No I don't like to travel and please don't touch me.

No I don't like to travel and please don't touch me is what i need to have printed on my clothing and my luggage my car, on my voicemail....pretty much everywhere and that explains alot of my issues.  I am generally OK to get out of the house to get to work, i have some rituals that i have managed to habituate over the past two years so that i can get out of the house in a more timely manner.  I am OK being out of my house for about 10 hours during the work day which makes it hard for me to hang out with people after work.  I start to obsess about the safety of our animals at home.  That is always where my obsessive thoughts take me, I come home and find that someone has tortured and killed all of little bunnies and smashed all the fish tanks so they have suffocated on the floor.  So I am always rushing home to check on all of the rabbits and fish.  I compulsively call my husband over and over again to ask him if they are all ok, these days he doesn't tolerate that behavior from me so much.  I can take day trips with some difficulty, I have irrational fears about where I am going, that somehow i am going to run out of gas on the middle of the highway or i am going to get lost (truth be told that is my worst fear) i don't like going to new places, I have real problems with it.  Incidently I am going to set a GOAL (giving ocd another lifestyle) to go to the water shed near my house and i am going to ask help from my support group to go.  Now back to the traveling issue.  Both my husband family and my family live a couple states away and it is drivable but incredibly stressful for me to make the trip so to be quite frank on the matter we tend only to visit his family because mine is like walking into a nightmare.  I will obsess and compulse for days upon days about leaving for a drive down to my inlaws.  I obsess that the house isn't the clean enough, that someone is going to break in and kill our animals, that i will forget something like my medication or that something else horribles going to happen and if i had just thought about it alittle bit more before we left everything would be OK.  I get worried about leaving the house physically leaving it.  That the locks are going to fail and I get stuck pulling on the front door from the outside as if to try to get in and if i don't have my husband with me I could be there a good 10 minutes.  I have a hard time enjoying what ever trip we take because i am so worried about getting back home and I really have a problem staying in new places.  Some part of it is the contamination issues that I have some problems with but most of it is centered around the paranoia i have with people that i am not so sure about.  It is just really hard because there are lots of places in the world that i would love to see and go to and I just mentally can't right now.  I think that i would have to be heavily sedated to get on a plane right now.  I don't like planes for a variety of reasons including the fact that they don't seem very sanitary, in my opinion the bathroom is nasty, i keep feeling like i am rebreathing everyone else air that has been inside them and finally that you can't get away with not getting touched. which leads nicely into the second half of this entry....don't touch me

I have noticed over the years this issue has gotten worse and worse.  I don't like people that I find stressing, am not fond of or unfamilar with being close to me, like touching distance, I don't like handshaking these days either.  It is probably something that I should start working on before it gets bad.  I don't like having people follow me around anywhere, which is a problem for my side of the family because what ever i seem to be loking at they seem to find to be the most fascinating thing on the whole planet and are essentially my shadow. 

This whole touching aversion has made it hard for me to go to the doctor or the dentist or pretty much any other appointment other than my therapist and psychiatrist visits. (no touching there) Crowds of people are out of the question and shopping in bookstores is a real problem because I don't ever seem to be able to find my own space.

Well i will try to write more about this later. Please comment if you have a resource you would like to share or if you have any questions.