Article

Culture

Psychology

10 November 2023

6 min read

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

Film & TV

Trauma

Work

23 September 2025

5 min read

What would Pascal make of Emmy-winner Severance?

Locking ourselves away in a room still doesn’t work

Rick Hansen

Rick writes and speaks on leadership, transformation, and culture.

Pascal ponders a steampunk TV showing Severance.

Nick Jones/Copilot.

Severance, the hit Apple TV series, garnered the most Emmy nominations at the star-studded 77th Emmy Awards. Colors and fame popped on the vibrant red carpet as Hollywood’s elite strolled along the walkway, exuding famous smiles, elegant evening wear, and their signature flair.

It was strikingly ironic, however, to see the Severance actors in such formal attire, ripe with ready-made smiles. Their presence was, well, very Hollywood. This contrasted sharply with their on-screen characters, who are typically set against a dark, desolate backdrop of despair, compelled to force smiles as if it were an immense burden on their very souls.

The stark contrast between the opulent Hollywood red carpet and the sterile, bland workspace Severance is set in underscores a core theme in the show: the tension between faith and doubt, belief and despair, light and darkness.

In the show, the main character Mark S. grapples with the challenge of navigating his own tension in his own calibrated nightmare of hope and despair. He has to cope with the sudden loss of his wife, and it's suffocating him.

His company, Lumon, helps him deal with this loss through a surgical procedure called Severance. This procedure implants a chip in his brain that creates two separate identities: an "Innie" for work and an "Outie" for home. These two co-existing selves are emotionally, physically, and psychologically unaware of each other, essentially severing the person's whole self into two pieces. Whatever they are trying to bury or escape, becoming “severed” keeps the person’s “Innie” from dealing with this delicate paradox of the “Outie”. In short, they don’t have to choose the light or the dark.

For Mark S., severance offers a thin thread of disguised hope, a potential breach in his unbearable pain.

In his Pensées, French philosopher Blaise Pascal explores this intrinsic human tension between faith and doubt, belief and despair - a fundamental aspect of the human experience. He says, "In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don’t."

He posits that the evidence between the light and the shadow is just enough to sway us in one direction or the other. It’s calibrated on either side allowing us to lean into our personal autonomy. We are free to choose the hope of the light or succumb to the despair of the darkness; the outcome depends entirely on what we choose.

Leaning into Pascal, the act of severance relieves Mark S. of this beautiful yet complicated tension.

A review on Reddit said it simply, “Severing allows Mark to just literally shut his brain off, get the work done, then go home and distract himself with TV and alcohol... he doesn’t want to let it go.”

It’s real pain and he doesn’t know how to manage it. The shadows are pervasive. However, by choosing severance, Mark avoids the light and the shadows. The more he relies on severance for hope or healing by attempting to bury the shadows, the more the shadows intensify - the shadows Pascal says will blind us in our disbelief.

The battle that Mark S. faces embodies the very tension that Pascal is surfacing. This tension of choosing the light or the shadows is something we all must face.

We all carry shadows wrapped in our own circumstances. I think many of us would likely prefer to avoid confronting them. They are painful. They are dark. They are heavy. In truth, if we had the choice I think many of us would likely choose an escape instead of dealing with the darkness, with the secrets and the pain that hide in our souls.

For example, many of us show up to work or to life like Mark S. in some version of our “Innie” - a professional face of compliance, rule following, corporate persona, goal oriented, etc. and leave the version of our “Outie” at home alone and isolated to wrestle with our demons, with our painful, confusing questions. We curate our internal messiness and disguise ourselves with our own “Innie”.

For some, our day job is an actual version of a self-imposed severance.

I wish this tension between the light and shadows Pascal speaks of was less “tense” to say it plainly, and yet it is an inherent, essential part of the human experience.

This faith that both we and Mark S. wrestle with, by its very nature, lacks complete clarity; this tension is, in fact, a testament to this profound mystery of life itself. It's the wonder of life. There’s just enough data for us to lean into the light and also just as much for us to lean into the shadows. What we see depends on what we choose to believe in.

This tension is similarly addressed in the Biblical book of Hebrews. It highlights Pascal's subtle paradox and defines faith as "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."

The freedom to choose “the substance of things hoped for”, this inherent tension of Pascal, is the true marvel and mystery of life. It’s both messy and wonderful.

Our capacity for choice, to engage with the light and shadows and to lean into one over the other as we wish is a profound gift.

While some find this very tension a reason for disbelief, Pascal tugs on this and says it's actually fundamental to belief, it's a wonderful component of the human condition - a true gift. It hints at the very essence of hope. It’s the same process we must engage when choosing to believe in or not to believe in something beyond our selves, and ultimately beyond this world.

This struggle, the shadows of pain and suffering and the light of hope and belief is precisely what makes us alive; it’s what makes us human. It points us to the heavens where hope and faith were authored.

The question isn’t whether we have an “Innie” or an “Outie”, a tension of light and darkness, of faith and doubt. We all do. We all wrestle with this essence. The question is do we have the courage to wrestle with these internal conflicts, enabling us to bring our whole selves - our flaws and pains, our joys and hopes - into every interaction.

This tension Pascal speaks of is ultimately a mirror that shows us, us. We are all tempted to numb our pain, divide ourselves, to compartmentalize the shadows. But Pascal reminds us there is always enough light to see, if we choose it.

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