Life Beyond OCD
A 10-week recovery program for adults tired of living with intrusive thoughts, rumination, compulsions, fear and panic and ready to reclaim their life and find peace.
You've spent enough time trying to manage OCD & anxiety. It's time to treat what is keeping you stuck.
You look like you're handling everything.
You show up at work. You take care of your family. You meet your responsibilities. People see you as capable, reliable, successful.
But underneath it, your mind is constantly working.
Monitoring. Analyzing. Preparing. Trying to prevent the next moment of fear. You monitor every sensation, wondering: "What if this time something is actually wrong?"
Or maybe your anxiety doesn't look like panic at all. Maybe it's the thought you cannot turn off. The mental reviewing. The constant need to make sure. The endless search for certainty that never quite arrives.
"What does this mean?"
"What if I missed something?"
"What if I'm not the person I think I am?"
You know these fears don't fully make sense. You know reassurance only helps for a minute. You know the checking, the researching, the analyzing keep you trapped. But knowing hasn't been enough to make it stop because anxiety was never a problem you could think your way out of.
OCD Doesn't Get Better With Time. It Gets Better With The Right Treatment.
Life Beyond OCD : A 10-Week ERP & ACT Program
Every week you spend managing OCD instead of treating it is a week the cycle gets more automatic.
The checking gets faster. The reassurance-seeking gets more urgent. The compulsions get sneakier, quieter, harder to even notice you're doing. OCD doesn't plateau while you wait for the "right time" to deal with it. It rehearses.
This is the part most people don't hear until it's already cost them years: OCD is not a personality trait, not a quirk, not "just anxiety." It is a specific, diagnosable, highly treatable disorder but only if it's treated with the specific tools built for it.
Generic anxiety therapy doesn't just fail to help OCD. It can make it worse. Reassurance from a well-meaning therapist becomes one more compulsion. "Let's talk through why you feel this way" becomes one more ritual of analyzing instead of resisting. Every year OCD goes untreated, or mistreated, the pathways get stronger, not weaker.
This is why timing matters. This is why the treatment you choose matters even more. This is why generic anxiety therapy hasn’t worked for you and why you left feeling more anxious than you did when you began.
Inside Life Beyond OCD you’ll receive the RIGHT Therapy for your OCD so you can…
Learn how to get out of obsessive loops and spending all your time ruminating.
Handle even the most distressing and scary intrusive thoughts so they no longer have control over you and your life.
Learn how to focus on what matters and stop letting OCD take the joy from your life.
OCD Needs OCD Treatment. That's Not Optional.
Over 10 weeks you will receive ERP and ACT intervention that are the gold standard that willl relieve your OCD symptoms so you no longer have to lose time and quality of life to OCD. OCD can take people’s ability to enjoy their family, jobs, hobbies, spirituality and health.
In our 10 week program you’ll learn invaluable skills to release yourself from the obsessions that have been plaguing you for so long.
Here's what that means in practice: instead of talking about the fear, you learn to face it directly, on purpose, without performing the compulsion that's been giving you fake relief. Instead of trying to think your way to certainty, you learn to let the uncertainty sit there, unresolved, while your nervous system learns, for the first time, that it can survive that.
You will go from feeling stuck, discouraged and alone to having a very clear path to recovery with your OCD. One of the most beautiful things about a group is that you will also go from feeling isolated, ashamed and alone to finding a group of people struggling with the same obsessive mechanisms. After the 10-weeks you will find a sense of community and a toolkit that you will use to help you with anxiey and OCD for the rest of your life.
That's not something you pick up from a self-help book. It has to be taught, practiced, and coached, in real time, by someone trained specifically to do it.
This program puts you in front of that specific treatment, starting now, not whenever an opening appears.
Who is this for?
This group is for adults struggling with OCD. It could be relationship, harm, POCD, just-right, contamination, health, pure-o, hit and run, somatic, perfectionism, checking, religious/moral, false memory, existential OCD, work obsessions and obsessions around parenting. Any themes are welcome and encouraged to join. This is the beauty of a group, your OCD theme DOES NOT MATTER, the treatment works for everyone.
It is also for people that need a little more than 1-1 therapy and are just feeling STUCK. They need a booster in their OCD treatment and want a program that helps them actually stick to their exposures. It can be so isolating doing exposures alone and this group will give you the opportunity to connect with others that are on the same recovery journey as you. It’ll provide you with motivation, accountability and inspiration.
I understand how scary it can be to join a group when you have OCD & talk about your OCD with strangers or people you never met but the scariest things can often be the most powerful and rewarding. I will create a safe space where people can connect and learn skills to tackle their OCD together. I will do a consultation with everyone before they start the group to discuss how the group will be run, what they are comfortable discussing and answer any concerns.
Why OCD TREATMENT IN A GROUP SETTING IS THE NEXT STEP IN YOUR HEALING …
Watching someone else name the thing you've been hiding, and watching the room not flinch, does something individual therapy alone often can't: it tells your nervous system, directly, you are not the only one, and you are not what your OCD tells you that you are.
Here's something else that keeps people stuck, even after they find the right treatment: OCD thrives in isolation & shame. Many people will say to me they thought they were the only ones with these thoughts & behaviors.
OCD tells you your thoughts are too disturbing, shameful and odd to say out loud. It tells you no one else could possibly have this thing running through their head.
That shame is not incidental to OCD, it's part of what keeps the whole cycle sealed shut, silent, and running.
The moment that breaks is the moment you're in a room with people who already know
This is why this program is built as a group, not one more solo workbook. Community isn't a nice extra here, it's treatment. It's the piece that makes the exposure work actually stick.
What This Group Actually Gives You
ERP works. The research is not in question. But ERP only works if the exposures actually happen and exposure, by definition, means doing the thing that scares you.
Left alone, most people negotiate their way out of it. "I'll do the harder one next week." "This one feels like too much right now." "I'll just do the easy version." Avoidance is patient. It will wait as long as you let it.
A weekly group with a specialist tracking your progress removes that negotiation. You build your fear ladder here, out loud, with guidance. You report back on what you actually did, to people who are doing the same work and will notice if you're avoiding the hard step. A group gives you more than that structure. It gives you:
A realistic timeline for hope. Isolated, you don't know if struggling with a mid-level exposure in week 6 means you're behind or right on track. Watching people ahead of you and behind you gives you a real reference point instead of your own worst-case assumptions.
Exposure to being seen, built in. A lot of OCD themes, harm OCD, ROCD, "unacceptable thought" OCD, carry a hidden fear of what happens if someone finds out what's in my head. Saying it out loud and watching the room not flinch is its own form of exposure. You don't get that from a workbook.
A mirror for your own blind spots. OCD is good at hiding the compulsions you've stopped noticing you're doing. Hearing someone else's fear ladder often surfaces a version of your own avoidance you'd missed entirely.
A check on "am I doing this right?" People with OCD tend to obsess over whether they're doing exposure "correctly enough", which quietly turns ERP itself into a ritual. A specialist watching in real time catches that fast.
Proof recovery is real, not just a claim. Watching someone else get visibly less afraid than they were in week 2 does something a testimonial on a website never could.
Your 10-Week Curriculum
Week 1: Introduction: What Is OCD? The OCD Cycle
Obsessions, compulsions, and reassurance-seeking. Naming your own themes and exploring how they show up for you specifically.
Week 2: What Is ERP and How Does It Work?
The mechanics of exposure and response prevention. What to do if you're not ready to start exposures yet, and what to do if you want to jump right in. The value of response prevention specifically (not just exposure).
Week 3: What Is ACT and How Is It Different from ERP?
Comparing the two models, where they overlap, and why most people end up using both.
Week 4: Sneaky Compulsions
Mental compulsions, reassurance-seeking, avoidance, checking, and other compulsions that don't look like "classic" OCD behaviors, the ones people miss for years.
Week 5: Exposure Exploration: Stuck Points
Where people get stuck in exposures and why, doing exposures "too safely," accidentally compulsing during exposure, all-or-nothing thinking about what counts as success.
Week 6: Rumination in Anxiety & OCD
How mental reviewing and "figuring it out" keep you stuck in your head, and why trying to force yourself to stop usually backfires.
Week 7: Cognitive Defusion Skills
How to unhook from a thought and stop treating it as fact, urgent, or true. The skill that makes real acceptance possible instead of just white-knuckling.
Week 8: White-Knuckling vs. Leaning In
The difference between gritting your teeth through anxiety and actually leaning into it. Using defusion and response prevention together to shift from tolerating to accepting.
Week 9: Uncertainty & Mental Flexibility: The Keys to Freedom
Why learning to tolerate uncertainty, rather than resolve it, is the long-term key to lasting relief. Approaching your own thoughts with curiosity instead of dread.
Week 10: Living With OCD: Coping Skills, Self-Care & Relapse Prevention
Managing flare-ups, building a self-care plan, identifying early warning signs, and having a concrete plan for what to do when OCD ramps back up.
At The End Of 10 Weeks, You Will:
Know exactly how to respond to intrusive thoughts, to rumination, to anxiety, to panic, to fear. Not hope you remember something you read once. Know it, the way you know how to drive a route you've done a hundred times.
Have a full toolbox, not one trick. A different situation calls for a different skill, defusion for the looping thought, response prevention for the compulsion, acceptance for the fear that won't fully go away, values for the moment you need to move forward anyway. You'll have practiced all of them enough to reach for the right one without having to think about it.
Feel it, inside and out. Not "I read that this works." Confidence that's actually lived in your body, because you did the exposure, watched yourself survive it, and did it again.
Have people who get it. A community of others who know OCD and anxiety from the inside, not as an abstract diagnosis, but as the exact 3am spiral you've had. You leave this program knowing you were never actually the only one.
That's the shift. Not "less anxious, maybe." Confident, equipped, and no longer alone in it.
Led By An OCD Specialist
I'm Dana Colthart, LCSW, CEDS, owner of Clear Light Therapy, licensed in six states, trained specifically in ERP and ACT for OCD. Not general talk therapy with anxiety somewhere on a list of ten things I treat. OCD is my specialty. It's the thing I'm most passionate about in this entire field.
I've treated it in every form it shows up in. Pure O. Harm OCD. Relationship OCD. Hit-and-run OCD. Contamination. Just Right. Somatic and sensorimotor OCD. If it's a theme OCD can attach itself to, I've sat across from someone living it.
I've also seen what happens when OCD isn't treated right, when someone spends years in therapy that was never built for this, getting reassurance instead of treatment, insight instead of exposure, and watching their world get smaller the entire time. I've seen how much damage that does. I built this program because I don't want that to keep happening to people who are just trying to find someone who actually knows how to help.
That's what drives this work for me: watching someone go from organizing their whole life around a fear, to facing it, to finally feeling like themselves again.
I'm not currently taking new individual clients, my caseload is full. This program is how you get the exact clinical framework I use in session live, in a group, with real accountability, without waiting on an opening I can't promise a timeline for.
What's Included
10 live weekly sessions applying ERP and ACT directly to your OCD themes
A guided fear ladder you build and actually start climbing, with support
A small group that understands OCD & anxiety
Built-in accountability so exposures actually happen, week after week
Direct access to a specialist clinician for questions specific to your situation
What Waiting Costs You
Every week you don't treat this is a week OCD gets to keep rehearsing. The compulsions get more automatic. The isolation gets heavier. The life you're not living gets a little further away.
Or, ten weeks from now, you could be the person who built the fear ladder, faced it with a group who understood exactly what it cost, and stopped needing an answer OCD was never actually going to give you.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this therapy? This is a psychoeducational and skills-based group program, not individual psychotherapy. You'll learn the same clinical frameworks (ERP, ACT) used in treatment, in a structured group format, with direct guidance from a specialist clinician.
What if I've already tried therapy and it didn't work? This is common, most anxiety and OCD sufferers have tried at least one type of therapy that wasn't designed for their specific condition before finding ERP and ACT. If you've done talk therapy, general CBT, or self-help and still feel stuck, this program was built for exactly that situation.
Do I need a diagnosis to join? No. If panic, intrusive thoughts, compulsions, or chronic worry are affecting your quality of life, that's reason enough.
Is this instead of individual therapy? For some people, this program is enough to create real change. For others, it's an excellent complement to individual therapy or medication management, and a way to build core skills quickly.
How is this different from an app or self-help book? You're getting live instruction from a specialist clinician, real-time guidance on building your own exposure hierarchy, and a group that keeps you accountable, not a static workbook you're left to figure out alone.