Real life guilt vs obsessions

[Kangarooman]

How do you know if you are experiencing real life guilty thoughts over something you did vs obsessing over them in an unhealthy way?

[mind-full]

Experiencing guilty thoughts, or obsessing over them?

Let's start by using a new word I recently added to my personal vocabulary. Rumination! And for many OCD sufferers, rumination is more than just a word. It's a living nightmare.

Here's an older post from our OCD Community discussing rumination:

healthunlocked.com/my-ocd/p...

Ruminating about something you did, and prolonging your guilt, may be obsessive. What you did is done. Try not to do it again.

Consider also that what you're experiencing may not be guilt at all, but instead, shame thoughts. There's a significant difference between the two, and learning to overcome shame is a powerful tool for mastering OCD. Remember that guilt is only the negative assessment of something you did, as opposed to shame, which is the negative assessment of your whole self. One says "I did something bad," while the other says "I am bad."

"Your character is unique, but not an antique." Jon Hershfield, MFT

If you have OCD, you've probably been carrying your moral identity around like some expensive antique whose value could plummet over the slightest flaw. Life throws us a lot of challenges, so this thing you carry around with you will get dented and scratched; but you should love it anyway.

We're all human. Mistakes and imperfections don't make us worth any less to the world. They simply make our experience here unique.

[Clouds9]

I have this, as I've gotten older I am less naive, and so I've become aware of tough social experiences that happen to people. It makes me overly afraid when I am around people, because I obsess over my mistakes and others' mistakes. I think about it constantly and put myself in an intense anxious state. I have hope I'll get over it, because I've gotten over my hypersensitivity of being awkward and nervous around people. I don't really care about doing that anymore, so I don't carry the anxiety with my constantly. But I do still have it, just with another topic.