Checking
Repeatedly checking doors, appliances, messages, work, memories or decisions to make sure you have not missed something, caused harm or left a risk unresolved.
In person in Plymouth · Online across the UK
OCD therapy for intrusive thoughts, doubt and compulsions
You may understand that the fear is out of proportion, yet still feel driven to check, analyse, seek reassurance or avoid. I offer specialist OCD therapy to help you understand what keeps the cycle going and practise responding differently — so you can feel calmer and more confident, with more of your attention and energy available for the people and parts of life that matter to you.
- BACP Accredited
- NCH Accredited
- Supporting clients since 2008
When the feeling makes it urgent
When not responding feels careless or irresponsible
An intrusive thought, image or urge rarely feels like a neutral mental event. It may bring a surge of dread, anxiety, guilt, disgust or a powerful sense that something is not right. The feeling can be so convincing that leaving the experience alone seems careless rather than therapeutic.
If the feared possibility concerns someone you love, your health, your morality or the chance of causing harm, checking can feel like the responsible thing to do. Reassurance can feel like due diligence. Analysing can feel like the only way to make sure you have not overlooked something important.
This helps explain why logic alone may not loosen the pattern. You are not responding only to what the thought, image or urge seems to say; you are also responding to an emotional and bodily experience that appears to confirm it.
The feeling is real. But it is not always reliable evidence of danger, meaning or responsibility.
Therapy helps you learn that not every feeling of threat needs action. Over time, leaving the experience unresolved can begin to feel less like negligence and more like a deliberate choice not to reinforce the cycle.
Compulsions you might recognise
How OCD pulls you into trying to feel safe or certain
Mental reviewing
Replaying conversations, events, thoughts, images or urges to establish exactly what happened or what the experience says about you.
Reassurance and research
Asking others, searching online or comparing information to rule out the feared possibility or make certain that nothing important has been overlooked.
Avoidance
Avoiding people, places, objects, decisions or information because encountering them — or not taking precautions — feels too risky or irresponsible.
Internal monitoring
Checking your feelings, intentions, urges, bodily sensations or level of certainty for a warning sign, an answer or proof that something is wrong.
Neutralising and “just right” rituals
Repeating, counting, arranging, praying or replacing thoughts and images to prevent a feared outcome or make the experience feel complete.
The pattern that keeps returning
Why the OCD cycle can feel so convincing
Compulsions are understandable attempts to reduce discomfort, prevent harm or reach certainty. The difficulty is that the short-term relief can strengthen the sense that the thought needed a response.
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Something is noticed
An intrusive thought, image, urge, memory, sensation or unanswered question enters awareness.
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It feels important
Anxiety, dread, guilt or incompleteness rises. Attention narrows and the experience feels urgent.
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You try to resolve it
You check, analyse, avoid, neutralise, seek reassurance or monitor yourself for an answer.
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Relief reinforces the cycle
Relief may arrive briefly, but the system learns to call for the same response when doubt returns.
Trying to force thoughts and feelings away can become part of what keeps them powerful. Therapy helps you create different experiences in which the thought can be present without automatically deciding what you do next.
Different themes, familiar processes
OCD can attach itself to almost anything that matters to you
The subject of the fear varies widely. Therapy takes your particular experience seriously while also looking at the checking, avoidance, reassurance, mental rituals and search for certainty that can recur across different themes.
- Harm and responsibility
- Contamination and washing
- Checking and persistent doubt
- Relationships and feelings
- Sexual orientation or identity doubts
- Taboo sexual intrusive thoughts
- Morality, religion and scrupulosity
- Health, illness and death
- False-memory and real-event fears
- Symmetry and “just right” experiences
- Sensorimotor or bodily awareness
- Existential questions and uncertainty
These are examples rather than a diagnostic checklist. You can talk about distressing thoughts without being judged or reduced to their content, and you do not need to disclose everything before you feel ready.
How therapy can help
Understanding opens the door. New experience changes what happens next.
We will develop a shared understanding of your particular pattern: what triggers it, where your attention goes, what the experience seems to predict, how you respond and what that response costs you over time.
Understanding matters, but it is not the finish line. Therapy also creates opportunities to practise a different response when thoughts, feelings or urges are difficult to ignore.
Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) can be an important part of this work. It involves approaching uncertainty, sensations or meaningful situations while reducing the compulsions that keep the old pattern intact. ERP is planned collaboratively and adapted to you. The purpose is useful learning — not making you distressed for the sake of it.
The goal is not to feel calm first. It is to practise choosing while activated.
Explore the LIBERATE Approach™ →Understand without over-explaining
Learn enough about OCD, attention, uncertainty and your own pattern to reduce shame and make change purposeful — without turning explanation into another form of reassurance.
Recognise the choice point
Notice the moment just before checking, rumination, reassurance or avoidance takes over, and identify a workable alternative response.
Create new learning
Use ERP and other carefully chosen experiences to practise allowing uncertainty or discomfort without automatically performing the usual compulsion.
Return attention to life
Re-engage with relationships, work, rest and ordinary activities without waiting for perfect certainty or emotional comfort.
A wider view of improvement
Symptoms can ease as the struggle and compulsive response reduce
As you spend less energy fighting thoughts or treating them as instructions that must be followed, they can begin to feel less urgent. You may notice thoughts becoming quieter, less frequent or easier to leave alone, anxiety settling more readily, and compulsive urges losing some of their force.
This change tends to emerge from new learning and repeated practice. It cannot be forced by monitoring whether a thought has gone or checking whether you feel better yet — because that monitoring gives the experience more attention and importance.
Symptom relief matters. So does having more of your attention, time and energy available for the people and activities that make up your life.
Less checking and ritualising
Notice the pull towards a compulsion and increasingly choose not to give it another round of your time and attention.
Decisions that stay made
Allow the aftershock of doubt to be present without reopening the decision through analysis, comparison or reassurance.
More presence in ordinary life
Return more fully to conversations, work, rest and relationships even when your internal experience is not perfectly settled.
Specialist, individual support
Therapy that is collaborative, clear and shaped around you
I’m Carolyn Gillan, a BACP Accredited counsellor and NCH Accredited hypnotherapist. Since 2008, I have supported people experiencing OCD, intrusive thoughts, anxiety and persistent uncertainty.
My work is warm, practical and evidence-informed. I will take your distress seriously without treating every thought, feeling or urge as proof that something is wrong. I will also explain the purpose behind what we do, so therapy feels collaborative rather than like a protocol being applied to you.
- BACP Accredited Counsellor
- NCH Accredited Hypnotherapist
- Creator of the LIBERATE Approach™
- Fully qualified, insured and enhanced DBS checked
In person in Plymouth
Face-to-face appointments in a calm, private consulting room in Plymouth, Devon.
Online across the UK
Specialist therapy from your own space, without geography limiting the therapist or approach you choose.
You do not need a formal OCD diagnosis to enquire. We can begin with what is happening and decide together whether the way I work is a suitable fit.
View fees and frequently asked questions →
Your next step
Ready when a suitable space becomes available?
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