constantly asking myself if i really have ocd, or if it’s denial. but at this point, it doesn’t matter. my guilt will just consume me anyway, no matter what it is. shame will take its place, the intrusive thoughts will linger. i believe time heals. but time cant heal shame. what if i’ve really become what i’m most scared to be? what if i always was? the guilt from the past will always bring back the same thought: “you are a monster. look what you’ve done. you’re in denial. it’s not ocd. why do you even apart of the community. you’re fake. denial. denial. denial.” i await the day pure happiness comes. the day i wake up and feel alive. the day i forgive myself for everything. the day i realize who i am. i pray i am not what i fear. though, i live with the uncertainty. this era in my life, if i ever overcome it, will always be remembered. it hurts to think about. one day having to share this horrible story. will i have to share why i felt the guilt? or will i keep it locked up forever? what will make me feel better? patience. praying for peace. let the day come.

To be absolutely clear: self compassion stuff is not in the book, I really recommend reading/watching other things about it, and also reading the book, before doing the stuff in the book. Because the book will show you in serious detail how to process feelings like guilt, and once you've felt it until it's gone, you'll feel at peace but raw, and turning to self compassion and compassion for others at that point would be an extraordinarily healing experience.

Thank you so much for sharing your journey and the book recommendation. ?Aho. Also, you mentioned that as you began to practice self compassion it opened you up to feel it from others. Have you ever felt like you didn’t deserve compassion because of the feelings of guilt and shame and perhaps blame? How did you overcome that? And how do you take accountability and be self-compassionate at the same time, without being so harsh? Like would you be open to sharing an example. This is something I sometimes struggle with, but am developing the skill to do.

I understand, but I just can’t convince myself that i’m not a monster. the feeling is just so strong. I feel like I don’t deserve to be alive. I keep telling myself i’m in denial. Which leads to be thinking “if i’m really what i think i am, could i live with myself?” which leads to me thinking more and more about how much i hate myself even if i’m uncertain. I’m so terrified to be a horrible person. I made a couple mistakes. I’m plagued by the guilt. Which has led to me believing i’m a horrible person, and into those things, which led to shame and the OCD. I cant feel compassion with myself. I’m just disgusted. I’m terrified to share what i’ve done. Mostly because if i was a random listener, hearing that some other person did what i did, I’d think they were gross. I wouldn’t want to go near them. So i feel that way about myself. There feel no escape to this. I’m too young to get ERP for myself. I cant tell my parents what i’m going through, there’s just no escaping this. I have to live with the battle in my head everyday. And i don’t know how much longer I can do it.

@AlwaysHere Another thing that plagues me is how i feel the need to confess what i did. Maybe not now, but later. I’m terrified to fall in love now. I’m going to feel the need to tell them what i did, and what if they hate me? I would hate me. So why wouldn’t they? I’m also severely depressed. So i’ve lost interest in relationships and have no sex interest. and the type of OCD i have, makes this so much worse. Because it’s telling me i’ve interest in people “because i’ve gained interest” or “realized my interest” in the thing i’m terrified of. I just can’t get away from it.

@esoteric_nomad Ahh, that's exactly why self compassion came before being open to compassion from others. I didn't right off the bat go "I love myself, and I deserve love". It started with beginning to tolerate myself and just be a bit more flexible on the idea that I'm the worst person in the world and everyone would hate me if they really saw me. Realising that others make mistakes too did help. Self compassion was a bit by bit process, and opening myself up to the love and kindness and understanding of others was bit by bit too. I didn't always feel worthy of it. Sometimes I still don't. I haven't shared everything or righted every wrong. But I now have more faith that I wouldn't be condemned by others- or at least not others who are kind. Genuinely kind people have been through their own pain. They don't think that others deserve shame or believe in the idea of a rotten or tainted person based on mistakes. They believe in second chances. They're not all a stereotype of the worst of twitter or gossipy highschool students. I had to learn to not need everyone to like me and be a bit more ok with the idea that some people won't understand me or have compassion for me, but that it says more about them than about me. As for accountability and self-compassion... Do self compassion first. You're tortured by guilt and it means your heart is thoroughly in the right place. Once you've done strong self compassion work and processing of the guilt, shame and fear like the book shows, you'll be able to do accountability the way it's meant to be. Accountability isn't overblowing mistakes and begging for forgiveness. It's not making excuses or misdirecting, either. It's just pure sincerity- knowing what you did, and that it was wrong, being sorry, saying that you did wrong and are sorry, and offering to make amends. Mind you, the idea of that can be terrifying if you're in the middle of OCD and your brain is giving you over-responsibility, false memories compiled from other guilt feelings and insinuations and the opinions of others etc. My experience was that I had a very bad real-event OCD of having done something major wrong. It wasn't exactly a false memory OCD, there was no memory although I hunted and hunted for one, it was just a belief. I did around 3 days of ERP for it through emotional processing of my huge store of unprocessed guilt using the book I mentioned, and I mean non-stop allowing those awful feelings to be in me, for 3 days, resting when I could, taking care not to act on either my moments of despair or my moments of clarity. During it, I "went back" in my own head to times that I'd abandoned myself emotionally and times I'd made bad mistakes, and said kind, compassionate things to myself. At the end of the days, I had a deep meditative experience of love and compassion for myself and the world. I knew that my thoughts hadn't been reasonable. BUT, I settled on a lesser version of the OCD fear. That I'd done some less bad things around the same real event/topic and had caused harm by negligence and potentially done more bad stuff around it on purpose and then forgotten. I didn't know what to turn to, it became a slight return of OCD trying to work it out, but I realised what was going on and instead just treated it with more self compassion. I accepted it as my reality and was able to live my life actually very happily for a few years by massive doses of genuine self compassion exercises when I felt shitty, and my distressing OCD symptoms went away completely because I was no longer resisting whatsoever. At this point I (kinda embarrassingly) made sincere apologies/did accountability for the stuff I now sincerely believed I'd done and wasn't resisting. It was met with kindness and understanding, but I still feel weird about it and would prefer to correct it even if it makes me sound nuts to them. It was a few more years before I shared my story with others and got compassion for it specifically. On the back of that, I was able to reassess my beliefs and work out what was realistic and what wasn't, without it turning into OCD. My conclusion is I made some mistakes, I really did. But I hadn't done anything bad and forgotten, and the stuff I thought I caused by negligence wasn't just my responsibility and I couldn't have done any different at the time due to my traumatised headspace. Now I have much more putting the record straight to do than I have apologising stuff to do. I have a more rational view of what harm if any my actual mistakes caused and I no longer think they say something awful about me. In retrospect it would have been better for me to work on opening up and doing therapy about my beliefs before I did accountability. But we live and learn. Accountability, when it does come to it, is going to take courage, I won't lie. But you'll be able to do it. With self compassion and emotional processing, you'll have become flexible and you'll have a new confidence that you can cope with the risks of pain or judgment. Baby steps. You don't need to solve it all at once, even though after processing you might feel a rush to do so. You're allowed to take your time and think, and to be smarter than I was before you do accountability. Just don't let yourself settle into not doing that step at all, because it's an important one, and healing in of itself. You'll be able to live with yourself. It's a real gift.

@AlwaysHere I felt exactly the same way. Disgusted, terrified, and full of shame. Please take the book recommendation and watch the Brené Brown videos and read about self compassion. It doesn't have to be self love, you only have to do baby steps alongside processing your guilt and shame (which is in the book). It's the light at the end of the tunnel. I had severe PTSD and OCD for 3 years. I barely left my bed. No friends, worked a couple of shifts a week, did nothing, had panic attacks. I felt precisely the same way as you, I don't want to be insensitive here but even to this day, having recovered, I don't think there's much on the planet which is more stigmatised than what I believed I had done. Maybe yours is even the same thing. The stuff I'm recommending to you literally saved my life. I didn't just end the agony, I was able to enroll in college and a top uni, make friends, travel, learn languages, get hobbies, gain wonderful friends who SEE me and love me even when they disapprove of me or disagree. There's a whole life out there for you. Be brave.

@AlwaysHere You will be able to share it when you have worked through this by processing guilt and adopting self-compassion, when you find kind people who earn your trust. It's hard and painful. But people are much less judgmental of us than we are of ourselves. I really mean it. They SEE the things we don't let ourselves acknowledge, like our pain or mindset at the time of our mistakes, they know our guilt indicates our pain and distress, etc. And often they have their own mistakes and stories of shame to tell. The first time of sharing a mistake is the hardest. Please watch the Brené Brown videos on shame and vulnerability. Telling your future partner about this is a bridge you can cross when you come to it. It's not something you need to solve and have a plan for right now.

@AlwaysHere I totally hear you and feel you. Those types of feelings led me leaning into compassion and self love and beginning to chip away at any blocks I had around receiving from my self and then compassion and love from others. It brought me to surrender. I just felt like I didn’t know what to do. Who was I? I just ask God for guidance. I didn’t need to be anything. I began to stop trying to be something. And practice observing when I was. I felt like that was ego getting in the way. What I saw didn’t match an image of who felt I needed to be to accept myself and love my self. So I began to open to removing the conditions I had. I saw how much my self abandonment and betrayal was costing me being able to show up embodying what I value most. And I’m sure you might relate when it involves the people you care about it can feel extra sensitive. So there feels like no way around it. When I don’t love myself I see how it effects the OCD cycle, and potentially my relationships. So there’s no escaping it. I have to confront it. Even when it feels hard. I’m learning how to be a friend to myself not just when it feels easy. So I’m with you. You are not alone. And I’m really thankful for this group. Because talking about this stuff and getting over this fear of being judged is a little challenging sometimes especially when I’m working on not judging myself. ?Ty

@Louw Thank you so much for taking the time to respond and share all this I super appreciate your feedback and respect and honor the journey you went to get here. Blessings to you. ?

@AlwaysHere And I’m not saying I have it figured out or anything. No. I’m just taking it one day or hours sometimes at a time. Noting any helpful clues. I just noticed this link between trying to live up to an image in my mind or this idea of who I “should” be was blocking me from actually healing. Do you feel that too? So that’s where my work is right now and some days it feels hard. But that’s part of why I’m here. Like @Louw says, baby steps.

Your comment was completely fine. thank you for responding. It means a lot to know you took the time to read it, and even more to know that i’m not alone in this. Though, no one is. It’s just nice to remind myself. This too shall pass. God knows a path. <3

@AlwaysHere ???