Vanessa Tirabassi, Psy.D.
Post-Doctoral Candidate | OCD & Anxiety Specialist | Licensed Psychologist - Temporary
Vanessa Tirabassi, Psy.D.—known to her clients simply as Vanessa—is a licensed psychologist (temporary status) & post-doctoral candidate at River City OCD Clinic in Louisville, Kentucky. She works with children, teens, and adults experiencing obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), anxiety, PTSD, perfectionism, and related concerns.
Vanessa's core values as a therapist are empathy, insight, and humor.
Her approach combines evidence-based treatment with genuine curiosity about how each person's mind works. She incorporates Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), and mindfulness-based approaches while adapting treatment to the individual rather than expecting the individual to adapt to therapy.
Vanessa also has experience working with autistic individuals and people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. She believes effective treatment should account for each client's strengths, needs, communication style, and lived experience, not simply apply the same protocol in exactly the same way to everyone.
And because anxiety and OCD are already very good at making life unnecessarily serious, humor is allowed in the room too.
Specialized treatment for OCD, anxiety, PTSD, perfectionism, and related concerns using Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), and mindfulness-based approaches.
Specialties & Areas of Focus
OCD Treatment
Vanessa works with adolescents and adults experiencing a wide range of OCD themes and presentations, including Contamination OCD, Harm OCD, Moral Scrupulosity, Religious Scrupulosity, perfectionism and "just-right" experiences, reassurance seeking, avoidance, mental compulsions, and other OCD-related concerns.
Using Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), Vanessa helps clients approach thoughts, situations, sensations, and uncertainties that OCD has taught them to fear while reducing the compulsive responses used to obtain relief or certainty.
ERP isn't about proving that an intrusive thought is false. And it isn't about becoming certain that something bad won't happen.
It's about changing what happens when uncertainty shows up.
Anxiety, Social Anxiety & Perfectionism
Vanessa also works with anxiety disorders, including social anxiety, as well as perfectionism and related concerns.
Anxiety has a way of turning possibilities into warnings.
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What if I embarrass myself?
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What if I make the wrong choice?
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What if I can't handle how I feel?
Perfectionism can make the solution seem obvious: prepare more, think longer, avoid mistakes, and don't act until you're sufficiently certain you've gotten it right. Unfortunately, that strategy can gradually make anxiety more powerful.
Vanessa helps clients develop greater flexibility in responding to anxious thoughts and uncomfortable emotions so that behavior can increasingly be guided by what matters rather than by what feels safest.
PTSD & Trauma-Related Concerns
Vanessa also works with individuals experiencing PTSD and trauma-related concerns.
Trauma can change how people relate to memories, emotions, physical sensations, relationships, and their sense of safety. Treatment involves understanding those patterns while helping clients develop more flexible and effective ways of responding to experiences that may have become associated with threat.
Vanessa approaches trauma work collaboratively and at a pace appropriate to the individual, incorporating evidence-based cognitive and behavioral strategies based on the client's needs and treatment goals.
Neurodiversity & Developmental Differences
Vanessa has experience working with autistic individuals as well as people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
Effective therapy doesn't require every brain to work the same way.
Vanessa adapts treatment to account for differences in communication, learning, sensory experiences, cognitive style, and individual strengths while maintaining the principles that make evidence-based treatment effective.
The goal isn't to make someone fit the therapy.
It's to make the therapy useful to the person.
What Therapy With Vanessa Is Like
OCD Is a Class in Paradoxes
Vanessa has a particular way of describing OCD:
"I think of OCD as a class in paradoxes. It turns your strengths into weaknesses and your joys into chores. It protects you from danger only to attack from within."
OCD frequently attaches itself to precisely the things a person cares about.
Someone who values being responsible may become terrified of causing harm.
Someone who deeply values a relationship may become consumed with determining whether it's the "right" relationship.
Someone who cares about morality may become trapped trying to establish whether they're a good person.
The problem isn't necessarily that these things matter too much. It's what OCD convinces someone they must do in order to feel certain about them.
Vanessa helps clients recognize that distinction and begin responding differently.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
Vanessa incorporates Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) to help clients change their relationship with difficult thoughts and emotions.
ACT doesn't require people to like their anxiety or convince themselves that intrusive thoughts are harmless.
Instead, clients practice noticing internal experiences without automatically treating them as instructions.
That creates room for another question:
What do I want to do here if anxiety doesn't get to make the decision for me?
Over time, treatment becomes less about successfully controlling what the mind produces and more about building the flexibility to continue living while the mind does what minds sometimes do.
Making Sense of "Sticky" Thoughts
Vanessa often describes intrusive thoughts as sticky. As she explains:
"They don't bother you because they're true; they bother you because you think they shouldn't stick around if they aren't true."
That distinction can be enormously important. People with OCD can spend extraordinary amounts of time trying to understand why a thought appeared, what it means, whether it says something about them, or how they can finally prove that it isn't important.
But the effort to solve the thought can be exactly what teaches the brain to keep bringing it back. Vanessa helps clients practice another possibility: allowing thoughts to be strange, uncomfortable, unwanted, unresolved, or simply present without requiring an explanation. A thought doesn't have to make sense before you can continue with your day.
Professional Background
Vanessa earned her Doctorate in Clinical Psychology (PsyD) from Spalding University.
She also holds two Master's degrees in Clinical Psychology, one from Morehead State University and another from Spalding University.
Her clinical experience includes OCD and anxiety treatment, trauma-related concerns, work with autistic individuals and individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and more than three years working as a therapist in a methadone clinic.
Vanessa is a member of the International OCD Foundation (IOCDF) and has pursued specialized training in evidence-based approaches for OCD and related concerns.
Her clinical work incorporates:
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Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP)
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Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
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Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
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Mindfulness-based approaches
Vanessa provides clinical services under the supervision of Dr. Street Russell, Psy.D., HSPP.
Beyond the Therapy Room
Vanessa was born in Massachusetts and spent the first eight years of her life in Salem.
She would like the record to reflect that she is, unfortunately, not a witch.
Vanessa has a dog and two cats and currently considers that sufficient representation from the animal kingdom.
She's an enthusiastic reader and belongs to two book clubs. She's also a serious Lord of the Rings fan and is slowly working her way through what appears to be every authoritative study ever written about Middle-earth.
When she's not reading, Vanessa enjoys computer games—particularly cozy games and life simulations—and reports having a "decent" singing voice.
And then there are conspiracy theories...
Vanessa knows a lot about them.
Not internet rabbit-hole at 2:00 a.m. a lot. Doctoral dissertation a lot.
Her dissertation research focused on conspiracy theories, which means she can legitimately say that years of graduate education prepared her to discuss both obsessive-compulsive disorder and why human beings become convinced that something suspicious is definitely going on.
In the interest of precision, only one of those is generally part of treatment.
Work With Vanessa
Vanessa provides specialized treatment for OCD, anxiety, panic, perfectionism, PTSD, and related concerns through River City OCD Clinic in Louisville, Kentucky.
She works with children, adolescents, and adults and has experience adapting treatment for autistic individuals and people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
Vanessa currently provides services in person at our Louisville office and via telehealth for clients located in Kentucky.
You don't need to know whether what you're experiencing is "really OCD," anxiety, perfectionism, or something else before reaching out.
That's part of what assessment and treatment are for.