So I've continued trucking along with my food/eating issues. I have continued to work on the same things and started to move forward in others. I have now eaten pizza 3 times from the pizza place I banned long ago, and can honestly say I have no anxiety eating the pizza, even thinking they may have been baked on rusty pans. I have continued to purchase bakery items almost daily and eat them, without any anxiety either (rusty pan concern here too!). In fact, I've probably been eating too much of them, ha! :) I went through a drive thru about a week ago that I haven't been to for awhile and successfully ate a cheeseburger there. I have gone back to the Hy-Vee grocery store a few times, that I stopped going to about a year ago. Have purchased and eaten food from there each time. I plan to make a big trip there tomorrow to buy several days worth of groceries. Wow, it is so nice only traveling 5 minutes to a grocery store, instead of driving a long ways away to get to a different Hy-Vee. I am planning starting this week to try some other new restaurants (take out of course, I can't bear the thought of eating AT a restaurant and using their silverware right now). The ultimate goal for my OCD in the food hierarchy would be to be able to eat out a restaurant without concerns, and I hope I can get there someday. I've been pleased with the progress I've made so far. It may not sound like much, but every little step helps. On another note, I had posted last week about an unexpected laundry exposure I needed to do. It turns out that actually went quite well, and I have been able to wash most loads of laundry only one time through, without really having any anxiety wearing them afterward. The loads I have had trouble with are towels and underwear, BUT for normal clothes....pants, T-shirts, I've been able to do them one load through the washer and they are done. Talk about a time saver! It makes me feel awful thinking about all the time I wasted back when I was running them three times through, even twice up to last week. I wasn't sure I would ever be able to do this and thought that basically my days were going to revolve around doing laundry. I imagine I saved about 5 hours of time this week alone, just on this one ritual. If you refer back to my last post, there is obviously a ton of work ahead of me in this area, but for me to start here when I wasn't ready is huge. Even if I don't get cracking on my laundry issues for awhile in full, at least I know I have gotten a start.
Now.....the clothing and husband contamination seems to get worse every day for me. This is what scares me. I feel that I may be able to slowly self treat some areas of my OCD, but the clothing contamination and feeling like my husband is contaminated are very extreme. I am going to call this episode the "chair fiasco", trying to be humorous but it's really not. I haven't sat in my seat at the kitchen table for almost 4 weeks now. It all started on Mothers Day. My puppy peed on the kitchen floor right next to the kitchen table. My husband cleaned it up and during the process he put his hand on my daughters chair seat. Well all I could imagine after that were his hands which had been touching pee soaked paper towels. The chair was now contaminated with dog pee. I meant to clean it up right away, but I didn't want my husband to see the decontamination process that I would put it through. One day turned into another and pretty soon it had been almost 4 weeks since my daughter and I sat there. We ate our meals on the couch or standing up at the kitchen counter. A couple of times during the past month I have noticed my husband touch my seat back with his hand when he is standing there looking outside. I asked him to please not do that because then I don't want to sit there or I have to wash it off. I have continued to explain this is why I'm not sitting here. His hand is contaminated to me ( for reasons I have previously explained in posts and he also has his hands in the dogs mouth frequently pulling stuff out that she tries to eat). I had off work last week and took the time to reall clean up my house, as I've been fousing on OCD cleaning and other parts of the huse were really needing some attention. I decided on Friday that I would tackle the kitchen chairs since I got the rest of my stuff done throughut the week. I wiped and cleared the kitchen table, and wiped down my cair and my daughters chair. They are wooden chairs wih a fake leather seat. It took me about an hour total to clean both chairs and I used a combination of wet wipes, rubbing alcohol and paper towels and Dawn dish soap and water. I was really excited to have a place to sit down again. I told my husband the day before that I would be cleaning this and if I saw his hand on my chair again I wasn't going to be able to sit there and if that happened, then I told him not to keep asking me why I wasn't sitting at the table again. On Friday he got home from work a couple of hours after I had cleaned them. He hadn't been home for more than 5 minutes and I saw him walk over to the window...and this is when he typically grabs my chair. In hindsight I should have said something. I should have reminded him, but I said nothing. I suppose part of me was hoping he would remember. Then he placed his hand just like he normally would. The first thing I said was" oh. my. gosh" in a very irritated way. As soon as I spoke the words, I think he connected it and his hand quickly pulled off the chair. I explained that I had just spent an hour cleaning the chairs and he insisted that he never touched it. I asked my daughter later if she had seen it, and she said yes he did touch it. So all that work for nothing. Then he asks me something like " what difference does it make if I touch your chair anyway? You are really not going to sit there because I touched your chair?.......I don't really answer him, because I've tried explaining things over and over to him in the past. I don't want him to touch my stuff. If I sit in the chair, then everytime I will worry that my clothes are brushing up against the part he touched. That has the potential to turn into a lot of " contaminated clothes" which would get even more expensive. How do you all handle these kind of things in your households? I understand that my husband doesn't think like me. I understand that I am the one that has OCD. My husband knows that this stuff bothers me though. Where is the fine line between families not engaging in your OCD compulsions, and just trying to keep peace in the house? These kind of situations come up all the time in our marriage, and the end result is always being angry with each other. We also had a family wedding last night and I can't stand people touching me, so I am mentally exhausted today from that. Next post will be about my decontamination processes from the wedding and some doctors appointments last week. It has been a stressful week, but I am reminding myself of the few positive steps I did make in this fight, or sometimes what I feel is a raging war, against OCD.
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