“Is your anxiety the same as if someone was running at you with a machete?”

That’s how Melissa Tyler, the executive program director for Northern California at OCD Anxiety Centers, explains the difference between everyday stress and the overwhelming fear faced by people with obsessive-compulsive disorder and severe anxiety.

Tyler’s organization opened a new facility in Pleasant Hill on March 15 that treats people from eight-years-old to adults for anxiety and OCD — a disorder that experts say affects about one in 40, or approximately 8.2 million adults in the U.S.

The OCD Anxiety Center specializes in exposure prevention therapy, a method designed to help clients confront their fears and retrain how their brains respond to things it perceives are threats.

The treatment encourages clients to face situations they fear, says Tyler, while resisting the responses they would normally use to reduce anxiety.

“It’s uncomfortable, but not unsafe,” she says.

Tyler describes the sessions as something closer to an experiment than traditional talk therapy.

“I like to call it not [an] exposure group, but exposure lab,” she says. “What we’re doing is testing [clients’] theories” about what they’re afraid of, versus the real-life consequences.

Common signs for OCD include obsessions (intrusive thoughts or urges) and compulsions (repetitive behaviors or mental acts). Anxiety symptoms vary but often include excessive worry, restlessness and physical tension, says Tyler.

During therapy exercises, for example, clients practice touching surfaces they fear are contaminated with germs, or are told to confront situations they would usually avoid, such as driving or even stepping out of their homes.

By being forced to face these fears repeatedly, without being able to use their usual coping methods, clients begin to learn the outcomes aren’t a matter of life and death, says Tyler.

According to Rayna Davis, the organization’s director of marketing, the exposure prevention process helps retrain the brain’s response to perceived threats.

“Every time they ride that wave and go through that exposure experience and don’t have the response they normally do, their brain is learning, ‘Oh, this is safe,’” Davis says.

The Pleasant Hill center, one of eleven OCD centers in California, offers multiple levels of care depending on its clients’ needs. In the most common treatment, called Intensive Outpatient Program (IOP), clients attend a three-hour session five days a week, while still maintaining their work, school and other daily responsibilities.

For clients who need more support, a Partial Hospitalization Program (PHP) provides six hours of structured treatment five days a week. The PHP treatment represents a step down from full-time hospitalization, as a bridge for getting back into society.

For people suffering from OCD, attending less rigorous, weekly therapy appointments at a health provider can often just tinker around the edge of a problem, says Tyler. By contrast, OCD Anxiety Centers allows clinicians to work more closely with clients on repeated exposures and skill-building exercises to better help and understand the issues.

Another key element of the program, she adds, is encouraging involvement from family or friends. The center has parent support groups for the families of younger clients, and even weekly sessions where loved ones can learn more about how to properly support their family members with exposure exercises.

“It gives them a space to see that they’re not alone,” says Tyler, because “they’re able to talk with others about what it’s like supporting someone with OCD or anxiety.”

Tyler says that misconceptions about OCD and anxiety are common. Not a lot of people realize that OCD isn’t just about being really neat and organized, but rather reflects a condition that can feel physically intense and all-consuming, to the point that people cannot function in their day to day life.

“For people with an anxiety disorder, their body can react like they’re in real danger,” she says.

For therapists at the center, the goal is not to get rid of those uncomfortable feelings altogether, but to help clients learn how to survive and live with them.

“A lot of people think we’re going to teach them not to feel distress, but we want them to feel the distress so they can learn,” Tyler adds. “We truly believe that everyone is capable — it’s their brains telling them that they’re not.”