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.

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Books

Culture

Sustainability

Wildness

5 December 2024

7 min read

Wild writers for those who wish to wonder

A wilderness reader for wintertime and beyond

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Sheep around a frozen pond in a snowy landscape, a ruined cottage sits beyond.

Winter near Brno, Czechia.

Tomas Tuma on Unsplash.

We live in a time of decreasing biodiversity, reduced access to wilderness, and worsening mental health, and these things are, I think, linked. I wrote a bit about this recently. We are intimately tied to wilderness. We evolved on a diverse, living planet – not separate to it, but in it, dependent on it. It can be easy to forget this in part because we manipulate the world with lights and schedules and ideas of progress; we seal ourselves away in the walls of home, of work, of shops. Some of us live within the walls of church, too – disconnecting us from a wild God who increasingly to me seems most at home under the loud silence of the stars, and in the way the setting sun points to beauty before darkness, and in the way two people can bask in each other’s hearts. When I encounter love, and the loveliness of the world, I also encounter God.

We are good at taking for granted the strange beauty of the planet. We are good at forgetting how to sit with wonder, how to even access it. The poetry of the Psalms tells us that “…they forgot what he had done, the wonders he had shown them...” We must restore not only the living breathing wilderness of the planet we live in and on, but also our own ability to feel wonder, because this can be a first step towards feeling, caring, and acting.

There are writers I turn to when I need to remember the diverse wildness and unlikeliness of our planet that is, as far as we so far know, an island of life in a cold and vast universe. When I read them, I wonder at our shared earth, at our hearts, and at the mysterious holiness of it all. Here then, some of those wild writers:

Wendell Berry has influenced the way I interact with my locality, my faith, my responsibility to the earth I stand on. He is the author of essays, poetry, non-fiction and novels, but he is also a farmer in Kentucky. His preferred tools are a pencil and a team of work horses. For decades, his tending of both words and soil have each strengthened the other. His writing is rooted in the particularity of place, and through that, he speaks to the universality of our shared existence. His voice is incisive and honest, clear-eyed but full of a well-worn love. His call to a more localised and rooted way of life is not a call to escape, but to encounter – with beauty, with neighbour, with a spirit that breathes life through it all. In recent years, his writings have found new audiences. A good place to start, is The World Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry. It contains a selection of his essays written over decades – essays that call out ideas of endless progress and the unthinkingness that feeds it. From here, you might turn to other collections like The Unsettling of America, or The Art of the Commonplace. His poems are earthy and beautiful – look at The Peace of Wild Things And Other Poems. For fiction, his best-known works are Jayber Crow and Hannah Coulter, rooted in the complexity of people and their community. At a time in which our planet burns faster than ever, his writing is prophetic and honest, yet braided with grace and love.

The World Ending Fire is curated and has an introduction by Paul Kingsnorth: a writer I increasingly turn to. His story travels a path from environmental activism via explorations of various beliefs (including Wicca, Paganism, and Buddhism) to a recent – and unexpected to both him and many of his readers – conversion to Christianity. His journey is recounted in his essay, The Cross and the Machine. In his popular newsletter, The Abbey of Misrule, he writes essays that explore deep ecology, and ideas of a wild God, and of early Christian mystics who seemed much closer to the earth than many modern Christians do. His background in environmental activism still echoes – he cares for the world deeply, but his writing now, like his contemporary Dougald Hine, faces what might come when modern life as we know it becomes untenable. Like Berry, Kingsnorth brings an honesty to his writing that is often challenging to sit with. His collection of essays and talks, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, was key in my own journey. He also writes fiction, set in a strange, old England. And his short book Savage Gods, in his words, “…marks a break in my writing, my style and my worldview. This slim semi-memoir is one long question about the value of writing itself, and about what it means to belong, or not to.”

Another writer of honesty and clarity is Marylinne Robinson. She is a social critic and novelist, perhaps Gilead being her most well-known book. Her latest book, Reading Genesis, is an interpretation of the book of Genesis. She takes words that are often interpreted in two-dimensional ways and makes them come alive. She speaks not just to the complexities of faith, but of what it is to be human in this world. Throughout her work more broadly, nature is a recurring theme, symbolising beauty but also fragility, and pointing to wonder and to our own inner state.

The late and beloved Mary Oliver points to the luminosity of the world. Whether small creature or vast landscape, she invites us to slow down and really look. She insists again and again that we “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” Often, her writing helps me to touch the interconnectedness of the living world, and of our humanity. Each fragment she shows us feels part of a larger whole she is also pointing to, and for which she regularly expresses gratitude, inviting the readers to consider “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” A good place to start is with Devotions, a collection of her most loved poems, or with Upstream, a mix of poetry and essays. Here, in the details of her daily walks and reflections, Oliver manages to conjure awe and a sense of the sacred.

Another author who is extraordinarily attentive to the natural world is Annie Dillard. Her rapturous wonderings and explorations of world and place and self, link to deeper reflections, and often to the divine. Like Oliver, Dillard values specifics: “The sheer fringe and network of detail assumes primary importance. That there are so many details seems to be the most important and visible fact about creation.” Dillard weaves her senses with her reading, and often her humour, zooming out and reminding us that “the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness.” Her 1975 Pulitzer prizewinning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is perhaps her best-known work, but a good place to start is Teaching a Stone to Talk; a slim collection of essays that begin with her observations of natural phenomena but end up encompassing the wilds of her mind and of its “ultimate concerns.”

Poet, author, musician and playwright Joy Harjo was the first Native American to hold the position of Poet Laureate. She is a member of the Mvskoke Nation, and often explores themes of identity, history and social justice. Harjo weaves together past, present and future, linking our innate holiness with the natural world. A good place to start is the personal collection Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, or for an insight into her life, try Poet Warrior which brings together memoir, poetry and song, singing often of regeneration in the face of darkness.

A few others you might naturally turn to from these authors include the late essayist Barry Lopez (his last remarkable collection published in 2022 is Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World), novelist and essayist Ursula K Le Guin (her Earthsea trilogy is fantasy but offers I think a profound reflection on who we are), and Robert Macfarlane, who writes thoughtfully of nature and myth, inner and outer landscape. And the old Psalmists tell of beauty and wonder: Psalm 104, in the New King James version, contains leviathans and rock badgers, lions and moons, trees and humans, all of it singing together the great song of life – a life that is precious, earthy and holy; a life woven by a God who we hear in Genesis say, “let us make mankind in our image, according to our likeness.” God is plural, as diverse as his creation. I am grateful for the writers, just a few of whom I’ve shared here, who help me to pay attention to the diverse and strange beauty of the world, and through that, help me see its luminous holiness. That holiness – wholeness – depends on all of us, all of creation, being able to be itself. As Mary Oliver says:

“…Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”