Religious OCD

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What can cause religious OCD?

Every person and every child need a frame of reference in life; a structure that helps them to understand the world. People who suffer of religious OCD often haven’t had this structure. Many of them have seen violence between their parents, alcoholism, or have been neglected. Others have suffered sexual abuse by people who they had held in high esteem until then, like family members, friends of the family, or people who are in position of power (teachers, priests, sport coaches). These situations can cause a huge level of internal anxiety in children and oftentimes intense feelings of guilt.

All these situations are transgressions of boundaries. They are situations in which the child doesn’t know how to react because they hold no logic to them. Situations in which they don’t know how to nor can defend themselves. There is no example or an ethical guideline. On the contrary, oftentimes there is an obligatory silence around what happened, an “omertá” which forces the child to stay in the same situation. Usually this “omertá” is accompanied by the constant threat of hurting somebody they love or losing the esteem of their environment. This causes the child not to be able to share their experiences in order to compare their situation to more healthy situations and improve the situation.

Since the child hadn’t had any kind of structure at home and hasn’t been able to learn a moral code from his environment, the child starts to need a very rigid structure to compensate this. They need somebody to guide them with their behavior because they themselves have difficulties to decide what’s right or wrong. They find this structure in religion. Likewise, they need religion in order to understand and give meaning to what happened to them. That’s why the child symbolically transfers the paternal power to God. However, due to their internal anxiety and their lack of values, this act and religion itself becomes another source of anxiety for them.

In the same way, one of the causes of religious OCD is overprotection. Children who grow up in an environment where they haven’t had any kind of freedom tend to grow up as scared children. The fact that their parents or caretakers don’t allow them to face life and difficult situations by themselves causes them to grow up with excessive fear. This form of parenting doesn’t allow them to develop a strong and powerful psyche, that leads them into a search for an external structure, which they find in religion. Nevertheless, their excessive level of internal fear converts this search into an obsession.

Religious OCD also presents itself in extremely religious families. Since the child grows up in a morally rigid environment and is surrounded by an excess of rules and norms, the child experiences the world through a rigid framework. They are not able to establish their own judgment, due to the fact that free thought is disqualified in their family. That’s why any situation in which they have to rely on their own judgment can become a real torture to them.

Sometimes religion itself can instill fear in the child, since they cannot grasp nor rationalize concepts such as an all-seeing and almighty God.

There are also people with religious OCD whose feelings of guilt about past experiences cause them to generate thoughts about the fact that God must be angry at them and thinks they need to be punished for what they’ve done.

Finally, an important factor which maintains religious OCD in adulthood is that due to the lack of values and structure, many people with OCD haven’t found their place in life. Some might have even renounced their needs and desires completely.

This causes them a lot of internal anxiety and in turn an increase in obsessions and/or compulsions.