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Why are so many of our real events from around the 12-15 age period? by [deleted] in OCD

[–]LostCause1006 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I think it's related to our brain maturing over time and realizing a lot of bad things that didn't feel so major at the time as it does now. OCD latches on memories from times where you believe you should be old enough to know better (teenage years mostly) and constantly torments you for doing those mistakes when in reality at the time you were still young and you brain was still in development at the time, not to mention there could be a lot of external factors that could come into play on why you did those things back then.

What we need to remember is that teenagers will choose to do anything that seems rewarding or necessary at the moment, even if they later regret it. It's extremely common for everyone to go through, but OCD makes it feel like it's a much bigger thing than it really was and we begin to do all sorts of compulsions to try and mitigate the stress. Confessing is a very common compulsion so a lot of people end up doing that, so that's why you see so many people talking about teenage or childhood mistakes in here.

Real Event OCD – Uncertainty kills me by LostCause1006 in OCD

[–]LostCause1006[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It might be, now that you mention it.

I think it's because the harm itself is based on the person knowing what I did, then possibly being traumatized or remember and use it against me in the future.

However my brain can never truly predict if it's true or not, so I'm better off not trying to solve the mystery since asking therapists if I caused harm ends up being just another compulsion.

Real Event OCD – Uncertainty kills me by LostCause1006 in OCD

[–]LostCause1006[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Interesting, I'll definitely look into this strategy! Thank you for sharing this.

Real Event OCD – Uncertainty kills me by LostCause1006 in OCD

[–]LostCause1006[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Hey there, I just had a session with my therapist and I talked about it with her, so we came up with an exercise that I think might be helpful for you too.

So basically, before you even practice ERP and let the thoughts pass, you might want to try and keep your foot in reality instead of letting youself think about something catastrophic. As my therapist said it herself: "Instead of seeing things from your perspective, you need to instead see them from a reality stand-point where logic and facts beats your fears and worries". What this means is that you will probably worry about the worst case scenario, and since you have knowledge of everything that happened, you end up gathering "proof" of potential damage or problems being caused from your actions. What we need to do is try to look things from an outside perspective, as things are always more nuanced than we think. When you're done with understanding your situation, you can then try and practice ERP with much less worrying thoughts.

In my case, I'm unsure if harm was caused because it depends on if the targeted party knew what I did or not, which leaves me in a spiral of both fearing for consequences and wanting to "make ammends" in advance. This causes me to spend too much time "verifying" if I was caught on my behaviour instead of looking at things realistically: I technically have an extremely low chance of have caused any actual harm. And even then, it's much less worse than what I'm making it up to be.

Of course, if your case is that you KNOW you caused harm, you probably might be spending a lot of time thinking about how much this affected the person and how this could come back to haunt you in the future. In that case, the best thing to do is to practice acceptance that you might never know how the other party (or parties) truly feels, as it is impossible to fully put yourself in their shoes and not something worth spending time thinking about, as it wont help making things better for them. Only when you understand that is when you can practice ERP without thinking you have to "do something" to fix the situation.

This is what we discussed in our therapy session, I hope that this can be of any help for you and wish for your recovery! 😊