About the author: Jenna Overbaugh has been treating OCD and anxiety since 2008, and has had it basically her whole life. She’s worked with some of the most severe, life-consuming cases out there, quit her job in 2023 to teach people all over the world how to be their own therapist, and has a book coming out in 2027. She’s been terrified for most of her life and keeps doing the things anyway, and she’s going to show you how to build a life so big and so bold that OCD and anxiety just can’t keep up. She runs on chai tea and the conviction that this is possible for you, too.
Hi Substack! Okay, so this is a little different.
I had to film a video answering Q&A questions about OCD, anxiety, and intrusive thoughts for another platform. And then I thought, why not film it here first so you guys have it!? Two birds, one stone kinda thing. You’re getting the video recording and the full written version below, and you’re getting it before anyone else.
If you’re new and just popping in: hi! I’m Jenna. I’m a licensed professional counselor specializing in OCD, anxiety, and intrusive thoughts, and I have personal experience with all of it. You’re in the right place.
Let’s get into it.
What problems or patterns do you specialize in, and what drew you to this work?
I specialize in what I call weird mental experiences - intrusive thoughts, intrusive images, impulses, feelings, urges. The thoughts that come in out of nowhere and feel ego-dystonic, meaning they conflict with your values. These are usually the thoughts that feel really scary, and you feel this desperate urge to get rid of them somehow or feel better about them.
What drew me to it: as a kid, I struggled with what I now know to be OCD. One pattern that stands out looking back - I felt this need to do everything in threes. I loved the band Hanson (if you know, you know, and we’d get along great), and I felt it was my singular responsibility to keep the Hanson brothers alive. If I didn’t do everything in sets of three (tie my shoes three times, walk in and out of a door three times, rewrite something because it didn’t feel right), one of them would die and it would be my fault.
In hindsight: obsessive compulsive. At the time: just how life worked.
I also struggled with social anxiety as a kid, afraid to raise my hand because of what people would think. But I knew, even without language for it, that the only thing worse than being anxious about something was letting that fear voice win. So even when raising my hand felt terrifying, sitting there and shrinking felt worse. I was competitive with my anxiety from a very young age.
Eventually I learned that what I was doing was exposure and response prevention. That’s what got me into this work.
What misleading self-help advice do you see most often, and what’s the truth?
The mental health field is still stuck on trying to get people to feel better, to get rid of their anxiety, to eliminate intrusive thoughts - so there’s a lot of thought stopping, snapping a rubber band against your wrist when a scary thought shows up. Reassurance, too, when a client is scared, the first instinct of many therapists is to reassure them. And for OCD, that is the opposite of helpful.
What we actually need is to build capacity. Not feel better about a specific subtype or theme but build your capacity for anxiety, for discomfort, for intrusive thoughts. Build more tolerance. Feel more capable of handling difficult things.
I tell my clients and students: I’m not interested in you feeling better. I’m interested in you getting better at feeling.
Because if you’re living a life that’s worthwhile and meaningful, being triggered, having anxiety, having scary thoughts = the tax, that’s the price of a fulfilling life. And if we’re not teaching people to get better at tolerating that, we’re missing a massive part of the work.
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