Areas › Worry and anxiety › Obsessions and compulsions
The thing your obsession keeps circling is usually something you care about a great deal. Contamination worry sits on top of wanting people safe, and harm worry sits on top of never wanting to hurt anyone.
This is worth saying out loud, because most people carry these themes as proof that something is rotten in them. Read the other way round, the theme shows you where your care is, and the illness has taken that care and turned the volume up until it hurts. None of that makes the worry true. It changes who you think you are while you work on it.
Obsessive thoughts and compulsions respond well to a specific kind of therapy. What is here is for understanding them, not for treating them by yourself.
Qur’an and Sunnah
He will not call you to account for oaths you have uttered unintentionally, but He will call you to account for what you mean in your hearts (Quran 2:225). What the heart means is the thing that counts, and your heart is plainly not the problem here.
لَّا يُؤَاخِذُكُمُ ٱللَّهُ بِٱللَّغۡوِ فِيٓ أَيۡمَٰنِكُمۡ وَلَٰكِن يُؤَاخِذُكُم بِمَا كَسَبَتۡ قُلُوبُكُمۡۗ وَٱللَّهُ غَفُورٌ حَلِيمࣱ
He will not call you to account for oaths you have uttered unintentionally, but He will call you to account for what you mean in your hearts. God is most forgiving and forbearing
Qur’an 2:225read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A narrative review of religion and obsessive-compulsive disorder found no sign that faith causes the disorder, but plenty that where the disorder is present it readily takes religious form, with reported rates varying hugely depending on how devout the community studied was. The disorder appears to reach for whatever a person holds most serious. This is a review of existing literature rather than a test of the idea, and it looked at religious content in particular.
Greenberg D, Huppert JD. (2010). Scrupulosity: a unique subtype of obsessive-compulsive disorder.. Current psychiatry reports doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Shame makes people hide the thought, and a thought you are hiding is one you cannot work on.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
If every step you try keeps not working, however small you make it, that is information rather than failure. A more intensive programme is the next thing to look at, and it should be put to you as an option.
Notice how when one worry is finally settled, another takes its place. That pattern is the thing you are actually dealing with, more than whichever worry is currently in the chair.
If you are stuck on whether having a thought makes you a bad person, that question is a symptom and not a case waiting to be settled. Name it as scrupulosity and let it stand unanswered.