My OCD didn’t spring up suddenly, it was something that had been gradually building up for most of my life – it just took a while for the symptoms to hit me full force and have such huge control over me.

I had reassurance behaviours from about the age of 5, where I’d have to tell my mum if I had a “bad thought” or I’d done something wrong. These then increased until I had a problem with intrusive thoughts at the age of 11, moving from primary school to secondary school. It was then that I first went to a therapist that gave me some techniques, few of which I can remember now, which seemed to help a bit. Nonetheless, I think that it just suppressed what was going on and it took until I was about 14 for the OCD symptoms to start.

It started by washing my feet and splashing water under my arms after a shower and compulsions gradually built up until my life was dictated by the compulsions. I look back now and can’t believe how bad it got. The peak of it was between December 2010 and April 2012. I was washing practically everything. I broke a phone because I ran it under the tap twice or three times daily and also broke an ipad because I was washing it. I destroyed many books and my clothes were constantly damp from splashing water on them. My skin completely dried out because I was washing my arms and hands too often.

I went to a therapist for the first time in November 2010, she was homoeopathic and worked with talking therapy as well as hypnosis. I could tell from the first session that it wasn’t going to be right for me, so I stopped there.

It took me a while to get the confidence back to go back therapy. SO it was in late February 2012, the 28th of February to be exact, I can still remember the date because the session was so poignant to me, that I first went to cognitive behavioural therapy. I can truly say that CBT changed my life, I have no doubt that I would have continued to deteriorate without it. From then on my life improved, extremely rapidly. I’m going to document the therapy in more detail so I won’t go into it now. But it worked incredibly well, so well in fact that I am now completely compulsion free and no longer consider myself an OCD sufferer. I even forget that I ever had it and so have my family.