religious ocd

It’s completely normal to have bad thoughts against God constantly when you have religious OCD. It’s basically a hallmark of religious OCD. I thought I was the only one who had blasphemous, horrible thoughts against God every second of the day. But when I read the book “Can Christianity cure obsessive compulsive disorder” by Dr. Ian Osborne, I learned that blasphemous thoughts against God are one of four main themes of OCD, and that TONS of people, struggle with bad thoughts against God. In a nutshell, you don’t have to fight these thoughts off. You don’t have to worry about them, because they don’t mean anything. The only reason we try to fight the thoughts off, is because we think that it means some thing if we think them. It doesn’t. You need a paradigm shift . This paradigm shift was a game-changer for me. I learned that it doesn’t matter what thoughts are in your head. God does not care what blasphemous or horrible thoughts are running through your head. These thoughts are not insulting to him at all. They are just OCD thoughts, and they don’t mean anything at all. When I was doing NOCD ERP therapy training, I learned to think of my thoughts like this: Imagine a big oak tree by the river. The leaves fall off the oak tree every so often and float down the river. You can notice the leaves falling, but you were still going to let them just float down the river. Your thoughts are like the leaves. You can notice that you are having disturbing and horrible thoughts. But you are not going to fight them off. You are not going to do anything about them. You are going to just let them float their way down the river. My intrusive thoughts did not go away until I stopped trying to fix them. I had to learn to just let them run “wild“ in my head. I had to learn to just let them roll by. Here’s another analogy. Imagine your head has a swarm of bees inside. If you try to swat a bee and smash it, it just makes the other bees more angry and swarm even more. But if you just let them swirl around inside and don’t do anything about them, eventually, they get a little bored and settle down a bit. So, I want to tell you something very important. You are not supposed to fight off the thoughts (or fix them). That is not your job. That is not your responsibility. God does not care whether or not those thoughts are there. Your job, on the other hand, is to try to fight off the compulsions that your brain wants to do to keep you safe from the thoughts. You are actually going to try to stop any safety behavior (in other words, compulsions). My compulsion was always putting a NOT next to the blasphemous thoughts in my head. I felt like I was fixing the thoughts. Actually, however, I was just doing a compulsion. When I let the thoughts, run free, and didn’t try to fix them, that opened the door for me to become free myself. 

I think ERP therapy would really help a lot :):)