One of the most devastating things about obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is its tendency to seize on the things you hold most dear. This can include faith-based or spiritual practices and rituals. When these practices, which are meant to bring you meaning, comfort, and fulfillment, become tangled in obsessions and compulsions, it can feel frustrating, confusing, and even shameful.
While this experience can feel deeply alienating, it’s very common for people with OCD, and specialized OCD treatment can help you learn to manage these obsessions and compulsions.
Why OCD can latch onto religious beliefs and practices
OCD loves to cast doubt about and attack the things that are deeply important to you. That can make religious faith—which also often involves deep self-reflection, as well as doctrines about how you should react to feelings of doubt—rich ground for OCD.
Scrupulosity OCD is a form of OCD in which anxieties and fears about morality can become centered on whether you’re adhering closely enough to the tenets of your faith or spiritual practice. During religious holidays, other times of traditional observance, and other moments that call you to draw upon your faith, scrupulosity OCD can become especially prominent.
But scrupulosity OCD can also show up at any time. OCD might cause you to doubt whether your faith is authentic or sincere enough, or fear that you’ve committed a sin or violation of your religious values without even realizing it. You might also experience intrusive thoughts that are in conflict with your religious beliefs and convictions, like imagining harm coming to others. You may then feel the need to “atone for” your intrusive thoughts by engaging in compulsions like repeated confession, excessive prayer, reassurance seeking (especially from religious authority figures or other members of your faith), or avoidance of certain actions or people that you worry could compromise your devotion to your religion.
Rituals that OCD can seize on
To be clear, religious and spiritual rituals are not inherently compulsive. But their structured nature and connection with morality can make them easy targets for OCD.
Food and fasting
Many religions have traditions related to food, whether that means rules about what you can and cannot eat and when, or ritual periods of fasting. Your relationship with these rituals can be disrupted not only by scrupulosity OCD, but also by other OCD subtypes—like contamination OCD—as well as eating disorders, which commonly co-occur with OCD.
For example, you might want to fast during the month of Ramadan, but fear that despite being healthy and strong enough to fast safely, the observance will harm you or make you sick because it deviates from an ideal healthy diet. At the same time, feeling this doubt or uncertainty about fasting might make you question your commitment to your faith, causing a spiral of religious OCD fear and anxiety.
Prayer and meditation
Both prayer and meditation can be deeply calming and centering practices. But OCD can also turn them into distressing compulsions. You might feel anxious and fearful if you don’t meditate for a certain length of time every day, or feel the need to start your meditation over again if your mind drifts, or anything else happens that keeps it from feeling “just right.” You might feel the need to repeat a prayer over and over again if you think you’ve stumbled over your words, had an impure-feeling intrusive thought during it, or just don’t feel confident that you did the ritual perfectly. These experiences can make it difficult or altogether impossible to truly connect with the feelings of spirituality, peace, or strength that prayer and meditation are meant to create—which can cause further feelings of shame and anxiety, perpetuating the cycle of symptoms.
Confession and introspection
OCD loves to make you worry about whether you’re a bad person, and this anxiety can combine with your religion’s teachings about morality in ways that make you feel the need to constantly surveil yourself to determine if you’re being virtuous enough. You might also find yourself compulsively reviewing memories to try to determine if you’ve behaved in line with your values, or engaging in excessive, repeated confession—either the formalized version that’s part of Catholic faith, or an urge to tell religious leaders or other members of your religious community about thoughts, urges, or actions you worry may be “bad.”
Religious tradition when your faith has changed
Sometimes, rituals and traditions stay with us even if what they represent no longer perfectly resonates. For many communities, faith and religion go beyond attending select ceremonies or reciting specific words—they are the fabric into which our families and shared life are woven. Even if you no longer consider yourself religious, or never did, you might still find peace in the familiar cadence of a prayer, or gathering for a traditional meal. You might find that the idea of forgoing certain cultural or religious rituals or occasions makes you feel sad, or excluded.
If you find that you’re still practicing a religious ritual that doesn’t perfectly align with your current values, know that it doesn’t necessarily mean that your behavior is driven by OCD—or that these religious traditions have become compulsions. It may just mean that, like most humans, you find comfort in tradition and community. Many people who were raised with faith or find comfort in ritual and togetherness still participate in rituals. For example, plenty of non-religious Jewish people attend Passover seders or fast on Yom Kippur, and many non-religious Catholic people go to church on major Christian holidays like Christmas and Easter.
If you’re wondering if your faith-based rituals have become compulsive, ask yourself:
- Am I doing this to genuinely connect with my faith or to ward off an OCD fear? Engaging with a religious practice can bring about all kinds of different feelings depending on the occasion, ritual, and faith. But if before your religious practice you feel anxious or scared, not because of a separate life circumstance but because you haven’t engaged in the practice yet, and afterwards you feel a short-term sense of relief as though you have temporarily staved off danger, the feelings you’re having are classic hallmarks of the OCD cycle, and the ritual may have become a compulsion.
- Does this practice align with my current values? If you grew up practicing a certain religion, the rituals that come with it may have once felt ingrained in your sense of morality. But as we grow, our values grow with us. If you feel compelled to engage in a religious practice even though you no longer identify with that faith, ask yourself: Am I doing this because I enjoy connecting to my roots or community through a familiar ritual? Or am I doing this because I’m scared something terrible will happen or that it will mean something awful about me if I stop?
- How frequently do I engage in this practice? While some people may feel moved to pray or engage in other kinds of religious practices more often than others, some practices come with specific timelines. If you find yourself engaging in a practice more often than is considered standard, or is recommended by the guidelines of your faith—for example, fasting as penance outside of designated times because you feel you have extra sin to atone for—that could be a sign that your practice is compulsive.
What ERP therapy can look like for religious OCD
Exposure and response prevention (ERP) therapy is the most effective form of treatment for OCD, and it works by helping you learn to gradually face your fears, without performing compulsive rituals in response. If you have scrupulosity OCD, your therapist will work with you to identify what triggers your obsessions, and expose you to those triggers in a safe and controlled environment—while teaching you to resist compulsions. Depending on the nature of your specific obsessions and compulsions, as well as your specific religious practices, you might practice things like exploring your doubts about religious doctrines, skipping the services you’re less interested in, or even saying “sinful” phrases out loud.
The goal of ERP is not to teach you to contradict your religious values. In fact, it’s the opposite: to help you live in accordance with them—and all your values—without OCD’s interference. After all, OCD insists upon certainty, but faith is defined by conviction and belief that go beyond easily available forms of evidence. If you don’t consider yourself religious, but still find that your OCD pushes you to engage in religious ritual, ERP can help you let go of practices that aren’t truly meaningful for you, and hold onto traditions that you genuinely care about.
