When obsession shakes certainties and challenges beliefs

What happens when questions of belief are subject to obsessive behaviours? The impact of OCD on key life moments.

Paula Duncan

Paula Duncan is a PhD candidate at the University of Aberdeen, researching OCD and faith.

A close-up of a complex clock mechanism featuring small statues within it.

The Millennium clock tower.

National Museum of Scotland.

I’m eleven years old and I’ve been given a New Testament in our school assembly. This is the first time I’ve owned a copy of the Bible. So far, I’ve only heard it read to me in school or the few times I’ve gone to church with my family. I flick through it that evening, taken by the table at the front that directs you to different verses that speak to how you might be feeling. I find myself reading Revelation. The imagery frightens me. The tone, the threat, the fear, and the condemnation… would this be me if I didn’t believe in the right way? If I didn’t believe enough? I’m terrified of this book, these words, terrified of God, even. Mostly, I’m terrified by my own doubt and uncertainty about all things religious, despite wanting to believe. What if God isn’t real? What if God is and I just don’t believe enough? God will know I’m not sure. I tell myself not to think about it. If I’m to avoid thinking about it, I can never read the Bible again. I accept this as a rule.

I’m twelve years old and I’m standing in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, listening to one of Bach’s minor key concertos playing from the Millennium Clock. To me, it looks like it depicts some sort of hellscape straight from the book of Revelation. Death, suffering, and evil are everywhere in this model with its eerie red glow at the bottom. It brings up all the thoughts I’ve been trying to avoid – “you don’t believe enough” and “this is what hell looks like.” I tell myself to forget about it. If I’m to forget about it, I need to make sure that I never talk about it and don’t tell anyone how afraid of it I am. Talking about it makes it real, I think. I accept this, too, as a rule.

I’m thirteen years old and I’m sitting in a church trying to concentrate on the service. I can’t because I keep having the thought that I don’t believe enough. I’m worrying about what the reading might be – I’m still too scared to read the Bible and I can’t prevent myself from hearing it in this space. I’m afraid of thinking that I don’t believe enough, and that God will know because this is God’s church after all. I tell myself that I do not belong in this place if I cannot control my thoughts. If I can’t do that, I can never go to church again. This too, becomes a rule.

I’m fourteen years old and I’ve started praying every evening. I’m not sure what prompted this, but I also know that I must do it correctly. If I pray and forget to conclude with “amen”, then it seems obvious that God will continue to listen to my thoughts as if I’ve forgotten to hang up the phone. I try to keep my thoughts corralled and pure when I pray. If I don’t end my prayer, God will hear all my worst thoughts – the ones I am ashamed of, the ones that scare me, the ones that fill me with doubt. I tell myself that I can no longer run that risk. If I’m to prevent this, I shouldn’t pray. Another rule.

I was scared to say these things aloud – to voice my fears or doubts in case they somehow became worse if I acknowledged them.

I’m now in my late twenties, and I have been diagnosed with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and I’m slowly unlearning the rules I’ve created for myself over the years. Each of them, in their own way, was designed to keep me safe from harm, safe from thinking about something that frightened me, or acknowledging difficult emotions like doubt and uncertainty.

It has been a long road to reach that diagnosis. OCD is regularly misunderstood and presented as punchline of jokes – “I’m so OCD!” is one that I’ve heard far too many times when someone simply means that they’re organised. The problem with these jokes is that it disguises the reality and makes it that bit harder for people to recognise what it is they’re really dealing with. OCD-UK, a charity to whom I owe a great deal, describe OCD as follows: “Obsessions are very distressing and result in a person carrying out repetitive behaviours or rituals in order to prevent a perceived harm and/or worry that preceding obsessions have focused their attention on.”

Obsessions could cover virtually any topic, and everyone will experience compulsions in slightly different ways. I didn’t recognise that I was living with OCD because almost all of my compulsions were mental rituals or avoidance behaviour. I would try and avoid thinking about things, check whether thoughts upset me, avoid reading the Bible… Layers and layers of compulsive behaviour in response to frightening intrusive thoughts that became associated with faith. I was scared to say these things aloud – to voice my fears or doubts in case they somehow became worse if I acknowledged them. I now know to call this “magical thinking” but I still find it difficult at times to accept that I cannot cause something to happen simply by saying it.

It can be particularly difficult for people with OCD to cope with uncertainty. I can see why anxiety and doubt about the existence of God has been hard for me to tolerate. I also know that I can never achieve absolute certainty and part of learning to live with OCD is learning to accept that and make choices despite it. Last year I attended the International OCD Foundation (IOCDF) Faith and OCD conference and was overwhelmed by the sheer number of people there. So many people with the same worries and doubts as me, and many more who had found that OCD impacted them in different ways.

But it was hard for a doctor to diagnose me until I could find the words to articulate what I was experiencing. It wasn’t until I started reading books about other people’s experiences with OCD that I started to recognise my own thought patterns, my own fears and doubts in other people’s words. Author and video creator John Green shares a very powerful video titled “What OCD is like (for me)” where he shares what his experience of having OCD and says:

“I can say what it is like more than what it is.”

This gives me a little more courage to tell people what living with OCD can be like and represent some of the diverse experiences of the condition. For someone who was too frightened to open a Bible, I think it’s a little ironic that I am now a theologian. My doctoral research project is focusing on faith and OCD, and in particular, how it might affect someone’s relationship with God. I hope to make use of some of my own experience along the way – examining my fear of not being sure enough, my worries that my intrusive thoughts would somehow offend God… I hope that by sharing this, I can raise a little more awareness of an experience that so many of us try to keep secret or just aren’t ready to speak about.

Through advocacy and research, I’d like to share a little of, as John Green says, what OCD looks like (for me). I’d like to add my voice – now that I’ve found it – to the discussion in the hopes that someone might read this and recognise what they’re going through. And if that’s you? You’re not alone. There is help and there is hope.

Review

Books

Culture

Podcasts

Re-enchanting

4 November 2025

5 min read

The book, the ritual, and the reader

Season 7 of Re-Enchanting explores how books shape our habits and our search for meaning

Tom Rippon

Tom Rippon is Assistant Editor at Roots for Churches, an ecumenical charity.

A reader sits on a sofa with a raised leg and holds a book

Jonathan Sanchez on Unsplash.

When was the last time a book elicited spontaneous reverence from you? It’s something of a cliché to say that books take you on a journey, but sometimes a book comes along which simply demands to be read with ceremony.

This is the experience of the writer Donna Freitas, just one of the guests welcomed onto season 7 of the Re-enchanting podcast. In her conversation with Belle Tindell and Justin Brierley, she describes how her morning routine of coffee and a book has practically attained the status of a ritual for her. Freitas describes the deliberate preparations she made for the final chapter of Alice Winn’s In Memoriam, a historical novel exploring the relationship between two young soldiers in the trenches of the First World War as their idealised understanding of war shatters and their suppressed feelings for one another play out against a shifting backdrop of class, national identity and belonging. Freitas’ ceremonial approach to finishing her book - you’ll have to listen to the episode to hear more about this - may sound somewhat unusual at first for the respect and honour that it implies is due to a book, but this notion of textual reverence finds a distant echo in the Christian faith, where the Word, living and written, is central.

Freitas’ particular experience of faith is recounted in her book, Wishful Thinking: How I Lost My Faith and Why I Want to Find It, but listening to her description of her reading experience posed its own questions for me. At what point does habit become ritual? And how do we distinguish between them? Even as people develop individual, secular rituals to give rhythm to their lives, this does not always translate into an openness towards religious ritual. Does this mean that ritual today is understood as an individual, rather than shared, activity? Despite some evidence suggesting a revival of sorts in the Christian faith, most of the growing churches in the UK tend place more emphasis on spontaneity than ritual, but perhaps our continued desire for ritual and familiarity should give mainstream churches a reason to pause in their current approaches to church planting?

Either way, for many of us, a home-grown ritual of an enticing cup of coffee paired with the smooth, dry pages of a book first thing in the morning may simply sound like an inviting, yet sadly unattainable, prospect. Sometimes just getting everyone and everything out the door on time constitutes an epic in itself. However, since there’s no harm in fantasizing, let’s peruse the Re-enchanting back-catalogue for more reading recommendations.

Looking back over season 7 of Re-enchanting, I’m struck by how popular biography remains amongst our guests’ reading choices. Nadim Ednan-Laperouse recommends Heidi Barr’s autobiographical account of the near-death experience which led to her conversion from Orthodox Judaism, What I Saw in Heaven. Lamorna Ash, whose work explores the softening of Gen Z’s attitude towards Christianity, appropriately lends balance to her Re-enchanting moment with her recommendation of John Stuart Mill’s autobiography, which recounts his journey away from faith. The faith landscape in the UK is certainly shifting at the present time and perhaps the only way to truly understand these shifts is to read both sides of the story. We need to read about journeys away from faith as much as journeys to faith in order to understand the society in which we work and witness. A data scientist might call these eliminating biases, a literary critic might call it awareness of an unreliable narrator.

Telling the story of someone’s life is at the centre of Bear Grylls’ most recent work, The Greatest Story Ever Told, in which he retells the life of Jesus through the eyes of those around him. The emergence of the faith is told from the perspective of those coming to faith, a hint perhaps that faith has to be remade, reborn, resurrected even, afresh for each person. Read Bear Grylls’ own take on his book, written for Seen & Unseen earlier this year.

Grylls’ own work seems to have an almost essay-like quality through its short, accessible chapters and essay collections seem popular amongst our other guests as well. Lamorna Ash also recommends Pulphead by the journalist John Jeremiah Sullivan, a collection of essays spanning topics from eco-anxiety and the blues to the Tea Party and Christian rock, each giving a brief insight into the concerns and ponderings of a thousand other minds. It strikes me that such collections are the literary equivalents of hitting shuffle play, the perfect fit for those reading rituals that have to be scattered in-between other moments of activity. If you’re searching for some faith-based content for these moments, then I recommend Richard Carter’s Letters from Nazareth, a collection of meditations from the contemplative tradition written for those ‘catch your breath’ moments in the day.

Alternatively, if it’s escapism and adventure that you are after in these moments, then take up Grylls’ own suggestion, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder, by David Grann, a true story yet wildly adventurous. For those in search of more light-hearted reading, then turn to another stalwart of Re-enchanting reading lists, C.S. Lewis, whose The Silver Chair comes recommended by NYT columnist and author, Ross Douthat. As Lewis himself said, ‘a children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.’ Perhaps it’s time to put Lewis’ own works to the test.

Long summer days of the kind envisaged in children’s books may now be a distant memory for most of us, but with each change in season comes a new reason to pick up some reading material. I hope these autumnal days with their familiar ritual of falling leaves lead to a home-grown ritual of turning leaves for you.

Some further suggestions:

Letters from Nazareth by Richard Carter – Meditations on home from St Martin-in-the-Fields.

Her First American by Lore Segal – An exploration of Jewish-Black trauma and solidarity in 1950s New York.

seven steeples by Sara Baume – A meditative novel on the rhythmic course of life in rural Ireland.

How Bad Are Bananas? by Mike Berners-Lee – Bite-sized explanations of our place in a changing climate.

Season 8 starts 12 November

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