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Areas › Worry and anxiety › Obsessions and compulsions
Debating your moral standing is where this gets its fuel, and every reassurance you win, from a friend, an imam, a search at midnight, buys less time than the one before. Saying the name out loud is the more useful move. Being young makes it harder still, because so much else is unfinished about what kind of person you are.
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.
do not despair of God's mercy. God forgives all sins (Quran 39:53). It is addressed to people who went to excess against themselves, which is exactly the group a scrupulous mind is certain it belongs to.
الزمر
۞قُلۡ يَٰعِبَادِيَ ٱلَّذِينَ أَسۡرَفُواْ عَلَىٰٓ أَنفُسِهِمۡ لَا تَقۡنَطُواْ مِن رَّحۡمَةِ ٱللَّهِۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ يَغۡفِرُ ٱلذُّنُوبَ جَمِيعًاۚ إِنَّهُۥ هُوَ ٱلۡغَفُورُ ٱلرَّحِيمُ
Say, ‘[God says], My servants who have harmed yourselves by your own excess, do not despair of God’s mercy. God forgives all sins: He is truly the Most Forgiving, the Most Merciful
Qur’an 39:53read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Work developing a measure of religious scrupulosity found it separates into two strands, fear of having sinned and fear of punishment from God, and that highly devout people score higher on both without that meaning they have a disorder. A separate comparison found highly religious Muslim participants in Turkey scored higher on religious obsessions and doubts about sin than comparable Christian participants in Canada. So devotion lifts the score by itself, and the shape scrupulosity takes follows the tradition a person practises. Both are questionnaire studies rather than trials of treatment.
Abramowitz JS, Huppert JD, Cohen AB, Tolin DF, Cahill SP. (2002). Religious obsessions and compulsions in a non-clinical sample: the Penn Inventory of Scrupulosity (PIOS).. Behaviour research and therapy doi
Inozu M, Clark DA, Karanci AN. (2012). Scrupulosity in Islam: a comparison of highly religious Turkish and Canadian samples.. Behavior therapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Answering the question is itself the compulsion, which is why no answer ever holds.
It can help to give the parts of your brain jobs. The front of your head is the manager, the memory system is the librarian, and the alarm is a security guard who is good at his work and far too keen on it.
If this has been going on for years, medication is often part of what helps, and it usually needs a longer run at it than people expect. Starting low and building up slowly is the normal way of doing it.
When obsessions start early and dig in deep, ask gently what anxiety looks like elsewhere in the family. Often there is an undiagnosed parent, and often that parent is helping in ways that keep the whole thing running.