Past-Oriented OCD

I have lots of intrusive thoughts about “what if I did something wrong” or “what if I hurt someone without realizing it” in the past and have an overwhelming urge to reach out to everyone I’ve dated and ask if they are okay with me (even though doing so would be super weird and random to them probably). Is this a common experience? My thoughts feel so convincing that it has progressed from a much more mild state to full out believing what my thoughts say about me although no one has ever said anything bad about me (to my knowledge) and I’ve always been a loving and respectful partner. Three of my past girlfriends have told me that I was the best to them and they are forever grateful for the time they spent with me yet I still have thoughts about them and others! Any guidance is appreciated, I feel as if I’m alone with these worries! I need help to stop seeking reassurance.

0hseeD

Date posted: 19h

Maybe you did maybe you didn’t. Wondering if others feel this way seems like an effort to find reassurance that others feel this way so you must be OK. Take care of yourself and use “maybe I did, maybe I didn’t” as a way to work with OCD. You’ll never get enough reassurance no matter where it comes from so feed OCD uncertainty.

Anonymous

Date posted: 18h

@0hseeD It’s weird because I even outright asked an ex “have I ever hurt you” and they said no and that I was the best boyfriend they’ve ever had and I “brought so much color to their life” and that seemed to help. But now it moved on to other exes it’s so annoying

Anonymous

Date posted: 17h

Hi anonymous, It is a common experience even without OCD, it's a human prompt to want to assess and navigate from time to time as a rational considerate human. It's harder with OCD as no matter how many people including yourself or videos show the evidence you did or did not hurt anyone, OCD begs to differ and will always switch targets and sides to stay relevant. I learned recently if i can't explain why i believe in what I believe in it, isn't my belief, it's from someone else's belief. The weird thing is I'm willing to defend someone else's belief than my own belief. So OCD made up that story and instead of assurance it's asking for reassurance which relies one too many answers to the same question expecting a different answer from other people instead of yourself. OCD is a very inaccurate crystal ball and witness despite invoking strong and real emotions with no real events. So i like to treat OCD as a magic 8 ball with the "try again later" outcome. There is no amount of pre-determination to prevent harm nor amount of compensation to rectify if you did harm someone. It is only proper if someone comes up to you on their own accord and tells you that you hurt them and if they even want you to redeem yourself or help heal them. Most people feel more healed if you just leave it alone, that also means towards yourself too. If detectives can't seem to find an answer quicker to solve a murder case and doctors can't avoid not hurting others sometimes, we don't have to be so hard on ourselves as it's not our job. Humans are meant to hurt and get hurt. Sometimes that's the only way we can grow and also not be zombies. It's just counterintuitive because OCD took the rule of treating others kindly as best you can and twisted it to remove nuances and say the only way to be kind is asking others for that reputation. You're okay, you got this. No need to engage the OCD fake magic 8 ball anymore. Just be a human being instead of a human doing.

Anonymous

Date posted: 15h

@Anonymous Quick question, wouldn’t you know like 100% sure if you hurt someone? Or that you didn’t hurt someone? My issue is my OCD finds every piece of evidence to prove my worse fears true. For example, if someone unfollows me on social media or doesn’t say hi if I walk past them, I automatically have the thoughts that they are upset with me and try to figure out why! If I did hurt someone, wouldn’t they have told me in the moment? Why do I play these mind games with myself trying to make up stories that might not even be real but feel so real? I don’t know anyone else that seems to worry about these things and they always say, “you would know if you hurt someone” but I don’t believe that because everyone hurts other people unintentionally everyday! They don’t know it unless you tell them. Sorry for the long message and thank you for your reply on this!

Anonymous

Date posted: 15h

@Anonymous Nah because it's more pain for them if they tell you about it. It's like trying to post online "the corner of the wall pushed into my toe!!" The wall and audienceisn't going to apologize or sooth the pain and the pain is already gone before the post was posted. OCD ignores rules and actual evidence. Apply it like if an ant walked away or bite you or unfollowed you on social media, does it hurt or make you wonder? No because an ant is a stranger, a topic of something the brain doesn't see a threat or interest in. OCD tries to do marketing to reform healthy social engineering into something toxic about how noble and martyr that you must treat others and yourself on conditions instead of treating yourself and other people on equal footing. Being above someone and below someone gave similar results of ignoring reality and pushing others to comfort our needs for a forever moving goal post of "if only you do this, then I will be happy" and that's exhausting for everyone. The more correct term is you also don't know if you hurt anyone. It's being able to regulate your emotions to hold the duality of the human mind without suppressing or drowning in feelings. And if you don't know you simply don't know until you do. Would you blame someone who have a mental disability of amnesia or currently at a stage where they can't comprehend their actions or be angry at a child who had yet known how to regulate their emotions yet? Even with children not everyone is responsible to educate or enforce because there are boundaries such as are you important to them enough for them to even want an apology from you or hear you out to behave? That's why it takes a village to teach a kid and even then most of the lesson best taught is in the moment. A parent wouldn't tell a child "so in case you ever hurt someone you bandage their legs up and say sorry" because it wouldn't make sense as no one is hurt, there's is nothing hands on to fix, there's no face for the child to recognize on their own autonomy this is what pain looks like to build empathy, and not every pain can be fixed by fixing the leg and how some apologies make the situation worse. People who are secure or actually willing to face the fact they caused pain and willing to work things out healthily do not question about those who they may have hurt. They can only reach out if they know either based on the other person saying something or because they know being treated that way would warrant an apology. Therapists don't go out of their way to help homeless or those crying help, they help those who's willing to go to their office because that shows the other party is open for commitment and change and even then that's hard. Treat others like cats how some cats know how to show you they are hurt, that they do walk away without saying hi, that the cat will jump onto your keyboard and not only unfollow you they will also make your social media unfollow your own friends, all the meanwhile the next day or even 5 minutes they do all the opposite. As much as cats are their own boss and annoying they are still loved and forgiven. So forgive your cat like self and find what's worth enforcing your values such as integrity instead of pandering to the rituals that seem to not allow any path of forgiveness. OCD is a disorder that causes to obstruct logic that unless it's 120% (which is impossible to even go at 100%) then it promises to not show you loan ads anymore but in reality it still would. These mind games are more safer than seeing the reality yeah you did hurt someone and you can never fix it, or you never hurt someone and you still can never fix it because no one is hurt. Brain wants to thrive on drama because our ancestors used to run from tigers and watch out for issues and it can still happen now but we have the luxury of fearing reputation instead of tigers as if someone going to be seriously harmed. But reputation can be recovered: tiger attacks, not so much. But brain doesn't know the difference between fantasy and reality.

anonymous737...

Date posted: 25w

i need some advice

So i had really bad pure ocd but recently it’s been sooo much better but i’m in a relationship and me and my bf dated before about 2 years ago then we broke up and now we are back together but i’m having an issue where i will try to go back years and find something i did wrong and i really do not want to find anything to feel wrong about or guilty specifically something i may have done wrong to my boyfriend but the thing is i’m a good girlfriend and i’m very loyal so i don’t want to ruin something for me because of my past if that makes sense like i can’t remember doing anything wrong but my brain keeps going are u sure let’s look at all your interactions with people and it’s so annoying i just wanna live my life in the present does anyone have any tips

Anonymous2212

Date posted: 24w

False Memory/ ROCD

I am diagnosed with OCD, ADHD, and mild depression. But my OCD symptoms are so prominent in my daily life where it feels debilitating. It comes in waves, there will be months with very minor symptoms and other times where it comes in random hitting me like a truck making me rethink life. I grew up having intrusive thoughts of all types, and a lot of them sent me over the edge because I couldn’t understand why things of such sort would cross my mind, things that I’m sure to this day that I’m incapable of or would never want to actually do. Yet I find myself in a constant cycle of trying to dig deep in the past and trying to figure out if I ever acted on any of the intrusive thoughts I can remember, yet ofc have no recollection of acting on them because they most likely didn’t happen. However, not having concrete proof of these things makes me not want to see another day sometimes. It is so hard to move into daily basis like this. I’m also in a happy healthy relationship and sometimes I get these thoughts of “what if I’ve done something awful during the relationship (for example, cheat, dishonesty, etc.) and can’t remember?” I know I would never do anything intentionally to harm my relationship and I think that maybe the idea of not having my partner sends me down a rabbit hole to think all these things. This mental fight is getting harder and harder. It feels unbearable. Does anyone have some fruit for thought, relate, or have any tips?

Roseptlss

Date posted: 24w

Persistent Intrusive thoughts about past actions

Hi Everyone! I hope whoever is reading this is having a good day so far :) So for years now I’ve had very bad intrusive thoughts about things that I have done or embarrassing things that I’ve said or have happened and it’s mortifying and debilitating on a daily basis. Specifically these thoughts are mainly things that have occurred from 2018-2020 and some are more simple just as a stupid joke I made or being way too loud on calls while my family was trying to sleep and others being way more complex such as past relationships and how I’ve hurt some of the people I care the most about and when I have acted on intrusive thoughts and these thoughts will appear with no triggers at all I’ll just wake up and already have something I did just nagging me. I don’t want to live like this anymore and I’ve tried working through it with self compassion but sometimes the things I said or did back then it’s very hard to forgive myself for and I’ll reminisce on it for hours on hours, gaslight myself into believing that’s not how it happened and try to change the memory itself, or just suppress it entirely. I know those habits aren’t healthy and truly I want to get better but I don’t know how to overcome some of these thoughts. I have talked to my fiancé about this a few times and even today we talked about it and he fully supports me and is helping me work through it. I might also contact my sister too, I don’t talk to her overly too much but ever since I was little she’s thought I’ve had ocd and was one of the people who made me consider that I might have it (I’m still undiagnosed but I’ll try to when I have the money and time) and I know she could maybe provide some insight. Another thing that is troublesome about the situation is my other family members specifically my mom aren’t the most helpful and can trigger thoughts. To put it in perspective on how her thought process is and some background info she is an ER nurse and has been for 30 years due to this she believes she knows mainly everything there is about mental health and she gets extremely upset when I don’t take her advice or set boundaries. She’ll force me to talk to her about my problems and when I don’t want to she’ll pin me in a corner where I’m forced to and last summer I had a really bad episode and was really overstimulated and I just finished taking a shower and due to the water on me, my hair being wet (my hair is naturally curly and it takes forever to dry and it’s very draining taking care of even with a keratin treatment) and all the intrusive thoughts I was having and she forced me to talk to her and I did open up for the first time about my thoughts and brought up how sometimes I have thoughts of hurting my animals and it makes me physically sick. Her response to this was threatening to call the cops on me saying it was a behavioral thing and I was doing it for attention. I have never hurt any of my animals but later that day my cat came into my room and a few minutes later she comes up just gives me the death stare and after a few seconds just asks me “are you going to go kill snickers?” In the most condescending tone and she’s always like this daily where she’ll force advice onto me or get upset and yell and then reinforce thoughts I’m having. I just want to know first how to stop the thoughts from so frequently and how to heal in an environmental where it keeps reopening wounds despite trying to place boundaries? I’m sorry this is really long I usually do go really in detail about things and it’s just how I’ve always been. If anyone has any questions feel free to ask and I’ll answer them to the best of my ability. I really appreciate the time you took to read this and thank you for your help! 🥰

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Past-Oriented OCD

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