My Life With OCD

I would like to share an excerpt from the chapter I wrote, titled "Just As I Am", in the anthology Deserts to Mountaintops: Choosing My Healing Through Radical Self-Acceptance.

Being involved in church was a high priority for Dad, wanting to make sure I was well-rounded in my faith and guided by evangelical theology. He often took me to the nearby church where he had been “saved” decades earlier, as well as to various tent revivals.

Unlike the Presbyterian services we typically attended on Sunday mornings, every one of these evangelical services ended with an impassioned plea for “sinners” to come to the altar, pray a scripted Sinner’s Prayer Of Repentance, and thereby get “saved” from experiencing hellfire and damnation for all eternity. If I had a dollar for every time I heard, “If you died tonight, do you know where you would be spending eternity?” I would be a wealthy woman today.

The song that typically accompanied these altar calls was Just As I Am. As I sat in yet another church pew, as the evening hours grew late, I couldn’t help but hum along to the lyrics that had become like white noise to me:

Just as I am without one plea

But that thy blood was shed for me

And that thou bid’st me come to thee,

O Lamb of God, I come, I come

Just as I am, and waiting not

To rid my soul of one dark blot

To thee, whose blood can cleanse each spot

O Lamb of God, I come, I come

On the surface, to my child’s mind, the message seemed to be one of unconditional love and acceptance. It sounded like an invitation to come and be accepted, just as I am, by an infinitely loving God. However, my brain couldn’t let go of the next stanza that very clearly held the opposite message: if I didn’t come to God to clean up the dark blot of sin that stained my soul, there would be trouble.

It was during one such revival meeting that Disapproving Susan made her debut. “Your mom doesn’t go to church. She’s going to hell. And it’s your fault because you misbehave all the time. You’re a terrible example of a Christian to her.” That inaudible, yet vociferous, voice of self-doubt became the voice inside my head that would cause me to pause and question my beliefs, actions, and even my self-worth. Many have a version of Disapproving Susan in their minds. My version used a megaphone so as to drown out all rational thought, which began a lifetime of trapping me in an endless spiral of doubt, fear and self-condemnation. Disapproving, Susan loved using any method she could to glom onto and strike fear into my heart.

In case it’s not obvious, I have given my OCD the fictitious name, “Disapproving Susan.” To clarify, with obsessive compulsive disorder, there’s typically not a psychosis where a person hears voices that aren’t there. But for a lot of us who have a type of OCD called “Pure-O” (for “Pure-Obsessional”), our obsessions and compulsions are not outwardly visible. Obsessions generally are always internal in our minds, but the compulsions are not things like washing your hands, being a neat freak, or having an immaculately clean house. Those are the stereotypical type of obsessions that one thinks of typically, when hearing the term "OCD", largely due to media portrayals.

For sufferers of Pure-O OCD like myself, the compulsions are things like praying for forgiveness, begging God for mercy for committing what most would consider to be a minor infraction. One of my primary OCD themes was called Scrupulosity OCD, a type of OCD where a person is inordinately obsessed with matters of right and wrong, of morality. It often ties in with that person’s spiritual upbringing, the religious rules and regulations and mores that the person has been taught.

For me, scrupulosity — that overly heightened sense of morality — tied in with my early evangelical upbringing to cause me a lifetime of pain. On the one hand, I was taught that Jesus loved everyone unconditionally. That Jesus loved us enough to die for us. And yet the paradox was, if you don’t accept Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior, and make sure he always remains first in your life, you will die and go to hell and burn for all eternity, because you did not live up to God’s standard.

I know my evangelical readers might say, “That’s not how it works. Kim. There is grace!” But it’s a paradox with OCD: “Yes, God loves me. Wait, what if he doesn’t? What if I’m wrong? What if I’m not really saved? Maybe I am saved? Maybe I’ll go to heaven someday. But what if it’s just because God is tolerating me? He might love me, but he doesn’t really like me because I’m not a good enough Christian.”

I will write more about my OCD in upcoming posts, For now, I wanted you to understand a little bit about what OCD is for people like me who only have internal compulsions, and maybe how to recognize it in a friend who could be suffering. Because you might not see those outward signs, but they might be talking a lot about things like, “I just don’t know if I’m saved. I just feel like I’m not living up to God’s standard. I’m just never going to be good enough.” Some level of moral scrupulosity might be considered “normal”, given an evangelical upbringing, but some of that just might be OCD scrupulosity.