New York Center for Obsessive - Religious Scrupulosity

Religious Scrupulosity
Religion not only provides guidance but can also enrich an individual’s life. As well, it provides a sense of joy, comfort, and structure for individuals. However, OCD can intertwine with an individual’s belief system and cause their life to become a hapless end of compulsive joyless behaviors. The way that a person prays and conducts their religious rituals becomes an endless sense of unhappiness and void. Individuals with scrupulosity turn pleasurable aspects of religion into compulsive rituals that lead to an endless road of confusion and grief. Religion intrinsically provides guidelines and laws to live by but average individuals conduct their lives in such a way a way that the incorporation of these laws enriches their lives. However, individuals with religious scrupulosity carry out compulsive behavior that skews from the laws that others observe. For example, instead of an individual getting a sense of comfort out a pray, the mere act of pray because a source of anguish. Pray must be recited with a sense of urgency and rigidity, each word that is recited must be just precise and “perfect”. In certain cases, an individual might get obsessive thoughts of hell or aggression while reciting the word G-d, thus creating a source of anxiety.”
 
Andrew’s Story
“Andrew always enjoyed the principles and tenants of religion. He felt a great sense of enjoyment when he helped in a charitable event for the less fortunate. But as Andrew grew older he started to get obsessive thoughts during religious prayers focusing on G-d. In the beginning, Andrew would get thoughts of the devil or of blasphemous sexual acts when reciting a meditation. He tried to prevent these thoughts from interfering with his praying. But the harder that he tried to block out the thoughts, the more intrusive they became. He tried at first to re-recite any part of the prayer at the point where he first thought of any unwanted thought. It began to take Andrew three times as long as others to recite a prayer. But after weeks passed he had to put an anguishing amount of effort in to reciting a simple five line passage. He even got the thought that his hands were somehow contaminated and that he was desecrating the religious books. He would make sure to wash his hands thoroughly over and over again before he entered into the religious sanctorum. He tried to explain this situation to his parent but they simply dismissed it as a stage he was going through and even suggested he was doing this for attention. But Andrew knew that this was his new reality and he no longer knew which way to turn. He wanted to follow his religion but his beliefs and religious rituals turned into strenuous and endless routine acts of void……”

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