When most people picture someone struggling with OCD, they picture a very particular kind of suffering. Counting steps. Checking locks. Washing hands until they crack. For some people, this is their reality, and they bear a tremendous cross.
While most of us will never be formally diagnosed with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, that does not mean we are free of obsessions and compulsions of our own.
An obsession is simply a painful fear, thought, or feeling that arises, sometimes out of nowhere, and refuses to leave us alone. A compulsion is whatever we reach for to make it go away, usually something outdated that once worked, or never really worked at all, but feels like the only thing standing between us and disaster.
Maybe you replay a conversation with a friend, convinced you said something that hurt them, and send a long apology only to find they had not thought twice about it. That quiet habit of checking in just to be sure everything is okay can be a small, everyday version of the same pattern. Or maybe you feel a little off one day and find yourself falling down a WebMD rabbit hole, searching symptom after symptom until you have half-diagnosed yourself with something serious.
In our fallen human state, these patterns can affect us in a variety of ways, as we will soon see. Scrupulosity is what happens when one of them attaches itself to the spiritual life, and it is a struggle that touches far more Catholics than we tend to admit.
What Scrupulosity Looks Like
For someone who struggles with scrupulosity, the obsession might be a fear that a confession was incomplete, that a stray thought was a mortal sin, or that God is somehow keeping score in a way that can never quite be settled. The compulsion is whatever the person does to try to quiet that fear: repeating a confession, re-examining a memory for the tenth time, seeking reassurance from a priest or spouse or friend, praying a certain way until it “feels right.”
None of this is a lack of faith. In fact, it is usually the opposite. It is often the most sincere, most earnest souls who get caught here, because they take God and sin seriously.
This is not a coincidence. Obsessions and compulsions tend to attach itself to whatever a person values most: faith, health, a marriage, the safety of a child. It does not target what is shallow in us. It targets what is sacred.
But the compulsion never actually delivers the peace it promises, a peace that, as we will see, only God was ever going to be able to give. It offers relief for a moment, and then the obsession returns, often louder than before, asking to be neutralized all over again.
I know this territory from the inside. I remember during my time formally discerning the priesthood in a Pre-Theologate program, going through stretches of days, weeks, even months tormented by uncertainty over whether I was hearing God’s call correctly, or about to make one wrong decision that would ruin everything. No amount of prayer or reassurance from my spiritual director could produce the certainty I was demanding of myself and of God.
Anxiety Grows in the Petri Dish of Uncertainty
Here is a truth about anxiety in general, and it is especially true for obsessions and compulsions: anxiety grows in the petri dish of uncertainty. The mind convinced by anxiety believes that if it could just get enough information, examine one more angle, or receive one more reassurance, it could finally arrive at certainty, and certainty would mean safety.
But no examination is thorough enough to produce the certainty anxiety is demanding. That is not a flaw in the person seeking it. Certainty of that kind was never available to begin with, not about sin, not about God’s judgment, not about most of what we spend our days worrying over. The compulsion is a bid for a kind of control that was never on offer.
Why Exposure and Response Prevention Is a Beginning, Not an End
In the secular world, the gold standard treatment for OCD is Exposure and Response Prevention, or ERP: staying present to the obsessive fear or feeling without performing the compulsion that would normally neutralize it. Over time, the nervous system learns the feared catastrophe does not arrive, and the grip of the obsession loosens.
This is genuinely good, evidence-based work, and it matters. But for a Catholic walking through scrupulosity, merely being exposed to the thing we fear and preventing the compulsive response is the beginning of the path, not the end of it. The real question is what a person finds waiting in that space, and who receives them there.
Mercy Is the Final Answer
This is where Dr. Greg’s reflection in this final episode of the series lands somewhere different than sheer willpower. Healing does not come from finally being disciplined enough, or proving you can outlast the anxiety on your own strength. It comes from being received, in that exact place of fear, with mercy and love.
Underneath every shape anxiety takes, there is the same great fear: disconnection, rejection, being alone. The struggle with anxiety, at any level, is a cry for connection, safety, and belonging. That is not something we come to know by gathering more information, more answers, more assurance. It comes from the felt experience of being held, received, welcomed, and loved.
The obsession says: you are not safe until you have earned certainty. The antidote says something else entirely. Safety was never something to be earned. It was already offered, freely, by a God who never leaves you alone with it in the first place.
That was ultimately what changed things for me during my time in the Pre-Theologate. Peace did not come from finally resolving my uncertainty about God’s call. It came when I was able to trust that God’s mercy was bigger than my need for a guarantee. And, ironically, that experience of being loved unconditionally put me in a far better position to discern, from a deeper, freer, more secure place, one no longer driven by grasping and control.
Trustful surrender in God’s Mercy, not control, is the ground healing has always needed to stand on. It is not naive. It does not pretend uncertainty away. It is the trust of someone who has stopped trying to hold themselves together and instead let themselves be held.
If this describes something you or someone you love has been carrying, know that this struggle has a name, it is treatable, and you do not have to sort it out alone. Learn more at CatholicPsych or listen to the full scrupulosity series on the Being Human podcast (episodes 290-293).