220. Getting Unstuck from Spiritual Mental Rituals

 Repetitive praying, rebuking thoughts, quoting scripture or a short phrase, or intentionally thinking a positive thought to neutralize a negative thought. What do all of these things have in common? They are all mental rituals in OCD. Today on the Scrupulosity series, we’re gonna be talking about five steps to get unstuck from spiritual mental rituals.

Welcome OCD Warriors to the Christian Faith and OCD podcast where we are all about reducing shame and stigma of struggling with OCD as a Christian sharing hopeful stories. And replacing uncertainty with faith as you develop practical tools for greater peace. I’m Carrie Bock, Christ follower, wife, mom, and licensed professional counselor in Tennessee.

I pray you are blessed by today’s episode. Number one is be aware of when you are doing it. If you’re gonna change any type of behavior, you have to become aware of how and when it is happening. You wanna know what the triggers are to this mental compulsive ritual. You probably already know that, but sometimes when you’ve been doing something for so long, you don’t even realize that you’re doing it.

It’s just almost happening kind of in the back corner of your head. I’ve met a lot of people with OCD who tell me there’s kind of like this murmur almost in the background going on in their mind. You may be responding at times and you’re not even fully aware of how much time you’re taking to respond to these types of things.

Ultimately, neurons that fire together, wire together, so the more time you engage in this obsession compulsion loop. The stronger it gets and the faster that goes. One thing you can do here is to practice mindfulness. If you’re not familiar with mindfulness, mindfulness is a component of acceptance and commitment therapy.

And what it involves is focusing intentionally on the present moment with a sense of awareness, acceptance, curiosity over judgment. And by doing so, you’re helping yourself be able to slow down, be aware, and take stock of what’s actually going on right now. Many people in today’s culture are moving at a hundred miles per hour.

Our brains are taking in all kinds of information and we’re just moving through life, not really as present as we could be, and mindfulness helps us get back to this sense of being present. I believe this is a very important component for us spiritually as Christians. Because we need to be able to sit in God’s presence and hear what he has to say to us.

And if we don’t slow down enough to even do that and learn to quiet our minds, learn to just let all of the dust settle, then it’s gonna be really hard for us to be able to connect even in our devotional moments that we have with him. Number two, we wanna create a distance, create some separation between you and your thoughts.

You need to understand that you are not the sum of your thoughts. You don’t act on all of your thoughts. We have thoughts all the time that we don’t pay any attention to, and we’re like, oh, that was kind of weird. Or. Oh no, I really shouldn’t do that. Or, Ooh, I wanna say that, but that would really be a bad idea.

Right now the filter comes in, right? We don’t need to super align ourselves with our thoughts and say, oh, well, because I had this thought, then that means something about me. Or create some type of additional meaning that doesn’t need to be there to create this distance. You can do a couple different things.

One, you can look at it from more of a metacognitive approach of, I am having an obsession right now. Or I always say, even if you can’t stop the compulsion, you could say in a mindful sense, I am engaging in a compulsion right now. This lets you and your brain know. Hey, I know what’s going on right now.

Even if I’m not in a place to combat it or stop it, I know that I am on this cycle of obsession and compulsion. That awareness piece, as we talked about is important. Another exercise you can utilize to create some distance between you and your thoughts is called thought diffusion. This is something I learned from dialectical behavioral therapy.

We borrow from a variety of different things on the podcast because I think different therapeutic approaches have little snippets and pieces that can be helpful for OCD, and these are actually considered adjunct therapies. If you go onto io CDFs website, that’s how they would define like acceptance and commitment or.

Dialectical behavioral therapy. I believe they’re under the adjunct approaches, not entirely sure could be under secondary. In order to practice thought diffusion, you’re gonna do something like, imagine your thought is on a leaf, going down a stream, or imagine your thought is on a cloud in the sky.

Imagine your thought is on a car and you’re watching the cars pass by on the highway. And what this does is it allows you to really examine your thought and recognize that you don’t have to immediately get roped into it. Ruminate on it, figure it out, can be really great strategy for rumination to practice this.

It does take practice. It takes time to learn. So you can’t just do it once and think that you’re good to go, but when you do this and you kind of imagine these thoughts moving by, it lets you know, okay, I’m creating some separation between myself and the thought. I’m also noticing I don’t have to act on the thought right now, so that can keep you from compulsing.

I don’t have to immediately do anything about this right now, even though OCD is screaming, you really need to do something about this, and you need to do it right now because OCD is super urgent like that. But when you practice these exercises, you go, okay, I’m having this thought. I don’t have to continue to hold onto it.

I can train my brain. To be able to let the thought come and let the thought go out. Like I said, that takes some intentional practice. It’s not an easy one and done type of scenario. Number three, understand what is contributing to this fear. We know that with OCD, it convinces you that some things are true about yourself that are not true about yourself.

An inference-based cognitive behavioral therapy call this the feared possible self. It’s like if I don’t engage in these compulsions, if I don’t entertain these obsessions in these specific ways, could mean a variety of things. Could mean I’m negligent, could mean I don’t care about my spiritual life, this sense of carelessness.

It could mean that I’m going to be some kind of spiritually unclean, dirty if I don’t immediately rebuke this thought. So figuring out what that is, what the feared consequence is, what the feared possible self is, can be really helpful and beneficial because the feared possible self is a lie. People that are worried about being spiritually negligent are engaged in their spiritual life.

They’re engaged in spiritual practice. Even sometimes when it’s hard or even if you’re maybe avoiding certain spiritual practices, you still care about it. It’s still a value. It’s still on your mind as something you desire to engage in. So understanding that feared possible self is a false sense of self.

It’s not actually who you are. And then looking at what is the story that you’ve told yourself regarding what you have to do with these thoughts? Oftentimes, Christians are told by spiritual leaders, Hey, you’ve gotta take that thought captive and make it obedient to Christ. So anything that comes in their mind, they feel like they’ve gotta immediately pounce on it.

And deal with it. Like, oh, if it’s any kind of negative thought, of course we know that this is not helpful for OCD and actually just reinforces the whole obsessive compulsive cycle. So we’re trying to get out of that by recognizing that taking these thoughts captive means I need to let them alone so that they don’t continue to grow, multiply.

And become an even bigger issue than they are right now. If you believe the thoughts are some type of spiritual attack, it may be really hard for you to let them alone and not feel like you have to rebuke them. Really examining maybe some of the teachings that you’ve heard from spiritual leaders or the council that has been given to you can be really helpful in these types of scenarios.

What have you been told about your thought process and how to handle specifically intrusive thoughts? Maybe the people that you were going to, they may not have known this was OCD, or you may not have known it was OCD, so they weren’t able to provide you a really balanced, helpful Christian clinical standpoint of that.

Hello, that’s why we’re here. Welcome to the podcast. That’s what we’re hoping to do, provide that really great balance for you. Number four, and I think this is crucial if you’re following an ICBT path, is really understanding the inferential confusion, the obsessional reasoning process. If you read resolving OCD one and two, actually it’s covered in volume two.

It’s the OCD trifecta. Essentially where if you understand how you reasoned your way into OCD in this obsessional reasoning process and that you have an everyday reasoning process, it really helps you know how you can get out of that obsessional reasoning process and back into the everyday reasoning process.

In the obsessional reasoning process, I’m going to try to simplify it for you. It’s a little bit complicated and I love that there’s a bit of a depth to it because the more that you learn about it and read about it, the more that you can grow an understanding of it and start to see it in real time is essentially where you’re distrusting whatever the sense data is of the moment.

When we say sense data, we mean things like common sense. Your five senses, your sense of self, who you are. So let’s say I’m distrusting who I actually am. Then what happens? Well, step two of the process is this unchecked and boundless imagination. So I’ve closed the door to what’s actually happening right now.

And in doing so, it’s opened up this alternate door where the imagination runs wild, dumps a bunch of what ifs on there. Scary stuff that I feel like I’ve got to address creates this internal crisis. And then once you believe something or you believe like, okay, this is possible, this really could happen to me.

Then you start to justify it with facts and reasoning and logical arguments. Well, yeah, this could happen. And the reason I know that is because I read a news article on it, or I know somebody that that happened to, or I read this scripture and it seems to support this belief that I believe about God being harsh and not really caring about me, or I’m gonna use this scripture from the Old Testament to support the fact that I believe that God is.

Harsh and judging me right now, even though I’m saved. And even though when God looks at me, he sees the blood of Jesus, I’m gonna take something out of context and utilize it in that way. And you see this all the time in terms of people making arguments for a variety of different things in the world.

And you can find some people that. Very convinced of some things that aren’t true, right? Or they’ve only seen one side of the story. Maybe it’s a complex issue and there are two sides, but they’re really only concerned with their side because that’s all the facts that they’ve gathered. That’s all the evidence that they’ve gathered, all of the arguments, and so they really only know like their side of the story.

And I think OCD. Is very similar in this way, is very selective about what it actually pays attention to. The reason we know this is because if you meet someone with, let’s say, contamination OCD, somebody may be really, really concerned about getting the flu, but they may be, let’s say, less concerned about or not concerned at all about getting the Norovirus.

Someone else with OCD, they are super concerned about any kind of stomach bug out there. They are not concerned necessarily about the flu as long. It doesn’t make them throw up. They’re like, whatever. I’m not really concerned about catching those specific germs. Sometimes people can be super focused on touching objects surfaces and believing that they’re going to be contaminated that way, but they’re not bothered about what’s in the air.

And people would look at that and say, that doesn’t make any sense. ’cause certainly many of our illnesses are airborne. However, that’s just how OCD works. Because if you understand the reasoning process is starting in the imagination and then we use the facts and the logic to back it up, then it makes sense that way.

But if you don’t understand that obsessional reasoning process. Then you just say, yeah, I know this is really weird, but this is what I think and and how I feel. Instead of going, yeah, this is how I got to this point. OC also has this way of starting with a particular belief and then neglecting all of the other things that may be true.

One thing that we learn in ICBT is this concept of affirming the consequence. What this looks like is making a statement like, well, God heals people that he loves, which is true. And then the next part of the equation would be. God hasn’t healed me, therefore he doesn’t love me. It’s like this way of reasoning backwards instead of looking at the situation saying, okay, there are many different reasons why God hasn’t healed you, but you’re focused solely on.

He hasn’t healed me because he doesn’t love me, instead of there may be other things that he’s trying to cultivate in my life and is gonna use this suffering in order to do that. Another example might be serial killers have poor relationships with their mothers. I don’t know if that broad generality is true, but let’s just pretend it’s true and then to say, I don’t have a good relationship with my mother, therefore, I may turn into a serial killer.

OCD can be very sneaky like that and make all kinds of arguments. Number five, if you’re gonna get unstuck from spiritual, mental rituals, may really need to bring in some reinforcements, get some help, whether that’s finding an ICBT therapist online. There’s a great. Resource list where you can do that, or I also have a course called Empowered Mind, Christian ICBT for OCD, and especially for individuals dealing with scrupulosity who have mental rituals or ruminations.

I’ve had many individuals go through this course who have found incredible hope and help for dealing with the mental rituals, the compulsions. They’ve been able to learn the ICBT process through a Christian lens, which helped them feel safe and comfortable having the faith integration piece. And if that’s something you might be interested in, you can just go check it out at kerry b.com/training.

We would love to see you take advantage of that self-help course. It is way cheaper than 12 sessions of therapy. Historically, in the past, there have been 12 modules of ICBT. The way that they’re being taught now is differently than when they were originally proposed in a treatment manual. So I have them broken down and all the concepts in there without specifically them being based on particular modules.

I’ve tried to make them easy to understand, breaking down some of these hard concepts and giving you a lot of different examples. We also are in the process of creating a custom workbook to go along with that course for the students that are in the live training right now. So I’m very excited to release that workbook as part of the course coming at the end of May.

So we are just around the corner with that. If you buy it now, you will have six months access to it. So when everything gets dropped in there in May, you’ll be able to see the most revised version of the material. Thank you so much for listening today, and as always, you can reach out @carriebock.com anytime.

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.