Skip to main content

Religious OCD

By Andrea ~

I was only eleven years old at the time but, for someone so young, the OCD disorder had built up fast and become a monster. I remember it first creeping up when I was cleaning my room one night.It started off normal, and then I had the sudden thought that I should rearrange all the puzzles in the closet.So I stacked the boxes..and then I felt like it wasn't good enough so I stacked them again. Then came the thought ''Maybe it's wrong to leave any kind of mess in the room.'' So it took about ten times of straightening them before I was satisfied.At that point I should have thought ''Wow that was a waste of time!'' But because OCD had crept up on me I just thought...''Guess that was annoying but important.'' I was preoccupied with silly tasks, but I could still function.What I didn't know was that it was going to get much worse.

Since I was only in fifth grade, I had been to church but hadn't really been drilled with condemnation threats yet. In such a thoughtful way *eye roll* ..they saved all that for when I entered sixth grade.They had vaguely talked about hell when I was in children's Sunday school but when you became a preteen,and so obviously becoming a dirty little whore,they figured it was REALLY time for you to start repenting of your sins. Me and all the other middle school kids were put in there with all these older teenagers, who knew ''so much'' about sin and we were supposed to learn from them. That was about as comfortable as wearing the wrong size shoe.Being the baby of the group was weird enough..but then they started preaching. I already had OCD before I came in there,so her harsh preaching was like throwing cooking oil on a kitchen fire.

That was in 2001, so the whole World Trade Center mess had just happened.She showed us Bible verses about living in sin.She talked about how she had a vision that some people who died in that tragedy did not make it to heaven.She said, ''We don't want to die unforgiven and end up like them..Jesus says to repent now while you still have time.'' (what's scarier then thinking all powerful Jesus is going to burn people who are already burn victims ?!) Any child raised in church would be terrified of that, because you believe the adults by instinct,but that fear is multiplied by a hundred when you say that to an OCD victim. Most kids there probably lived in terror deep down, but hid it,and tried to act like everything was fine.Because of the OCD I couldn't do that..and I lost my ability to function in the real world.

Whatever hell was supposed to be..I was pretty sure the next few months of my life were even worse.I was home schooled(yea that didn't help either) but I stopped working for three months because I couldn't concentrate. I became a compulsive bible reader. My mom finally stopped pushing me to do school work, because it was too hard to make me stop reading the bible.School was a disaster.I would believe that God wanted me to put down my school books and walk around the neighborhood twenty times,in a serious prayer hour,and no one could convince me otherwise.Numbers were always very important. Isn't that supposed to be a classic symptom of OCD?I believed God wanted things in perfect numbers, like exactly one hour of prayer or for me to wash my hands ten times.I couldn't function socially either. Normally I talk a lot, but at that time I became very quiet. Part of it was the belief that I should be very selective about what I said. If you said the wrong thing, too many times,that might have been a sin. Trivial things were no exception either...I once spent fifteen minutes trying to figure out how many glasses I should get out of the cabinet, and whether I should pour milk or water.No joke. The only place I was fit to be in was a mental hospital.

I had to endure the long days of OCD,until the whole thing went into a kind of remission six months later and I began to function again.Anyone who has ever had that problem will understand...six months of that feels like a century. Religious OCD is like regular OCD on crack.You do all the usual OCD things, like wash your hands ten times,but on top of that you fear getting it ''wrong'' is a sin against God.I think it would be better for you if a semi truck landed on top of you then to have religious OCD. So do I blame the church for my OCD?In a way I do. It's a medical condition so no one is really responsible for my brain going into that mode..but they are responsible for making it worse.They added the killer religious layer to an already existing condition. They were preaching verses right out of the bible, so that it why I lost respect for that ''holy book.'' People say religion was not to blame but I know what happened to me, and I know that it is partly to blame.Needless to say..I will never be christian again. I came in with a fractured bone, and then that religion threw me down the stairs and gave me a shattered bone.If a religion hurts the already weak then what is it good for?Has anyone else on here ever experienced religious OCD?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

THE FRIGHTENING FACE

By David Andrew Dugle ~ O ctober. Halloween. It's time to visit the haunted house I used to live in. When I was five my dad was able to build a big modern house. Moving in before it was complete, my younger brother and I were sleeping in a large unfinished area directly under the living room. It should have been too new to be a haunted house, but now and then I would wake up in the tiny, dark hours and see the blurry image of a face, or at least what I took to be a face, glowing, faintly yellow, high up on the wall near the ceiling. I'm not kidding! Most nights it didn’t appear at all. But when it did show itself, at first I thought it was a ghost and it scared me like nothing else I’d ever seen. But the face never did anything; unmoving, it just stayed in that one spot. Turning on the lights would make it disappear, making my fears difficult to explain, so I never told anyone. My Sunday School teachers had always told me to be good because God was just behind m

The Blame Game or Shit Happens

By Webmdave ~ A relative suffering from Type 1 diabetes was recently hospitalized for an emergency amputation. The physicians hoped to halt the spread of septic gangrene seeping from an incurable foot wound. Naturally, family and friends were very concerned. His wife was especially concerned. She bemoaned, “I just don’t want this (the advanced sepsis and the resultant amputation) to be my fault.” It may be that this couple didn’t fully comprehend the seriousness of the situation. It may be that their choice of treatment was less than ideal. Perhaps their home diabetes maintenance was inconsistent. Some Christians I know might say the culprit was a lack of spiritual faith. Others would credit it all to God’s mysterious will. Surely there is someone or something to blame. Someone to whom to ascribe credit. Isn’t there? A few days after the operation, I was talking to a man who had family members who had suffered similar diabetic experiences. Some of those also suffered ea

Reasons for my disbelief

By Rebekah ~ T here are many layers to the reasons for my disbelief, most of which I haven't even touched on here... When I think of Evangelical Christianity, two concepts come to mind: intense psychological traps, and the danger of glossing over and missing a true appreciation for the one life we know that we have. I am actually agnostic when it comes to a being who set creation in motion and remains separated from us in a different realm. If there is a deistic God, then he/she doesn't particularly care if I believe in them, so I won't force belief and instead I will focus on this one life that I know I have, with the people I can see and feel. But I do have a lot of experience with the ideas of God put forth by Evangelical Christianity, and am confident it isn't true. If it's the case god has indeed created both a physical and a heavenly spiritual realm, then why did God even need to create a physical realm? If the point of its existence is to evolve to pas

Are You an Atheist Success Story?

By Avangelism Project ~ F acts don’t spread. Stories do. It’s how (good) marketing works, it’s how elections (unfortunately) are won and lost, and it’s how (all) religion spreads. Proselytization isn’t accomplished with better arguments. It’s accomplished with better stories and it’s time we atheists catch up. It’s not like atheists don’t love a good story. Head over to the atheist reddit and take a look if you don’t believe me. We’re all over stories painting religion in a bad light. Nothing wrong with that, but we ignore the value of a story or a testimonial when we’re dealing with Christians. We can’t be so proud to argue the semantics of whether atheism is a belief or deconversion is actually proselytization. When we become more interested in defining our terms than in affecting people, we’ve relegated ourselves to irrelevance preferring to be smug in our minority, but semantically correct, nonbelief. Results Determine Reality The thing is when we opt to bury our

Christian TV presenter reads out Star Wars plot as story of salvation

An email prankster tricked the host of a Christian TV show into reading out the plots of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and Star Wars in the belief they were stories of personal salvation. The unsuspecting host read out most of the opening rap to The Fresh Prince, a 1990s US sitcom starring Will Smith , apparently unaware that it was not a genuine testimony of faith. The prankster had slightly adapted the lyrics but the references to a misspent youth playing basketball in West Philadelphia would have been instantly familiar to most viewers. The lines read out by the DJ included: "One day a couple of guys who were up to no good starting making trouble in my living area. I ended up getting into a fight, which terrified my mother." The presenter on Genesis TV , a British Christian channel, eventually realised that he was being pranked and cut the story short – only to move on to another spoof email based on the plot of the Star Wars films. It began: &quo

Why I left the Canadian Reformed Church

By Chuck Eelhart ~ I was born into a believing family. The denomination is called Canadian Reformed Church . It is a Dutch Calvinistic Christian Church. My parents were Dutch immigrants to Canada in 1951. They had come from two slightly differing factions of the same Reformed faith in the Netherlands . Arriving unmarried in Canada they joined the slightly more conservative of the factions. It was a small group at first. Being far from Holland and strangers in a new country these young families found a strong bonding point in their church. Deutsch: Heidelberger Katechismus, Druck 1563 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) I was born in 1955 the third of eventually 9 children. We lived in a small southern Ontario farming community of Fergus. Being young conservative and industrious the community of immigrants prospered. While they did mix and work in the community almost all of the social bonding was within the church group. Being of the first generation born here we had a foot in two