How do you get over the guilt and a real event feeling like “evidence” when it was actually a bad thing that happened :(.

Hi Isabella, I struggle a lot over the years with real event OCD as well as false memories stemming from revisiting those real events so many times that they get foggier and harder to tell what exactly happened anymore, like a copy of a copy of a copy…. In my experience, the more you dwell or revisit the real events bothering you, the more your OCD tends to make you look worse and worse, regardless of if you did anything wrong or not. Try to remember that no amount of dwelling, or guilt or shame or regret over past actions will magically change them, revisiting them or the feelings they caused will just make you focus on them more and feed your OCD more. We’ve all done things we’ve regretted over time, but we can’t change what happened. It’s how we learn and move on from our mistakes that matters. Your OCD wants you to live in the past because nobody’s memory is perfect so whatever questions it wants you to answer definitely about yourself, your behavior, your incident…you will never be able to provide a concrete answer and it will never be satisfied, so choose not to feed it as much as you can. The hardest thing to do is forgive yourself, especially your past self for whatever happened or whatever your OCD is trying to convince you may have happened. You are not that person anymore, no matter what your OCD is trying to convince you to the contrary. You can’t affect the past, you can only affect what happens now. Your OCD wants you to chose to live in the guilt and doubt it causes you and stay dwelling on the past while missing out on the present, but choose instead to not pay attention to it and choose not to play it’s what if and rumination games. I know that’s much easier said than done. Try to tell it “so what if I messed up in the past, or didn’t, so what if you think i should or should not feel guilty about it….I can’t change the past and I am not that person anymore anyway. There’s no point in feeding you by staying in the past, I’m moving fwd with the present the best I can and choosing to be the best I can now….where I can actually affect the outcome. So go kick rocks!” Or something to that effect…may seem silly but it usually helps me when I’m struggling with my real event guilt and shame. Anyway, stay strong against your OCD bully Isabella, and take care.

I’m still trying to figure that out. My therapist says to do the things I used to do that made me happy, to do erp. Expose you to what sets off the ruminating, but avoid doing compulsions

Radical self acceptance, learning from the behavior, accepting that you did the best you could at the time (In this case we were both very young when the incident happened and we just didn't understand as much as we wish we did now. It's really difficult but with practice it can work. I'm sorry we went through that

Read up on guilt and shame! It helped me a lot , lots of repetitive reading

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