Dehoarding: Day 1

So it started off on monday night with my "confession" to my support group that i have an issue with hoarding.  there is one other woman in the group that has been dealing with hoarding and is still dehoarding and tends to hang on to the same things that I do.  I really hadn't realized that how hard it was going to be to tackle this project.  This is something that to me feels like well i have lived like this for so long i don't know that it has to change, and i know that it is the ocd thinking.
so tuesday morning my husband came with me to my therapy appointment so that we could get together a game plan and make a hierarchy list (that we still have to do).  I thought that it was good that my therapist said out right that my husband can't just throw things out that i have to be involved in the decision making process.  and that I have to sit with the anxiety and have the habituation start to happen. a secondary thing came up that i think that i should share.  so spare your judgement, but i don't like to shower every day or even every other day because i have a feeling that the entire shower is contaminated along with the whole bathroom, all of my floors in my house, pretty much any surface.  and walking around wet just makes it worse for me, i will go into the explaination of that at some later date but not right now. i am just trying to get out the thoughts that are buzzing around my head.

so last night, after having anxiety all day i started to dehoard part of the living room that my husband had already started working on the other night that had really upsetted me.  so i was working on a book shelf that is next to the chair that i normally sit in and have a tendacy to use it as a "satellite" storage spot for things.  So before i started on the items in the bookshelf i decided to go through my mail and throw out what i don't need to keep.  I have a hard time throwing out coupons because "they could be useful one day" (which is the catch phrase for hoarding) so i went through and actually kept the items that i needed to and then started on the bookshelf.  i was finding things from the fall of 2009 when we had moved into our current apartment.  magazines that i am not sure that i had ever read, fortune cookie inserts (which i love to keep and have taped up at my cubicle at work) anyway at the end of it with a couple of pseudoseizures and tears and panic attack i had filled up a trash bag.  then came the task of throwing it out. which induced all the symptoms again and i am going to be really honest that i wanted to dig the bag out of the dumpster this morning to check the contents of the bag and see if they could thrown out.  but you aren't supposed to do that so i hung in there and didn't check it and tried to habituate.

tonight will be night 2.