The crazy christian

Hey friends! It’s for sure been a long time since I last posted. Today ( as you can tell from the title) I’m going to write about my experience of having OCD and also being a Christian!

So… As I said in my last blog post, I grew up in a Christian home. My parents are very keen Christians, and Christianity coloured every aspect of my life. As a little kid I loved my life and growing up in church! I couldn’t imagine anything different.

When I was about ten, I developed OCD. I remember feeling so anxious and scared as I went to my parents telling them the intrusive thoughts I was having. Because Christianity was such a big part of my life, OCD targeted that. I was having thoughts about the devil, I remember once being so worried that maybe my dad was the devil in disguise and how would we ever know. I was having sexual intrusive thoughts, which for a little 10 year old girl was so disturbing. And I was having all sorts of existential thoughts such as how do I know God is real… How do I know anything is real.

The real problem was that my parents didn’t know about any other type of OCD apart from contamination and ordering OCD, so they treated it as a genuine problem. They delved into the thoughts with me, trying to reassure me that dad really wasn’t the devil. They told me to pray that the sexual thoughts would go away, and they reasoned with me that Christianity was in fact the truth.

The thing with OCD is that it thrives on giving the thoughts meaning, so each time I talked to my parents, the problem was getting worse. I would be reassured and feel better for a week, then I would be back with another ‘what about this’ detail.

When I was 12 I went to get therapy on the NHS, but I wasn’t given a diagnosis, so it was assumed I had generalised anxiety disorder. I spent 4 years in that system getting help for a problem I didn’t have, and leaving my huge OCD problem untreated!

When I was 15 I was saved for myself and my faith became my own and not my parents. For about a year the OCD thoughts died down a bit and I had a year feeling like becoming a Christian had solved my problems! But then sure enough the thoughts came back and I was fixated upon had I sinned in all sorts of ways. The doubts also came back and I was back to, is what I’m basing my whole life upon really true? For a new Christian this was awful. For a Christian of any age it’s awful!

When I was only 17 I moved away from home to live and work at a Christian youth center for the year. I got on okay, until winter came and we didn’t have groups in and I was spending an awful lot of time on my own with my brain unoccupied, meaning I was spending so much time thinking on all the OCD thoughts. It got so bad that I was feeling suicidal by the spring so I had to move home to my parents. It was meant to be for a little break, but it became evident how serious the problem was so I never returned.

I was at such a low point in my life. I was constantly thinking about had I sinned, was Christianity true and all sorts of other religious thoughts! We tried to find help in the NHS, but they didn’t know what was wrong with me, so we turned to a friend in the church but she didn’t know what was wrong with me either. I was feeling so depressed and I couldn’t see any light at the end of the tunnel!

Then in the autumn of 2019 a miracle happened. One of my friends mentioned OCD in passing, and I was desperate to find out what my problem was, so I typed into Google OCD and Christianity. There I found out about the subtype of OCD called religious OCD and it finally all made sense! My eight years of suffering finally had a name. It was such a relief to have a name for what I was going through!

So we went back to the doctor’s and I got referred to a mental health specialist and I told her all about what was going on in my mind, but she had never heard of religious OCD! A MENTAL HEALTH SPECIALIST DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT MY MENTAL HEALTH PROBLEM! But she was really understanding and next we had a meeting with someone higher up who agreed I probably had OCD and I was referred to an OCD program on the NHS. The waiting list was so long that I’m still on it and haven’t had any help!

The problem was so urgent that my parents decided to go private. But this wasn’t easy either! Because religious OCD isn’t really heard of in the UK, my mum got in touch with a specialist whose book she read, in the US, but he didn’t want to help us either. We got in touch with so many different people, but none of them could help! Meanwhile I was on the internet, informing myself of OCD and I found a lady who put out videos almost every day and they were so so helpful.

So I told my mum about her and we got in touch and now I am doing therapy with her and let me tell you… SHE IS AN ANGEL! Honestly I don’t know where I would be without her. Recovery is possible and I’m about halfway to being recovered! Soon I will not have OCD anymore! But for now, I still do have it and it’s a nightmare. It attacks my whole relationship with God, so the thing most precious to me is the hardest thing in my life! But the difference now is I am no longer a victim of OCD and I’m on the path to recovery.

So there you go! Now you know a little bit more about me and my journey towards healing my mind!

I was born into a Christian family and from day one, my parents taught me the truths in the Bible. Looking back, I see this as a huge privilege- one that not a lot of people have. To me as a kid, the stories in the Bible were straight up fact- nothing to be argued with- that’s how my parents taught me. To some, this might be seen as brainwashing, but to me, I was brought up in a truth and love filled environment! One of my sweetest memories of my childhood is that every night right before bedtime, me and my siblings would crowd round Mum or sit on her lap as she would read to us stories from the Bible and bring them to life. It was such a safe and beautiful existence.

When I was nine, I started to develop OCD and this presented itself as questioning everything I believed about the Bible. This was the most troubling thing you can imagine! At this time neither me nor my parents realised this was OCD, so there was so much turmoil going on in our home and in my mind. I dealt with all my questions by coming to my parents as each new worry surfaced. This was incredibly exhausting for all of us! For me it felt like the foundations I had built my life upon were suddenly removed. If we had known it was OCD then I would have been able to manage it a bit easier and things would have made sense to my parents! Many nights I would have a panic attack at the thought of hell and seeing as I was confused as to what I believed, I felt I wasn’t a Christian so couldn’t be sure of heaven. Sometimes I opened up to my Mum, but most nights I just rode it out and was relieved when morning came. Things would have been so much easier if I had known that deep down I still believed the same things as when I was younger.

Things continued to stay the same and not get better, so when I was 12 I went to therapy. I was meant to be assessed as to what was wrong with me and why I was suddenly obsessing over things, but somehow that got missed out and it was assumed that I had GAD. Generalised Anxiety Disorder. For four years I had therapy for anxiety, but it never helped me at all and I thought I was a hopeless case, when in reality I was one of the many misdiagnosed cases.

When I was 13, we moved churches. My previous church had been really damaging to my mental health as we were taught over and over again that we must be ‘good’. All my formative childhood years I had grown up believing something bad would happen if I was ‘bad’. Essentially, growing up in an overly strict environment and developing religious OCD damaged me more than anyone could know. The church that we moved to was so much more chill and it was there that I decided I actually wanted to follow Jesus and that life without him sucks really bad! I’m still at the same church now and I’m learning how to follow Jesus and live my whole life for him. I still have so many false ideas that I had picked up during my 13 years at my old church, but I am about to start therapy for OCD and I’m confident things are going to get so much better with God’s help and by his grace! Grace is such a key word for me and every year that goes by, I’m coming to understand it more.

Hey lovelies! Good to have you here, reading my thoughts! I’ve wanted to start a simple blog for quite a few years, and now here it finally is!

I think this blog post fits well to be my first, because it’s about the most important thing in my life -being a Christian. I don’t know if you my friend are a believer in the Bible or not but here’s my belief.

I grew up in a home, with my parents teaching me and my siblings all about their own faith and trust in God and the Bible as God’s word. As a little child does, I trusted everything they taught me. I feel blessed to have had this childhood!

Throughout my teen years I have gone through much inner turmoil, deciding what I believe for myself. Being a deep thinker as I am, I have thought many times through everything!

Now, as a young adult, I have lots of similar beliefs, but a few different ones too. Lots of what I now believe is the same, but I interestingly believe it for different reasons now!

Pretty simply, I confidently believe all that the Bible teaches. I believe this because, if I take the Bible away, nothing makes any sense anymore!

I believe the Bible because it all holds together, despite the hatred it gets! Many people brush the Bible aside without genuinely checking it out.

On an emotional level, I can’t not believe in Jesus because I know him personally! Every time I hear the gospel of Christ, my heart warms up with swelling gratitude to my king.

If you’re a skeptic, or have never thought about it, please study the Bible for yourself because I have felt very skeptical about it too! There are lots of churches that hold courses checking out the amazing claims of Jesus too.

Anyway, to finish, I have in no way arrived, and I’m still on my journey… My journey home to heaven.