Reply To: I have still got ocd, we will get through this together… thejourney continues

[ArchiveParticipantParticipant]

Well…  to any old forum users reading this, please do rejoin the new forum. This is the future. We are dealing with a pandemic today… We have to get through this, and we can all do it together, with our new friends here too. So here we are. Let’s go for it!     Today, I’ve managed to get to our local shop… 10 years ago, no way… But today was different. I applied the stuff I’d been taught by my CBT therapist. I tried to not look too closely at the pavement as I walked. In years gone by, I would keep stopping to look back the way I’d come, just to make sure I hadn’t stepped in anything. The path was damp. Maybe from recent rainfall. I really don’t know… In the shop doorway, is an antibac gel dispenser. Just once will be enough, before picking up a basket ready to go around the shop… An impossibility ten years ago… But today it was different… I pick up the things I went in for… A cellophane wrapped pack of bread rolls… Then over to the refrigerated shelves for milk. It comes in plastic bottles with a moulded handle… Clean? I really don’t know… Never mind the person who stacked the shelf, I’d handled them after handling the bread rolls… I have contamination Ocd. They’ll get handled by the till operator, who will have handled cash, other peoples goods, all sorts of things… I’ll handle them again to get them into my bag, which, is not going to be sterile inside. I’ve never, ever, cleaned the inside of a shopping bag… And to be honest, I’ve never cleaned milk bottles… Even when I was a child in the 1960’s we had glass bottles. Sure, they got rinsed before going back to the milkman. They handled new bottles with the same fingers as the empties. Sometimes birds would peck at the foil tops to get the cream!!  They weren’t washed. They must have been safe enough… Later, we moved on to the famous tetrapaks… To begin with, they were torn, or cut open along a fold. Do you remember how grubby they were? Blackened fingernails… But they didn’t make us ill…  People would have sued the manufacturers… It would have been in the papers and on telly… We’d have died of food poisoning… Mmmm…. Back to today… I put the milk bottles into the freezer. Will they be okay? I don’t know… But they have always been okay so far, and that is evidence in our favour. We won’t need to clean the bottles before opening. We never have… And what about the foil inner to the coloured screwtop? Even with clean fingers they are difficult to open. Once opened, they can never be cleaned again, and 2 litres will do a lot of cups of decaff coffee. So that’s the story of the milkbottle Exposure response prevention routine. The thing is, very few people ever clean them… Along with a lot of other stuff the till operator has handled. I can remember worrying about the credit card reader…  The number buttons, and the button that used to be green… If they were really all that dangerous, the litigation solicitors would have sued, and made them legally unusable. But if they are okay for everyone else… And only transactions under £45 are contactless… More later. God bless you for reading.

Wannabe