Honesty and Confessing

Sounds like OCD, about truthfulness and over analyzing your speech. Some how you need to relax and let go and not focus too much on over analyzing yourself. Of coarse it's good to say good things and the right things(so you won't regret what you have said later), but remember we are all human and not perfect and over analyzing yourself only brings hurt on yourself. Remember what Solomon said in:
Ecclesiastes 7:18-20
18 Avoid both extremes. If you have reverence for God, you will be successful anyway.
19 Wisdom does more for a person than ten rulers can do for a city.
20 There is no one on earth who does what is right all the time and never makes a mistake.

Have you tried flower essences remedies(specially for Obsessiveness, worry, anxiety,...?

MaddKat said:

I have this tendency for past conversations to pop into my head where I wasn't wholly truthful, or even during conversations, I'm being almost neurotic with making sure what I'm saying is accurate. I'm almost afraid to have conversations because if constantly analyzing what I'm saying.

For example, I was just thinking today about a conversation I had months ago with my BF, about something serious, and I told him "my biggest fear is accidentally hurting someone." Which wasn't true; what I should have said was my biggest fear is deliberately causing harm. And within a very short while after saying that I felt guilty. But I forgot about it, for the most part. Except today I remembered it again.

And the hard part is, I feel this need to confess every lie or half truth to my boyfriend. Especially about serious stuff. But we'll be having a simple conversation, and he'll ask me something as a joke, and I'll analyze my response in my brain to make sure it's truthful. And it's hard to have conversations with him, and it's also hard to have conversations with others, too. The only thing is, I don't really have this confession compulsion with others, just him.

I'm having the hardest time right now. I don't know how productive it is to keep saying "hey, remember that conversation we had a few months ago? Well I wasn't truthful when I said this." I want to just let it go, but then he doesn't have an accurate picture of who I am. But if I go through with confessing this new thing to him, this would be the third time now, and I feel like it's not very helpful.

Please help me.

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Confession, while an essential part of the Christian life, does not require a priest or any other church-appointed human mediator. There is only One who can absolve us of sin, and that is God (see Psalm 130); there is only one Mediator between us and God, and that is Jesus Christ (1 Timothy 2:5).

We confess our sins to one another in order to solicit prayer, exhortation, and strength along the way.

so perhaps ask yourself, why am I confessing to him and are his responses through prayer, exhortation and help strengthen you?

"It's not productive...it's not helpful." It looks like you are doing a good job of realizing how OCD can negatively impact our lives, and how it doesn't make much sense to follow it even though it tries to convince us to. I understand your motivation for confessing ("they have to know how bad I am"), as that is the kind of motivation that often affects me. In fact, I'm still trying to work on this particular compulsion in my own life. It sounds like you value your bf's opinion almost too much - I mean, it means so much to you that it's making you paranoid that you're going to do something to lose that opinion. I find that my OCD is often triggered by something that I want really badly. I don't know if this will be helpful for you, but it helps me to realize that whatever thing or person I have latched my desires on is not perfect, and I don't have to be perfectly happy with them. I would naturally realize this over time anyway, but for some reason, some of us tend to get this strong love for something (or someone) and kind of romanticize it and feel like we have to be perfectly happy in it. Then our OCD gets triggered and we find some reason to NOT be "perfectly happy" in it. What helps me is to release my "right" to perfect happiness, and to realize that no one person or situation is going to make me perfectly happy. Life is a complex mixture of happiness and unhappiness, and the goal is not to find and hang onto happiness, but to just live and follow God with all of our hearts. I'm not sure if any of this makes sense, but it's just a few of the things I have been realizing for myself...

MaddKat said:

This does make sense!
I keep going around and around in circles with these thoughts of "I can't be with him because of this;" "he won't want to be with me because of that." On and on and on, and I'm just like "make it stop" lol. Overall I just have this feeling I shouldn't marry him, but a) we're not even close to discussing that and b)i can't think of a good reason why; he's constantly pushing me to do better, he's really fun to be around, etc. I just want to be in a relationship without questioning it so much ‍

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What do you think are some effective ways that you can avoid getting in those thought loops?

MaddKat said:

I guess just trying to ignore them or go do/think about something else when it happens... idk, it's gotten really bad recently.

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That sounds like a good strategy! Why do you think it's gotten worse lately?

MaddKat said:

He told me that my anxiety and constantly bringing up problems is weighing on him. Which in turn made me freak out. I'm also scared of physical affection; when we cuddle it feels like I'm sinning. So now I'm scared to even give him a hug. Which I feel like is going to be a problem because part of the issue is him being worried about physical affection and if he gives it, am I going to freak out again and have it be a 2 hour conversation.

I want to fix this, the fact that I'm causing him stress, but I can't see any other way except trying not to project onto him and just giving it time.

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It sounds to me like you are basically obsessing about the relationship. I don't mean this in a condemning way; only that, mentally, you might need to take a step back and not worry as much about losing him. I know that seems like an incredibly scary thing to do, but once you can accept doing it, it is actually very freeing. I've learned, and am still learning, to do this with many things in life, not just relationships. I'm guessing that those of us with OCD might be overly prone to doing this - to latching onto something or someone that we love and being terrified to let it go. OCD, in turn, uses this as an opportunity to make sure that we never feel at ease with that thing, always questioning about if it's OK for us to do or have. So, as I think I've mentioned before, taking a more "resigned" attitude (e.g, "I'll be OK even if I lose this thing/person") has actually helped my OCD. It's kind of hard to explain it until you go through it, I think. If you want to put it in Christian terms, it's the 'backwards' principle of Jesus' teaching, "deny yourself and take up your cross." This is, of course, something that OCD can easily freak out about, and we have to be careful not to let it take control in this matter. I don't think it means that we have to necessarily give up everything. But I think if we at least MENTALLY give up our right to something, if we hold it loosely in our hearts and are willing for God to take it if He wants - it does something positive to us. It sounds weird, and scary. But it's actually really good. Once we get over the initial pain of allowing something (at least mentally) to go, we find a certain freedom that we did not have before, and in many cases have a freer and more enjoyable relationship with the thing/person than we did before. At least, this has been my experience - I'm still trying to work it all out myself!