Overcoming Spiritual Anxiety + Scrupulosity (Religious OCD)
I began following Jesus when I was thirty. My life was turned upside down by a personal encounter with Jesus and an unexpected conversion to Christianity. As I read Scripture and felt my heart’s conviction, I quickly turned away from certain behaviors. Like a veil being lifted from my eyes, I could suddenly see the error in many of my ways. I traded breath work ceremonies for church on Sunday. I traded oracle cards for Scripture. I traded sexual promiscuity for waiting until marriage. I became starkly aware of a law I’d never consciously acknowledged before. There was, apparently, a right way to do things. There were rules for life. I was eager to conform to them.
But I fell for a very old trick.
My heart had been captured by the grace and truth of Jesus, the Savior of the world. But slowly, almost undetectably, I became consumed by an anxiety-driven effort to save myself. Rather than fix my gaze on the One who’d fulfilled the law for me, my gaze became fixed on the law itself and my frightful uncertainty about whether I was fulfilling it. I was tormented by doubts about whether I’d sinned or was sinning or was truly saved. I tried desperately to self-soothe by trying to ‘figure it out’, seeking reassurance, and avoiding anything that might trigger my insecurity.
Two years later, I sat crying across from a pastoral counselor and told her, “I feel more trapped now than I ever did before becoming a Christian. I don’t feel free.” Just saying the words aloud, I knew that something was wrong. It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Why, then, am I in such bondage? The rest of that very same verse would be the key. I was living like a slave to the law.
Intrusive thoughts, overwhelming fear, and desperate attempts to make them go away had plagued me since I was twelve. My obsession-prone mind had fixed itself to many different fearful things over the years — doubts about losing my Mom, dying of a heart attack, contracting rabies, developing early-onset Alzheimer’s, not loving my boyfriend enough. I’d been diagnosed with OCD not even a year before I became a Christian. It didn’t occur to me that my new obsession was a continuation of that condition. The same deeply engrained fear, insecurity, and self-reliance that had driven my OCD for years, was now driving spiritual anxiety and scrupulosity (aka. religious OCD.)
I realized that my faith had been hijacked.
That was three years ago. This is what I’ve learned about overcoming religious OCD.
OCD as Relational
OCD is complex (I invite you to check out this free training if you want to learn all about it!), but my goal here is to hone in on the relational aspect of OCD. The big fear, distorted thoughts, and control behaviors that characterize this condition are connected to our relationships. Let me explain.
The Fear
Our feelings, especially of safety, are shaped by relational experiences. Don’t get me wrong - there are other factors, including bodily, biological factors, that shape feelings. But how we are nurtured (or not) is huge in shaping our feelings. We know that anxiety is directly, positively correlated with how insecure we are in our relationships - that is, how seen, known, cared for, and safe we feel in them. People who feel deeply afraid in the world tend to be those who have been shaped by wounding relational experiences. How anxious we feel in the world is directly correlated to how alone we feel, have been, or have believed ourselves to be. Big fear has something to say about our wounds and our beliefs, especially in our relationships with other people and with God.
The Thoughts
From our earliest moments, our internal ‘stories’ are shaped in relationship with others. Automatic, intrusive, and/or doubt-filled thoughts reflect stories we’ve been told, shown, and have believed in relationship with others. These stories tend to be twisted, incomplete, and unreliable, which is why they can trigger and leave us stranded in terror. Beyond the content of our thoughts, the amount of attention and weight we give to our thoughts also has something to say about our relationships. Many of us who have suffered with forms of OCD give a great amount of attention and assign a great deal of weight to our thoughts. More than they are worth. This relationship we have with our own thoughts reflects something about our relationships with others and with God.
The Compulsions
Compulsions are the ways we try to self-soothe. They are motivated by our big fear and faulty stories, including about ourselves, others, and about God. Because of this, they’re usually misguided attempts to depend only on ourselves (hyper-independent) or to overly depend on another, limited human being who can’t be God for us (codependent.) For example, when we perceive our emotional vulnerability, needs, and/or weaknesses as unwelcome, we soothe in ways that allow us to hide these from other people or from God. When we perceive God as unsafe, uninterested, or unreliable, we turn to other people instead of Him.
When you look at the obsessive compulsive cycle of religious OCD relationally, you can approach healing relationally. This changes everything.
Religious OCD + Your Relationship with God
Perhaps more than any other form of OCD, religious OCD is deeply connected to our relationship with God. When we believe in our bodies, minds, or hearts that God fails, is unfair, or doesn’t care, these beliefs show up as distorted feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. When we believe, at some level, that we are alone (or will be) and our lives depend on us, not on God, we are filled with anxiety.
Many religions actually teach some version of this…
“Be a good person. Follow these rules. Then you’re safe.”
“Don’t mess up. If you do, there’s no coming back.”
“God loves you. But only when you’re good and do well.”
Can you feel the weight of these beliefs? Many who are religious have this understanding and this sort of lived relationship with God, including Christians. Sometimes we don’t even realize we’re living from these sub-conscious beliefs. That was true in my case.
People suffering with religious OCD often have what’s called an insecure, anxious attachment with God. This means we don’t feel fully safe and secure with Him. We want to be close to Him, yet we fear He’ll abandon us. This makes us hyper-vigilant to anything that could threaten our relationship with God, including our own potential failures. We have a fear of messing up and what that will mean.
This is often a sort of anxious, calcified residue from real experiences we’ve had in relationships. We’ve experienced abandonment or rejection with others we’ve been close to. Perhaps even small mistakes meant harsh punishment. Perhaps care and compassion were inconsistent. Perhaps we were separated from someone we felt safe with by something like divorce or death. These experiences of imperfect, insecure love can easily misshape our understanding of what it’s like to be in relationship with God.
The important point I want to make is that religious OCD has everything to do with that relationship. It’s driven and sustained by misshapen beliefs and misunderstanding about who God is and who you are to Him.
Replacing Lies with Truth
If religious OCD is sustained by lies, it’s disrupted and overcome by the opposite. We need to know the truth - in our bodies, in our minds, in our very cells and center. What is the truth?
When I was suffering with religious OCD, I was deeply afraid of making a wrong step or missing something. Having thoughts I hated in my head felt life-threatening. I was afraid that God would punish, reject, or abandon me for these things. I didn’t feel secure with Him.
This was right after Jesus came and met me with kindness when I was making countless, even conscious wrong steps! I couldn’t see how my fears contradicted my actual experience with God.
The truth is that we have messed up. We have made many wrong steps. Our thoughts are twisted. This can feel scary to acknowledge, but it is freeing. It is true for all of us, regardless of what we were been told or modeled by those close to us. We have felt, thought, and done wrong. And if we believe in justice, we do deserve to pay.
But God
The Good News that Jesus embodies and offers us is that, even when we are abandoning, God doesn’t abandon us.
Even when we fail, He does not.
Even when we are inconsistent, He is not.
Jesus, “God with us” in human flesh, shows humanity that we have not been abandoned
We are the ones who abandoned.
We fail, and we are inconsistent.
But God loves us. He wants and welcomes us back with open arms.
Jesus came to us, gave up His life, and has covered everything we owe, ever.
When we accept the truth that we are sinners, but Jesus has come to save and secure everything good for us, we get to be free. Not because we don’t mess up, but because He doesn’t. Human love fails in countless ways. But God’s love for us never fails. That’s the the hope Jesus offers.
Religious OCD tempts us to place our hope in the wrong place. It tempts us to try to find peace in our own performance. In having perfect feelings, thoughts, and behavior. But Jesus invites us to look to something, or someone, far more stable and secure: Him.
When we’re obsessing about whether we’ve messed up in God’s eyes, are overwhelmed by a fear of being condemned, or are trying desperately to be perfect to avoid punishment, we’ve either missed or forgotten that God loves us so much, He sent His Son.
Our hope is in Jesus - the perfect life He lived, the price He paid, and the enemies He defeated and will defeat. Not in our own performance, punishment, or power. True peace comes from resting in His work. Not trying to earn it through our own.
Once we accept the truth of Jesus, we are with Him. Nothing - not even our own failures - can threaten us or separate us from God’s love. Jesus accounted for all our failures when He gave His life on the cross. Our sin and brokenness didn’t keep Him from loving us then, and they won’t keep Him from loving us now. We can trust Him. We can trust God.
To know this is your ultimate freedom. The more you know and trust Him, the less anxious and insecure you’ll be.
Knowing + Trusting That God Is Secure
How do we show and teach our bodies, minds, and hearts the truth?
We need every part of us to know that we do mess up, and God doesn’t abandon or give up on us. We do have distorted feelings, thoughts, and reactions that need transformation, and God loves us, even at our worst.
He invites us to trust Him, follow Him, and find the peace we’ve been looking for in our compulsive, controlling behaviors.
In the simplest terms, overcoming religious OCD is about knowing and resting in God’s love in Jesus. Our primary job is to know we’re loved. Our most important “work” is to rest in what His work secured for us: safety, a place in heaven, adoption into God’s family, new life, new, perfect creation.
And this is work for those of us who are so used to trying to earn, secure, and hold on to insecure love. Our bodies, minds, and hearts need renewing.
This is why, after I came to know and believe in Jesus, I very nearly abandoned the original truth that set me free. I began to rely and depend on myself to save me, instead of my Savior. Even though He loved me first, when I was lost and far away from Him, I got swept up in the lie that I had to somehow earn His love and get Him to stay.
Even when we have been born again and believe in Jesus, unbelief still lives in us. It lives in our bodies, our nervous systems, our automatic thought patterns, and our reactions. Our spirit may be willing, but our flesh is weak! We can be vulnerable to familiar, false gospels that make us believe we can or have to save ourselves. We have to actively remain in the truth. Regularly “work” to let our anxious hearts rest.
Rest In the Love of God
How do we do this? Here are some ways:
Practicing stillness + slow, intentional breathing that shows your body you’re safe
Practicing focusing your mental gaze/attention on something better + more beautiful than your thoughts (like the gift in front of you, Jesus’ sacrifice, or worship music)
Being gentle and patient with the part of you that feels so afraid
Spending time reading + meditating on Scripture
Bringing your honest fear, insecurity, questions, and doubts to Jesus in prayer
Taking thoughts + fear captive and examining them against Scripture (I share a specific practice to do this at the end of this article.)
Naming specific ways God has been good to you or is being good to you now
Getting connected in a community of believers (eg. a local, truth-rooted church) + allowing them to love on you
Receiving the support + guidance of a wise, Christian counselor, therapist, or mentor
Sharing your unwanted thoughts, the big fear you feel, +/or the unhelpful ways you try to cope with them with that counselor/mentor
Confessing your mess-ups (eg. when you engage in those compulsive, control behaviors) honestly to Jesus knowing He loves + forgives you
Taking baby steps to courageously trust + depend on Jesus (ex. by doing any of the above!)
Breath Prayer
To get you started, here’s a practice I’ve found to be helpful that combines a few of the practices above. It’s called “breath prayer,” which simply means praying or meditating on the truth in sync with your breath.
Start by taking a deep breath in through your nose for 5 seconds. Let your ribcage expand as you breathe in. Then exhale slowly through your mouth, allowing it to be a little longer than your inhale. Then, choose a phrase or a verse to sync up with your breath, like this:
(Inhale) God is my Savior,
(Exhale) I am safe in His love.
Continue breathing like this for 1-2 minutes. Notice what happens in your body, mind, and heart when you do this.
His Grace Is Sufficient
Showing up, one day at a time, taking small steps of faith empowered by God perfectly in His timing, you will know and believe the truth that sets you free more and more. This is a guarantee.
In the last few years, I’ve learned that, with Jesus, we don’t have to be afraid, even when our bodies feel afraid. We don’t have to trust our thoughts or take them as fact or as having the final say. We don’t have to depend only on ourselves or fight our battles alone. We get to trust Jesus, His word, and His work. We can depend on Him who is secure, certain, and so powerful He overcame death. With Him, we get to be free. Free of the bondage of religious OCD.
How could freedom be so simple? How could a physiological, mental, emotional, trauma-affected, complex condition like OCD be overcome by something as simple as a relationship with Jesus? I don’t know. But I have found it to be true. Not that I don’t have intrusive thoughts anymore, not that I don’t ever feel afraid of being damned or abandoned anymore, not that I never engage in those old, untrusting compulsions anymore. But.
The thoughts don’t have the same power. The fear is far less than it used to be. The compulsions are few and far between.
Healing doesn’t happen overnight. Relationships take time, especially when you’ve been wounded in them. It takes time for our minds to be renewed, our bodies to believe, and our hearts to truly trust. But we’re on our way. His grace is sufficient to carry us and cover us all the way to the finish.
Of that, we can be certain.
This article doesn’t replace personal, relational support, which is so very important when you’re suffering with anxiety and OCD. I highly recommend working with a wise, Christian counselor, therapist, or mentor if you’re able. If you’re a California resident and would like to learn more about my 1:1 virtual and in-person counseling services, click here. If you’re outside California or need referrals for any reason, please send me a message!
So Christ has truly set us free. Now make sure that you stay free, and don’t get tied up again in slavery to the law.
Galatians 5:1
