Learning to trust in God’s ability to support and heal
In her new memoir, Scorpions, actor Tuppence Middleton offers a powerful “immersive experience” of severe obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).
She describes the violent thoughts which bombarded her mind; her fixation with numbers; her compulsive performance of complex rituals, and the sense that the safety of those close to her depended on her completing these.
A total of 1.2 per cent of the population (12 people per 1000) has been diagnosed with OCD, but the numbers suffering from less severe symptoms is much higher.
There is no absolute cure, but treatments available include various talking therapies and medication (SSRI anti-depressants).
Christians are affected by OCD as much as any other group in society.
I, too, am troubled by obsessive thoughts, and the compulsion (though much less powerful than Middleton’s) to perform rituals of checking that taps and appliances are “definitely off” and doors “definitely locked.”
But I have only recently realised that, in a person of faith, obsessive thoughts often come clad in religious garb.
In my case, such thoughts assure me that I am guilty of things there is no cause to be guilty about; that I’m wrong to believe something which previously seemed so right; that I am condemned by God; that I am a failure.
These thoughts try to convince me that they speak the absolute truth about me. They come with life-crushing power, black holes annihilating daylight.
How unlike the voice of God, which is gentle, affirming, life-giving, even when it challenges.
Such thoughts are hard to deal with.
I try logic, but OCD isn’t easily trumped by reason, even when I quote scripture and argue on the grounds of God’s forgiving love.
When I feel obsessive false guilt, I have a compulsion to confess.
I talk to others, but any reassurance is soon swamped by the negative thoughts’ urgent insistence that they, and they alone, are right.
Other people pray for me. I mutter ‘Help!’ to God, repeatedly.
And given time – be it hours, days or weeks – the cloud of obsessive thinking lifts, often suddenly.
I see the thoughts which have plagued me as foolishness - for doesn’t my heart, beneath the mental storm, continually seek God? – and my arms rise in a hallelujah of gratitude.
For people with OCD, whether severe or milder, it’s easy to regard the “scorpions” in your mind as the enemy.
In the most powerful piece I have read by a Christian with OCD, Sarah Clarkson writes of learning that this enemy, too, is to be loved.
Her mind, she comes to see, would be “both my treasure and my enemy for the rest of my life ….a tangle of glory and disaster, one that God would not discard, but cherish, forgive and heal.”
