The Constant Questioning: Did I Do Something Bad? Did I Do Something Wrong?
Dear Nicholas, I just ran across an article that describes so well the weird kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder that has troubled me since age five: moral OCD, also known as scrupulosity. It’s the daily question: did I do something wrong? Identifying it as abnormal can be an enormous relief. I think a lot of people could be helped by knowing this.
Bonkers!
I wish I had known as a child that it was wacky. I didn’t realize that until I was fifty and got medication. Before that, I thought everybody had daily damaging guilt-ridden questions but others just managed them better than I did.
Here’s the link. The article really makes clear the difference between this ailment and normal moments of self-recrimination.
“Moral OCD disrupts someone’s life and takes up a lot of time. Someone with moral OCD may go to the grocery store, leave and worry they accidentally didn’t pay for something in their cart, which would make them “bad” and a thief. This could lead them to check the receipt again and again and even go back inside and insist on paying for the item again….” This is not an extreme example.
I remember as a kid playing Monopoly and having to count over and over the number of squares I was supposed to move. I feared getting it wrong, which would mean I was cheating.
Cheater?
As an adult, I remember thinking I might have done something wrong on my county taxes and thinking this would bring permanent shame on my whole family. I remember inexplicable severe upset over why I wasn’t doing more to stop war in Bosnia.
The hardest part for me has been thinking–over and over and over– that I might have damaged someone or hurt their feelings decades ago. That can be really hard to shake. And someone trying to assure me that I’m a good person doesn’t work.
Relief!
But I have had good meds for the last twenty-seven years and they are about 90% effective. I am so grateful for this. The problem is now at worst a little jab or background simmer of feeling that at some time in my life I have let this or that person down or hurt their feelings.
But scrupulosity is little-known and can even be seen as a viritue. My first-grade teacher told my mother she had never seen a child with such a highly-developed sense of right and wrong. It isn’t a virtue; it’s a disability.
The Catholic Church has long recognized extreme fear of sinning as illness. See “The Struggle With Scrupulosity.”
The International OCD Foundation has a nice succinct description. And psychologist Reid Wilson offers in his books some innovative paradoxical ways of relieving OCD.
But mainly OCD is seen only as extreme feelings about order and neatness. A popular awareness of the extreme fear of doing wrong could help a lot of people.
Peggy
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Tags: do something bad, do something wrong, extreme fear of doing wrong, extreme fear of sinning, extreme feelings, guilt-ridden, hurt their feelings, kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder, moral OCD, order and neatness, Reid Wilson, relieving OCD, scrupulosity