Dr Celin Gelgec

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Dr Celin Gelgec Welcome to a world of Education for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

13/10/2026

It’s happening: Foundations is coming to Melbourne, in person.

You learnt exposure therapy at uni. But recognising when OCD is hiding in plain sight, knowing what to ask, and feeling confident about what to do next? That’s where the work can feel much less straightforward.

For two days, we’ll get into the practical clinical work of OCD assessment and treatment: how to spot the clues, build a useful formulation and help treatment move forward.

📍 Surrey Hills, Melbourne
🗓 Friday 20 and Saturday 21 November 2026
⏰ 9 am–4 pm both days
🎓 12 active CPD points
☕ Morning tea, lunch and afternoon tea provided

If you’ve been wanting to feel more grounded in your OCD work, I’d love to have you there.

Explore the programme and book your place via the link in my bio.

“How do I actually do ERP with my clients in session?” is one of the most common questions I hear in supervision. And it...
02/10/2026

“How do I actually do ERP with my clients in session?” is one of the most common questions I hear in supervision. And it comes from experienced clinicians, too.

Because knowing the theory is one thing. Sitting with a client, deciding what to practise, and knowing what to do when anxiety rises is another.

ERP isn’t simply asking someone to face a fear and waiting for the discomfort to pass. It means working together to choose a meaningful, manageable exposure, then helping the client resist the compulsions that usually follow, including the ones that are easy to miss, like reassurance, mental reviewing, avoidance, or trying to feel certain.

Your role isn’t to make the anxiety disappear or convince your client they’re safe. It’s to help them make room for uncertainty and practise responding differently, while you stay curious about what the OCD is asking them to do.

That’s where the work gets more nuanced: not just what exposure to do, but how to stay alongside your client without accidentally helping OCD keep the loop going.

If you’ve ever left a session thinking, I understand ERP… but what should I actually do next? You’re not alone. To learn more hit the link in my bio.

When OCD arrives it’s consuming and visceral. It sets in sounding like a fact: “This happened.” A warning: “You’re about...
25/09/2026

When OCD arrives it’s consuming and visceral. It sets in sounding like a fact: “This happened.” A warning: “You’re about to do something terrible.” An order: “Check again. Confess. Work it out now.”

Or evidence about who you are: “If you thought it, felt it or noticed it, it must mean something about who you are as a person.”

And when a thought is given that much authority, responding to it feels completely reasonable.

So you review the memory.
Check your body.
Analyse your intentions.
Test your feelings.
Ask someone else what they think.
Avoid anything that could make the thought feel more real.

Everything feels so strong, it’s as if we need to pay attention to it every. single. time.

Recovery isn’t learning how to prove every thought false, or even true. It’s learning tools to help you sit with thoughts and urges that can feel true, urgent and deeply personal, and still live the life you want to live, on your terms.

It can be there. You can feel uncertain. And it still doesn’t get to decide what you do next.

OCD makes you feel like you have a bad memory.Like you can’t trust yourself to remember what happened, what you saw, wha...
24/09/2026

OCD makes you feel like you have a bad memory.

Like you can’t trust yourself to remember what happened, what you saw, what you touched, what you meant, or whether you checked properly.

But do you actually have a bad memory?

Think about the level of detail your mind can produce when it reconstructs the daisy chain of events surrounding a trigger.

Where you were standing.
What you touched.
What you thought.
What happened immediately before it.
What happened immediately after.
The exact angle of the tap when you turned it off.

That doesn’t sound like a mind that can’t remember anything. Then doubt arrives.

But what if I’ve remembered it incorrectly?
What if I missed something?
What if I’m filling in the gaps?
What if the fact that I can’t feel certain means it didn’t happen the way I remember?

And suddenly, a memory that seemed perfectly accessible seconds ago no longer feels trustworthy.

So you replay it. You inspect it from another angle. You try to recover one more detail. You ask someone else what they remember. You check again, just to make sure.

But the more you interrogate the memory, the less clear it feels, because OCD has taught you that remembering something isn’t enough. It convinces you that you must also feel certain that you remember it correctly. And that is an impossible standard.

Human memory is imperfect. It contains gaps. It rarely arrives with the absolute certainty OCD demands. The problem is that OCD treats those ordinary limitations as evidence that something could be terribly wrong.

So perhaps the question isn’t:* How can I make sure I’ve remembered this correctly?*

Perhaps it’s:* Can I allow this memory to feel incomplete, resist investigating it again and continue with my day anyway?*

Because you may not need a better memory. You may need to stop asking your memory to provide the certainty that OCD will never let it give you.

OCD math is less concerned with accuracy and more concerned with reaching one very specific conclusion: “We need to do s...
02/09/2026

OCD math is less concerned with accuracy and more concerned with reaching one very specific conclusion: “We need to do something about this”…

Check again.
Ask someone.
Review the memory.
Google the symptom.
Avoid the situation.
Run through the evidence one more time, but this time properly.

The problem is that compulsions quietly interfere with the data, which means that the “evidence” is not accurate. For example:

If nothing bad happens after checking, OCD credits the checking.
If nothing bad happens without checking, OCD calls it luck.
If anxiety decreases, the compulsion was apparently necessary.
If anxiety doesn’t decrease, we clearly haven’t done enough of it yet.

Now you have a beautifully balanced accounting system in which OCD can never record a loss. This is part of what makes response prevention in ERP (exposure and response prevention) so difficult. You’re not only resisting the urge to perform a compulsion. You’re allowing OCD’s calculations to remain unresolved.

ERP doesn’t give OCD a better equation. It asks whether you’re willing to stop doing the maths.

One of the most convincing things OCD does is convince you that this time, the usual rules don’t apply.Because this thou...
01/09/2026

One of the most convincing things OCD does is convince you that this time, the usual rules don’t apply.

Because this thought has evidence. This memory feels different. This sensation is stronger. This situation has an extra detail that changes everything.

And sometimes, there genuinely are differences. Of course there are. OCD doesn’t show up identically in every person, neatly following a textbook example.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean we need to solve those differences. Sometimes “yes, but…” is exactly where OCD finds its way back into the conversation.

And if I’ve learnt anything from years of treating OCD, it’s that OCD is exceptionally good at finding the footnote. The technicality. The one detail that makes you think: “Okay, but maybe this one really is different.”

It might be. And you can still choose not to figure it out. That’s kind of the point 🩷.

Knowing the logistics of ERP for OCD treatment is one thing, being able to apply it is a different skill. You can know h...
24/08/2026

Knowing the logistics of ERP for OCD treatment is one thing, being able to apply it is a different skill. You can know how to build a hierarchy. You can understand habituation, inhibitory learning, and response prevention. You can know that reassurance and avoidance maintain the cycle.

But then there’s a real person sitting in front of you. Their OCD doesn’t fit neatly into a textbook example. Their compulsions are subtle. They’re asking questions that might be reassurance seeking or might not be. They’re distressed. You’re wondering whether to push, slow down, change direction, or revisit the formulation entirely.

That’s where knowing ERP and being able to do ERP well become two different things. Good ERP isn’t about mechanically moving through a hierarchy. It’s being able to understand what OCD is doing in this person, in this moment — and knowing what needs to happen next.

Sometimes that’s an exposure. Sometimes it’s noticing a covert compulsion you’ve both missed. Sometimes it’s helping someone stay with uncertainty for another 30 seconds without doing the thing OCD is demanding.

And sometimes it’s recognising that you, as the therapist, are starting to get pulled into trying to make the anxiety go away too.

The model matters. But learning how to think, respond and make decisions inside the room is the skill.

That’s exactly what we work on in Foundations. Foundations is designed to help you bridge the gap between understanding OCD treatment and knowing how to actually apply it — from assessment and formulation through to building and delivering effective ERP.

Because knowing the model is the foundation. Knowing what to do when there’s a real person sitting across from you is the practice.

If you’re ready to feel more grounded in your OCD work, Foundations is available now. Head to the link in my bio to learn more. Follow the link in my bio to register.

When you’re a therapist who works with OCD, there’s an understanding that ERP is rarely as simple as it seems on paper. ...
19/08/2026

When you’re a therapist who works with OCD, there’s an understanding that ERP is rarely as simple as it seems on paper. We get taught that we need to…

Identify the fear.
Build the hierarchy.
Do the exposure.
Resist the compulsion.
Repeat.

And yet, anyone who has actually sat in the therapist chair when working with OCD knows that it rarely feels that clean. The difficult part often isn’t knowing what ERP is. It’s working out what’s actually happening in front of you.

Is this avoidance or a reasonable boundary? Is that question reassurance-seeking or does my client genuinely need information? Is the exposure targeting what’s driving the OCD or just what the symptom looks like? Am I helping my client stay with uncertainty or have I subtly started trying to make them feel better?

There isn’t always a neat rule that tells us what to do next. OCD treatment asks us to keep coming back to function, formulation and process, and to tolerate some uncertainty ourselves while we do it.

ERP might be simple to explain. Doing it well with an actual human being? That’s where the work is.

If you’ve often been wondering where to start, hit the link in my bio for **Foundations, ** my comprehensive training for clinicians who want to build confidence in working with OCD.

A reasonable question and a reassurance-seeking question when it comes to OCD treatment can sound exactly the same. That...
17/08/2026

A reasonable question and a reassurance-seeking question when it comes to OCD treatment can sound exactly the same. That’s what makes this tricky. The distinction isn’t necessarily in what your client is asking. It’s in what the answer is trying to achieve.

Is your client asking because they need information they genuinely don’t have? Or is OCD asking you to help settle something that already feels doubtful, uncomfortable or unresolved?

And sometimes, the harder question is this… Am I answering because my client needs the information, or am I answering because I can feel their discomfort and I want to make it go away?

Sometimes, reassurance in therapy sounds completely reasonable.

“Is this normal?”
“Do you think I did something wrong?”
“Would most people worry about this?”
“But realistically, how likely is it?”

The content of the question won’t always tell you what’s happening. We need to consider what’s happening underneath that. What happens after you answer? Does the information help the client move forward? Or does it buy certainty for a moment, before another question appears?

OCD treatment doesn’t mean refusing to answer every question. It means getting curious about what our answers are doing. Sometimes answering is good clinical care. And sometimes, without realising it, we’ve joined the compulsion.

07/08/2026

The Lindsay Clancy case is devastating. Three children lost their lives, a family has been changed forever, and a court is now considering incredibly complex questions about mental illness and criminal responsibility.

I’m not commenting on what happened in that home, and I’m certainly not diagnosing someone I’ve never assessed. But there are conversations surrounding this case that I think are important.

We need to understand the difference between postpartum OCD and postpartum psychosis. We need mothers experiencing frightening intrusive thoughts to know that having a thought is not the same as wanting it, intending it, or being instructed by it. And we need to make it safer for women to speak about what is happening in their minds without immediately fearing what others will think of them. But perhaps the question I keep coming back to most is much simpler:

Who is holding mum while everyone is holding the baby?

Maternal mental health cannot be an afterthought. And supporting mothers and supporting babies were never competing priorities.

Address

685 Burke Road
Camberwell, VIC
3124

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+61398828874

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