Monique Williamson

I've wanted to become a therapist since I was 12. It's been a long time coming! I started off wanting to be like a marriage counselor. I've just always loved the idea of helping people through difficult challenges: hearing their stories, helping them make sense of situations, and understanding their emotions. It was intuitive for me—one of those things you're naturally good at and want to build skills in to be better.

Treating OCD has been a personal journey for me. I know this works, because I lived it. I have two OCD-related diagnoses. First, I'd had a snake phobia since age five. Five years ago, I did exposure therapy and it really worked. I've also experienced trichotillomania (hair-pulling) since childhood. Exposure therapy really helped me with that as well. As a therapist, I've seen ERP change a person's life in three to four weeks. Some people get through the hard things they're afraid of so fast that it can be difficult to accept their reality. Sometimes it takes a little longer to turn that switch in your brain that says, 'I actually don't have to stay afraid. Or even if I am still afraid, I can be afraid and not let that stop me from functioning.'

I have a lot of experience working with addiction and substance abuse. I have also worked with autism and in marriage therapy. I am an MFT, a marriage and family therapist, and I enjoy focusing on interpersonal relationships. During grad school, I interned at a residential treatment center for addiction, and my first job after graduation was at a residential treatment facility in Ohio.

We can do hard things while we're scared. That is a tenet to live by. We're going to do hard things here, and we're going to do hard things while we're afraid. But we can move through the difficulty and get past it.

Start where you can and let's work our way up. Most of the time, when members say, 'I'm not comfortable,' I say, 'Don't worry. There's plenty we can work on now. We can't work on everything at once.' As you get more comfortable, there's a domino effect: things we're working on in one area will start to help you in another area, and then we can get into things that are a little bit harder.