Specialized treatment for OCD, anxiety, body-focused repetitive behaviors (BFRBs), perfectionism, and related concerns using Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Habit Reversal Training (HRT), and other evidence-based approaches.
Jessica Dowell, MA, LPA
Licensed Psychological Associate | OCD & Anxiety Specialist
Jessica Dowell, MA, LPA is a licensed psychological associate at River City OCD Clinic in Louisville, Kentucky. She specializes in the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), anxiety, body-focused repetitive behaviors (BFRBs), perfectionism, and related concerns.
Jessica has received specialized training through the International OCD Foundation and primarily incorporates Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and Habit Reversal Training (HRT) into her clinical work.
Her approach is collaborative, down-to-earth, and grounded in compassion, honesty, authenticity, and humor. She also takes a holistic view of treatment, recognizing that people don't experience anxiety or OCD in a vacuum. Environment, relationships, culture, spirituality, identity, and lived experience can all influence how someone understands themselves and the difficulties that bring them to therapy.
Jessica works with clients from late adolescence through older adulthood and particularly enjoys working with individuals navigating early adulthood, a period when questions about identity, relationships, independence, career, and what comes next can collide rather spectacularly with anxiety's desire to have everything figured out immediately.
Specialties & Areas of Focus
OCD Treatment
Jessica works with individuals experiencing many different OCD themes and presentations, including Contamination OCD, Harm OCD, Moral Scrupulosity, Relationship OCD (ROCD), Sexual Orientation OCD (SO-OCD), "just-right" experiences, intrusive thoughts, reassurance seeking, avoidance, and mental compulsions.
Using Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), Jessica helps clients practice approaching thoughts, situations, sensations, and uncertainties that OCD has taught them to fear while reducing the compulsive strategies used to feel safe or certain.
ERP isn't about proving that everything will turn out okay.
It's about discovering that uncertainty, anxiety, and unwanted thoughts can be present without having to organize your behavior around them.
Young Adults & Life Transitions
Although Jessica works with clients across adulthood, she particularly enjoys working with people in late adolescence and early adulthood.
This stage of life can bring major changes in independence, education, work, relationships, identity, expectations, and responsibility, all while anxiety and OCD insist that these decisions need to be made correctly.
Jessica helps clients distinguish between thoughtful decision-making and becoming trapped in endless attempts to eliminate uncertainty.
Treatment can create space to ask a different question:
Instead of figuring out the perfect next step, what kind of person do I want to be while taking it?
Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviors (BFRBs)
Jessica also works with body-focused repetitive behaviors (BFRBs), including hair pulling (trichotillomania) and skin picking (excoriation).
She incorporates Habit Reversal Training (HRT) and other behavioral and acceptance-based strategies to help clients increase awareness of patterns and triggers, develop alternative responses, and change how they relate to uncomfortable urges.
BFRBs can carry a tremendous amount of frustration, embarrassment, and self-criticism. Jessica approaches this work without shame, helping clients understand the function of the behavior rather than reducing treatment to another version of "Why can't I just stop?"
Anxiety, Panic & Perfectionism
Jessica also treats panic disorder, generalized anxiety, social anxiety, perfectionism, depression, PTSD, and other anxiety-related concerns.
Anxiety can make avoidance feel reasonable and certainty feel necessary. Perfectionism can make waiting, checking, overpreparing, second-guessing, or not starting at all feel like responsible choices.
Jessica helps clients recognize these patterns and develop greater flexibility in how they respond to uncomfortable thoughts, emotions, sensations, and uncertainty.
What Therapy With Jessica Is Like
Collaborative, Down-to-Earth, and Genuine
Jessica doesn't view therapy as something a clinician does to a client.
She sees it as collaborative work.
As Jessica describes her approach:
"I enjoy collaboration in my work with clients while staying grounded in what actually works. I believe treatment should feel supportive and encouraging while still helping individuals face the patterns that keep them stuck."
That balance matters.
Compassion doesn't mean helping anxiety avoid everything uncomfortable, and evidence-based treatment doesn't require therapy to feel cold or mechanical.
Jessica works to create an environment where clients can feel supported while also being challenged to notice and change patterns that are no longer serving them.
Jessica Dowell Teaches What It Means to Live with Uncertainty
Understanding the Whole Person
Jessica takes a holistic perspective on treatment and recognizes that a person's experiences cannot always be separated neatly from the world around them.
Family, relationships, environment, culture, race, spirituality, identity, and other aspects of lived experience can influence how someone understands distress, what matters to them, and how they approach change.
Rather than assuming one person's path through treatment should look exactly like someone else's, Jessica works collaboratively to understand the individual sitting in front of her.
Evidence-based treatment provides the framework.
The person determines the context in which that framework has to work.
ACT: Responding Differently to What Shows Up
Jessica incorporates Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) to help clients develop greater psychological flexibility.
ACT isn't about replacing every negative thought with a positive one or convincing yourself that everything will work out.
Instead, clients practice noticing thoughts and emotions without automatically treating them as facts, warnings, or instructions. They learn to make room for discomfort, clarify what matters to them, and choose behaviors based increasingly on those values rather than on what anxiety demands in the moment.
Sometimes the mind gets a vote.
It doesn't always need veto power.
Professional Background
Jessica earned her Master of Arts degree and is licensed in Kentucky as a Licensed Psychological Associate (LPA).
She has received specialized training in the treatment of OCD through the International OCD Foundation and has continued developing expertise in evidence-based approaches for OCD, anxiety, and related conditions.
Her clinical training includes Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and Habit Reversal Training (HRT) for body-focused repetitive behaviors.
At River City OCD Clinic, Jessica provides individual psychotherapy and also leads From Page to Practice, an educational group designed to help participants take useful psychological concepts beyond simply understanding them intellectually and begin applying them in everyday life.
Jessica provides services under the supervision of Dr. Street Russell, Psy.D., HSPP.
Beyond the Therapy Room
Outside of therapy, Jessica enjoys cooking, traveling, exploring local coffee shops, gardening, plants, and spending time outdoors.
She finds inspiration in creativity, connection, and the small acts of courage that occur in everyday life, something that fits pretty naturally with her approach to therapy.
After all, meaningful change doesn't always look dramatic.
Sometimes it's trying something you've been avoiding, allowing an unanswered question to stay unanswered, speaking when anxiety says stay quiet, or simply choosing the next useful action without waiting to feel completely ready.
And presumably, sometimes it's finding a really good cup of coffee.
From Page to Practice
Jessica leads River City OCD Clinic's From Page to Practice educational group.
Learning about anxiety, OCD, mindfulness, acceptance, or behavior change can be incredibly useful.
But understanding an idea and actually using it when your brain is yelling at you are two very different things.
From Page to Practice creates an opportunity to explore psychological concepts collaboratively and translate them into practical ways of responding differently in everyday life.
Interested in Working With Jessica?
Jessica provides specialized treatment for OCD, anxiety, BFRBs, panic, perfectionism, and related concerns through River City OCD Clinic in Louisville, Kentucky.
She works with clients in person at our Louisville office and via telehealth throughout Kentucky. Jessica sees clients ranging from late adolescence through older adulthood and particularly enjoys working with young adults.
You don't need to determine whether what you're experiencing is "really OCD," anxiety, perfectionism, or something else before contacting us.
That's part of what assessment and treatment are for.