i have really bad contamination ocd and i can honestly get through my days without panic attacks but it always requires that i have hand sanitizer, wet wipes and access to wash my hands and be able to shower afterwards. i’m feeling like there’s no hope because i can get through the days okay and i try not to let other people know about it because i deal with it all privately but i’m afraid i’ll never be able to stop with all of the cleaning throughout the day. does anyone have tips to stop cleaning their hands or anywhere that may have gotten “dirty” or anything like that? thank you (:

I’m going to an ocd clinic rn and they had me create a list of things that contamination ocd affected (e.g. touching doorknobs) and rate each one on a scale of one to ten how anxious it would make me to do that and then not do the associated compulsion (e.g. wash my hands). We have worked our way up from the least anxiety inducing activity. While doing the activity I had to say out loud the thought that was most distressing and repeat it until I didn’t get anxious, but was actually bored, when I said it. At first, even the lowest activity would send me into a panic attack. But then we did that same activity next session, and the next and the next and it slowly became easier to do. When I was able to do the first activity without anxiety (or at least just mild anxiety) we went to the next one, and so on. Maybe you could do something like this? It’d be really helpful to have someone there with you though bc it can be really tough and they’ve been times that if I hadn’t had the therapist in the room with me I would’ve given up and done the compulsion. But is does get better. It’s taken me almost two months to see a little progress but I finally am! Hugs?

I had to do the same thing as Devon. It honestly feels terrible but once you can achieve one thing it feels great

@locustmoon i do that too i go through wayy too many lysol wipes even tho i know its unessesary (i don’t know how to reply to people on this i’m new ): )

oh okay @devon !!! so does that really work to make you stop thinking about it? i feel like it would make me think of it more

okay that’s crazy.. that’s seriously one of my biggest fears. I almost got fired from my job because i seriously will not take out the bathroom trash even with gloves (that i bring from home) for that very fear and i will almost never use public restrooms either even at the little store i work at where really only the few employees use it. anyways sadly my therapist who was doing the cognitive therapy didn’t help me much so now i’m going to a hypnotist but it’s not working either so love that... but one thing that’s getting me by like even if something disgusting happens during the day is to put it off. my therapist did help me to learn to hold things off so even if you have the urge to wash your hands right away try to wait as long as you can bc then either the fear will go away or you’ve at least proved to yourself you don’t have to do it and hopefully your life won’t be as impacted with having to do the compulsions at that very second. i’m not sure if that completely made sense but it’s not a complete fix whatsoever but it’s so much better than when i use to always have to drop everything and go wash and clean

taking the job i have rn is where i have to face my biggest fears and sometimes i also just don’t look and that’s something i decided on my own to be honest so it may not be technically a good thing. but my issue with blood started out by if i saw someone had a cut on their hand i would freak out if they handed me something for the fear the blood transferred onto the object onto me. so it honestly got out of control and i stopped go to drive throughs bc they had to take my card and id put like 5-10 bandaids on at all times to secure all of my even healed paper cuts.. sorry for the backstory but then i started thinking that i hated my life for a little bit there bc i wouldn’t stop inspecting people’s hands for cuts so i slowly just stopped looking, i’d just focus on their face or their arm so i didn’t have to think about the possibility of the blood so therefore it wasn’t there. so id assume too if you needed to use a bathroom try hard to focus on the bathroom door or ceiling and not on the trash can or the places in the stall where blood may be. bc the diseases in the blood cannot live past a few seconds and even though i know that, if i see it i will freak out too): but if you’re not looking you can’t see it so you can’t freak out! this logic is probably flawed but it’s helped me a lot and i hope it makes a little sense to you(:

Wow a77. We are sooo similar! I also used to be fearful of blood on people’s hands but I also got over it by not looking! I appreciate you sharing everything here. It really helps. The delaying technique has worked for me too (when I am able to do it). I’m trying to understand my fear of blood as period blood doesn’t really carry diseases but for me it’s not about diseases, it’s the pure disgust that I’m next to someone’s used tampon. And then ocd steps in and tries to make me think it got allover me and basically everything I have come across shortly after. I work at a mall so I have to deal with this daily and trying to battle it. I may have to take meds soon if I am unable to use tools from CBT.

i feel like that’s the case with me too sometimes bc for me it’s really just with anything with blood or bodily fluids that just completely freaks me out. but i did the CBT too and it wasn’t too effective but i’m hoping that the hypnosis i’m doing right now will help so maybe you could look into that too? it’s with a licensed therapist so it’s not like just some sketchy hypnotists it’s specifically for ocd and fears and they try to get into your unconscious mind and help for when your conscious mind doesn’t want to accept the therapy which is what was happening to me and probably you too! @lark

i have many different issues this is just one of them i havnt been able to control very well

I feel that buddy. I keep Lysol wipes and spray stocked at all times

I try to logically figure out if something is dirty. It doesn’t always help but it sometimes does. Like I think things like even if it was at one point dirty what is the likelihood it still is

@devon thank you!!! i’ve gone to a therapist for awhile and she gave me different tools but none of them seemed to work, i hadn’t heard of that one though. if you see this, do you repeat out loud like what the fear is or like the action you’re about to do? i really want to try new things and hoping this app will help(:

@animallover i feel like i know that too it just like feels so much better to just wash my hands too so it’s hard to go against like what makes you feel better, but i really want to!!!

@a77, np! You repeat the fear. For me it was typically “I’m going to get sick” or “bacteria are sleeping into my skin”

I have the exact same issue as you!! I manage to not overly sanitize but my trigger are dirty public bathrooms and I have to use one daily which sets me to shower for long hours and treat my clothes as if it was radioactive. I’m suffering really badly today since I had a bad exposure. Some of the things I’ve been trying before today’s bad exposure is refusing to wash hands more than once. Not sanitizing unless needed. Etc.

@a77 no no the point of it is to make you keep thinking of what’s making you anxious until the panic goes down instead of trying to get the panic to go down by doing a compulsions or other avoidance behaviors, which will only bring the panic down in the short term. If you can hold out through the panic until it dies down and you do that over and over, the “peak” anxiety level will start to become lower and lower until it is barely anything. Think of it like a rainbow - the outmost color arc peaks higher than the innermost one. Mind you this process can be very long. I’ve been at it for about two months and still have a ways to go. I think maybe it is because I’ve had this for years and years so maybe it could take less time for you:)

@Devon thank you so much for your help!! i feel you, it sounds like we’ve got similar stuff going on. the therapy i’ve tried so far isn’t working so i’m always looking for new ways so thanks so much(:

@a77 any tools your therapist gave you that you can share? My issue is extreme fear of public bathrooms, specifically period blood. If I see anything close to it or even being next to the period trash bin, it’s enough to make me want to shower for over an hour and feel like everything I touched got contaminated.