How Casey Knight, LCSW, LICSW, found her own diagnosis hiding in plain sight—and how it’s shaped the way she cares for people with OCD at NOCD
For most of her life, Casey Knight, LCSW, LICSW, thought she just liked things a certain way.
Socks folded just so. Stuffed animals arranged in a particular order before bed, then rearranged from scratch if she woke up and found them in any way disturbed. Every stair climbed starting with her left foot. A heightened awareness of symmetry.
She didn’t have a name for any of it. She just knew that if she didn’t do certain things just right, something inside her wouldn’t feel settled.
It wasn’t until Knight, now a licensed clinical social worker at NOCD, began specialized training in OCD treatment that she started recognizing something familiar. As she learned more about the nuances of OCD and the many ways symptoms can show up, pieces of her own life began falling into place.
The rituals she’d followed since she was six years old. The intrusive fears she’d carried into motherhood and through parenting three children. The years spent seeking help from different therapists, never quite finding the answers she was looking for.
It had been obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) the whole time.
Suddenly, experiences she had spent decades wrestling with had an explanation.
“I now know I was undiagnosed for the majority of my life with a pretty raging case of OCD,” Knight says. “I’d been to dozens of therapists over the years, which is honestly what sent me to become one myself—because I thought nobody could help me. Now I know why: talk therapy alone doesn’t work for OCD. That’s not a knock on that type of therapy or those therapists. It’s just not the right path for treating OCD.”
With a deeper, more practical and nuanced knowledge of OCD, Knight began seeing her own history differently, including a marriage that ended after being strained, in part, by compulsions she didn’t yet recognize as compulsions.
But that insight didn’t only change the way she saw herself; it changed the way she connected with people who came into her sessions struggling with intrusive thoughts, fears, and behaviors that consumed their time and energy. And it gave her the chance to see what could happen when people finally received therapy designed specifically for treating OCD.
“It opened my heart to this community differently,” she says. “Understanding myself, and understanding exposure and response prevention (ERP) therapy, and seeing how effective it is and how quickly people get better—I’ve never experienced this level of gratitude from clients in any other clinical work I’ve done. Their lives are actually changing.”
Seeing what the right treatment can do
The same evidence-based approach that helped Knight recognize her own OCD soon showed her what was possible for the people she treated.
Knight joined NOCD in January 2024 after years in community mental health, where she worked with immigrant communities and trauma survivors, as well as experience in an adolescent intensive outpatient program. Treating OCD introduced a level of specialization she hadn’t experienced before.
And she quickly saw what the right treatment could do.
One NOCD Therapy Member’s experience, in particular, has stayed with her. Their OCD had grown to the point that the entire family’s life revolved around it—avoiding everyday activities like grocery runs and doctor’s appointments. Contamination fears had gradually made their world small.
Then they started ERP.
Within two months, they were using their kitchen again. Everyday parts of life that had once felt impossible were becoming part of life again.
“It’s phenomenal,” Knight says. “Watching people succeed, celebrating with them, getting misty-eyed together over something as simple as using the bathroom—for someone who’s been stuck for years, that can be the biggest deal in the world.”
For Knight, those moments bring her story full circle. The specialized training that helped her finally understand experiences she’d carried since childhood now gives her the tools to help other people understand their OCD and begin changing their own lives.
It’s the kind of transformation she knows from both sides—and the reason the work is so powerful.
