As I said before, I suffer from scrupulosity. It's a kind of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder connected to-- what else-- religion.
Potentially one in four American Catholic high schoolers are said to suffer from it, but I'm pretty distinct from the descriptions given in the Wikipedia article as well as the demographics, being in the latter half of my twenties. The Wiki article focuses primarily on feeling unworthy of being loved by God. And while that's certainly a component of what I suffer from, I gotta say, these are some pretty mild descriptions of what it's like, which are on the low end of the scale. I'm... not on the low end of the scale. My scrupulosity is very clearly obsessive-compulsive disorder and it's very clearly neurochemical in nature. Feelings of overwhelming guilt are present, but they certainly aren't the end-all be-all.
So let's break it down: the foundation of all obsessive compulsive disorders, the operating mechanism by which they operate, is an intrusive thought. Now, we all have intrusive thoughts. Obsessive-compulsives have intrusive thoughts unrelated to their pathologies, even. Sometimes an intrusive thought makes you feel horrible. A classic example is holding a baby and seeing yourself throw the baby down a flight of stairs in your mind's eye. But what separates an obsessive-compulsive's intrusive thoughts from other peoples' is they're recurring, and come with an attached sense of impending doom. Obviously, this makes OCD cluster with anxiety disorder, because the mechanisms underlying both reinforce each other quite strongly. In the case of most people with scrupulosity, it apparently tends to manifest in obtrusive thoughts over-emphasizing your faults and errors. That's certainly happened, and much like Aquinas I've done the thing with feeling bad about stepping on anything in my environment that's vaguely cruciform. Much like
some others I've also done the thing with the seven obsession. But additionally, I have intrusive thoughts that are blasphemous in nature. Spoiler alert: it's not fun. Additionally, unlike the primarily obsessive component of the stories described, I eventually got into physical compulsions. Much like the rest of people there, I kept repeating prayers over and over again. Of course, reading Matthew 6 when Jesus says not to do that helps-- but if I feel I didn't do my prayer right, I feel like it's not a vain repetition, so I have to do it over again. Prior to reading that I was constructing, well... towers of regimented prayer. I'd have more peaceful moments, see them as phony, pare them down, then with time and anxiety they'd build up again. Some times it'd be seven Lord's Prayers before bed. Other times it'd be a Lord's Prayer, Hail Mary, uh... something like the Spanish equivalent of Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep, plus some other prayers of my own construction. Things like that. Of course, this intersects with religious iconography. First I'd pray facing it. Then I wouldn't because that's idolatry. Then... and so on. It's a very permutative process because I'm aware of my illness. Like I said, though, it doesn't end there. Like others I'm... regimented about things like obscenity. Never use it in this thread, for example (except damn and hell which have their own uses anyway). Can't swear while in the presence of religious icons or while looking at geometrically cruciform objects. This doesn't only extend to my facing but also where my hands and feet are pointed. You may notice, too, this takes a lot of awareness. So you can already see why a church environment is bad for me. And with time, stuff like religious iconography starts generating a stress response simply because I become hyper-aware of all these rules. Pavlovian association sucks. Feeling your adrenal gland go, sucks.
That's not really where it ended for me, though. OCD isn't called that simply because you're obsessive. For a lot of people obsession is a primary part of it, of course-- but then there's the compulsion of physical action. Compulsion to stop what you're doing and pray for forgiveness, for example-- and because I'm genuinely a believer, it's hard to tell when it's something I'd do authentically and when it's something produced by my own stress. Which is, in fact, WHY I suffer from scrupulosity as opposed to compulsive handwashing (which, surprise surprise, I get into when handling Bibles or icons of any kind). It's because it matters to me in a way very little else does. And... that's where the self harm comes into play. The blasphemous thoughts (or replays of my regular thoughts which become blasphemous in a religious context, that happens too) drove me to feelings of impurity just like everyone else you're reading about here. Feelings of unworth. Before knowing about my OCD as a neurological thing (I've been dealing with this since I was
eight) I assumed demons and stuff like that. So I'd cross myself... compulsively. Eventually I stopped just crossing myself and I'd drag my fingernails along my skin as I crossed myself. Fast forward... oh, about ten, twelve years later and there's just a patch of skin on my chest that's ruined. For a bit there, I used to just have a cross made out of scabbed and irritated skin. I'm sure it looks cool on some hyper Christian DeviantART OC, but I can tell you for sure it was just kind of... excruciatingly painful to have. Physically painful. Emotionally painful. Spiritually painful. Painful for me. Painful for my mother.
You can imagine, in this state of mind, how badly someone talking about you disappointing Christ can affect you. Or talking about Hell, where a part of you is sure to remind you that you're going. Or about not doing enough, where a part of you is sure to remind you that you're deficient.
And it's so weird because my parents weren't like that at all. They were pretty much cafeteria Catholics, if my dad even believes in God. My GRANDPARENTS weren't like that at all. On my mom's side, grandpa's a freemason so he's on that Grand Architect of the Universe stuff. He still goes to Mass sometimes, I think, but he's very mystical and reserved about it. My grandma's on some weird magic vibe, she just does inexplicable stuff, and is admittedly extremely Catholic. But not the hellfire kind, just the kind that knows every saint and their feast day, even the non-canonical ones, and has WEIRD paraphernalia sometimes. On my dad's side, my grandpa's got one of those intellectuals' understandings of God that's vague and abstract and sees the commandments as useful superstition from a bygone era. My grandma on THAT side once told me God's parent was Sophia. Remember what I said about the Gnostics?
Yeah.
Coming from this background, too, my devotion didn't and doesn't make sense. Nobody knows or understands why. Which meant nobody could really help. With this eclectic pile of beliefs in hand, it was always easy to find someone else to tell you you were hellbound for that kind of stuff. In a lot of ways this was a source for a lot of friction on my part. I was brought up to be skeptical of the church and to see it as an institution of control. I think I've been to three Catholic masses in my life. The only other Church I've been to was a protestant gig my parents were invited to as some Multi-Level-Marketing thing. Later, of course, the Catholic church practically blew up with sex abuse scandals, and the church I was nominally a part of lost all respect in my eyes. Even so it still had this horrible sway over me, this horrible grip and this horrible feeling that I was still going to Hell for looking at that and desiring to be no part of it while remaining loyal to Christ. It's discouraging in its own way too. When I finally realized I had OCD, I had to ask myself: is my devotion authentic, or is it an aspect of my neuropathology?
Something you realize as someone with scrupulosity is there's always someone eager to tell you that you're doing it wrong and you're going to pay the ultimate price for it. People pick up on your nervousness, on your desire to have some goddamned peace for once, and think there's an opportunity for conversion there. And contrary to what you might believe, living in this kind of fear doesn't preclude you having your own convictions. All the stuff I dish about the infinite love of God and about hoping for Universalism? That's me. That's been me. There's always a part of me that tells me I'm wrong, that tells me I'm being arrogant, that's willing to listen when someone says I'm too willful and unwilling to heed the commandments of the Lord, though. Despite that, I haven't retreated from religious debate or discussion as a whole. I believe it's important. I used to think faith was best strengthened like steel sharpening steel. What I didn't really realize was that I was taking hits that were a bunch harder than the people I was debating with.
One of the things that helped for me was learning about other religions. I'm always going to have a deep respect for Theravada Buddhism, because you can imagine how my quality of life changed when meditation entered my life. You can't pray away compulsive prayer. Trust me. I've tried. And when it didn't work, I tried again. And again. And again. You can't pray away blasphemous intrusive thoughts. They're not the influence of demons. They're a part of your neurological makeup. Learning about the mysticism of other religions doesn't come with the ingrained stress response or the stakes that I apply to learning about Christianity. Learning about the Kabbalah and trying to conceptualize God in these majestic terms of infinity and rarified near non-existence whose will penetrated through EVERYTHING helped to combat these weird ideas of judgment. Hell, I've even managed to study the occult, if so far from a mostly non-practical perspective, because it fascinates me. That one's a bit hinkier, of course, and ten years ago got me into one of the worst spirals of my life with this stuff when I tried to discuss religion with someone who... just had no care about my baggage or intrusive thoughts and who I kept engaging with despite that.
Crises of faith aren't hard to come across when you're in this kind of state. When really anybody can put the fear in you that you're hellbound (even someone pathetically bigoted, someone acting in a way that I understand to be contrary to God) it all gets really difficult. Reading about atheism and rationalism, too, is a strange thing. Because on the one hand, I felt I needed that. I felt that I needed to look at cultish and irrational behaviors so that I could realize when I myself was falling into them. I needed to expose myself, too, to conflicting opinions. Because if I just ran, every time, I'd never actually adapt. But consequently, especially in the mid-aughts, a lot of atheist sites weren't... they were rather edgy and content to write stuff that would just be repeated ad nauseam by my intrusive thoughts. My desire to learn more about the Bible, too, to try and root myself in something like concrete Truth that would settle this all once and for all, was and remains fraught. If I read about something in the Bible being edited by a later author, am I betraying the faith by giving that any credence? There's always someone religious who's willing to tear you a new one for suggesting some bit of the Bible's a later addition or a rewrite, even as historians are willing to show you citations indicating that might be the case. Who to trust, who to believe, especially when there's plenty of people willing to tell you you're doing it wrong?
Eventually one night, I just got sick of it. I finally looked back at all my religious practice and freely acknowledged that it was all driven from fear. Not fear of disappointing God, really, but just fear of eternal perdition. And driven by the counter-reaction of fleeting comfort that I got from that. I admitted it. And then I asked myself, did I really want to believe? And I told myself in that moment that if I said "yes," and that "yes" was tainted by fear, or if that "yes" was tainted by a desire for comfort, I wouldn't accept it. I couldn't accept it. Because I would just be locked in this forever, too afraid of damnation to even actually move forward. And so for several hours I just sat there and rejected every time I said that I'd believe because I could see that it was still a response driven from fear or from comfort-seeking. Maybe for others those would be valid reasons to start on a religious path, but for me? Nah. Not at this stage. Eventually, after doing this over and over, after having admitted the emptiness of my faith, something kind of emerged. It was a wordless and multisensory thing. The answer was still yes, but it wasn't for those reasons anymore. And so I decided to keep with the faith. And keep to the faith.
But churches are still bad for me. They're still places loaded with things that produce a stress response, in environments that tend to be highly conformist, where people are liable to ask more of me because... well... they don't know about how hard this is. I'm not sure they'd care about how hard this is, especially in the US. You know how many pamphlets I've got in my life talking about Hell? The number's quite high.
Now, in a proper religious story, this would be the part where I never dealt with an intrusive thought ever again after that religious experience and stopped scarifying myself. Not so. Since then I've still had to deal with those things. The worst of that was ahead of me, still, in fact, because grad school was that godawful and my dad wouldn't stop being abusive. I'm not immune to people chastising me for being heretical even though my faith has ALWAYS been experimental. But I'm keeping the faith. And I'm keeping myself in religious discussion anyways. Because I feel like I can help people. My views may seem heterodox to traditionalists, but they've managed to resonate with people who are different from your average churchgoing sort. I can tell people when they feel unworthy of God's love that they're WRONG-- and speak with hard-won authority on that. An authority that I feel is real, and is strong. I can entertain discussions about if things were added to the Bible or not, I can bring context from different religions into this stuff... and that's let me relate to people differently. Because my perspective is different. My lax upbringing and the firey conflict between that and my scrupulosity makes me look at things with a different eye. And there's still... room for self-reflection. I'm a very prideful and arrogant person, and I've had to work on that throughout my life. Having this doesn't mean there isn't a legitimacy to asking myself hard questions, even though discerning genuine self-reflection from over-the-top self-flagellation is an added challenge. I've sinned, and I've sinned grievously too, even despite of the fear put in me by scrupulosity. I know there's not just room for repentance in faith, but that repentance is a gift from God. So I feel like... like I can help people.
