The Top 7 Mental Rituals in OCD: How to Recognize Them and How to Actually Stop

A clinically grounded guide to the invisible compulsions that drive OCD — including the question every client eventually asks: “you say stop ruminating, but how?”

If therapy has helped you understand OCD but your mind is still running all day, the missing piece may be mental rituals. These are not personality flaws or overthinking habits. They are compulsions, and they can be treated.

“I’m not doing rituals. I’m just thinking.”

This is the sentence I hear most often from new clients in the first session. Sometimes in the first ten minutes. They have been told by previous therapists that they have OCD. They have read about exposure therapy. They have read about response prevention. They know the basic framework. And yet they are convinced that whatever it is they are doing all day, every day, in their head — it cannot possibly be a ritual, because rituals involve hand-washing or counting or checking the lock, and they are not doing any of those things. They are just thinking.

They are doing rituals. They are doing thousands of them. They have been doing them for so long, so automatically, that the rituals have become indistinguishable from the texture of their own consciousness. They cannot see them because the rituals are the way they think now. The disorder has colonized the cognitive operating system, and from inside the operating system, the colonization looks like normal life.

If this sounds familiar — if you are exhausted from a kind of mental work you cannot quite name, if you have been told to “stop ruminating” and have no idea how to follow that instruction, if your therapy has taught you what compulsions are without ever helping you recognize the ones happening in your head — this article is for you.

Mental rituals are the invisible compulsions of OCD. They are the most under-recognized feature of the disorder, the most frequently missed by general therapists, and the most clinically important to identify, because untreated mental rituals are the single most common reason ERP fails. You can do every behavioral exposure perfectly, restrict every observable compulsion, and still have OCD running on full power inside your head, hidden so well that neither you nor your clinician can see it.

This piece will name the seven mental rituals I see most often in my practice across Texas, Washington, New Hampshire, and Florida. It will show you how to recognize each one in your own thinking. And it will give you specific, concrete techniques for what to do instead — because every client eventually asks the question that everybody dodges: “you keep telling me to stop ruminating, but how do I actually do that?”

The answer exists. It is not magic. It is not “just stop.” It is a set of specific cognitive moves you can learn. Stay with me.

What Mental Rituals Actually Are

Before the list, the framework. A mental ritual is a cognitive operation performed in response to an obsession, intended to neutralize, prevent, or relieve the distress the obsession produces. The operation is mental rather than behavioral, but the function is identical to a behavioral compulsion. It generates brief relief. It reinforces the obsession’s importance. It teaches the brain that the intrusive content is the kind of thing that requires response. And it locks the OCD loop in place.

Three features distinguish a mental ritual from ordinary thinking:

1. It is reactive. Mental rituals occur in response to an intrusive thought, image, or feeling. They are not free-flowing thought. They are triggered cognitive operations performed to deal with something the brain has just produced.

2. It is repetitive. The same operation is performed over and over, sometimes within seconds, sometimes over hours, sometimes spread across years. The repetition is rarely productive. It does not lead to new conclusions. It loops.

3. It is anxiety-reducing in the short term, anxiety-amplifying in the long term. Each performance of the ritual provides brief relief. The relief teaches the brain to perform the ritual again. Over time, the threshold for relief rises, the rituals become more frequent and more elaborate, and the underlying obsession becomes louder.

This is why the standard advice — just stop thinking about it — is useless. The ritual is not the thinking. The ritual is a specific operation on the thinking, and the operation has to be identified before it can be stopped.

Most clients I work with have been performing mental rituals for so long that the rituals feel like personality. They feel like who I am. They feel like conscientiousness, intelligence, moral seriousness, attention to detail. They feel like virtues. The first task of treatment is often the slow, careful work of separating the person from the rituals — recognizing that the cognitive operations the client believed were just how their mind works are in fact the disorder doing its work.

Now. The seven.

1. Mental Review (Rumination)

This is the cornerstone mental ritual of every OCD subtype, and the one most clients recognize first once it is named.

Mental review is the compulsive replay of past events, conversations, decisions, sensations, or imagined scenarios, looking for evidence — evidence of having done something wrong, evidence of being safe, evidence about your character, your orientation, your moral standing, your spiritual state, or whatever territory the obsession has colonized.

In the False Memory OCD client, mental review is replaying the night of the ambiguous moment, looking for what really happened. In the Real Event OCD client, mental review is replaying the cruel thing said to a sister three years ago, examining every word for moral weight. In the Harm OCD client, mental review is replaying interactions with loved ones, scanning for evidence of dangerous capacity. In the SO-OCD client, mental review is replaying past attractions, relationships, and reactions, comparing them to current sensations to determine orientation.

The content varies. The structure is identical: replay → analyze → fail to reach conclusion → replay again.

How to recognize mental review in your own thinking. Notice the moments when you find yourself “going over” something. The replay usually has a slightly different quality than free-floating memory — it is purposeful, effortful, focused. You are not remembering. You are examining. The examination has the feel of work. You are trying to find something. You expect that this time, you might.

Why standard advice fails. Most therapists tell clients to “stop ruminating” or to “interrupt the thought.” This is like telling someone to stop tasting food while eating. The instruction does not contain a method. It just names the goal.

What to do instead — the actual technique.

The first move is recognition without engagement. When you notice the replay starting, do not argue with it, do not try to push it away, do not analyze why it is happening. Simply name what is occurring: that’s mental review. The naming does two things — it activates a part of your brain that is observational rather than reactive, and it begins to teach you that the rumination is a discrete event rather than continuous you.

The second move is redirection without suppression. The instruction is not “don’t think about it” — that triggers the rebound effect and makes the replay worse. The instruction is to redirect attention to something else that requires real cognitive engagement. Not passive distraction (TV in the background). Active engagement (a conversation, a complex task, a piece of physical work that requires your hands and attention).

The third move is willingness to be wrong. The replay continues because the OCD insists you must reach a conclusion. The way out is to stop trying to reach the conclusion and instead accept that you will live without one. Say to yourself, out loud if you can: “I might never know what really happened. I am willing to live without knowing.” Then return to your life.

In my practice, I often have clients keep a small notebook for the first two weeks of working on mental review specifically. Every time they catch themselves replaying, they note the time and the trigger. The point is not to analyze the entries. The point is that the act of writing down the moment of recognition strengthens the recognition skill, which is the foundation of all subsequent response prevention.

2. Mental Checking

Mental checking is the compulsive scanning of your own internal state — your emotions, attention, body sensations, intentions, beliefs — looking for evidence about whether you are safe, good, normal, faithful, attracted, dangerous, or any of the other categories the obsession is interrogating.

In the Harm OCD client, mental checking is scanning the body for signs of aggressive urge whenever a loved one is nearby. In the SO-OCD client, mental checking is scanning the genital region for response when in the presence of triggering people. In the Scrupulosity client, mental checking is scanning recent thoughts for sin. In the Sensorimotor OCD client, mental checking is scanning the breath, swallow, or heartbeat to see whether the awareness is still present. In the POCD client, mental checking is scanning attention and arousal whenever a child is in the visual field.

How to recognize mental checking in your own thinking. Notice the small, brief, repeated moments throughout the day when you “check in” with yourself — am I feeling normal? did I react right to that? is the awareness still there? do I still love them? These moments are quick. They do not feel like rituals. They feel like ordinary self-awareness. They are not. Self-awareness produces information that informs subsequent action. Mental checking produces brief reassurance followed by renewed doubt, and it never resolves.

Why standard advice fails. Therapists who have not been trained in OCD often praise “self-awareness” and “emotional intelligence,” which are confused with mental checking. The two look similar from the outside. From the inside, the difference is that genuine self-awareness is generative and occasional; mental checking is consumptive and constant.

What to do instead — the actual technique.

Refuse to check, full stop. When you notice the urge to scan your body, your attention, your emotional state — let the urge be present without engaging it. The instruction is not “check and find that you are okay.” The instruction is “do not check at all, regardless of what the answer would have been.”

This is harder than it sounds, because the urge to check feels like a survival instinct. The technique that works for most clients is deliberate attention to external sensory input in the moment the urge arises. Look at three specific things in your visual field. Listen for two distinct sounds. Notice one physical sensation that is not the one your OCD wants you to scan. This is not distraction in the avoidant sense — it is the active redirection of attention from internal to external, which interrupts the checking operation.

The second technique is uncertainty statement. Out loud or silently: “I don’t know how I’m feeling and I’m not going to check.” The point is not to determine your emotional state. The point is to live without the scan.

The third technique is behavioral commitment. Tell yourself: I am not going to check for the next ten minutes, regardless of what happens. Set the timer. When the urge arises, you have a clear rule. When the ten minutes are up, set another ten minutes. Build the tolerance gradually. Most clients can extend to longer windows within two weeks.

3. Mental Neutralization (Undoing)

Mental neutralization is the cognitive ritual of cancelling, undoing, replacing, or counteracting an intrusive thought with a “good” thought, a counter-image, a prayer, a phrase, or a mental gesture.

In the Magical Thinking OCD client, neutralization is replacing a “bad” thought of harm coming to a loved one with a deliberate “good” thought of safety. In the Scrupulosity client, neutralization is mentally cancelling a blasphemous thought with a counter-prayer or sacred phrase. In the Harm OCD client, neutralization is mentally rewriting an intrusive violent image with a non-violent version. In the POCD client, neutralization is mentally “scrubbing” an intrusive sexual image involving a child by replacing it with adult-appropriate content.

The neutralization is usually fast — sometimes happening in less than a second. Most clients perform thousands of neutralizations per day without recognizing what they are doing.

How to recognize neutralization in your own thinking. Notice the moments after an intrusive thought when you feel a small mental “shift” — a deliberate effort to think of something else, a mental phrase, a counter-image, a prayer, a touch, or a small mental gesture. The shift has a purposeful quality. It is not just the next thought. It is correction.

Why standard advice fails. Cognitive restructuring techniques sometimes look like neutralization rituals from the outside, and untrained therapists may inadvertently coach clients into more sophisticated neutralization rather than out of it. “Replace the negative thought with a positive one” is a CBT instruction that, in OCD, becomes a compulsion.

What to do instead — the actual technique.

Allow the intrusive thought to remain present. When the bad thought arises, do not undo it. Let it sit. Continue your life. Notice that you have not undone it and notice that nothing catastrophic has happened.

This is the single most counterintuitive instruction in OCD treatment. The disorder has trained you to believe that the bad thought, once present, must be neutralized or terrible consequences will follow. The treatment is to test that hypothesis by not neutralizing and discovering, over hundreds of repetitions, that the predicted consequences do not occur.

The technique I use with clients in active treatment is deliberate non-undoing. When an intrusive thought arises and you feel the urge to neutralize, you instead say to yourself: “That thought is allowed to be there. I am not going to fix it.” Then you go on with your activity. The thought may continue to be present in the background. That is correct. The thought continuing to be present, without your operation on it, is the exposure.

For clients who have been performing neutralization for years and find it almost impossible to drop, an intermediate technique is delay. When the urge to neutralize arises, instead of doing it immediately, set a delay of thirty seconds. Wait. The urge often weakens within the delay. Then extend to one minute. Then five. Eventually the neutralization drops away because the brain has learned that the bad thought does not require it.

4. Mental Reassurance Seeking (Self-Reassurance)

Self-reassurance is the internal version of asking your partner or therapist for reassurance — except you are doing it to yourself, in your own head, dozens or hundreds of times a day.

It looks like: I’m probably okay. The article said this is OCD. Most people don’t act on intrusive thoughts. The fact that I’m worried means I’m not the thing I’m afraid of. I just confessed it last week. My therapist said I’m safe.

The content is genuinely accurate. That is part of what makes it so insidious. Self-reassurance feels like sound coping — you are using factual information to calm your nervous system. The problem is that you are using it over and over, and each iteration produces less and less relief, requires more sophisticated arguments, and trains the brain that the underlying obsession is the kind of thing that requires constant verification.

How to recognize self-reassurance in your own thinking. Notice the small internal arguments you make to yourself throughout the day. The “I’m probably fine” thoughts. The “this is just OCD” thoughts. The mental rehearsal of why you are not the thing you fear. If you find yourself “explaining” something to yourself in your head, you are probably engaged in self-reassurance.

Why standard advice fails. Most cognitive therapy explicitly teaches clients to reassure themselves. For non-OCD anxiety, this can be appropriate. For OCD, it is fuel.

What to do instead — the actual technique.

Replace certainty with willingness. The technique is to deliberately substitute the reassuring thought with an uncertainty statement. Instead of “I’m probably not actually a bad person,” you train yourself to think “I might be a bad person and I’m willing to live without knowing for sure.” This sounds counterintuitive — why would you tell yourself something that increases anxiety? Because the increase is brief, and the underlying lesson — that you can tolerate not-knowing — is what actually heals OCD.

The second technique is recognition without engagement. When you notice the self-reassurance starting, name it: “that’s self-reassurance.” Do not complete the reassuring thought. Let it dangle. Move on with your life. The thought wanted closure. Refuse to provide it.

In my practice, I often tell clients that successful treatment involves becoming, paradoxically, less reassured about the obsessional content over time, not more. The goal is not to feel certain that you are not what you fear. The goal is to be able to live a full life without needing the certainty.

5. Mental Confession (Internal Disclosure)

Most clinicians know about behavioral confession — the compulsion to tell partners, therapists, or religious figures about every intrusive thought. Far fewer clinicians know about mental confession, which is the internal version of the same compulsion.

Mental confession is the cognitive ritual of narrating the obsession to yourself in detail, sometimes as if telling a confessor, sometimes as if telling a future therapist, sometimes as if testifying. The narration provides the brief relief that confession provides without the social damage of actually disclosing. Many clients perform mental confession dozens of times a day and have no idea it is a compulsion.

How to recognize mental confession in your own thinking. Notice the moments when you find yourself describing the obsession to yourself — running through it as a narrative, often with imagined audience (a therapist, a priest, a partner). The narration has a quality of testimony. You are not just thinking; you are telling.

Why standard advice fails. Most therapists do not know mental confession exists. Even ERP-trained therapists sometimes miss it because the client is not behaviorally confessing. The compulsion is invisible from the outside.

What to do instead — the actual technique.

Stop the narration mid-sentence. When you notice that you have started internally narrating the obsession, simply stop. Mid-thought. You do not need to complete the narration. Leaving it incomplete is the response prevention.

The technique that works for most clients is the unfinished sentence. When the mental confession starts, you cut it off at the moment of recognition. “I had this intrusive thought about—” and stop. Do not finish. The OCD will demand completion. Refuse. The unfinished narration is the exposure.

The second technique is external attention pivot. The moment you catch yourself in mental confession, redirect attention to a specific external sensory input — a sound, a visual detail, a physical sensation that is not the one your OCD wants you to monitor. This is not avoidance in the suppressive sense — it is the active interruption of the cognitive operation.

6. Mental Researching (Internal Investigation)

Mental researching is the cognitive ritual of running through what you know about a topic, looking for the piece of information that will finally settle the obsession. It is the internal version of compulsive Googling. The client may have already searched the topic externally hundreds of times; mental researching is the brain doing the same operation without the search bar.

It looks like: mentally listing all the symptoms of the feared illness and comparing yours to the list; mentally reviewing what you remember about legal definitions of the feared act and assessing whether your behavior fits; mentally cataloging your memories of past attractions to determine your orientation; mentally rehearsing what your tradition teaches about the unforgivable sin.

How to recognize mental researching in your own thinking. Notice the moments when you find yourself “running through” information you already have, looking for new combinations or insights. The running-through has the feel of investigation. You are not just thinking about the topic; you are trying to figure something out.

Why standard advice fails. Mental researching looks like intelligence and conscientiousness. Most clients with this compulsion are bright, analytical, and have spent years cultivating cognitive habits that the disorder is now using against them. Standard advice (“stop overthinking”) feels like an attack on a core feature of who they are.

What to do instead — the actual technique.

Acknowledge the urge without acting on it. When you notice that you are starting to mentally research, name what is happening: “that’s mental researching.” Do not engage the content. Do not start running through what you know. Just notice the urge, and let it pass without satisfying it.

The technique that often unlocks this for clients is the impossibility statement. You say to yourself: “I will never have enough information to settle this question. There is no fact I can find that will make the OCD stop. I am willing to live with the question unresolved.” This statement is true, and stating it explicitly often reduces the urge to research, because you are no longer pretending that one more piece of information will solve it.

The second technique is behavioral redirection. The urge to mentally research often arises when the body is at rest and the mind is unoccupied — driving, falling asleep, in the shower. When you cannot prevent the urge from arising, you can prevent it from running by deliberately occupying the mind with something else that requires real cognitive engagement: a podcast, a complex task, a conversation. Not passive distraction. Active engagement.

7. Mental Avoidance (Thought Suppression)

Mental avoidance is the cognitive ritual of trying not to think about the feared content. It is the inverse of mental review — instead of replaying the obsession, the client is actively working to prevent it from arising.

This is the most paradoxical mental ritual, because the effort to avoid the thought is itself a form of attending to the thought. Cognitive science has been clear about this for decades — Wegner’s research on thought suppression in the 1980s and 1990s established that deliberate efforts to suppress a thought reliably produce more of that thought, not less. (Try not to think about a white bear for the next thirty seconds.)

In OCD, mental avoidance often pairs with other mental rituals. The client tries not to think about the obsession (avoidance), notices the obsession arising anyway, performs a neutralization (undoing) to make it go away, then tries again to not think about it. The cycle can occupy hours.

How to recognize mental avoidance in your own thinking. Notice the moments when you are aware of not wanting to think about something. The not-wanting has a quality of effort. You are working to keep something out. The working is the ritual.

Why standard advice fails. Generic anxiety frameworks often advise “thought stopping” — deliberately interrupting an unwanted thought. For OCD, this is precisely the wrong intervention. Thought stopping is mental avoidance with a label.

What to do instead — the actual technique.

Allow the thought to be present. The instruction is the opposite of what the disorder demands. Instead of trying to not think about the feared content, you make space for it. You let it arise. You let it stay. You let it leave on its own timeline.

The technique that works for most clients is the welcoming statement. When you notice the urge to avoid, instead of avoiding, you say: “This thought is welcome to be here. I am not going to push it away.” This sounds insane to the disorder. That is exactly why it works.

The second technique is deliberate exposure to the content. Once a day, for a set period (start with five minutes), you sit with the feared content deliberately. You allow it to be present. You do not engage it (no review, no analysis, no neutralization), but you do not push it away either. You simply allow. Most clients discover, within two weeks of this practice, that the feared content becomes less intrusive at other times of day, because the brain has stopped treating it as the kind of thing that requires suppression.

What All Seven Have in Common

If you read through the list and recognized yourself in multiple rituals — most clients do — there is a structural insight worth naming.

Every one of these mental rituals is an operation performed on a thought, intended to manage the distress the thought produces. Every one of them works briefly. Every one of them strengthens the underlying obsession over time. And every one of them is invisible from the outside, which is why they get missed by therapists, by family members, and most damagingly, by the client’s own self-monitoring.

The treatment for all of them is structurally identical: recognition without engagement. You learn to notice the ritual starting. You learn to name it. You learn to let the underlying intrusive content be present without performing the operation. You learn to redirect attention to your actual life — not as suppression, but as engagement with what matters more than the obsession.

This is what I mean when I say “stop ruminating” — not the empty instruction, but the actual cognitive skill of recognizing a mental operation and choosing not to perform it. The skill is teachable. It takes weeks of practice, not minutes. It feels almost impossible at first and then, with repetition, becomes second nature. Most clients who do this work describe a moment, somewhere around six to ten weeks in, when they realize they have been not ruminating for hours without noticing — the cognitive operating system is starting to reset.

Why Treating Mental Rituals Is the Difference Between ERP That Works and ERP That Doesn’t

I want to name something that gets missed in a lot of OCD treatment conversations.

Behavioral ERP — touching the contaminated surface, putting the knife back, holding the baby on the stairs — gets most of the public attention because it is dramatic and observable. But for most OCD clients, especially those with primarily-obsessional presentations (sometimes called Pure-O, although the term is misleading because there is no such thing as OCD without compulsions), the real battle is in the mental rituals.

In my practice, I have seen clients do months of behavioral ERP perfectly — engaging triggers, refusing avoidance, completing exposures — and continue to deteriorate, because they are running mental rituals through every exposure. The behavioral exposure looks complete. The mental compulsion is still feeding the disorder. The ERP is not working because the response prevention is incomplete.

The fix is identifying the mental rituals specifically and dropping them as part of the response prevention plan. Once that happens, ERP that has been failing for months often produces dramatic improvement within weeks. The mental rituals were the missing piece.

If you have been in ERP and feel like it is not working, ask yourself — and ask your clinician — whether you have been doing real response prevention on your mental rituals, not just your behavioral ones. The honest answer is often no. That is correctable.

Working Together

Murad Counseling PLLC provides ERP-based therapy for adults with OCD via telehealth in Texas, Washington, New Hampshire, and Florida. I specialize in OCD, ERP, EMDR, and the treatment of trauma, anxiety, and BFRBs. I work with particular care on the identification and treatment of mental rituals, which are frequently missed in non-specialty OCD treatment and which are the most common reason clients arrive in my office having “tried ERP” without success.

Sessions are private-pay, and I keep my caseload small enough to give every client the depth and continuity that this work requires.

If you are tired of being told to “stop ruminating” without ever being shown how, this is the kind of OCD work I treat directly: identifying the hidden compulsion, practicing response prevention, and rebuilding life around something other than the loop.

Schedule a consultation.

Frequently Asked Questions

Normal thinking is generative — it produces new ideas, new conclusions, new perspectives. Rumination is consumptive — it loops over the same content without producing new conclusions, generates brief relief that quickly fades, and over time crowds out genuine thought. If you are doing the same mental work over and over without resolution, you are ruminating, not thinking.

No. Many people have repetitive thoughts that are not OCD compulsions — earworms, lyrical fragments, recurring ideas during creative work, intrusive memories during grief. The discriminator for mental ritual is intent and function: a mental ritual is performed in response to an obsession, with the goal of neutralizing or relieving distress, and it produces brief relief followed by renewed obsession. Ordinary repetitive thoughts do not have this loop structure.

It depends on the function. Genuine prayer that serves connection with the divine, expression of values, or contemplative practice is not a compulsion. Prayer performed in response to an intrusive thought, with the goal of neutralizing dread, that requires repetition until it “feels right” and that produces brief relief followed by renewed dread — that is a compulsion that has hijacked the form of prayer. The two can coexist. A trained clinician working with religious clients can help distinguish.

It can become one in OCD presentations, particularly when used as a way to neutralize or “make peace with” intrusive content. Real mindfulness is observational without effortful engagement. Compulsive mindfulness is the cognitive operation of “accepting” the content with the goal of relief. The compulsive version is one of the most insidious mental rituals because it looks like the treatment.

The first clue is exhaustion that is disproportionate to your observable activity. The second is the loop quality: your mind keeps returning to the same content without resolution. The third is what happens when you try to stop. If letting the thought remain unanswered produces panic or an urgent need to figure it out, you are probably dealing with a compulsion, not a preference.

Two reasons. First, the brief relief the ritual was providing is now absent, so the underlying anxiety is more apparent. This is normal and temporary. Second, attempting to suppress the ritual sometimes activates additional rituals (mental avoidance, neutralization) that intensify the loop. The solution is not to suppress the rituals but to not perform them while allowing the underlying obsession to be present. The distinction is subtle but critical.

Probably not. Intrusive thoughts are a near-universal feature of human cognition — research using non-clinical populations consistently finds that the vast majority of people experience occasional intrusive thoughts, including dark or taboo ones. The goal of treatment is not to eliminate the thoughts but to change your relationship to them, so that they can arise and pass without triggering the ritual cascade.

The basic recognition usually develops within two to four weeks of focused practice. The deeper skill — recognizing rituals in real time, before they fully run, and choosing not to engage — typically takes two to three months of consistent work. Most clients describe a noticeable shift somewhere around the eight-to-twelve-week mark, when the recognition becomes more automatic than the rituals.

Some clients make significant progress on their own, particularly with the help of high-quality books on OCD and mental compulsions (Sally Winston and Martin Seif’s Overcoming Unwanted Intrusive Thoughts is among the best). For most clients, particularly those with significant comorbidity or long-standing patterns, working with a clinician trained specifically in mental ritual identification and response prevention significantly accelerates progress and reduces the risk of inadvertently developing more sophisticated rituals during self-directed work.

SSRIs, the first-line pharmacological treatment for OCD, can reduce the overall intensity of obsessions and may make response prevention more tolerable. Medication does not directly address the rituals; the behavioral and cognitive work remains essential. Medication decisions are between you and a psychiatric prescriber.

This is a common concern, particularly among intellectually-oriented clients who have used cognitive habits as a core part of who they are. The answer is no — the opposite, in fact. Clients who successfully treat their mental rituals often describe themselves as more thoughtful, more present, and more able to engage in genuine reflection, because their cognitive resources are no longer consumed by compulsive operations. The skill being treated is not thinking; it is the compulsive operation on thinking. The thinking itself becomes more available.

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Felix Murad, M.Ed., LPC-S, LMHC, CMHC, NCC is the founder of Murad Counseling PLLC, a telehealth private practice serving clients in Texas, Washington, New Hampshire, and Florida. He specializes in OCD, ERP, EMDR, BFRBs, trauma, and couples therapy, with particular clinical attention to the identification and treatment of mental rituals — the most frequently missed feature of OCD treatment.