COLORADO SPRINGS — In our Rebound Colorado series, we're taking a look at a disorder that so many people deal with everyday; Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, otherwise known as OCD.
At the Colorado Springs OCD Treatment Center, licensed professional counselor, Kayla Engel, says her patients with contamination OCD, actually reported feeling safer during the pandemic because they felt the world was cleaner. Contamination OCD involves the fear of germs or getting sick. Now that communities are beginning to reopen, the anxiety is back.
Engel stresses this type of OCD is not the only disorder out there. She says the type of OCD are contamination, doubt/harm, scrupulosity, and symmetry, to name a few.
"OCD tends to be intrusive thoughts and images that come into someone's mind," Engel explained. "They tend to be repetitive, and the cause anxiety discomfort."
She treats patients who have several types of the disorder, and uses exposure prevention therapy.
"We have to break the OCD cycle," Engel said. "We take the obsession and trigger it in some way, and they are going to feel that anxiety, and that's when the ritual prevention or response prevention comes into play."
Engel says overtime this form of therapy helps alleviate her patients' anxiety towards their obsession or fear.
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