This life demands more of us than we can imagine, but not more than we can bear. Because we don’t bear it alone. True conscience is not a hyper-individual inner experience, but a knowing with others, a cleaving to the wisdom of God’s Word and the witness of his body here on earth, the church. Conscience, understood this way, demands not that we follow every whim of our fallen minds, but that we collectively trust in the grace and goodness of the Father.

Growing up evangelical, I was taught that your personal conscience is law. God uses the Holy Spirit to guide and convict us through our innermost selves. So when the conscience speaks, not to listen is a sin. Your conscience can be mistaken, of course, but really only in one direction: a seared conscience. If you are insufficiently attentive to God’s word, or if you allow a particular sin to dominate you, then your conscience, rather than being God-guided, becomes “seared”: deaf to the promptings of the Spirit. But otherwise, I was told, when your inner voice speaks with conviction, you are morally obligated to obey.

What nobody told me was that your conscience, or what feels like your conscience, can be entirely mistaken through no fault of your own. Just like it’s possible to feel no guilt when you should, it’s possible to feel guilt or anxiety or shame over things that you shouldn’t feel bad about at all. Nobody told me how your mind can be your own worst enemy. How it can fixate on imaginary sins. Nobody warned me about moral scrupulosity, the type of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) I suffer from. Nobody warned me how anxiety and fear can take the thing you care about most – your faith – and turn it against you.

OCD is what psychologists call an “ego-dystonic” condition: your fears come from the things you value the most, your greatest hopes, your most cherished aspirations – the kind of person you most deeply desire to be. I deeply desire to be a trustworthy, safe, responsible, morally upright person. So my OCD takes the form of fear that I’m exactly the opposite. Fear that I’ve behaved irresponsibly. Fears that I’ve harmed people in the past. And no matter how little evidence I have for these fears, no matter how many times or in how much detail wise friends reassure me that I haven’t harmed anyone, my OCD never lets me accept that reassurance. There’s always something my friends must have missed, that I must have overlooked. There’s always “one more thing.”

Having OCD is like living with Columbo. There’s always just “one more thing,” one more doubt, one more detail. One more fear. And each fear feels like an accusation. The accusation that I’m an immoral, irresponsible person who has done grave harm and must live under judgment forever. That I can never be redeemed.

OCD is surprisingly prevalent in the general population: around one in every hundred people has it. In spite of this – and in spite of how disabling the condition can be – the condition is widely, sometimes frustratingly, misunderstood. Typically, when people hear the term “OCD” they imagine obsessively tidy people: it’s not uncommon to hear someone refer to themselves as “a little OCD” about tidying their desk. The better informed, when asked about OCD, may think of someone who compulsively washes their hands. But the reality of OCD, especially in its severe and extreme forms, is much more debilitating.

It’s washing your hands until they bleed. It’s ruminating alone for hours about harms you fear you’ve caused. Thinking over an event that occurred a decade ago again and again, finding it impossible to let go. And those are the good days. On the bad days OCD can look like locking yourself in the bedroom to agonize alone for ten or twelve hours. And when you’re done, you have a kind of hangover to deal with: the physiological cost of intense, anxious focus on the same thought for hours on end. Your body is worn out. Your mind is in a fog. And even then, when you’re wracked with shame over your endless rumination, the guilt you feel acts to tip you back into the habits that brought you to that point in the first place. Just check one more time. One more thing.

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