In interviews leading up to my mission, I confessed (in general terms) to “heavy petting.” The bishop and stake president were fairly low-key about things, and I was allowed to go on a mission (these were the days before “raising the bar.” However, in the MTC I remember listening to a talk where they said that “incomplete confessions” meant one was still unworthy. This really got under my skin, and so I went to the MTC branch president and got more specific with things–how often, what did it entail exactly, etc. The branch president did not probe any further, and was very kind about it all. But I personally went into a kind of OCD spiral, and confessed to him a couple more times, as I recalled more (always LESS serious) things that I had done.
When I got to the mission field, the guilt and shame weighed even more heavily. In my very first interview with the mission president, I regurgitated everything again–because I just felt like I until I had verbalized every single misdeed I had ever done, I would not be worthy. This is where the mission president started asking probing questions. He asked if I had engaged in “digital sex” (and this was before internet, so he meant fingers), he asked if my girlfriend had ever climaxed, and he asked about penetration. The mission president then called my stake president from back home (I was overseas now), who happened to be available and answered the phone. The mission president made me cough it all up to my home stake president again, then sent me out of the room while they discussed my fate. They let me stay in the mission–because in all of the confessions, the severity of the sin had never *increased*, I had just bled out every excruciating detail about it with more specificity each time.
During the first several months of my mission, on his request I continued to make more confessions by LETTER to the mission president; as I thought of other things I needed to get off my chest. This became somewhat of a compulsion for me, as the confessions became more and more benign. I drove myself crazy with this behavior, until I finally had to just believe that I had said enough, and physically block out the feelings of guilt/shame that came regularly. I was in anguish for a long time.