Episode 105 - Scrupulosity

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[Music] one theme that we really want to explore more deeply on the literature podcast is the intersection of mental health and spirituality specifically the kinds of emotional impacts that an upbringing and a fundamentalist religious tradition can have on human psychology it's something that i know i've struggled with a great deal learning to regulate my own emotions and cope with gosh old theological beliefs that my brain no longer accepts but my soul if i have one still seems to adhere to i mean we get emails all the time from people who say they no longer believe the bible literally and they're afraid that they're going to hell because of that this is a a problem common to most of our audience and so we asked hillary mcbride host of the liturgist podcast and practicing therapist and phd candidate to have a conversation with our dear friend audrey assad about mental health and faith if you don't know audrey she's an award-winning singer-songwriter and after a five-year hiatus she's just released a new album called evergreen which reflects on how her faith has evolved it's a really beautiful conversation and i think you'll find something you identify with and i think you'll learn how scrupulosity intersects with our religious identities and our life experiences and most of all what the hell scrupulosity is in the first place i'm science mike welcome to the liturgist podcast [Music] i hadn't heard the term scrupulosity until i listened to a podcast with audrey assad and she described having dealt with it and all of a sudden i had a term that described this phenomenon that's been happening to me for the majority of my life i don't have these obsessive you know rituals or anything but whenever i see you know pass a piece of trash that i take notice of that's on the ground or even on the floor of a bathroom where it's disgusting to touch something like that or if i am in a store and i notice that there's an item out of place like someone's put the macaroni with the socks at walmart and i see it i feel this moral spiritual obligation to right that wrong and i'm not a very organized person i don't have ocd in my home i don't make sure that things are meticulously organized but when i see these types of things it's a spiritual dilemma for me it's not an organizational one i look at it and i think god has brought this to my attention because i need to fix it and if i don't fix it then i'm wrong in his eyes or he's angry with me or he's judging me and there have been times when i have walked past paper towel on a gas station floor and i've gone out to my car and i've been so obsessively thinking about how i've wronged god by not putting that in the garbage that i have gone back in and done it and just can't get those obsessive thoughts about pleasing god out of my head [Music] audrey we're so excited to have you on the podcast and i'm wondering if you can start by telling us a little bit about your story why faith and mental health is something that you resonate with well it's something that has become clearer over time to me as i've done my own journeying through different you know phases of my life that i have actually been struggling for a long time with things that i didn't know were mental health issues until i started going to therapy for other reasons um namely i live with and manage several forms of ocd and my particular experience of ocd has been the interior types and so one of them would be called religious ocd or scrupulosity related to existential ocd which is another one that i that i live with and so i sort of just believed those things were normal ways of thinking about religion and about god because i honestly had no idea i didn't ever vocalize the types of internal shenanigans i was going through i just kind of assumed that everyone around me was having that same experience and quite frankly when you're raised in a fundamentalist environment as i was you're kind of rewarded for a hyperscrupulous conference so you know i think the signs were there but honestly i think people probably saw it as a positive so i never really understood that it was an actual condition until much later in life when i realized that not everyone says the sinner's prayer 300 times the night before bed you know so it's been a slow awakening as i've kind of journeyed through other other forms of getting healthy and you know religion has certainly been wrapped up in that story yeah for listeners who aren't familiar with scrupulosity religious ocd or what we might actually call clinically like pure ocd can you tell people a little bit about what that means and maybe what it's like yeah yeah so an example of something that would have happened as a child for me more often than it does now because i've learned different ways of managing and intercepting these things would be that what i said earlier i had a very big fear that i had not said the sinner's prayer correctly or meant it purely enough and so i would say it over and over it's almost like it's akin to the hand washing compulsion but it's something that you do inside your mind to sort of try to do it correctly and perfectly enough that it's been done but i could never feel satisfaction of having done it well enough and so it i've seen now as i look back that those things there were triggers to that getting worse you know i didn't do that every night my whole life but there would be things in my home or interior world that fell out of control and i would get triggered into a loop of an obsession like that a fixation and then more recently in life even several years ago before i really discovered that i had these conditions i would start obsessing over questions like is god noble do i really love my children is love real and instead of just thinking about it for five minutes i would lose hours and hours of sleep trying to think about it long enough to get to some kind of resolution for you know months on end i mean so i just get i've got a tendency to get very fixated on these questions that are in a lot of ways unanswerable or things that i can't really verify with any kind of data so it's it's a hamster wheel for sure yeah i think that for a lot of people who are familiar with ocd they're they're only familiar with it in such a way that it's been portrayed by the media or that is most obvious to other people right like the chapped hands from hand washing or you know the thing that people make a comment about kind of off the cuff things like oh i've i'm so ocd right you know i checked the i checked the stove twice before i left the house today so conflating you know normal checking behaviors with ocd and and with the things that are most overt and obvious but as i'm hearing you say it's really hard to know that you have something that you're struggling with something that is creating a challenge in your life when there's no marker on the outside of the interior struggle right interestingly you know i had markers develop on the outside later that i still didn't associate with it i had no idea that the fact that i and i still i still have this behavior that i go in and out of plucking out my leg hair you know i it's called i think trichological trichotillomania yeah and that's something that i notice myself having a compulsion to do when i'm feeling anxious but at the time that that started happening i was probably 12 or 13 years old and i did not honestly have any i had no education about this this type of thing and so i had no idea what real ocd was and i had no idea that these behaviors could be related that my fear of hell could be related to plucking out the hair on my legs but now i see those connections of course and like i said i mean being raised in a fundamentalist environment my particular type of ocd came with some fears that were enforced and kind of encouraged actually and so it was really difficult to tell it apart from just everyday fear of eternal conscious torment you know right yeah and i think i think that for a lot of people their their mental health issues or they perceive them to sit outside of their faith or spiritual or religious experience right there's a there's an experience of depression and i go to the church to seek support and maybe that's where the fracture or the pain comes from is i don't get the support that i need but it sounds like you're you're drawing the conclusion between the context within which you were raised and then the actual development of some of these specific compulsions or obsessions yeah i think that they really have at least fed into each other because when i look at my theology that i lived with and under and by for most of my childhood and young adult life i see how influenced my ideas were by my mental patterns and loops and so there were these conclusions i drew about the nature of god from the way that my psyche was functioning and what it what's so beautiful now is that as i look back i can see how that happened and then i am able to ask myself the questions now you know in real time how is my mental health affecting the beliefs that i have because i absolutely firmly believe that for maybe all of us in some way like the health of our psyche and our emotional life affects what we believe about the world and ourselves and obviously god but that's not really a perspective that you get in a fundamentalist environment because you're sort of taught like these things are absolutely true they are above our reason and above our health and sanity but the people who are perpetuating those ideas are absolutely influenced by their own you know trauma or mental health and so it's become uh i hope a healthy fixation of mine to um explore that connection between health and of the mind and emotions and the body and then faith because i do think they impact each other drastically dramatically yeah well i think you're kind of getting at something really important which is like underneath this all do we believe that our interpretations of the world and maybe even scripture or spiritual experiences are objective and how do our lived experiences actually shape perception or the other way around it's it's complex especially like you're saying in communities where you're told this is the way you're supposed to think as was dictated by somebody else's perception yeah i really believed that there was a such thing as not only absolute truth but truth that was absolutely knowable and one really i think poignant example for me of how this played out is that when i look at my idea of who god was when i first started quote unquote deconstructing which i don't even know how to pinpoint a start date for that but maybe seven or eight years ago when my question started to take over my mental space more than they really had i i began examining and scrutinizing the ideas of god that i had lived with and lived by and so one thing i see is that my ocd which was such a task master and so rigorous and so demanding of me god mirrored that disorder because my idea of god was that god depended on and demanded my absolute not just overall obedience and adherence but fine point adherence and obedience and so every little thing that i felt i had done that was divergent from whatever i was taught was appropriate or right or or every little thought or question i had that felt divergent from that suddenly god really mirrored the thing that was keeping me awake at night and so i began to see that our lenses at least in my experience my lens my you know the holistic lens that i have my body my history my context in the world my mental health all of these things impact how i interpret everything it scared me at first it sent me into like a four-year panic because i was like if i can't know these things absolutely what is there to life but i've moved thankfully past and beyond that but it was the crisis part of the faith crisis came for me when i started to realize that [Music] i remember when i was in my most religious of days i would spend countless hours lying on the floor prostrate just on my stomach with my face and the carpet and i would just pray to god over and over and over again for hours and hours about relieving me of afflictions and desires and all these you know just powerful behaviors that i had and i i knew i had but i just really hated so i would go through these kind of extreme phases where uh you know sometimes i would just read the bible for just like hours and hours and psalms and proverbs i used to have a wall that i covered in poster board and i would take sharpies and i would draw all over the wall just like thousands of bible verses uh it was i mean it kind of looked like the writings of an insane hermit at one point i think because there was just so much uh like scripture and writings and books and theo theological quotes and everything and i just constantly and continually did this in the name of piety and ways to kind of give myself this psychological chamber where i was just forced to continually brief face these ideas i had for what i thought was myself betterment [Music] a few years ago i was in the midst of a really bad bout with ocd that involved a lot of suicidal ideation um i had just been diagnosed a few months prior so i was under medical care and we were working on it but the disease had worked in my mind along with narratives from growing up in a very fundamentalist restrictive cult-like environment that made me think that if i was not perfect then i was judas and if i was judas it meant i deserved to die because i had betrayed all my friends and worst of all i had betrayed christ and this was so real to me that it didn't matter who spoke in to that place to me it was just this break from reality that i knew was real i went to the hospital and had a good stay there and began another wave of recovery and it was actually after i got back from the hospital was on medication and all that stuff um [Music] i started to feel again like i deserved to die i heard this voice that said i've already died for you and all your friends so you don't even need to worry about that and that's the one time that i really feel like i've heard god [Music] when things are at their most intense can you paint us a picture of what life felt like on the inside like a metaphor and image i had recurring dreams as a child that all kind of had this similar theme and i could name many of them but i'll just briefly describe two of them that kind of i think paint what it felt like i had a dream when i was young probably seven or eight that i had a few times i was walking around at my own wedding many years later and i was being followed by a woman dressed all in red and she had an iron hand and she was just whacking me in the shoulder with it but no one else could see her so that's one example i think of a picture of how it felt and then i had another dream as a child of being in a swimming pool being pursued by uh of all things a squid but no one else could see the squid and everyone else is having fun and i could not get in the pool in real life for like years after this dream because it freaked me out so much that i was the only one seeing the animal and so i would say it felt very much it was a very isolating experience and i i felt as if i had one way that the world worked in the way that i worked and everyone else had another way and i was the only one you know sort of stuck in the internal situation i was in because i really truly didn't even have language for it but i know that my subconscious in those dreams i look back i think wow i really knew what to say it just i didn't have any words but those i had i had many many dreams of that type yeah it sounds so so lonely and so on the outside and i imagine at times you felt like you were kind of losing it yeah definitely um it's such a scary feeling oh yeah especially as a child who really i just wanted to please and do the right thing and i never felt like i could so it was an extremely frustrating situation as well you know i'm thinking like i'm working so hard and i'm trying so hard and i can't seem to be right enough and i'm really grateful to have come to a place where i see those things in myself and i actually compassionately allow them to exist because i do think one of the things that's counterproductive to managing mental health conditions like this is the sort of shame impulse uh tish to squash it instead of realizing that that really only grows you know um the isolation and the uh the feeling of being alone you know and so i've not been totally cured of these things although i will say they've calmed down quite a lot over time but i see them and i sort of just find myself practicing saying you are allowed to be here i am not going to allow you to totally drive my bus but you get a seat you know and that really helps because i've realized like this is it's shaped my story but it's not who i am right yeah well there's an interesting piece about this which you are alluding to and i think you might even said explicitly that that this is a a kind of rewarded obsession in a way like this you were actually being a really good airport you're like christian yes we were were actually doing everything that you were told to do and better than probably some other people or i could use the language of saying like with more commitment or rigor i'm curious if you were ever rewarded or praised for something that on the inside was extremely painful and compulsive but on the outside it looked ideal definitely i mean i could think of many examples something that comes to mind for me immediately is that at my church growing up we went to a new church when i was 13 i was there for about five years and i became the student leader of the youth group and i was playing in the church band and i was babysitting for everyone and their children and i was sort of the the model christian teenager didn't kiss didn't hold hands didn't date didn't do anything you know and so there came this point though in that season where two things really happened that i think just reveal the level to which this was very sad and isolating one i developed a pornography addiction in that time and what i see now is that i was so desperate for connection and so curious about sexuality but really felt no freedom to you know engage with that part of my body that i almost had this dissociative ability to engage in pornography uh viewing in a compulsive way because it was a daily multiple times a day compulsion for me for several years out of nowhere from nothing to that you know and it took over my sort of compulsive abilities like really quickly and then it would send me into the shame spiral with the conscience and i would you know do the 300 times a day sinner sinner's prayer cleansing and swearing to god and making vows you know that i would never do this again and then that would isolate me and then i would get driven into the compulsive behavior there was a real feedback loop happening with that that's when the leg hair plucking started as well so i see those as connected i think that it was a way for me to like in a very small subtle way experience some pain that felt good to me and then the other thing that happened was i was being groomed for two years by an elder at my church who never quite you know molested me but he preyed on my conscience and my desire to please very adeptly and uh so i was stuck in that situation and the whole time thinking like with all of these messages i've absorbed from purity culture about my body these are the two things i can never tell anyone if i want to be that kid who everyone looks up to and whoever owns respect and who everyone thinks is doing a good job i can't reveal that i have a pornography addiction because i will lose like everyone will disown me and everyone will hate me and everyone will you know cast me aside and then if i tell anyone that this is happening and all the things that go along with this abuse i'm undergoing i you know which i was certainly internalizing as my fault i i just really could not figure out how to communicate about any of that in my environment when all of my good behavior the the fact that i was quote unquote pure was the reason that i was receiving all of this communal support and so i could not be myself or be honest about what i was experiencing i'm so sorry like i know that you're okay yeah but i still feel that my i feel the twinge in my heart and my eyes you know when i think about her uh the little girl that truly just found herself sort of thrust into these situations because at that age 12 13 14 you're just beginning to come into your own really i had not chosen almost anything that was going on and so i still feel you know the ache in my throat of that voicelessness i felt and it's good to remember and to honor that pain and sadness even though i am much healthier and freer now but i'm sorry too you know yeah yeah you mentioned something about how there's a quality of the ocd in particular and some of the coping behaviors that have a function that might even be a tool for our nervous system to help us survive some things and and i can hear the compassion for yourself and the way that you speak about your your own struggles that you have it sounds like committed to not adding shame to your woman's story yeah in addition to the shame that that is all around us and in the church i have committed to that and i have been fortunate in just my station in life and the the places and the times in which i found myself supported by people who have taught me you know about these things enough and i've read enough about them to understand that they're not things to ashamed about but it takes time to reprogram your body response as well and so it's been years of work um hard work and i still continue to work you know i go on and off to a trauma therapist and i see a sex and body therapist as well and just continue to work through the layers of these things but i do it is beautiful to note and i want to say this for the sake of anyone listening who might find themselves in a place where they are not yet experiencing that kind of freedom from shame or from the behaviors either i would argue that shame might be the most crippling thing of all of it but i am at a place where most of the time i am not run by any of these scripts or by the shame that accompanied them and it is the exception to the rule now and i when it happens i know what to do you know so it can really vastly get better and i yeah i'm so thankful because i don't find myself my bus is not driven by any of this stuff now you know and it takes i mean the paradox of shame is that we think we'll be judged or rejected for letting people know or even kind of confronting ourselves what it is that we're struggling with what hurts us how we're trying to survive but in in protecting ourselves from the potential rejection we actually cut ourselves off from seeing what is understanding what is and asking for help for what it is absolutely absolutely and i mean it's you know there are functions to that kind of fear because in a fundamentalist community in particular there are the chances that being fully forthcoming about things like this can lead to damaging reactions and i would say that did happen to me you know i several times made motions toward being forthcoming or open and was met with damaging rhetoric and things that made me feel unsafe for example never tell anyone else this don't air your dirty laundry you know things in that vein or you know other more damaging things from friends where they were just like i don't know how to be around you you know and i so that fear has a function because the sad reality is that they're not everyone is safe but there is definitely no scenario for most people in which no one is safe you know and shame will tell you the story that no one is safe and that you cannot you know ever tell anyone and that is most of the time i think for most people not actually the reality and so i just am saying that to validate the fears of people who are in communities where the culture and the climate is such that people are not prepared to handle vulnerability but also to affirm that even if that's the case there are people there are options there are outlets you know yeah [Music] so my early christianity in my late teens was largely shaped by a fear of angry god and by the idea that i was unworthy and not okay and so this really shaped the way that i connected with with god i prayed every day um but those prayers mostly took the form of confession and kind of quite anguished frenetic excessive apologizing i would sometimes not even really get to the juice of the prayer in terms of connecting with god or asking for help or being with god because i would just get stuck on this endless list of things that i felt that i needed to apologize for i felt a real deep sense of unworthiness and the thought of god being able to see not just my behavior but also my thought life just terrified me and so i would find myself habitually apologizing all throughout the day and feeling this strong need to get right with god through excessive apologies i don't know maybe it's a british thing to keep saying sorry when i was 12 the passion of the christ was released in theaters so i was old enough to see it but probably shouldn't have seen it and i was terrified of satan and i was terrified of hell from that moment on um i was raised evangelical so i was told to evangelize and if i didn't share the grace that had been given to me that i was you know hiding my light under a bushel um and what that meant to me was that i could not go to sleep um until i had prayed for the salvation of every person that was going to die that night and asked god to spare them from hell and that they would choose jesus before they died and so i had to do that every night i had to pray for every person because i believed that they were my responsibility to save from hell um and if i forgot or if i fell asleep before i did that i would be stricken with this insurmountable guilt and i did this up until i was about 18 and it's been you know 11 years since i've done something like that and to be honest sometimes i'm still terrified that that was my responsibility and i'm shirking it now even though i don't even believe in hell [Music] anymore [Music] so the shame tells us that we can't talk to people and there are some people that we probably shouldn't talk to about it but not all people right not right forever right i think the shame story that i carried for a very long time was that all of my belongings depended on my behavior and my adherence to the community rules and a lot of people experience that and i have now cultivated within myself a deep sense of belonging that has nothing to do with anyone else really although ironically it has fostered much more connection with other people that my belonging comes from within me because i'm coming to all of my relationships with a deep sense of my being held together by whatever is benevolent in this universe and of being one and connected to that and so shame will usually not foster either of those things connection to self or connection to others and belonging that depends on behavior is not belonging a good parent would never say that my child does or doesn't belong to me because of their behavior although sadly that story does happen but a connected a good a healthy parent would never say that and uh we often don't mother ourselves the way that you know we would mother our own children or father our own children and so that's been an approach i've also taken is just you know what would i say i happen to have two children so i'm able to come from that experience and say what would i what would i say to my daughter or my son if they were experiencing this i want to say that to myself too yeah that's interesting you mentioned that because i noticed that in my counseling practice that often people who have kids can draw on this well or pool of unconditional love and affection that they have for their children and and borrow from that mimic that for themselves as a strategy to begin practicing that that sort of inner dialogue yes i mean i've had such healing from that approach because one thing that i have loved picturing is me being my own child and me being my own mother it's sort of this again i i think just a deep sense of belonging to myself and of having compassion for myself and it has made me a better parent and a better friend and a better artist and also more importantly a person who is feeling healthy and whole and you know grounded so i had to move away from that behave and believe to belong paradigm because that did not foster real community or connection it actually achieved the opposite result when you talked about some of those people that you did reach out to and try and tell your story to and it didn't go well i'm curious about experiences of within relationship or maybe with even within a faith context where you did say something to someone and it and it went well what happens when it goes right what is that it was salvation really for me when i i started reaching out you know i had uh it feels like such another life but when i was 17 i think i prayed to god one day i want you to reveal to me three people that i can tell about this because i need the spirit's help to understand who might be able to take this news from me about pornography addiction in particular because at that point i still had no handle on the ocd or the you know other sort of fundamentalist stuff but i was feeling very trapped in this sort of pornography cycle so i had three names come to me of three girls that i knew and i very with with terror and trepidation approached each one of them in person and said you know i have this big thing to tell you and i don't know how you're going to feel about it and i just wanted but i've got to get it off my chest and i said you know like i have pornography addiction and all three of them all three of them looked at me and said me too and i thought i was the only one all three and i was so blown open by that because i had really truly believed myself to be the only woman in the world who had a pornography problem which was perpetuated by the narratives i heard at church and at camp which was always sort of like pornography is something only men deal with and i believed that and so when that happened it changed my life and all three of them were of course hospitable to me and i was able to be hospitable to them as we walked through that experience the memories and the history of it and then the ongoing reality and so i was really really blown away and i experienced a lot of compassion from the people that i went to with what i now see as you know maybe a mixture of god's spirit with my own gut you know just sort of leaning in where people felt hospitable and safe and they really were and it changed the whole course of the journey for me and i i experienced quite a bit of positive change in my relationship to pornography from that moment on really well especially if shame says don't tell anyone you're going to be rejected you're all alone and keeps us alone that say something to people that you care about and trust and having them say not only you're okay with me you're safe but me too would shatter the shame story yeah and which if if shame is the thing that is i guess i would say deepening and perpetuating those feedback loops then it really is the only way to ever truly heal from those other things that are going on is to remove shame from the driver's seat and shame unfortunately as i'm sure you've talked to many people about and have experienced is a core tool in many many fundamentalist environments if not all that is used or or at least if not used purposely it is perpetuated and handed down as a script so once i started to to sort of understand shame and to start to reject it then i think it was inevitable that i was going to deconstruct my particular christian at the time my particular expression of faith i'm in the rebuilding and reordering phase for sure but i needed to tear that scaffolding down and have a look yeah i'm just as i'm listening to you i hear these the three things in this dance together the shame yeah the faith and religious stories and the suffering that they were inextricably linked yeah they really were and i don't think there was going to be any way into a reordering of any kind without just burning it all down i don't see how i could have because they even just on a neural level like my pathways in my brain that were carved over years of reinforcement by behavior and by narrative and by scripts i was handed in by scripts i had you know internally they couldn't change with just me reading different theology books or which i tried of course i i became a baptist and then i became a presbyterian and then i was i became a catholic 11 years ago almost 12 years ago and i will say you know you were raised fundamentalist when becoming catholic was a huge liberation and it was because the why the birth became wider all of a sudden i was like oh there's like henry nowin and thomas merton and mother teresa and richard rohr like it doesn't have to all look one way but i could not have just you know i couldn't have healed from this stuff or begun the healing without by just a change in ideas it was a much deeper reality in the tissues of my body and continues to be you know that's what i am continuing to work on most now is the sort of bodily the bod the places in my body where these messages still live and hide out and hunker down a little bit yeah yeah i often say to people in counseling too that when our thoughts get us stuck sometimes we can't use our thoughts to get us unstuck we have to do something else absolutely i mean i've read yeah oh sorry go ahead oh please please go ahead i was just saying i've been reading a lot about flow state and this is going to go on another tangent but i one of the things i'm learning and even in these other fields of study about like when people are able to lock into a way of whether it's art or on their navy seal team or at you know playing in the church band or whatever where their amygdala i guess is kind of put out of like it goes to rest a little bit and they're able to sort of embody their expression and inspiration um honestly i believe that is the kind of place where there are certain types of healing that can only happen like that because as you said i mean thoughts alone cannot heal the body but the body can heal the body you know and it can work in tandem with the changing of our minds um because at the end of the day our mind which lives in our brain is an organ with tissue and electricity and it has elements to it that aren't just pure like invisible spirit you know so i value that very much and i am on a continuous quest to greater healing and oneness in my body and as well as my mind you mentioned a few moments ago that shame was one of the tools that the church or that that specific branch of christianity used to reinforce this kind of distinction or coping or maybe even suffering i'm curious if you off the top of your head can think about some of the other tools scripts or stories that might contribute to suffering yeah health issues absolutely well i will name the number one text for me that caused me torment as a child especially with my fear of what i had painted as a demanding nitpicky unpredictable god figure was the isaac and abraham text when abraham is instructed by god in the story to take his only son up the mountain and to sacrifice him as a blood offering which you know as a kid i had no idea of the context of anything to do with like where the bible's written and when and how and by who it reflected so many stories of its time but it has this different ending this twist ending where god you know stops abraham's hand and says i've seen that you're devoted to me i'm paraphrasing but i've seen that you're devoted to me and i've provided an alternate which is this ram and the thicket and so for people of that moment it was probably an incredibly encouraging story to read because all the other stories of the cultures around them were of child sacrifice and of god's needing to be appeased and this was actually a step forward in the narrative of who god was but when i read that as a kid i just thought how could i ever trust this being who would put someone through that kind of psychological torment both of them you know isaac and abraham which i don't think there's any reason to believe that story really happened but at the time i certainly did you know and so i felt so confused and so troubled by the fact that at my church and in my community which was very insulated from the rest of the world in various ways that i was taught that god was this loving merciful being that that was so forgiving and kind and then i would read these stories and there would be no differentiation made and i'm thinking like i don't know which god i'm going to get day to day what if tomorrow i don't pray the salvation prayer 300 times and he happens to be in an abraham isaac kind of mood you know versus you know the way that i was the gospel was preached to me and yeah it was just there were so many stories told without any kind of contextualizing or or just i don't know yeah there's so many texts but that was the biggest one for me that gave me torment was i was just sort of like how can i possibly predict the emotions of this god he's unpredictable i found that very terrifying you know because predictability was the only way that i felt any kind of comfort about my eternal destiny you know so and i'm sure you also encountered the maybe the inner inner pressure to make a change happen on the basis of moral fortitude so if i if i do this better if i think this better maybe if there's another 300 times of the sinner's prayer then the whole thing will go away yeah i think that and again i come from a puritanical kind of upbringing i call it i mean it's like if you imagine the sort of somberness of a quaker meeting meets the dress of a fundamentalist mormon gathering meets you know some pretty intense like the i don't know hellfire preaching type of stuff it was the kind of environment where it was considered a virtue to be scrupulous it will show thyself approved that was the rule that we followed study to show thyself approved unto god and that was what i tried to do i want to show god that he should approve of me by these various things that i'm told to do and that i'm told will bring me closer to god but when i was sort of confronted with these stories like about the god of abraham and isaac and you know we were told of course god doesn't do that kind of thing anymore but i'm thinking but if he ever could though if he ever could have done that then it's not someone i want to be around you know i don't want to be around someone who thinks it's okay to have that kind of collateral damage emotionally dramatically i didn't understand trauma but i see now i had an instinct of that's traumatizing like how can that be all right in the economy of the love of god you know and it did ask those questions a couple times but they were highly discouraged and so to show myself approved i just quieted down so if instead of showing yourself approved or scrupulosity or purity um if not those things what do you wish was rewarded in faith contexts oh it's so hard for me not to think of my son so i guess i will the things that touch me the most with him he's four and a half almost five are his vulnerability about his fear his deep questions about the nature of existence you know he'll ask me things that are so uh they stop me in my tracks sometimes you know he saw jesus on the cross at our catholic church you know on the crucifix maybe a year ago and noticed it for the first time and asked me like why is jesus body on the cross and i said i was like pulling for things you know i'm like why do why how do i explain this to a four-year-old and i'm like with all my complications around faith and religion and i decided to put those aside and i said well in the catholic church we like to remind ourselves that jesus had a body that could hurt like our bodies just like your body could bleed or hurt you know it makes god feel very close doesn't it if god or god's son or you know jesus could hurt and he started to cry and he said how will i ever heal the wounds in his body if he won't come down from there and i thought to myself you are so empathetic and so concerned with pain and i was that way but i felt totally unable to express my fears and my questions about this god that i was constructing and so what i wish was rewarded was true vulnerability about the depth to which these questions and fears go for most of us you know for empathy i wish empathy was rewarded i wish that the bravery of being your your true self in front of others was rewarded i can't really think of any other things it's the things that stop me in my tracks about my child every day that's exactly what jesus says like become like the little children and then you enter the kingdom of heaven i know and it's been so much for life through yeah like they do so intuitively which actually just kind of makes sense when we're looking at the world like of course we would hurt when someone else is hurting because we haven't learned to be disconnected from ourselves or from each other yet but these things that your son is doing tell us something about actually what it means to to be in the kingdom of heaven to understand the kingdom of heaven and yet it's been socialized or groomed out of us in our effort to be quote unquote like good good quick questions pure i know and i've been thankful for the chance that you know i have to affirm those things in him and while i would never i hope live vicariously through my child or project all my experiences onto him i do get a chance to in that moment which i remember doing just say i love it so much that your heart hurts for someone who's bleeding that is a beautiful thing and i think that the fact that you care and that you're crying tears of you know care and concern it makes jesus feel a lot better because you care about him you know and it's like i always am continually finding myself in these positions where i have to put aside all the complication and complexity of my relationship to faith and religion to just actually see him where he is and instead of giving him all of the i don't want to hand him all the complexity up front because he'll find it you know but to instead take the opportunity to really see and notice what he's trying to tell me because i honestly think that had that been the case for me a lot would have been very different to be seen and to be noticed and to be given the room to to reveal myself right [Music] my experience with scrupulosity began pretty much when my faith began early on we were taught so many things about hell and that you know whoever didn't believe the way that we did would be going there and for me that was my entire family and regularly i would have such intense anxiety around bedtime you know fearing that i would wake up to a dead parent or somebody that i knew had died and gone to hell and i started engaging in ritualistic behaviors such as walking around my neighborhood in the middle of the night praying and eventually memorizing scripture so that i could repeat it over and over and over again to calm myself down and i think i realized that i could have been dealing with scripulosity when i shared with a therapist that sometimes i couldn't sleep at all unless i put a bible open and directly on my chest in order to fall asleep because i truly believed that if god were to take my life he would see that i was at least trying to read the bible so yeah this has affected my life pretty severely for me scrupulosity was very intersectional and it combined a lot of other factors and identities in my life that were causing me pain so i already had ocd to begin with as a kid and then i started realizing that i was queer and kind of fitting that into a religion that told me i couldn't be so scrupulosity looked like a lot of repetitive numbered prayer asking for my sexuality to be something other than what it was and it also looked like praying for my mental illness to stop bringing me so much pain i didn't know that's what it was but i would ask god to stop the bad thoughts and i would list people i wanted god to keep safe and now i'm a therapist doing work at the intersection of sexuality and religion so who knows what i have to think about my experience with scrupulosity i can't just totally wish it weren't there because who knows what my life would be but it did bring me a lot of pain [Music] you mentioned the role that faith and religion played in the development or the expression of your experience of mental health issues but i'm curious if you can identify how faith or religion has been helpful in the healing repair of mental health issues so i think the only way i've been able to experience that has been first to remove most of the structures and ideologies and ideas and theologies that i had because it really i had to start over from somewhere as close to ground zero as i could get and when i did that and i would say i probably about three years ago felt like i had really like scorched the earth of my forest of of ideas and beliefs i found that i think what happened is that i did become more like a child i became more sensible to the oneness of all things and all people with god and with each other and i think that's how children do see it so as i've approached faith and religion through that lens as much as i am able to do and i do that by various means and methods including meditation mindfulness doing as many things as i can do to get myself into flow state where i'm not just or running on you know uh amygdala-led scripts all the time the more that i do those things in those practices which are you know their practices they're things you do the more i'm able to hear words and phrases that actually used to trigger me really badly and not that i necessarily believe them now but i'm able to hear what i need to hear and leave what i need to leave and it's given me a deep level of compassion for people who are still where i used to be because i used to be there and i'm thinking what would have happened to me if everyone in my life had said well she's hopeless because she's fundamentalist and she has no you know there's no chance for this person to grow and to change and as richard would say like to move into the second half of life so i've thankfully i think moved through the rightful anger and the rightful disenfranchisement and into a season where faith and religion have become something that i see so much wisdom in because of the practices that they involve so like maybe you know some people might have different ideas about salvation and hell in heaven than i do but i can look at the fact that inside let's say catholicism in particular which is where i still live in practice the deeply rich meditation tradition inside catholicism that i have learned from and that practice is still really wise you know it still communicates oneness it still leads towards that and so i have been able to find a lot of healing in the i guess the kindness and wisdom of these ancient practices that are for better for worse mostly handed down by religious groups i do think you don't have to be religious to engage in those practices by any stretch but i just know that those are the places where i i found those practices and so i'm thankful for that gift and it's been a healing thing to sort of move into that season of of saying well i may not believe all of these things exactly but i'm still thankful for the wisdom and the gifts i've been given in practice thanks for sharing that and as i'm listening to you i can't help but notice the interesting parallel here that so much of the suffering you experienced the mental health issues even the framework within which it all developed was thought based what you're describing in this healing process and in these this phase of your faith journey is practice space yeah and it's body and connection based yeah it is moving so away from the knowing and the certainty and the achievement of certain things towards just kind of a being with yeah absolutely i think back the one thing i missed the most from church growing up was the corporate singing and i think that was the wisest practice we had it was a way to again occasionally disconnect from our sort of amygdala-led processes together as a group it was a way to revel in the beauty of what the human body could produce and we sang in four-part harmony and we sang at every meeting and i i look back at that and i actually think that was a medicine to me all along i didn't know that at the time but it was like uh i think if i hadn't had that i think i would have been sicker and worse off you know and so that was a practice that yes we were singing words but ultimately what we were doing was vibrating with our bodies and a lot of the practices that have healed me and brought me back to an openness to god and to whatever religion and faith look like in this phase of my life yeah they've been practice based and really centered in the body and i think i had those things all along but i didn't understand how wise they were or how helpful they were being that reminds me of a shamanic tradition which asks a person who is suffering when did you stop dancing when did you stop singing right that the healer the intuitive healers who have been around long before our more modern presentation of the christian faith have known that being in the body using our voice joining in some sort of embodied expression is intimately connected to our well-being and our thriving and our ability to navigate pain absolutely i mean ever all of this is vibration in some way right you know we pain is also at some level a vibrating thing in the body and yeah we need those things we need to vibrate our bodies with with things that are deeply healing and music and dance are certainly two of the biggest and i again you see children intuitively do these things without shame or embarrassment until something enters in that changes that relationship for them but i see i have an 18 month old daughter as well and she is so in touch with her body it is like is marvel to behold and i just do marvel at her because she walks around half the time with her fist in the air like um just so enthusiastic she's pumped you know she's just like i'm here we're doing it living life with every like cell in my body and she dances and she sings and she hums and she vibrates all the time but we find ourselves i know i found myself very often in a place of i wouldn't even call it silence because the interior world i my interior landscape was very noisy but none of the vibrating was happening in my body anymore it was you know all thought and that is a prison our bodies are so important and they are the doors to that jail you know my last question for you is if there was something you could say to someone who's struggling with mental health particularly in a faith context what would you say to them i would say that you have never been fundamentally broken in any way including with your mental wellness or mental health and that any any voice in your life that is communicating to you whether that's the voice of shame or the voice of people in your community or your family you know anybody any voice that is communicating to you that you are fundamentally broken is lying to you [Music] it's only by i think recognizing your deep goodness and deep wholeness that you will find certain kinds of healing you know it's not fake until you make it it sounds like that but what i'm really saying is that i think rejecting shame is the first step for many people for whom religion and mental health are deeply linked rejecting that voice of shame is is really the path forward to relief from all of it i just think no one is fundamentally [Music] broken [Music] [Music] so thank you i'm sure that your younger self if she knew that you were saying these things now would be tremendously proud of you to know that that you have been on the journey that you've been on and done the incredibly hard and painful work to rebuild your interior landscape thank you hillary yeah my last kind of curiosity this is just a tool that we often use in research when we're talking about sensitive content and there isn't the framework of a therapeutic relationship i i feel compelled to ask what it was like for you to talk about this and how you're feeling now having had this conversation oh well i feel i feel wonderful i feel connected to the sorrow of it but in a good way i've i've learned that you know not every situation is safe for me to do this but of course i i did feel very safe talking with you and i i know that this will be broadcast but i i've done enough kind of tilling of the ground in there to to get to the place where i see myself as the awareness of these experiences you know and not these experiences themselves and so i have a good healthy connection and detachment that live together with these things and whenever i get the chance to connect to the sadness of my younger self i feel really thankful because you know the tears and the feelings connected to that feeling of futility are important to release so i'm always grateful for a chance to do that it was so beautiful to be a part of this for me um yeah just hearing your story feels like there's so much depth and wisdom there and i really appreciate you letting us in and doing exactly what was never allowed to be done which is the vulnerability and the naming of all of it so thank you so much audrey thank you hilary you're welcome it's been a joy we hope you found this episode both entertaining and enlightening and we'd love to talk with you more about that if you go to our website at theliturgist.com and tap the button that says join our community you can find every place online that both the hosts of this podcast and the members of the liturgist community gather online to talk through not only the topic of this episode but all the issues that we all face in life every day the music played during the introduction of today's podcast was evergreen by audrey assad and the music during the outro is deliverer also by audrey assad the host for this episode has been hillary mcbride the guest has been audrey assad editing was provided by matt ozzowski editing and sound design by jayden lee business and talent management by brent cradle the production manager was corey pig and the producer was victory palmisano thanks for listening everybody [Music] foreign [Music] me