(this is a request for advice! but I put the tw for contamination ocd including discussion of specific exposure to contamination irl -- please don't read if this might trigger you, take care of yourself<3) In March-May, I was in exposure therapy for a form of mental contamination -- fear of an abstract concept basically "infecting" real items. It was very successful and I felt so good and excited to visit my friend for a month without ocd troubles! Sadly for me, I'm so excited about this trip that I've had a big old relapse into just straightforward contamination ocd, but triggered by very specific real-life incidents. Most significantly: a few days ago I stepped barefoot in what I believe was animal poo (likely a dog or coyote). I came inside (carefully doing my best to avoid touching the floor with that foot/the parts of it with feces on it, obviously!) and washed it off in the bathroom. But then my ocd really escalated, and I've spent the last few days terrified that I did an imperfect job keeping the house clean (jostling contaminated bits of grass off my foot while hopping upstairs; accidentally touching a contaminated part of my foot to the floor when trying to balance just on an uncontaminated part; anything I did an imperfect job cleaning up in the bathroom, etc) and the house/floor could be contaminated with microscopic bacteria, parasite eggs, etc, that I might carry to my friend when I visit them. (This has been ... not at all helped by me finding a faint stain on my foot about an hour after initially washing it, that I'd been walking around the house with!) Anyway, obviously not looking for reassurance that I and my friend are definitely 100% safe. I know both that there's probably *technically* a risk of some kind of infection and also that that risk is for sure very small! Pretty sure the path forward is to go about life as normal without giving in to any (more...) compulsions to clean, research illnesses, etc. However, I'm having trouble shaking the idea that maybe this is actually a *rational* concern, and most of the resources I know of/have found on contamination OCD tend to discuss fears that are a lot less ... direct in origin (ie fear of touching a door handle in public and such)? And I'm wondering if anyone has experience with or advice on dealing with contamination ocd stemming from such a specific real-life incident. Sorry for the long post!