dinuriel replied to your link “Do you Suffer from Scrupulosity? Take this quiz”
I wonder what the test defines as an "immoral thought"? Is a sexual fantasy an immoral thought? I don't think so, as long as it's a fantasy about consenting adults. Is a fantasy of going on a violent rampage one? Does a thought require follow-up action to be immoral? Maybe moral thinking is consciously overcoming our immoral thoughts, not the absence of immoral thoughts altogether.
I have to admit that sex is not something that my personal scrupulosity cares about. I imagine that’s due to the whole demisexual pair-bonded for life to one person thing, so it’s not a thing that comes up for me. I’m just really not attracted to anyone except the spousal person, and that’s because he’s my most best friend ever for all times and I love him, and I don’t fantasize about anyone. I’ve always been confused by “beefcake” stuff, and I never got the appeal of it.
So it’s not an issue for me personally. And I don’t care what other people do as long as it’s consensual and honest.
I’ll admit that if I am exposed to other people’s fantasies of things that aren’t consensual or honest and that are violent and hurtful, I get triggered and feel icky and gross, but that doesn’t mean that those fantasies are immoral. It just means that I have lots of personal issues around sexual abuse and objectification, partly just as a result of my personality and partly because of my history with my mother having icky and gross boyfriends after my father died.
And I guess with the violence...well, as long as you don’t act out on it, then I don’t think so. And even then, I can find understanding and empathy for one lone person who maybe was vulnerable and didn’t have the tools they needed going on a rampage. It’s the large groups of people who aren’t vulnerable and who just go about living a normal life but then they go on about the need to bomb other countries to the Stone Age that gets to me and that I think are highly immoral.
Yeah, that makes sense. When it comes to other people’s thoughts, my barometer for morality is how much they’re objectifying other living beings. The less you see other living beings as real, the less I see you as moral.
My thoughts that get to me that I think are immoral are....
Well, like looking back at my old LJ entries, and seeing how I could definitely come off as elitist and arrogant. If I really think about it, I know that I don’t mean to be that way, and if anything it’s rooted in my ignorance about how other people work. And generally if I am called on things I can recognize it and improve on it. Well, as long as the calling out is done by people I trust, to me personally, and in a caring way. Anonymous hate isn’t going to help me see my errors at all.
I really wish there was more information about non-religious scrupulosity. I can’t find much, and some of what I’ve found talks about how it’s harder to deal with. Because it’s not like I can go to a cleric of some sort and get help and reassurance. This is all my own moral system that I came up with attacking me, and there aren’t any rituals or outside rules or external authorities that can help me. I gotta make my own peace with my brain.
If I think about it, when I get right down to it, what my brain considers immoral thoughts is any thoughts that, when expressed, result in people rejecting me and my friends abandoning me. That’s usually what triggers the obsessive searching for what I did wrong and the guilt and the self-hate.
Which when you combine that with a moral system that I came up with on my own, and one of its strongest tenets is thinking for myself and not accepting any socially-imposed rules or conventions....well, I’m gonna piss off a lot of people.
I guess that explains my history of jumping between the two poles of “OMG I suck and I’m wrong and I can’t do anything right and everyone’s rejecting me and yelling at me and I should just go away because I don’t know how to be human and I can’t be around the perfect people because I mess everything up.” and then blasting some Joan Jett and being all “I gotta be me and I don’t care what you think!”
One thing I can do to help is learning about how other people work. Like with the Bad Times, right? I was so innocent and ignorant, and I had no idea that people would say horrible things about me and not actually mean them. So I took the hate to be honest real valid feedback, because I couldn’t imagine people saying things that they didn’t mean and that they hadn’t thought through and that they weren’t sincere about.
Learning about how so many things are socially determined also helps. Like with how I’m realizing so much of the Bad Times was about the internalized sexism of the Sims community. It’s really hard for me to wrap my brain around people rejecting me and saying that I was wrong just because of their socially received messages. That didn’t even occur to me back then. As far as I knew they got so mad at me for taking my work seriously and for wanting readers because there was something really actually wrong with wanting readers and with taking Sims stories seriously, because I was completely ignorant of all this stuff about how women shouldn’t want attention and shouldn’t think that their writing is any good and all that.
