Yesterday was really bad, had an awful panic attack, tried to confess, ruminated all day, and then I decided, I cannot do this anymore. I cannot continue to torture myself like this. I don’t care if I’m bad, a cheater, a liar, whatever. I want my life back. So today, I caught myself starting to ruminating 4x and made myself stop. I feel somewhat better. I’m going to do this everyday until I absolutely fucking love my life again.

Hi everyone, I’m new here, and I wanted to share my experience. I’ve been struggling for over a year now on obsessing over a mistake. And the rumination of the mistake I made has been overwhelming and exhausting in those two years. I feel like such a horrible person. At the time, I didn’t realize what I was doing would affect me so much. When I realized it was wrong, I just said I’ll never do it again, and I moved on. But then months later, I was reminded of what I did, and I felt like I did the worst thing in the world, and that my life will never be normal again. And ever since then, it’s been a constant thought. And it’s exhausting. I have been able to open up to my family and a close friend about it and their reactions were so nonchalant compared to what my brain has been telling me. They say it wasn’t even that bad, and that I shouldn’t be beating myself up. I tell them how badly I feel and they just act like it was nothing. I thought that would help, but my brain continues to tell me how horrible of a person I am and I obsess over this one mistake I made two years ago. I’ve learned from it, I’ve moved on, I’ve opened up about it, I’ve gotten reassurance, but yet it still eats at me. It’s constant some days. Where all I wanna do is lay down in a corner and never leave. I feel like my life will never be normal again and I’ll never experience happiness again. Whenever I smile or feel any type of joy my brain tells me to stop and reminds me that I’m a bad person and I don’t deserve to be happy. Even though everyone tells me what I did wasn’t even that bad. And that it doesn’t make me who I am. But guess it’s not enough and I’m really running out of options.

I have been really really struggling for the past 3 months and haven’t been able to stop intrusive thoughts/ rumination and confessing. It’s making me question my entire life, my relationship and even who I am as a person. It’s mainly effecting my relationship, I am so afraid that I did something or think things that are definitely hurtful to my partner. I know my brain is contorting my own memory and making things seem so much worse. I also know I haven’t done anything bad, all my things I’ve confessed about have been considered “normal” and I’ve been told that “you’re normal, you didn’t do anything wrong”. But I have felt this intense sense of guilt and shame and it doesn’t go away, I can’t even be a normal person anymore. And I keep searching for “just one more thing I need to tell” and I don’t want to keep searching my brain of every time I’ve said or done anything that I can distort and make seem 1000% worse. I’m isolating myself and just feel like I’m a bad person. I keep confessing my thoughts, feeling, urges, etc. to my partner and while I know I would never do any of these I feel like my ocd is trying to convince me that maybe I would because “why else would you think it or feel guilty” and that makes it so much worse. I really need guidance on how to handle this. What do I do to stop feeling like this and heal?

I ruminated too much this morning and got distressing mental images (and confirmation) which sent me spiraling again. How do I stop thinking about this and how do I get back to myself? I feel destroyed.