Intensive CBT for OCD & Anxiety
Sometimes you need more than one hour a week.
Weekly therapy can be incredibly effective. But sometimes it isn’t enough.
If OCD, anxiety, or avoidance is significantly interfering with your life—or you understand what you should be doing but are having trouble putting it into practice—Intensive CBT can help you build momentum by increasing the dose of treatment.
Instead of spreading therapy across months, we can temporarily meet more frequently or for longer sessions, creating more opportunities to practice new behaviors and make meaningful progress toward the life you want.
More ERP. More Practice. More Momentum.
Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) works through doing, not simply talking about anxiety.
That means intentionally approaching situations, thoughts, sensations, and uncertainties you have been avoiding—while practicing new ways of responding when anxiety shows up.
Intensive treatment gives us more time to do this work together. Longer or more frequent sessions allow us to tackle exposures that may be difficult to fit into a traditional 60-minute appointment and to practice repeatedly enough for new learning to take hold.
The goal isn’t to make therapy more intense just for the sake of intensity. It’s to create enough practice to help you move forward.
The Value of Clinician-Guided ERP
Knowing that you “should face your fears” and actually doing it are very different things.
OCD and anxiety are remarkably good at finding loopholes: avoiding just a little, seeking subtle reassurance, distracting yourself, mentally checking, or ending an exposure before the most important learning occurs.
That’s where clinician-guided ERP can make a difference.
Rather than simply giving you exposures to complete on your own, I can practice alongside you—helping identify hidden avoidance and safety behaviors, adjust exposures in real time, maintain response prevention, and make sure we are targeting the patterns actually keeping you stuck.
Over time, the goal is to transfer that learning back to you so that you become increasingly confident doing the work independently.
Why Increase the Dose?
There is a strong research foundation for intensive ERP for OCD.
Standard ERP is already one of the most well-supported treatments for OCD. Intensive treatment builds on the same principles while providing more exposure practice and greater clinical support over a shorter period of time.
Research reviewed in my doctoral dissertation found substantial reductions in OCD symptoms across intensive treatment programs. Importantly, treatment outcomes were related to factors including the length of ERP sessions, the number of treatment hours per week, and the total amount of treatment received—supporting the idea that, for some people, increasing the dose of ERP may improve treatment effectiveness.
Intensive treatment may be especially useful when you have struggled to complete exposures independently, avoidance is significantly restricting your life, progress in weekly therapy has stalled, or you simply want a concentrated period of treatment focused on an important goal.
Let’s Get You Back Into Your Life.
Intensive CBT does not have to mean entering a hospital or residential program.
We can design a personalized outpatient intensive around your needs and goals—using longer sessions, multiple sessions per week, or a concentrated block of treatment.
We might practice driving together. Go into a crowded store. Eat a feared food. Practice being imperfect. Sit with intrusive thoughts without seeking reassurance. Approach a place you have avoided for months. Or work directly on whatever anxiety has been telling you that you can’t do.
Less time organizing your life around anxiety. More time practicing the life you actually want to live.
Interested in Intensive CBT?
Let’s talk about what has been keeping you stuck and whether increasing the frequency, duration, or amount of clinician-guided ERP could help you make progress.