Have your family’s routines started revolving around your child’s anxiety or OCD? Learn what family accommodation is, why it develops, how it can unintentionally maintain anxiety, and how parents can respond in more helpful ways.

Hit-and-run OCD involves persistent fears about accidentally injuring or killing someone while driving and not realizing it. Although the fear centers on driving, the core issue is often a need for certainty and repeated attempts to determine whether harm occurred.

Rumination is a common mental compulsion in OCD that can feel like problem-solving but often keeps people trapped in cycles of doubt, uncertainty, and overanalysis. Learn how rumination works and why it can be so difficult to stop.

Moral scrupulosity is a form of OCD characterized by excessive guilt, moral doubt, and a relentless need for certainty about being a good person. People may become trapped in cycles of rumination, reassurance-seeking, confession, and compulsive self-evaluation that never fully resolve their doubts.

What happens when a child refuses therapy for OCD or anxiety? Learn how SPACE treatment helps parents reduce accommodation, support change, and move treatment forward even when a child isn’t willing to participate.

AI can be a valuable source of information, but for people with OCD it can also become part of the obsession. Whether it takes the form of reassurance-seeking, compulsive research, rumination, or endless self-analysis, AI can unintentionally reinforce the very cycle people are trying to escape.

Health anxiety involves persistent worry about illness, symptoms, or medical conditions. Although reassurance and checking may provide temporary relief, they often keep anxiety going by reinforcing the search for certainty.

POCD is a form of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder related to the possibility of being sexually attracted to children, becoming a danger to children, or having hidden desires that the person finds horrifying.

The core problem in OCD isn’t the presence of the thoughts themselves, but the compulsive attempts to achieve certainty, eliminate fear, or prove something with absolute confidence.

People with POCD often become trapped in cycles of fear, hypervigilance, mental checking, reassurance-seeking, avoidance, self-monitoring, and compulsive analysis. The experience is often emotionally consuming and profoundly isolating.

Everyone experiences intrusive thoughts from time to time. The difference between normal intrusive thoughts and OCD often isn’t the thought itself, but the meaning attached to it and the compulsive attempts to eliminate uncertainty, distress, or risk.

Many parents describe feeling as though they are constantly walking on eggshells. They may find themselves reorganizing routines, avoiding certain situations, or spending large amounts of time trying to prevent distress before it escalates. These efforts come from love and a desire to help. The problem is that some of the things families do to reduce anxiety in the short term can unintentionally strengthen it over time.

SPACE treatment was developed to help families change those patterns.

Contamination OCD involves intrusive fears about contamination and compulsive attempts to eliminate uncertainty about safety. Although many people associate Contamination OCD with germs and cleanliness, the core issue is often persistent doubt about contamination, illness, exposure, or harm.

For many people, repeated reassurance can unintentionally teach the brain:

• uncertainty is dangerous

• anxiety must be resolved immediately

• reassurance is necessary to feel safe

• confidence should come from other people rather than from one’s own ability to tolerate uncertainty

Living with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is no walk in the park. As a clinical psychologist based in Arlington, Virginia, I specialize in Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) Therapy, an evidence-based treatment for OCD that helps people reclaim their lives from endless cycles of obsessions and...