- Date posted
- 1y
Has this videogame made me hurt my cat?
Weird question I know but bear with me. During this summer I developped intrusive thoughts about being an animal abuser and coincidentally, at around the same time, I also developped unwanted involunatry spontaneous action against my cat for which I always felt guilty about and I would pet them afterwards to make up for it. Now because of that, as long as I didn’t make up for what I did, I couldn’t partake in my hobbies, one of which being playing videogames, I started identifying myself to the character I played so much it felt like a second life as many player of this game often do. At some point I realised that those actions were automatic, and since I couldn’t control them, I would just play my game because I was tired to go pet my cats everytime I did something wrong to them. But an incident happened in September where I left for class without removing a heavy extinguisher from the closet in the hallway of my house, which could have fallen and hurt my cats had someone opened the closet a bit hard. I called my parents to tell them not to open it and went to attend class but it wasn’t enough since I had a feeling they would do it anyway, and at some point I felt the need to leave class and take the earliest bus home to fix the issue myself but I didn’t, for what reason I do not know, and I felt super guilty ever since, similar accidents happened since then and I can’t justify these actions as being involuntary anymore... I feel like making myself not play and pet them kept me in check and now that this punishement is gone my body takes decisions that will endanger my cats so I stopped playing... I don’t know how likely or plausible such a thing is but if someone coukd shed some light on what to do that would be amazing, I’m kinda at the end of the rope with this one... You can check some of my older posts to get more details about what I described. I do see a psychiatrist who will let me see a therapist hopefully soon. Ultimately I want to know if what would be the best decision, delete my savefile? Would that help? I’d be sad to lose all my memories with them playing. If I do recreate a savefile, would those symptoms come back anyways? Is it just not related?