OCD Therapy
OCD Therapy in Dublin
When your mind won’t let something go
OCD can be exhausting. It can leave you caught in cycles of intrusive thoughts, doubt, anxiety and attempts to find certainty or relief.
While OCD is often associated with things like cleaning or checking, it can take many different forms. You may find yourself repeatedly questioning your thoughts, memories, relationships, decisions or even what your thoughts say about you as a person.
Sometimes the compulsions are obvious. Other times, they happen almost entirely inside your head.
You might find yourself:
Checking or repeating things until they feel “right”
Seeking reassurance from other people
Repeatedly Googling or researching something that is worrying you
Reviewing conversations, events or memories in your mind
Analysing whether a thought means something about you
Avoiding people, places, situations or information that trigger anxiety
Confessing things in order to feel relief
Comparing your feelings or reactions with other people's
Trying to achieve complete certainty before allowing yourself to move on
These behaviours can bring temporary relief, but the doubt often returns — and the cycle begins again.
Intrusive thoughts
Intrusive thoughts can be particularly frightening because they often focus on the things that matter most to us.
They may involve relationships, sexuality, identity, health, religion, morality, harm or fears about losing control. Sometimes the content of the thought can feel so disturbing or out of character that you become frightened by the fact that you had the thought at all.
You may start asking yourself:
Why did I think that?
What if it means something?
How can I be completely certain?
Trying to answer those questions can gradually become part of the OCD cycle.
Therapy offers a confidential and non-judgemental space where intrusive thoughts can be talked about openly, including thoughts that may feel frightening, embarrassing or difficult to say out loud.
Therapy for OCD
I am an IAHIP Accredited Psychotherapist with specialist training in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and Exposure & Response Prevention (ERP) for OCD.
ERP is an evidence-based approach and is widely regarded as the gold-standard psychological treatment for OCD. Rather than trying to eliminate every intrusive thought or achieve complete certainty, the work involves gradually changing how you respond to the thoughts, feelings and uncertainty that OCD creates.
This does not mean being pushed into situations before you are ready.
My approach is collaborative and paced to the individual. Alongside ERP and CBT, my wider approach is humanistic and integrative, so there is space to understand you as a whole person rather than reducing your experience to a collection of symptoms.
OCD and neurodivergence
OCD can also exist alongside ADHD, autism and other forms of neurodivergence, and it isn’t always straightforward to work out where one experience ends and another begins.
As a psychotherapist and trained Neurodiversity Coach, I am particularly interested in working with people where OCD, anxiety and neurodivergence intersect.
Therapy can take account of your individual way of thinking, processing and experiencing the world rather than expecting you to fit a standardised approach.
You don’t need to be certain it’s OCD
You don’t need to arrive at therapy already knowing exactly what’s happening.
Perhaps you’ve been diagnosed with OCD. Perhaps someone has suggested it to you. Or perhaps you’ve simply noticed that you’re spending increasing amounts of time caught in intrusive thoughts, checking, reassurance-seeking, analysing or trying to achieve certainty.
We can begin by making sense of what you’ve been experiencing and understanding the patterns that may be keeping you stuck.
OCD Therapy in Dublin
I offer psychotherapy for adults experiencing OCD, intrusive thoughts and related anxiety from my practice in Dublin City Centre and online.
If you’d like to explore whether working together might be right for you, you are welcome to get in touch.