Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) can make everyday life challenging through intrusive thoughts, anxiety, and repetitive behaviors or mental rituals that feel difficult to control.
Based in Naperville, IL, our OCD treatment can help you understand these patterns and develop healthier ways to respond. ERP therapy provides a structured approach to managing obsessive thoughts, compulsions, and avoidance.
OCD is more than simply liking things organized or having certain routines. Obsessions can bring unwanted thoughts, images, or urges that create significant anxiety or distress, while compulsions can feel necessary to make that discomfort go away.
You may spend time checking, cleaning, asking for reassurance, repeating actions, mentally reviewing situations, or avoiding things that trigger your fears. These behaviors can provide temporary relief while keeping the cycle going.
Over time, OCD can take up more of your attention and make it harder to focus on school, work, relationships, family, sports, or other parts of everyday life.
OCD can take up time and mental energy that you would rather spend elsewhere. You may be late for work or school because of rituals, avoid certain activities because of your fears, or struggle to stay present during conversations because your mind is focused on an intrusive thought.
It can also affect relationships. You may ask loved ones to participate in rituals, repeatedly seek reassurance, or avoid certain situations because you are worried about what could happen.
If OCD is affecting your mood, relationships, or ability to function day to day, Therapy Works Wonders can provide a place to work on these patterns.
OCD often follows a cycle involving an intrusive thought, anxiety or distress, and a compulsion or avoidance behavior that provides temporary relief. Recognizing this pattern helps you and your therapist identify where to make changes.
Exposure involves intentionally facing situations, thoughts, or sensations that trigger anxiety rather than automatically avoiding them. These steps are planned carefully and adjusted to what you are ready to work on.
Response prevention means practicing what happens when you experience an OCD trigger without performing the usual compulsion. Over time, this helps you develop a different response to anxiety and uncertainty.
OCD often creates a strong need for certainty or reassurance. ERP therapy helps you practice allowing some uncertainty without relying on rituals, checking, avoidance, or reassurance to feel completely certain.
OCD can affect people differently depending on their age, responsibilities, and daily environment. Treatment can be adapted to the situations your child, teen, or you face at each stage of life.
OCD can show up in children through fears, repetitive behaviors, reassurance seeking, or routines that feel necessary to prevent something bad from happening. Therapy is adapted to your child's age and helps your child work through these patterns in a way that feels appropriate for their stage of development.
OCD can interfere with school, friendships, family life, activities, and growing independence. Therapy can help your teen recognize OCD patterns, work through intrusive thoughts and compulsions, and develop healthier ways to respond when anxiety increases.
College, work, relationships, and greater independence can create new situations where OCD symptoms become harder to manage. OCD therapy provides practical ways to work through intrusive thoughts, compulsions, avoidance, and the uncertainty that can come with this stage of life.
OCD can affect work, relationships, routines, parenting, and other parts of everyday life. Therapy helps you address patterns that have become established over time and use ERP techniques to gradually change how you respond to intrusive thoughts and anxiety.
ERP provides a structured way to work with OCD symptoms rather than simply trying to make intrusive thoughts disappear. Treatment can focus on changing the responses that keep the OCD cycle going.
OCD treatment focuses on the cycle of unwanted thoughts, fears, urges, and behaviors that can become difficult to control. You may experience intrusive thoughts or images that create anxiety, followed by compulsions, reassurance seeking, checking, avoidance, or other behaviors that temporarily make you feel better.
Treatment helps you recognize how this cycle works and practice different ways of responding to OCD. The focus is not on getting rid of every unwanted thought, but on reducing the control those thoughts and compulsions have over your everyday life.
ERP stands for Exposure and Response Prevention. It is a form of behavioral therapy commonly used to treat OCD.
During ERP, you gradually face situations, thoughts, or sensations that trigger your OCD while practicing not performing the compulsion or ritual that you would normally use to reduce your anxiety. You and your therapist plan exposures that can start with manageable situations before moving to more difficult ones.
The purpose is not to force you into situations that feel overwhelming. Instead, ERP gives you opportunities to practice responding differently to OCD and become more comfortable with uncertainty and discomfort.
No. ERP is not about immediately confronting the most frightening situation you can imagine.
Your therapist will help you identify different OCD triggers and organize them based on how difficult they feel. Treatment begins with smaller, more manageable steps and progresses at a pace that allows you to practice the skills you are learning.
The specific exposures will depend on your symptoms and what OCD looks like in your everyday life.
Yes. OCD treatment does not require you to prove that an intrusive thought is false or completely eliminate it from your mind.
Instead, therapy helps you change the way you respond when an unwanted thought appears. This can include reducing mental checking, analyzing, reassurance seeking, avoidance, or other responses that keep you focused on the thought.
Yes. OCD can affect children, and treatment can be adapted to your child’s age, development, symptoms, and ability to participate in therapy.
Children may experience fears, repetitive behaviors, reassurance seeking, avoidance, or routines that take up significant time. Parents can also become involved in OCD patterns by providing repeated reassurance or helping with rituals, so treatment may include guidance around how family members can respond differently.
OCD can interfere with school, friendships, family relationships, activities, and growing independence during adolescence. Your teen may also feel embarrassed about their thoughts or worry that other people will not understand what they are experiencing.
Therapy can give your teen a private place to talk about intrusive thoughts and compulsions without judgment. ERP can then be adapted to situations that matter in your teen’s everyday life, such as school, friendships, family routines, or activities they have started avoiding.
Yes. Young adults may experience OCD while also navigating college, work, relationships, living independently, and other major changes.
Therapy can focus on how OCD affects your independence and daily responsibilities. ERP can also be adapted to situations involving school, work, relationships, decision-making, uncertainty, and other parts of young adult life.
Yes. OCD can affect athletes and student-athletes just as it can affect anyone else, and symptoms can sometimes become connected to training, competition, performance, injuries, or routines.
For example, you might feel pressure to perform a routine a certain way, repeatedly check equipment, worry about making a mistake, or get stuck in performance-related thoughts. Therapy can address these patterns while considering the role that sports play in your daily life and identity.
Perfectionism can sometimes be connected to OCD, particularly when you feel compelled to repeat, check, correct, or redo something until it feels exactly right. This can take significant time and make it difficult to move on from tasks.
Therapy can help you look at what happens when something feels incomplete or imperfect and how you respond to that discomfort. ERP can be used to practice tolerating situations that do not feel completely finished, certain, or “just right” when appropriate.
Not necessarily. You can contact our team to discuss what you are experiencing and whether OCD treatment is appropriate for you.
If you have already been diagnosed with OCD, you can share that information with your therapist. If you have not received a diagnosis but are experiencing intrusive thoughts, compulsions, avoidance, or repeated reassurance seeking, your therapist can discuss what you are experiencing and whether an OCD-focused approach makes sense.
We accept BCBS IL PPO, UnitedHealthcare/Optum PPO, Aetna PPO, and Cigna PPO plans. Self-pay options are also available, and sliding-scale options may be available for eligible individuals.
Insurance coverage varies by plan, so verify your benefits and out-of-pocket costs before beginning treatment. Contact our team to ask about your coverage and payment options.
OCD can make thoughts, routines, and everyday decisions feel much harder than they need to be. With the right treatment approach, you can work on the patterns that keep the cycle going and begin responding to intrusive thoughts and anxiety differently.
