- Date posted
- 6y ago
- Date posted
- 6y ago
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 ago
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 ago
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 ago
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 ago
Thanks deputydean. What are the best ways you suggest? Is it the things like mindfulness, meditation and living in the present?
- Date posted
- 6y ago
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 ago
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
- 23w ago
I’ve said and done so many hurtful things growing up, especially in elementary and middle school. I was very passive aggressive and mean for a majority of my life, and I’ve hurt peoples feelings. I’m no longer like that now, but every single thing I’ve ever done wrong replays in my head constantly, from the moment I wake up to the second I go to sleep. I know I deserve to feel the chronic guilt and shame, so I feel even more guilty pitying myself. It’s eating me alive, I’m so scared. I know people must hate me, and they have every right to. feel like I don’t deserve to have moments of happiness because I’ve taken that ability away from someone before. I’m not diagnosed, but this has been going on for years and I’m scared to talk to anyone about it because I fear they would look at me differently knowing I’ve hurt someone’s feelings. I feel like a monster. It’s ruining my life and I don’t know what to do.
- Date posted
- 12w ago
Hi, I’m new here!! I’m praying I don’t get judged for this. But, back in late May of 2022 ( literally right before I graduated high school), I added this one random girl from my school on Snapchat. She posted something about a graduation party , so I swiped up on her story basically saying how I can’t believe we’re almost graduated. She replied and we had a really short and simple conversation. The next day ( i believe) , we started talking a lot , and I just so happened to see her at the highschool when we were grabbing our graduation outfits and doing the rehearsal. When I saw her irl, I kinda got turned off ( I heard she was kinda crazy) , and on top of that , she was a little ugly irl. I remember seeing her Snapchat bio , and she was close friends with my female cousin ( a year younger than me) , who I happened to experiment sexually with when I was 10-11 years old. I remember going to work later that day and having sort of a lightbulb flick thought ( it wasn’t a good thought though) , what if my cousin told her about what happened when we were younger? So I started to kind of panic and immediately distanced myself from that girl. I also experimented sexually with one of my female friends when I was 10-11 , and from that day onwards, I’ve been pretty much living in paranoia and a little bit of guilt about someone finding out and my life being ruined . On top of that, It’s gotten worse to now sometimes I wonder if a girl I added off of quick add ( Snapchat) is underage even if they told me they were 18+ or had 18 and above in their bio, and I get so much guilt and anxiety about that. I even had a quick thought last February on what if I did something inappropriate with my younger cousin when I was 15-16 but I just can’t exactly remember when it happened , and it still eats me alive when I think about it, because I don’t know if it happened or not. I’m sorry for the long vent, I just wish I felt normal again. No matter how much I try to do things that old me used to do, life always feels “ off”. I always kept the top part about when I was younger a secret up until early (ish ) 2024, then I vented to one of my best friends and he told me that that’s a normal thing to do at a young age. Since then, I have told multiple friends and they all say they did similar stuff, but my brain just can’t accept that. Please help me, I quite literally overthink everything nowadays. 2021 was the last full year that I felt normal ( coincidentally, the best year of my life so far) . It’s not just about sexual related things either, sometimes I’ll wonder if I messed up something at work or hit a car while driving/hit someone and drove off. I just wanna live my life how I was supposed to live it after highschool ( carefree and happy) before whatever it is ( I think it’s ocd) hit me unexpectedly. Thanks to anyone who read this , I just needed to pour it out regardless of how negative I felt typing this, I hope someone can relate , because I feel so alone in my head at times.
- Date posted
- 11w ago
So, I know my capacity to get fixated on things. And it's normally something that's relatively remote but, my latest issue is really getting to me and I was wondering if people have any advice. I'm avoiding getting too into specifics, as I don't want this to get reassurance-y but, in essence.. I came to the realisation recently that people who I'd been "friends" (feels like the wrong term now) when I was younger were not very nice people, and normalized a lot of very unpleasant behaviour towards other members of the group. They really normalized it, sold themselves as figures of authority, as older and more responsible and grown-up than others, and looking back, they acted horribly. And coming to this realisation, that I'd been manipulated into just accepting their behaviour has just... broken me. My OCD has latched onto it and I can't stop feeling irreversibly tainted by it. I've talked to others about it, and they've reassured me, told me it's not a big deal and that I hold myself to too high a standard, but none of that sticks. I feel better for a bit, then think 'Maybe when you told them you were skewing it to make yourself look better' or 'Did you leave out a crucial detail'. I keep ruminating over and over, trying to remember exactly how everything played out, trying to figure out if I fed into the behaviour, if I did something bad myself (because y'know, I feel like I was accepting of it at the time, so what does it say about my own values?). I know I need to stop doing all this if I want to improve, but then some part of me keeps saying 'So, you're just going to let yourself off the hook then?' Normally, I can rationalize my own fears to some degree, assure myself something won't happen, but the realness of the situation, and the fact I only came to understand the reality of it because the thought had been bothering me means it feels so much more all-encompassing. I know confessing in itself is a compulsion, but I keep feeling that if I'm not I'm somehow concealing what I 'really am' from others around me, and any positive interactions are me deceiving them in some way. I feel like I can't enjoy anything in life right now, and a good part of me feels I should not enjoy it ever again. If anybody has any advice on it, I'm all ears. Or even hearing if you relate to these feelings, I might appreciate the solidarity at least.
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