When obsession shakes certainties and challenges beliefs

What happens when questions of belief are subject to obsessive behaviours? The impact of OCD on key life moments.

Paula Duncan

Paula Duncan is a PhD candidate at the University of Aberdeen, researching OCD and faith.

A close-up of a complex clock mechanism featuring small statues within it.

The Millennium clock tower.

National Museum of Scotland.

I’m eleven years old and I’ve been given a New Testament in our school assembly. This is the first time I’ve owned a copy of the Bible. So far, I’ve only heard it read to me in school or the few times I’ve gone to church with my family. I flick through it that evening, taken by the table at the front that directs you to different verses that speak to how you might be feeling. I find myself reading Revelation. The imagery frightens me. The tone, the threat, the fear, and the condemnation… would this be me if I didn’t believe in the right way? If I didn’t believe enough? I’m terrified of this book, these words, terrified of God, even. Mostly, I’m terrified by my own doubt and uncertainty about all things religious, despite wanting to believe. What if God isn’t real? What if God is and I just don’t believe enough? God will know I’m not sure. I tell myself not to think about it. If I’m to avoid thinking about it, I can never read the Bible again. I accept this as a rule.

I’m twelve years old and I’m standing in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, listening to one of Bach’s minor key concertos playing from the Millennium Clock. To me, it looks like it depicts some sort of hellscape straight from the book of Revelation. Death, suffering, and evil are everywhere in this model with its eerie red glow at the bottom. It brings up all the thoughts I’ve been trying to avoid – “you don’t believe enough” and “this is what hell looks like.” I tell myself to forget about it. If I’m to forget about it, I need to make sure that I never talk about it and don’t tell anyone how afraid of it I am. Talking about it makes it real, I think. I accept this, too, as a rule.

I’m thirteen years old and I’m sitting in a church trying to concentrate on the service. I can’t because I keep having the thought that I don’t believe enough. I’m worrying about what the reading might be – I’m still too scared to read the Bible and I can’t prevent myself from hearing it in this space. I’m afraid of thinking that I don’t believe enough, and that God will know because this is God’s church after all. I tell myself that I do not belong in this place if I cannot control my thoughts. If I can’t do that, I can never go to church again. This too, becomes a rule.

I’m fourteen years old and I’ve started praying every evening. I’m not sure what prompted this, but I also know that I must do it correctly. If I pray and forget to conclude with “amen”, then it seems obvious that God will continue to listen to my thoughts as if I’ve forgotten to hang up the phone. I try to keep my thoughts corralled and pure when I pray. If I don’t end my prayer, God will hear all my worst thoughts – the ones I am ashamed of, the ones that scare me, the ones that fill me with doubt. I tell myself that I can no longer run that risk. If I’m to prevent this, I shouldn’t pray. Another rule.

I was scared to say these things aloud – to voice my fears or doubts in case they somehow became worse if I acknowledged them.

I’m now in my late twenties, and I have been diagnosed with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and I’m slowly unlearning the rules I’ve created for myself over the years. Each of them, in their own way, was designed to keep me safe from harm, safe from thinking about something that frightened me, or acknowledging difficult emotions like doubt and uncertainty.

It has been a long road to reach that diagnosis. OCD is regularly misunderstood and presented as punchline of jokes – “I’m so OCD!” is one that I’ve heard far too many times when someone simply means that they’re organised. The problem with these jokes is that it disguises the reality and makes it that bit harder for people to recognise what it is they’re really dealing with. OCD-UK, a charity to whom I owe a great deal, describe OCD as follows: “Obsessions are very distressing and result in a person carrying out repetitive behaviours or rituals in order to prevent a perceived harm and/or worry that preceding obsessions have focused their attention on.”

Obsessions could cover virtually any topic, and everyone will experience compulsions in slightly different ways. I didn’t recognise that I was living with OCD because almost all of my compulsions were mental rituals or avoidance behaviour. I would try and avoid thinking about things, check whether thoughts upset me, avoid reading the Bible… Layers and layers of compulsive behaviour in response to frightening intrusive thoughts that became associated with faith. I was scared to say these things aloud – to voice my fears or doubts in case they somehow became worse if I acknowledged them. I now know to call this “magical thinking” but I still find it difficult at times to accept that I cannot cause something to happen simply by saying it.

It can be particularly difficult for people with OCD to cope with uncertainty. I can see why anxiety and doubt about the existence of God has been hard for me to tolerate. I also know that I can never achieve absolute certainty and part of learning to live with OCD is learning to accept that and make choices despite it. Last year I attended the International OCD Foundation (IOCDF) Faith and OCD conference and was overwhelmed by the sheer number of people there. So many people with the same worries and doubts as me, and many more who had found that OCD impacted them in different ways.

But it was hard for a doctor to diagnose me until I could find the words to articulate what I was experiencing. It wasn’t until I started reading books about other people’s experiences with OCD that I started to recognise my own thought patterns, my own fears and doubts in other people’s words. Author and video creator John Green shares a very powerful video titled “What OCD is like (for me)” where he shares what his experience of having OCD and says:

“I can say what it is like more than what it is.”

This gives me a little more courage to tell people what living with OCD can be like and represent some of the diverse experiences of the condition. For someone who was too frightened to open a Bible, I think it’s a little ironic that I am now a theologian. My doctoral research project is focusing on faith and OCD, and in particular, how it might affect someone’s relationship with God. I hope to make use of some of my own experience along the way – examining my fear of not being sure enough, my worries that my intrusive thoughts would somehow offend God… I hope that by sharing this, I can raise a little more awareness of an experience that so many of us try to keep secret or just aren’t ready to speak about.

Through advocacy and research, I’d like to share a little of, as John Green says, what OCD looks like (for me). I’d like to add my voice – now that I’ve found it – to the discussion in the hopes that someone might read this and recognise what they’re going through. And if that’s you? You’re not alone. There is help and there is hope.

Article

Culture

Identity

Psychology

Work

7 February 2025

5 min read

Even the office can be a place for self-discovery

What the office makes us feel about ourselves

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

A model of an office desk and shelves, at which a green plastic person sits leaning into the desk.

Igor Omilaev on Unsplash.

The realisation strikes me as I wrestle to fit my key into the lock on my office door: today I have no memory whatsoever of my journey into work. At my usual time I left the house and got in my car. I drove my usual route to my usual parking space and hopefully I stopped for all the red lights – but in truth I can’t remember any of them. Nor can I remember getting out of my car, locking my car (I hope I did that too) or walking from my parking space to this door, the lock of which is still failing to yield. This, I then realise, is because I am absent-mindedly trying to unlock it with my car key. Rolling my eyes, I reach into my pocket for the correct key… and it is not there.

Now I’m awake, glancing at my watch; 50 minutes until my first meeting of the day (online). This is enough to drive home again, but not enough to drive home, collect my key, and return to this frustrating door. By now I have established that both coat pockets are empty, so I drop to my knees and start to rummage through my bag.

It’s not a disaster if I do have to drive home, I can simply stay there and have a WFH day. I am fortunate, in my current job, to have the privilege of deciding this on a day-by-day basis. Many, I know, would love to work from home but do not have the option, but I prefer the office. The smell of black coffee, seagulls yakking on the roof. Doors open and close as colleagues come and go, keyboards tap, and on and off there is distant hum of student voices emanating from a classroom downstairs. In the hive of activity, I hum too, and I definitely get my work done more efficiently.

I’m interested to analyse this phenomenon through the lens of place attachment. There is a considerable body of research that investigates the way people feel about the spaces that they inhabit – that certain places become meaningful places to be in. Place attachment theorists explore how we can have relationships to places in much the same way that we have relationships to people – feeling a strong pull to return to the familiar, disliking change, and feeling ‘homesick’ for places where we have a strong emotional attachment. Of course, this is usually discussed in relation to the natural world, or to one’s childhood home, or ancestral lands… but why not of the office? Because the heart of place attachment is not really how we feel about places, but how places make us feel about ourselves.

Either for good or for bad, in the office one inhabits a certain sense of self – maybe not a different self to the one that we are at home – but at work, different aspects of that self are valued differently and are allowed to come to the fore. Perhaps I feel this especially because I am a working mum – it can be a relief to leave the home each day and come to inhabit a space where I am valued for more than my ability to know whether or not it’s PE today, or if there’s milk in the fridge. In the office, I can dwell in a version of myself that I enjoy – one that is paid to think and to write and to teach, a part of the university hum.

George Pitcher, in his recent article for Seen & Unseen, challenges managers to ask themselves why they are opposing more junior staff working from home. His discussion hints at this same phenomenon of places shaping identities, and Pitcher proposes that managers might resent junior staff working from home, at least in part, because they feel like their identity as a manager is compromised when they cannot sit in their glass-walled office, gazing out over the rows of worker bees, queen of all they survey. As Pitcher puts it, “…if staff aren’t in the office, then what’s the point of being a boss?”

The Bible too engages with the interplay between one’s sense of self and one’s sense of place. In the Old Testament, before the birth of Jesus, prophets and hymn writers spoke longingly of their homelands, and especially of the temple where they gathered to be assured of their identity as the people of God. “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in strange land?” cries one hymnwriter, exiled far from home, while another writes of how he longs to dwell in the House of the Lord all the days of his life. With this sentiment I can empathise; just as I feel like more of a worker-bee when I am within the hive of the university, I feel I am much more of a Christian when belting out hymns among the Sunday throng than I am among my colleagues at a Monday morning meeting.

And yet the Bible issues a challenge to me here. Because after the Old Testament comes the New, written after the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and largely after the destruction of the great “Second Temple” that Herod the Great had built in Jerusalem. With the temple gone, and the region subdued under Roman overlords, the New Testament writers make frequent allusions to Christian believers themselves being temples – temples of the Holy Spirit. This means that, as a Christian, I am urged to think of myself as a “place” of God’s presence in the world – and not just for my own sake but for the sake of others. I am not just part of the hum; I change the hum by being in it. The challenge is to gently bring the notes of my Sunday morning hymn to my Monday morning meeting.

A long time ago, when I was a little Brownie-Guide, we used to sing a campfire song called “Bees of Paradise.” It was very short and simple:

Bees of paradise, do the work of Jesus Christ

Do the work that no one can.

As a child, I never understood the words, although I enjoyed the pretty little tune that we sang it to, in the round. It comes back to me now, as I rummage in my bag for a key that I know I’m not going to find, and I return to my childhood habit of pondering the lyrics.

I’ve only got 40 minutes now until my first meeting of the day, it’s time to give up and drive home. Turning resignedly back down the stairs, I resolve to be no less a worker-bee at home than I would have been at the office today. And no less of a Christian either.

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