Everyday I see a trigger that most people can walk away from but having contamination ocd I’m really struggling. Today I saw blood on the public bathroom floor and while I saw it before I stepped in the stall, I’m just really struggling now as I got close to it and public bath and blood are my trigger. Really looking for tools to fight that ocd voice please.

Im the same, i have emetophobia (phobia of sick and being sick) and If I’m out In public and there’s sick on the pavement I have the exact same reaction it’s very difficult. You must remind yourself there’s no possible was it could have physically touched you. You were close to it but you did not touch it.

Public bathrooms are like trigger central to me.

Can you do some scripting with your therapist? At the IOCDF they do a group exercise for contamination fears where they go dumpster diving and stuff. Huge community around this kind of OCD.

I think it’s helpful to recognize that there is a rational and ordinary concern here. Blood borne pathogens are a legitimate concern. You wouldn’t want to go touch it to create an exposure. But the catastrophizing is the OCD. So once you follow basic mall employee protocol for calling the custodian of whatever, fighting OCD will mean trusting that the protocol is sufficient and doing exposures about “what if the standard cleanup protocol isn’t enough to protect me.” Push into that fear of what might happen if you weren’t adequately protected from blood borne pathogens. What might happen? And then what? And THEN what? Most of this will be mental scripting to be able accept the possibility of whatever lies at the end of the “and then what?” chain of hypothetical events. You can work on this even while being waitlisted for a therapist bc a bunch of the OCD workbooks have instructions on how to do “what if?” scripting. Hang in there, you’re going to push through this and be all the stronger for it!!

*custodian or whatever

No possible way*

Thanks all. It’s so hard as I work at the mall and have to use public bathroom daily. Most of the time it’s moderately clean but being trained to look for the contaminants and triggering days like today really set me back a ton.

Tryingso hard to deal with the discomfort. I’m not wiping my shoe as much as it’s the easy way out

I’m still waitlisted for a therapist. I think dumpster diving or any other conventional dirt won’t gross me out so long as it’s not public bathroom or bodily fluid in a bathroom which is my trigger. I know it’s not rational but I can touch a trash can and be ok washing my hands once but the sight of a dirty public bathroom is enough to trigger me.

Thanks so much. I didn’t even know about what if scripting and I’m looking into this now! Very helpful. As for the custodian sadly ours is actually very below standard and I’ve already complained but they have done nothing. For example, the custodian doesn’t use cleaning materials. She wipes the bathroom with a rag wet with water and no cleaning solutions. She also just empties the trash and leaves. She cleans a long bathroom with 8 stalls in under 3 minutes since it’s very bare min.

You’re welcome! As for the custodian, I see a legitimate concern and it sounds like grounds for contacting OSHA. https://www.osha.gov/workers/file_complaint.html