Sometimes I'm just amazed with frustration about how crippling this disease can be. My mind is always obsessing over one thing, if not the other. Did I get urine on my hands? Could that saliva spread herpes? Is that scab underneath my finger nail going to get loose onto food?I was making an effort to make some food my mom suggested, stuffed bell peppers. I didn't even get past the first peppers before the knife slid out one end and grazed my finger. I looked at my finger, which was not bleeding out, and searched for any opening I could find. There wasn't one, other than a red line I saw.Any regular person could get past this and keep on making the food. But I had to work on just not throwing everything away. Or not throwing away everything that my finger touched after that as microscopic amounts of blood could be getting on food and other things in the kitchen.I wanted my mom to be happy about that food being made when she gets home from work, but I'm stubborn and won't push through that.As I see the types of things that I'm still having a difficult time with, I don't know how I'm going to improve beyond my current status.I thought I may have gotten some urine on my belt yesterday. So I challenged it and touched my hair and put my hair on my bedding. It's taking a toll on me to not wash all my bedding today.It's taking a toll on me to be paranoid about spreading urine all over the house. It's taking a toll on me to be paranoid about spreading microscopic amounts of blood all over the house. It's cases such as this that I haven't been able to overcome the challenge of doing my exposures. Does it really just come down to taking the risk or not? Is there really no other cognitive tool? I feel so alone when it comes to taking that risk.
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I can so relate to this–all of it (except for some reason, blood–especially my own–is fairly low on my “yucky” list  Plenty of other candidates, though).[br][br] You did really well to do the challenge.  Mostly I can’t.  Especially lately, because my husband currently has a very contagious condition (and I may have caught it–waiting to talk to doc). The idea of spreading it around does bother him some, but nowhere near the obsessive level it does me.  Which is unfortunate because I have to somewhat stay on him about it, although he is getting better about noticing what he touches when.  I do do keep my mouth shut sometimes :), but deciding which is important enough to bring to his attention and which isn’t–another thing to obsess about.
Have you looked into other therapies? Not instead of ERP, but in addition to? I've been hearing about something called acceptance and commitment therapy which incorporates mindfulness and some other techniques. It apparently has helped some people who found ERP alone too much of a struggle.