God and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
In 2012, I was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Many have complicated feelings about receiving such a diagnosis, but, for me, it was a relief. Suddenly, my past mental-health struggles made more sense. I met the criteria in a number of ways, but perhaps my most debilitating symptom was intrusive thoughts.
Basically, an intrusive thought is something you can’t get out of your head, which impedes your daily life. For me, it takes the form of worrying that in any given situation I will somehow lose control and do the worst thing imaginable. I’ll spare you the details, but, suffice to say, the fears build over time and feel very real.
The therapists I worked with compared intrusive thoughts to Chinese finger traps. The idea was if you resisted an intrusive thought, its hold grew stronger, while if you relaxed, it would release you. In recent years, as I’ve grown more interested in spirituality, this dynamic has reminded me of the popular bumper sticker that reads “Let go and let God.”
Intrusive thoughts, at least in my experience, are fundamentally the result of distrusting the universe, to put it in secular terms, or God, to put it in religious ones. It’s a fear there is no plan — that we live in an indifferent if not hostile place, that the very worst thing which could happen might actually be the most likely.
I should note dogmatic materialism like mine isn’t the only way to arrive at this way of thinking. Bad or misunderstood theology seems to do the trick just as well. There’s a whole category of obsessive-compulsive disorder symptoms called scrupulosity that’s primarily diagnosed in religious patients. I believe I had a secular case.
To this day, I often view the universe as a hostile place. After all, human society is filled with violence. Predation and starvation is common among animals. As far as I can tell, most theologians answer this problem of evil by saying God’s creation has somehow gone wrong or is incomplete, and we must play a role in fixing it.
I yearn to see things the way my spiritual teacher did. He was a Hindu perennialist named Eknath Easwaran, who wasn’t unaware of human or animal suffering. I find a story about him trying to feed his cat a vegetarian diet particularly charming. But despite this awareness, he frequently talked about what he termed ‘the compassionate universe.’
I have no evidence the universe is a compassionate place. In fact, I have a lot of evidence to the contrary. But I have a deep spiritual or psychological need for it to be true. I have to believe underneath all the violence and suffering, there is some force for good, that is slowly but surely, despite setbacks, moving us toward a better future.
That’s why, now, when I begin to feel the stirrings of an intrusive thought or, more generally, an anxiety over something I cannot control, I try to think of Easwaran’s idea of a compassionate universe. I try, as the bumper sticker says, to let go and let God.