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Phobic of bleach


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I am phobic of bleach. When I use it for the toilet I use gloves. My mum touches the bottle and I fear bleach gets on the toilet flush button and door handles. I have changed my clothes a lot over the past couple of days after brushing against the door handles. Pathetic huh?

Would love reassurance but it’s not the done thing with OCD ?

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7 hours ago, daja said:

I am phobic of bleach. When I use it for the toilet I use gloves. My mum touches the bottle and I fear bleach gets on the toilet flush button and door handles. I have changed my clothes a lot over the past couple of days after brushing against the door handles. Pathetic huh?

Would love reassurance but it’s not the done thing with OCD ?

Pathetic? No, you are struggling with a very real, very difficult condition.  While it is definitely not the best/right choice to change your clothes in these situations (definitely a compulsion), we can all understand doing it because we have all been in similar moments.  The important question is, what are you going to do about it?  How can you change things for the better.

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I think you can experiment with where you "draw the line"

To be fair using gloves while you put bleach in the toilet, is NOT unreasnoble, lots of people do, and I'm pretty sure that's one of the recommended  control measures at work, (not that we are using bleach these days).

How ever plenty of folks just tip it down the look, trying not to get it on Thier hands.

Jumbo washes his hands in the stuff till it hurts, (bloody hell @Jumbo mate!)

You have to decontaminate your self if you have been in the vicinity of bleach.

So we have a spectrum.

A reasonable goal, (not changing clothes after touching a door handle).

I think you could set yourself some exercises, using

SMART

Specific

Don't change clothes after touching the toilet door.

Measurable

That's pretty easy to measure!

If you are pouring neat bleach on your hands you have gone to far.

Attainable

I know you can do it!

Relevant

Well it's definitely that

Time based

Let's say wait 5 mins before you give into getting changed.

 

You could work out a hierarchy of door knobs, which ones are the most "contaminated" and work your way up .

Whatever, you're are not pathetic, you just have a problem that needs fixing.

Mind you you have been on here ages , you know all this.

I reckon you just need to get going 

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9 hours ago, Jumbo said:

Recently, I handled a letter that I feared had blood on it. After freaking out the next thing I did was to pour copious amounts of neat bleach onto my hands. Duhhhhhh!

After 30 seconds or so I had to rinse my hands thoroughly... the burning sensation got a little too much to bare, ha ha. And guess what... after all that my hands still felt contaminated!

And this is what nibbles my biscuit about the "little bit OCD, or shouldn't it be CDO, or its all a big joke".

I'm not a humourless prude far from it I happy to laugh at the absurdity of OCD,  but honestly people who just think its"being tidy", haven't got a ******* clue!

Off topic rant sorry, but not sorry enough not to post it.

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16 hours ago, daja said:

I am phobic of bleach. When I use it for the toilet I use gloves. My mum touches the bottle and I fear bleach gets on the toilet flush button and door handles. I have changed my clothes a lot over the past couple of days after brushing against the door handles. Pathetic huh?

Would love reassurance but it’s not the done thing with OCD ?

It's absolutely fine to wear gloves to use bleach. It's also fine to do it without gloves on. 

If you got bleach on your clothing you would know because it would stain your clothing. If you got bleach on your skin you would know because it stings!! (if you wash it off immediately though it doesn't harm you!). So basically OCD is lying (as it always does) by telling you that bleach is on your clothes/skin because you brushed past door handles BUT I completely empathise with the fear that thoughts of 'spreading contamination' cause and it's not silly at all! 

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Hi Jumbo, it realised many on this forum like bleach - funny huh. I like hydrogen peroxide as it breaks down much quicker I think but it’s expensive.

Thanks for your comments ClosedForRepairs unfortunately this isn’t my only worry at the moment. I will re-read your post sometime.

Always good to read you dksea.

That helps BellAnna in that if I got it on my clothes I would stain them or if got it on my skin it would sting. That’s true so I guess I am worried about trace elements.

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Hope you're ok Daja!

Yes, it definitely would sting or stain. As you say trace amounts of bleach are not a problem; very dilute bleach in water is even used to sterilise baby's bottles and dummies (e.g. Milton) without the need to rinse it off afterwards.

I do sometimes worry about bleach and chemicals too and even though I know it's not rational I do worry about trace amounts but thinking like this has helped.

Edited by BelAnna
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