How Praying Affected My OCD

When I first discovered I had OCD I didn’t know what to do or how to combat my obsessive thoughts. I come from a Christian background and was told to pray to God and He would help me fight off my obsessive thoughts. That sounded like a perfect anecdote to me so that’s what I decided I would do.

Every time I had an intrusive vulgar thought I would bow my head to pray. This seemed normal to me because, obviously, vulgar thoughts were not acceptable to think about as a Christian. However, I became obsessed with prayer. My prayers were never good enough and I had to say them over and over in a specific way to feel like I had forgiveness or acceptance from God. This turned into a nightmare and I spent many long days with my head bowed. People would look at me and wonder what I was doing because all I ever seemed to do was have my head bowed and be whispering to myself. Everyone seemed to notice and look at me so I felt even more insecure.

However, focusing on them to fight them only made things worse. It makes my intrusive thought seem 3,000 times bigger. After a while, I simply had to come to realize that it was not a sin to have these intrusive thoughts come into my head. God knows I have OCD and He knows that these thoughts are not from me. I am truly thankful for an all knowing and all powerful Savior. Of course, if I acted out these intrusive thoughts and truly thought about them freely than I would need to talk to God and ask for forgiveness. This helped me not become so obsessive over prayer when it came to my intrusive thoughts.

OCD is an interesting creature itself. It is one that people seem to know little about and that is why I write these articles. I want to shine a light on OCD so people that have it can relate to someone and people that don’t have it can become educated on what OCD is like.