Exposure as Spiritual Practice: Or Breaking Free from Religious Scrupulosity OCD

A journey with divine love and dancing with fear

(TW: religious trauma, intrusive thoughts, compulsions)

I don’t want this.

When I was around six or seven, I began experiencing religious intrusive thoughts. I feared so many things, and they piled on top of each other, year by year.

First: it was, Am I really saved from hell? Let me pray the sinner’s prayer one more time. Rinse and repeat.

Then it was, Was that really my original work on my homework? Let me double, triple, quadruple, quintuple check, etc. God hates liars and cheaters.

Then it was, Why can’t I get the phrase “d@mn stupid God” out of my mind—after I accidentally overheard it on TV? Let me pray and confess and cry again to save me from going to a burning hell forever for blasphemy.

Then it was, What if I accidentally swear into the mic while I’m leading worship?

And the list just kept getting longer and longer.

Though I didn’t yet know this word, religious scrupulosity was the air I breathed. Everything was under constant assessment. Is this interest/hobby/normal human emotion/experience holy or not? Check and recheck.

Therapy wasn’t an option back then. And the structures that surrounded me only encouraged my obsessive scrupulosity.¹ Don’t even think about XYZ. Don’t be too close to a line. You’ll tumble out of grace.

As if that were possible. (And Bible nerd alert: frankly, the above is not what the Bible teaches. There is one line: love God, love neighbor. That’s it. Anything else is from humans—control tactics adored by all forms of fascism, including variants masquerading as some kind of word from God that rule by preying on our fears. God is Love. Full stop. That is my boundary.)

And yet somehow, a thread of divine² love held me—held up my universe, connected me to a way forward. I learned about the importance of exposure³ to the things I feared religiously, and I bought this coloring workbook. I began the journey of healing.

I followed the voice of Love into sitting in the discomfort of the fear.

I laid every intrusive religious thought—every so-called anathema, every fearful subject—before Jesus, put them through the sieve of Love, and found…

• my fear gone,

• the ability to tolerate religious intrusive thoughts,

• some healthy but forbidden-by-fundamentalism special interests,

• and the comforting gaze of unconditional positive regard from the divine.

And all that was strained out? Only the unjust structures within religion that used God’s name to control and abuse, using fear. These are the only anathema I know.

In other words, you might say that “perfect love cast out fear.” For no question, no interest, no thing, no intrusive thought in all the cosmos can separate us from the Love that holds it up.

We can wonder at it all…with Love and without fear.

Finding joy in trying a once-forbidden makeup look (black lipstick), filter (rainbow/queer), and symbol (the snake). When I took this, I was inspired by the imagery in the chorus of Fia’s “Honeycomb Hexagon.”

In Wonder,

Kandi Zeller (she/her)

KandiZeller.com

P.S. If you have a religious trauma background and you are comfortable sharing, what liberation have you found by dancing with or confronting religious fears in a safe environment?

1. D.L. Mayfield has written so much important stuff about religious scrupulosity OCD: here and here are just two great examples. Another great resource is Aly Prades’s Susbtack, A Glitch in the Good Enough.

2. My understanding of how God expresses Godself is expansive. Basically, I conceive of spirituality as our experience with divine love and connection. But even that feels a little religious-y. Put another way, I believe spirituality is the place where we as individuals and communities connect with the “force of love that holds up the universe” (in words sometimes attributed to Julian of Norwich), whether we conceive of that love as divine or as the love shared between fellow humans/other creatures or some combination of both loves. It is the place within our bodies and our communities where we find love and connection with all who have come before and who will come after.

3. Here’s one resource to learn more about exposure therapy.