CONTAMINATION OCD: Hi all! I’m new to the app and I think I’m just looking for people who understand what’s going on. I was diagnosed with OCD when I was 6, am now 19. It started as hoarding, but morphed into various subsets throughout my life. Of course all of it is hard, but this summer I developed contamination OCD and I have never struggled with any other subset like I do this one. I went through a break-up and soon realized I was uncomfortable wearing other peoples clothes, and then when my mom would kiss my forehead Goodnight, and it quickly spiraled into any spit, blood, bodily fluid, etc. I then got to my second year of college a couple weeks ago, and it has spiraled more than I could’ve ever imagined. I love my roommate/friend, but I can’t go on her side of the room. I can’t have anyone touch me or my things and I am drenching everything, even my face/lips with alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, hand sanitizer all of the time. I’m starting OCD-specialized treatment next week, and it’s hard to not feel hopeless bc I can’t imagine this ever going away due to how severe it has gotten. I miss hugging people and curling up on my roommates bed at night to debrief. I’m having nightly breakdowns about it, and I cannot thank her enough for how understanding she has been. I miss physical touch, even high fives, and I just don’t feel like a person. Can someone who has experience with contamination OCD give me some kind of hope? I just want to feel human again.

Does anyone have any tips that helped them? Mine is due to a specific person and I work with them so it’s been really difficult. I’ve started ERP which has been reaaalllllly challenging and I would love to hear from anyone else that has gone through any type of contamination ocd and how they have overcome or are fighting their way through it. Thank you!l

(Long post warning) Hi, I’ve been struggling with severe OCD for six years now. it started in 2019 with my theme being getting sick/emetophobia. it devastated my life. I almost didn’t graduate high school from it. I remember washing my hands for three hours one day until they were nearly bloody while crying and asking why I could not stop doing it. I remember id have to write and rewrite sentences when I did my English homework and that’s why I nearly failed that class. I remember how I would spend up to thirty minutes to an hour pacing the halls of my apartment while my mom was asleep until I neutralized the thoughts about throwing up and I could finally go to bed. I don’t know when it happened, but my theme switched. Sometimes in late 2020 or early 2021, it switched to POCD. It started with a single thought, and I focused on it and it’s been my theme since then for four years. It has been absolutely destroying me. I feel so disgusted and lost and just tired. My compulsions are severe now. I thought they were bad before, but now they’re ten times worse. I can’t eat, drink, change my clothes, walk, or even do things on my phone normally. I’ve developed so many mental compulsions that it’s so intricate and complicated yet at the same time I’ve done them so much that they’ve become normal. An example I have is if im putting on a shirt and I have a “bad” thought, I have to take it off and put it back on two more times (that’ll make it 3 times I put the shirt back on - odd numbers are my safe number). I have to have a good thought on the third time otherwise I have to take it off and put it on two more times to make it five times I put on that shirt. If not that then I just put on a different shirt because the original is now tainted with my bad thought. I can’t open apps on my phone. It’s with the numbers again. If I open TikTok once while having a bad thought - I have to close it and open it two more times and so on. Sometimes I do it up to 30 times. So I just don’t do things usually. I don’t turn on the TV because I know I’ll redo it. I don’t open a book or grab it off my shelf because I’ll have to repeat the action. I can’t even lay in bed without getting up and redoing it even if im exhausted. I just feel so helpless. I don’t know what to do. I feel disgusting and even now my minds screaming at me that I am dirty and what I think is true. I just wish I was free of this, I wish I could just live my life. I’ve wasted hours and days because of my compulsions. I mask it so well around my friends. I don’t do them in front of anyone or I’ve learned to hide it well. But when im back home alone, it goes haywire. I just want to live again.

TW: mice/rodents; contamination/virus; feeling unsafe in my home Hello, I'm new to the community, and new to OCD at 42 years old. My OCD is about contagion but specifically around mice and a virus some of them carry (hantavirus). For background, my husband and I have been in our house for a little over 10 years, and in all that time, there have been mice coming in and out through what we've discovered are chew-holes in the sill plate where the house frame sits on the foundation. Mice are gross, but we never saw evidence of them in the actual living spaces (only attics and cellar), and I was okay knowing they were there. I was a new mom when COVID hit, and the anxiety over that ratcheted up my general anxiety, which was never awful but definitely had me thinking more about contamination and contagion in a big way. Two years ago, I found mouse poop in the upstairs where the bedrooms are, got some traps, never caught anything, and then ended up actually SEEING a mouse come out from behind the toilet. It went back into the wall before we could catch it. After that, I got steel wool and expanding foam and plugged up EVERY hole in the house--mostly pipe holes for the radiators, toilets, sinks, etc. And I was still OK. Then, two months ago, I was in the cellar doing laundry and I saw a larger-than-usual dropping, bigger than mouse OR rat droppings, I thought, sitting on top of the dryer. I was like...hm, that's strange. I mentioned it to my Discord writing group, most of whom live in the Midwest (this will become relevant), and one of them said "oh, you have to be careful with mice, they carry Hantavirus. My husband had it a couple of years ago and it was really scary." I didn't know what hantavirus is, so I looked it up and found out you can contract it through breathing/contact with mouse poop, urine and saliva. The sickness that results from hantavirus has a 40% mortality rate, which scares the heck out of me b/c that's really high. Further research told me that the CDC started tracking Hantavirus in 1993. Between then and 2022, the latest of their available data, there have been fewer than 900 cases in the entire US; 96% of those cases were west of the Mississippi, and there has been in that time only ONE confirmed case in the state where I live. So, objectively, the risk of me or my family contracting this virus from our local mice is low. And I wouldn't think about it at all, except that there are still mice in the house. We've had a pest company setting and managing traps this whole time; recently they also came to plug the existing holes in the foundation, but they keep finding mice in their traps and they found a new chew hole near one of the cellar windows this week. We're working on a more aggressive solution (1/4" hardware cloth over the places where they're getting in), but it's slow going and in the meantime, there's still the risk of coming into contact with mouse stuff. But my brain has ballooned this into something so much bigger than that. I'm washing my hands so much that they're starting to crack and bleed and the skin feels tight. I'm afraid to go in the cellar to do laundry, because that's where the mice are. My husband has no problem going down in the cellar, which means I'm afraid to touch things around the house because what if he touched something with mouse virus on his hands? And even though I've plugged up all the holes where mice could get into the living spaces, I'm still obsessively afraid of every single surface--what if a mouse touched it? Ran across it? Peed on it? Even though I don't see mouse droppings in any of our living spaces, nor evidence of them chewing anything, I'm still losing my mind with fear. And although I've heard that folks with contamination OCD typically clean a LOT, I'm afraid to clean because what if I move the mess (we both have full time jobs and a 6 year old, so cleaning isn't always top priority) and I find mouse poop under there? This is an absolute nightmare. I hate not feeling safe in my own home. And I'm frustrated because I was FINE for so long...I don't know where this OCD suddenly came from, but it went 0 to 100 almost overnight. My loved ones are concerned and want to be supportive, but they're also not afraid and have never experienced anxiety nor OCD, so their "helpful" advice is usually along the lines of "can't you just decide to be afraid and do it anyway" or "have you tried not feeling this way"? I know this is a weirdly specific OCD but that's my story. I've been working with a therapist now for a few weeks but her breathing techniques, while somewhat helpful, aren't enough, so I need to have a talk with her about what comes next for treatment. Thanks to OCD, my world feels like it keeps getting smaller and smaller. I want to just find a tiny chair where I can sit and not move and not touch anything until all the bad stuff goes away...but I know that's not realistic, nor is is healthy. I'm just...exhausted, and frustrated, and scared, and really hopeful that I can find a way through this.