Click here to read Part 2.
Click here to read Part 3.
CONTENT WARNING: In this post I discuss the content of my religious OCD. If you have religious OCD, or other forms of OCD which involve magical thinking (e.g. “if I do x then y will happen”) please take care if reading on. OCD has been known to “take on” new symptoms when hearing about other people’s symptoms.
OCD’s “theory”
The idea that I have insulted the Holy Spirit or the devil are the most powerful thoughts that my OCD uses. They underpin almost every OCD thought I have and every compulsion I do. I’m planning on doing a later blog post about strategies I have found useful in combating these lies that OCD tells. For now I’m mostly going to describe what they mean to me in the context of my mental illness.
There are 2 verses in the Bible in which Jesus says all sins can be forgiven, but insulting the Holy Spirit cannot be forgiven. Scholars of the Bible suggest that these verses mean that if you reject God (i.e. reject God’s gift of His Spirit) then you can’t be forgiven because you are choosing not to accept His forgiveness. The verses are not referring to a specific event or to insulting language etc. I know this, but OCD still uses the verse to terrify me. The ultimate fear behind this, for me, is the idea that if I insult the Holy Spirit I will not be saved and will not go to heaven. I no longer believe that hell is a real place, but my OCD still keeps me afraid of going there. I’ve discussed in other blog posts how having OCD means you can know that something is incorrect yet still fear it.
The second thought that OCD uses, that I could insult the devil, is also ultimately linked to a fear of hell. The OCD rationale says that if I insult the devil and one day end up in hell then the devil will single me out for specifically harsh treatment. This rationale depends on cultural notions of the devil as being in charge of hell, an idea that came into fruition long after the Bible was written. This concept of the devil as a god of hell is not actually Biblical. Even if you take the view that hell is a place, there is nothing in the Bible to suggest that the devil is in control there. In fact many Christians believe that the devil is not a specific being, but a metaphorical concept which was used at the time the Bible was written to describe the conflicting nature of the human mind – sometimes we want to (and do) do things that are wrong because it feels good, for example. The irony here is not lost on me – it’s plausible that when the Bible refers to the devil and demons afflicting people this is a pre-scientific description of what we now understand as mental illness.
One of the reasons my OCD has settled on these thoughts is that they can’t be disproved in the way that my earlier OCD thoughts could. If OCD tells me that my mum will die if I don’t stand in a certain spot, I can ignore OCD, then check if my mum is still alive. There’s no way to check whether I have insulted the Holy Spirit or the devil, and there’s no way to check whether I have stopped myself from going to heaven when I die.
Another reason why these thoughts are so powerful is that as a Christian I believe that God knows my thoughts. OCD is a condition which is based on intrusive automatic thoughts. Recovering from OCD involves accepting that you can’t control your thoughts – “but what if,” my OCD says, “by letting these thoughts go by, I am insulting the Holy Spirit and ruining not just my life but my eternity?” This is terrifying, and gives you an idea of why religious OCD is so difficult to treat.
I also fear that the devil knows my thoughts, or listens to the things I say out loud in attempt to prevent me from getting totally stuck, such as “I am not insulting the Holy Spirit or the devil if I use my left foot”. Again these fears are not based on a thoughtful reading of the Bible, but are more based on myths created by writers such as Dante.
This post has outlined some of what lies behind my OCD thoughts. Read Part 2 to see a concrete example of what this looks like in practice.
What it's like to have OCD 