Glory to God!
The primary source for this article is Joseph W. Ciarrochchi’s The Doubting Disease, one of the most popular books dealing with OCD from a religious perspective.
Obsessive-compulsive disorder, which involves unwanted, involuntary thoughts and “compulsions” on the patient’s part to relieve their anxiety over them, affects people on a religious level as well. Many Christians have blasphemous thoughts against God that cause deep worry and fear; their main compulsion, then, is to repent multiple times after such thoughts as an attempt of alleviating their fear. The thoughts and compulsions may reach such an extent that OCD Christians fail to feel saved or forgiven, no matter how many times they repent for a certain act. This is where exposure-response prevention may help.
Understanding exposure-response prevention
The typical therapeutic strategy for OCD sufferers is “exposure response prevention,” or ERP. The idea is twofold: the OCD patient must expose themselves to a situation that causes anxiety, but abstain from performing the compulsion until a later time. There are a number of explanations for why ERP is so successful at curing OCD, but it is evident that both steps of ERP—exposing oneself to the thoughts and delaying their compulsions—help lessen the patient’s focus on the thoughts, and prevents the obsessions from actively controlling them.
For Christians, however, ERP may come across as sinful. After all, one who employs it in response to sinful thoughts is actively allowing sinful thoughts into their head—without repenting immediately afterwards. Granted, anyone with doubts about the legality of ERP on a religious level should pray to God for answers. This article acknowledges that ERP is not always the correct means of treatment, but also suggests that exposure response-prevention has spiritual worth. Before exposure response-prevention goes into effect, the believer may wish to prayerfully consider God’s will for them.
Weighing the benefits of ERP
If a Christian rejects the help that exposure-response prevention provides, their OCD may only get worse. The patient will continue to fear the same unconscious, blasphemous thoughts against God that have been plaguing them, and they will continue the immediate compulsory repentances for the sinful thoughts in their head.
Unfortunately, both the anxiety over the thoughts and the compulsory responses to the thoughts only increase one’s focus on the blasphemes and curses directed towards God. The more they repent, and the more they resist the thoughts, the more their mind will remained focus on the same unwanted obsessions since OCD began. Prayer to God can help, of course, but there comes a point where the Christian is too besieged by fear to respond to God’s calling. This is where ERP can help.
At first, exposure response-prevention seems like the very opposite thing a Christian with unconscious thoughts should do. Not only does one expose themselves to horrible thoughts against God, but they delay repentance for such thoughts as well. And yet, both of these measures help decrease the control that unconscious thoughts may have over Christians. By exposing themselves to the thoughts and apparently sinful actions, believers learn to manage and control the fear they might have of the images and voices in their head. In addition, if the compulsion or repentance is delayed until a set time, Christians focus much less on the thoughts themselves—to the point where one may live without constantly fearing, or acting in response to the obsessions.
Ironically, those in exposure to blasphemous images and thoughts who withhold their compulsion will often have fewer obsessive thoughts than those who fear, and act compulsively, to the same obsessions.
An example of ERP
If one feels that exposure response-prevention is part of God’s will for them, they may wish to try something like the exemplary ERP episode below.
Suppose that one has recurrent, undesired thoughts about shooting Jesus. First, they record this obsession—and how it compels them to repent repeatedly to assuage the situation. Their next step is to spend 10 minutes doing something that may expose them to the thought, such as drawing guns on a piece of paper, while waiting until the time is up to repent for thoughts about shooting that they may incur.
At the end of this exercise, the person writes down the nature of their thought patterns while drawing, and whether or not the exercise helped them in the end.
Further Reading
If the subject of obsessive-compulsive disorder interests you, or if you’d like more help in your fight against OCD, try reading some of these additional articles on obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Religious OCD—Why it’s different (A look at some of the challenges religious OCD patients face)
When OCD stains religion (a general resource on religious OCD)
Prayer for Religious OCD Sufferers: (A helpful prayer for religious OCD patients beginning treatment)
