Telehealth OCD & Anxiety Therapy for Adults in California
Meet Allison Zeen, AMFT
An OCD and anxiety therapist helping high-achieving adults in California quiet the cycle of overthinking, perfectionism and self-doubt and move forward with greater confidence and clarity.
You are competent, driven, and outwardly successful.
You manage complex decisions, high stakes, and constant responsibility. From the outside, it looks like you have everything handled.
Internally, your mind will not stop. You replay conversations. You question your judgment. You scan for the mistake. You seek reassurance, get it, and then doubt the reassurance. You analyze, research, and mentally review until you feel some relief, and then the relief expires and the whole loop starts again.
The problem is not your capability. It’s that OCD and anxiety have attached themselves to the very qualities that make you good at what you do.
Who I work with
I work with high-achieving adults across California whose obsessive thoughts hide behind productivity, perfectionism, and a sense of responsibility for everything.
That can look like relationship doubt that will not quiet down. Moral scrupulosity, meaning a preoccupation with whether you have done something wrong or are a bad person. Health anxiety. Contamination fears. Or relentless analysis paralysis, where every choice gets researched into the ground and still feels unresolved.
It also shows up as mental exhaustion from overthinking, as perfectionism that has stopped being useful, as people pleasing, as difficulty relaxing, and as burnout in someone who is still, from the outside, performing perfectly well.
Many of my clients are insightful and emotionally aware. They have often done therapy before and found it helpful without being sufficient. They want deeper change rather than another set of coping skills to manage a problem that never actually shrinks.
How I work
I use Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.
ERP is a treatment with strong evidence in treating OCD, and it works differently from what most people expect therapy to be. We don’t spend our time analyzing the content of your intrusive thoughts, because that analysis is itself part of the cycle. Reassurance feels like progress and functions as fuel.
Instead we target the compulsions directly. The rumination, the reassurance-seeking, the mental checking, the avoidance, the researching. We reduce those deliberately and gradually, which allows your brain to learn something it cannot learn while you keep rescuing it: that uncertainty is survivable and that the feared outcome does not require your constant vigilance to be prevented.
The goal is not to eliminate your ambition or lower your standards. It’s to help you tolerate uncertainty, trust your own judgment, and succeed without living in a permanent state of mental threat.
This work is structured, steady, and depth-oriented. It asks something of you. Exposures happen between sessions, not only during them, and the people who do best are the ones who are ready to engage fully rather than to talk about engaging.
What to expect
We start by mapping the actual cycle: what triggers it, what you do in response, and what that response is costing you. Most people have never laid this out explicitly and find it clarifying on its own.
Then we build a plan and work through it at a pace that is challenging and manageable at the same time. I will not spring anything on you and I will not let us stay comfortable indefinitely, because comfortable is where this problem lives.
Therapy is collaborative and tailored. You will have a supportive space to challenge unhelpful patterns, build new skills, and gradually face what has felt unfaceable.
Practical details
I provide virtual therapy throughout California, with flexible weekday appointments.
Sessions are available in English, Spanish, and French.
I work out of network with insurance, which gives us flexibility. If you have PPO benefits, I can provide documentation to support reimbursement. A limited sliding scale is available.
I offer a free 15-minute consultation call to work out whether we are a good fit.
About me
I earned my Master’s in Marriage and Family Therapy from Chapman University and hold a bachelor’s degree from the American University of Paris. I am an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist, California registration number 138449, supervised by Yael Eiserike, LCSW #75053.
I work as part of Yael’s practice, which means my clients often sit in the same world as hers: demanding professions, high standards, and very little room to admit that something isn’t working.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Exposure and Response Prevention is the frontline treatment for OCD. Rather than examining the content of intrusive thoughts, it targets the behaviors that keep them powerful, meaning the checking, the reassurance-seeking, the rumination, and the avoidance. It is more structured and more active than most talk therapy, and it has considerably better outcomes for OCD.
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No. Plenty of my clients have never been diagnosed with anything and simply cannot stop overthinking. The same approach helps with perfectionism, health anxiety, and relentless analysis paralysis whether or not a formal diagnosis is in the picture.
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Yes, and it is common in exactly this population. The compulsions often disguise themselves as diligence, thoroughness, or conscientiousness, which means they are rewarded rather than noticed. Functioning well is not evidence against it.
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Some of it, yes, and I will be straightforward with you about that rather than selling it as easy. We work at a pace you can sustain, and the discomfort is purposeful and time-limited. Most people find it far more tolerable than anticipated.
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ERP for a focused OCD presentation often runs a few months of consistent weekly work. Longer-standing patterns or several overlapping issues take longer. I would rather give you a realistic picture at the start than an optimistic one.
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It means I have completed my master’s degree and am working toward full licensure under the supervision of a licensed clinician, in my case Yael Eiserike, LCSW. In practice it means your care is reviewed by two clinicians rather than one, at a lower fee.