- Date posted
- 16w
Religious meta ocd bait and switch
TW Religious ocd This is very confusing. I have severe religious meta OCD, and it’s making my mind go to bad places. With meta ocd there are multiple layers to it and it becomes complicated. Prayer can be basically both used to express desire and as a test, and it is REALLY confusing. This is probably triple or quadruple meta ocd pr even more but I’ll do my best to explain. During the prayer obsession I’ve had, I convinced myself I prayed for bad things (it was probably more ocd than I realized). One thing ocd would do is present scenarios of things I wanted that I wouldn’t normally pray for to basically create a lot of ambiguity. It also found loopholes such as praying to pray for things. One of the things I would do while praying for things I’d want is praying to die. This is I guess already a gray area, cause I’m sure god wouldn’t be happy, but at the same time, it’s something I established I wanted and prayed for. It could be like I was running on the trail and I’d see a fox and pray it attacked me and mean it. The issue is, in reality, I wouldn’t really want a fox to attack me that much. I wrote about that as an example and there was a therapist who was probably right who said the prayer could be both a testing ground and to express desire. OCD realized that if it could get a bad prayer in that, it could be bad, since they said “and express desire.” Another issue with this is a fox attack isn’t the most desirable thing. So then today, my brain thought of something else: what about a bee attack. Same thing. I prayed and meant that, and then it instantly jumped to something that could affect not just me but other people: world war 3. The ocd is so complex that I have that the way out is likely just allowing myself to pray for whatever I want regardless of how bad it is and letting god ignore it. So I did the same thing with world war 3, and some other bad things my brain hand picked, meant it in that moment, felt bad, and then that whole thing was gone. I also prayed to pray for it. Essentially, I prayed through magical thinking (I know it makes no sense. Praying through magical thinking makes it easier to do and that’s why my brain came up with that). After it was done, I had no desire for any of those prayers. I’m confused because there are so many layers, and I technically prayed for something bad. Unfortunately, if I don’t pray for that thing, I’ve prayed for so many things like that, and it could cause issues. I could wonder why I prayed for stuff like that in the past. So I can’t walk away easily. I might just have to let myself do bad prayers, get it out, hopefully it fixes my brain, and move on with my life. What I hate too is for the prayer to die, my brain selects whatever way I could die that would either hurt the most people or be relate to whatever I was afraid of it relating to. If I don’t do it, I start to ruminate about why I did it in the past. But essentially, with this specific part, it’ll almost bait me by starting off with a prayer for a fox to attack or something, move to something else somewhat less desirable, and then whatever thing it hand picked that could hurt others. And it all feels similar.