Checking they are breathing, and handing over bath time
The checking and the avoiding feel like care. Each buys a moment of relief and teaches your brain the danger was real. Getting bath time back is the goal, gradually and with no risk to your baby.
It looks like care. You check the baby is breathing, then check again on the way past, then once more before you can sit down. You hand over bath time, because your partner is steadier. You take the stairs with them held a particular way, or you do not take the stairs at all. You keep the windows shut. You make sure you are never quite alone with them. From the outside, a careful parent. From the inside, a day organised entirely around preventing something you cannot name to anyone.
The checking and the avoiding do the opposite of what they feel like they are doing.
What each check teaches
Every time you check that they are breathing, two things happen. The anxiety drops, because for a moment the question is answered. And your brain records the event: that was dangerous enough to need checking. The drop is the reward that keeps the checking going. The record is what makes the fear grow.
Then the answer fades, because certainty about a sleeping baby is not something a check can give, and the doubt returns, and you check again. The more you check, the less the last check holds. This is the OCD engine, identical in a nursery to anywhere else, and it does not stop because the object of the checking is precious. It gets worse for that reason.
What avoidance teaches
Handing over bath time works the same way, with one extra cost. The relief is immediate, the danger has been managed, and the brain files: I could not be trusted with that. Over weeks, the file thickens. Bath time, then the stairs, then the knife, then being alone in the house with them. Each avoided moment brings relief and confirms the fear, and the list grows to match.
And you have never once found out what happens when you bathe your own baby, because you have never let it happen. The prediction that something terrible would occur has never been tested.
The rush of love
There is a particular check in perinatal OCD that does more damage than the others. You look inwards for the feeling everyone described, the rush, the overwhelming love, and you monitor for it. And monitoring for a feeling is the surest way to stop being able to find it, because feeling and inspecting use the same attention. The absence, produced by the check, then becomes the evidence: I do not feel what a mother should feel, so what does that make me. It makes you a person checking, and the feeling returns when the checking stops.
What treatment does not involve
Exposure work here never involves any actual risk to your baby, and the fear that it might is what stops people starting. That is not what exposure means, and anyone suggesting otherwise has misunderstood it. The work is giving up the safety behaviours, and only that.
Getting it back
In CBT with exposure and response prevention, we map the cycle first: the trigger, the intrusion, the meaning it has taken on, and everything that follows. Then we build a ladder from something you could do this week to the thing you want back, and we withdraw the compulsions gradually, by agreement, at a pace you set.
A step might be checking once at bedtime rather than four times. Then not checking on the way past. Being in the room during bath time. Then doing part of it. Then doing it alone. Carrying them down your own stairs. Keeping the knife where knives go. Being alone with them for an hour without a running commentary. At each step, the thought arrives and the task is to let it be there without the check and without the handover, and to find out what happens. What happens is that the anxiety rises, and then, given nothing to feed on, falls, and the baby is fine, and your brain records a different lesson.
Practicalities
Sessions run over secure video, which for new parents is often the difference between having therapy and not having it. You can feed during a session. The baby can be in the room. It is genuinely fine if we are interrupted. Where you want it, I am glad to work alongside your GP, health visitor or perinatal mental health team.
The goal is your ordinary life back in your hands: bath time, the school run in three years, being alone with your own child without a guard posted. If the checking has taken over the day, there is more on how I treat perinatal and postnatal OCD.