Five Keys to Beating Scrupulosity

My name is Ted Witzig, Jr. I’m a clinical psychologist and pastor and I have spent over 20 years working with individuals and their families who are dealing with OCD and specifically OCD that wraps around religious and moral matters. And so today, what I hope to do is be able to share some key tools to helping you, whether you’re a sufferer, a parent, family member, friend, a therapist, in ways to beat Scrupulosity.

It often confuses people. It oftentimes shows up in ways that people aren’t sure what to do with it. They’ll think it is a spiritual matter, and so they’ll show up to clergy or try to deal with it through repetitious prayers or other things like that. And so, it can be confusing for people across the board.

So, what I hope to do today is lay out a pathway that can help individual sufferers, their families, their clergy and mental health professionals work together in a way that helps to beat the scrupulosity. I’m going to share up my screen here, and so let’s get started.

First of all, when we think about scrupulosity, what is it? So, first of all, it is considered obsessions to compulsions that have religious themes, hyper morality and pathological doubt, and worry about sin. And so, I want to make very clear that OCD and particular scrupulosity is not about somebody’s religion or their beliefs. There are millions and millions of people that practice their religious faith every day and every year and every week that don’t have OCD or scrupulosity. So, it’s really important to understand that we’re not just talking about somebody who is devout. We’re talking about somebody who OCD has overtaken or gotten in the way of them being able to practice their faith. What you have also then is that the symptoms of scrupulosity follow moral or religious lines of teaching, oftentimes and almost every religion of the world has different beliefs that fall along these things.

Like what do we believe about what’s right or not right about how to deal with God, sex, violence, and what’s clean or not clean? I just want to say also, as a Christian pastor, a lot of my examples will be coming out of my experience base today. But it’s important to know that scrupulosity has been identified in people of all the world’s religions.

I wanted to say also that there are a couple of different kinds of obsessions that occur. And the first type, I call the intrusive or the ego dystonic or the shocking obsession are the repugnant obsessions. These are the kind that when the sufferer has them in scrupulosity, it slams into their thought stream.

They feel shocked about it. Like, oh no, I think I just shot blasphemous thoughts at God, or, oh no, I think that I committed the unpardonable sin, or I had the image of having sex with a virgin Mary or something along those lines. And so, the person has a sense of disgust at just having the thought, okay, what kind of a person am I that I would have a thought like this? I can’t believe that I would have this thought. And I think another thing, it’s really important is that this shocking type of obsessions, I should say they’re shocking to the person. No OCD professionals are going to be shocked by these because we’re going to say, you know what, this is what OCD does.

Okay. But to the person that has it, it feels very shocking. And so, they feel very shameful. They feel very much like if other people knew I had these thoughts that they would send me away. They wouldn’t want to talk to me. They would think that I was a bad person. Sometimes, for example, the thoughts, particularly in a religious context, a person will have these thoughts and people will interpret it as a spiritual attack or for example, something like a demonic possession or things of that nature.

But while I’m not debating that there’s a spiritual world, what I would say is that intrusive, obsessional thoughts are things we see very regularly with OCD and they’re very, very common. Wherever you’re in the country, even the world, these kinds of themes are very commonly seen.

Type number two type of obsession in scrupulosity is something I call faith syntonic. Ruminative obsessions. Now that’s a mouthful, isn’t it? Wow. But what it means is obsessions that the person doesn’t question at all. Because they just think they’re just true. So, a question like, am I truly at peace with God?

Or what if I’m proud? Or what if I just lied? These kinds of obsessions don’t really slam into somebody’s thought stream as much as they just come in and like, oh man, am I too proud or am I modest or am I really at peace with God or do I really have love?

What happens with these kinds of obsessions is the, the obsessional thoughts and the pathological doubt are interpreted as syntonic. That means that they, they fit with the person’s religious worldview. So, because again, I don’t want to lie and I don’t want to be proud, and I do want to be at peace with God.

So, what happens is the actual distress doesn’t come with a thought slamming into their thought stream. The stress comes when the person starts to go, oh, no, what if I’m not at peace with God? Oh, what if I am proud and that’s bad? And so then, it kicks off obsessional rumination and or that analysis and it’s trying to figure it out.

And so, there are lots and lots of mental rituals and neutralizations. And then oftentimes following that, some reassurance seeking. We’re going to talk about that more as we go here. So, one question before we dive in further, and that is, does religion cause OCD or scrupulosity? So, first of all, like I said, scrupulosity has been identified amongst followers of all the major world religions.

What it does do is it tends to take on the characteristics of a person’s religion or their cultural beliefs. And so, it tends to mold itself to the person’s religious worldview. So, I work a lot with Protestant Christians and so one of the things that you’ll find is that the kinds of things they worry about have to do with the things that Protestant Christians worry about.

Correct belief, whether they have repented correctly, whether they’re walking in a way that is honoring God. The interesting thing is if you look at somebody who has scrupulosity in an Orthodox Jewish context or ultra-Orthodox Jewish, the things they’ll worry about are things like mixing milk and meat and cleanliness.

And so what you’ll find is, and while it’s possible that those could be flip flopped, because OCD doesn’t really know any boundaries in terms of what it can cause somebody to worry about, what you see is the Jewish believers are going to have obsessions that revolve around their religious beliefs and practices and then like the Protestant or Catholic or other groups are going to revolve around those.

So, I like this quote from Perdon Clark that just says it very succinctly. There is no evidence that religion causes OCD. However, your religious background and experience can influence the type of obsessional concerns that develop in people with OCD. And I think that that’s definitely been the case in what I have seen.

All right, so what are the five keys that we’re going to be looking at? We’re going to be looking at faith, doubt, and uncertainty. We’re going to talk about acceptance of commitment, therapy skills, and how we can use ACT to create synergy between your religious beliefs and the treatment. We’re going to talk about effective support and the 85% rule, again, to make sure that people are on the same page between pastors and family and the sufferer and a counselor to try to make sure we’re working in the same direction. We’re also going to talk about helpful and unhelpful exposures. Exposure and response prevention is one of the primary treatments for O C D, but we do want to make sure that it’s done in a way that is going to be respectful of people’s faith background.

And then the last thing we’re going to talk about is self-compassion. Now these aren’t the only five keys to beating scrupulosity, but today that’s what we’re going to cover here. All right, so let’s talk about faith, doubt, and uncertainty. First of all, I want to highlight, and this is very important, faith is not the absence of feeling uncertain.

Okay. Faith is going forward through the uncertainty. This is a big key because uncertainty and the intolerance of uncertainty is one of the major drivers of OCD symptoms. We all love to feel certain. I love to feel certain; you love to feel certain. We all love it when everything feels like it lines up, but that’s not real life.

Our feelings and our circumstances don’t always match. And OCD is driven by this feeling of, oh no, what if I don’t know for sure and I have to figure it out for sure. And again, OCD doesn’t just say, oh, it’s okay if I’m 99% sure. OCD really fixates on that .00001% chance that I might not be okay, and it actually flips it over and says, prove to me that I am okay.

And so, we keep redoing and checking and things of that nature. It’s important to remember then that faith is faith because we are believing in something that is beyond, and that doesn’t mean that faith isn’t real, that it’s not good. And faith is good. But faith sometimes, or OCD, I should say, wants to create a little formula here that doesn’t work.

What it does is it wants to say faith equals certainty. Okay? And that little formula is going to spin you around in a way that really is unhelpful. Faith equals trusting God through the uncertainty. When you say faith equals certainty, all of a sudden that’s going to spin you in a way that says I have to check, and I have to analyze.

And that’s accidentally going to turn you into somebody who’s going to be putting gasoline in OCD’s engine. So, OCD also wants you to believe that uncertainty and doubt is just dangerous. Okay, that having feelings of uncertainty and doubt are dangerous. Everybody sometimes has feelings of uncertainty and doubt, even the most faithful, and it’s important to understand that while uncertainty and doubt are uncomfortable, they are not dangerous.

It’s not dangerous, and you can learn to tolerate it. In fact, what I would say, and this is really important because this is one of those places where you can create synergy with the treatment. Okay with faith in treatment or moving in the same direction, is that treatment for OCD is learning to tolerate the uncertainty.

It’s learning to push past doing the rituals. You know what faith is? Faith is moving through the uncertainty, and it’s really important to understand that people of faith all over the world, and even as I think about Old Testament, New Testament teachings, what you see are that the faithful went from a place that was familiar to them through uncertainty, and then they trusted God through that. And so, here’s the thing, you can move forward in faith and do your treatment. Now, does that mean you’re going to feel certain through the treatment? No, no, no. That’s not what it means. In fact, what I’m saying is that you can move forward in your treatment and learn to tolerate the uncertainty, and it’s doable.

So, remember this, faith is what you believe. It’s not what you feel. OCD on the other hand, wants you to believe your faith is what you feel. And as a psychologist and even as a person, I love emotions. I love to talk about emotions. I love to understand people’s emotions. One of the things you need to understand is your faith is not your emotions.

Your faith is what you believe to be true. So, remember this, feelings are not facts. Okay? Now, OCD wants you to say, feelings are facts. And if you feel unpeaceful, that means that you’re not right with God. And we really need to remember that what makes you right with God is what you believe.

Okay. And who you believe in. I love this. This is a little Scripture from Mark 9:24. And it really teaches this that I can have faith and still feel uncertain. In this particular passage, Jesus asked a father of a young man. He said, do you believe? And he said, Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.

And so, what we need to remember is that sometimes we need to say, okay, I believe this is true and I need to move forward acting on that with what I call walking faith. Walking faith is the direction of your faith, and then you keep going whether you’re feeling it or not. Okay? Another thing is to remember.

That God loves you completely, even when your feelings are uncertain and clouded by doubt. I want you to think about those of you who are parents, okay? Do you love your kids less when they struggle? Okay? When they go through a time when they’re, um, hurting or, or doubting or frustrated or whatever. No, you don’t.

In fact, when they’re hurting, okay? When you see your kids hurting, what do you as a parent feel? Your compassion just increases for them during those times. So, so it’s very interesting because we can even understand that, that we love people as they struggle, but for some reason OCD’s convinced us that, that, um, if we have any doubt or uncertainty, that God’s like, oh, you’re done.

Okay. Another thing to remember here, and this goes back to this thing about the role of feelings and faith. OCD, by its nature blocks the peaceful feeling that people of faith desire in religious practice, we love to feel peaceful. We love to have that sense of certainty that we have peace with God.

But I want to highlight something. This goes to just the biology of human beings and the biology of OCD, okay? It’s very important to understand that the part of the brain that is activated in OCD sends this message. It says it’s an air detection circuit in here. It’s in the mid part of the brain, your Singulate system, and it puts the message out and it goes.

Something’s wrong. You got it. It’s not quite right. Not quite right. And the other part of the brain and the frontal lobes are going, fix it. We have to fix it. We got a problem, fix it. Fix it. Come on. What’s the problem? Fix it. Fix it. Analyze it. Fix it. And what we have then is a loop that’s going on here biologically, that in which the more and more we try to feel peaceful.

The less and less peaceful you will feel. Okay. It’s a lot like a little child. If you’ve ever seen a toddler try to pick up a balloon. The closer they get to the balloon, the more they kick it out in front of them, okay? And the more you try to make yourself self feel peaceful, the more you’re going to go I don’t feel peaceful. Okay. Actually, the brain projections, the nerve projections, the vagus nerve that comes down into your chest and abdomen. Okay? It sends anxiety messages into your chest and abdomen that give you the feeling of something’s wrong. Okay? And so, it’s very important to understand that feeling is essentially the neurological opposite of feeling peaceful. Okay, so you need to remember this, that feeling peaceful is not the same thing as being at peace with God. And I want to just remind you of this. I’m going to give you just an example of this. My wife and I have twin daughters who are 19 now.

When they were born, they thought that they heard something in one of their hearts that wasn’t quite right. And so, they hooked my little daughter up to a bunch of wires and things like that to do an examination of her heart. I was standing there, in fact, I was holding her little hands while this was going on, and I loved her.

This my little baby daughter that was just born that I love so much, I’d give my life for her in a second. Okay. The question is, was she loved? Absolutely. My wife and I loved her so much. Did she at that moment feel peaceful? No, not at all. She was screaming, she was unhappy. She didn’t know what was going on.

She was not liking having these little electrodes put on her chest and not being wrapped up swaddled in a blanket. So, the feeling was anything but peaceful, but was she loved? Absolutely. And that’s one of the things you have to remember about faith. Is that the feeling of faith may be all kind of messy, but the focus of your faith needs to be on what you believe and moving toward that and walking in your values, believing that God can sort out the difference.

Now, that was the first section, and that first section was on faith, feelings and doubt. The second section now is about acceptance and commitment therapy. Oh, I wanted to just, say one thing, I want to go back here. At the bottom of the page, I have some links to different tools and resources. Free tools and resources. And if you go to the website there, I have a resource called coping statements. It’s specifically written towards Christians with scrupulosity, but it could also be adapted otherwise, but it is called, Coping statements for Christians with Scrupulosity, and it really talks about faith and doubt, and it has a number of statements that could help you in your treatment forward.

This next section is about acceptance commitment therapy, and I have some resources and suggested books and resources on ACT. It’s a newer of the treatments for OCD, but it really has a lot of wonderful application, especially for those with scrupulosity. I would also say that over the time that I have been doing OCD treatment I have watched the field progress through with cognitive behavior therapy and exposure and response prevention. And as it’s gone on, then acceptance to commitment therapy came out. And what we’re really finding is a wonderful merging together of acceptance commitment therapy with exposure and response prevention.

And I really want to recommend that to you as OCD sufferers. I want to recommend that to OCD treating professionals as well. I think there is something there together that really is helpful. So, the acceptance part of acceptance commitment therapy is learning skills to help you detach from assigning meaning to obsessions.

And this is really important because our tendency is to do something called fusion where we have an obsessional thought like, oh no, did I commit the unable sin? Oh no. Did I repent, right? Oh, no. Do I really love God with my whole heart? Or whatever those things are. And when the person has a thought, they grab onto that thought in their mind, and then they start fighting with it.

They start analyzing and what they do is they leave the present moment. They go up into their head. So like, you might be with your family, you might be with your spouse or your children. But you might be your body. But where’s your mind? Up in your head? You’ve left the moment you’re up in your head fighting and fighting and fighting.

Here’s the problem, the more you fight with obsessional thoughts, the more power you give to the OCD and the stickier those obsessional thoughts get. So, here’s the thing. You need to remember when thoughts of a religious, sexual, or moral nature come into your mind, okay? This is key. You must reject the notion that you have to fight, analyze, or control the obsessions in order to show God or yourself that you don’t want them.

Okay. This is why I really like this for people of faith with OCD because oftentimes they’re looking at this going, oh, no, I had this thought. I had a thought. Oh no. What if I’m gay? Or what if I sexually touch my child? Or some kind of thought like that. What ends up happening is a person goes, oh no, I had that thought, so I have to fight having this thought. Okay. And I have to fight it so that I can show God and myself that I don’t want this thought. Now I get it. The acceptance skills in terms of acceptance and commitment therapy don’t mean that you like or agree or want the thoughts. What it means is I’m not going to fight with the thoughts.

I’m not going to get in this battle with the thoughts because the more we fight with them, the stickier they get. And so, in fact, there’s a New Testament Scripture that talks about taking every thought captive. And one of the things that happens is people oftentimes with OCD oftentimes interpret that to believe I need to grab onto my obsessional thoughts, grab, crush, and kill them. The problem is the more that you try to grab onto those thoughts, and the more that you fight with them, you fuel the thoughts, you accidentally create a rebound. And so, what we’re actually trying to do in taking them captive is to disempower them.

We are disempowering the thoughts, and we do that by shifting instead trying to fight, grab and crush those thoughts we’re trying to shift toward then the things that you value and get out of your head and move forward in faith. I wanted to say one more thing here before I go on to the second part of ACT.

If you wonder if you’ve sinned, like what if I did this or what if I did that and you’re not sure? If you have, then you need to move forward. Okay? You need to go on as if you did it. You need to keep moving forward. Okay. The thing about it is OCD constantly gets us looking in the rearview mirror.

Oh no. What did I say yesterday to that person? Did I do this wrong? And we can analyze things for years. Okay. Oh man, did I cut in front of somebody at the drinking fountain in sixth grade? For heaven’s sake. Sorry, I got a microphone right there. The thing to remember is that ACT and your faith are about going forward and forward in faith is the thing you need to remember.

Think about riding a bicycle for a second. Okay? If you’re constantly looking over your shoulder like this and you stop pedaling, you’re going to fall over, you’re not going to get anywhere. Your goal is when OCD is going, hey, you need to analyze this. Hey, you need to check this out because you’re not sure did you or didn’t you sin over here?

You need to focus forward. And get on the track pedaling as hard as you can to go forward down the track. Now what do we learn from the feelings part? We want our feelings to say it’s okay to go on. That’s not the reason to go on. The reason to go on is that you need to think about moving forward towards your values.

So, the ACT skills, the commitment part of ACT is talking about living a meaningful life based on your values. This is why it’s a wonderful treatment for people of faith because values are what we’re about. Okay? And so, what we can do then is think about if you have a value, like a service or value of being able to show love in some way, or you have a particular skill or method that you like to share kindness and love with other people, that what ACT teaches us is the way to beat your obsessional complaints and fears instead of trying to analyze it inside. We focus on living out and using walking faith instead of getting stuck on our head. Okay. It’s a beautiful synergy because it says instead of me sitting at home analyzing whether or not I said the right thing to somebody and being stuck and so paralyzed that I don’t go to the food pantry and go help serve because I’m too much stuck in analysis here. I don’t know if I’m good enough to be worthy of serving. No, no, no. We get out and go. Okay. So, it’s one of the brain phrases in ACT is get out of your head and into your life. So, another thing about ACT is it teaches us that the key is the direction of the movement not the feelings that you have, not the presence of any particular thoughts. Martin Luther said this comment, and he said it this way, at least this is attributed to him, that you can’t stop a bird from flying over your head. Okay? But you can stop the bird from making a nest in your hair. The whole point is people with OCD are holding themselves responsible for essentially these thoughts like birds flying over their hair or they’re over their head.

What we want to do is instead go, you know what? I need to think about what my life is about. And then get active and involved in doing those things. Now we’re going to go on to the next section, and it’s called effective support. And the 85% rule, one of the most common compulsions that we’ve been talking about is this analysis and these mental rituals.

But the second most common cluster of compulsions in Scrupulosity is reassurance seeking and reassurance seeking can come out in repetitive confessions, asking people questions for reassurance and et cetera. That will only keep you stuck. I know of people, for example, who, let’s say they’ve worried about, did I commit the unpardonable sin?

What they’ll do is they’ll just, they’ll not tell some, uh, other people that they have OCD, but you know what they’ll do? They’ll go ask that person, well, what do you think the pardonable sin is? They’ll ask somebody else, what do you think it is? Then they’ll get online, okay, and ask Google what it is.

Let me tell you what. reassurance seeking through online searching is not a good thing, okay? It is only going to keep you stuck. Okay? So, it is very important that you have key support people in your life that understand OCD. Okay. And it’s okay if they don’t know about it very much at the beginning.

There are many, many great ways to learn about OCD, this conference and the resources and materials are out there. Your support people need to understand what OCD is. Okay. They also need to understand what reassurance seeking is, repetitive confession, those kinds of things, and be able to identify it so that they can know well enough that when you’re subtly seeking reassurance that the support person can say, I think you need to use your skills.

I love you enough that I can’t answer those kinds of questions. Okay, now it can take time and effort to get family members, clergy, mental health professionals, and physicians on the same page. Now sometimes things are working along well enough that there doesn’t have to be a whole lot of collaboration.

Because people are kind of already moving in the same direction. The physician goes, yes, hey, I think you need to take an SSRI medication. The mental health professional says, hey, you’ve got OCD, and this is what we’re going to do, and you and the family is on board and the clergy is on board, but sometimes, you’ve got people that are in different angles.

Here you’ve got, maybe sometimes you have a, a counselor that doesn’t know how to treat O C D or you have a, you have a clergy that doesn’t, that never worked with somebody that, that has, um, O C D or you have family members that think, uh, the issue is you just need to try harder, uh, or pray more. And so, we have to work together.

Now, here’s the thing. Communication takes time and effort. Okay. I know it does and nobody has extra time and so what I would say is I would really encourage you that if you’ve got people in your support network that aren’t working together, take the time to try to build those bridges.

Okay. If you have a pastor, for example, Christian pastor who doesn’t understand OCD, the resources on my website, for example, they’re all free and the concepts he can learn or she can learn about, your mentor or Bible study leader can learn about, what OCD is and how they can be a support to your faith and treatment.

Your family members need to understand what, what the treatment is. Because if you’ve got a counselor who’s saying, hey, we need to do exposure and response prevention. You explain it to a family member or family member says, don’t do that. Okay. Or you have a counselor who understands OCD really well and understands exposure and response prevention very well, but doesn’t understand your faith, and so you feel like they’re putting your faith in the crosshairs of the treatment.

This can all be worked through. And sometimes you need to do a consultation with somebody who can help. These people can all get on the same page. What I want to say is it takes time and effort, but what I find is generally the counselors and the clergy really care for you.

And they want to be on the same page. They would like to be on the same page. But sometimes counselors are afraid of clergy. Sometimes clergy are afraid of counselors. Sometimes family members are afraid of all these things. Let’s break down the communication barriers and get on the same page.

It is worth it. So, I say identify someone, and I think this is really key in OCD treatment, particularly for scrupulosity, particularly when we’re trying to understand what is and isn’t OCD. So, identify somebody. It could be a pastor, it could be a family member, a friend, who can help you and the therapist determine what things are a part of the practice of your faith and your church community.

So, what’s the normal practice versus what is OCD? So, for example, if your practitioner is trying to help you stop having compulsive praying. That’s a good goal. Compulsive prayer sometimes can really get to be a problem. But if your practitioner says, you cannot pray. We’re stopping prayer altogether and you are going, I don’t know if I can do that. It feels like a violation. Those kinds of things. The question is what’s the difference between healthy prayer and OCD prayer because they’re not the same thing. Okay. OCD prayer is a response to an obsession. It’s part of a mental ritualization. And so, let’s figure out, can we say, you know what, hey, it’s okay for you to have at the end of the day, a two-minute prayer. It’s okay for you to recite this particular prayer or whatever, but when you do what? When you say things like I have to pray until I feel a certain feeling in my chest, in my abdomen until I say in Jesus’ name, amen. And then I don’t have a certain thought that says, oh no, what if I accidentally prayed to Satan? And that’s why I have to pray again, and I have to go through all those things again. OCD prayer is not okay here. I want to be very clear.

But sometimes we need somebody who can help you and the practitioner to know where OCD and faith begins and ends. There are some really nice lists that some authors have put out and again, on our website, you can find this. What are the differences between healthy religious faith and OCD? So, one of the things that I want to say is you need to be able to do whatever other people from your faith community can do as part of their normal practice of faith. Okay. That’s the key here. Whatever other people can do; you should be able to do. Okay? If they can walk into to a sanctuary, sit down and listen to a sermon, you should be able to walk into a sanctuary, sit down and listen to a sermon.

And so, that’s what we want to use as what is normative. I use this thing called the 85% rule a lot of times. I didn’t come up with it. I don’t remember who I learned it from, but you could say, out of a hundred people in my faith community, what percentage of them would do this particular thing?

Okay. If you would say, you know what, I can’t even attend services anymore because of my OCD. I say, okay, well let’s see what’s normative here. Out of a hundred people from your church, what percentage of them go to a service on Sunday and or on the weekend and you say, oh, well, yeah, way more than 85%.

We’d say, well then, it’s normative that people from your church attend services. And so, we should say for you, that should be part of your goal to get back to that. Okay? Now, if it is something like, how many people, for example, have been confessing the same sin to multiple pastors year after year after year, and have gone to different churches, different clergy, and they all say you need to stop confessing, and you keep confessing and you keep confessing and you keep confessing.

What percentage of people do that? You know, very few it’s about one to 2%. You know why it’s one to 2%? Because one to 2% of people have OCD. Okay? And so, we can say, oh yeah, it’s way below 15%. So, we say that’s not normative. That’s the OCD, and I have to get over that. Okay, so exposures, what to do, what you do and do not have to do.

Okay? So, first of all, you don’t have to do exposures that involve doing things that your faith specifically forbids or says is sinful or immoral, okay? So, for example, you don’t have to destroy, tear, or burn your Bible. Okay. You don’t have to deface anything; you don’t have to commit sacrilege. If those are not things that people in your religious group would do, you shouldn’t do it.

Okay. I’ve never had somebody destroy their Bible, for example. You don’t need to do exposures to pornography. Sometimes fears about sexual things keep people from moving forward. And it’s very important for you to be able not to get stuck by that because otherwise, OCD will control your life for sure, but you don’t need to do exposures to things like pornography that would be considered sinful by your faith. Another one, you don’t have to do things like an exposure in which you have to sit in church shouting blasphemous thoughts at the preacher, for example, as an exposure. But you do need to be able to go in church and allow those thoughts to pass through your mind without neutralizing.

Okay, now some of you go, oh, Tedd, I don’t know if I can do that. Well, that’s why you have a therapist, and you can work through it. But while you don’t have to do some exposures the exact way that somebody might do them, we have to figure out how to get around it.

Okay, well, I’m saying you don’t have to do exposure to pornography. You do need to figure out how to move forward in your life not being bound up by those sexual intrusive thoughts. For example, you don’t have to give up the core beliefs of your faith. Okay. You don’t have to have the concept that in order to cure your OCD, you have to leave faith.

No, you don’t. You don’t have to, but you do need to learn how to follow the tenets of your faith and not OCD’s skewed version of faith. Okay? You don’t have to leave or stop going to church, but you do need to live in a way that’s functional. Okay? You don’t have to completely stop praying, but you do need to learn how to pray in a way that doesn’t feed into OCD.

So, here’s a prayer, God, give me the grace to push through my feelings of uncertainty and to not do my rituals. Good prayer. Okay, God, give me grace to accept obsessions and resist compulsions. And you don’t have to share or agree to the same religious beliefs as your therapist. Oftentimes people have to work with people of different faiths, but you do need to follow through on your agreed upon exposure exercises.

Okay? And again, if you’re having trouble doing that, then we need to find ways to build bridges there by bringing in clergy, by bringing family, bringing a consultant. Okay. And I have at the bottom there a link to a thing called Principles of Effective and Religiously Sensitive Exposures.

Last section is on self-compassion, and I want you to remember this is important because people with OCD and Scrupulosity sometimes are really, really hard on themselves. And really, really brutal. And their picture of God has been skewed by OCD. So, first thing I want to remember is that OCD is an affliction.

It’s an affliction, okay? So, I want you to think about your practice of faith, and I want you to think about how does God feel about and treat the afflicted, okay? And I will tell you that in the Old and New Testaments as I read them, I see God showing compassion on the afflicted. Okay. In fact, I see him encouraging us, as people to care for the weakest and the afflicted and those who can’t care for and defend themselves.

Okay? That life is sacred. Okay. I love this, uh, this Isaiah 42, 3, a bruised reed, shall he not break nor the smoking flax, shall he not quench, he’s just talking about the compassion and kindness and the gentleness of God. So, some ways to increase your self-compassion. How would you treat a good friend or a loved one dealing with the same issues that you are?

See, many of you, if you would think about your friend, if they were having a very same thing. You wouldn’t be nearly as hard on it. You wouldn’t say to them, oh, you’re a terrible mother. You’re a terrible Christian. You’re a terrible worker. You’re a terrible whatever. Nah, you wouldn’t do that.

One of the things that I say to my clients is, I’m only asking you to treat yourself like God would treat an afflicted person and how he would direct you to treat a struggling loved one. Okay, so keep a growth mindset instead of this pass/fail mindset, the perfectionism, all or nothing thinking. OCD wants you to say you’re either perfect or failure.

You’re all in or all out, and that’s it. Okay. It’s better to look at it in this way. Let’s say you’re listening to a sermon, and you think, oh no, I’m failing at this now. That’s a good reminder. I need to work on that. Okay. I’m going to try to grow in that. Okay. But, but to say it pass/fail and then to go to extremes is not helpful.

And lastly, don’t pathologize what is normal. If you feel, for example, that you’re supposed to be positive and happy a hundred percent of the time, and you’re never supposed to have an unpleasant emotion or an unpleasant thought, you’re going to really struggle. Because nobody does that.

Everybody has unpleasant thoughts and feelings. Even the most faithful people sometimes have thoughts and feelings and don’t feel the way they want to. Everybody’s motivation and desire go up and down for things. And so just remember that it’s okay that you feel these things. Remember, your faith is not your feelings.

Your faith is what you believe. I’m going to end here with just some online resources. I have online resources, free resources for anybody @scrupulosity.org. There are all different kinds of things to help you there. Ian Osborne has a site Piece of Mind Foundation has things. One of the things that I didn’t mention here today but is something called the two-screen method of mindfulness. that’s from a book called Freedom From Anxious Thoughts and Feelings that I really like. I have it here. Here are a number of books that I use. And I just really want to encourage you, there are many, many tools out there and resources, don’t give up.

OCD wants to really hurt you and hurt your faith. But I want to encourage you to move forward in hope and forward in faith. And you can beat OCD, you can beat scrupulosity. And uh, I want to thank you for joining me today, and I hope that this has been an encouragement to you.