Faith spiral as usual

Hi! I don’t have perfect words to help like I wish I did but I just wanted to encourage you that I went through this for a long time as well. However, I’ve made a lot of progress and that obsession doesn’t run my life like it used to. It may not always feel like it but it does get better. God bless.

I have some faith based obsessions too. Most of mine revolve around purity and believing that because I'm not a virgin, I've ruined myself and I'll never be loved or saved. What's helped me accept that part of myself is looking at how Jesus lived and loved. Jesus was the absolute opposite of my obsessions. There is forgiveness, compassion, and no judgement. All the things I struggle to give myself. Jesus met with plenty of sinners and loved more than he met in person. If Jesus could treat a sinner the way he did a saint, why should I treat myself like I'm unsavable? It's rough. We want to be perfect and OCD makes us focus on the little things that could be wrong in our lives. We will mess up. We will sin. We are not perfect (as much as OCD says we should be). It's rough but know that you're not alone in feeling doomed and that feeling isn't reality. That's the OCD talking. It helps me to focus on the fruits of the spirit. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control. These don't demand perfection. They don't demand fasting. They don't demand chastity. They do describe aspects of a Christian personality. Changing my focus to implementing those aspects into my life instead of focusing on all the bad really helped me overcome my obsessions with what sins I've committed (it's still a struggle, but I've found it helps)

Breathe in, breathe out ...be present...

Hello. I also struggle with morality based OCD. I was raised Baptist, and was constantly worried that I was actually not, “saved.” I ended up getting a theology undergrad because my upbringing was so severe and I just really needed to understand theology in a different way. Some things that help me are: 1) remembering that, “God is love.”; 2) the parable of the prodigal son. Jesus tells the story to show us, all of us, how much God loves us and is willing to forgive us. The prodigal son literally went to Gentile territory, and we know this because he was eating the pods of the swine, which we know was forbidden by the Torah. I’m sure you know everything else he did. When the father saw him, he ran to meet him and threw a feast for him. Jesus is saying this is what God will do for us. 3) Jesus tells us that the amount of times that we should forgive other people is, “77×7“. Anything else is literally a mistranslation. In the original Greek, it says 77×7. So this is kind of weird, but in biblical times there were, “perfect numbers.“ Examples are, the 12 tribes of Israel, the 12 apostles, 12 of clean animals going on the ark, three persons of the Trinity, Jesus’ death = three days. Jonah in the belly of the whale three days. Of course, 40 shows up a lot. And if something is really, really perfect.