Jennifer’s Story – A Mother’s Journey with OCD
“Thank you, Ricky, for helping our family stop organizing our lives around OCD and start building lives beyond it.”
Our family’s experience with OCD is LONG.
For the last 10 years we’ve experienced OCD in one way or another but for the last six years, we lived in what felt like a constant cycle of treatment. My son and daughter’s worlds had become consumed by OCD rituals covering almost every subtype imaginable… sexual OCD, contamination, existential fears, intrusive thoughts, rumination, counting, tapping, “just right,” perfectionism, harm OCD, scrupulosity… and the list goes on.
At this point, I’m pretty sure our family may have invented a few new OCDs nobody had heard of yet.
OCD didn’t just affect my kids. It slowly made our whole family’s world smaller.
Eventually, it felt like everyone in our house was stuck inside our home… and somehow even the house seemed to be shrinking around us. Our lives revolved around OCD, fear, rituals, avoidance and trying to get through the next crisis. We were constantly stressed, exhausted and afraid.
Life SUCKED for everyone.
We went to treatment center after treatment center. We learned terminology. We did therapy. We did exposures. We worked incredibly hard WITH NO LASTING CHANGE.
Then we found Ricky and The Scoggan Institute.
The difference between our previous treatment experiences and what we learned at The Scoggan Institute felt like night and day.
For the first time, we weren’t simply being told what exposures to do. We were being taught to truly understand OCD… how it works, how to identify it, speak to it, how it pulls you into compulsions and rumination, and most importantly, what to DO when it shows up.
That education changed everything for our family.
Ricky teaches you how to recognize OCD, respond to it differently and create your own exposures for whatever OCD decides to throw at you next.
Instead of needing someone else to tell you what exposure to do every time OCD finds a new theme, you learn how to recognize what it’s doing and build the exposure yourself. The goal is to develop the skills and confidence to continue doing the work outside of treatment.
And our entire family had to learn… including me as their mom.
For years, I thought helping meant answering the questions, calming the fear, solving the problem and reassuring my kids when they were struggling. I now understand how easily a loving parent can unknowingly become part of OCD’s ritual.
I had to learn when to support my children and when to step out of OCD’s way. Instead of trying to make their anxiety disappear, I’m learning to trust them to experience discomfort, uncertainty and fear… and discover for themselves that they can handle it.
My kids are learning the same thing.
When OCD shows up, the question isn’t automatically, “How do we make this feeling go away?”
They’re learning to recognize OCD, identify compulsions and rumination, create exposures, tolerate uncertainty and keep living their lives even when OCD is screaming at them.
And Ricky somehow manages to teach all of this while being one of the kindest, funniest, most down-to-earth people you will ever meet.
He makes you feel comfortable while still challenging you. He can laugh with you… and occasionally at you when you need it. He helped us stop treating OCD like this terrifying monster that everyone had to tiptoe around.
Sometimes you have to look directly at it, laugh and refuse to play its game.
Today, our house feels lighter.
We laugh more. We go out more. We enjoy being around other people again. There are good days, good conversations and even good dreams.
My kids are thinking about moving forward with their lives… school, relationships, jobs and their futures. Things that once felt too difficult to do, or honestly even too difficult to imagine, now feel possible.
And maybe that’s the biggest change of all.
We believe we can.
Recovery for our family doesn’t mean OCD magically disappeared or that nobody ever struggles anymore. It means we aren’t building our lives around OCD anymore. When it shows up, we understand what it is and have the tools to respond.
Our world is getting bigger again.
After watching OCD make it smaller for so many years, there really aren’t words to describe what that means to us.
That is what makes The Scoggan Institute different for our family. After YEARS of treatment and more treatment centers than I care to count, we finally received something we had been missing… the education and understanding that gave our family the ability to move forward.
Ricky has become much more than the person who taught our family about OCD. We love him dearly and consider him family.
We also see how passionate he is about educating other therapists and professionals so more people with OCD can receive help from people who truly understand it. After everything our family has been through, we know firsthand how desperately that education is needed.
We are incredibly grateful that our very long OCD journey eventually led us to Ricky and The Scoggan Institute.
We are also so thankful for Nira Tamayo, who worked with June and Sophia alongside Ricky during their treatment.
Thank you, Ricky, for helping our family stop organizing our lives around OCD and start building lives beyond it.
We love you, we believe in what you’re doing, and we will forever be your biggest supporters.
— Jennifer Qureshi
June’s Story – I Feel Like I Have My Life Back
“OCD used to consume my time, my attention and my ability to imagine a normal future. Now I can actually live it.”
I began struggling with OCD when I was 10 years old. Almost overnight, I became obsessed with whether or not I was homosexual, what I now understand was Sexual Orientation OCD (HOCD).
It completely turned my life upside down.
I was raised in the Mormon church, and I was terrified about what these thoughts might mean for my life and whether people would still accept me if they were true. The problem was, I didn’t WANT to be having these thoughts, and they didn’t feel true to me. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make them stop.
That was the beginning of years of OCD.
Over time, OCD shifted from Sexual Orientation OCD to Harm OCD, paranoia and contamination. Before coming to The Scoggan Institute, I spent almost my entire day engaging in compulsions. Even though I thought my OCD had gotten better compared to how severe it had been in the past, Ricky quickly helped me see just how much of my life OCD was still controlling.
I honestly didn’t have much hope going into treatment that anything would really change.
But things changed quickly.
Ricky didn’t just teach me how to fight OCD. He taught me, step by step, how OCD works in the brain and why I was experiencing what I was experiencing.
For the first time, OCD actually made sense to me.
It stopped feeling like some weird glitch in the matrix that I had no control over. Once I understood what was happening and could see that there was a way forward, Ricky laid out a plan for me.
My job was to do the work.
And I did.
Three weeks later, I experienced what I would estimate as about a 95% reduction in my OCD symptoms.
But one of the most important things I gained wasn’t just symptom relief. Ricky taught me enough about OCD that I now feel capable of continuing the work myself. Even if OCD were to show up tomorrow with a completely new subtype, I feel like I understand how to recognize it, build exposures and fight back without allowing it to take over my life again.
Today, I feel like I have my life back.
I’m able to function without the debilitating anticipatory anxiety that used to follow me every day. I also have so much more time because I’m no longer spending most of my day trapped in compulsions.
OCD used to consume my time, my attention and my ability to imagine a normal future.
Now I can actually live it.
I would absolutely recommend The Scoggan Institute to anyone struggling with OCD who is ready to put in the work and face their OCD.
I also want to thank Nira Tamayo, who worked with me alongside Ricky during my treatment.
Thank you, Ricky!
— June Qureshi
Sophia’s Story – Finding My Way Back to Myself
“I went from believing there was no future for me to being able to imagine one again.”
My name is Sophia Qureshi. I’m 18 years old and from Washington State. I’ve struggled with OCD and depression since I was about 11 years old.
When I was 11, I experienced a sudden and overwhelming change in my mental health after being diagnosed with a mycoplasma infection. Before that, I had been a happy, typical kid. Then, seemingly overnight, I began experiencing an unbearable sense of anxiety that felt like it had taken over my entire body. That was the beginning of my experience with OCD.
My first compulsion was confessing every “sin” I believed I had ever committed to my mom. The next day, my family took me to a doctor, where I was diagnosed with OCD as well as a mycoplasma infection. From that point forward, I lived with constant fear. I struggled with counting, excessive explaining and confessing, intrusive thoughts, and compulsions that often felt impossible to control. Medication helped suppress my symptoms for several years, but eventually, my OCD became much more severe.
By eighth grade, I was struggling intensely with contamination OCD. My life became controlled by my fear of germs and contamination. I spent hours performing rituals, avoided touching things around me, isolated myself from my family, and became afraid to eat because I believed my food could be contaminated. My OCD became so severe that I was barely able to function in everyday life.
I lived that way for about a year without receiving the specialized treatment I needed. Eventually, the constant fear and isolation contributed to a deep depression. I reached a point where I could no longer see a way forward.
That was when I was admitted to Seattle Children’s Hospital for intensive care. Even there, my OCD continued to affect nearly every part of my life. After leaving the hospital, I went from treatment to treatment, desperately hoping that something would finally help. Each time, I became more discouraged when I didn’t experience the change I was searching for.
Then I found Ricky at The Scoggan Institute.
On my first day of the three-week program, I told Ricky, “This is my last try before I give up on life.” I was hesitant because I had already tried so many treatments and had been disappointed so many times. But Ricky looked at me with complete confidence and told me that he believed he could help me.
For the first time in a long time, I felt like someone truly believed there was a way forward for me.
That experience changed my life.
I still remember how hopeless I felt when I walked through the doors of The Scoggan Institute, and I will never forget how different my life felt afterward. Through my treatment with Ricky, I learned skills that helped me take my life back and make it my own. I began doing things I had once believed OCD would never allow me to do. I felt free in a way I hadn’t felt in years.
Ricky didn’t simply help me manage my OCD—he taught me how to stop letting it dictate my life. I learned that I could experience fear and uncertainty without allowing them to control my choices. For the first time in years, I felt like myself again.
I will always be grateful to Ricky for believing in me when I felt like I had nowhere else to turn.
If someone asked me today whether I would recommend Ricky’s work, my answer would be immediate. I would recommend his approach wholeheartedly. Finding a treatment that worked for me gave me the opportunity to reclaim parts of my life that I thought I had lost, and I will always be grateful for the role Ricky and The Scoggan Institute played in my recovery.
I went from believing there was no future for me to being able to imagine one again. That is something I will never take for granted.
Thank you, Ricky, for helping me find my way back to myself, and thank you, Nira, for working with me during my program. We love you, Ricky!
— Sophia Qureshi
