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

Advent

Attention

Christmas culture

Culture

21 December 2024

4 min read

The Visitation and Wicked taught me about welcoming

See, behold, recognise, welcome.

Jessica Brown

Jessica is a researcher, writer, and singer-songwriter. She is studying at Trinity College Dublin, and is an ordinand with the Church of Ireland.

A Renaissance painting of Elizabeth greeting the Virgin birth show two woman reaching out to hug, while others look on.

Pontormo's Visitation, 1528.

Pontormo, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

It is a gift when we encounter something — a walk, conversation, work of art — that gives insight into a story we’ve long held dear (or often, long wrestled with). Last week in a cinema in Limerick, a moment in the film Wicked did just that.

For the last year or so, I have been thinking about an event in the Gospel of Luke traditionally called the Visitation. This is the moment when Mary, the mother of Jesus, after realizing she was pregnant, traveled from Galilee to the hill country in Judea where her cousin Elizabeth lived. Elizabeth was also pregnant with a son, who would be John the Baptist. When these two women see each other, the word ‘greet’ is used several times in quick succession: a moving ethos occurs of this very human act of greeting — seeing, beholding, recognizing, welcoming. In a moment of abundant overflow, they vocalize praises from the deep heart; Elizabeth calls out to Mary, and Mary responds back.

This Visitation moment has captured hearts and minds through the centuries. One of my favourite examples is the sixteenth-century painting by Pontormo, and a 1995 work of video art by Bill Viola, which brings this painting to life. In both of these pieces, we see the kind of beholding that the Visitation involves. We see warmth enveloping warmth. We see the brightness of recognition. We see tender enfolding and embrace. We see welcome. I have come to believe that this greeting we humans long for.

They see, greet, and welcome each other in an overflowing moment of beholding and recognition.

So, last week in the cinema. I am a big fan of Wicked and from the start of the film was thrilled with the cinematic version. But at the start of the scene when Elphaba (played luminously by Cynthia Erivo) walks onto the dance floor of the local disco, the film shifted. It was as if the whole movie slowed into something different: a kind of halved-open, shadow-light play of the heart.

Elphaba, realizing how the hat she had put on was all too wrong, instead of running, leans into this electrifying space of vulnerability and exposure. As silence pounds, she lifts her hand to her forehead and bizarrely wriggles her fingers. Steps of a strange dance follow. Others look on, mortified and disgusted. Galinda (played incandescently by Ariana Grande) watches, her face stamped with distress. She had given Elphaba that hat, as a trick. Then, she decides and acts: she joins Elphaba on the dance floor and tries to follow the steps.

Narratively, the moment is the hinge to their friendship, securing them together in scenes that follow. But, before the narrative arc moves on, it dips down and stretches out. The lens rests closely on the two faces, separately, and we are drawn into the slopes of Elphaba’s face and the shine in Galinda’s eyes — and in the way they are drawn into the reality of the other’s face.

They see, greet, and welcome each other in an overflowing moment of beholding and recognition. Such seeing shapes both. Such seeing brings them to be part of something whole. Sitting there in the cinema, my breath caught: I felt I was watching an iteration of that moment in Judea’s hill country from long ago, when two women also greeted each other.

Serendipitously, because we are in Year C of the Anglican Church’s Lectionary — as in, we are in the third set of scheduled readings from the Bible — this year’s fourth Sunday of Advent reading presents the Visitation. This Sunday, as we tip from Advent season (a stretch of time marked by waiting) into Christmas (celebrating the birth of Christ and God-made-flesh, God-with-us), the long-suffering waiting of Advent funnels through this stunning moment of recognition. As the nativity narrative unfolds around them, Mary and Elizabeth enact this mutual, abundant recognition, and we have the chance to behold them beholding each other, so that our own sensibilities for seeing and being seen are given a glimpse into how this kind of wholeness-making can happen.

I think too their praises give us an even deeper glimpse into what makes this wholeness real. They rejoice in the God who comes to us, and is-with-us, who heals us so that we too can participate in this kind of greeting — with God, with ourselves, and with one another. And that healing is so needed; as Mary’s words ring out unfettered, she praises God for empowering the lowly, those caught in dreadful structures of power. The ethos of deep greeting can happen no other way.

A dear thing happened right after that Wicked dance moment. In the dark theatre, I looked over to my friend, three kids between us, with a smile — and without missing a beat, she raised her hand to her forehead and wriggled her fingers. Her daughter and I followed suit. We were all wriggling our hands at our foreheads, communicating a new, just-seen signal for the abiding welcome that friendship means.

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