Did something amazing today

[Guest nervous]

Ok you may not see this as amazing but it was for me. I have severe contamination ocd and lately I have been making quite a bit of progress. My wife is out of town for work and that leaves me to taking the kids around to their schools. i am not too good yet at being out in public especially crowded areas like a school drop off time. So I am dropping my older one off at his school and I have my 4 yr old in the stroller and when walking home another parent in a hurry rushes past and his coat brushes the awning of the stroller, it made me cringe a bit but after a moment I started to think "what if that coat touched his face as well?" In the space of a few seconds I was now convinced that it had indeed touched his face and was indeed contaminated and my mind was racing trying to think of how to "fix" the problem. As I walked home I tried to slow my mind down and not let this take over, it was so convincing that I must do something. The further I walked I tried to think about how nice a morning it was and how the air smelled clean and tried to notice other things around me besides my OCD talking to me. When I was almost home I was still convinced I needed to clean everything, so I said to myself, well I can either throw gasoline on the fire and try and clean or I can do nothing. I took the leap of faith and did nothing, now over an hour later I can see I made the right choice, even though some anxiety still remains, I feel I did the right thing. I know I had imagined it worse than it was and come to think of it now that would have had to been quite a magical coat to be able to hit the awning of the stroller then bend around and hit my son in the face but at the time I was convinced that this was what happened.

Two things worth pointing out is that OCD can make our fears seem so real and convince us that what we could imagine has indeed happened. The other point is that if we can stop ourselves before we start doing our compulsions we have a much better chance of fighting this, it is so easy to think, I will just clean a little. But a little is never a little if I would have started I would have spent hours trying to clean a crying 4 yr for something that never happened.

and now I breathe

Edited October 22, 2014 by nervous

[Franklin12]

Brilliant, well done!

[dksea]

Congratulations, you should be really proud of yourself! And its great that you posted to give hope to others in their struggles!

[PolarBear]

Maybe the coat did touch your son. Oh well. Stuff happens and that too would have been something to resist performing compulsions over.

Good for you for resisting.

[Guest imalright]

Wow! ))))

Now that is an achievement!

Thanks for sharing - gives hope and strength to others! X