What if it's not God?
Finding Freedom from Scrupulosity, an essay from the archives
I originally wrote this essay about my experience with religious scrupulosity OCD for D.L. Mayfield’s Substack. The essay has also been featured on the International OCD Foundation’s blog.
I am proud of this piece and feel like it’s one of the most comprehensive essays I have on my OCD experience, and I realized I never shared it directly with my own readers. If you can relate, I hope you feel seen; if you can’t relate, I hope my story opens a window into a new perspective.
***
What if it’s not God?
I can still remember the drop of red food coloring my Sunday school teacher squeezed into a jar of water as an illustration of sin. She lined up three clear jars and added in increasing amounts of red dye to each. The deep red ink bloomed and spread, tainting the whole glass. The lesson was meant to be a call to repentance, an “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” kind of deal1. I only saw my worst fears confirmed; just one mistake will poison the whole.
Therapist Hilary L. McBride said, “Spiritual trauma is someone handing you an inner critic and telling you it’s the voice of God.2”
OCD sufferers already have an inner critic; our brains are pre-wired to notice and fixate on the tiniest imperfections3.
As a kindergartner, I would rip up my book reports if my illustration didn’t match the caliber of the book cover.
Why would they show us the cover if ours wasn’t supposed to look like that? I thought. I can remember the frustration building in my tiny body as I tried with all my might to draw a recognizable Brother and Sister Bear to accompany my one sentence summary: brother and sister ate too much junk food4. I gripped the pencil harder and harder, focused my eyes on minuscule details—the C curve of Brother’s ear, how Sister’s mouth made a backwards number 2, but my lines came out squiggly, the bears somehow both childish and grotesque.
I balled up the paper and threw it at the wall. My cheeks flushed hot and I swallowed back tears.
I enlisted my mom to try. Begged her to just trace it, just this one time, please!
“You’re in kindergarten!” she replied. “No one is expecting any more than scribbles.”
Her words only heightened my distress. Why was I the only one aware of the failure?
Sobs shaking my shoulders, I didn’t know what was happening to me. I only knew my drawing wasn’t good enough. And no one else seemed to care.
My mom eventually gave in. I steadied the book cover against our sliding glass door as she traced the bear shapes backlit by the sun. Everything was working until my fingers tired and the paper slid, causing her to make an errant mark.
Immediately I balled up the drawing, heaving and crying as I did.
Not good enough either.
I could see the good I ought to do, staring right back at me in cartoon illustration, and I could not—did not—do it. I didn’t know the word for my feelings then, but guilt and shame consumed me. I had failed. I was a failure.
***
Growing up in the evangelical church in the 90s, with its own obsession with personal holiness, certainty, and right and wrong behavior, my mental health condition did not just go undiagnosed, but was given space and language to bloom.
I latched on to the verse from James 4:17: “If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them.5”
In Sunday school, I knew all the answers. I memorized all the verses. On the outside I did all the right things; internally, I could not stop cataloging my ever-growing list of sins.
I could have been nicer to my brother.
I could have tried harder on that test.
I could have talked to my unsaved grandmother about Jesus.
Sin. Sin. Sin.
Every missed opportunity to do good felt like a drop of poison in my metaphorical sin cup.
I knew with cold conviction: I was bad to the core.
***
In high school, I prayed every hour on the hour; I compulsively recited Psalm 26, seeking desperately to lead a blameless life. I taped Bible verses to my mirror to obscure my own reflection. “More of You, less of me,” I prayed over and over and over. I set an evangelism calendar: talk to John on the bus about Jesus on Monday, Michele at gymnastics on Tuesday, Nini, my grandma, on Wednesday.
I did all of these things not out of a love for God, but festering fear that I would be found out. In youth group, we sang lyrics like “You've taken me from the miry clay, You've set my feet upon the rock, Now I know,” yet I didn’t know. I couldn’t claim God’s transforming love in my life. Not if I was being honest. And that dissonance chipped away at my sense of self, a drip drip drip of Poison in my veins, in my brain, coloring everything with shame and guilt.
I believed the guilt was conviction from the Holy Spirit. I didn’t have a framework to recognize intrusive thoughts or even name my experience of anxiety.
I thought—no, knew—I deserved to feel this way.
***
I was 35 the first time a therapist asked me, “What if it’s not God?”
***
“What if it’s an Obsession? A Compulsion? Disorder?”
My therapist explained that the OCD cycle is just that—a loop that you get stuck in. It starts with an obsession, which can be an intrusive thought OR feeling, image, or urge. For me, it most often presents as a gut punch of guilt and a statement, “I did something wrong.”
The intrusive feeling causes so much distress that one will do almost anything to get rid of it. These urgent, desperate actions are compulsions.
Most are aware of physical compulsions: repetitive lock checking or hand washing. We have a reference for Howie Mendel not shaking hands (pre-Covid and fist bumps) on Deal or No Deal. Avoidance can be a compulsion.
What people may not know about—and I certainly didn’t!—is that it’s possible to engage in mental compulsions6. Mental compulsions are internal actions of checking and rechecking, seeking reassurance, ruminating, or trying to solve a problem that can’t be solved.
These compulsions bring relief temporarily, but ultimately fuel the OCD cycle by reinforcing to your brain that the intrusive thought or worry or feeling was indeed dangerous or true and warranted a response.
As my therapist explained all this, I didn’t feel relief. I felt the familiar pit of shame in my stomach, fresh tears on my cheeks.
No, of course it’s not God. I felt fucking foolish. Images flashed of me at five, stacking my blocks in numerical order, eating my food from least favorite to favorite, rotating my clothes and stuffed animals for fairness, ripping up the book reports. At 15, color coding and reorganizing my physics notes. Rewriting rewriting rewriting into the early hours of the morning and showing up sick and exhausted, but with a completed essay for English class at 7:26am. Of course I have OCD.
I should have known.
My first response to a mental health diagnosis was to berate myself and list all of the ways I’ve failed because I didn’t figure it out before the trained specialist.
I jumped straight into my mental compulsions even as my therapist explained them to me.
He sat in silence as I cried. Then said, “What if I told you this cycle is optional and I can teach you how to get out?”
***
By this time in my thirties, I had undergone a faith deconstruction and rebuilding. I had moved from obsessing about evangelizing and saving souls to the downward mobility of liberation theology to a social ethic of progressive Christianity. My theology had shifted, but my need for certainty had not. I still operated under the assumption that there was one “right” choice to be made in every moment—and that God would make that choice clear if you prayed and listened faithfully enough.
I could still list twenty failures off the top of my head at any moment. I was spending almost all of my waking hours trying to figure out if I had made a mistake, was currently making a mistake, or would make a mistake in the future.
Jon Hershfield calls the OCD cycle a “glitch in the good enough system.7” For a person with OCD, they can never be clean enough, sure enough, good enough.
OCD is also called the “doubting disorder.” You doubt your cleanliness, your goodness, your character. OCD can make you doubt anything that you care about.
***
I am learning that I don’t HAVE to feel bad about every decision all the time. And more importantly I am CHOOSING not to figure out if I made the right choice or not.
Prayer feels like an enigma, but I am practicing self-compassion.
For now, I’m giving myself permission to be inconsistent. (And, yes, it feels yucky just to type that phrase.)
I’m letting myself pause on figuring out exactly what I believe about prayer and discernment and the tangle of God’s voice with my own obsessions, and I’m showing up to church anyway. I’m choosing to serve and be in community and participate in the parts of church that are life-giving, even if it feels inauthentic, even if I’m not “all in.”
OCD thrives on the all-or-nothing. I am slowly experimenting with the in-between.
I am learning to acknowledge the good I ought to do and not do it. I can respond, “I can and I don’t have to.”
It sounds irresponsible, I know. That’s exactly the point.
In recovery, I am re-learning and re-wiring. I am moving toward the fear and accepting uncertainty–about my choices, about God, about life’s unanswerable questions8. I am learning to tolerate my “mistakes.” I am even making mistakes on purpose!
While I am still tempted to ruminate on my failures, I am experiencing relief, freedom, progress, hope.
“But how will I know I’m doing the right thing?” I pleaded with my therapist a few weeks into treatment.
“You won’t,” he replied.
Thanks so much for sharing this post. I resonate with not all, but a lot, of it. I also feel like I see it in people I care for. This is an honest knowledge-seeking question: Did you/do people with OCD generally expand that scrupulosity and anxiety out to *other* people's behaviors, or is that a different disorder? Do you know?
Thank you so much for being so open and honest. All of this I am learning as I’ve started ERP.