How OCD Therapy Intensives Help You Reset Before the Holidays
The holidays can be joyful, but if you live with OCD, they can also activate stress, rituals, and old emotional patterns more quickly than any other time of year. Increased family time, disrupted routines, heightened expectations, and the pressure to be “on” can all make OCD symptoms feel louder and harder to manage.
An OCD therapy intensive offers a powerful opportunity to reset before the holiday season begins. Instead of entering December already overwhelmed, a therapy intensive gives you focused time to break out of compulsions, reduce anxiety, and strengthen the ERP skills you need to move through the holiday season with confidence and calm.
Why OCD Symptoms Often Get Worse During the Holidays
Spikes in OCD this time of year are extremely common, especially for those dealing with contamination OCD, harm OCD, checking OCD, relationship OCD, or health anxiety.
Here’s why symptoms rise:
Holiday gatherings disrupt your rituals and routines, making OCD scream for control.
Family interactions can activate old patterns, expectations, or unresolved stress.
Traveling, hosting, or staying in unfamiliar places can intensify contamination fears.
Holiday pressure (“be happy,” “be present,” “don’t disappoint anyone”) increases anxiety.
Cold/flu season can spike health-related obsessions or contamination fears.
When you combine these factors with the emotional exhaustion that comes with the holidays, it’s easy to feel like OCD is running the show.
How OCD Therapy Intensives Help You Prepare and Reset
Weekly therapy is incredibly effective, but it often isn’t enough when symptoms escalate quickly or when life feels especially overwhelming. This is where an OCD therapy intensive becomes transformative.
An intensive gives you:
1. Uninterrupted Time for Real ERP Work
Instead of 45-minute weekly sessions, intensives offer multiple hours of guided exposure and response prevention (ERP).
This means you can:
break rituals faster
tolerate distress more effectively
practice exposures that require preparation and support
create more momentum in less time
2. Faster Symptom Relief
Immersive ERP speeds up the process of breaking compulsions because you’re repeatedly practicing new skills, not waiting a full week between sessions.
3. A Clear Plan for Navigating Holiday Triggers
You walk away with:
a personalized ERP plan
coping strategies for holiday-specific triggers
scripts for handling family dynamics
tools to reduce compulsions in the moment
4. Space to Release Avoidance
Many people with OCD enter the holidays already avoiding certain situations, people, or experiences. Intensives help you face these areas with support—so you don’t lose out on connection or joy.
5. A Calmer Nervous System
Because intensives blend ERP with grounding, mindfulness, and emotional regulation skills, you leave feeling more centered and less reactive.
What You Gain from Doing This Work Before the Holidays
A therapy intensive before the holidays can give you:
Improved ability to manage obsessions in real time
Reduced rituals, avoidance, and reassurance-seeking
More confidence in setting boundaries and tolerating discomfort
Stronger resilience during family gatherings
A sense of control as the season gets busy
Tools to prevent OCD from hijacking your holidays
And most importantly, you gain the ability to experience the holidays as you, not through the filter of OCD.
Making Peace with the Past So You Can Be Present Now
You don’t need a “perfect” holiday season, just one where you feel grounded, empowered, and capable. A therapy intensive creates space to process what’s been hard, build new skills, and step into the season with more clarity and ease.
Taking care of your mental health before the holidays isn’t selfish…it’s necessary. When you’re regulated, supported, and anchored, everything else feels more manageable.
If you want to enter the holidays with less anxiety, fewer rituals, and more emotional stability, a therapy intensive for OCD can help you reset quickly and effectively.
Schedule an OCD Therapy Intensive on Long Island
Start the season with clarity, confidence, and calm.
Dr. Rose Taveras, is a licensed psychologist on Long Island specializing in OCD, anxiety disorders, and therapy intensives for young adults. She uses evidence-based approaches, including Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), CBT, and mindfulness-based treatments, to help clients break the OCD cycle and reclaim their lives. At RIT Psychology, she offers both in-person and virtual sessions for clients across New York.
