- Username
- catattak
- Date posted
- 4y ago
Struggling with a lot of the same things I mainly have worries about OTHER people not my self like how my actions may contaminate others
I am going through the same. It’s been really hard for me to decide what to touch and how to handle stuff especially because of fears for others.... I wish I can give you a better answer, but I think we have to try to be careful but not let our OCD take over. Of course it easier to say than done. I am struggling with this pandemic and my ocd so much that I feel most of the time OCD just takes over completely....
I’ll keep you in my prayers
@elijah7 Thank you ❤️
I’m not sure if ERP allows this, I haven’t started it, but could you discuss with him if he thinks you’re putting him at risk and if he doesn’t, then go ahead and do that ERP and if he does, just wash your hands?
I don’t want to “reassure” in the sense of telling you that nothing bad could POSSIBLY happen, but because of my own experience, I believe in sharing facts: 1) The risk of fomite transfer is already very low. That is per the CDC. Cleaning high-touch surfaces is a good idea in general, but in the situation you’ve presented, it doesn’t seem to me that the risk of anyone in your household catching COVID19 has increased by any amount of significance. (Obviously I don’t know why you felt your hands were contaminated, but I’m leaning towards the idea that you weren’t in a high-risk situation prior to the bookshelf incident.) 2) It is your husband’s responsibility to himself to make sure his hands are clean before he touches his eyes, nose, or mouth. It is NOT your responsibility to him to ensure a completely sterile environment. He is already aware of the existence of COVID19, and presumably fully capable of commanding his own actions, so it is up to him to protect himself in household situations.
I got the intrusive thought "What if you unknowingly ran into your kitchen, pumped soap in your hands & rubbed it on your TV". My compulsions now are trying to figure out if I did that, looking for potential soap rubbed on the TV. How would you apply ERP to this scenerio? I'm confused about how it works to break the cycle.
I'm stuck in an OCD cycle and having a hard time trying to figure out how to treat it with ERP. Basically what happens when I go to the bathroom, shower, walk past the kitchen sink, my mind goes "You've just ran over to the soap/shampoo bottle, and pumped soap on yourself for no reason." I think that's a weird thought, where did that come from. Next, I'll sometimes re-rinse my hands, body, etc. to make sure I haven't just ran and pumped soap on me for no reason. For ERP I get confused if I'm just supposed to let the thought "you've just ran over to the soap/shampoo bottle and pumped soap on yourself for no reason" be there and not react with compulsions. Or if I need to pump soap on me and not rinse it off, making pumping soap on me the new norm? I don't know, it's confusing to me.
(How can you do ERP when there is a legit concern?) Trigger warning for Contamination OCD/coronavirus. For instance, I’m pregnant right now and have had a resurgence of contamination OCD. (I also have GAD, so I’m never sure which tactic to take with a thought.) Health really is a legitimate concern here, and I’m told I should be more careful. Of course I overdo it, yet ERP seems to be the exact opposite of being more careful and that seems very, very unwise. How do you do exposure for something that your doctor says to not do? How do you do exposure for something like, for another unrelated example, not wearing a mask around other people right now in the time of the pandemic when you’re absolutely required to wear a mask and it’s dangerous to not? ERP basically doesn’t make sense to me. By that thinking I should be changing the litter box and not washing my hands and *I definitely should not do that*. How do you do ERP when there is a legitimate aspect of an actual concern?
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