Hello and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD with Carrie Bock. I’m a Christ follower wife and mother. Licensed professional counselor who helps Christians 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.
Carrie: Another reason I like this interview is because it really shows you how scrupulosity often comes as a secondary OCD to an initial OCD theme that then gets latched into faith. That’s helpful for us to know because oftentimes we have to really look at tackling that initial OCD theme before we can unravel the spiritual pieces of it.
I know you’re gonna enjoy today’s episode, so let’s dive right in. Stephanie, if you can just go ahead and introduce yourself for us.
Stephanie: Yeah. My name is Stephanie Smith. I’m a psychotherapist, licensed professional counselor. Virginia located at a group practice in Richmond with lived experience with OCD.
Carrie: Awesome. And we met through the ICBT group, or was it through Instagram?
Stephanie: I think it was Instagram. I saw I was following some OCD accounts and had followed, stumbled across years. Why did you wanna share your story today? I think my diagnosis of OCD, just the intersection, I think of my faith and OCD and sort of how my own faith sort of.
I took hold of, or my OCD kind of had the theme of the scru moralistic, the religious OCD already as a Christian OCD really attacks your values. Just raising awareness, I think, of the forms that OCD can take and shedding some light on a sufferer of OCD, who’s also has navigated her faith. How that can kind of be complicated when OC D’S a liar and your faith is not.
And so trying to navigate what voice is what,
Carrie: Tell us a little bit about how OCD showed up for you, or when did you start to notice those obsessions coming on?
Stephanie: They really started. I think I was really young and we’re talking maybe like elementary school, and I would have really intrusive thoughts. They would just kind of, they were like violent or they were sexual or they were horrific and they would just be these images and I would just burst into tears.
I didn’t know where they were, what they were, how they came about. I. And I had a lot of separation anxiety, I think from my parents at the time, the separation anxiety. I was asking my parents, am I gonna be okay? Is everything okay? They didn’t have much knowledge about anxiety and OCD or there was not much mental health awareness in general in the early nineties.
I’m a millennial, so there wasn’t a lot, and my parents didn’t really know what to do except to reassure me. And we know with OCD sometimes reassurance. Can make it worse as a compulsions. There was a lot of reassurance seeking a lot of confessing that I had a thought or that I, and a lot of the confessing wasn’t even anything I was doing wrong, but I worried, what if I was doing something wrong?
And so compulsive praying a lot of that. So that’s kind of how it started when I was young. And I guess I can fast forward a little bit into middle school. With OCD, it tends to play whack-a-mole with themes. So at first it was kind of that harm OCD that worries that something bad was gonna happen to my family or me.
And this fixation in the nineties, around the time when I grew up and was a child and also a teenager in a lot of, I guess at that time I grew up in evangelical culture, so in youth group and stuff, where at that time there was a lot of talk about, I truly got hung up on obedience. I was like, oh, what if I go to hell?
What if I’m not pleasing? God? What if, what if? What if?
Carrie: Did you feel like you could share any of those concerns with your parents? Or were there certain ones that you would seek reassurance for and ask them about? And then other ones that you were like, oh no, that’s too scary to admit or tell anybody? I don’t think until later,
Stephanie: no.
A lot of what I was struggling with, I just remember lots of times I would cry to nowhere because I had an intrusive thought.
Carrie: Oh, but they
Stephanie: didn’t know why I was upset, why I was crying, and I couldn’t really articulate it. I did feel like I could come to my parents. My dad is a pastor and it was funny ’cause he was never really a hellfire and brimstone pastor, but I think in that culture there was just fixation on eternal damnation and I was like, oh no.
As a kid, when you have OCD, it just makes some things a lot harder to navigate
Carrie: and it just gives latched on to certain things and especially I think. OCD like structure, like, oh, well you’re telling me do A, B, C, and I’ll be obedient and I’ll be like the good Christian, so I’ve gotta like extra be sure that I’m doing A, B, C, so that I can go to heaven and please God, and he won’t be upset with me.
Stephanie: It was challenging to get to a place where I didn’t fixate on my face as much. I got to a place where I had figured out my beliefs for myself and things didn’t scare me. It was a journey, and there’s a lot of themes that sort of played Whack-a-Mole, but in sixth grade. There were rumors about me and a friend of mine that we were gay, and this is in like mid to late nineties where there wasn’t as much awareness or acceptance of the lgbtq plus community.
And so then it was like you were really ostracized. At the time, I didn’t think I was gay, but then I started to question it. What if I am gay and if I’m gay? What if I’m an abomination to God and I’m really going to hell? Yeah. Again, just this fixation and at the time I didn’t have a healthy understanding of, I don’t think, my faith and the concept of heaven.
Hell, as a child, you are very black and white with your categories of thinking. It’s either good or bad. Right or wrong. Yeah.
Carrie: Yes. Or. I think that whole period of sexual development too, back in that day, very much like purity culture. I don’t know if this was part of your story, but like not talking about sex and our only conversations surrounding it are no bad, don’t do it.
Wait till
Stephanie: you’re married. I had a really great youth group, leaders and things, but there were camps that we’d go to and so sometimes. Even if a youth pastor a leader was well-meaning if you’ve got somebody in the group that’s got OCD, you gonna latch onto something that you said and spin a story. And I tended to do that.
I did that a lot and just really thought that I was like too bad of a person for Jesus to love, which at the time really made me very depressed when I was, I wanna say in 10th grade or 11th grade, my dad had found a poem that I wrote. He thought was a suicide note. It wasn’t. It was just a really depressing sort of self-deprecating poem.
And he had taken me outta school to go to, I guess the hospital to look into counseling or medicine. And this is the first time I’m 17, so I have not gotten any help all these years for OCD or anxiety or any of it. And I got put on Paxil, which is SSRI, antidepressant, which really helped with my mood and I didn’t find out until later into my own career as a licensed therapist that.
Those types of medications also help a lot with OCD. And so when I got put on that, I was also given, uh, recommended or referred to a therapist who really spotted my OCD. I mean, it might have been the first session or something. She was like, this is what this is. So it was a huge relief to know, you mean this is a thing that I’m not wrong and bad.
I literally have a pulse condition, the psychoeducation piece, this is what OCD is. Your intrusive thoughts are actually the opposite of what you want. They’re not indicative of who you are as a person. That’s why you are so scared of them. ’cause you don’t like them. This is OCD and so that was instrumental in my career now as a therapist was having her.
Carrie: Yeah, that’s awesome that it was found so quickly and they didn’t just treat you for anxiety. Right. That sounds like you were having some pretty clear symptomology though, like just explaining the thoughts that were going through your head. And then did you stay with that same counselor for a while? I did.
Stephanie: She told me a little bit about ERP and gave me a book on it on exposure response prevention, which is a kind of golden standard therapy for OCD, but I found that just the knowledge of what OCD was significantly decreased. Not only my fear of my intrusive thoughts, but it dissipated the fear. So I wasn’t afraid of having them, and therefore it decreased the frequency because I wasn’t living in fear of having them ’cause I knew what they were.
So I could just, oh, that’s OCD. It was also interesting because when I told her about my fears of. At the time, oh, what if I’m gay? Or what if she goes, Stephanie, do you wanna ram your tongue down a girl’s throat? And I was like, no. Ew. She’s like, then you’re not gay. And I’m like, okay. So at the time, regardless of your thoughts on, as a Christian, as a believer and sexuality, it wasn’t like okay, like it wasn’t anywhere and was still wasn’t as much of acceptance or awareness really of the LGBT community.
And so I’ve since reconciled some of my thoughts on, and my faith and I. That just kind of was a growing process as I got older. But at the time in the culture in the nineties that I was in an evangelical culture, it was just this big no-no. And so after I kind of realized what OCD was, got the education from her, that sort of propelled me forward into.
Going into my career now.
Carrie: I mean, essentially what she did there in terms of I Ccbt was get you in touch with your true desires.
Stephanie: Yeah, I really like ICBT as a therapeutic modality for OCD because it resolves. It kind of at the root, tells you that your intrusive thoughts, like what you obsess about, is it random.
It’s actually a threat to kind of your true self. It scares you because it’s not how you see yourself. But OCD tends to be very strong in making you feel that the thought or the urge or the fear is true. And even if you know kind of deep down that something is not the case, OCD tries to convince you it is as it is the doubting disorder.
Carrie: I’m just realizing more and more how much of OCD treatment is about identity development, and I’m curious about. Your spiritual development from that point, of course, like OCD was trying to hijack that and distort really your view of God and distort like your beliefs about what it meant to be a Christian or workspace, salvation, however you wanna conceptualize that.
Yeah. But how did that shift? Over time for you, was it just kind of small ways of like reading the scriptures for yourself? Was it being around other forms of teaching? Like
Stephanie: after college? I think I had sort of, I’ve gone to your more conservative evangelical churches. I’ve gone to more progressive churches.
I’ve kind of like explored a lot to get to a point where I’m confident in my faith as I see it, I don’t fear it as much. And my grandmother. She had really bad anxiety and worry. My grandfather, her husband had OCD, which is where I get it from, which unfortunately, but both the OCD and the anxiety, one of my great aunt had told her one day, Jeanette, you read the Bible too much, it’ll drive you crazy.
The idea was if you obsess and you were compulsively, urgently seeking the scriptures, you were reading out of fear and you were not reading in a way that is where you’re at peace and you’re interested, you are afraid. And so I took that to really mean that I. If you are looking at stuff and you were forgetting about the grace component or the fact that salvation is a journey, a process through which Paul says to work out your salvation, it’s a sanctification process, so right, it’s not gonna be, you’re gonna get everything right in this moment.
You’re gonna obey 100%. It’s just not realistic. Nor is it indicative of the great heroes of scripture
Carrie: who also made their share of mistakes and messed up and. I think people forget that Paul was on a track murdering Christians before he encountered Jesus. I think somehow we’ve missed that part of the story.
We’re like, let’s like just exclude that and pretend like that never happened. But OCD will have you getting stuck on like one small offense or some sin that you’ve committed. It could be something that you did a long, long time ago, and OCD keeps bringing that back up. Well see you’re this way or that way.
Okay. That was something I did 10 years ago and it’s not even relevant to my life today and who I am. Thank God I’m not the same person that I was that many years ago. I’ve just been processing, I think a little bit about what you’re talking about related to sin, forgiveness, grace related to scrupulosity, that those can be really challenging concepts for people to grasp understanding of.
It’s not about me doing all the things to be right with God. It’s very hard to shift out of that. I mean, do you wanna speak to that? Maybe a little bit?
Stephanie: Yeah. I think with, you had kind of mentioned earlier, like a workspace kind of, we can get into that mentality with OCD being a kind of black and white all or nothing, that it can really align with this idea that I have to earn, I have to do, I have to this workspace.
When the work has already been done. And that’s the beauty of it that I had to realize was that these are all things that I have been saved from and I don’t have to white knuckle it, grip my teeth and like push through and try to obey all these commands. It’s hard because I think sometimes why I used to look at Christ’s commands.
Christ can say some things that are pretty all or nothing pretty, like absolute obey. And he said, be perfect for your father in heaven is perfect. But if he said, be pretty okay, we’d all be patting ourselves on the back. We wouldn’t be motivated to grow and mature. So I think it was something to strive for because he knew that we weren’t perfect or he wouldn’t have had to die.
We just have to keep that in mind that this is what he came for. And I think OCD can really convince us. And keep us staying in this rut of self-loathing and things like that, that really is the opposite of what I think Christ came to do. We’re made in the image of God, and if we’re constantly self-loathing, we’re really just kind of showing that we don’t believe that, and I think it’s important to believe that we are made in God’s image and that we don’t have to let OCD be the
Carrie: judge.
I don’t have to keep like striving all so much and working so hard at something. I think it’s something that we’re meant to have like a natural abiding in Christ and connection to the Holy Spirit and making sure that our conscience is clear in the sense that we are connected to God, making sure that we are not actively repetitively sinning, that we’re allowing the Holy Spirit into nudge us.
To do that gentle transformation, that’s very kind for us. Like, Hey, you’re in the wrong here. Like do something different. And it’s a very big shift from feeling like we’ve gotta do all the roles or we’ve gotta complete all the tasks. And I think that so many people were raised in one system of thinking.
It can be very hard for them to experience God for themselves and to start to shift some of that thinking and looking at these things a little bit differently. Maybe there is grace for me too. It’s not just some kind of foreign concept out there, but I think accepting that we’re not going to be perfect, accepting our imperfections is just so huge part of this process.
Like striving for it, but then also understanding we’re gonna fail. It’s very strange, right? Right. It’s like a dance.
Stephanie: It’s like it’s, you do what’s in your power or what’s a response to God’s love and grace and he meets us where we are. He’s there first and we sort of take a step. I definitely feel like it would take pages and pages to kind of like really flesh out.
I think Cru velocity, OCD is a very challenging thing to have, especially when you are religious. You are a believer in work. It’s, yeah, it’s hard. Because there’s a book of rules, but I really think it takes the right disposition approach to scripture. When we read, are we reading out of fear or are we reading out of a willingness to be loved and understood and a response to the love that’s already there?
Carrie: I like the dance metaphor ’cause it’s very active, it’s very engaged. You can’t do it by yourself. I mean, I guess you can dance by yourself, but in this sense of having a relationship with God, I can’t do that by myself. God invites me into that process and into that relationship because he loves me and I’m gonna have some missteps in the dance and that’s okay.
Like God continue to lead me back to where I need to be. And so I think that that’s a beautiful, it just shifts your faith from, is this about rules? Just doing the quote right thing all the time, or is it essentially Jesus told the Pharisees like, you’re doing a lot of things, but like your heart’s not in the right place.
So it’s just, are we gonna look at, okay, where is our heart at and allowing God to continue to mold and shape that into who he wants us to be. Why else do you think that just from your clinical and like kind of professional glasses now, why do you think Scrupulosity is so challenging to treat?
Stephanie: I think probably because I think scrupulosity of cd, you are probably already very conscientious.
You probably have a very loud conscious and a sense of right and wrong and guilt and like, and you’ve got this constant condemner of OCD here and I think if anything, maybe there’s. Some hope in knowing that I’m probably doing the right thing more than someone who doesn’t have OCD and has a thing that’s really trying to, not that we should compare ourselves, but I think it’s totally challenging because there are people who maybe who have Cru philosophy OCD, that will fixate on past mistakes as evidence that they’re doing something wrong or that they shouldn’t do.
Because then with ICBT, we talk about what’s the evidence? Do we have any direct evidence for this? Someone might say, oh, well I’ve got this experience with it, or this past thing I did, which I guess partly we call real event ocd. Yeah. But if we have a OCDs, logical fallacies or the reasoning categories it uses to try to convince us of these.
Erroneous messages that does become challenging to navigate. Really say that, okay, this might have happened in the past, but I think is it your intention to be a terrible person? Do you even feel angry when you worry, oh, what if I harm this person? Are you even angry in the moment? Do you have an intention?
Because that matters too, just because you did something in the past. Or struggle with this or that doesn’t mean that you are actively intending to do these things versus an actual person that is doing bad things or is an actual, I guess, bad person isn’t concerned that they’re bad or isn’t concerned.
They don’t care. And so I think it’s important to realize that we’re not perfect. So again, it is a dance with the Holy Spirit. It’s a dance with God. We’re gonna mess up. It’s some perfectionism, I think, falls into that true velocity, OCD two.
Carrie: Absolutely, definitely. I see a lot of perfectionistic tendencies in the clients that I work with.
Is there anything else that you wanna share about like ICBT and how you’ve seen it be helpful? Would you say that’s primarily what you’re using or you use some ICBT, some ERP kind of depending on wanting or. I do more ICBT currently,
Stephanie: but I’ve done some ERP as well. I think that one of the most helpful things about ICBT others have found is that there is this space where we go from reality into our imagination and we kind of, there’s this bridge where we get triggered.
We walk past a doorknob and we think, what if it’s dirty? Or what if my hands are contaminated? And then we have this space where we can stay rooted in reality and say, with my five senses, do I see or smell dirt? My common sense says that I am clean. We have a choice to stay rooted in direct evidence. And the here and now.
Or we can choose to go over that bridge into the imagination and then start spinning a story which never gets resolved. OCD can say, well, you know, it might be dirty. You might not be able to see these germs. Or, what if you just thought you washed your hands earlier? What if you didn’t actually wash them enough?
What if there’s a spot on your hands that didn’t get washed? And then there’s like point of no return. Like you’re over the bridge at this point. And so I like ICBT ’cause it helps us to be mindful of when we’re going into Ooc D land. The bubble. Yeah. And how to stay rooted and grounded in the here and now.
And in reality,
Carrie: it really allows you to slow down. And I also like too that you talked about the shifting of themes and sometimes that can be so jarring work through one theme and then. For example, okay, I’ve kind of worked through this. I feel like I’m okay with it now, but then some new theme just seems to pop outta nowhere, and then they feel like they’re okay.
Now I’ve gotta expose myself to this. Make sure that I’m not avoiding, make sure that I’m not seeking reassurance, and it just can be very jarring. Versus with I ccbt, you’re really learning all of these skills that can help you across whatever theme that you’re gonna face or that’s gonna pop up for you.
You’re like, okay, let me go back to, like you said, kind of what’s in here and now let me look. How did I get carried over into this OCD land? What was the story or the reasoning behind it? I’m, I always like to tell people because they’re like, Carrie, I can only talk to you about this type of stuff. It makes zero sense to anybody else.
In OCD world, I understand your logic, like I understand how you got to this point. And so then we have to teach you to like retrain your brain to learn like all of the OCD, I don’t know, prosecutor arguments, how you can kind of be over here on the other side and go, that’s really not relevant to what you’re saying over here.
You’re bridging right there into something else. Yeah, that’s really good.
Stephanie: Yeah.
Carrie: I
Stephanie: think of OCD as, like you said, prosecutor like this, almost like a Pharisee saying, pointing its fingers, saying you didn’t do this, and just who could stand up under that sort? And Jesus condemned, he rebuked kind of the legalistic tendencies of you are putting people under the weight of burdens they can hardly carry.
I wonder if externalizing OCD kind of like that could also be helpful with scru velocity, OCD and that theme to be like, okay, what is the truth of. The gospel say to me versus this condemnation that OCD is, it’s like, no matter what way I spin it, I’m gonna be damned so to speak by OCD. It’s like it’s a lose lose and so better with ICBT not to get into that OCD bubble to begin with.
And ICBT teaches you how to do that, how to not get caught up in the story of OCD with the narrative.
Carrie: Yeah. It’s a complex therapy and really you have to kind of go through it layer by layer understanding. Okay. These are totally new concepts. Let me get my mind like kind of around the concepts. Let me maybe apply it to somebody else if I don’t feel like I can apply it fully to myself.
And then I feel like I can move forward and apply some of these things to myself and look at the reasoning AR arguments. But a lot of people who are just very logic based really enjoy it. They do. I found it the same. Yes, absolutely. I’ll put a link to your practice in the show notes and where people can find you.
If they’re in Virginia, then that’d be great. Thanks so much for sharing. Is there anything else that you wanted to share? There is hope for OCD is very
Stephanie: treatable with therapy, those two modalities. But also there’s medications that work to help that Part of the brain is in that obsessive loop. Sometimes a combination is helpful.
There definitely is hope
Carrie: if you have OCD. So if you’re in a really negative place right now and you get nothing else from this episode, that’s why we’re here on the podcast talking about these things and letting you know that there are other people that have gone through treatment. That’s what this whole like summer series is about is, hey, there were people that were in really rough places with their OCD and they’ve come to a much healthier level.
Let me ask you this, what does recovery for you.
Stephanie: I think recovery for me looks like I’m not as hung up on things as much anymore. I think that with recovery I have tendencies. I still have OCD. Mm-hmm. But it’s less sticky. The thoughts are less sticky. I am much more willing or able, I guess, to stay rooted in reality, to let go of a thought or a what if, or a maybe I’m, however, it, it can show up in images, urges, thoughts.
Whatever way OCD manifests in anyone. Like for me, it’s easier for me to kind of let go and be mindful of, okay, what’s in the here and now and what’s my common sense and my true self say about this? And it’s a lot easier to stay
Carrie: grounded. Well, thank you so much for sharing today. You’re welcome, Carrie.
Thanks for listening today. If you have any show suggestions, guest suggestions, or would love to share your story on the podcast, you can reach out to us at kiri bach.com/podcast.
Stephanie: 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 opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of myself or 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.
