One of the single biggest obstacles in learning how to manage scrupulosity is your personal understanding of what you are dealing with. I cannot begin to relate how many good people have told me that scrupulosity is “their cross, sent by Jesus.” Still others are convinced that they must be somehow possessed by the devil. Still others have different explanations, all of which are manifestly false. Scrupulosity is a disorder. It is rightly categorized as a disorder by medical doctors and psychologists, and it is recognized by the Church as an example of “diminished capacity.” It is a mental disorder that wreaks havoc on a person’s ability to make decisions about specific content that is important to him or her.
It is essential to understand this and to accept that OCD/scrupulosity is a disorder—because when you realize that what you are suffering from is primarily a mental disorder, you can then be motivated to seek and apply the medical treatment needed to manage your pain. Gritting your teeth and “white-knuckling it” through life because you believe that Jesus wants you to suffer in this manner is counterproductive. Looking for someone to expel the “demons” from you is also not helpful. Instead, correctly identify what you are suffering from, then take the necessary steps to engage in your healing process, such as embracing good, solid, well-thought-out, prescribed medical applications.
Accepting that OCD/scrupulosity is a mental disorder does not eliminate the truth that there is also a spiritual component to the suffering. Your suffering, which you struggle to express to people who are trying to help you, has assumed a religious vocabulary. It is masquerading as a spiritual issue rather than a mental health issue. This is the cruelty of the scrupulous condition; it wraps itself in spiritual concepts to enable what it truly desires: anxiety, depression, shame, and eventually isolation from people you love and things you care about.
Scrupulosity is particularly effective in using big words to generate the anxiety on which it thrives, and, unfortunately, religion can be perceived as a system that is filled with complicated and scary language. For example, normal human sexual feelings are quickly misidentified as lust. Questions that are essential for spiritual growth are miscategorized as blasphemy. Normal human conversation about life and relationships becomes calumny. And, of course, any deviation from the norm fuels worry and anxiety about validity and invalidity. A scrupulous person’s imagined need to engage in restitution for what the person is convinced he or she is responsible for can be ruinous.
When the scrupulous effectively examine all the sins they have convinced themselves they have committed, the path to omission becomes wide open. Sins of omission are never-ending, are easy to exaggerate, and can cause the scrupulous to hold themselves to impossible standards. The realm of sins of omission creates a virtual playground for the scrupulous condition.
Even when a scrupulous person can acknowledge and accept each of the points that I have outlined, the struggle is not over. Scrupulosity likes to play tricks, telling those who suffer, “Even if all of this is true for some people, you are the exception. Why would you want to risk condemnation if you are not sure?” This is a particularly compelling argument for a person who is already compromised by anxiety and fear.
However, everything the scrupulous condition generates is a lie. There may be a kernel of truth in what it proposes, but that kernel is effectively minimized by all the false components. For example: yes, if you engage in a compulsion or some kind of ritual action, you will feel better. That is the kernel of truth. What the scrupulous lie does not tell you is that the relief is not long-lasting, and you will not find any real peace. In fact, when you engage in a compulsion, you guarantee that your next obsessive action or thought will begin with the same intensity at which the previous one ended. In other words, scrupulosity is progressive. It never resets to zero. It just gets more and more intense, stealthily becoming stronger in small increments you may not even notice.
In the 1983 movie WarGames, starring Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy, there is a scene at the end of the movie that makes a relevant point for this discussion. In the scene, a massive and powerful computer, which is the central character of the movie, quickly generates many different strategies and scenarios, one right after the other, to solve a problem. Each answer it devises, although seemingly promising and somewhat convincing, leads nowhere but to chaos. The tension keeps growing, and soon it seems as if destruction is imminent, when the computer suddenly stops running simulations. “A strange game,” the computer says. “The only winning move is not to play.”
And so it is. When scrupulosity is at work, the only winning strategy is not to play its game. Not to engage the compulsions or obsessions. With as much certitude as possible, identify the disorder for what it is and refuse to engage it. Manage it, by all means, using the methods you’ve found to be effective for you, but do not engage it. And, most certainly, do not believe the lies that scrupulosity fabricates about you, your relationship with God, or your final destination.