Question around contamination ocd and ethics. If you can give feedback I'd so appreciate it. I have a fear right now that over touched something in my house contaminated with covid. Rationally it's so unlikely its contaminated. Just the side of a bookshelf I may have touched yesterday when I felt my hands were contaminated. Realistically i never should have had the concern to begin with. However, i feel guilty doing erp to ignore it, because by not washing my hands and continuing to touch common surfaces in my house, I feel i am spreading it. Is it unfair to my husband to push past and keep going because then hes exposed to what I've touched? ERP gets a lot more confusing when addressing fears that you yourself are the one spreading contamination because you have independence and dominion over yourself to say "I agree to this exposure". When you fear you are the person doing the spreading, its other peoples dominion. Thoughts? Help? Any philosophers out there? Lol

I have contamination OCD and sometimes I don't feel like cleaning. I have a huge pile of blankets on my floor that feel contaminated and I have two dogs and seven cats. I don't really touch them anymore like I used to since my OCD got worse. One of my dogs like to pee on my floor a lot and sometimes I'm too lazy to clean it, because I'd have to get the carpet shampooer out and actually clean. Sometimes I do it because I don't want to wash my hands over and over, so I just avoid it. Now I'm scared that the dry urine is on my feet and are now in my bed. I know that I should just say well maybe it did or maybe it didn't and just go about my day, but it's hard. For the people who conquered contamination OCD how did you get through stuff like this? Thank you in advance to anyone who answers my post.

I have contamination OCD that causes me to excessively wash my hands/clean items with disinfectant wipes. I know I just need to start with small exposures but how do I do that without spiraling? I tried a while back by just touching the outside of my dishwasher and not washing my hands after and it led to me being unable to even exist in my house. I basically lived on my couch for three weeks as it was the only 'safe' space that I had not touched with my dirty hands. I had to take a week off work to clean my house to make it somewhat liveable. I still haven't got round to cleaning everything though so things like my kitchen are still no-go zones that I don't enter. I just don't know how to start ERP without it making everything worse. Any advice would be appreciated. I am not seeing a therapist at the moment due to financial constraints.

So, I know my capacity to get fixated on things. And it's normally something that's relatively remote but, my latest issue is really getting to me and I was wondering if people have any advice. I'm avoiding getting too into specifics, as I don't want this to get reassurance-y but, in essence.. I came to the realisation recently that people who I'd been "friends" (feels like the wrong term now) when I was younger were not very nice people, and normalized a lot of very unpleasant behaviour towards other members of the group. They really normalized it, sold themselves as figures of authority, as older and more responsible and grown-up than others, and looking back, they acted horribly. And coming to this realisation, that I'd been manipulated into just accepting their behaviour has just... broken me. My OCD has latched onto it and I can't stop feeling irreversibly tainted by it. I've talked to others about it, and they've reassured me, told me it's not a big deal and that I hold myself to too high a standard, but none of that sticks. I feel better for a bit, then think 'Maybe when you told them you were skewing it to make yourself look better' or 'Did you leave out a crucial detail'. I keep ruminating over and over, trying to remember exactly how everything played out, trying to figure out if I fed into the behaviour, if I did something bad myself (because y'know, I feel like I was accepting of it at the time, so what does it say about my own values?). I know I need to stop doing all this if I want to improve, but then some part of me keeps saying 'So, you're just going to let yourself off the hook then?' Normally, I can rationalize my own fears to some degree, assure myself something won't happen, but the realness of the situation, and the fact I only came to understand the reality of it because the thought had been bothering me means it feels so much more all-encompassing. I know confessing in itself is a compulsion, but I keep feeling that if I'm not I'm somehow concealing what I 'really am' from others around me, and any positive interactions are me deceiving them in some way. I feel like I can't enjoy anything in life right now, and a good part of me feels I should not enjoy it ever again. If anybody has any advice on it, I'm all ears. Or even hearing if you relate to these feelings, I might appreciate the solidarity at least.