Often with OCD we can be minding our business and going about our day when an old memory resurfaces of something we’ve done in the past that we regret/don’t agree with. We wonder how we ever let ourselves off the hook for what we did and how we’ve gone all this time without thinking about it – now riddled with guilt and convinced we’ll never move on from this.
Guilt is a very unhelpful emotion and nothing in life warrants chronic guilt. This intense feeling usually stems from our irrational beliefs around self-rating and whether we depict ourselves as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ people. We need to learn to see that we are neither and this idea is something that we have completely made up. The first book on the reading list by Albert Ellis goes in to this in great detail.
As humans we are all fallible, capable of actions we perceive to be good and actions we perceive to be bad, but these actions can’t define us. We can absolutely learn to better ourselves but the problem lies where we write ourselves off for our mistakes. ‘Cancel culture’ is a great example of this and is a highly irrational reaction to fallible humans making mistakes, which is in our nature to do. This isn’t to say we should agree with what we’ve done in the past, it’s about accepting that we messed up and understanding that it doesn’t make us bad. People without OCD make mistakes all the time too and allow themselves to move on without chronic guilt and rumination.
It’s important to not attempt to push the memory away either, as just like other intrusive thoughts this will make them linger. Welcome the flashbacks and remind yourself that it’s ok that you have performed an unfavourable action that you would rather not do again. Our mistakes do not make us bad or unworthy, they make us human!