Real event OCD guilt – confession will ruin my relationship

[tupxoParticipant]

Hi all. In a really difficult place with my OCD right now.

This has all been triggered by my new relationship. I have met the most loving, genuine and kind man who I am confident I want to be with for the rest of my life. He is an amazing, supportive partner in so many ways, but I have something from my past which is eating me alive with guilt but I know that if I tell him it will ruin everything.

To preface, when I was a young adolescent I went through a very traumatic event of abandonment. I buried the emotions deep and never really talked about it. I started watching [comment edited by Moderators] but I then started having my own thoughts in my head which are the source of my immense guilt. I don’t really want to state exactly what they were.

However, I actively thought these thoughts rather than them being intrusive in nature. I will say that they’ll were primarily driven by disgust and other negative emotions rather than this being anything I would ever actually want to do in real life. I find the actual thoughts in real life disgusting, always did, but for some reason I had these until I was around 19. I wouldnt even know if you could call them ocd because it’s something I would never want to happen in real life. I personally believe they may have arisen from my trauma, but I really dont know. They just naturally ended and I didnt think about them anymore.

I developed severe OCD in my first relationship at 16 and the primary compulsion was confession. I realised I had acted well below the moral standard and confessed so many things. I did confess those days to him and he called me sick and said I needed help. The relationship ended a couple months after, although it had always been quite toxic. I have never once confessed this to anyone since, I could not as the ramifications on my life would be too severe.

It’s been lying dormant for a long time, even in other relationships it has not cropped up, but a couple months into my new relationship I suddenly thought what would he think of this? And it has all begun again from there. It goes so against his morals, and mine too, and the topic is so bad that I feel like he would leave me if he knew, but I also feel like a massive fraud because I feel I am not being 100% open about myself by not telling him. It’s like I need the reassurance he would still be with me and love me even if he knew because in my head right now I have visions of him telling me what an awful person I am and ending it all.

My thoughts now are very run of the mill. This all happened over 10 years ago. Still, it haunts me that I even thought that it was okay [edited by moderators] to these thoughts. It could hurt a lot of people if they knew and I feel I can’t talk to anyone about it. I feel so alone. My boyfriend knows I struggle with anxiety and OCD and all I have told him is that I feel immense guilt for things that happened around that period, that [edited by moderators]and that some of it was quite messed up. That’s as far as I have gone. He tells me that I can talk to him about anything, but I cannot talk to him about this. I feel the only person I could talk to about this is a therapist (I am looking to go to therapy, it is getting too much to handle on my own).

I don’t know if I am placing too much importance on this as they were thoughts, though disgusting in nature, but It’s definitley the worst thing I’ve ever done in my life and my OCD has latched onto it so firmly. My boyfriend tells me all the time that I am a good person and I feel horrendous guilt because I don’t think I am. I mean, I try to be as good a person as I can but I feel like this is a dark stain on myself. I wish it hadn’t happened.

The thing is, confessing this would be for my own reassurance only. It would not benefit the relationship at all, and like I said could potentially ruin everything. So in that sense it isn’t fair on him. On the other hand I feel like I am lying and it torments me every day. I even have intrusive thoughts. Then there is the issue that even if I confessed I would then feel the need to confess more details, I know I would, and that would be awful.

I know that the best thing would be to forget about it all but I just cannot. The only person I have hurt is myself, so in that sense all the advice re guilt of making up for things just doesn’t apply. I wish I could pretend these thoughts didn’t happen. I genuinely believe if it hadn’t happened I would be living a much happier life right now with not a care in the world, excited for the future with him.

I recognise that I need therapy, but not sure if I should go to a therapist to figure out what the root cause of these immoral fantasies were or an OCD therapist. I would probably feel more comfortable confessing these past thoughts to a therapist.

I think I am dealing with relationship OCD/Real event OCD. I just want to be an upstanding person, and although I am now I definitley was not back then. I just can’t get over these sick things that went through my head that I used to have. I genuinely can’t believe I thought, yeah this is okay. I wish I could go back in time.

I guess I wrote this for a bit of therapy in itself as I feel so alone in this battle in my head. Any words of advice and alternative viewpoints would be really welcome. I am in a loop of utter shame, guilt and generally feeling very negative. I really do think it would end if I confessed, but I love this man very much, have never even entertained these thoughts for over 10 years and just want to be loved for who I am but I feel like a monster…

[wannabefreeParticipant]

Hiya, and welcome… I could be way off here but… Is it really so important that he knows about the past? In truth, I believe that everyone has a past…  It is all from a time gone by, and doesn’t represent the person you are now…  When we meet someone special, they don’t need to know our life story… They need to know who we are now, who we’ve become, through whatever happened to be there at the time…  I guess we are all basically a product of our growing up, but that can be a good thing…  As grownups we understand more about what we want out of life…

Maybe it just needs writing down on a totally encrypted hard drive, so you get it out of your system, but then just leave it all behind. None of us is the same person we were before the pandemic struck… We are yet to find out what our new ‘normal’ will be…

[Author]

Posts