Click here to read Part 1.
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. (The post starts below the picture).
I’m now going to write about a specific OCD thought that is based on the OCD lies I described in Part 1. I hope that by writing it out I can help myself to see it for what it is, and show other people what OCD looks like in detail.
A couple of weeks ago I was on my way into town and I itched my eye with my middle finger. OCD told me that this meant I was giving the middle finger to the Holy Spirit or the devil. [It is frightening for me to write that.] OCD told me that I had to “correct” it. In order to correct it, what I needed to do was itch my eye with a different finger whilst in the same position on the road and whilst listening to the same part of the song that I was listening to when I originally itched my eye. OCD says that if I can do this successfully then I will ensure that I am not insulting the Holy Spirit or the devil.
I have tried to “correct” it, but haven’t managed to do so in a way that makes me feel it’s been properly corrected and “made safe”. I can’t keep trying to make it safe at the moment, a) because I am many miles away from the place I had the thought, b) because when it comes to “correcting” something OCD is never satisfied – anyone with OCD will know that however hard you try to do as OCD wants it will keep changing the goalposts. For example it will say I wasn’t quite in the right position, or the wrong part of the song was playing (I can’t actually remember the exact position or the exact part of the song that was playing, so OCD is bound to capitalise on that).
The way it is bothering me now is that I want to plan an event for my birthday. OCD is telling me that I can’t, because the eye-itching situation has not been adequately corrected. If I were to go ahead and plan the event I would need to re-do the planning once the eye-itching thing had been made safe. This is a good example of one of OCD’s tricks – in order to stop you moving on from a situation like this it will attach itself to a situation in the future, ensuring it stays in your mind.
Another trick OCD is using at the moment is making me doubt my intentions – it’s telling me that by itching my eye with my middle finger I was intending to insult the Holy Spirit and the devil. This gives OCD more power as it’s harder to dismiss as an intrusive thought if it tells me that it was actually me who was behind the thought. I will try to tackle this in Part 3.
What it's like to have OCD 