“Dear Lord, please keep my family safe. Put an angel bubble around our home so that no evil can enter. If I die, please don’t let me go to hell. Amen.” This was the prayer I would pray every single night from the time I was 7 until I was about 13 years old. Why?
When I was 7 years old, one of my brother’s friends and I were in a car, waiting for my brother and my mom to drive us back to the house. In my innocence, I wanted to strike up a conversation. “Did you know angels are God’s helpers?” I asked. Without missing a beat, he responded: “Did you know that demons are satan’s?” I was confused. That was a word I hadn’t ever heard before. “What is a demon?” I questioned. “A demon is basically the evil version of an angel. My sister knows somebody who had one fly out of her closet and chase her with a stapler,” was his response. Suddenly, my brain had hooked onto the idea, and I was terrified. It was all I could think about the rest of that night. The friend had said it so casually, yet it still sticks with me to this day. That night I couldn’t sleep. I cried for several hours before my mom had to come upstairs and comfort me. Eventually, I did fall asleep, but I thought about demons every single day after. I refused to be alone, and when I was, I was terrified. I had a hard time sleeping when my sister (who I shared a room with) wasn’t there. I remember countless hours staying up, praying that same prayer over and over and over, and just hoping that I would never be chased with a stapler myself. I didn’t want to go to hell to be with the demons, either. I would pray the sinner’s prayer every night, just hoping that if I were killed in my sleep, I’d go to be with the Lord. Now, it sounds kind of stupid, but it truly is something that haunted and tormented me for years.
A few months ago, I told my counselor all of this. She asked if I had ever considered that maybe I had some OCD tendencies. I hadn’t thought about it before. I wasn’t obsessively clean or controlling (or so I thought.) She explained what OCD was. She told me it wasn’t just cleanliness, it’s about an obsessive thought, and the compulsions you do to “help with” the obsessive thought. For instance, I was worried I was going to go to hell, so I’d pray the sinner’s prayer over and over again. I thought I was just a bad kid. I thought that because I was afraid, I didn’t have enough faith, when in reality, something was actually wrong with my brain.
Even as I explore what denominations I specifically align with, I find myself still struggling with the elements of scrupulosity (religious OCD). I get stuck in patterns of wondering if, because a certain denomination does x, that makes me not a good believer, because I don’t. I have to constantly remind myself that it is through my salvation in Christ Jesus that I am a believer, not by legalism.
There are a couple of other OCD “stims” I have picked up on in the more recent years. I have to flip the switch on my alarm clock several times just to make sure it’s set properly. Even when I decide I need to go to bed and be done checking, there is still a part of me that wants to check it one more time. If I touch something, for example, a surface other people may have touched, I HAVE to wash my hands before eating. Either that, or I’ll take condensation droplets from a cup and just rub my hands together aggressively until the feeling goes away. If a moment is quiet, my brain used to instantly go into singing the ABCs, and if there is a bump in the road, I have to check and make sure I didn’t run over a cat. All of these things are tied to specific memories.
I am still trying to work on NOT doing the compulsions, so eventually the obsessions will go away. I am just not completely there yet.