I am a Christian too. And I understand the struggle. I had bad thoughts against God for years in my head because of the OCD. And when I was in my early 20s, I started reading a book called "Believing God" by Beth Moore. In it, she said that she prayed for a miracle for the people reading her book, and she encouraged everyone in the book to do a 40 day fast. Since I was struggling with OCD, I didn't fast, because I couldn't take anything else away from myself; but I did add five minutes of meditating on scripture a day.
At the end of the 40 day fast there was a snow day, which is very rare where I live, and I was able to stay home from work. And I got on my knees, and wrestled with the idea that I could pray and believe that God would heal me of the OCD. At the end of that time of wrestling, I was able to pray that prayer--in words, to pray that God would heal me and trust that he would.
And God started healing me of the OCD from that moment going forward. I was on a journey of healing (and still am!!!). God started making me better very slowly, little by little, every day.
That was over 19 years ago. And I have come such a long way from where I started. I still have farther to go. But I have been able to cover so much ground in this OCD journey over all that time.
I vividly remember the time when I decided that it was safe to let the thoughts run freely through my head, without trying to stop them or fix them.
Are used to try to negate all the thoughts that came into my head, in order to try to make them not dangerous. But this is wrong--And it just feeds the OCD.
Along my journey, I learned that we can just ignore these thoughts. These thoughts actually have nothing to do with our relationship with God. God does not care if we have these thoughts in our heads at all . I started to allow even the blasphemous thoughts to play out freely in my head without trying to stop them.
And that opens the door for those awful thoughts to stop altogether.
I am very passionate about this concept now. I see a lot of people on the app posting about how afraid they are of their thoughts, especially negative religious thoughts. And I understand how scary that can be because I was there 19 years ago.
But I really try to encourage everyone on the app to change their relationship with their thoughts. When people first have OCD. They are terrified of the thoughts and they do everything they can to try to mitigate the thoughts, "fix "the thoughts, or do any action to make them less dangerous.
But the real treatment for OCD involves ALLOWING the thoughts to play freely through our heads. We freak out about the thoughts, we are actually just going to make them worse. If we can hold onto the truth, that's the thoughts don't matter at all, they start to lose their power. So I want to encourage you to take the mindset that the thoughts DON'T MEAN ANYTHING. And God doesn't care if they are there or not.
This will really set you free in your journey to recover from OCD. It's actually one of the biggest steps that anyone in OCD recovery can take. It can be especially hard for people with religious OCD, because we are so worried about offending God with the thoughts. but I have learned that it is actually a STEP OF FAITH to let the thoughts play freely in our heads.
This is also what ERP therapy will train you to do. We are supposed to let the thoughts play like bad background music, without trying to fix them, while we go about our day just the way that we want to. we can't control the thoughts, but we can essentially ignore them and continue to live our lives. And God wants us to be able to get to that point, where the thoughts aren't causing us fear, distress, etc. When we are distressed about the thoughts, we give the OCD control over our lives, because we can't truly live while we are trying to fight the thoughts off or are afraid of them.
I really enjoy talking to people on this app. So if you wanna talk about this more, and work through how you're feeling, I am more than happy to. I have a lot of empathy for the people who are suffering like I was suffering before. I know what it feels like. And I think the OCD suffering is one of the worst forms of torment on earth. So please know I'm happy to talk if you want to work through any of your questions.
