Why do the problems continue and get worse?
The actions which people with OCD perform what we have called 'rituals' - (see Section 4) seem to work in the short term. If you can't rid yourself of a fear of catching a disease, it seems logical to try to dean yourself. It probably will make you feel better, at least at first. Avoiding particular situations or getting reassurance from friends and family does also happly to feel less worried, for a while. But these actions work against you in the long run.
There are two main reasons for this. First, because rituals do work to reduce your discomfort, they become a stronger and stronger habit. It's a bit like smoking for a cigarette smoker of 20 a day tends to become 30 a day, and then 40 a day and so on. If you feel uncomfortable and you know that some action will make you feel better, it's natural that it's hard to resist carrying out that action. The trouble is that soon your whole life is taken up with rituals or avoidance. You never learned any other, less disruptive, way of dealing with worries.
Second, by controlling the discomfort with rituals you never get a chance to test whether what you fear is really as likely as you think. By definition your worries are in some way unrealistic, but the only way to really find this out is to face up to 'them without rituals.
There is an old joke about a man standing on the street waving his arms up and down. When someone asked him what he was doing, he replied 'keeping the dragons away", the second man said 'but there aren't any dragons around here", to which the first man replied,'That shows how well it works!"
The person with OCD may be a bit like this man - the rituals serve keep away non-existent dragons. What is really needed is to learn that there are not dragons.
