Specialized, wrap-around therapy for children with OCD, PANS, and PANDAS in Maryland. Discover our 4-phase medical, parent-coaching, and ERP framework.
When a child is wrestling with obsessive-compulsive behaviors, it can feel like an uninvited, aggressive weed has taken over your family’s life. Every day becomes an exhausting effort to manage rituals, fears, and sudden behavioral shifts. If you are noticing these symptoms appear overnight, or if your child’s OCD seems deeply intertwined with intense physical and emotional flares, you aren’t just looking for standard behavior management—you need a team that understands the complex interplay between the brain, the body, and the family ecosystem.
At our practice, we provide specialized, evidence-backed care for children navigating Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), with a dedicated, comprehensive focus on families navigating Pediatric Acute-onset Neuropsychiatric Syndrome (PANS) and Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal Infections (PANDAS). We know that healing a child requires more than just a weekly therapy appointment. It requires a wrap-around approach that holds the entire family system. Who better to help you than a practice run by a PANS/PANDAS mom of 3?
To explain how we cultivate deep, lasting healing for PANS, PANDAS, and pediatric OCD, we look at the therapeutic process through the lifecycle of a garden.
Our Four-Phase PANS/PANDAS & OCD Treatment Framework
- Phase One: Preparing the Soil: Ensuring Medical Stability First
You cannot grow a healthy garden in toxic or depleted soil. When a child experiences an acute neuroinflammatory flare, their brain is under physical stress. In this first phase, our primary goal is medical stabilization. We provide coaching to help you navigate medical steps, decode complex symptoms, and systematically connect you with literate medical specialists, immunologists, and practitioners. We ensure the biological foundation is supported before asking your child’s brain to do the heavy lifting of behavioral therapy.
- Note- we are not medical providers or doctors and cannot provide medical advice; however, we can provide local and national resources to find the medical care you need. Please email Sara for the resource guide!
2. Phase Two: Water and Sunlight: Nurturing the Nurturer
A caregiver cannot pour from an empty cup, and a family under the chronic stress of medical trauma needs deliberate nourishment. This phase focuses entirely on supporting you. Through specialized Therapeutic Parent Coaching with an individual therapist, we help you process the unique grief and anxiety that comes with this journey. For deep communal support, we also offer our trauma recovery parent group—run by Sara Rodriguez, LCSW-C, an expert clinician who deeply understands this path as a PANS/PANDAS mom to three boys. Here, you find validation, somatic regulation tools, and a community that truly gets it.
3. Phase Three: Gentle Pruning: Systemic OCD Interventions via SPACE
When a child is in a high-flare state, asking them to sit on a therapy couch and confront their biggest fears is often counterproductive. Instead, we begin “pruning” the family dynamics that inadvertently keep OCD alive. We coach parents through the SPACE program (Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions). Without your child ever having to step foot in the therapy room, we teach you how to systematically reduce parental accommodations—the small ways the family changes its routine to keep the OCD calm—while maintaining high warmth and validation. This shifts the home environment and weakens OCD’s grip before direct child therapy even begins.
4. Phase Four: Harvesting the Skills: Direct Child Behavioral & OCD Treatment
Once the soil is prepped, the caregiver is supported, and the home environment is stabilized, the child is finally ready to actively participate in their own growth. In this final phase, our therapists work directly with your child using heavy-hitting, gold-standard interventions: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP). Because of the groundwork laid in previous phases, your child can safely build a psychological toolkit, face their obsessions without engaging in compulsions, and harvest the resilience needed for long-term, sustained recovery.
A Note on Accommodations:
In OCD and PANS/PANDAS, accommodating a fear (like checking a door for your child or washing your hands with them) feels like compassion, but it actually feeds the anxiety loop. Our framework helps you step out of the loop safely and gently.
Whether your child is facing classic pediatric OCD or the complex, multi-system storm of PANS/PANDAS, you do not have to tend this garden alone. Our multi-disciplinary, systemic approach ensures that every member of the family has the tools, the tracking, and the therapeutic alliance necessary to reclaim a peaceful home.