I’m really struggling right now. I’m having intrusive thoughts around a real event. My family thinks I’m being ridiculous and can’t understand why i can’t let it go. I keep ruminating on “what if”. I don’t want to say what’s bothering me because that’s reassurance seeking. So instead I’ll give an example of the type of thinking that bothers me… It’s illegal to run a red light. I went through a yellow light that turned red. How soon did it turn red? Was I in the intersection before the turn? What if I get a ticket mailed to my house and we can’t afford the insurance hike on our monthly payment. What if that leads to not being able to have 2 cars and one of us loses our job and then we can’t afford to take care of our family on 1 income? I’m sure from that example you can see how distressing this type of thinking is. It’s a real event, I’m responsible, I’ll ruin everything, etc, etc. I think like this no matter how improbable the scenario is. To me, with OCD nothing seems improbable, but I can see the irrationality about it. My compulsion is rumination on the event, researching online, confession, explain myself, and ask if I’ll get in trouble. Does anyone else deal with this type of OCD or anxiety related thinking?

Hey guys, for the past three months I’ve been obsessing over a mistake I made about 6 months ago, I constantly have panic attacks and wake up in fight or flight mode I have convinced myself that someone is gonna find me somehow and punish me. I have endlessly looked up reassurance that what I did wouldn’t get me in trouble or something, I have filled up 5 different ChatGPT chats and it tells me it’s 100% certain nothing will happen. But then I convince myself well everyone says not to trust it and then I just spiral again. The point is I’m just scared, I’ve convinced myself this isn’t OCD because it’s something I actually did wrong. I can’t stop looking for reassurance because that’s the only thing that makes me feel safe anymore. Everyone tells me, just say maybe, maybe not, but my brain has convinced me the stakes are too high. I’m too scared and I don’t know what to do.

With real event OCD, I don’t know if any of you feel this way, but do you ever feel that the past event(s) that you ruminate about or constantly obsess about are gonna come up in your future and just absolutely ruin you, that’s how I’ve been feeling for months, it just feels like impending doom, and I hate having to even think that my future would be ruined by what I did as a teenager, and I did some dumb things, that I regret so deeply, I just can’t stop thinking about that.

Real event, legal ocd, and false memory ocd around events that happened years ago but never bothered me till a month ago and now my life is being destroyed because I feel sooooooooooo guilty