The Three Lies That Fuel Scrupulosity: Finding Freedom from Religious OCD Using I-CBT Principles
A Christian OCD therapist's perspective on the most crucial shifts in scrupulosity recovery
Lie #1: “If I have a strong feeling about something, then that feeling is from God.”
This belief is common among many Baptist, non-denominational, and charismatic folks I work with who (like me) have been to a lot of church events (or a huge conference called Passion) with an emphasis on emotion, conviction, “feeling a peace,” etc. These feelings, which are nice byproducts of a life of discipleship that depend a lot on individual personality, end up being confused with faith, belief, or trust in God itself. An aspect of faith is confused for faith. I-CBT calls this “reverse reasoning.” We try to prove something using a feeling rather than starting with what is written (consensus in scripture) and what is a common-sense understanding from trustworthy sources or wise counsel.
The bottom line is that you can feel all types of ways about all types of things. That feeling, no matter how ominous, doesn’t make it any more true, and it doesn’t mean it’s from God. For example, you probably have a loved one who’s not with you right now. If you try hard enough, you can feel like they are not okay. That feeling doesn’t make it any more true. And you don’t want to live on that roller coaster of reverse reasoning (if I feel it, then it means something). In fact, you can’t and don’t do it in other important areas of your life because it’s unsustainable. You do it with this topic because this topic is very important to you, and there’s probably a story behind why you started getting stuck on this topic in the first place.
On that topic of “feeling a peace” ... I often “feel a peace” about actions that are very selfish. A feeling of peace can be from God, but it must be checked with good counsel, common sense, and scripture.
Also, I don’t disrespect or disqualify these traditions in any sense. I love them and think they have so much to offer. If I could change two talking points I grew up hearing, I would eliminate preachers saying things like, “Do you know that you know that you know that you know?” That leads to people searching desperately for a feeling of knowing (as if knowing is a feeling), and the person with OCD has a really hard time holding on to that feeling, even if they are the most committed person in your congregation. And I would simply ask preachers and teachers to clarify that feelings are important, but they are not how we know that we have faith, and they are not how we make all of our decisions related to our faith.
Lie #2: “I must have perfect understanding of something before I can feel better about it.”
I went through a period where I thought that the logic of good biblical theology was the answer to the emotional reasoning I talked about in part one. The organization and clarity of Reformed theology (see the beauty of the Heidelberg Catechism) can certainly help a lot of cases—maybe even most scrupulosity cases! Theology matters. There’s a common saying in the OCD treatment world that content doesn’t matter, but it really does matter to a point in religious scrupulosity.
Now I’ve been treating OCD long enough to see folks with upper-level degrees in theology who still struggle despite putting away much of their emotion-first reasoning about God. Typically, this struggle takes the form of a very complicated and high-stakes question that people have been dealing with for centuries: How can a good God send people to hell? Does God predestine mass numbers of people (maybe even the majority of people) to suffer in hell forever? If so, what’s the point in life? Conversely, if people aren’t predestined, then why am I enjoying anything instead of frantically preaching on every street corner and remote island? Find an answer to any of those questions that temporarily satisfies you, and another one will probably pop up that disturbs you if you’re willing to think about it hard enough. Is that because God is evil or illogical? No, it’s because we can’t perfectly comprehend exactly how all of that works.
My wife is a pharmacist, and she’ll often tell me about lots of different drugs that work really well for certain disease processes, but we still don’t really know why they work—what the mechanism of action is. Does that mean we stop using the drug? Absolutely not. It works, so we use it with a clear understanding of what diagnosis to use it for, how much of the drug to give, and how long to give it. And we let it work without having to fully understand it. If we waited to fully understand it completely before we gave it, a lot of people would suffer needlessly. Similarly, if you try to fully understand the mechanism of action behind God’s ways before you fully surrender your life to him in obedience, you will suffer needlessly.
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” — Isaiah 55:8-9
I’m not saying that everything about God is a mystery. That is absolutely untrue, and the answer to the pain of not knowing things you wish you knew is not to assume that nothing can be known—essentially becoming an agnostic. Agnosticism won’t save you from painful existential questions for long. We are going to have to stand strong on some things that we can know about God and how He works in order to move forward, but we are also going to have to be open to some things that we can’t know or understand. Just as feelings aren’t faith itself, knowledge isn’t faith itself. New Testament scholar Dr. Craig Keener describes faith like this in his commentary on Romans 1:17: “Biblical saving faith was not passive assent but actively staking one’s life on the claims of God. It was a certainty sufficient to affect one’s lifestyle.” We see faith clearly demonstrated in Hebrews 10 and 11 as the author describes Old Testament heroes who had a clear leading from God and then acted in faith without having all of their questions answered ahead of time.
The Heidelberg Catechism calls this a wholehearted trust in Q & A 21:
“What is true faith? True faith is not only a sure knowledge by which I hold as true all that God has revealed to us in Scripture; it is also a wholehearted trust, which the Holy Spirit creates in me by the gospel, that God has freely granted, not only to others but to me also, forgiveness of sins, eternal righteousness, and salvation. These are gifts of sheer grace, granted solely by Christ’s merit.”
Faith is, most accurately, knowledge and trust that causes you to stake your life on the claims of God.
For anyone getting hung up on the “sure knowledge” piece of that statement, go back to my medicine analogy. You can have a “sure knowledge” that the medicine is effective and appropriate even if you don’t know every detail of how and why it works. We can and must do the same with God.
Do you believe enough to give your life to Him and His way and increasingly stake your life on Him, whether you are brought low or abounding (Phil. 4:12)? Then you have faith.
Do you have unanswered questions about Him that bother you? Most of us do. That’s okay.
Continue to walk with Him, ask for the good gift of peace (Matt 7:7-11, Phil 4: 6-9), work with a therapist and pastor who understands OCD, and you’ll begin to trust His goodness and character without needing to perfectly understand it. You’ll live into the emotional relief you are looking for.
Lie #3: The way to feel better is to no longer have doubts/blasphemous thoughts.
Trying to delete thoughts from your mind is not possible or necessary. It might happen over time, but you can’t make it happen. The more you try to make it happen, the more they appear with force. Whatever you do, don’t think about your big toe on your right foot right now. What happened? You are thinking more about your big toe on your right foot than you have in years. As Dr. Sally Winston says, “Effort works really well outside the skin, but it works very poorly inside the skin.”
You know you’re in recovery from OCD when you are less bothered and impacted by the thoughts and feelings—not when they go away. The goal is to spend less time and energy on them for a long time, and then hopefully they will fade as a distant memory. I’ve seen this happen for a lot of people, and this can happen for you too.
Do You Relate to This? Here Are Some Practical Recommendations
If this is you, or if you are reading this for someone you love, here is what I would recommend:
Find someone who specializes in OCD treatment. Don’t just find someone with OCD listed as something they treat, but find someone who indicates that they have training and some original thoughts related to treating and understanding OCD. They need to be trained in Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) or Inference-Based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (I-CBT) or both. Get on their waitlist even if you have to wait a little while to see them. It’s a big bonus if they are a Christian, but they don’t necessarily have to be.
Meet with your pastor about your questions before you meet with your OCD therapist—or at least have this meeting early in treatment. If you don’t have a pastor, please find one. You need community and someone to demonstrate the love of God to you more than you need good information. Show them this article or other articles on religious scrupulosity and tell them that you think you have OCD. This meeting and the opinion you receive from your pastor won’t fix your OCD, but it will be part of the “good enough” answer about your questions that you come back to in treatment. Any good OCD therapist, even if they aren’t a Christian, would be glad to see that you have worked through your questions with someone who is wise and well-educated on the topic you are struggling with.
Stick with treatment. If you’re working with an OCD specialist, you’ll go through waves of excitement and relief, followed by doubt and frustration, followed by realistic acceptance and peace. If you will be persistent in treatment and persistent in pursuing Christlikeness through this treatment, you will find relief—even if you don’t find perfect answers.
“Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.” — James 1:2-4
Read More: Overcoming Scrupulosity: A Guide to Treating Religious OCD Using ERP Principles
About Tyler Slay
Tyler Slay is a Licensed Professional Counselor in Madison, Mississippi working at The Center for Hope and Healing at Broadmoor. Tyler Specializes in OCD, Anxiety Disorders, Trauma, Stress, and Christian Counseling.
