OCD ERP exposures

So I have contamination OCD. It worsened when I was living alone. The first time was when I was renting a flat. I didn't feel comfortable there at all. I wasn't used to cleaning and it felt very overwhelming.

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I was also living near the chemistry faculty. I remember that my sofa felt like a safe place. People working at the faculty sometimes did their grocery shopping in the same shop that I used. The groceries felt contaminated to me, and I would often wipe them with paper towels.

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The shower was leaking and water would end up on the floor. I didn't like touching surfaces, and if I touched something that felt dirty, I would often change my clothes. When I lived with my parents, I didn't have to clean much, and I can be a bit messy. I think that actually made my OCD worse.

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Later I moved in with my boyfriend. Then he moved away and we became long-distance, so I was living alone again. At that time I was writing my thesis. The flat had a kitchen, a bathroom and two rooms, and it felt like too much to manage.

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That was also when I became scared of prions. The feeling was similar to what I had experienced before. My parents even suggested that I stop using one of the rooms if cleaning it felt overwhelming. Unfortunately, that turned into a disaster. If I hung laundry to dry, I would start worrying that droplets of water from the laundry might fall onto something and contaminate it, which would then make the laundry contaminated.

That was when I started therapy.

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As I wrote in my previous post, understanding where my OCD was coming from and realizing that there probably wasn't much risk of prion exposure brought me a lot of relief.

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I eventually moved out and started living with my boyfriend again in a smaller place that felt easier to manage. My therapist insisted on doing exposures, especially touching things that I was afraid of.

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I remember reading a paper about difficulties therapists encounter when treating OCD. One of them was correctly identifying obsessions and compulsions. An obsession is something that causes distress, while a compulsion is something that temporarily relieves it.

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I think many people assume that people with OCD are very hygienic and love cleaning. In my case that wasn't true at all. Usually the mess would just accumulate. When I had to clean something, especially something I considered "prion-related", I would become extremely uncomfortable. My body would tense up and I would become very cautious.

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I think part of it came from working with chemicals that were genuinely dangerous. If I touched something by accident, I immediately considered it contaminated.

Eventually I realised that cleaning itself wasn't bringing me relief. Instead, it often triggered even more anxiety and obsessive thinking. The compulsion was often taking a shower and then finally allowing myself to relax or go to bed.

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Sometimes I would enter a strange panicked state where I repeatedly cleaned something or cleaned it with extreme caution. It felt a bit like a mixture of contamination OCD and just-right OCD, where an activity doesn't feel right and you keep repeating it.

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I feel like the exposure of touching something super dirty was the next, hard step. The first step was just cleaning normally instead of treating every cleaning task like a radioactive biohazard. Teaching myself to react to those situations more normally.

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That is actually very similar to what my therapist was saying. The only difference is that my therapist wanted me to deliberately touch things that scared me, sometimes things that felt like a 5/10 fear and sometimes a 10/10 fear. During sessions they would repeatedly ask me about the fear itself.

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I wasn't afraid of germs and I can imagine that people who have issues with going outside might struggle more.