- Date posted
- 6y
- Date posted
- 6y
Yes, all my OCD themes stem from real life events. As I said yesterday, we all do crazy, questionable and disgusting things when we're young. Most people do and most people forget. We just have to figure out a way to live with it.
- Date posted
- 6y
Yes, however all those methods are easy to suggest and hard to apply, unfortunately. I haven't figured out how to apply them yet. ?
- Date posted
- 6y
Same thing happened to me violet I will obsess over past real events and feel a need to confess. I'll go weeks or months not even worried about it and laughing at it and then I'll start giving the thought more power and it comes back
- Date posted
- 6y
Same here, I had to contact people and apologise for trivial things that were 25 years ago. I had to ring ex girlfriends to see if I treated them badly, (turns out I didn’t). I went through the twelve steps for recovery of this OCD theme (didn’t know it was OCD at the time), and made amends to anyone that I felt I had wronged. The need to do this was of utmost importance and the feeling of urgency/anxiety I had was crazy!
- Date posted
- 6y
Thanks deputydean. What are the best ways you suggest? Is it the things like mindfulness, meditation and living in the present?
- Date posted
- 6y
Sorry to hear that ? but think the important word there is ‘yet’. I found this article online about real life events OCD: http://www.ocdspecialists.com/real-event-ocd/ I suppose if you’re already quite clued up on it, perhaps reading it might be a kind of reassurance or compulsion (I’m trying hard not to reread it) - but it reiterates that idea that we have to live with the uncertainty. We may never know if by doing these things we’re actually ‘bad’ people, or if we’ll ever be ‘found out’, we just have to manage that uncertainty. It feels so odd because I got over this and got to a point where I had a year of almost laughing at myself and my former worries, and now it’s back, my brain is almost shocked that I was able to spend a year not worrying about these things or trying to correct them in my head!! I guess it all comes back to the amount of power we give a memory or thought. Nothing has actually changed during the time that’s passed, other than the fact I’m giving that thought more power now...
- Date posted
- 6y
Sorry to hear that j289l, it’s so hard isn’t it. I just took myself to a workout class, and just kept trying to tell myself ‘I can’t ruminate if I’m struggling to breathe ? and focusing on the next dance step’. Not sure if distraction through exercise is always the best way but I’m hoping the serotonin boost will help things? Thanks for your messages guys, you’re all so inspiring.
Related posts
- Date posted
- 20w
I would really appreciate it so much if someone took the time to read this and help me. I don’t know what to do anymore. I haven’t posted here in awhile. I had my OCD managed pretty decently for a year or so on medication, but I had to stop taking it, and after around 3-4 months, the OCD has become unbearable again. It used to be much more surrounding existential themes, eating, and others, not really real event/false memory stuff. But now it’s gotten really out of hand and I don’t know how to do it anymore. It’s surrounding a time of my life a long time ago. It was a dark time. I wasn’t myself and I was going through a lot of things, and I did a lot of things I regret. I self-destructed, embarrassed myself, and wasn’t good to the people around me. I was able to get my mind off of it for a long time, even though I would still think about it a good amount. I was able to be in the present, at least moreso than now. But now that I’m off medication, the guilt has become my obsession again. I can’t move on. I can’t do anything without thinking about all of these memories. I’m obsessed. I’ve started hating myself again, so much so that it’s hard to do anything anymore or believe I deserve anything good. The people around me tell me it wasn’t even that bad, but to me it was. To me, I failed myself, lost myself, and failed everyone around me. I can’t stop thinking about every person I said something wrong to or every time I screwed up. I’ve now started to convince myself I did terrible things I can’t remember, and that my mind just can’t deal with it. And that’s why I feel so guilty. There’s nothing to really support this though. But I’m starting to really convince myself that’s true. I’m trying not to listen to it, because I’ve convinced myself I have hit people with my car before and haven’t remembered when I absolutely didn’t and I know I never have. I drive back over and over to check there’s no one, even though I never heard any bang or felt myself anything. I can convince myself of some crazy false memories. So I know that I shouldn’t listen. But it’s hard not to when I have this guilt gnawing at me constantly. I come to conclusions that this guilt must be because I did something terrible that I don’t remember, even though I already think the things I remember were bad enough. But I would know by now right? If I did something bad I don’t remember? I don’t feel like this all the time. But it’s a lot of the time. But maybe that should be reassuring, that I only start obsessing like this when I think to. The past haunts me though. And I can never be in the present. I’ve started to resort to some unhealthy behaviors to distract myself or help me work towards something. I am starting to hate myself so much and feel like there’s no way I’ll ever be able to get out of this loop. I feel like I just can’t do this anymore. Maybe I need to go back on medication. But I don’t know. I don’t really want to. But will I ever fix this without it? Why do I feel SO guilty, all of the time? I do all these things for people because I feel indebted to them, because I feel undeserving of everything. I feel awful about myself. I don’t know what to do. Does anyone else deal with this?
- Date posted
- 11w
Currently feeling extremely shameful for something I did in the past. Any advice? I've had periods of coming to terms with it and understanding that it was just a mistake, as no one got hurt, but now it's resurfacing again.
- Date posted
- 7w
TLDR; i'm terrified that my past confessions/need for reassurance to the wrong people will get back at me one day from them not knowing it was undiagnosed OCD/not understanding. back when i was 17/18 i began struggling severely with POCD. at the time, i wasn't diagnosed and had not much idea what OCD was, so naturally i just thought i was a terrible person. i needed reassurance from everyone - even coworkers, friends, anyone, some who barely knew me. i'd tell people about the thoughts i was struggling with and when i look back it upsets me because i know deep down they thought it was weird. i don't know why i felt the need to tell these people about my POCD. i even remember one of my supervisors looking at me with this horrified look on her face. the job i worked at back then, i sometimes had to do parties for children so naturally i refused because of my theme, i was (still am if i'm honest) scared of children. i ended up not being kept permanently at my job (i was seasonal) due to me not doing the parties. i ended up going back to that job a year (ish) later after being diagnosed. i made it clear i had OCD and wore lots of pin badges about it and made it my mission to spread awareness of what OCD really is. i was on meds (still am). some people had left naturally, so i know there's some people out there who never actually found out i had OCD and i am terrified they think of me as this dangerous, weird p*do because of my intrusive thoughts whenever they hear my name/think of that job. i'm terrified that my old coworkers talk about me and describe me as a bad person. i had someone come into my new job a few months back, and being in customer service, we were having a friendly chat and she mentioned she just started working at my old job. i said i used to work there, she then asked me if i was *my full name* and i said yes, she said she'd heard about how bad my manager was back then. she tried to follow me on instagram and i blocked her. i'm terrified on how she knows about me, what does she know? what was she told? it haunts me to this day. what if she thinks i'm a bad person, because my old colleagues have told her stories of my POCD? why was i even mentioned? but yeah - long story short i'm just mortified that i was so open about POCD and that there's people out there who know about it that probably shouldn't, some who i know didn't like me very much anyway, and that it might come back to me later in life and i'd lose everything, and just overall the thought of someone thinking of me as a bad person. anyone else relate?
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