1.2. Scrupulosity

The reason it is important to recognize our multipartite composition is that diseases of one component can affect the others in unexpected and difficult to recognize ways. One of the hardest things for me to personally accept was that scrupulosity is, contrary to how it felt, not solely a disease of the spirit. It felt like utter nonsense the first time I heard it, but getting right down to it, scrupulosity is, at its very core, a mental illness, specifically a subtype of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), itself a subtype of anxiety disorder. This is not to say it does not have it’s origins in the spiritual domain or sin (yours may not, but mine certainly did), nor is it to say that the spiritual domain is not going to be pivotal in your recovery (it will). For now, just know that wherever yours came from, it lives in the realm of the mind and feelings in particular. You may not accept at first that this is possible. I sure didn’t. Scrupulosity feels so very (and purely) spiritual, that even considering other factors feels blasphemous and dangerous. Just know that the time you spend unwilling to consider this possibility is wasted time. I spent six years in agony before I even heard about scrupulosity, and wasted several additional months afterward because I felt so very deep down that something that felt so spiritual couldn’t be anything but.

Notice how many times the word feel, feeling, feels came up in the last couple sentences. This is what OCD does. It hijacks the pathways in your brain which respond and give focus to percieved dangers in the environment. This is experienced as an all consuming fear which demands immediate attention to the exclusion of all other factors. When you’re ten yards from a lion staring you in the face with nothing between you, this pathway and intense focus make sense, but an important hallmark is that when responding to real threats, this intense state is very temporary and (one way or another) will end quickly. When hijacked however, this unignorable, fight-or-flight, imminent danger response is kept activated and focused on whatever matters most to the victim. Because the percieved threat is not real or addressable, it drives the victim to seek comfort in behaviors which seem to offer relief. For me, it was research. I researched the Unpardonable Sin (what I felt so sure was the real problem) for 12 hour uninterrupted stretches overnight, seven days a week. Because the cause is pathological however, the cause remains unaddressed, and any relief the behaviors bring will be temporary at best.