About

Treatment is not mainly about talking. It’s about teaching. If you work with me, you will teach me what it is like to live with your OCD. I will have lots of questions for you so I can understand exactly how your OCD lives and grows in you, and so I can help you create the game plan we will use to defeat your OCD.

Your OCD is your Superpower

All of the power of your OCD symptoms is inside of you to begin with! 

OCD divides you against yourself. One part of you knows the anxiety is irrational and the compulsive behavior doesn’t completely make sense. But another part of you strongly insists the danger is real and the rituals must be obeyed. Your mind is generating your OCD, and I can help make it stop.

I have spent a great deal of my adult life healing a similar division in myself. The therapy that I do flows from this experience. I am a much calmer and happier person than I once was. My worry about what others think of me has dropped at least 90 percent since I was a young adult. I did it using exposure, the same basic feature of my therapy.

Fears grow weak when you face them head on

As I worked through my own internal division, I found ways to understand its roots in things I was taught – by parents, teachers, and messages pervading our society. But understanding the roots came after the healing from exposure.

If you work with me, we will not spend much time tracing the roots of your OCD, because you need relief now. I’ve found it works better to directly attack the core driver of your OCD by getting you to face your fears, one at a time, in real life settings. During treatment, you are likely to remember important events that helped create your OCD, so you will also achieve important insights into the childhood roots of your problems.

I teach you after you teach me

After you teach me about your unique OCD, I will teach you the proven skills that have helped many thousands of people like yourself defeat OCD. And I will coach you through them, in real time and even in real world settings if possible, so you can practice the skills until they become automatic coping strategies you use without thinking too much about it.

Why I Became a Psychologist

One summer when I was 15, I went to a garage sale and picked up a transformational self-help book called Psychocybernetics, by Dr. Maxwell Maltz. The book was filled with practical, solution focused information that spoke straight to my needs. I was hooked, and my love for psychology was born. Psychologists had developed a tool kit of life hacks, and I wanted to master every tool in that kit.

I went off to college at the University of Texas (The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You!) not sure what I would become. I started in engineering and burned through four years worth of electives in one year. I quickly figured out that I was much more interested in people than machines and equations, so I switched majors to psychology and flourished. 

In college, I worked half-time, as a vocational counselor at a halfway house for people with long term mental illness. I helped my clients land jobs and I spent time taking our people on community outings. I saw firsthand how incredibly powerful psychology can be when you work with people in the real world settings where they have trouble. You can see so much more – about how people get triggered and about how quickly they can learn to get better results for themselves if the coaching takes place right where the problem is and when it is at its worst.

I was hooked again when I studied cognitive-behavioral therapy for OCD at Cognitive Behavior Associates of Beverly Hills. My supervisor, Dr. Joel Becker, trained me and my classmates in a radical new therapy called Exposure and Response Prevention (ExRP, for short). In this treatment, the therapist actually goes into the real world to help people confront their greatest fears, such as a fear of germs. 

As I read the inspiring stream of research papers from clinical trials on this method, I became more and more convinced that this was the kind of therapy I was meant to do.

In mid-life, I took a detour and went to The Ohio State University (O-H-I-O) and got a second Ph.D. This time, I studied a fascinating research field called mathematical psychology and delved deeply in the science that gave us AI by trying to mimic human learning processes with computers. Strangely enough, this deepened my conviction in the value of psychotherapy for healing minds from the effects of trauma and stress.

As I psychologist interested in basic research in how humans think, I am particularly fascinated by intrusive thoughts. They are mysterious, in that you feel like the intrusive thoughts are not really coming from your own real self. The intrusive thoughts seem to have a life of their own. They seem to be from an enemy or adversarial force. You cannot will them away. Under stress, I have to fight my own intrusive thoughts, so I get it. 

My career has given me abundant opportunities to try different things. I teach college students, and I do therapy and psychological testing to make precise diagnoses especially where neurodivergence is suspected. While I love the variety, I have honed in on OCD over the past couple of years as my true calling. 

I love talking to people with powerful anxiety disorders like OCD because I know how much relief they get through the tough work of behavioral therapy. And I love talking to people who aren’t yet sure whether they are ready to commit to the work. I would enjoy hearing from you so I could help you figure out whether ExRP might liberate you from your OCD. And if you have a different form of anxiety, like a phobia, or generalized anxiety disorder, panic, or PTSD, I can assure you that exposure therapy works extremely well with those kinds of anxiety as well. 

Please send me email, call me, or send a text message if this sounds good to you!

614-254-9122

Robert@RobertGorePhD.com