It was difficult at first – it meant allowing all the horrible physical sensations of anxiety that came with the intrusive thoughts to just be there – but with time I began to feel that I was managing my intrusive thoughts better and could brush them off more easily. My recovery wasn’t linear – for four months I went through a loop of feeling better one week and having a setback the following week. But slowly, the better days started to outnumber the bad days.

It took me a year to fully recover from my postnatal OCD. By the start of this year, I felt that while the medication saved me, there was work I needed to do because I was still experiencing setbacks. I used the NHS’s IAPT service to make a self-referral and was put on the waiting list for CBT.

In August, I was assigned a therapist who was highly experienced with OCD; something I had needed all along. For the past two months, we have been exploring the reason I have these intrusive thoughts about harm: after having a child, a mother’s threat response goes into overdrive to the extent that her own brain incorrectly detects itself as a threat to the child. I have been keeping an OCD log, which has helped us to identify triggers and patterns – my intrusive thoughts always make a return during my period so may be linked to hormones, and they are always worse when Ammar is unsettled and I am feeling overwhelmed.

I have also just begun exposure therapy: intentionally thinking about my intrusive thoughts without trying to block, reason or mentally neutralise them, so that eventually I desensitise myself to them.

“OCD convinced me I was dangerous – it hurts to see people joking about intrusive thoughts”