This month we are going to be camping out a little bit on the topic of OCD. We have an amazing guest post coming up and I will also be publishing a public post about the interplay between autism, OCD, and high-control religions. But today is a very personal essay, which means it is behind a paywall (for privacy and community reasons). Thanks for being here and exploring these complex topics with us in community!
The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom. — Proverbs 9:10a
“Finding early historical descriptions of OCD does exist, with some clear detailed likely cases dating back to the 14th century . . . Of course the name OCD did not come into being until the 20th century, but prior to that earlier references to symptoms we would now call Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder were surprisingly called scrupulosity.
Much of the earlier historical record of OCD descriptions are in the religious, rather than the medical literature, and what is clear from the cases we have found, is that from the 14th and 18th century, obsessional fears around religion were commonplace.
So around this time, a new word for obsessions and compulsions came into usage, scrupulosity. Later in the seventeenth century, obsessions and compulsions were also described as symptoms of melancholy.1”
I’ve been working on some personal writing about growing up with caregivers obsessed with religion and the end times. Our entire world revolved around religion. My father was a conservative non-denominational pastor, and my mother homeschooled me and my two sisters to keep us out of godless public schools. All of our media was carefully curated and controlled—Focus on the Family, Rush Limbaugh, charismatic prophets, and other conspiracy-minded Christians. My mom loved to talk to me—the only child of hers genuinely interested in religion—about “the fear of the LORD.” It was what I needed to develop if I wanted to please God. And if I wanted to please my mother, then I needed to have my life revolve around pleasing the concept of god instilled in my head since birth.
So I did. The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom. It can also, unfortunately, be the beginning of mental health disorders like scrupulosity or religious OCD (the oldest form of obsessional thinking we have on record, and which we will be talking about a lot more this month). And we don’t talk about it enough, especially in religious spaces. I have a few suspicions about why this is, but I don’t want to talk about that today. Today I just want to write about what it was like to be me, as a child who took it all literally and did indeed try to make my life revolve around fearing God and where it got me— constant intrusive thoughts, obsessions about being good/perfect/holy/ethical, and an anxiety disorder that has impacted nearly every aspect of my life2.
And the reason I am writing about it publicly is because I know I am not the only one.
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