Hello and welcome to being well. I'm Forrest Hanson. If you're new to the podcast,

thanks for joining us today, and if you've listened before, welcome back. Today we're going to be

talking about working with anxiety, and particularly a pretty common form that significant anxiety takes

obsessive- compulsive disorder.

To help me do that, I'm joined by an expert on generalized anxiety and OCD therapist Kimberly

Quinlan. So Kimberly, thanks for joining me today. How are you doing? Oh, thank you for having me.

I'm so happy to be here. I am really happy to have you. We had a whole adventure with scheduling.

I reschedule you multiple times. You were just a gem throughout the whole process. So a little bit more about Kimberly. She's the host of Your Anxiety Toolkit. It's a fantastic podcast that has, I think, over 400 episodes. She's also got a YouTube channel by the same name. It's really, really good stuff. I was very happy when I first bumped into it. How long have you been a therapist for, Kimberly?

Oh, over, let's see, about 12 years now.

So part of why I wanted to talk with you is that you're bringing this great blend of personal experience and professional experience.

You've been open about your own experiences with generalized anxiety and eating disorders

and you've spent years helping other people work with them. And then you were diagnosed fairly

recently with OCD. So what was it like to be diagnosed with something that you are incredibly

knowledgeable about as a clinician? I have to admit it was not my favorite day, only because, you know, it's such a whirlwind

of a time. And it was mostly bizarre because this is a condition that I had been treating and

public that I did not have. A lot of people always ask, do you have OCD? And I would always say, no, I have

generalized anxiety. And I always had had some OCD-like traits. But then about maybe a year

and a half ago, I got hit with a massive wave of PTSD, actually. And the OCD immediately followed afterwards.

And so at the beginning, I really couldn't, even as a clinician, knowing the condition,

knowing the symptoms, I actually didn't even catch it myself until one of my best friends,

who is an OCD therapist as well, of course, we stick together,

basically said, like, hon, I think, I think we need to like get you assessed. And so that was a,

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