OCD — Affecting my life

[JoshyyParticipant]

Hi everyone,

I haven’t been on here for a while as I have had my OCD under control but recently it’s just kind of come back with a vengeance.

I’ll start by saying, years ago, my OCD really took a hold of me and I messed up (I believe I made a post about this on old forums) and basically, in a nutshell when I was 16, to ‘test’ if I really was capable of doing something wrong. I typed ‘c*p*'(full phrase)  into Google after seeing a video talk about the topic. I think it was a checking ritual, at least that’s what I say to myself, it was so long ago and the memory changes each time I think about it, but regardless the shame and guilt over doing that is memorable, and still there somewhat. I completely forgot it even happened until recently.

Anyway… Present day, I see an email talking with someone about this and it made me remember it and it came flooding back, then I started having the thoughts/urges again, getting myself worked up, Googling OCD symptoms, experiences and if people had ever done the same as part of a compulsive ritual or even morbid curiosity etc. This took up a lot of time in my day and I then began to worry whether, in my frenzy and panic, I had searched it again, and this fear was cemented by the fact I deleted my search history after the Googling so I convinced myself I must be hiding something, right? I started worrying about police intervention, people thinking I’m one etc, every knock at the door worried me.

Anyway, fast forward to the last few days it’s gotten that bad now where it is even bleeding into my work, something I very much enjoy and take pride in.

It initially began as me thinking I had typed the same thing into my work laptop, again cemented by the fact I had limited search history. I then tried to find my deleted history in the cache/dump/temp files on the computer. I was trawling through them for ages. Then the thought popped into my head that ‘what if, in my search for that in the computer files, I had written that onto a document. So to see if I would have even been able to edit over a computer file, I typed something in, I think it was either a) gibberish, or b) I just added a load of spaces, and it didn’t save the document, but then I tried another (probably typing the same sort of thing) and it let me save it and I lost the file!!!  Which filled me with uncertainty and anxiety.

I spent hours in non-work time searching through probably hundreds of files, looking for the phrases ‘por’ and ‘orn’ (I didn’t want to search the whole word into a work PC) and looking at documents edited recently. But, despite me searching via these keywords, and files modified over last few days, some files apparently did not come up in search (probably due to some settings for search I cannot change as it is a managed/monitored work laptop) , even ones I KNEW for a fact had ‘orn’ or ‘por’ in them somewhere. But because there are literally hundreds of thousands of files which are being updated by the system constantly, it’s going to be almost impossible to go through each individually… Due to some files not showing up, that must mean that there is a file somewhere, not showing on search which I have written something horrid on)

Then there is the possibility I have deleted any files I’ve edited and then removed them from the recycling bin?

I feel terrible, and I’m convinced that somewhere I have written and saved it into my work computer in a file. I’m worried I will lose my job, be arrested etc, I don’t know what to do. I feel awful ?

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