I can’t trust myself when I wash my damn hands
To keep it short I have really bad contamination ocd and I’m washing my hands all the time after touching/thinking I touched various things. But the main problem isn’t getting “contaminated” and the need to wash my hands, it’s that when I’m washing my hands and I lather my hands with soap and then rinse I immediately forget if I lathered my hands with soap correctly or not so I have to do it again and again and again to the point where I have spent 30 minutes straight multiple times washing my hands because I keep forgetting if I have correctly put soap everywhere or not. I try to make up little jingles/songs to sing as I do it or do it in a particular order but none of that seems to work because the inner voice of doubt is so loud.
I’m wondering if anyone else experiences/has experienced this and has any tips/tricks that I could use to get over this specific ocd behaviour I have because this particular part of my ocd is making me not want to do/touch anything because I know I’ll get caught in an endless hand washing loop after. If I could simply be able to wash my hands once and be done with it I feel it would make my ERP sooooo much easier to do because if I fail at it I don’t need to worry about being caught in a hand washing doubt loop.
Posted Dec 3, 2025, 1:47 AM UTC