Ep. 133: Dr. Patricia Zurita Ona — How to Overcome OCD and Other Struggles with Fear

by Seth J. Gillihan, PhD

My guest this week is Dr. Patricia Zurita Ona, a clinical psychologist who specializes in treating obsessive-compulsive disorder. We discussed her new workbook entitled Living Beyond OCD Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (affiliate link), and what ACT adds to traditional CBT for OCD. We covered some really interesting territory about changing thoughts vs. making peace with them. We also discussed the latest research in how we overcome our fears, as well as increasing our ability to tolerate discomfort.

Other topics we touched on included:

  • The most effective way to use my guest’s OCD workbook
  • Slowing down to deal with anxiety and OCD
  • The fundamentals of Exposure and Response Prevention for OCD and anxiety
  • My discussion with ACT creator Steve Hayes
  • Acceptance and Commitment Therapy in the context of treating OCD
  • The problems that can come with trying to change our thoughts
  • The value in making acceptance and values explicit in ACT
  • When to directly challenge unhelpful beliefs vs. treat them as noise and move on
  • How thoughts can change through ACT
  • The latest research on why facing our fears makes them diminish
  • Michelle Craske’s research on fear reduction and the Inhibitory Learning Model
  • Replacing threat-based associations with safety-based associations
  • Increasing our willingness and ability to tolerate discomfort
  • Potential differences in the difficulty of treating certain subtypes of OCD
  • The “Meta” subtype of OCD: OCD about OCD itself
  • Fake vs. true acceptance in ACT
  • Suffering less by not resisting our experience
  • Developing a new relationship with our mind
  • Taking the contents of our minds less seriously

Patricia’s other books include (affiliate links):

I hope you enjoy our discussion.

Patricia Zurita Ona, PsyD, or “Dr. Z,” is a licensed clinical psychologist.

For more than 17 years she has worked with children, adolescents, and adults struggling with anxiety, perfectionism, procrastination, and emotion regulation problems, with a special emphasis on OCD and related conditions.

Patricia is a graduate of the International OCD Foundation Behavior Therapy Training Institute.

Over the past 10 years she has been practicing and teaching ACT for specific populations.

As you’ll hear in this episode, she is passionate about helping clients get unstuck from any fear-based struggle.

Find Patricia online at her website, on Twitter, and explore her online course ACT Beyond OCD.