OCD Treatment in Los Angeles
An evidence-based approach to help children, teens, and adults understand OCD, break the cycle of obsessions and compulsions, and build practical skills for uncertainty, anxiety, and daily life. Offering online and in-person OCD therapy, serving Los Angeles and surrounding areas.
You are not what your mind suggests
There’s a difference between having a thought and being it, and OCD works hard to blur that line. It picks your children, your relationship, your faith, or your character, and asks something unbearable. Then it convinces you that not being certain is the same as being guilty.
You might be good at hiding this; so good, in fact, that nobody in your life has any idea. You appear to have it all together on the outside, but behind closed doors, you’re asking why you can’t let this go the way everyone else seems to.
With OCD treatment in Los Angeles, we can help you build a different response and feel like yourself again.
Find the right anxiety therapist for you
OCD Treatment in Los Angeles
What Does OCD Look Like?
Most people picture handwashing, light switches, and a tidy desk. That version is real, and it’s also a sliver of what OCD does. Plenty of people go years without a name for what they’re living with, because their version never looked like the one on TV.
Our therapists have experience working with OCD across a range of presentations, including:
Harm OCD
Thoughts that you might hurt yourself or someone else.
Contamination OCD
Fear of dirt, germs, or feeling unclean.
Scrupulosity OCD
Fear of being immoral, sinful, or doing something wrong.
Counting and Ordering OCD
The sense that certain numbers, or the order things are in, carry special meaning.
Repeating and Sequencing
The need to repeat an action, or complete steps in a specific sequence, before you can move on.
HOCD
Intrusive thoughts about your sexual orientation or gender identity.
Pure O
Thoughts about your identity, the nature of reality, or other questions that don’t have a clean answer.
When Does It Make Sense To Get Help For OCD?
If intrusive thoughts, rituals, avoidance, or the need for reassurance are making daily life harder than it needs to be, it may be time to dig deeper. At Straight Up Treatment, we don’t just talk about where the thoughts came from; we use exposure and response prevention within therapy to help you change what happens after they arrive, so you can build a response that holds up outside our office.
SIGNS YOU OR YOUR CHILD MAY BENEFIT FROM OCD TREATMENT:
- Intrusive thoughts that feel disturbing, dangerous, or shameful to say out loud
- Washing, wiping, or avoiding places and objects that feel contaminated
- Checking locks, appliances, texts, or your own memory again and again
- Asking for reassurance, feeling better briefly, then needing to ask again
- Replaying conversations for evidence you did something wrong
- Scanning your body or googling symptoms to rule something out
- Getting stuck monitoring your breathing, blinking, or swallowing
- Testing your feelings for your partner to see if they're still there
- Pulling hair, picking skin, or biting nails when you're stressed or zoned out
- Panic attacks that hit when a ritual gets interrupted
- Feeling foggy, distant, or disconnected from your body when anxiety spikes
- Turning down plans because being around people means more to manage
- Lying awake running the same loop, night after night
OCD Doesn't Care How Old You Are, But It Does Change Shape
Adults hide it well. Teens explain it away. Children ask their parents to fix it. But underneath all three, the mechanics are identical. At Straight Up Treatment, we treat OCD across the lifespan, using gold standards like Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) therapy, and we adjust the methods to fit who’s sitting in front of us.
Adults
Adult OCD is often invisible from the outside. You’re meeting the deadlines, showing up for people, and carrying a whole second shift internally that nobody sees. Maybe it’s relationship OCD asking whether you love your partner enough, health OCD sending you back to the doctor, or morality OCD reviewing a conversation for proof you’re a bad person. Many adults spend years assuming this is a character flaw, or get told they’re a perfectionist and leave it there. There’s a meaningful difference between OCD and OCPD, and a meaningful difference between high standards and a brain that won’t let you stop. OCD treatment for adults sorts that out, then gives you something concrete to do about it.
Teens
The teenage years already come with enough scrutiny. Add OCD, and you get a teen redoing homework three times, avoiding the group chat, taking forty-minute showers, or asking the same question every night before bed. Teens are skilled at hiding compulsions, so what parents see is irritability, procrastination, panic attacks, or a kid who won’t come out of their room. Social anxiety often rides alongside it. OCD treatment for teens gives them language for what’s happening, skills they can use without an adult in the room, and a way to push back on the loop that doesn’t require anyone else’s permission.
Children
Children with OCD usually pull in the people who love them. Parents end up checking, answering the same question, adjusting routines, and doing whatever keeps tonight’s meltdown from happening. That’s called accommodation, and it’s a normal parenting instinct that OCD learns to use. This is where SPACE comes in. SPACE is a parent-based treatment, so we work with you instead of putting a young child through exposures they aren’t developmentally ready for. You learn how to respond in a way that’s warm and firm at the same time, and your child’s anxiety gets room to come down. For kids who also have ASD or ADHD, we build the plan around how they process rather than around a template.
You've done enough negotiating with your own brain. OCD treatment gives you somewhere else to go.
Who We Are
Why Work With Straight Up Treatment?
Dr. Christine Izquierdo
Owner & Lead Therapist
Licensed Psychologist
We do things differently.
Blending cutting-edge treatments with time-honored methods, we create an integrative approach that is personally tailored to your needs.
We believe that therapy isn’t just about treating the symptoms—it’s about mastering how you handle them. It’s about leaning into the scary parts and facing them in a way that allows you to emerge stronger on the other side.
Our team boosts your courage when working with difficult emotions to create the level of self-awareness and confidence you need to live your potential.
At Straight Up Treatment, we offer therapy that is:
- Tailored to you
- Results-focused
- Integrative
- Values-driven
Our Approach
How OCD Treatment Works
This might be your first time hearing that what you’re dealing with has a name, or you might have been managing OCD for years and want treatment that goes further than talking about it. Either way, we’ll make the process clear before we ask you to do anything hard.
At Straight Up Treatment, OCD therapy isn’t about analyzing where the thoughts came from. It’s about changing what happens after they show up.
Mapping the Loop
First, we get specific. What are the thoughts, what do you do in response, and what does OCD promise will happen if you don't? We look at the subtypes you're dealing with, what you've been avoiding, and who's been pulled into the rituals with you.
Building Your Plan
Next, we build an Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) plan that starts where you can already stand, not where OCD is loudest. Alongside ERP, we draw on ACT to help you make room for discomfort instead of arguing with it, and OCD-informed DBT skills when emotions run hot, or dissociation makes it hard to stay present.
Practicing Skills
We practice in session and between sessions, until not doing the compulsion starts to feel possible. We'll also coach the people around you on what to do when OCD asks them for reassurance.
Let's change the terms.
OCD Treatment in Los Angeles
What You Can Expect From OCD Treatment
With specialized OCD therapy, many people find they can:
- Understand how their particular loop runs, and what's been keeping it going
- Know whether it's OCD, anxiety, OCPD, or something else
- Use skills that hold up outside our office, not just inside it
- Spend fewer hours on checking, washing, confessing, and reassurance
- Feel more compassion toward themselves
- Face fear, sit with uncertainty, and let the urge pass without acting on it
- Communicate better with the partners, parents, or kids who've been caught in the loop
- Move through an ERP plan built around what they're ready for
OCD treatment gives you the language, the tools, and the practice to loosen the grip of OCD on your life.
Questions About OCD Treatment
How do I know if this is OCD, or if I'm just an anxious, detail-oriented person?
The main difference is that OCD involves distressing, unwanted thoughts that trigger repetitive rituals or mental acts to ease anxiety. Being detail-oriented is a preference for order and accuracy, and it doesn’t trap you in a cycle of fear.
Most people double-check a locked door once. OCD is present when checking, mental review, or the need for certainty takes up enough time or distress that it interferes with the day, and the ritual buys only a few minutes of relief before the doubt returns.
How do I know if it's OCD, anxiety, or something else?
There’s plenty of overlap here, and plenty of people have more than one thing going on at once.
Generalized anxiety worries about plausible problems, and the worry moves around. Social anxiety zeroes in on being judged. Panic attacks are a sudden surge in the body, plus a fear of what the surge means. OCD has its own signature shape: a specific intrusive thought, image, or urge that feels intolerable, followed by something you do to make it go away.
The compulsion is the tell, and it isn’t always something anyone can see. Mental reviewing, silent counting, and reassurance-seeking all count.
OCPD gets confused with OCD because of the name, but it’s a different thing. OCPD is a pattern of rigidity, perfectionism, and control that usually feels like the right way to live. OCD feels unwanted, even when you can’t stop responding to it.
We sort this out with you at the start, because the plan depends on getting it right.
What does ERP look like in practice?
Exposure and response prevention means facing the thing OCD wants you to avoid, then skipping the compulsion afterward. That’s the whole mechanism, and it’s less dramatic than it sounds.
For contamination OCD, it might mean touching a doorknob and waiting before you wash. For relationship OCD, it might mean sitting with an uncertain feeling instead of checking whether it’s still there. For health OCD or somatic OCD, it often means dropping the body scan and closing the search tab.
Each exposure teaches your nervous system that you can handle not knowing. Over time, the thought shows up and matters less.
Does ERP mean you'll make me do the thing I'm most afraid of right away?
No. We build a hierarchy together, start with exposures that are hard but doable, and move up only as you’re ready.
Do I have to say my intrusive thoughts out loud?
This is one of the most common fears people bring to a consultation, particularly with harm, sexual, or morality-themed obsessions.
You get to go at your own pace. We won’t push you to disclose anything before you’re ready, and we’ll never treat a thought as evidence of who you are. Our team has heard the full range of OCD themes, and the content of an obsession says nothing about your character.
What we’ll tell you straight up is that OCD tends to shrink in the places you’re willing to bring into the light. Most people find their way there.
We already tried therapy, and it didn't help. How is this different?
Many well-meaning therapists inadvertently reinforce OCD by talking through the fear or offering reassurance, which the disorder treats as another compulsion to feed.
Our clinicians are trained specifically in ERP and SPACE, both of which work by building tolerance for uncertainty rather than trying to resolve it.
My child has OCD. Do they have to do the exposures themselves?
Not necessarily, particularly with younger children.
SPACE is built around the parent instead of the child. You come to sessions, you learn how to step back from the accommodations that keep OCD running, and you practice responding in a way that’s warm and firm at the same time. Kids often improve without ever sitting in a therapy chair themselves.
For older children and teens who are ready to engage directly, we pair individual ERP with parent work, so we are all on the same page.
My child is in crisis and doesn't want treatment yet. Can you still help?
Yes. This is what SPACE was built for. We’ll work with you directly to reduce the accommodation patterns that keep the OCD cycle going, and that shift often creates enough movement that your child becomes more willing to engage.
Over time, the rituals stop producing what they used to, and the pressure comes down at home. Many kids who refused treatment outright become curious about it once they’ve felt some relief, and once it’s no longer being asked of them in the middle of a crisis.
How long does OCD treatment take?
Length depends on severity and how many subtypes are active, but many clients see meaningful movement within the first several weeks of ERP. Clients who want faster relief, or families in crisis, can use our accelerated intensive track to compress that timeline without a full IOP or residential program.
Typical outpatient timeline: once-weekly sessions, with initial symptom movement in six to eight weeks and continued work over several months depending on subtype complexity.
Accelerated intensive: roughly four months of standard once-weekly therapy condensed into four to six weeks, for clients who want faster change or who are stepping down from a higher level of care and need more support than one or two weekly sessions.
What does OCD treatment cost?
Session fees at Straight Up Treatment range from $185 to $325, depending on the clinician you see and the type of session.
We’re an out-of-network practice, and we provide monthly superbills you can submit to your insurance for possible reimbursement. Our client coordinator can walk you through all of it before you book.
Still have questions?
Straight Up Treatment
Ready to get started?
If you’re ready to get started, please schedule a free phone consultation with our client coordinator. We will understand your needs and ensure we are a good fit before booking your first treatment planning appointment. Use the button below to book directly online. You can also call us or submit a request via the contact form. We look forward to connecting with you!
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(424) 777-0520
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1180 S Beverly Dr # 750, Los Angeles, CA 90035, United States
