OCD Therapy in the San Francisco Bay Area
You’re tired of the relentless doubts and exhausting mental loops that consume your time and spike your anxiety.
You wake up feeling anxious and the running thoughts begin even before you’ve had breakfast. Keeping up with the already high demands of your job has gotten harder lately because of the chaos in your mind. The doubts lead you to live in the depths of your imagination. You get entangled in the what-ifs, prepare for all the negative hypotheticals that could take place, and mentally review things from the past. Your mind can’t seem to redirect and it’s hard to move away from the fixation. When not stuck in the mental behaviors, you find yourself compelled to repeatedly check things, go down Google search rabbit holes, or fear that you’re annoying those around you because of the frequent reassurance that you seek. It feels distressing, urgent, and at times unreasonable and bizarre. You think it might be anxiety, but the much stickier quality is leading you to suspect OCD.
Online Anxiety & OCD Therapy in the San Francisco Bay Area could help.
Whether you’re a techie in Silicon Valley or a healthcare professional at UCSF, you might be finding it challenging to fit another thing into your schedule. Your mental health is suffering, but the thought of an additional commute for a weekly appointment isn’t super appealing. Online therapy in California can be just as effective as in-person, and you can have it during your lunch break or on a WFH day. Since OCD is often confused with generalized anxiety, an OCD specialist could help you sort it out and offer you treatment.
If this sounds like your struggle, there’s help out there. Read on below for more on how therapy could help!
OCD Therapy in the San Francisco Bay Area
What if I suddenly lose control and blurt something offensive in the middle of this Zoom meeting?
I keep having gruesome images of my dog, does that mean I want to hurt him?
What if I accidentally corrupted a file and it infects the entire company’s network?
What if I don’t really love my partner and I’ve been pretending to be happy this whole time?
Could this headache actually be a brain tumor that I don’t know about?
What if I made a careless mistake with my patient charting and it leads to a deadly outcome?
You might be dealing with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) if you’re experiencing unwanted recurring thoughts, doubts, mental images, or even urges (like the ones above), followed by repetitive physical or mental behaviors.
Exposure and Response Prevention Therapy (ERP) in San Francisco can help you learn to confront things you’ve been avoiding or encountering with great difficulty. You will learn how to relate to your obsessions and challenging feelings in a more effective way. Combined with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), you can live a life that is driven by your values and not by your fears.
Inference-based CBT (I-CBT) Therapy in San Francisco can teach you to stay out of an obsessional narrative created by a faulty reasoning process. OCD has you over-relying on possibility, taking facts out of context, and distrusting your senses. Learn how to shift from OCD reasoning to the adaptive reasoning process that you use in all other areas of your life.
Anxiety Therapy in the San Francisco Bay Area
Is anxiety running your life? You worry about nearly everything, the catastrophic thoughts are hard to stop, and that sense of dread is exhausting. Maybe you’re struggling to stay focused at work or have difficulty settling down at night in the presence of all those “what if” questions. You seem to constantly be in fight or flight mode with the angst and physical symptoms your body experiences.
You might be dealing with Generalized Anxiety. Therapy approaches like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and mindfulness strategies can help you learn practical tools to manage your thoughts and cope with challenging feelings and sensations.
Social Anxiety Therapy in the San Francisco Bay Area
Social situations make you squirm. You avoid them like the plague because the fear of being judged or embarrassed is strong. You worry about saying the wrong thing, being “awkward,” and attracting unwanted attention. The overthinking before and after social interactions is overwhelming. You want to be more socially connected, but it’s hard.
You might be dealing with Social Anxiety or Social Phobia. Therapy approaches like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and exposure techniques can help you gradually build confidence and challenge unhelpful beliefs that keep you stuck.
Therapy for Perfectionism in the San Francisco Bay Area
Perfectionism keeps you stuck in the belief that flawlessness is needed EVERY time. Otherwise, it’s not good enough, and you’re not good enough. The pursuit of perfection keeps you in overwork mode, second-guessing every decision, and fearful of making mistakes. While striving for perfection might seem productive, it can often lead to stress, burnout, and feelings of inadequacy.
Modalities like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), mindfulness, and self-compassion work can help you create mental flexibility and break away from the self-created rules that aren’t working for you. Learn to be more realistic with your expectations, reduce self-judgment, and embrace human imperfection.
