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

Romance

8 September 2025

5 min read

The summer we turned romantic

Belly, the other Taylor, and the defiant desire to get married

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

The cast of The Summer I Turned Pretty pose on a wedding set.

Netflix.

A new communal rhythm has been unearthed over the hazy summer months, a fresh ritual has made its home among us. Every Wednesday, twenty-five million people are tuning into Amazon Prime’s The Summer I Turned Pretty. This show, an adaptation of Jenny Han’s novel of the same name, tells the story of ‘Belly’ – a young-ish girl who spends her summers staying with family friends at their beach house in the fictional yet notably Hamptons-esque town of Cousins Beach.

It has all the ingredients of a wistful watch:

A summer that we can vicariously bask in – tick.

An absurdly chic beach house – tick.

Two love interests who happen to be brothers and also happen to be tremendously easy on the eye – tick and tick.

It’s time for me to lay my cards on the table, if it wasn’t already obvious, I am one of those 25 million people tuning in.

Every darn Wednesday.

I find the pull that this (OK, I’m going to say it… don’t hate me…) undeniably silly show has on us fascinating. I’m acutely aware that it’s been crafted to hit all the right notes, it is a masterclass in escapism. The show’s writers’ room probably had a tick-list of binge-ability traits plastered on the wall, the writers adhering to each one thoroughly. But there’s also something about our insatiable appetite for romance that shouldn’t be dismissed with an eyeroll. We are romantically-inclined beings, to a notable degree. And, what’s more, we feast on the presumption that romantic love is something that happens to us - some kind of cosmic inevitability, sitting just beyond our control, making fools of our will.

In his essay, ‘Love and Need’, Thomas Merton wrote ‘the expression ‘to fall in love’ reflects a peculiar attitude toward love and life itself – a mixture of fear, awe, fascination and confusion. It implies suspicion, doubt, hesitation in the presence of something unavoidable yet not fully reliable’. While C.S. Lewis similarly speaks of its ‘strength, sweetness, terror and high port.’

Thus, our obsession with romantic love takes a hammer to one of our most ingrained lies: that we want, above all else, to be in control. To be the most powerful force in any room. Immovable. Unshakable. It’s hard to keep up the façade that we want to be steady on our feet when we’re endlessly nurturing the idea of being swept off them.

I could, as I have done before, suggest that this is an inherently spiritual matter. It’s a symptom of not believing in God, but craving him nonetheless.

But, alas, my attention has wandered elsewhere.

The Summer I Turned Pretty is currently running through its third series – so, we’re familiar with the love-triangle at this point, the internet has already decided which brother they’re routing for, we’re chomping down our third helping of Belly’s story. And so, what is the extra ingredient added to this third and final series? What’s keeping us on our toes? What’s ensuring that the stakes stay high enough to captivate 25 million of us? Well, interestingly, it’s the prospect of marriage.

Belly getting engaged to one of the brothers truly upped the ante. At the tender age of 21, the show’s supporting characters are less than elated at Belly’s engagement, with whole episodes dedicated to her mother’s desperate - can’t you just live together?! – pleas. Marriage is too huge. Too weighty. Too significant. Nevertheless, Belly and her fiancé defiantly plan a wedding, determined to dedicate themselves to each other in the most consequential way they know how.

And that interests me. the role that marriage still plays in our collective imagination interests me.

This is a way we still imbue our love (even the fictional kind) with the utmost meaning.

All of the data suggests that we are falling rapidly out of love with the very concept of marriage. In 2022, the UK’s Office for National Statistics told us that – for the first time ever – less than 50 per cent of people in the UK (above the age of 16) were married. And, of course, the minority who are married famously have a fifty-fifty percent chance of staying that way. You could make a robust argument that our society is pretty disenchanted with the whole institution.

And yet, we seem to keep suspending that disenchantment. The Summer I Turned Pretty’s popularity is exhibit A. Exhibit B is Taylor Swift’s obscenely newsworthy engagement announcement. This August, she posted a collection of photos of her and her new fiancé, Travis Kelce, quaintly captioned ‘your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married’. Her words alluding to her songwriting and Kelce’s football career. Journalist, Helen Lewis, notes the ‘defiant conventionality’ of it all. A defiant conventionality that is also woven into Belly’s rebellion – her audacity to rebel against her parents’ wishes and… get married.

It's all just left me wondering, as old-fashioned as it sounds – is there anything more romantic than marriage? Is it ever fully dis-enchant-able? I guess I’m just struck by how it’s still something we do, you know? We are meaning-making creatures, and this is a way we still imbue our love (even the fictional kind) with the utmost meaning.

We bind ourselves to someone else; perhaps defying our survival instincts in the process (it’s certainly the case that unmarried women live longer). It’s costly, it’s hard, it has a certain prodigality about it. Henna Cundill thoughtfully studies marriage as a ‘much slower kind of martyrdom, a decision made not once but daily, in a society where such decisions are frequently undone’. We lay our lives down for something that is bigger than us. It’s a weird human idea, if you think about it. So odd, in fact, that I’m confident in my inkling that it isn’t a human idea at all. It’s dripping with sacrality.

This really has been the summer we turned romantic. Well, 25 million of us, at least.

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 articles. All for free.
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief

Pledge now