#scrupulousity

[daughter-of-mary]

[starry-voids-deactivated]

it's starting to feel like some posts on this site are deliberately meant to trigger people with moral OCD or scrupulousity. feels like people are just using ableism to get notes.

[safety-net-did]

Moral scrupulosity OCD, or the relentless pursuit of certainty about one’s morality, can feel like a truly impossible situation. You have a thought about something you did or thought about doing, or felt an urge to do, and so forth, and because this experience doesn’t line up with your presumed identity as a moral person, you feel bad. Because you feel bad, you try to get the feeling to stop. You may seek reassurance, try to make sure you’re not doing bad things, check to see if you have, and engage in other compulsions. You set up a series of rigid rules that apply only to you to guarantee you’ll never do a bad thing, but since these rules are impossible to follow perfectly, they also make you feel bad.

What’s worse, ceasing to feel bad makes you feel like you’re getting away with something, like you stopped caring about your moral compass. Bad feelings at least reminded you that you care and reassure you that you would never intentionally be immoral. So, you find yourself trying to get away from the pain of bad feelings while at the same time clinging to those bad feelings for proof of inherent goodness. Ultimately, this compulsive relationship to moral doubt sends the message to your brain that thoughts about morality are codes to be cracked, problems to be solved. So, the brain faithfully performs its duty to help you by sending more intrusive thoughts and feelings your way.

https://www.sheppardpratt.org/news-views/story/moral-scrupulosity-ocd-part-three/

Ever read something that just so clearly outlines the pain in your mind that you start to cry with relief that there's a word for that? There's a name for it, other people experience it, it is known.

I've never been DX'd with OCD (just "obsessive compulsive tendencies"), and this one looks like it would be kinda hard to detect. Especially if someone whose brain tells them they are a bad person if they talk about this line of thinking. Especially in a person with much more severe symptoms showing up.

[fredzina]

Okay I can't get this out of my head. But we know Sam prayed daily growing up and still in the earlier seasons. He always felt dirty and prayer was his way of trying to cleanse himself. But I can just like imagine him going to confession at some point when he was younger and Azazel having a demon placed as a priest. And as Sam just confessed the demon saying something along the lines of "God must flinch when he sees you." And the absolute shame Sam felt at that moment and it just further set him on his path of martyrdom

[metapianycist]

i was scrolling through old evernote things I'd saved and found a blog post about scrupulousity that I'd bookmarked in 2015. i realized after reading it that I've progressed a lot with regard to my scrupulousity.

scrupulousity refers to the combination of moral rigidity and anxiety where you're convinced that you're doing something wrong all the time and that the only thing stopping you from being an Irredeemably Bad Person is that you have anxiety about being an Irredeemably Bad Person. it's not a mental state that produces good results.

i still struggle with some things, but overall i think i've gotten much better at being flexible. being a parent has been instrumental in this process, because you can't teach a child to be compassionate by giving them a list of rules.

edit: i'm purposefully being vague in this post because i don't have the ability to adequately describe things in greater detail without risk of shitty people thinking that I'm valorizing them. feel free to PM me for further details

[safety-net-did]

Constantly torn between

"this opinion/question/expressible point of connection I want to pose will mark me as a 'bad person' and therefore open me to harassment"

and

"I need to be 100% open and honest about my every thought and feeling or else I am lying, and that makes me a bad person".

And online discourse culture just amplifies that by like, a million.

Obviously, in putting it so plainly, neither thought is correct.

It's not healthy to avoid all connections because I'm afraid someone will accuse me of being a bad person.

It's also not healthy to put all my thoughts and feelings on display-- I'm allowed privacy.

Disagreements with someone shouldn't shake my very foundation of belief in self.

Especially when I agree with 99/100 points about issue X, but not point #100- I shouldn't feel like I can't talk about point #100 without being accused of disagreeing with points 1 through 99 and therefore "a bad person".

Idk. It's especially hard to talk about this issue without bringing up an example issue. But to bring up an example tends to steer the conversation to talking about that issue, and that's not the point.

I don't want to talk about Hot Button Issue #3. I want to talk about how the culture behind black and white Stances is harmful to me.

But I don't have good language for that.

Callout culture and purity culture touch on it. That fear of being Found Out to be Bad about something. Even though I am not bad?

The idea that once you're Found Out to be Bad you can never recover, never grovel enough, never apologise enough, never grow and learn enough, never be free from accusations and reminders.

People having to torch their online presence and start over and pretend they never were that person that made that mistake.

[safety-net-did]

Lol

Me: *worries about being a bad person*

Also me: *worries that worrying about being a bad person makes me a bad person*

It's a fucking nightmare, bro!

[brain-boggled]

The morally gray mind and OCD

The cancel culture on this website is so fucking harmful. Enforcing the idea that if you made a mistake you should be condemned by society, never allowed to change, make amends, or learn from your mistakes. The idea that you must be forever defined by a version of yourself that is no longer alive.

For people who are mentally ill (especially those with OCD), having someone constantly enforce this black & white idea of never practicing forgiveness, never teaching instead of punishing is so damaging.

For many of us who suffer from OCD, we already beat ourselves up for actions we did years ago. We condemn ourselves for bad thoughts because culture is teaching us that if you arent 100% unproblematic, 100% clean, then you must be a bad person unworthy of empathy and connection.

The amount of times I've compulsively confessed bad thoughts or memories to the people I love is ridiculous. I felt like an imposter, because surely if they knew xyz about me they would stop loving me. Every time I've done it has only puzzled my loved ones. I've been met with the same response dozens of times. "I could never stop loving you. What matters is who you are today."

I've had to learn how to forgive myself, and most importantly, love myself. All of myself, including my flaws.

As my therapist once told me, "it's okay to be human."