Acted on a compulsion, feeling frustrated :(

What you are describing is a very classic OCD cycle, where brief relief is immediately followed by a new threat and a new sense of responsibility. You did not mess everything up, and the urgency you feel right now is coming from OCD’s demand for certainty and moral correctness, not from a true obligation. From a therapeutic standpoint, the healthiest move is to forgive yourself, allow the anxiety to be present, and choose not to confess, undo, or perform another compulsion even though your mind is insisting that you must.

of course you can forgive yourself. you can always, always forgive. i think the right thing to do is to tell yourself to accept the anxiety, according to ERP principles. i’m new to all this too, so it’s hard for me to say since i’m struggling with the anxiety acceptance bit. don’t go back, confess, and do some new compulsion. you already know how that plays out. i think the fact is that your anxieties could actually be true. all those things you mentioned could actually happen. now, are they LIKELY to happen? probably not as likely as it feels. but literally ANYTHING could happen. like the world could end tomorrow. so, usually, it’s not crazy that we think these things could happen…the unreasonable part is how much we worry about them, how much time we spend in our compulsions, how much of our life we dedicate into “fixing,” given the actual probability our worries happen. i don’t know about you, but for me, my compulsions are so pervasive in my life that i’d say they’ve directly impacted some of my character and personality traits. so yeah, long story short, we should probably give this anxiety acceptance thing a shot. and my two cents are that instead of denying the reality that these possibilities we worry about ARE actual possibilities, we just wait to see if they actually happen. hopefully, the more we see that they don’t, the more our minds will become more attuned to reality and the stronger we’ll get at dealing with anxiety and uncertainty. now i need to screenshot my response and read it to myself daily lol.

Thank you so much! That’s really helpful and it’s nice to have someone bring me back to reality and remember this is very classic OCD like you said. 🙏🏼

Thank you so much! I completely agree! I’m working on just sitting with the anxiety, it’s so hard but you’re right that it’s the only way through! If we’re worried about something, accept it could happen, it could not, we don’t know. But we don’t have control over that. Haha I might screenshot all of the responses I get here too to keep myself on track 😅