Cross post from Reddit:
TW Religious ocd TW Racism
This is going to confuse a lot of people but I’ll try my best. OCD could be tricking me. I don’t know. But I’ll do my best to explain. Warning: there are some extremely sensitive themes including racism.
OCD has caused me to worry about making bad prayers. It is mainly an anxiety of what others would think of if I prayed for something bad. Basically, it can think of something bad, and I can think of why I want it, and say “amen” pretty easily. Not sure if that constitutes a prayer really since it is ocd driven, and might even feel more real to me than it actually is, but it gets very complicated.
None of this makes any logical sense to anyone but me, but to me it makes sense and that’s the issue. My mind invented something where I can pray to pray for something. Yes, that’s right, and it makes no sense. Essentially these ideas for prayers come in automatically. I don’t necessarily choose them. I can somewhat choose how I react, but that is where it gets tricky. OCD also blunts my emotions with certain prayers or makes things feel more real than they are
So, what happened, is my ocd targeted the theme I was most worried about having a bad prayer about, which was unfortunately racism. In the past, I made a mistake that was racist (I won’t get into what it was here), and I thought about it a lot. I imagined people never wanting to forgive me and saying I deserve to suffer forever. Additionally, worrying about making racist prayers made this go up. It was frustrating, because with ocd it can take what people say too literally. So if someone says: “you deserve to suffer,” I might be thinking that thinking about it 10 hours a day for multiple months was justified. This made me have a misdirected frustration towards the people I perceived as yelling at me, which was unfortunately people of color.
Here’s where ocd comes in with the prayer obsession. OCD gave me the idea: well you’re so mad at them you could pray for them all to die. Unfortunately, with the prayer obsession I’ve had, I’ve had a bit of a history with doing bad prayers when I’m not feeling great, and I don’t know if that is just part of the ocd or not, or just doing them to do them. One example is world war 3. I don’t want people to get hurt, but when I was feeling horrible I thought “screw it, I’ll pray for it cause I want to die.” I knew God wouldn’t actually do it, and the normal me didn’t want him to.
Then, and I don’t know why, it seemed extremely easy for a moment to pray for people of color to die, and I actually almost did it, but I stopped myself. This is where the praying to pray comes in. With ocd, if I have a moment where I almost did a bad prayer, my mind “saves” that mindset, and it is possible for me to go back to it any time. So this situation will present itself many times to me. With praying to pray, I can essentially be put back in the mindset at any time no matter what is going on, and by saying “amen,” my brain basically magically does it and it feels like the same thing. Because it feels real to me, it seems like the same thing as a prayer. Last night that is what I did for this and I regretted it less than a two seconds later. So basically, I ended up doing a prayer that was racist. This is exactly what happened in that moment.
This isn’t who I normally am (although my brain would disagree), but in that moment, with magical thinking, I prayed for all people of color to die, out of what my brain said was “hatred.” My brain also said I felt genuine hatred, but I don’t think I really do. I think it is all related to a misdirected frustration of feeling like I was yelled at, which stemmed from ocd. After the prayer, all those feelings were immediately gone. I don’t know how messed up my brain was, or how much of a role ocd played. It probably at least blunted my emotions. It sort of came on all of the sudden too, but I did it. I’m really sorry. I don’t hate people of color despite what my brain says, but I feel like I did something really bad.
When I sit with what happened and don’t engage with it, it does not feel like a big deal at all. The guilt is almost all ocd driven. So I don’t know if that means there is something I’m missing or not. I might be missing something, but I know what happened in the moment
