Frequently Asked Questions

Your first session, or initial intake appointment, is an hour and a half of detailed information gathering. During the first half, we’re going to ask you a lot of open-ended questions about what’s been going on in your life, with others, in school, and work so we can understand what’s going on in your own words. The second half of this appointment involves us going through a detailed checklist of various types of mental health issues so that we make sure we’re doing our job to be thorough and not miss anything. Our goal in this session is to be able to tell you what we think is going on and what we recommend we do to help you get what you want out of therapy. From time to time we’ll go back to those original goals you made with us in the beginning to check on the progress you’re making and see if we need to adjust anything.

Anxiety and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) have several pieces in common. Both can come with daily stress, difficulty controlling worried thoughts, being irritable with others, headaches, and tension. But there are also key differences and figuring out which one is going on is important to figure out because the way they’re both treated in therapy is very different. For someone struggling with clinical anxiety, worried thoughts tend to be about a variety of possible issues that they’re mulling over and trying to solve. What if they didn’t text me back because they’re mad at me? What if I miss my appointment and something bad happens as a result? Did I make a mistake at work that others will notice and judge me for? What if my teacher calls on me and I don’t know the answer? It’s like constant problem solving for difficult scenarios that could happen or have happened in the past.

But OCD is different because these thoughts or mental images, which cause significant stress, are often about things they don’t want to think about or would never do. What if I lost control and physically hurt someone I love? What if my partner or family didn’t really love me and my entire relationship with them is fake? What if something was wrong with my body and I didn’t find out until it was too late? These “what if” thoughts, which someone with OCD has no control over and does not want to have, cause such high levels of stress that they regularly try to get rid of them by performing the same kind of habits or behaviors over and over again. Those are called compulsions. They are the way someone with OCD has learned to survive and try to neutralize or get rid of the thoughts they don’t want.

With clinical anxiety, it can be helpful to talk about underlying thoughts and beliefs as you learn tools to change how you act in stressful situations. With OCD, analyzing your thoughts can actually make things worse. You can’t talk your way out of OCD but we can help you act your way out.

First of all, if you’re a parent or guardian, watching your child struggle is heartbreaking. Many parents come to us because they’ve tried everything to help and just want their child back but realize they need help. The short answer is yes, you will be involved to some degree. But the long answer is that we want to build enough trust with you that you feel comfortable letting us talk to your kid alone and then determining with you when to involve you. If you ask to be involved for their entire session every time or regularly ask to see their progress notes then we won’t be able to develop a relationship with them and they won’t be able to open up. We also understand that there are several sides to a story and that we only see them for an hour a week while you live with them. Please be patient with us as we work with your kid while making sure we support their relationship with you and if you have any concerns let us know.

No. But you should know ahead of time that your parents or legal guardian does have the right to your records, which are a general write up of progress you’re making and what we’re doing to help. That being said, we discourage parents and guardians from doing this because we know that will cause you to limit what you tell us. It is beneficial for us to bring them into session to hear from them, give them tools to help you, and collaborate about how to all work together. To do that effectively we may need to share some of what goes on in your sessions with us. We will discuss this with you ahead of time and do our best to ensure what you share with us stays private unless it compromises your safety or someone else’s safety.

Medication is not the end all be all in therapy. However, the challenges that come with anxiety, depression, or OCD, may be so loud that it is difficult to engage in sessions or feel motivated to do your homework during the week. If we see that going on we may talk to you about working with a medical professional we recommend so that medication can turn the volume down while we use therapy to help you learn to change the station.