I am a therapist, educator, practice owner, and advocate. I founded Flourishing Future Wellness because I wanted to create the kind of practice I kept wishing existed: one where people could receive evidence-based treatment without being forced into a rigid, one-size-fits-all process.

I tend to work especially well with people who have felt misunderstood, mislabeled, or dismissed by previous providers or systems. I want to know what is happening, why it is happening, and what function a behavior is serving before deciding how it should be treated.

That matters because two people can engage in the same behavior for completely different reasons. Avoidance can be a compulsion, a trauma response, a response to sensory overload, or a healthy boundary. Repetition can be driven by OCD, ADHD-related memory concerns, an autistic need for predictability, neurological impairment, or an attempt to regulate distress.

If we misunderstand the mechanism, we can give someone a technically appropriate intervention for the wrong problem and then blame them when it does not work.

My work is practical, collaborative, and direct. I will explain what I think is happening, why I am recommending something, and how the intervention is supposed to help. You are allowed to ask questions, disagree with me, and tell me when something does not fit.

OCD Therapy Without Shame

OCD can produce thoughts, images, sensations, impulses, and doubts that feel completely inconsistent with who you are. It often attacks the things you care about most and then convinces you that the presence of the thought must mean something about your character, intentions, identity, or safety.

I work with many OCD presentations, including:

• Pedophilia-themed OCD, commonly called POCD
• Harm-related OCD
• “Pure O” and mental compulsions
• Relationship OCD
• Scrupulosity and moral OCD
• Sexual-orientation and identity-related obsessions
• Real-event OCD
• Existential OCD
• Health-related OCD
• Contamination concerns
• Responsibility and checking OCD
• False-memory concerns
• Memory and perception doubt
• Rumination, confession, and reassurance seeking

POCD, harm-related OCD, and other taboo themes can carry an incredible amount of shame. People may be terrified that a therapist will misunderstand the thought, react visibly, assume it represents desire or intent, or report them simply for disclosing it.

You should be able to tell your therapist the actual thought without having to watch them panic.

I do not determine what a thought means based only on how disturbing its content sounds. I look at how you experience it, what meaning you attach to it, what you do in response, whether you are trying to obtain certainty, and how the entire pattern functions.

“Pure O” is also not OCD without compulsions. The compulsions are often happening inside the person’s mind through reviewing, analyzing, checking feelings, testing reactions, replaying memories, replacing thoughts, or trying to solve an unanswerable question.

Those compulsions are easy to miss because nobody else can see them. If treatment only targets visible behavior, someone can complete exposures while continuing to perform hours of compulsions mentally.

Differential Diagnosis Matters

I spend a lot of time thinking about differential diagnosis because OCD rarely arrives in a perfectly labeled box.

A person can have OCD and trauma. They can have OCD and autism, ADHD, borderline personality disorder, depression, dissociation, or psychosis. The question is not always which diagnosis “wins.” The question is what processes are present and what each one requires from treatment.

OCD and Borderline Personality Disorder

OCD and borderline personality disorder can both involve intense emotions, relationship fears, reassurance seeking, self-doubt, impulsive responses, and difficulty trusting internal experiences.

With OCD, the pattern is more likely to center on intrusive doubt followed by checking, reviewing, reassurance seeking, avoidance, confession, or another attempt to become certain.

With BPD, the pattern may be more closely connected to relationships, identity, emotional regulation, fears of abandonment, and shifts in how the person experiences themselves and others.

A person can also have both. Treating everything as OCD misses important emotional and relational patterns. Treating every intrusive fear as part of BPD can leave the obsessive-compulsive cycle untouched.

OCD and Autism

Autistic routines, repetition, focused interests, sensory regulation, and the need for predictability are not automatically compulsions.

I look at what the behavior does for the person. Is it regulating, organizing, pleasurable, sensory-based, or consistent with how their brain naturally functions? Or is it being driven by a feared consequence, intrusive doubt, or the need to neutralize anxiety?

When autism and OCD occur together, treatment should reduce the suffering caused by OCD without trying to eliminate harmless autistic traits or train the person to look more neurotypical.

OCD and ADHD

ADHD can contribute to forgetfulness, inconsistent attention, difficulty completing tasks, problems with time, and reduced trust in memory.

OCD may attach to those very real difficulties. Someone may begin checking repeatedly because they know they are forgetful, then become trapped trying to achieve a level of certainty that is not possible.

Treatment may need to address both the executive-functioning problem and the obsessive-compulsive response to it. Telling someone to “just stop checking” without giving them realistic external supports is unlikely to work.

OCD and PTSD

OCD and PTSD can both involve intrusive experiences, avoidance, hypervigilance, physiological arousal, and attempts to feel safe.

I look at whether the person is responding to something that happened, an obsessional “what if,” or both. I also consider whether a behavior is protecting the person from a trauma reminder or functioning as a compulsion intended to prevent or neutralize a feared outcome.

The distinction matters because trauma processing and response prevention are not interchangeable treatments.

OCD and Generalized Anxiety

Generalized anxiety often involves worry across several areas of day-to-day life. OCD is more likely to involve intrusive doubt paired with checking, rumination, reassurance seeking, avoidance, confession, or another effort to reach certainty.

The distinction becomes harder when all the compulsions are mental. That is why I look at the structure and function of the worry rather than deciding based only on its topic.

OCD and Psychosis

OCD can include severe doubt, poor insight, unusual fears, and experiences that sound implausible when they are described without context.

Psychosis may involve differences in conviction, perception, reality testing, thought organization, or the person’s relationship to a belief.

Not every unusual thought is psychosis, and not every frightening belief is OCD. These presentations deserve careful assessment rather than a quick assumption in either direction.

OCD and Depression

Both OCD and depression can involve repetitive thinking, guilt, self-criticism, hopelessness, and difficulty disengaging from painful thoughts.

Depressive rumination may focus more on loss, failure, worthlessness, or hopelessness. Obsessional rumination is often an attempt to resolve, prevent, prove, remember, or understand something with certainty.

Again, someone can have both.

Treatment Should Fit the Person

I use evidence-based treatments, but I do not believe evidence-based means identical.

The basic treatment mechanism matters. So does the person receiving the treatment.

I adapt and scale therapy based on:

• Trauma history and current safety
• Autism, ADHD, and other neurodivergent experiences
• Sensory and communication needs
• Executive-functioning needs
• Severity and complexity of symptoms
• Current ability to function
• Work, school, parenting, and caregiving responsibilities
• Financial and transportation realities
• Available support
• Previous treatment experiences
• Readiness and capacity for change
• Identity, values, preferences, and goals
• What is actually maintaining the symptoms

Adapting treatment does not mean watering it down or letting OCD make every decision. It means thinking carefully about where to begin, how quickly to move, how much structure is needed, and which intervention makes sense for the person in front of me.

Trauma-Informed OCD Treatment

Trauma can affect trust, consent, emotional regulation, body awareness, and the ability to tolerate feeling trapped or powerless.

ERP should not recreate helplessness. You should understand what we are doing, why we are doing it, and how it connects to your goals. Exposure work is collaborative, and you retain meaningful choice throughout the process.

At the same time, trauma-informed care does not mean allowing OCD to avoid every uncomfortable experience. We work toward a pace that respects your history while still creating actual change.

Neurodivergent-Affirming OCD Treatment

Neurodivergent people are often given treatment designed around neurotypical expectations. Sensory needs, communication differences, stimming, shutdown, executive-functioning difficulties, and the need for predictability may be treated as resistance or pathology.

I do not assume every routine is a compulsion or that every repetitive behavior needs to stop.

Treatment may include more explicit structure, written information, visual explanations, direct language, additional processing time, executive-functioning supports, or exposures adapted around real sensory needs.

The goal is not to make you look more neurotypical. It is to reduce the suffering and restriction caused by OCD while respecting how your brain works.

Scaling Treatment to Symptom Severity

Someone with mild or circumscribed OCD may need a different amount of structure and support than someone whose entire day is dominated by obsessions, compulsions, and avoidance.

More severe symptoms may require smaller initial steps, increased structure, more frequent practice, coordination with other providers, or greater attention to restoring basic functioning.

Scaling treatment also means being honest when outpatient therapy is not enough. If someone needs a more intensive level of care, we talk about it directly rather than continuing a treatment that cannot reasonably meet their needs.

Working With Real Life

Treatment has to function in the life you actually have.

You may be working, attending school, parenting, caregiving, managing a disability or chronic illness, or trying to attend telehealth sessions in a home with limited privacy.

A perfect treatment plan that cannot survive contact with your real life is not a useful treatment plan.

We develop interventions that are challenging enough to create change but realistic enough to use outside the therapy hour.

Training the Flourishing Future Wellness Team

In addition to treating and assessing OCD, I lead ongoing OCD training and clinical consultation for the Flourishing Future Wellness team.

We focus on recognizing OCD presentations that are commonly missed, identifying mental compulsions, improving differential diagnosis, developing individualized case formulations, and using ERP, I-CBT, and ACT responsibly.

We also discuss treatment barriers, trauma, neurodivergence, shame-based themes, risk assessment, and how to determine when someone needs additional assessment or a different level of care.

I do not believe clinicians should complete one training and then be expected to handle every complex OCD presentation alone. Continued consultation gives our clinicians somewhere to bring questions, think through difficult cases, and continue developing their skills.

Affirming Care

I provide LGBTQIA+-affirming and neurodivergent-affirming care.

You do not need to defend your identity, educate me about why affirming care matters, or separate your OCD from the rest of who you are.

Treatment considers the full context of your life while carefully distinguishing your identity from the doubts OCD creates about it.

Walk and Talk Therapy

For clients in the Philadelphia area, I offer Walk and Talk Therapy in local parks, trails, and accessible outdoor spaces.

Some people think more clearly when they are moving. Others feel less trapped or self-conscious when they are not sitting face-to-face with a therapist or staring at another person on a screen.

Walk and Talk Therapy can be used for OCD, trauma, anxiety, neurodivergence, and other concerns when it is clinically appropriate.