassurance, checking, comparison, and rumination while learning to tolerate uncertainty.

OCD + Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD)

What treatment can work on: Excessive worry, intrusive thoughts, mental reviewing, reassurance seeking, intolerance of uncertainty, avoidance, and compulsive problem-solving.

How treatment helps: Separates OCD-driven compulsions from generalized worry while addressing the underlying intolerance of uncertainty that can fuel both.

OCD + Panic Disorder

What treatment can work on: Fear of panic, fear of bodily sensations, catastrophic interpretations, avoidance, checking, reassurance seeking, and safety behaviors.

How treatment helps: Combines OCD-focused ERP with panic-focused exposure so patients can learn to experience intrusive thoughts and uncomfortable physical sensations without escaping, checking, or seeking reassurance.

OCD + Social Anxiety

What treatment can work on: Fear of judgment, post-event rumination, social checking, reassurance seeking, avoidance, self-monitoring, and intrusive social thoughts.

How treatment helps: Targets both obsessional doubt and social fear through graduated exposures that reduce avoidance, self-monitoring, and post-event analysis.

OCD + Health Anxiety / Illness Anxiety

What treatment can work on: Body checking, symptom monitoring, researching symptoms, doctor shopping, reassurance seeking, Googling, avoidance, and catastrophic health interpretations.

How treatment helps: Helps patients break the cycle of checking and reassurance while gradually confronting health uncertainty without relying on compulsive attempts to obtain certainty.

OCD + Specific Phobia

What treatment can work on: Fear and avoidance of specific objects, situations, animals, needles, blood, driving, vomiting, heights, contamination, or other triggers.

How treatment helps: Allows phobia exposures and OCD ERP to be coordinated when fears overlap, rather than treating each problem in isolation.

OCD + Emetophobia

What treatment can work on: Fear of vomiting, monitoring bodily sensations, avoiding foods or places, reassurance seeking, escape behaviors, excessive preparation, and contamination rituals.

How treatment helps: Targets both the fear of vomiting and the compulsive behaviors used to prevent or obtain certainty about it.

OCD + Agoraphobia

What treatment can work on: Fear of being trapped, fear of not being able to escape, avoidance of public places, safety behaviors, panic monitoring, and compulsive planning.

How treatment helps: Creates repeated opportunities to practice entering feared environments while reducing escape behaviors, checking, and reliance on safety signals.

OCD + PTSD / Trauma-Related Symptoms

What treatment can work on: Intrusive thoughts, avoidance, hypervigilance, compulsive safety behaviors, trauma-related triggers, guilt, shame, and persistent threat monitoring.

How treatment helps: Provides a structured treatment plan that can distinguish OCD symptoms from trauma responses and determine which symptoms should be addressed concurrently versus sequentially. Different evidence-based approaches may be integrated according to the clinical picture.

OCD + Depression

What treatment can work on: OCD rituals, hopelessness, withdrawal, low motivation, rumination, avoidance, loss of functioning, and difficulty engaging in treatment.

How treatment helps: Combines OCD treatment with strategies that address depressive withdrawal and loss of behavioral activation, helping patients regain daily functioning while continuing to work directly on OCD. Severe depression can interfere with engagement in ERP, making coordinated treatment particularly important.

OCD + Perfectionism

What treatment can work on: Excessive checking, rewriting, reviewing, fear of mistakes, procrastination, over-preparation, reassurance seeking, and inability to accept “good enough.”

How treatment helps: Helps patients identify when high standards have become compulsive and practice completing tasks without excessive checking, correcting, or seeking certainty.

OCD + Pure O / Primarily Mental Compulsions

What treatment can work on: Rumination, mental reviewing, analyzing, thought suppression, internal checking, reassurance seeking, “figuring it out,” and attempts to achieve certainty.

How treatment helps: Makes hidden mental compulsions visible and gives patients repeated opportunities to practice disengaging from rumination and uncertainty-seeking.

OCD + Scrupulosity

What treatment can work on: Fear of sinning, moral doubt, excessive confession, prayer rituals, reassurance seeking, mental review, and fear of being a bad person.

How treatment helps: Helps patients distinguish values from compulsions and practice responding to moral uncertainty without ritualizing.

OCD + Sexual Orientation OCD (SO-OCD)

What treatment can work on: Sexual-orientation checking, attraction checking, comparing, reassurance seeking, mental reviewing, testing, and avoidance.

How treatment helps: Targets the compulsive need to determine or prove certainty while reducing checking, comparison, reassurance, and avoidance.

OCD + Harm OCD

What treatment can work on: Intrusive fears of harming oneself or others, mental checking, avoidance, reassurance seeking, thought suppression, and monitoring intentions or feelings.

How treatment helps: Helps patients learn to respond differently to intrusive thoughts without treating the presence of a thought as evidence of danger or intent.

OCD + Responsibility OCD

What treatment can work on: Excessive responsibility, checking, repeated review, over-preparation, reassurance seeking, apologizing, and attempts to prevent every possible mistake.

How treatment helps: Builds tolerance for uncertainty and the possibility of ordinary mistakes without engaging in excessive checking or responsibility-taking.

OCD + Contamination OCD

What treatment can work on: Washing, sanitizing, avoidance, cleaning, contamination checking, reassurance seeking, and mental contamination fears.

How treatment helps: Provides repeated, supported exposure opportunities while helping patients resist washing, cleaning, avoidance, and reassurance rituals.

OCD + Symmetry / “Just Right” OCD

What treatment can work on: Repeating, arranging, touching, evening-up, correcting, restarting, and attempting to achieve a specific feeling.

How treatment helps: Helps patients practice leaving things imperfect or incomplete without repeating behaviors until they feel “right.”

OCD + Existential OCD

What treatment can work on: Endless philosophical questioning, analyzing reality, consciousness, existence, free will, meaning, and attempts to reach absolute certainty.

How treatment helps: Targets the compulsive process of trying to solve unanswerable questions and builds tolerance for uncertainty without mental debate.

OCD + Religious Scrupulosity + Guilt

What treatment can work on: Confession, prayer rituals, moral checking, repeated consultation, fear of punishment, guilt, and reassurance seeking.

How treatment helps: Helps patients maintain their values while separating meaningful practice from compulsive attempts to eliminate doubt or guilt.

OCD + Excoriation / Skin Picking

What treatment can work on: Urges to pick, scanning for imperfections, repetitive picking, avoidance, shame, and difficulty resisting urges.

How treatment helps: Combines OCD-informed strategies with habit-reversal and behavioral techniques to identify triggers and interrupt the picking cycle.

OCD + Trichotillomania

What treatment can work on: Hair-pulling urges, sensory triggers, automatic pulling, focused pulling, avoidance, shame, and attempts to control urges.

How treatment helps: Uses structured behavioral interventions and repeated practice to increase awareness of triggers and build alternative responses.

Treatment for the Whole Person

A diagnosis can provide useful information, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.

Two people with OCD can have completely different symptoms, fears, compulsions, and treatment goals. Likewise, anxiety can look very different from person to person.

Our goal is to understand your experience and not simply place you into a diagnostic category.

Whether you’re struggling with one primary concern or several overlapping OCD and anxiety symptoms, treatment can help you build greater confidence in your ability to experience uncertainty, manage distress, and move toward the life you want.

When Anxiety and OCD Feed Into Each Other

One of the most frustrating parts of co-occurring OCD and anxiety is that it can be difficult to tell where one problem ends and another begins.

You might find yourself:

Worrying → “What if something goes wrong?”

Obsessing → “I need to figure this out completely.”

Feeling anxious → “I can’t tolerate this uncertainty.”

Compulsively responding → checking, researching, avoiding, analyzing, asking for reassurance, or mentally reviewing.

Feeling temporary relief → followed by another doubt or intrusive thought.

This cycle can become exhausting. Effective treatment focuses not only on reducing anxiety in the moment, but also on changing the patterns that keep OCD and anxiety going.

Treatment Options – Intensive Treatment Program

Our intensive treatment programs for adults offer a comprehensive and specialized approach to help individuals effectively manage and overcome OCD and anxiety. These programs are designed to provide intensive therapy and support to adults who are struggling with the debilitating effects of multiple conditions.

It is important to note that our intensive program is one-on-one between the client and the therapist for the entirety of the program. This allows us to create an individualized treatment plan for each of our clients and adjust it based on how the client is progressing and what treatments are proving most effective.

At our OCD treatment center, we use exposure and response prevention (ERP) therapy, cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), and other treatment modalities such as our More Than ERP™ and More Than CBT™ framework, along with other evidence-based interventions tailored specifically to each individual’s needs.

Counseling and therapy for couple and family. Adoption, psychology or psychotherapy concept. Session with psychiatrist or psychologist. Husband and wife with marriage counselor.

Treatment Options – Weekly Treatment Sessions

Our weekly treatment sessions offer a flexible treatment approach for OCD, anxiety-related conditions. Clients can meet with their therapist on a weekly basis to receive support on their schedule.

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We Are Here To Help

If OCD and anxiety are interfering with your relationships, work, school, or everyday life, you don’t have to navigate them alone.

Treatment can help you understand the cycles that keep symptoms going and develop new ways of responding to thoughts, fears, and uncertainty.

Meet Our Team

It can be difficult to know whether what you’re experiencing is OCD, anxiety, or a combination of both. You may even worry that your symptoms are “too complicated” or that you need to understand your diagnosis before reaching out.

You don’t, our team can help you figure out what you are experiencing.

A first step in our treatment is developing a clearer understanding of what’s happening and identifying the patterns that are keeping you stuck. From there, we can work together to create a treatment plan that meets you where you are. Learn more about our therapists who can help you understand more about your diagnosis and treatment.

ABOUT US

Call: (949) 398-8350

When OCD & Anxiety Overlap: Treatment for Co-Occurring Conditions