OCD A to Z: S is for Scrupulosity and Obsessing about God, ethics, and sin

I remember reading that the word "scruple" comes from the meaning "sharp stone" and scrupulosity is like a sharp stone in your shoe, paining you with every step. Scrupulousness can be a form of OCD, with a sensitive conscience constantly jabbed by fears of committing sins, doing something wrong, making a mistake or being negligent. Scrupulosity means never feeling forgiven, redeemed or having any lasting relief from confession(if one is Catholic), or constant fear of eating something not Kosher(if one is Jewish), or fear of breaking the law, being dishonest, or unjust(whether religious or secular).

Compulsions could include repeated confession, constant checking to make sure items are Kosher, repetitive prayers, or rituals that seemingly have nothing to do with what you fear, but give you a brief relief from the fear. For me, going to church generated whirlwinds of questions, and sucked up my energy, and filled me with despair. I went to a very liberal church, and ruminated on whether I was going to hell because I believed being gay wasn't a sin, or that women could be ministers. I was afraid that my decision to go to this church was a mistake, even though in my heart, I couldn't go to any other church.

And of course, there are people who would say that really God was trying to get me to repent, that I really was making a mistake, that it wasn't OCD at all. This is where faith comes in, the faith to believe what I know in my heart, in spite of the intrusive thoughts, and the collusion of some preachers and teachers with what my OCD is saying. I also suffered from fears of being a bad person, outside of any particular theology. An excellent article is Scrupulosity: Blackmailed by OCD in the Name of God by Laurie Krauth, who describes this type of fear:

Some people—religious and not—experience scrupulosity as an irrational moral perfectionism. I’ve heard them describe the fear of getting “in trouble” for making a non-existent or unlikely error for which they would be punished. A businessman obsessed about having told a colleague that he had read a book when in fact he had skimmed one of the chapters, and agonized over how to clarify “the truth” to his colleague.

There is part of me that knows God is bigger than my OCD fears. There is part of me that knows I have intrinsic worth by virtue of being human.

OCD A to Z: Q is for Questions

Questions are a defining aspect of OCD for me. Something about an unanswered question creates more anxiety for me than many statements of scary facts. "What if that bump on my ear is skin cancer?" kept me suffering more than when the doctor told me it was skin cancer, especially since I obsessed about the bump for 5 years. But then OCD in its opportunistic way turned its attention on "How could I have obsessed about this for 5 years? Why didn't I go to the doctor? What if this means I am a negligent irresponsible person?"

As a girl it was, "What if I am drafted into the army?" or "What if I can't fall asleep because I feel like I need to go to the bathroom?" In highschool I had "What if those earrings I bought my mom for her birthday look like sperm and she hates me for that?(that particular obsession seriously sucked)" and "What is that red dot on my lip?" In college it was, "What if I am meant to be with a woman rather than a man?" or "What if it too dangerous to be with a man, and I should break up with my boyfriend?"

As an adult it was "What if my beliefs are wrong? What if it really is a sin to be gay or have sex before marriage?" About this time, the internet became freely accessible, and I searched for answers to these questions, like turbo charged trips to the library reference section, searching without boundaries. I rarely asked my questions of other people. I focused on finding the answer myself, but whatever answer I found was not sufficient to stop the questions. Many questions in life have no answer, or inadequate answers, or painful answers.

OCD gave me the illusion that I could find a good answer to every question I had if I just looked diligently enough. At one point I decided it would be easier to say God didn't exist than to keep trying to find answers to my theological questions, and my therapist said that she believed God would understand how much pain I was in that I would be pushed to this point.

What kind of effect do questions have on you?

Intrusive Thoughts and Harming Fears: A Review of I Hardly Ever Wash my Hands: The Other Side of OCD by J.J. Keeler

TLC Book Tours contacted me about reviewing J.J. Keeler's I Hardly Ever Wash My Hands: The Other Side of OCD, and I was intrigued by the title because my OCD doesn't manifest in handwashing rituals, and this is the short-cut metaphor for OCD much of the time.  After reading the book, I felt like I'd found an OCD-Soul-Sister and although I am never glad that someone else has OCD, and I am glad when they can write about it in an articulate and insightful way.  

I had to laugh when J.J. Keeler describes how her twin sister had hypochondria with fear of many diseases(a type of OCD I am very familiar with), but the author had only "had" one disease: AIDS.  In the irony of OCD, in elementary school she is triggered into worrying about AIDS when her parents mention a blood transfusion she had, but what her OCD latches onto is the risk of "dirty needles" which in her young mind means thumbtacks, staples, pine needles, with dirt on them.  Humor is a major component of Keeler's account of OCD, grabbing the edge of ridiculousness about OCD fears and pulling the whole thing apart, so that the sufferer can catch a glimpse of OCD's game of generating endless scenarios and holding life hostage.  

The second chapter, The Bomb in my Teddy Bear, is a marvel of encapsulating the experience of morphing OCD thoughts.  When she was 8 years old, neighbor gives her a teddy bear at a yard sale, and a chain of fears links itself around her.  She started getting a weird feeling about the bear, and wondered why a relative stranger would give her a teddy bear for free.  Then it came to her, "The reason was obvious.  There was a bomb in the teddy bear."  Keeler agonized over how to dispose of the bear, without harming anyone else, and then when it didn't explode, wondered if the neighbor would come back to finish the job.  Her rituals to keep the anxiety from exploding were a constant stream of "figuring out" and "analyzing" combined with tin cans at the door to let her know if there was an intruder, and plotting how she could take the bear on one of her father's fishing trips and throw the bomb overboard.

Eventually, OCD moves onto other topics in Keeler's life, but the same corrosive fear and desperate maneuvers to make the fear go away.  In addition to fears about AIDS(and calling the testing center before her test was even received, to check, check, check), she feared causing harm to others after being deluged with intrusive thoughts.  If you suffer from this very painful form of OCD, please read this book.  Keeler has known the despair that made her consider suicide, because she didn't want to harm anyone and yet these images would pop into her head, and she has survived, and now thrives.  

The most difficult part of reviewing I Hardly Ever Wash My Hands: The Other Side of OCD, is that I want to quote everything, but it would be better for my readers to go find a copy of this book and read it for themselves.  

Read J.J.Keeler's Introduction to Harming Obsessions on her blog.  

Find J.J. Keeler on Twitter

Related Post:

Fear of Thoughts Getting Stuck: The Challenge of Self Help Books for OCD

http://tlcbooktours.com/

Scrupulosity and the Body: Lunch with the Religious

Yesterday I walked into the middle of an exposure so surreal I thought maybe my therapist orchestrated it. I was meeting a friend for lunch at a restaurant that is part of a conference center. The parking lot was packed, and as I was circling around looking for a space, I started to notice the large number of bumper stickers about respecting life, marriage and chastity(the one I am still pondering is "Chastity is for lovers.") I walked into the lobby, and my friend was sitting there in a sea of nuns in full habit and priests in clerical collars, with some lay people mixed in.

There was a long line of various religious folk at the hostess desk, but fortunately I had a reservation. We were seated next to a man in a floor length black robe and a gold cross about 8 inches long, and people kept coming up to him to reverently say hello.

I went through several years of struggling with scrupulosity centered around Catholic theology, for instance, contraception being a sin. Of course the irony is that I am not Catholic. My first boyfriend was Catholic, and later I worked at a Catholic college, and being introduced some of the central Catholic issues set off a cascade of anxiety. This is the bizarre thing about having OCD--I can latch onto a thought, and wrestle with it hoping to make it go away because it disturbs me, but which has no connection to my actual beliefs. The thoughts that I feared were "What if contraception is wrong? What if I am going to hell? What if I am supposed to be Catholic?" And this is what makes dealing with scrupulosity incredibly hard--there will be people who do believe I should convert to Catholicism, who wouldn't interpret my anxiety as OCD, and this compounds the anxiety.

So there I was yesterday, enveloped in a conference about Catholic theology of the body, and I did ok. I was uncomfortable, but I focused on my friend, who is going through a hard time right now. I didn't go home and look up the conference, or research the agenda, or the supposed immorality of contraception, or sites that say a marriage without children is a sin, or read conservative Catholic websites like I used to do. At the worst of my scrupulousness, I was subscribing to a mailing list about natural family planning, trying to figure out if there was any way I was redeemable.

Yesterday I was even able to laugh at the over-the-top exposure material. Today I am feeling tired and unsteady, but I know for me the act of faith is choosing what I believe. Yes, that is exactly what will rile some people up--and I am learning to live with that.

Resources:
Although I am not Catholic, ironically I did find Scrupulous Anonymous to have some helpful articles:
Scrupulous Anonymous: Newsletter by Liguori Publications

The Scrupe Blog is moderated by a Lutheran Minister and often has quotes from religious folk who suffered from tormenting thoughts:
The Scrupe Blog

The first book I read on scrupulosity was psychologist's William Van Ornum's A Thousand Frightening Fantasies: Understanding and Healing Scrupulosity. The author did a survey of sufferers, and I realized I wasn't alone.

I heard Ian Osborn speak at one of the IOCDF Conference's and his talk about scrupulosity was very interesting.

I am the Keeper of My Time

I've had a lot of time of my own this week, because my job is gone. I've been avoiding blogging here, in part because my whole routine is a mess, but also the OCD sneaks in quickly and says, "Well, now you have time to do everything *exactly right* so don't mess it up" and then I avoid posting at all. But today I'm here, because the support I've received from this community of readers and bloggers has been wonderful, and it's important to me to continue to share my experience of dealing with OCD, and sharing what I've learned.

An expression my therapist uses floated into my mind when I sat down to write, "I am the keeper of my time." As in, there is the possibility in my human-ness to keep my own time, independently of what the OCD demands. I struggled with this concept at my job in the past, because of my fear I would do the wrong task or do things in the wrong order, and even though I worked independently, I was not the keeper of my time much of the time, but rather my OCD was. The anxiety about making a mistake would come like a wall of water knocking my chest in, and I would divert immediately into compulsive web searching to distract myself.

The irony was that I would inevitably find something on the internet that caused me additional anguish, but the initial hit of anxiety relief kept me coming back. In 2001 I started therapy with Molly, who was instrumental in helping me find compassion for myself, and starting to create my own life, but who didn't really understand the nature of my compulsive searching. I started reading sites that left me feeling even more defective and unredeemable than when I started. When I said something about it to Molly she was alarmed, and told me to "draw a boundary" and stop reading the multitude of sites that were telling me I was going to hell.

My secret hope was that I'd find a site that said I was ok--the compulsive search for comfort. I was not the keeper of my time. My time was like a stretched out sweater that couldn't bounce back into its original shape, and one of my OCD fears was that once I started websearching I couldn't recover any of the day, that it was all ruined, and this meant just about every day was ruined.

My challenge now, while unemployed, is to claim my time. My well ingrained habit, my overlearned skill, is to start drifting on the computer, and making a schedule stirs up all the fears of choosing the wrong things to do, but there is true delight in actually doing things that are important to me, like writing this post. What ways has OCD interfered with keeping your time? How have you reclaimed bits of your life? My OCD says that it's all or nothing--either I claim it all, or none at all, but that's just another sneaky way for it to perpetuate itself!

Good Friday and Scrupulosity

I confirmed my faith on Palm Sunday some 30 years ago, and then had first communion on Good Friday. OCD can infiltrate every aspect of your life, and the term for religious and moral obsessions is scrupulosity. Ironically, from the outside no one would ever suspect I had such struggles and turmoil about perfectly pleasing God. I was at church constantly. During Lent I went to every Wednesday night service and every night of Holy Week Services. I wrote prayers and devotionals. I took great pains to never hurt someone's feelings. I was quiet, compliant, conscientious, studious. I didn't swear.

This made my confirmation difficult, because as I knelt down to receive the blessing from the minister, obscenity hurtled into my mind. Suddenly, I was thinking words I would never say. I desparately wanted them gone. I agonized over what this meant about me, and how to make them stay away. I had been looking forward to my first communion, and yet, the first thing I thought of was "Will the thoughts come back?" which immediately brought the obscenities to mind in the self-generating way that OCD has. I couldn't be in the room, in the sanctuary of this church, because my OCD was compelling me into the future.

Existential questions heavy laden with intense anxiety and fear that I was doing everything wrong. Did I feel the "right" way during communion? Did I enjoy writing prayers more than loving God? How can people exist without being Christian? How do they get through life? Would God really reject them? I wrote long journal entries trying to figure this all out, until the point of exhaustion. In my heart, I had a passionate longing for God, and a sense of God's presence, but my constant analysis of every thought and action obliterated the possibility of comfort and peace.

Finally, in my 30's I stopped going to church, because the waves of compulsive figuring out of sermons, and fears of being imperfect and therefore damned and being afraid that if I couldn't figure out the meaning of suffering, or whether Christianity was the only way, or whether God was good, that I would disintegrate from the anxiety of these unanswered questions. I want to honor the heart of the girl I was, who loved God, but I'm still afraid.