- Date posted
- 1y
Please help
Please pray for me to do what I want and not what OCD wants
Please pray for me to do what I want and not what OCD wants
I certainly will. My name's Mike, I'm a believer too. I'm in my 50's so I'm old enough to be your grandpa. Lol. Anyway, I know how OCD messes with us spiritually, even tells us we're not loveable and not worthy of grace, etc. I would like very much to be here for both of you, to encourage you in any way through all this. Not hidden agenda, just a genuine love and concern for others, especially young people who are struggling with this. :-)
And pray for me to be what i want to what my ocd tells what i dont want
@star1232 I will
This is sort of a sub part of the religious OCD, but I have Meta OCD as well. My main fear is ocd driving me to do a horrible prayer. Unfortunately, one thing my mind does is prays for things I want constantly to prove that I can choose what I pray for. Some of these things include either my ocd to go away, people to be safe, or to die by being killed by a an animal or something when I’m running on the trial. The issue is with the being killed thing. I have prayed for all sorts of things I know are not going to happen. Unfortunately, one of them was almost world war 3. I’m not usually that kind of person. I read someone say they basically prayed for disaster every day on Reddit and people didn’t completely destroy them over it, so I thought “well I could pray for world war 3.” The issue is, if I were my normal calm self, I wouldn’t do that. All I would be thinking about is how I would die if it happened. I’m not sure if testing the prayers are somehow warping my actual values or if that’s an excuse I’m making for myself. When I’m running on the trail, I really wouldn’t want to be killed by an animal either, but I guess I mean it, cause I want to die. But I know it’s not going to happen. So I’m not sure if this is an ocd issue or not
I have an obsession with doing bad prayers and it’s worse cause of meta ocd. I feel like I can psyche myself out into doing prayers I wouldn’t normally actually do. It’s not all just intrusive prayers either, but that is part of what Meta ocd is targeting. One issue, is that because of it, I’ll start praying for every little thing, like there to be enough soap, etc. I wouldn’t normally pray for this, but thanks to meta OCD I am and I still want it. This creates a bigger issue when there are other desires I have that I want but wouldn’t normally pray for. I can psyche myself out into possibly praying for those and meaning it, however this would not normally happen. Basically there is the fear of doing the prayer I know I could do. Then the fear of the fear of the prayer. Then the fear of the fear of the fear of the prayer, and it causes a lot of anxiety, and can lead to me actually doing it. I’m sure there can be confusion as to how much I mean things, but ocd will also hand select things I can mean (not just intrusive thoughts, since meta ocd is targeting things that aren’t intrusive thoughts). One way this goes away is if I allow myself to pray for all the bad things, even if I mean it. Because everything will go away, including praying for enough soap or something. But then I’m stuck on the fact that I prayed for the specific things. If I don’t do it, I’m stuck worrying about how my mind is going to manipulate me into praying for something
TW Religious ocd So I just did a bad prayer. Probably should not be posting this, cause I probably didn’t have much of a choice but I’ll explain. Meta ocd has made my obsession much more complicated. Essentially, one feature of it was praying for things I normally wouldn’t but wanted, to prove I could choose my prayers. So I may pray for cake to pop in front of me or something like that that I normally wouldn’t. Or I would be running on the trail, see a fox, and pray for it to attack me. All of these prayers I meant, BUT there was also a stimulus of “prove you can choose what you pray for.” Essentially I did not come up with them on my own. Unfortunately, meta OCD used this against me. The main reason I wanted a fox to attack me was I wanted to die. But if you think about it, a fox attacking me isn’t something that’s really pleasant. In fact, it would be one of the least desirable ways to die and while I wanted to die, I didn’t REALLY want that, even if that was the prayer. So now my mind starts thinking of other creative things that could get me to die that affect other people. Those include World War 3 or anything else that would affect other people. My mind even came up with offensive things that could happen. Like it could say if I were afraid of making an offensive prayer, that a bomb magically takes out both me and a specific group of people. The end result is still the same: I would still die. During this bait and switch prayer, my mind will start off with me thinking “I really want to die” (which is true), so then I’ll think “ok please let x happen to me.” My brain might even choose something I wouldn’t really want (like the example it chose today was to get swarmed by bees) to prep me for something I really wouldn’t want. I’ll mean it, cause I want to die, but then it doesn’t really matter what the next thing is. That is what my mind will go to. I’ll do that, and mean it. And then after that’s all done, I don’t have a desire to do ANY prayers to die, however the desire was strong throughout the whole thing (that was caused ultimately by an ocd prayers obsession but it doesn’t really matter in the moment). At the end, I’ve prayed for something horrible (though my real desire was to die) and meant it, but then the anxiety over it is gone and I’m not thinking about prayers like that again. And it is all based on what my brain decides it is going to pick. If I don’t do the prayer and resist it, the odd does not go away. It will focus on the fact I did prayers like this in the past and I won’t be able to stop thinking about it, which will bombard me with other “escape” prayers my brain has hand picked beforehand. There is no easy way to end the cycle. Something I could do is allow myself to actually pray for every bad thing I want and it’ll eventually go away, however, it’ll mean I prayed for the things. I’ve actually started doing this, which possibly is partly why I did the bad prayers. Doing that completely removes any ambiguity. The issue is, I know I wouldn’t normally do ANY of these prayers without an ocd prompt. Once I know it doesn’t matter and I could still mean them, my brain starts getting extremely creative
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