Did I Black Out and" Do It " in the Food Court?!! Please Hel

Hello.
I have severe ocd. Two weeks ago I bumped in to an ex I haven't seen for 30 years! We sat down and chatted. He ate his lunch and I felt too shy and awkward so I sat opposite him and didn't eat. We are at the mall. I'm married and so is he , so I was feeling nervous about sitting opposite him. Anyway, we chatted and he hugged me a d he left. Simple as that. Now my head is telling me that we had sex and I forgot. I keep telling myself it's just a thought and I would never do it in private with him let alone public! Wouldn't security or cops be called? I feel like I've committed a crime and the police are after me.
Please ,can anyone help me think rationally.
Bella xx

Hello and welcome!

Oh you have it bad, don't you?

I think you really know the answer to this- if you'd had sex at the food court, you'd be arrested, yes? Okay then.

Defer anxiety. I have to do that when I run over those invisible pedestrians (bumps). I'll want to go back and check. One time late at night, I passed a woman walking on the road. Well I got to worrying that I'd hit her, so I circled around. Of course you don't want to call her attention to you because she might think I'm stalking her. Well damn if she wasn't already over on the next road I was circling back around on. Well then I had to worry about did I run over her again? Will she call the law on me for stalking her?

Or I'd be shutting down at work for a week. And I'd have to check everything more than once for fear I'd burn the place down or something by leaving something on (we had things that created heat). What I'd really have the urge to do, is pull up a chair and sit there by myself where I have no business being for a whole week of shutdown so I could watch it every moment and make sure nothing bad happened. In case I forgot and hadn't checked every single thing. Which I had, several times over.

Well, I can't do that. So I'd eventually have to be like 'screw this I'll worry about it when they cover the fire in the newspaper'.

And guess what? Place never burned down.

And on and on.

What you do is, defer the anxiety. And make yourself have the attitude you don't care. Of course you don't want to have sex in the food court- but you have to act as if you don't care if you do. You'll worry about it, when the cops show up to arrest you. Not before. I tell myself I'll worry about those invisible (and sometimes real) pedestrians when the cops show up at my door. Not before. It's like this. If you got banged in the middle of the food court, you'd know it. If I actually hit someone, I'd hear a loud noise and have car damage. I've accidentally run over small animals before and you know when you go over something. I try not to let my brain play 'oh you forgot/didn't notice/blacked out' games with me. Otherwise I'll drive back miles to check then worry they were already picked up by the ambulance. I'd do that crap every time I drove, if I let it get the best of me. Well I can't do that, gas is too expensive now.

So... try to chill and be like "I didn't do that, and if I did well I guess I'll find out".

Attitude like that works wonders for my Harm OCD thoughts. It's simple but it's real hard to get started doing. And you have to be stubborn as hell about it, too. OCD is stubborn, you have to be more stubborn.

Oh thank you so much for your reply.
I also think that when I go over a pothole that I have ran over someone. I hate it. One time I had an argument with someone and thought I " blacked out" and killed him. It's always centred around not harming others and worrying about shame.

Snaga, I messaged the man on instagram and said " it was nice chatting with you" and he replied " likewise". It's still not enough proof for me. If I could I would look through the malls CCTV but obviously I can't. It has been two weeks since then. If I think about this logically, even though this man ( my ex), who is still a sleazebag, wouldn't he , if I tried to have sex with him, at least be shocked and say, not here! Let's go somewhere private! Cause I know he wouldn't refuse. Mind you, I've never had sex with him when we were younger. My husband was my first. Ugh, I'm a lost cause

You're not a lost cause.

It just takes practice to deal with this sort of OCD anxiety. I mean, it's pretty cut-and-dried, unlike a lot of the themes posted about in this forum. You had sex; or you didn't. You harmed someone; or you didn't. Not a whole heck of a lot of 'fuzzy' there.

For me, it's a matter of first, disregarding the thought. You have no memory of doing the nasty for an audience; therefore you didn't. Throw out all the forums here dealing with acting under amnesia- this is OCD. For our purposes, you don't remember, so you didn't.

Then you make a conscious decision to not care whether you did. This one is tricky. Obviously you do care about having sex in public, or blacking out and killing someone. We don't want to do those things. So you care, but you have to make a decision that you're going to not care if those things already happened. It's the attitude that you're looking for here. The attitude like 'oh well if it happened it did'. Doesn't matter that you don't want it to have- that's quite beside the point. It's all about copping an attitude.

Then... you tell OCD you'll worry about having done it when it's been done, and not before. In this case, OCD has to show you the receipts. When the law shows up at your door for murder, or public indecency- THEN and only then do you give yourself permission to freak out. Otherwise, OCD can take a flying leap, you didn't do it, you don't care if you did it because it's did, and you'll worry about it when it happens, not before. And it didn't happen without the proofs- for which there are none because it didn't happen anyway.

It's not complicated. It's bloody hard to start doing. But it's not complicated or magical. It's like raising an X-wing bogged down in a swamp by using The Force. Do- or do not- there is no try. You learn to do it by doing it, and you do it while you learn to do it.

A simplistic breakdown of something I'm sure a professional could say a lot better, but from what I've read it's all about retraining pathways in the brain so we don't get stuck in these what-if loops or something.

With practice it gets easier. But it's bloody hard at first.

Anyway, that's what helps me with some of the more outrageous intrusive thoughts, especially for those that are more black/white.