Need advice on a situation that’s making my OCD act up and making me feel really bad. Please respond!! So I have a lot of OCD surrounding the fear of having had cheated on assignments/tests. I’m a college student and I really value integrity and honesty in my work. Yesterday during class we were playing this game for extra credit and we were not allowed to talk with/work together with other teams. The one guy on my team mentioned that he was in contact with one of his friends on the other team were in contact and trying to collaborate. I was PISSED. I wanted to tell him to stop but I was really shy and this guy is really confident/loud so I didn’t find the courage to stop him and I feel really bad about it. Eventually he stopped having contact with him but I’m afraid that his knowledge of stuff with the other team influenced our answers. Then this other guy on the team tried to make contact as well but I was able to shut him down and tell him to stop. The thing is I don’t think we ended up using any of the information we knew about the other team, but I really don’t know. We ended up winning the most extra credit points than any team and I feel so bad about it. SO BAD. I don’t know what to do. I really want to confess but I’m afraid of getting in trouble, afraid of getting 8 other people in trouble if they get mad at me esp cause a lot of them weren’t even the ones communicating. I’m also afraid of this desire to confess being a compulsion, but I also don’t want to benefit from anything that could possibly be cheating and I’m afraid of being associated with this. I want to do the good thing but I also don’t want to get people in trouble. I’m just really mad about this whole situation. I’m afraid the professor is going to find out if I don’t come forward/someone else will tell them before I do. Also me and the professor are close/have a professional relationship as I’m helping her out with research and she’s helping me out with a grant proposal. I’m really passionate about it and I’m afraid of losing that opportunity and afraid that I’ll lose my career/degree over this. I did not choose for those guys to do that. I did not choose to be on their team. The thing is also they were not being quiet particularly about the collaboration. It’s possible the professor heard them talking about this and already knows and is waiting for someone to come forward. I just can’t handle this. I had a nightmare about it last night and woke up in a major anxiety attack like 3 times. What do y’all suggest I do? Am I overreacting? It is just extra credit but it feels really unfair to me. Thank you for reading if you did.

I was at a house party a month ago and everyone was taking photos of silly moments. I took two photos that had an attractive person in them. I deleted the photos a few days later because I felt guilty and anxious that I had taken them. I keep ruminating and thinking about my intentions. I do believe I took them because they had an attractive person in them. I worry that this makes it count as cheating. I am very very open with my partner and I tend to constantly confess things like this to him. I have confessed so many things to him, and he always holds the same stance: he believes that fantasizing and crushing is okay. He said he has had his own crushes and he said “fantasizing is nice as long as it stays a fantasy.” I agreed. I told him about my crush and how anxious I was about it and how I was afraid that it was emotional cheating. He told me that it really doesn’t matter and that it’s only wrong if it’s physical cheating. I should note that I have taken VERY VERY good care to never even attempt to become friends with this person. I’ve seen them a handful of times at group gatherings but I never ever message them on my own, I ignore all their messages in a group chat because I don’t want to give them special attention, I never even speak to them in person unless they speak to me first. We are barely even friends. He said he doesn’t need to know what goes on in my head and as long as an action seems innocent to an outsider, it’s not cheating and he doesn’t need to know about it. One time I confessed an action where I also felt like my intentions were wrong, and he told me “Who cares about intentions? It’s outcome that matters.” My therapist also told me not to worry about these actions. He said that if I keep ruminating on whether an action is right or wrong, I should just try to sit with the discomfort and not confess. He told me that if an action were really wrong, I would KNOW it intuitively and “my body would push me to confess.” I’m just so worried sick about this. Do I confess or not?

I’m currently in a very emotionally stressful situation with my partner. We had a huge argument because I did something I had promised not to do again: I looked at my ex-partner’s profile. To me, it didn’t have any real emotional meaning. It was impulsive, meaningless, almost automatic. But my partner was deeply hurt – and I understand why. I told him about it. We talked. It was hard. But after that, things got even worse for me. I suddenly remembered that it didn’t just happen once. And since then, I’ve been stuck in this thought loop and I don’t know if it’s OCD or not So, should I tell him that it was more than once?”– if I should tell him, even if it might mean he’ll leave me. Should I confess this? I urgently need advice. I don’t know if this is OCD or not – the thought suddenly came to me in that situation. I have been formally diagnosed with OCD. But if I know that my partner would see this as very serious and might possibly leave me over it – shouldn’t I still tell him? I feel so awful and I’m having panic attacks. Is this OCD?

I am a woman, my partner is a man. Two nights ago I was at a house party / movie night with my friends while my partner was at work. Many of the people there are also mutual friends of my partner’s. They all know my partner and I talk about him frequently. One of the people there was a (male) mutual friend who came over to my apartment beforehand to pick me up, waited for a few minutes while I finished up some chores around the apartment, and then we went shopping to pick up food and supplies for the party. During the party, this friend got EXTREMELY drunk. He was saying some pretty outlandish/unfiltered stuff the whole night about the movie were watching, laughing uncontrollably on the floor, that kind of stuff. I don’t drink, so I was 100% fully sober the entire time. The party pretty much consisted of everyone sitting on the couch for the whole night, watching movies and eating pizza and drinking. I do remember there being a point where I was kind of sunk back on the couch, the friend was sat next to me, and we made eye contact and he said something (I can’t remember what) and I remember feeling like we was a little too close for comfort. This must have lasted for less than a minute (everyone was kind of squeezed together on the couch since there were lots of us and a pretty small couch). I remember there being another point where his leg/foot grazed my leg, so I recoiled instantly, and then it happened again and I kept moving my leg away so we weren’t touching. I’m fairly certain that this was a complete mistake, as like I said, there were lots of people squeezed together on one couch, and he was very uncoordinated. Finally it was getting too late, so I called my partner and asked him if he could come pick me up since he was on the way back from work. While on the phone, several people at the party were yelling “HI” to my partner over the phone (pretty much everyone there was also friends with him). Then this friend, who like I said was VERY VERY drunk by this point), yelled (to my partner over the phone) something like, “YOU CAN HAVE MY SLOPPY SECONDS.” I was very very very caught off guard and confused. I instantly hung up the phone because I didn’t want my partner to get the wrong idea that there was something going on. After I hung up, the friend said “Oh come on I’m sure he would have found that very funny!” I was very bothered for the rest of the night and then went home shortly after, when my partner picked me up. The entire ride home, I kept replaying those words in my head over and over again, and I kept replaying the whole night over and over in my head, wondering if something had happened between us and I’d somehow forgotten within minutes or hours?? For the entirety of the next day, and the day after that, I keep ruminating on that night and trying to replay all the events that happened, what order they happened in, what exactly I remember, etc. I have absolutely no idea why my friend said that over the phone, especially since neither of us has ever expressed any sort of romantic or sexual interest in one another. When we met, I had already been with my partner for well over a year, and I talk about my partner frequently. My partner is also friends with this friend, and the three of us have had some good times together. This friend is also absolutely NOT the type of person to be sleazy, a womanizer, a homewrecker, etc. Perhaps I’m leaning into stereotypes too much here, but I should note that pretty much everyone at the party (including this friend) has mild to moderate autistic tendencies, and the friend group was brought together because we all met in a heavily anime/DnD/politics based club at a university. I say all this to illustrate that the atmosphere at the “party” was definitely NOT the type of atmosphere where anybody was hooking up, hitting on each other, flirting, etc in any way (of course I’m not saying that people in these demographics can’t hook up, but just that it was a cozy movie night with respectful friends, not some sort of crazy party). It’s the third day after the party now, and I’m still ruminating on this. I still have no idea why he’d say that, and I’ve replayed it so many times in my head that I’m wondering if maybe I just imagined it, or misheard it, or maybe he didn’t know what that phrase meant, or maybe I misinterpreted it or something. I mean, we were showing a mature cartoon movie that night that both me and this friend absolutely love, and both of us were making jokes all night about being attracted to several of the characters in the movie. Some of the jokes this friend was making about the characters were very sexual, so maybe his comment had something to do with that? Maybe he was extrapolating some sort of “sloppy seconds” meaning from the characters to me?? I’m not sure. Either way, I’ve been sitting, replaying and ruminating for days and of course I’ve fabricated lots of false memories. I’ve run through all the possibilities. Did I kiss the friend? Did we cuddle on the couch? Did he have his arm around me? What if, in those few minutes that we were alone in my apartment before we left, what if I took him into the bedroom and did something with him while my partner was gone? I do remember having intrusive thoughts about THAT before he even came over. I’ve been dealing with on-and-off ROCD for the entire 3 years that my partner and I have been together, and it always ends up coming back to an obsession related to cheating and false memories. It’s so hard to know what’s real and what isn’t, especially since it’s so easy for me to picture these things happening in my head. I’ve been absolutely lost in unrealistic obsession-induced delusions before, to the point where there was a time where I was legitimately convinced that I had cheated on my partner with a friend 18 months prior, and even went as far as messaging this friend to ask if anything had happened between us. Of course the answer was no, and things were so awkward after that. I just don’t really know what to do. I keep imagining scenarios where me and this friend were getting handsy or touchy, and I’m starting to come up with so many false memories. It’s stressing me out and I keep compulsively replaying them. What bothers me is that when he made the sloppy seconds comment, I remember feeling some sort of guilt that almost felt like it was already there? Like preexisting guilt? Which leads me to wonder why I already had felt guilty if I hadn’t done anything? I even feel like I almost remember there being a point during that night where I thought something along the lines of “Okay, I’ll allow this.” And I am so confused and trying to figure out what I was allowing. It feels very difficult to enjoy time with my partner when I have this fear in the back of my mind that I’ve cheated. Every time I try to conjure up a memory of me cheating with this person though, I always come up with a different one and none of them make any sense. What was said between us, what was done, etc? I keep making up the details as I go. The other thing is: every single person at that party knows my partner and respects/likes him. Surely if we were doing something inappropriate, someone would have said something? Surely I would have felt worried that someone would tell my partner? Surely I’d feel anxious by now about my partner finding out? I don’t know: deep down, I think I know it’s a false memory. But the situation feels so weird and unsettling that I’m considering either talking to my partner about it or confronting this friend. My next therapy session isn’t for another 2.5 weeks.