Hi,

I'm new here but unfortunately not new to OCD. I've suffered to varying degrees for more than 20 years (I'm 35 now!). I have two beautiful children, my youngest born in July and a 2.5 year old.

My OCD centres around fears of contamination, which peaked during my pregnancies but is a bit easier now, and magical thinking which is currently my biggest problem. At least the contamination fears, all be it extreme, have some basis in reality. The magical thinking and the fear that thinking certain things, or imaging horrible scenarios involving my family, can make them happen is proving much more difficult to manage right now.

It's the magical thinking that has brought me here. My husband is incredibly supportive but the magical thinking OCD is something he just cannot really understand. I'm a logical person and even I cannot really understand why my brain is trying to convince me that I have the power to make or prevent something awful from happening.

Now I have two children my brain likes to play the safety of one off against the other, ie if you do that you'll protect child 1 but not child 2 and so on. So whatever I do I feel horribly guilty.

I also struggle more around Christmas, the end of the year and start of a new year. I attach huge significance to things being 'just right' in my mind for the start of the year and fear that I can somehow jinx the whole year by thinking the wrong thing and not performing certain rituals around that.

It's this that is currently distressing me most at the moment. It sounds and feels crazy writing it down but I've been 'stuck' in a mental loop for the past three weeks around whether thinking something just before I had a haircut will now mean something awful will happen to my daughter in the new year.

My OCD is such that I've been weighing up whether or not having another haircut can cancel out the bad thought and make it all ok - in my heart I know it won't, I know I'll either think something equally bad or I'll think that by giving in I'll make the original bad thing happen. Hours of my life have already been wasted trying to weigh up the pros and cons of action/inaction.

The people around me have no idea how much mental and emotional energy is being spent on this right now. I've almost convinced myself that because this time I feel so bad it must somehow have greater significance than other OCD thoughts I've had over the months and years.

I am aware that being a new mum again - my baby son is five months old - may be adding to the problem and making everything feel more extreme. On the outside I'm coping well with two children but the mental effort has really started to take its toll on me now.

I have previously had counselling/CBT for OCD, including a stint after my daughter was born (focused mainly around contamination fears) but I feel I never really tackled it properly. Because I've already been seen twice before I feel unable to ask for help again as the waiting lists are always long and they'll see that I've already been seen previously and didn't make as much progress as I would have liked. The sessions they provide are quite restricted and set to a certain time limit (10-12 weeks I think) and at the end of that they seem to just send you off on your way and forget they ever saw you.

Sorry this is such a long post (it's a miracle the kids have slept long enough to write it!) but I wonder if there are any other parents out there who have had similar experiences and struggle with similar thoughts/fears?