PolarBear

Hopefully you realize this is a made-up concern and not a real one. What do you think the thousands of other people are going to do? Chances are some of the seats will be pooped on. Birds poop. Fact of life. Some won't even notice and will sit right down. Some might wipe some off, saying to heck with the rest and sit down. That's about it. Probably too late, but stop Googling about bird poop and diseases. The rest of us don't care. Neither should you. Go have fun!

Why don't you stop using your elbows, which I'm sure you can see is impractical and kind of nuts, use your hand and DELAY washing your hand for 30 minutes. Then go ahead and wash if you must. Do that a couple of times, then increase the delsy to 45 minutes. And so on. What you should find is that you'll reach a point where, by the time you've waited through the delay, you just don't care much anymore, your anxiety is down and you can go without washing at all. One concern I have with you is that I feel you likely have dozens of compulsions you do and it's going to take a lot of hard work to get rid of them. But, Rome wasn't built in a day.

Agreed. I am not a fan of replacing one compulsion with another, except in one instance: where a sufferer's compulsion is causing them physical harm and a lesser compulsion would solve the problem. Example: a sufferer who uses bleach and a scrub brush to wash has hands that are cracked and bleeding. A switch to mild soap as a first step could be in order. Other than that, delay, reduce, stop the compulsion.

Except with a subset of those with Contamination OCD, basically not at all. Dog poop is a common occurence. So is dirty laundry. But people generally don't wash their hands after touching dirty laundry. Dog poop gets cleaned up. In all cases, there is no such thing as forever contaminated. That is an irrational concept your mind invented with no basis in reality.

Phil, I know you have high anxiety and I know in your panicked mind, all you can think of is getting rid of the anxiety. That's what drives you. What you need to understand is that YOU have caused your anxiety to be so high. Every time you do a compulsion, you reinforce in your mind that the thoughts were true. That guarantees more thoughts in the future and higher anxiety. It slowly gets worse and worse. You don't want to return to a mild form of OCD, Phil. You want it gone, obliterated. Your gosl needs to be to kill OCD once and for all. Kill it! And how do you do that? Mainly by abstaining from compulsions and exposing yourself to that which you fear.

Phil, replacing the door handle is a big mistake. You know that after being told such a hundred times here. The fact is, there are no germs on the door handle or anything else you touched. The germs exist only in your head. If you replace that door handle, you will make things worse for next time. And there will be a next time. And another and another. What do you hope to accomplish with CBT? Because if your therapist is any good, s/he will tell you the same things we have. You haven't listened to us or done any of the hard work we've advised you do, so what's going to be different going to a therapist?

Then you will remain trapped. It's as simple as that. We've been telling you that for a long time.

This post is why we need a Like button.

By the way, you never have to post a trigger warning. We don't do that. Almost anything could be a trigger for someone. We'd have to warn people in every post. And how do people know your warning applies to them, unless they read it anyway?

I had to chuckle when you said you feel your wife needs to know everything about you and you've been married only a year. We just had our 31st anniversary and I'm still learning about my wife. You don't puke everything out right away and then live happily forever. You learn over time. You need to explore why you get upset when you don't agree. That's normal for a whole lot of people but it doesn't make it right. We are all individuals and our worldviews have been impacted independently. We are all going to have differing opinions. If you can't figure out where your anger and frustration come from, ask a therapist to help you out. As for dark thoughts, that's the name of the game with OCD. You could have chosen to shrug off the incident, but instead you analyzed it and ruminated over it. There's your compulsion. Leave it alone. Stop looking for an answer you'll never find.

Touch them anyway, Phil. It's what you need to do. Over and over again.

Doh!

You can learn to live with uncertainty. Everyone else does. You have to teach yourself that it is okay. You do that by stopping the checking.

Your therapist's advice was not good. Saying something or making a noise is another compulsion. You can start by counting how many times you check. Then work on checking one less. Do that for 3 or 4 days and then reduce by another check. Keep on hoing until you don't check at all.

Once again, you came here, complained about your situation, told us it has nothing to do with OCD, then slammed yourself. How's that working for you?