Does anyone have recommendations for CBT that will ease guilt? Thanks!

@crazycatlady that happened to me today. I thought I contaminated someone with a disease. It made sense to me at the time but I did research and discovered that it wasn’t likely. So now I feel better and realize that my thinking was super irrational. It was hard to say to myself they might not get sick. I needed the proof.

Reading what you wrote, I suggest you look into DBT there’s a thing called radical acceptance. That might be a better option for you. I’ve taken this therapy before.

Ohhh, I get it! Yes, radical acceptance is great, I use that for everything, OCD or non-ocd related things. It’s like you know it’s the OCD, but your mind keeps telling you it’s important and you need to fix this or figure it out right? Always choose to sit with the anxiety. Tell yourself, “if I need to do something more, I’ll found out about it later. Right now I’ve done all I want to do with and that’s that.” The guilty feeling might take some time to go away. But, it’s most likely OCD like you said, so treat it like all other OCD thoughts or urges and accept the uncertainty.

Following!

What kind of guilt do you feel?

What do you mean what kind? Like what is my guilt about?

Yes

If you feel guilty you might get someone sick because you spread germs, then you can tell yourself “he might or he might not get sick”. But trying to ease the guilt is a form of compulsion. Unless you actually caused a 5-car pile up accident.

@crazylady the thoughts are never pleasant. I know where you’re coming from. But there are many ways people can get sick. Sometimes I think they can’t trace where the disease came from or our bodies are more capable than we think, medicine has been advancing, though I think this is a form of compulsion. Hugs ?

@crazylady. I’m glad you’re feeling better.

I had guilt over two things in the last day. Parking lot accident yesterday where a car hit mine while we were both reversing from our spots. But i didn’t realize it until it was too late to get out of the way. I feel guilty for how i handled it and fear that Because she felt it wasn’t her fault that I’ve caused problems for her life by having to report it to my insurance. The other item is that I betrayed my girlfriends trust. I met my girlfriend two weeks before moving out of state. She initially didn’t want to sate long distance but we visited and decided we liked each other and dated long distance for a year before we were able to be in the same state. While long distance(in the beginning) I flirted with other people and was challenging my sexuality at times. But once we were official and long distance I still had reservations about dating because it seemed impossible to work out. I also feel guilty for not having faith in us then. I often looked for reasons to break up. I also had scenarios where I was able to gain closure through text conversations with people from my past and didn’t tell her about it. These things often eat at me but I feel like they were necessary to my growth and my ability to learn and do better each day. I don’t want reassurance here. I just want to figure out CBT for this. For instance, telling myself “you may or may not have caused trouble for that lady by filing a claim on an accident she is technically more at fault for” doesn’t help me because there’s still time to tell my insurance “don’t pursue her insurance.” Though it would inconvenience me. And telling myself “you may or may not have done something your girlfriend wouldn’t have approved of at the time” doesn’t help because then I’d feel I need to confess, though it would be more selfish at this point (over a year after living together where once we moved in, we both agree that’s when things became more real).

I think you just have to accept that you made a mistake (if that’s what you think it is). Maybe you did do the wrong thing, but the messages were for closure and you weren’t official yet. Car accidents are super common. Who knows whose fault it was, either way it’s smart to get insurance involved. Everyone makes mistakes sometimes and we’re constantly growing. I think about stuff from my past that I wish I had done differently, but we can’t do anything about it. OCD makes us think we have to be perfect or else we’re just terrible people, but we’re not. We’re humans, and humans mess up sometimes. We can’t always do the right thing or even know if we’re on the right path, but that’s okay because we’re constantly learning from our mistakes and growing from them. If you believe you made a mistake in this situations, accept that. Accept that you will probably make more mistakes because it’s so hard to always know if what you’re doing is right. If we never made mistakes, we would never learn.

@0823 it’s not the fear of “did I make a mistake” because I’m sure in the moment I made the best decisions I could have at the time. It’s just more so “is there something I need to do further” and in these cases the “thing” is something that would incriminate me in some way and I don’t feel that it would be wise because I know this guilt is from OCD. I don’t think a non/OCD person would have this guilt. But I don’t know how to stop it.

Ok amazing!!!! I’ve actually done that in the past but didn’t realize it was a form of therapy! I just thought “k I’ve ruminated in this every night- I’ll do it tomorrow too, let me just get some sleep” and then practice mindfulness meditation. But I wasn’t sure if it was a form of avoidance- so this helps to realize that it’s actually good for me to do.