OCD
You touched a doorknob and now everything you've touched after is contaminated and the cleaning chain expands faster than you can keep up.
You touched a doorknob. Now your hand is contaminated. You touched your phone with that hand. Your phone is contaminated. You put the phone down on the counter. The counter is contaminated. The decontamination chain expands faster than you can clean. Public bathrooms are unusable. Other people’s homes are unsafe. You sanitize groceries before they enter your house. You change clothes when you come in. The list of contaminated things in your environment grows daily.
The decontamination is the loop. Without it, the contamination thought wouldn’t have anything to do.
The contamination map keeps expanding.
Educational, not diagnostic. Not a substitute for clinical assessment.
© The Institute for Applied Strategic Therapy. All rights reserved.
You very likely came up in a household where cleanliness was tied to whether you were a good person. You may have grown up with a parent who needed the house spotless and treated dirt as a moral failing, and you absorbed the framing. You may have lived through a stretch of your life when you were genuinely sick or genuinely scared of getting sick, and the system never recovered the resting baseline. You may have started the cleaning during a period when you needed something to control, and your body became one of the few things you could keep clean.
Each decontamination delivers brief relief. The relief tells you that the thing was correctly treated as contaminated. The next “what if it’s contaminated” thought arrives because you’ve trained the response system. The chain expansion happens because anything the contaminated object touched has now been categorized too. You’re not being unreasonable. You’re following the logic of contamination consistently. The logic is what we change.
If the cleaning has become a multi-hour ritual, see I wash my hands compulsively . If the avoidance has shrunk your world, see I’m afraid to leave my house .
The germs aren’t the problem. The decontamination ritual is the system that’s been telling you to keep flagging things.
Strategic therapy works the chain in reverse. The contamination thought arrives, you let the object stay where it is, and the decontamination doesn’t happen. The brief relief that has been telling your system “yes, that thing was correctly flagged” stops being delivered, and the map stops expanding because nothing is being added to it.
The doorknob becomes a doorknob. The phone goes on the counter and stays there.
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