Harm OCD and the search through memory
What if I already hurt someone and do not remember? Reviewing the past for proof of what you might be is a compulsion, and it never finds the certainty it is looking for.
For many people with harm OCD, the worst of it is the past. Did I hit something while driving and not notice? Was there a moment, years ago, that I have blocked out? Did I do something to that child, that person, and the memory is hiding? You go back through the day, the year, the decade, searching. And the search never finishes, because you cannot find the absence of something.
I want to write about mental reviewing, because it is the compulsion that leaves no trace anyone else can see, and because it is often the one doing the most damage.
Reviewing is checking
If you check a lock, you walk back to the door. If you check a memory, you walk back through your own mind. The mechanism is identical. A doubt arrives, did I do it, and you go to look, replaying the drive, the evening, the moment, to establish what happened. You find nothing, feel briefly sure, and then the doubt seeps back: but what if I missed it? What if the memory is wrong? And you go to look again.
The cruel irony of checking, which applies to memory as much as to locks, is that the more you check, the less you trust what you checked. A memory reviewed fifty times becomes blurred by the reviewing. Details shift. The image you are searching gets contaminated by the fear that sent you searching. And the uncertainty, rather than shrinking, grows.
Why you cannot prove a negative
You are trying to establish that something did not happen. But there is no memory of not doing something, any more than there is a memory of not seeing a particular bird this morning. Absence leaves no trace. So the search, however thorough, can never return the certainty it is looking for, because that certainty does not exist in the form the search requires.
This is why people can review the same drive a thousand times and still not know. "I definitely did not" is not something memory can produce. Everyone lives with this. Nobody can prove they did not hit something on the way home. People without OCD simply do not ask, because the question was never live for them.
The feeling of a memory
There is a second twist. If you imagine something vividly enough, often enough, it starts to acquire the texture of a memory, because rehearsed images and recalled ones use the same machinery. People with harm OCD who have spent months picturing the terrible thing sometimes come to me half-convinced they have a memory of it. They do not. They have a well-worn image, produced by the reviewing itself.
False memory and real event OCD
If the doubt is about a specific event that did happen, something you said or did that you now cannot stop re-examining, that is a close relative, and there is a page on real event and false memory OCD. The mechanism is the same, and so is the treatment. What I am describing here is the search for an event that the fear has invented.
Stopping the search
The treatment is CBT with exposure and response prevention, and for mental reviewing the response prevention is the centre. When the doubt arrives, did I do it, the work is to let it stand unanswered, to carry the uncertainty that every human being carries, that no one can prove they did not, and to get on with the day.
This is very hard at first, because the urge to check feels like conscience. Surely a good person would want to know? But the checking has never produced knowing, and it never will. What it produces is an OCD that grows with every review. Declining to review starves the doubt.
We practise it gradually. First with small doubts, then larger ones, always agreed together. The anxiety rises when the search is not performed, and then it falls, and the doubt, given nothing to feed on, loses its charge.
What I will not do
I will not go through the memory with you to establish that nothing happened. That would be reviewing with a witness, and it would leave you exactly where you started, plus a therapist to check with. What I can tell you is that this pattern, the search for a crime that the fear invented, is one I have seen many times.
If you have spent years searching your own past, there is more on how I treat harm OCD, including the compulsions nobody can see.