Today’s episode is a little bit of a loaded question, and I’ll admit maybe even a little click Baity. Is it my parents’ fault? I have OCD.
Hello, and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD with Carrie Bock. I’m a Christ follower wife and mother licensed professional counselor who helps Christian struggling with OCD get to a deeper level of healing. When I couldn’t find resources for my clients with OCD, God called me to bring this podcast to you.
With practical tools for developing greater peace, we’re here to bust through the shame and stigma surrounding struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories of healing and helping you replace uncertainty with faith. I’m here to help you let go of the past and future to walk in the present abundant life God has for you. So let’s dive right into today’s episode.
The first thing I’ll say when we start talking about this is everyone wants to know when it comes to mental illness, is this something that you inherit or is it something that you get from just how you were raised? We call this in psychology, the nature versus nurture debate.
Was it nature? Did you inherit it or was it nurture the way that you were raised? And the biggest ways that we study this is via twin studies often. So they’ll look at twins who were raised together versus twins who were raised apart from each other and kinda see how they turned out and if they were raised in two completely different environments. They still develop to the same mental health conditions, then that gives some indication that there probably are some genetic components. Now, no one has discovered an OCD gene if there is such a thing out there, but it does look like genetics do play a factor as individuals who have OCD are much more likely to have a parent who has struggled with OCD.
So the genetic elements are probably about 10 to 20%, and that’s something I’m getting from the international OCD Foundation webpage. I really didn’t want to spend the majority of time talking about genetics because that is not my specialty, obviously. I did wanna talk to you about the nurture components that I see involved in a lot of families where individuals are struggling with OCD, and I just wanna be really clear that I don’t share this to shame anybody because I know we have some parents listening who struggle with OCD. I don’t share this information to cause you to just become a victim and say, oh, woe is me. It’s all the fault of my parents.
If they hadn’t have done this, then I wouldn’t have ended up this way. I think that’s a big ditch that people can fall into is blaming everything on their parents. And then on the other side, kind of pretending like how you were raised doesn’t matter at all. Like, oh, well you’re an adult now and you have to take responsibility for your own life.
And sometimes people can just become very defensive about how their parents raised them. Well, my parents did the best they could and they really provided for us, and they made sure that we didn’t lack anything. Okay. Yeah, all of that may be very well and true, but no one was raised by Jesus. And my guess is you probably weren’t raised by Mother Theresa either.
So we all had imperfect human parents. That contributed to how we came to see the world, how we came to see caregivers, how we came to see our very closest relationships. I think it’s important for all of us at some point or another in our adulthood to take that step back and evaluate how we got to the point where we are now in terms of how we look at God, how we look at our romantic relationships, how we look at ourselves and relationship to authority like bosses.
Because all of those things were first shaped and formed in our family system and instead of saying I’m a victim because of my childhood, or, oh, my parents didn’t do anything wrong, which are both extremes, I’m much more balanced views to say. I understand how my child has influenced my adulthood, and now I know why I battle some things more than others.
I know what my triggers are and I’m learning how to cope with them in a healthy way. Some of them we’re probably not gonna get there till heaven. That’s okay. But we are in process with the Lord as he’s refining us day by day. In order to take that balanced perspective, you have to have an awareness of how your childhood affected you.
Obviously, not all of these things are negative. You may have been entrusted with some really great values as you were growing up. And here’s an exercise for you. What if you were to make a list of the things you used to hear your parents say? Often, I’ll give you a positive and a negative example. So from my own childhood, my dad used to say, I love you a lot.
The reason he said I love you a lot was because his own father did not verbalize that he loved him and was not verbally affectionate. My dad was like, yeah, I know that my father loved us, but I didn’t hear it. And that was a wound that he made a decision not to pass on to his children. So I did hear Dad say, I love you a lot, but I also heard dad say, you’re stubborn.
You’re stubborn. Now I look back on that and I can laugh because I’m like, no, what you saw is stubborn when I wasn’t listening or when I wasn’t doing it the way you wanted it to or following instructions. I get it. That’s frustrating as a parent. You know what? I was really determined and I was able to push through and I was able to get things that I wanted.
And you know what? It serves me really, really well as an entrepreneur because if I wasn’t stubborn, I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you right now. I would’ve given up a long time ago. This has not been an easy road. I probably wouldn’t have my own business if I wasn’t stubborn and I didn’t have to figure so many different things out.
I’ve had to be okay with falling and getting back up again and failing and getting back up again, and working with the wrong types of people, firing them and finding someone else to work with. It has been a wild ride. If that makes me stubborn, thank you. I will take the compliment since that is my own wounded piece, I will never call my daughter stubborn.
I’ll call her determined. I will call her tough. I will call her very good at getting what she wants. I will call her. Perseverance determined, I think is a good replacement word for this, but I will not call her stubborn. My mother was very big on excellence, and she always used to say, if something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well, and that was a positive attribute I got from my mother.
On the flip side, she was a bit of a worrier and she could tell you 10 ways that something was gonna go wrong. I absorbed a lot of that anxiety when I was younger, but as I got older and separated a little bit more, I had to learn basically to not take on her anxiety and really to not take it personally if something that I was doing was causing her to be afraid.
What about you? What did you always hear your parents say? I can tell you that it shaped you in some way. Even if it was just that your parents were silent and they weren’t around and you didn’t really get a whole lot of guidance from them, that in itself has impacted you. One of the things I do with clients that I work with when we’re using EMDR and parts work, sometimes we’re looking at things that we’re very hurtful, that they were told as a child and really reworking those messages in their brain.
Not just at a cognitive thought replacement level, but really more at a nervous system level where you can go from, yes, this was basically imprinted on my brain growing up, but now I know what the truth is about myself. Like I know who God says that I am, and that’s absolutely what’s the most important.
I want to talk for a moment about what I define as a rigid upbringing as this is something that I’ve seen over and over again that my clients have experienced in their family system. A rigid upbringing is one that lacks flexibility, adaptability, and freedom. There’s only one right way to do something if you do it in a different way.
You’re reprimanded, even if it’s something small. That message that comes out ends up being, well, you’re stupid or you’re incompetent. It may not have been said directly. It may have just been a look because you didn’t adjust the couch cushions the right way, or because you didn’t vacuum in straight lines.
It might look like very rigid schedules. Mom is only washing clothes on Saturday. If your PE uniform needs to be washed during the week because you only have one too bad. Friday nights are only for family. You can’t go out with your friends. We’re having pizza. Can we have chicken nuggets instead? No. This leads to a level of black and white thinking, difficulty problem solving or recognizing that problems often have more than one solution to them.
You may just have viewed your family growing up or your parents as particularly strict because they had a lot of rules. They had a lot of ways they wanted things done. They would only let you hang out with certain people and they got onto you pretty harshly if you didn’t follow those rules. Let’s talk about lack of freedom.
If you’re not free to make choices at some level, then that means that you’re not free to make mistakes and learn from them. So if somebody completely micromanages every little thing and then you go to make a decision on your own, obviously you’re gonna be lost because you’re so used to everyone else telling you how to do things.
The consequences can really be this dependency on others. I’m afraid of doing something wrong. There’s probably only one right way to do it, so I better ask before I go ahead and do something. Another consequence is difficulty problem solving. If you’re not taught that problems have more than one solution, it causes you to not be able to think creatively.
Maybe you just weren’t taught to think critically, so you don’t know how to do it. This can lead you to really being paralyzed in adulthood. So if you’re a parent, it’s important at some level not just to tell your children this is right and this is wrong, but to sit them down when they’re faced at a crossroads and say, what do you think is right?
And follow the reasoning process. And then of course, you can always course correct if you have a child convincing you that lying is the right way to go. Of course you’re gonna bring up, well, how might that affect your relationship with your friend if you lie to them? Do you think they might believe you the next time that you tell them something?
If they’re having difficulties in a friendship, being there to guide and support, but asking a lot of questions and causing them to really think through what they should do next. Or son or daughter, how do you know that this person is worthy of being a friend? Is this somebody that you should be investing a lot of time with?
How do you know that? Really getting them to think through these processes instead of just saying. This person’s okay for you to hang out with? No, I don’t like that person’s mother, so you can’t hang out with them. With some of my clients, I talked with them about having a delayed adolescence. What I mean by this is that in the adolescent process of development, the parents are supposed to be this safe and secure base for their children to come back to.
They are given some sense of freedom. There are boundaries and guidelines, but they’re given a little bit of freedom to go out and make some choices about a few things, come back, process that with their parents, go out, make some more choices, make mistakes, mess things up, but still have that safety net of we’re always going to love you and we’re always gonna care about you.
When you are the overbearing helicopter type parent and you don’t give your adolescent some of those freedoms, there isn’t that opportunity to make the mistakes in a safe and healthy way. And yes, adolescent mistakes can be very messy and have lasting consequences, but they’re typically a little easier to come back from than when you make those same mistakes as an adult.
You think about that in terms of finances, there’s a reason that we have kids earn money and learn how to spend that money and appropriately teach them about saving, teach them about tithing so that when they’re older and have more money, they can know how to save for things they want, or how to budget or what they need to do.
Make sure that they’re appropriating money for giving. It’s a whole lot easier to teach them that when they’re younger versus them having to figure that out as an adult. Another consequence I see of rigid upbringing is perfectionistic tendencies. This belief that mistakes are unacceptable and irreparable.
I believe this contributes to a lot of moral or scrupulosity type OCD if you are shamed as a child and everything that you did wrong was made to be a huge deal. There was a lot of shame and a lot of feeling bad about yourself. Then you’re going to develop these tendencies to try to make everything perfect so that you don’t let other people down around you.
Then when you do make a mistakes, it just feels like the worst thing in the world, and that might be what you’re carrying into adulthood. Mistakes happen. We have an opportunity to grow from them and to learn from them and to do something different next time. When we’re stuck in a place of shame, it only leads us to hide.
We don’t actually end up growing from the mistakes, and it’s not that we end up making less of them. When we’re stuck in shame, we just get better at hiding them. The last consequence that I see is really a combination and a collection of the previous ones that I mentioned, dependency on others, difficulty, problem solving, perfectionistic tendencies, and low self-esteem or self-confidence.
If when you listed out those things that your parents always used to tell you. If there were things on there like you’re stupid, you are never gonna learn, you’re difficult, you are lazy, whatever it was, you may have those things, but like I said, it may not have been that direct. It may have just been the look that told you you were completely incompetent or incapable of doing anything.
Right. And when we don’t give people freedom and the ability to make choices. That opportunity to do things for themselves, to develop confidence that leads to low self-esteem as well. Low self-esteem, of course, can have a variety of origins, and if you grew up struggling with OCD and you didn’t have the support and help that you needed, it’s quite possible that your parents didn’t know what was happening.
Since OCD typically takes a long time to get diagnosed, unfortunately. So if you grew up in this family and everybody was just kind of frustrated or confused, like, why are you doing things that way, or What’s wrong with you kind of mentality, then obviously that’s gonna affect how you feel about yourself.
In some family systems, there may have been shame about needing to go to the psychiatrist or needing to go to therapy. It may have been a hush type of thing. We don’t talk about that, or we kind of try to pretend like the mental health issues don’t exist. We try to sweep things under the rug. As a child, if your parents don’t talk to you about something, if there were just kind of this unspoken code of silence.
We don’t talk about sex, finances, or feelings, then that leads you to believe that somehow these things are bad and maybe I need to suppress all of my sexual desires because those are taboo. Or maybe I need to suppress and push down my feelings because, oh, we don’t talk about that here. That must be bad, and I’m just gonna ignore those things and move on or I don’t have anybody that I can open up to about them or share what’s really going on. And of course these things cause problems connecting in relationships because feelings, vulnerability, being able to share information openly, being able to be honest about what’s going on with us internally. That connects us to those in our lives who are the closest to us, and we want to be able to have those skills and do that.
If you grew up in a family where there wasn’t that emotional vulnerability or there wasn’t emotional safety, maybe you found out really quickly if you were vulnerable. You were gonna be put down. You were gonna be called a baby. You were gonna be told you’re too sensitive, you cry too much. Then you’re like, okay, it’s not safe here to open up.
And that leaves you close off to others. That can cause significant issues in friendships, in roommate relationships and marriages. And one of the reasons I’m doing this episode is to help you build awareness or bring some of these things into the light in terms of how your family of origin issues have affected you now, so that you can healthily deal with those things and recognize, oh, okay, this piece of my family system, these values that I got, these were really good things.
These were positive. These over here. These were not so healthy. These were not in line with the Bible. These were not in line with how God wants me to live as a person with emotion, that I need to be able to connect with other people, that I need to be able to be vulnerable and open up even to God about how I feel and prayer what’s going on in my life.
A lot of these family of origin issues, especially if you had issues with your dad, that can affect your relationship with God. Once we build the awareness and bring these things into the light, then that allows us to say, okay, how can I take active steps to do things differently even though I know it’s going to be really uncomfortable for me?
It took me many years and many mistakes to recover from the perfectionism that had developed in my life. I don’t completely blame my family for that. I think some of that was a little bit of just internal temperament of how I was born. I. I think there was part of that and a little bit of how I was raised, but the perfectionism was real and it ruled my life for a while.
I would definitely beat myself up over and over again if I made a mistake on something. It just seemed like that just wasn’t okay and wasn’t acceptable. Created a lot of shame. A lot of that got worked on in therapy for me when I went through my divorce process and just recognizing how much pressure I put on myself to perform, how much I was sweating the small stuff, and really missing the big picture.
Developing an understanding of God’s incredible grace and mercy for when I do fail and mess things up, and finding acceptance and unconditional love in the body of Christ. All of those things were very helpful and healing as part of my process. Having a deep level understanding now of how much God radically loves me, regardless of how I perform, that I can still strive for excellence without things having to be perfect.
It’s taken me a long time to get to that balance point. I want to end on a moment of hope here, and that is that as some of you know, I started out my career working primarily with children and families, and I’m talking children who had severe emotional behavior problems, were getting kicked outta school, were using drugs, were having massive tantrums.
There were many times where I came to an understanding of the parents’ story, how they had been raised, what they had been through. I will tell you that 99% of the time they were raising their children better than how they were raised. They might not have been the best parents. They may not have known how to do certain things like create routines or structure or have healthy boundaries or self-regulate to assist their kids in self-regulating.
They may not have had all of these skills, but they were doing the very best that they could to make sure that their child had a better raising than how they were raised. Hopefully, that can give you some compassion for your own family members. If you were raised in a family where maybe there was a lot of abuse or that your parents were cold, whatever the scenario was, it allows you to have some compassion that they probably got it a lot worse.
That’s not an excuse and it doesn’t invalidate your feelings. Your feelings about the situation are still real. And we all have these unmet needs from childhood and things that we’re trying to work through in adulthood. And the beautiful thing is that. In Christ. God has given us this opportunity not to pass things down to the next generation, to be able to give things to your kids that you never received because we have received that love from God.
And prayerfully because you have received that love from Christian community. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this episode. Maybe it was eye-opening for you in some way. You can always get ahold of me at kiri bach.com/podcast. We have a little box where you can write me a message. It wasn’t working at one point, but we got it back up and running now.
As always, thanks so much for listening and hanging out with me today. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you. Christian faith in OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area.
