Religious Scrupulosity Doubts

I swear I could have typed this myself. I told a specialist about my religious OCD and she said for exposure maybe I can actually pray to the devil and honestly I don’t get it 😭 Like what’s the point of OCD exposure if we’re gonna end up doing something opposite of our actual values?

Have you reached out to NOCD for therapy? It can be extremely difficult to to be objective about designing your own ERP exercises. A therapist trained to treat OCD will be able to ascertain the best exposures for you and your specific situation. Additionally, and this was the case for me, my OCD would latch onto the thought I was doing my exposure incorrectly. Once I got with a therapist, I was better able to trust the exposure would be beneficial. I would use ACT AND ERP in my recovery because once I did the exposure, I got to the point where I had to accept the fear,additional horrible thoughts that came up, and I would use my acceptance, commitment to my values to move forward in spite of feeling terrible. When I reread your post, though, i notice something I used to do. I would look at an exposure as a way to stop something I didn’t like. So, the end goal of your exposure isn’t to make you not have concerns about “making a pact with the devil” the end goal is to allow/accept when those thoughts pop in your mind (without ruminating about them or paying attention to them in any way). Over time, with practice, these thoughts will mean less and less to you, clarity will come. Hope this helps!

My therapist explained to me that at its core OCD is about trying to relieve the discomfort (to put it mildly) of uncertainty. So she would say, through ERP I was going to learn to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. It’s true, in the beginning of my therapy I was miserable but over time, if I didn’t do compulsions, the intense anxiety dissipated. Now, I still get that whoosh of anxiety when a thought pops in my head, but I mostly can quickly apply ERP Tools “maybe” “oh well, moving on” “oh more of the same, uncertainty” and it’s amazing how if you don’t feed the fear it dissipates.

Hang in there, keep trying and don’t give up❤️. Sometimes, still, it happens and you have a hard day, but, you can’t unlearn your skills and if you apply them it does get better 😀. That’s the one thing I wish I had understood at the beginning of treatment, but of course, you have to live it to understand it. My therapist would always say, “don’t be upset you’re feeling these feelings, you need to feel them(and not do compulsions 😉). That’s how you get better by reacting in a different way.”