I-CBT Therapy for OCD: An Effective, Non-Exposure-Based Approach to Healing

Do you experience unwanted thoughts, images or impulses that repeatedly enter your mind, despite trying to get rid of them? For example, worries about dirt or germs, or thoughts of bad things happening. Do you ever feel driven to repeat certain acts over and over? For example, repeatedly washing your hands, cleaning, checking doors or work over and over, rearranging things to get it just right, or having to repeat thoughts in your mind to feel better. Does this waste significant time or cause problems in your life? For example, interfering with school, work or seeing friends?

If you answered yes to one or all of these questions - you may have OCD.

Many people who come to me for OCD have either never been diagnosed, or they have been in treatment before with someone who tried exposure based treatments like Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP). While ERP is the therapy with the most evidence for successfully treating OCD, it is only effective for 55-70% of people who try it. If you’re one of those 55-75%, that’s amazing! However, if you’re not, you can often feel completely lost and hopeless. You may even feel traumatized from the process of ERP. This is where I-CBT, or Inference-Based Cognitive Behavioral Treatment, can absolutely change your life and finally give you the relief you’ve been looking for.

I-CBT is a fairly new type of therapy that is evidence based for treating OCD. Instead of focusing on the compulsion prevention using exposures, it focuses its attention on the obsessional doubts that lead to fears and emotions that the compulsion is driven by. I-CBT assumes that everyone, even people with OCD, have the ability to reason logically, and it helps break down how OCD can cause you to doubt yourself. By learning these tools and applying them, you can find freedom from OCD and get back to living your life the way you want to live it!

You can read more about I-CBT and access FREE resources by visiting ICBT.Online!