Why Trying to Feel Certain is Keeping You Stuck in OCD – Interview with OCD Specialist, Lee Solomon

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is one of the most misunderstood mental health conditions in the world. While many people associate OCD with cleanliness, organization, or perfectionism, the reality is far more complex. For millions of individuals, OCD is a relentless cycle of intrusive thoughts, doubt, anxiety, and compulsive attempts to find certainty.

For Lee Solomon, OCD is more than a professional specialty. It is a journey he understands personally. After spending years trapped in the cycle of obsessions and compulsions himself, Lee dedicated his career to helping others understand what he wishes someone had explained to him sooner: recovery is not about eliminating uncertainty. It is about changing the way we respond to it.

Today, as an OCD specialist and founder of Solomon Psychiatrics, Lee helps people around the world break free from fear through evidence-based treatment, education, and practical recovery strategies rooted in Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP).

In this interview, Lee shares the lessons he has learned through both personal recovery and years of clinical experience treating OCD.

Lee Solomon, Licensed Mental Health Therapist, OCD Specialist

You often say your mission is to help people reclaim their lives from fear. What first inspired you to dedicate your career to that work?

My mission was born from my own experience with OCD. For years, I believed the answer to my anxiety was hidden somewhere inside the next thought, the next realization, or the next piece of reassurance. Like many people with OCD, I spent an enormous amount of time trying to figure things out, convince myself I was okay, and achieve certainty. The harder I chased certainty, however, the more trapped I became.

The turning point came when I realized that OCD was not actually asking me to solve meaningful problems. It was demanding certainty in situations where certainty simply does not exist. Once I understood that, my focus shifted away from trying to eliminate fear and toward learning how to respond to fear differently.

That experience changed my life. As I recovered, I became passionate about helping others understand what I wish someone had taught me years earlier: OCD is highly treatable, recovery is possible, and no one deserves to lose years of their life to fear.

How did discovering Exposure and Response Prevention change the way you understood your own OCD?

Discovering ERP completely changed the way I understood recovery. Before ERP, I viewed recovery as the process of getting rid of fear. I believed that if I could prove my intrusive thoughts were irrational, find enough reassurance, or finally feel certain, I would recover. ERP taught me that I had been solving the wrong problem.

What maintains OCD is not the presence of intrusive thoughts. It is the compulsive response to those thoughts.

ERP helped me understand that recovery is not about eliminating uncertainty. It is about learning that uncertainty can exist without requiring a response. Instead of trying to neutralize fear, I learned how to allow fear to be present while continuing to move toward the life I wanted to live.

That shift was incredibly freeing. For the first time, recovery felt achievable because it no longer depended on finding certainty. It depended on changing my relationship with fear. In many ways, ERP taught me that freedom comes not from feeling safe, but from no longer needing to feel safe before living.

What have six years of specializing in OCD taught you that most people misunderstand about the condition?

The biggest misconception about OCD is that it is primarily a thought problem. Most people focus on the intrusive thoughts themselves, but in my experience, the thoughts are only one part of the cycle. What keeps OCD alive are the compulsions people perform in response to those thoughts.

These compulsions are not always visible. They can include reassurance seeking, checking, researching, mental reviewing, rumination, avoidance, or repeatedly trying to figure out what a thought means. While these behaviors provide temporary relief, they also reinforce the belief that the fear was important and required attention.

One of the most important lessons I have learned is that OCD attacks what people care about most. It targets their values, relationships, identity, and sense of self. That is why the thoughts feel so convincing and emotionally powerful.

Recovery begins when people stop treating every intrusive thought as a problem that must be solved and start recognizing the role compulsions play in maintaining the cycle.

Why do you believe so many people remain stuck in OCD even when they understand their thoughts are irrational?

One of the most frustrating aspects of OCD is that insight alone is often not enough to create change. Many people with OCD already recognize that their fears may be exaggerated, unlikely, or irrational. Yet they still feel trapped.

The reason is that OCD is not primarily a logic problem. It is a fear and learning problem. When someone responds to intrusive thoughts with compulsions such as reassurance seeking, checking, rumination, researching, or avoidance, they unintentionally teach their brain that the fear was important. While those behaviors may reduce anxiety temporarily, they strengthen the cycle over time.

I often tell clients that OCD is not looking for the truth. It is looking for certainty. Unfortunately, certainty is something no one can fully achieve.

People remain stuck because they continue trying to solve what OCD is asking rather than questioning why OCD is asking it in the first place. Recovery begins when we stop treating every intrusive thought as a problem that requires an answer and start changing our response to uncertainty.

You have spoken about how traditional talk therapy can sometimes miss the mark with OCD. Where do you see the biggest gaps?

Traditional talk therapy can be incredibly helpful for many mental health concerns, but OCD often requires a different approach.

One of the biggest gaps I see is an overemphasis on understanding thoughts rather than changing behaviors. Many individuals with OCD already spend hours analyzing, questioning, and trying to understand their fears. In some cases, therapy can unintentionally become another place where reassurance is sought rather than where recovery is practiced.

The goal of effective OCD treatment is not simply to help someone feel better in the moment. It is to help them build a different relationship with uncertainty.

This is where Exposure and Response Prevention becomes so valuable. ERP focuses on helping people gradually face feared situations while resisting the urge to perform compulsions. Over time, the brain learns that anxiety can be tolerated and uncertainty can exist without requiring action.

Insight is important. Understanding OCD is important. But lasting recovery typically occurs when understanding is paired with behavioral change.

What is one small shift someone can make when they feel trapped in the cycle of obsessions and compulsions?

One of the most powerful shifts a person can make is changing the question they ask themselves. Instead of asking, "How do I get rid of this fear?" try asking, "What is this fear encouraging me to do right now?"

That question often reveals the compulsion. Perhaps the urge is to seek reassurance. Maybe it is to mentally review the situation, check something repeatedly, research online, or avoid a trigger altogether. Once the compulsion becomes visible, a person has an opportunity to respond differently.

Recovery is not about controlling what thoughts enter your mind. Intrusive thoughts are part of the human experience. Recovery is about learning that you do not have to obey every thought, feeling, urge, or sensation that appears.

Small moments of resisting compulsions may not feel significant in the moment, but they are often where meaningful recovery begins. Every time someone chooses not to obey fear, they are teaching their brain a new lesson: uncertainty can be tolerated, and life can continue.

Your Reality-Based ERP approach brings treatment into real-world environments. What difference does that make for recovery?

One of the biggest challenges in OCD treatment is that recovery does not happen in a therapist's office. Recovery happens in everyday life.

People do not struggle with OCD only during their therapy sessions. They struggle while driving to work, spending time with their families, making decisions, using the internet, going to school, entering relationships, and navigating the countless uncertainties of daily life. That is why I developed what I call a Reality-Based ERP approach.

Rather than treating ERP as something that exists only within structured exercises, I focus on helping clients apply recovery principles directly to the situations where OCD has the greatest influence. The goal is not simply to complete exposures. The goal is to build confidence in the ability to tolerate uncertainty in real-world situations.

When people begin practicing recovery where fear actually shows up, treatment becomes far more meaningful. They stop viewing ERP as an exercise and start viewing it as a way of living. Ultimately, the objective is not to help people become less anxious. It is to help them become less controlled by anxiety.

How has your relationship with uncertainty changed since your own recovery journey?

My relationship with uncertainty has changed completely. For a long time, I viewed uncertainty as something dangerous. I believed that if I worried enough, analyzed enough, or prepared enough, I could protect myself from life's unknowns. What I eventually learned is that uncertainty is not the exception to life. It is the foundation of it.

Every meaningful aspect of life involves uncertainty. Relationships are uncertain. Health is uncertain. Business is uncertain. Parenting is uncertain. The future itself is uncertain.

The problem was never uncertainty. The problem was my belief that I needed certainty before I could move forward.

Recovery taught me something much more valuable than certainty. It taught me trust. Not trust that everything will work out perfectly, but trust that I can handle discomfort, navigate challenges, and continue moving forward even when I do not have all the answers.

Today, I no longer see uncertainty as something I need to eliminate. I see it as a normal part of being human. Ironically, accepting uncertainty gave me more freedom than certainty ever could.

What would you say to someone who is struggling to believe that freedom from OCD is possible?

I would tell them that I understand. I know what it feels like to believe you will never get better. I know what it feels like to spend hours trapped in compulsions, desperately searching for answers that never seem to last. I know what it feels like to question whether life will always feel this difficult.

But I also know that OCD is not a life sentence. Throughout my career, I have worked with individuals who were convinced their lives were over. People who felt completely trapped by fear, doubt, and uncertainty. Many of them believed recovery was impossible. Yet I have watched those same individuals reclaim their relationships, careers, goals, and futures.

What changed was not that they found certainty. What changed was that they stopped waiting for certainty before they started living.

Recovery is not the absence of fear. Recovery is learning that fear no longer gets to make your decisions.

If there is one message I hope people take away from this interview, it is this: you are not broken, you are not alone, and no matter how stuck you feel right now, recovery is possible. The life OCD has convinced you is out of reach may be far closer than you think.

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