Seven Shifts For Beating Religious Scrupulosity Webinar

Hello, I’m Ted Witzig Jr. and I want to welcome you to this presentation of Seven Shifts for Beating Religious Scrupulosity. I’m glad that you’re with me today and I hope that you’re encouraged by this presentation. Let me start by introducing myself really briefly. I’m a clinical psychologist and a Christian pastor, and I just want to thank you for this opportunity to be able to come alongside of you as we talk about some ways to improve your treatment in beating religious scrupulosity and living the life that you desire to live.

I have the opportunity, both as a clinical psychologist, and a pastor to work with people whose mental health conditions get entwined in their spiritual and religious lives. And so, this is something that’s near and dear to my heart. Throughout the presentation, we’re going to talk about seven different ways to pivot, in your treatment, to help improve your condition and to grow.

You should know that because my background and my work is primarily with Christian clients, most of my examples and things of that nature will come out of that tradition. So those of you from other faith traditions will need to adapt that but hopefully you’ll find this beneficial to you as well.

So, let’s get started. So, what is scrupulosity? Just real briefly, it’s obsessions and compulsions where religious themes, hyper morality, doubt and worry about sin and excessive religious behavior show up. The symptoms often fall along the major lines of moral teaching in a particular religious group.

So, it’s very interesting. But what ends up happening is the OCD, as it wraps around somebody’s religious faith will pull in aspects of that. So, scrupulosity in Orthodox Jews will look quite different, usually than scrupulosity in a Catholic or a Protestant Christian and other religions as well.

But the teaching of that particular religious group about what they would look at and say is pure, impure, right, wrong, things of that nature is often where the OCD shows up. So, things about what is considered blasphemy or sacrilege. Sex and immorality are oftentimes brought in there. Violence or harm, clean, unclean, pure, impure, belief, unbelief, those kinds of things. And an individual with scrupulosity may focus on one of these things or they may focus on a broad range of things. Also, people with scrupulosity may really focus on the religious aspect, or they may have both religious OCD symptoms as well as other OCD symptoms.

I’m going to talk about two kinds of obsessions and the first one which I refer to as intrusive, egotistonic, and shocking or repugnant obsessions. These are oftentimes pretty easily identified by OCD practitioners because just the presence of these obsessions shock and alarm the sufferer. So, oh no, did I just shout blasphemy? Sexual orientation, OCD, all fall into this a lot of times. Blasphemous thoughts, just maybe a thought of what if I’m a child molester, something that just shocks the person. They have a sense of disgust about the content. And they just really wonder what kind of a person am I that had a thought like this? And so, really, this kind of thought or image really slams into the thought stream.

The second type of obsession, though, is what I refer to as a faith syntonic ruminative obsession. Now that’s a mouthful there, but what it means is that the person doesn’t really question the obsession itself. And rather oftentimes will accept it at face valid. It’ll be a thought like am I at peace with God or what if I’m proud or did I just lie? And that thought just in itself may not be that different from what somebody in the normal population might have, but then what happens is it sets off a chain of pathological doubt and wondering and worry.

Did I do this? What’s the implication if I did do this? And what are the potential consequences to my faith if I did? And so, there’s a lot of obsessional analysis and rumination, a lot of mental neutralizations that show up. And oftentimes, these don’t slam into the thought stream as much as they just hang around.

Now, let’s start with remembering the main treatments for OCD and scrupulosity. And there are really three main clusters here. They all really fall under cognitive behavior therapy. In terms of CBT, ERP, or exposure and response prevention and acceptance and commitment therapy.

Now, each of those have different strengths and weaknesses and different angles. But those all have really good research support, and they are the first lines of treatment. They are what you should be going after when you’re looking at treatment for OCD. Oftentimes too, people when they have OCD will take a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. That’s an SSRI like Paxil, Zoloft, Celexa, Luvox, that cluster. And these are the really main treatments or some combination of them people get for OCD or should be seeking. Over time, I will tell you that I use more and more ACT in my treatment and an ACT ERP combination is really what I’m doing heavily now in my work.

Also, I would say the majority of my scrupulous clients will also take a medication, one of those SSRIs at some point in their treatment. Not everybody does, but I would say a majority of the clients I see eventually do. So, what I want to talk about here is now just some thoughts about spiritual support and OCD and scrupulosity treatment.

Those other treatments that I mentioned are considered empirically validated treatments. They’re the kind of what the research shows that you should do. But oftentimes people coming with scrupulosity or dealing with faith in their treatment often need to think about the role of their faith in the treatment because sometimes they’re really worried that the treatment will harm their faith or that the symptoms are harming their faith.

So, I want to highlight a few things as we get started here. So, number one is I want to encourage you to view OCD treatment as an act of faith, just even doing the treatment, trusting the process of God working through the treatment is an act of faith. The other thing is that I would really encourage you to consider that the goal of treatment is for you to be able to live your faith as it is typically practiced in your faith community. No more, no less. I’m not trying to tell you that you have to be a super Christian or a super whatever, or that you should be less than. Your goal is just to live faith as it is typically practiced in your faith community. So that means, for example, practicing reading Scripture or sacred texts or prayer or attending church or whatever in a healthy manner that is not bound by OCD rules. OCD wants to come in and alter this and give you extra rules about how you must or must not do things.

Another part of spiritual growth as it relates to OCD treatment is developing a healthy God image. And we’re going to talk about that a little bit today because OCD wants you to view God and your faith practice through the lens of OCD and we want to get OCD out of the way.

Another thing is it’s really important to have knowledgeable support people, people that understand you and your faith as well as understand OCD. And so, I would really encourage you to engage with family members, friends, clergy, that can be with you on this journey. You don’t need a hundred support people. But just having a core anchor group of people that can walk with you through this is very important.

And then lastly, one of the things we want to do is we want to make sure that we’re avoiding reassurance seeking repetitive confessions and going back to people with those things. That’s part of the reason we need knowledgeable support people so that your pastor or minister or other people in your life can help give you guidance. And when you come to them and you’re asking for what you call spiritual guidance, but it’s really reassurance seeking that they’re going to say, hey, time out. You need to go use your skills.

So, let’s talk here about the seven shifts that we’re going to look at here. We’re going to be moving from one thing to another thing and we’re going to go through all seven of these. So, we’re going to move from faith is what I feel, to walking faith or living into your beliefs. We’re going to move from viewing, taking medication may mask a spiritual problem to viewing medication. Maybe one way God helps me to beat OCD from viewing perfectionism and all or nothing thinking is how I view my faith. Growth is about progress, not perfection. From viewing OCD is helping you be spiritually safe to God desiring that you break OCD rules in order to be free from continually analyzing the past and replaying things and rehashing things to viewing healing is moving forward. The number six, viewing God. I’m picturing God through the distorted lenses of OCD. We want to move from that to viewing God without OCD as a distortion. And finally, we want to move from this belief that I must prove to God and myself that I don’t want these thoughts and images to understanding that God understands OCD and its treatment.

So, let’s get started. So, the first one here is moving from faith is what I feel to walking faith and that’s living into my beliefs. So, first of all here, we want to just say that OCD wants you to use your emotions as the measure of your relationship with God. It really wants you to be checking your emotions over and over to see if you’re feeling peaceful or if you’re feeling some kind of angst. But that’s a common trap that OCD wants you to use your feelings instead of using your beliefs here.

Because here’s the thing, OCD will want us to try to hold on to positive emotions and sensations, and it will want us to push away negative ones. Unfortunately, when we’re doing that, fighting emotions like that is guaranteed to both increase your unpleasant emotions and diminish pleasant ones.

So, if I say to you feel peaceful right now, go ahead, Pete, feel it. Peace, peace, nothing else, but peace. Feel it, feel it. Well, what do you get? Oh, no. And if I say, okay, whatever you feel, don’t feel any uncertainty. Make sure you don’t feel any uncertainty. Well, all of a sudden, you’re going to start feeling that uncertainty all over the place.

Our feelings are an important part of who we are, but let’s not use feelings as the indicator of truth, the indicator of the be all and end all of your life. So, I want to give you a different definition than thinking about your feelings as the indicator of all things. And that is this that faith is not the absence of feeling uncertain. Faith is trusting God through uncertainty. This is really important because it’s very common for OCD to want you to feel that your faith is your feelings and your faith is what you believe, not what you feel because feelings aren’t facts. And in fact, all of us go through times that we feel uncertain or that we have doubts, or those kinds of things and we can still keep moving in the direction of our beliefs.

I love this Scripture that comes from Mark 9:24. And, it was where a father was talking to Jesus. And he just said to Jesus, Lord, I believe, help my unbelief. And I think many times in our lives, that’s really where we are. The next step here, shift number two of seven is just one of those things.

Again, not everybody takes medication, but there are many people with scrupulosity that withhold themselves from taking medication because they fear that taking medication may mask a spiritual problem. And what we want to move to is viewing that medication may be one way God helps me to overcome OCD.

So, I would like to start with this. Remember this, that you are a physical, psychological, relational, and spiritual being. Those four areas. You’ve got a physical body, you’ve got a mental and emotional self, you’re a relational and social being, and you have a spiritual self. Now, here’s what happens. We accidentally tend to put an or between those things and look at life as is this spiritual or is this physical or is this psychological or is this relational?

And I just want you to understand that OCD will affect all these areas. It just does. It is a physical condition. It has biological correlates in the brain. It affects your thinking and emotions. It affects how you will relate to other people and see yourself in relationships with other people. And it’ll also affect your spiritual walk and how you view yourself there.

So, when we, when we look at treatment, I really encourage my clients not to say, okay, am I dealing with OCD? If I take medicine, am I dealing with this as a spiritual issue or a physical issue? I think it’s very important to say, hey, we’re going to put on a full court press here. I’m going to try to do what I can spiritually, emotionally, relationally, and physically to beat OCD.

Most people, for example, wouldn’t dream of saying to a diabetic that taking insulin is a lack of faith or that it masks a faith issue. We go, hey, you have a condition. It’s called diabetes. We need to, you need to monitor and regulate your blood sugars. And we would say in fact, that it is a blessing and we would thank God for the use of medication and knowledge that helps us to address that physical and emotional challenge.

Right? The same thing is true of OCD. We want to thank God for the means by which he helps bring help and healing, and he can help bring help and healing through cognitive behavior therapy and acceptance commitment therapy and SSRI medication and talking through to your pastor and learning good cognitive skills.

So, just remember this, that your brain is an organ. Just like your heart is an organ and your lungs are organs, and your kidneys are organs. And many times, people of faith will sometimes view mental health conditions, depression, anxiety extra harshly because they’ll view anything mental as being an indicator of some kind of a spiritual flaw in them.

If somebody has a heart problem, they don’t view that as a spiritual flaw. But if they have depression, they’ll go, oh, I must have a spiritual flaw. And so, what we want to do is remember that the brain is an organ. You are part of a whole, your whole body is put together in a magnificent way. It’s a wonderful creation.

But just remember this, that when your brain is healthy, it can process thoughts and emotions better. And that means it can process your spirituality better. Just think, for example, when you don’t sleep well for a period of time, okay, sleep is physical, but guess what? When you don’t sleep well, guess what happens to your mental functions?

Oh, it doesn’t go so well, right? Your concentration, maybe your irritability, you snap at other people in your family, you’re irritable and that creates some relational challenges. And even spiritually, when you’re tired, you worry and other things and your ability to trust and to get perspective is going to be lower.

So, which is it? A physical problem or psychological, relational, spiritual. Well, it’s all those together. And guess what, by the way, for some of us who are sleep deprived, I heard it said one time, maybe the most spiritual thing we could do right now is to go take a nap. And that might help us all to do a little bit better.

When it comes to medication, I don’t fight with my clients about taking medication for their OCD. I may have an opinion and I’ll share that with my clients especially if somebody is finding that their OCD and particularly with depression, is interfering in their ability to cope and function.

I’ll push that a little bit more up front. But let’s say I talked to somebody and they’re like, Ted, I’d like to really try this without medication. For me, this is very simple in how I reason. I’m not saying it’s simple in practice because sometimes it’s harder working it through with individuals.

But at the beginning of a treatment, I do several assessments with people so that I have a baseline level of functioning, their OCD symptoms, their depression, how much scrupulosity they have, how much they’re fighting with their thoughts, all those different kinds of things. We have that as a baseline. So, if they say to me, Ted, I don’t want to take medication initially. I’ll say that’s fine. We have your baseline. Now I’m going to teach you CBT and ACT and ERP. And if you can use those skills to reduce your symptoms and to live into your values in a way that meets your goals, then we don’t have to revisit this. However, if you don’t want to take the medication, but you’re not moving forward, you’re not able or willing to do the treatment, you’re too scared or you’re not doing the treatment like you ought to, you’re not living into your values. Then I’m going to bring it around again. I’m going to keep pushing those treatments.

But you know what? We need to understand that medication is one tool in the toolbox. And I really want to encourage you not to view yourself as spiritually inferior if you take medication. Remember this, God doesn’t look at you and see some kind of medication in somebody’s system and then think, okay, oh, wow, there’s Zoloft in this person’s bloodstream. I can’t work with them anymore. Are you kidding? God, the Creator of the universe is going to tremble at the sight of Zoloft? No, no, no, we need to remember that he’s the one that has allowed these things to be discovered and can be used in helpful ways.

Next, let’s go to shift number three. That is perfectionism and all or nothing thinking. That’s a very, very common thing that wants to seep into our spirituality as well as in OCD. And what we’re really trying to move to is viewing our progress, both in OCD treatment, as well as in our spiritual walk as growth is about progress, not perfection.

So, let’s talk about a growth mindset versus perfectionism. So, first of all, OCD wants you to view your spiritual walk as all or nothing. You’re either hitting it perfectly or you’re failing. There’s no middle ground. Okay. Unfortunately, this has the effect of leading people to avoidance and procrastination.

If you come to reading Scripture or prayer and you either have to do it absolutely perfectly or you’re failing, then what ends up happening is there’s lots of pressure on that to get it exactly right. Did I do it exactly right? Which oftentimes leads to avoidance or procrastination, which then leads to more pressure.

The other thing that happens is fears of catastrophic consequences are common. So, what starts to happen with perfectionism is you must speak and know that you said everything perfectly or else it was a lie or if you didn’t do your prayers right, then it was blasphemy or whatever that is. And it’s catastrophic consequences. And OCD never has anything in a mindset that just kind of goes well, hey, do better next time. Or, hey, let’s grow here. It’s always either perfect or it’s catastrophe. That’s OCD. When you hear things of that ring, that sounds like OCD to me.

Let’s just use the example of how OCD would like to distort prayer. It’s very common in scrupulosity that people struggle with prayer because OCD wraps around it. So, think about how OCD would like to think about prayer. So, how long is a good prayer? Okay. And now, by the way, I’m not asking you this to say that you should figure this out and analyze this. I’m saying OCD wants to think like this. OCD is like, well, which is better, a one-minute prayer or a two-minute prayer. Well, I better, well, longer is always better. OCD will say, not necessarily. Okay. How do you know if you said all the correct words? OCD is constantly wanting you to analyze those things.

How many things should you pray for on your prayer list? How long should a prayer list be? Can you take someone or something off your prayer list? OCD wants to take these things that are supposed to be helpful, like a prayer list or praying for a certain thing at a certain time and wants to turn these into crippling rules instead of helps. Another one. Did you forget the wording or mix up your wording of a prayer? And so, people will get all worried about this and they’ll feel like they have to start over, or they’ll have to repeat themselves. Were you sincere as you prayed? OCD loves this one. Did you have the right feelings as you pray?

Did you get that little click feeling when you said amen? You know, did you say amen with enough gusto? Did you say in Jesus’ name, amen? Because you didn’t want to pray to Satan or something like that. Did you get distracted or tired while you prayed? Well, guess what? If you have all these things going through your mind, which is what OCD likes to do, it’s really hard to pray because OCD has given you a whole bunch of rules and a whole bunch of pressure and it becomes crushing.

So, we really want to think about this as a growth process. And I love this phrase and it says this, I say this over and over to my clients. So, if you were in my office, you’d hear this over and over, growth is about progress, not perfection. We want to keep leaning in the direction of our values, leaning in the direction of our faith, and focus on taking steps in the desired direction. See, God desires a relationship with you. What OCD wants is for you to view God as a cosmic accountant who’s simply tallying up all your mistakes and who wants to give you a report at the end that says you’re a failure. And that kind of mindset is crippling. Many people have it. But it does not highlight the fact that God desires a relationship with us. And I think about for myself, I think about the relationship that I have with Jesus Christ and what how important that is relationally. And how crippling it is to view that if I go through my day that I have a cosmic accountant trying to tally up my mistakes. I remember I had a supervisor one time in a job that I had that was kind of, I felt like was on my shoulder all the time and constantly saying, did you do this? Did you do this? Did you do this? And it made me so anxious. And I was never able to relax and really do my work because I was so worried about what’s over my shoulder. And I’ll tell you that is how OCD wants you to view your spiritual walk.

I want you to think of a parent with a child. You all have parents, but many of you had children or grandchildren or another child in your life. I want you to think about as they grow, as you watch them learn to walk, they stumble, they trip. What do you do? You lift them up and you help them keep going. You say good job. And then if they get off track, what do you do? You correct them. You bring them back on track. No, no, no, we don’t do that. No, no, no, hey, you know what? We’ve got to do this. And you teach them. right and wrong. You teach them to stay on the right path. You teach them to stay away from things that are dangerous for them, but you also encourage them as they keep moving on.

And if you think of that, that’s oftentimes much more helpful in this process. Remember this too, as you go through treatment, sometimes you’re going to win against OCD and sometimes you’re going to lose. Okay. OCD is mean. It’s nasty. It comes at us 101 different directions. And if you think you have figured OCD out all the way, then all of a sudden it will show up another way.

And that can be really frustrating. And so, if you look at your growth, like it has to be a straight line. And I have to start and I’m going to straight line out of OCD. Progress is much more up and down. Down at the bottom of this slide, there’s a link to a video I did called growth and recovery process that you can go to that shows this up and down progress of growth.

But it’s okay. You’re going to have steps forward and steps back. But the growth mindset says, hey, you know what we’re going to do? We’re going to refocus on our values. We’re going to get up and we’re going to get moving again. And that’s why it’s good to have other people on the journey with you to keep you moving in the right direction.

Next, shift four is this. OCD is helping me to be spiritually safe. This one is a constant one that I find people’s scrupulosity wrestling with. They don’t outright say it, but they live like it. And I’m going to explain this more. And we want to move to God desires that I break OCD rules in order to be free.

So, OCD compulsions, a safety or a prism. See, often OCD convinces people that by doing the compulsions, that’s behavioral, mental, avoidance, that by doing those, you’re being spiritually cautious, which is interpreted as being safer, which is interpreted as being more spiritual. So, if you’re doing the “spiritually safe” thing, there’s, and I’m putting spiritually safer in quotes here because it’s kind of like, well, I’m not sure that I said that prayer, right?

So, I’m going to repeat the prayer three times. That’s safer, therefore more spiritual. No, no, no, no, no. That’s OCD. In fact, obsessional doubt holds people captive, and it uses a lot of thoughts like this. And this is oftentimes not spoken directly by somebody with OCD or script velocity, but it will be there.

And underlying a lot of these, it really comes down to this, what if this isn’t OCD, but it’s actually spiritual. And they’ll say to me sometimes, Ted, if I knew that this thing, this last thought was OCD for sure, then I could dismiss it. But what if it isn’t OCD? What if it’s actually spiritual?

That’s the crux of the matter with all OCD treatment. That little nugget of doubt that’s under there. Ted, if I knew for sure this was OCD and not spiritual, then I wouldn’t worry. Well, the problem is that’s right at the crux. So unfortunately, this type of thinking plays right into OCD’s hands, and it leaves us feeling that I’ve got to analyze and check and go over this again and again.

At the same time, I’m feeling the weight of eternal life or death hanging in the balance. Okay, so it’s adding a lot of pressure. So, while it feels that the key to dealing with uncertainty and doubt is to find certainty, that accidentally puts more fuel in OCD engine. So, I want to think of it this way.

So, over here is this uncertainty and doubt. It feels like what I’ve got to do is go to the other end of the continuum here and really find absolute certainty. The problem is your mind is going to go back and forth between. Okay, I feel doubt Okay, I’m going to make it feel certain. And then all of a sudden you feel doubt and then you want to find more certainty.

And then as you’re seeking certainty, you feel doubt and it goes back and forth and back and forth. And that back and forth is OCD. That’s how OCD operates. Okay, so the goal is to live by faith and to break OCD’S rules instead of seeking certainty instead of going back and forth between do I have uncertainty? Do I have perfect certainty? The goal is to move forward. Seeking to live by faith and faith means I’m going to go forward towards my values even when I don’t have certainty. See, walking by faith may not give you the emotional feeling of certainty you want in the moment. In fact, many times in the moment you won’t feel that emotional certainty.

But here’s the thing, you will have a full life consistent with your beliefs and values if you can get out of your head and into your life. So, shift number five is I must continually analyze the past. We’re just a step forward from shift number four, this continually analyzing the past. I got to go back. Freedom is found in moving forward. So forward or backward. So, how about this? Here’s some obsessional thoughts. Oh, no, did I just lie? Or do I need to explain more to my minister? Maybe I didn’t share enough, uh, in my last confession. Maybe I skipped something or was I sorry enough or did I blaspheme in my prayer?

All those kinds of thoughts coming up. So, one of the most common things that people with scrupulosity do is to replay the scenes from the past to make sure they didn’t do something wrong. So, they analyze, well, did I do this? What about this? You know, well when I took communion, did I do that right?

Or when I was baptized, did I have, or did I feel this feeling of peace when, and they’ll be analyzing things decades later sometimes. Doesn’t help, but they’ll do it. Okay. Unfortunately, analyzing the past will not help you regain your present and have a future. Okay. OCD wants to control the past.

It wants to mess with your present, and it wants to always just keep coming back in your future. And we don’t want that. So, hey, by the way, yes, it’s true. There are times that you need to go back to someone and say you’re sorry. All of us sometime or other, maybe you are irritable with a family member, and you really snapped at somebody, and you need to go back and say, hey, you know what, I’m sorry. I really was wrong, like me, my mouth gets running, and I shouldn’t have said that. I’m really sorry. Okay. But the concept is this. You need to use, I call it the 85% rule, to know when to do something like this. And that is out of 100 people, how many people would go back or how many people would go do that?

So, let’s take an example from contamination OCD. So, some people are constantly over washing their hands because oh no, what if I touch that doorknob and I end up giving my family AIDS or something like that. And so, you can ask yourself this question. So, out of out of 100 people, how many people, if they touch that doorknob, will go to the bathroom and wash their hands ritually in scalding hot water until they have pain and they have to feel an internal click that lets them know that they’re absolutely at peace with their family before they can leave the bathroom.

Well, you know what? People with OCD do that, but that’s not something that people without OCD do. But let’s take it this way. Let’s say after changing the oil in somebody’s car, they have their hands full of oil. What percentage of people may go wash their hands before they eat lunch? Guess what? A high percentage of people. So, if 85% or more of people are going to do something, we’re going to call that typical and we can think, yeah, I’ll do that. But if it’s on the low end, like what? Only 1% of people are going to do that. We should go. That’s probably the 1% or 2% of people with OCD. They’re going to do that. So, yes, there’s a time to say you’re sorry. But you know what? OCD wants you to go back 99% more than you need to. See, the majority of the time when something is imperfect or we didn’t handle it exactly the best way, what we need to do is go forward, not backwards.

Okay, I want you to think about riding a bike for a second. What do you do when you ride a bike? You grab the handlebars, you pedal, and you aim forward. You look in the direction that you want to go. See OCD, what it wants you to do is this. It wants you to live life looking in your rearview mirror, okay? And guess what though? If you’re continually looking over, oh did I say that just right? Did I accidentally do this, or did I actually do that? If you’re looking over your shoulder while you’re riding a bike, guess what, you’re going to crash into something. And we want to just keep moving forward. Okay.

Shift number six, picturing God through the distorted lens of OCD versus viewing God without OCD’s distortion. So how clear are your lenses? I like to look at it this way. OCD wants to color the lenses. Just like I’ve got lenses. I see things much clearer when I’ve got my glasses on, but it wants to color everything in our life. Okay. Including the spiritual and religious.

So just consider, for example, if the lenses of my glasses, maybe you have contacts or glasses, but imagine you had even sunglasses but imagine they were green lenses. Okay. Well, if you had green lenses and those green lenses represented looking at things through OCD, and then you looked at things like when you read the Scripture or when you pray or how God views you. How does God view me? How do I view God? How do I view this worship service? How do I view myself as I’m giving or serving or doing some kind of charity work? See what happens is OCD will want you to look and as you’re reading the Bible, for example, what it will want you to do is to color what you see so that the promises of Scripture are for somebody else.

Okay. But, but if there’s some kind of warning or things like that. You go, oh, no, I’m in trouble. And so, what happens is it becomes very lopsided. Instead of, remember that parent we talked about earlier, that is encouraging the child to keep growing in the direction they should go, but also willing to correct and help that child to stay on the path.

That’s how God is. He wants us to stay on the path, but he wants us also to know that we’re loved along the way. OCD is going, you’re not perfect enough. You didn’t do this right. You’re in trouble. You’re in trouble. You’re in trouble. God’s angry at you. You’re not worth loving. In the worship services, it will constantly be like, oh no, you know what? Everybody else here is lovable, but not me. You know, I don’t do enough when it comes to these kinds of things. I’m inferior when it comes to all these kinds of things of service and giving and charity and those kinds of things. Those are all wonderful things, but here’s what happens. OCD wants to use that perfectionistic mindset, or this God is angry at you, mindset, or whatever to make it seem like you’re just failing. So, I often think that it’s helpful for somebody to have an external perspective to help here. Sometimes we don’t know when our lenses are dirty.

Okay. Have you ever done that? You’ve kind of stepped back and you’ve looked at your lenses and we’re like, I can’t believe how dirty these lenses were. And I didn’t notice I’ve been walking around like this all day. Well, guess what? Sometimes we don’t notice how distorted our lenses are. So, I often have my scrupulous clients work with their spiritual advisors on this.

Now, a note on spiritual advisors. This could be a pastor. This could be a mentor. It could be a parent. There are lots of different people that it could be, but it means that spiritual advisors should understand OCD and its treatment. Okay. I often invite pastors and clergy family members to come to session with a client.

Okay. I think that there are a lot of times we talk about that in the OCD community, but oftentimes don’t really take the advantage of really doing that. I think there’s great value. And in this day and age, when there’s a lot of video conferencing and things going on, we can very easily video conference, family members, clergy, and other people right into a session. And to be able to do that in a way that helps to educate spiritual advisors, families, et cetera, and also get the collaboration and the working together. I think this is really helpful. Okay.

I oftentimes then ask clients about how they feel that God views them with their OCD. Oftentimes when I ask him those questions, they’ll get tears in their eyes and they’ll just say, they’ll shake their head and say, God probably just looks at me and says, I’ve given you so much. Why are you failing so much? You know, they’ll feel very discouraged and those kinds of things. So, oftentimes I’m listening for things, a range of descriptors that they go along. You know, does God feel compassion towards this person or condemnation? Those kinds of things. Sometimes it’s very mixed. Sometimes it’s lopsided one way or the other. So, again, you’ll have to adapt this to however it works best for you. But I often find when people have really had a picture of God that’s been really skewed by OCD, many of my clients have found it helpful to use a picture of Jesus with a lamb or the imagery from the 23rd Psalm to really help provide them with a counterbalance.

And again, not a counterbalance just so that we’re going like this between there’s the OCD view and then there’s this perfectly rosy view that goes like this. Okay. Remember that gets into this all or nothing, perfectly rosy, perfectly condemned, perfectly rosy, perfectly condemned. We actually want to grow along with your spiritual advisor and in your faith practice, a view of God that’s very consistent with your beliefs.

Shift number seven. This is the last shift that we’re going to cover here. And that is, I must prove to God and myself that I don’t want these thoughts versus God understands OCD and its treatment.

So, first of all, a lot of times people are just wondering, does God understand this OCD battle? Okay. They’re very worried that God is going to just be angry at them or that if other people in their faith community knew that they had these thoughts, that they would be cast out. Okay.

A lot of shame in that. So, intrusive thoughts with moral content, sexual, violent, religious thoughts are often distressing to people because they’re saying, wow, this isn’t who I’m supposed to be. This isn’t what I’m learning about at church. It violates my moral code. I would never want to do this, but these thoughts keep popping in my head.

So, what happens is often people with scrupulosity feel like they must fight against the thought. So, they actively are trying to push those thoughts out of the way. They’re trying to control them. They’re trying to shove them down. They’re trying to not think the thoughts in order to prove to God and themselves that they don’t want them.

In fact, they’ll sometimes start to go, I really hate these thoughts, or they’ll really start to get disgusted about the thoughts. And it feels like what they’re doing is trying to push those thoughts away. Here’s the problem. Unfortunately, trying to control and suppress thoughts and fusing to them. Fusing means just really wrestling with thoughts. It accidentally leads to a rebound, and it increases the frequency, distress, and the stickiness of the thoughts. Now you’re saying to me, what? You know what? I can’t allow these thoughts to stay here, Ted. These are awful thoughts. I have to push them away.

And I’m going to say it this way. Okay. Our goal is to do something a little bit different. I would say that our goal is to drain the intrusive thoughts of meaning and power. Okay. How do we do that? Well, first, God understands that thought suppression doesn’t work. Okay, you’ve probably heard this is a very common thing. I’ll say it though here because it’s so helpful, but it’s that white bear suppression test. Don’t think of a white bear. Don’t think of a white bear sitting next to a red ball. Whatever you do, don’t think of a white bear because that will be really bad if you do. Guess what? The more you tell yourself not to think of a white bear, the more you do.

Well, guess what? If you have a thought about, have I committed blasphemy or what if I didn’t fully confess and you go, don’t think about it. Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it. What happens? You’re going to think about it. You’re going to think about it. You’re going to think about it.

I can understand that God can certainly understand that. He understands how distressing the symptoms of OCD are. I want you to remember here, this is important. I believe that God views OCD as an affliction. Okay. And I would really encourage you to that as well. Okay. That when we understand that OCD is an affliction, we can think about how we would treat people who are going through an affliction.

We treat them with compassion. That’s how God treats people with afflictions. It’s how you and I treat people. So, why don’t you treat yourself that way? Okay. Another one is, don’t read condemnation of you and your scrupulosity into Scripture. What I mean by that is, and there are a number of Scriptures that OCD will oftentimes hook onto, and different faith communities will find different hooks in that regard.

So, 2 Corinthians 10:5 is a great example. It says one of the things here, it says to take every thought captive and bring it into obedience of Christ. Now, if you read that through the lens of OCD, you know what happens? It feels like that what the Bible just told you is I have to do thought suppression.

I have to take that thought captive by grabbing, crushing, and killing it. Problem is what we just say, grabbing and trying to grab, crush and kill that thought does what? It causes a rebound. So, don’t read into the Scripture your scrupulosity. So, you don’t need to prove to yourself or God that you don’t want the thoughts.

He understands that. The goal is to shift toward your values. and to get out of your head and into your life in the present moment. Okay, being up in your head, fighting up in here, trying to convince yourself and God that you don’t want these thoughts is way less helpful than, than going, okay, there’s those thoughts there.

I don’t like them, but I’m going to move past them and I’m going to get out of my head and into my life. I do want to say here that I highly recommend that you learn about the two-screen method developed by psychologist, Scott Symington. His book called Freedom from Anxious Thoughts and Feelings is one that I use regularly.

It’s in the resource list. That two-screen method of mindfulness is one of my favorite tools that I use with my clients with scrupulosity. Also, I would highlight a quote here attributed to Martin Luther. He said this, you cannot keep birds from flying over your head, but you can keep them from building a nest in your hair.

And I would encourage you to understand obsessional thoughts that are coming and going. We need to understand they’re like birds flying over our head. We need to do our best to get moving forward in the direction that we want to go and live. By the way, here are a few other slides of resources.

I have some resources. There are other groups as well. Peace of Mind Foundation, the OCD Foundation, the two-screen method, other things. And there are some books. So, I just want to thank you for the opportunity to be with you today. I want to encourage you. OCD is a hard battle to fight.

Scrupulosity is oftentimes a painful battle, but it’s beatable. And I just want you to know that God loves you and wants to help you on your journey in overcoming scrupulosity. May God bless you today.