Intense guilt over past real events- please help feeling desperate

[Anonymous]

Hi all!

Like many of you, I struggle with OCD (mainly OCD over the past few years). I am a 28F and my biggest struggle with OCD is it likes to latch onto itself to past events (mainly from childhood and teenage years) where I then become horrified and guilt ridden with how I could do or say certain things. I have been with the same therapist for a few years and she has been incredibly helpful, but at the moment I can only afford to speak with her once a month and with lockdown/all this time to myself and my thoughts, these memories are coming back stronger than ever and so is the guilt/convincing myself that I am a monster.

One of my most recent obsessions is regarding my behaviour the summer I was 19. I had come back to my hometown after my first year of uni and reconnected with old friends. Because the school I went to was very small (from Kindergarten to senior year we were 160 people in total, with maybe 10 to 12 people per class size), I had a lot of friends who were a few years younger than me and a few years older than me. This isn’t what worries me, but my obsession is that while I was reconnecting with those old friends that summer we would all go partying together, and the younger friends were from 15-17/almost 18. All of the parents (including mine) knew this and were okay with it, and partying from teenage years was very normalised in our community. I was actually a prude in high school and didn’t start partying until I was 18, so all of my younger friends were partying before me, yet I feel this hyper responsibility and guilt for having ‘exposed’ them to the party scene even though I know I didn’t. I should be clear that I wasn’t getting fake IDs for these people or anything or buying alcohol on their behalf; the bars in our community simply do not care so anyone and everyone was allowed in. The guilt more stems in because I already had OCD at the time (since I was 15) and obsessive guilt, so how could I have not known better when I was 19 that I shouldn’t have been partying with teenagers? My therapist, family, and friends think I’m being way too hard on myself, and I can recognise that at 19 I was a very immature and naive, especially from having not partied at all during high school, but I struggle to accept that and let myself live guilt free. Another point that bothers me is that a friend who as 16/almost 17 was hooking up with older guys at the time and I feel responsible for this because I never stopped her from doing it. Her mom was okay with it, and again this stuff was normalised in our community so much that it wasn’t until my early 20s that I realised how wrong it was.

I’m sorry if I’m not making much sense but just feeling so distressed and drained from guilt over this time in my life. To put things simply: Am I a monster/horrible person who should be put in jail for having partied with 15-17 year olds when I was 19? There was one night where I had alcohol poisoning and was in a terrible state, and I feel so guilty that my younger friends had to look after me. I know it’s not that they haven’t seen people like that before but because they are younger I feel so guilty because I should have been so much more responsible.

Can anyone relate to this?

[Author]

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