Treatment built for how anxiety works
Our Anxiety & OCD IOP is built around Exposure and Response Prevention, the most effective treatment for OCD and anxiety disorders. Structured, specialist-led, and available at all three of our locations.
9–15 hrs
Per week, flexibly scheduled
3 locations
Cincinnati · Dayton · Indianapolis
In-person & hybrid
Including community-based exposures
Plus weekly individual therapy, medication management, and family therapy.
What makes this program different
Grounded in real places, real people
Most intensive programs exist behind a screen or inside a building you pass without knowing what happens there. TAC is built around actual communities, Cincinnati, Dayton, and Indianapolis, with therapists who stay, and relationships that persist beyond the session. Attend in person, hybrid, or remotely. The community holds either way.
The right treatment for the right condition
Anxiety and OCD are not treated the same way depression is, and they are not treated with the same tools. We practice evidence-based care in the most specific sense: Exposure and Response Prevention for OCD, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for anxiety disorders, and targeted interventional options when medication alone is insufficient. Your loved one won't be placed in a generic group.
We work with the hard cases
We know what it looks like to watch someone cycle through treatment without lasting change. TAC was built for exactly that. Our team combines deep specialty training with a full spectrum of options, therapy, medication management, TMS, Spravato, ketamine, because finding the path forward sometimes takes persistence, knowledge, and the willingness to try what others haven't.
Comprehensive care,
every week
Every person in the program receives the full picture, not just groups, but the individual attention and family support that make treatment last beyond the program itself.
Daily group sessions
Goals Group, CBT Fundamentals, and Direct ERP run every session day, three sequential, clinically linked blocks that build on each other within and across sessions.
Individual psychotherapy
Weekly 1:1 sessions with a dedicated licensed therapist who serves as your clinical anchor for the entire program, coordinating care across groups, psychiatry, and family therapy.
Medication management
Weekly psychiatric check-ins for clients where pharmacotherapy is part of the plan. Your prescriber coordinates directly with your therapist so the full care team stays aligned on progress and adjustments.
Family therapy
Optional but often the missing piece. Families learn how accommodation patterns unintentionally maintain OCD and anxiety, and how to support recovery rather than inadvertently sustaining it.
Exposure is the treatment, not a technique we use occasionally
ERP works by breaking the cycle of obsession, anxiety, and compulsive response. Through repeated, systematic exposure to feared stimuli, without engaging in the compulsive or avoidant behavior that temporarily relieves distress, clients learn that anxiety will naturally diminish on its own, and that they are capable of tolerating it. Over time, this extinguishes the conditioned fear response.
What separates TAC's approach is specificity. Exposures are individually designed, hierarchically structured, and carried out across all relevant modalities. Treatment does not stop at the clinic door.
In vivo exposure
Direct, real-world contact with feared objects, situations, or environments. Hierarchies are built collaboratively with the client and conducted both within the clinic and, critically, out in the community, where feared stimuli actually live. Supermarkets, public transit, social settings, workplaces. Real life is the treatment environment.
Imaginal exposure
Systematic engagement with feared thoughts, images, or scenarios through structured narrative scripts. Used when the feared outcome is a future event, a past trauma echo, or a mental intrusion that cannot be reproduced in the physical world. Particularly indicated for harm OCD, death-related obsessions, and scrupulosity.
Interoceptive exposure
Deliberate induction of feared internal physical sensations, racing heart, shortness of breath, dizziness, depersonalization, through structured exercises. Essential for panic disorder, health anxiety, and OCD presentations with strong somatic components. Teaches clients that the sensations themselves are not dangerous.
The three-block sequence
Why the order matters
Goals Group opens each session day not as a formality but as a functional clinical intervention. Members articulate a specific behavioral intention, which avoidance pattern they are targeting, what they noticed since the last session, what feared stimulus they are preparing to confront. This activates engagement before the cognitive work begins.
Fundamentals of CBT builds the conceptual scaffolding that makes ERP work. Understanding the cognitive model of obsessions, that intrusive thoughts are normal, that their meaning is assigned rather than inherent, that compulsions are maintained by short-term relief, directly reduces the threat value of the content that will be confronted in the ERP block.
Direct ERP runs last, at full intensity, for ninety minutes. The sequence is not accidental: cognitive preparation is most effective immediately before exposure work, and the longer ERP block allows sufficient habituation within a single session. Clients leave having demonstrated to themselves, not just their therapist, that they can tolerate the discomfort.
What a week looks like
Hover any session to learn what happens in that group, and why it's there.
If any of this sounds familiar, we can help
People come to us for a range of reasons. Many have already tried treatment elsewhere. That's okay, this is what we specialize in.
- Intrusive, ego-dystonic thoughts, images, or impulses
- Compulsive rituals, behavioral or mental, performed to reduce distress
- Reassurance-seeking that provides only temporary relief and reinforces doubt
- Avoidance of triggers that progressively expands and constrains daily life
- Magical thinking, contamination fears, harm obsessions, scrupulosity, symmetry
ERP is the gold-standard treatment for OCD with strong meta-analytic support. Our ERP protocol is individually hierarchized and delivered across all relevant modalities: in vivo contact with feared objects and situations in real community settings, imaginal exposures for feared thoughts and outcomes, and interoceptive exposures for somatic components. Response prevention is explicitly targeted for both overt behavioral compulsions and covert mental rituals.
- Recurrent unexpected panic attacks with peak distress within minutes
- Persistent anticipatory anxiety about future attacks
- Avoidance of situations associated with prior attacks
- Agoraphobic restriction of travel, activity, or social engagement
- Catastrophic misinterpretation of benign physiological sensations
Interoceptive exposure is the primary mechanism for panic disorder, systematically inducing the feared bodily sensations through structured exercises to decondition the fear response. In vivo exposures address agoraphobic avoidance across the full range of avoided environments. Community-based exposures are standard.
- Disproportionate fear of specific objects, animals, or situations
- Immediate anxiety response on exposure, often with panic features
- Active avoidance that restricts daily functioning
- Recognition that fear is excessive but inability to modulate it volitionally
- Secondary functional impairment in health care, travel, or occupational contexts
Single-session or brief intensive in vivo ERP is highly effective for specific phobias. Exposures are conducted in community settings where the phobic stimulus is naturally encountered. Interoceptive exposures address any somatic component.
- Excessive, difficult-to-control worry across multiple domains
- Muscle tension, restlessness, and chronic fatigue
- Sleep disruption secondary to ruminative worry
- Difficulty tolerating uncertainty in any form
- Functional impairment in work, academic, or relational domains
CBT for GAD targets the positive and negative metacognitive beliefs that maintain worry. Intolerance of uncertainty is addressed through behavioral experiments and graduated exposure to ambiguous situations. The CBT and ERP blocks work in tandem to both reappraise worry-related beliefs and directly build tolerance through behavioral exposure.
- Intense fear of scrutiny, judgment, or humiliation in social situations
- Anticipatory anxiety that begins well before feared situations
- Post-event processing, prolonged self-critical review after social interactions
- Reliance on safety behaviors that maintain anxiety
- Avoidance that narrows social, professional, and academic participation
CBT targets self-focused attention, overestimation of negative evaluation, and safety behaviors. ERP exposures are conducted in real social environments, meetings, groups, presentations, restaurants, public transit, where the feared audience is present. Behavioral experiments test specific predictions rather than achieve habituation alone.
- Preoccupation with having or acquiring a serious illness despite medical reassurance
- Body hypervigilance and heightened focus on ambiguous physical sensations
- Frequent reassurance-seeking from medical providers, internet, or family
- Avoidance of medical information or clinical settings
- Impaired functioning due to health-related worry and monitoring
Health anxiety shares its maintenance structure with OCD: reassurance-seeking and avoidance provide temporary relief and perpetuate the cycle. Treatment targets reassurance-seeking behaviors through response prevention, and builds tolerance for uncertainty through graduated imaginal and in vivo exposures. Interoceptive exposure addresses catastrophic misinterpretation of benign physical sensations.
When therapy and medication work together
For many clients, the combination of structured ERP and the right pharmacological support produces outcomes that neither achieves alone. We build that combination deliberately.
Why the combination matters
SSRIs and SNRIs are first-line pharmacological treatments for OCD and anxiety disorders. When titrated appropriately alongside active ERP, they lower the baseline anxiety that can otherwise make exposure work inaccessible, particularly at the early stages of a hierarchy when distress tolerance is still being built.
For clients who have not responded adequately to standard pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy, interventional psychiatry offers a second avenue. Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), Spravato, and ketamine work through different neurobiological mechanisms than oral medications, and for treatment-resistant presentations, they can be the element that finally allows therapy to take hold.
What's available at TAC
Medication management
Weekly psychiatric check-ins with prescribers who specialize in anxiety and OCD. Medication decisions are made in coordination with your therapist and updated based on treatment response.
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS)
FDA-cleared, non-invasive neuromodulation that targets cortical circuits implicated in OCD and treatment-resistant depression. Can be scheduled around IOP attendance without interrupting the treatment week.
Spravato (esketamine)
FDA-approved intranasal esketamine for treatment-resistant depression and major depressive disorder with suicidal ideation. Administered in-office under clinical observation with same-day return to standard programming.
Ketamine
Infusion-based ketamine for clients with treatment-resistant mood and anxiety presentations who have not responded adequately to standard pharmacological and psychotherapeutic approaches.
Your questions answered
Outpatient therapy, one hour per week, is often insufficient for moderate-to-severe anxiety and OCD. Research consistently shows that treatment intensity matters: more frequent exposure practice, with clinical guidance and within-session processing, produces faster and more durable gains than once-weekly sessions. Our IOP provides 9–15 hours of structured treatment per week, allowing exposure hierarchies to progress at a pace that outpatient care cannot match.
It means treatment doesn't stop at the clinic door. For many anxiety presentations, the situations that need to be faced are out in the world, supermarkets, transit, public spaces, medical facilities, restaurants, social gatherings. Our clinicians accompany clients into these environments as part of the structured ERP protocol. For agoraphobia, social anxiety, and certain OCD presentations, in vivo community exposure is a core component of the treatment plan.
All three. We have locations in Cincinnati, Dayton, and Indianapolis. Clients may attend fully in-person, fully remotely, or in a hybrid format. We generally recommend as much in-person attendance as feasible, community-based ERP exposures require in-person participation, and the group cohort experience is more potent in person, but consistent attendance matters more than modality.
We are in-network with most major commercial insurance plans and accept Medicaid in Ohio and Indiana. Our intake team verifies benefits before the first appointment so there are no surprises on cost. Self-pay rates are available.
CORE is our full IOP, 9–15 hours per week. STEADY is for clients who need more support than weekly therapy but not full IOP intensity, typically 5–8 hours per week. FREE is our post-IOP step-down track providing a structured bridge back to standard outpatient care. Your intake clinician recommends the appropriate starting level based on assessment.
Yes. Every client is paired with a dedicated licensed therapist who serves as their primary clinician for the full program, leading individual sessions, conducting family therapy if indicated, and coordinating with group facilitators and the prescribing psychiatrist.
TMS, Spravato, or ketamine can be scheduled around IOP attendance without disrupting the treatment week. TMS sessions are brief and can be completed before or after the morning program. Spravato is administered in-office under clinical monitoring per FDA protocol. The prescribing team coordinates directly with your IOP therapist.
Discharge planning begins well before the end of the program. Your treatment team coordinates a step-down plan that includes connection to a weekly outpatient therapist, ongoing psychiatric care, and enrollment in our RISE post-IOP transitional track if additional structure is warranted.
We aim for same-week intake assessments in most cases. Call us at (513) 547-2861 or submit the intake form online. Our admissions team will follow up within one business day.
Ready to take
the next step?
Our intake team can typically schedule an assessment within a few days.
Call us or submit the form, we'll take it from there.
Same-week assessments often available · In-network with most major insurance · Medicaid accepted