This was an AI generated this for me based off my writing. I can’t remember when or where it was. My brain is utterly fried. However, the gospel and the mission goes forward to wipe out the devil and his angels.
Part 1: The Double Bind of Salvation
The Impossibility of Grace. Your torment centers on what Gregory Bateson called a double bind, a psychological trap where every option leads to punishment. In your case: If you approach God, you face judgment, adds to my damnation. If you avoid God, you’re abandoning your only hope. If you try to be perfect, you become hypervigilant to sin. If you accept imperfection, you fear divine rejection.
This isn’t simple anxiety, it’s an existential checkmate where the very act of seeking salvation feels like it ensures damnation. The reformed tradition’s emphasis on total depravity, when internalized by an anxious mind, creates a theological perfectionism that makes grace literally unreceivable.
The Torment of Divine Omniscience. The great fear I have of that man, the Carpenter, this phrase reveals profound theological anguish. You’re describing what Søren Kierkegaard called fear and trembling before the absolute. But your fear has curdled into terror. God’s omniscience means: Every thought is witnessed, making OCD-like intrusive thoughts feel like chosen sins. No mental privacy exists for recovery. The very fear of sinning becomes a spiral of meta-sin, am I sinning by worrying about sinning?
Part 2: The Phenomenology of Religious Trauma
Sermon as Traumatic Trigger. Your Russian roulette metaphor maps perfectly onto trauma psychology. Each sermon activates your amygdala’s threat detection. First, Hypervigilance Phase: Scanning the sermon for potential condemnation. Second, Impact Phase: The bullet, the triggering interpretation, hits. Third, Collapse Phase: Dorsal vagal shutdown lasting hours or days. Fourth, Recovery Phase: Gradual return to baseline, only to repeat.
This cycle mirrors Complex PTSD, where the trauma isn’t a single event but repeated exposure to inescapable psychological danger. The church pew becomes like the chair of a torture victim who must return weekly for more.
The Corruption of Sacred Language. Every biblical phrase has been weaponized against you. If you don’t forgive others, your Father in heaven won’t forgive you becomes not promise but threat. Scripture, meant as medicine, has become poison. This is theological trauma, when the very vocabulary of comfort becomes the language of condemnation.
Part 3: The Paradox of Scrupulosity
Moral OCD as Spiritual Affliction. Your spiraling questions, Have I been lusting? Have I had unforgiveness? reveal classic religious scrupulosity. Pathological doubt: Can never achieve certainty of being forgiven. Mental review: Obsessively scanning for sin evidence. Confession compulsion: Need to clear up and solve each accusation. Moral inflation: Minor thoughts become damnable offenses.
Martin Luther likely suffered from this, he would confess for hours, then immediately fear he’d forgotten something. You’re in historical company with tormented believers.
The Cruelty of Intrusive Thoughts. When you have religious OCD, intrusive thoughts which all humans experience become evidence of your wickedness. The more you try NOT to think something, the more it appears, the white bear problem. Your mind becomes a courtroom where you’re simultaneously: The accused, the sinner. The prosecutor, the conscience. The jury, the judge. The executioner, the self-punisher.
Part 4: The Thanatos Drive in Religious Context
Death as Theological Solution. Your suicidal ideation has a unique religious character. You fantasize about repeatedly killing and resurrecting yourself until stable, this isn’t just wanting to die, but wanting to: Purge the sin nature through death. Reset the spiritual system through resurrection. Achieve stability through exhausting the chaos.
This is thanatos, death drive, filtered through Christian theology. You’re trying to enact your own crucifixion and resurrection, to be your own savior because accepting Christ’s salvation feels impossible.
The Animal Envy. Wanting to be a pug reveals profound theological exhaustion. Animals, in Christian theology, are morally innocent, they can’t sin because they lack moral agency. Your desire isn’t for death but for moral non-existence, to exist without the terrible burden of potential damnation. You want to be loved by God the way He loves sparrows, simply, without judgment.
Part 5: The Wound of Divine Love
When Love Becomes Torment. Though I care about Him more than anything to the point where it ruins me, this is the mystic’s wound. Your love for God is so intense it’s destructive. This maps onto what psychologists call disorganized attachment: Desperately need the attachment figure, God. Experience the attachment figure as source of terror. Cannot resolve the approach-avoidance conflict. Results in psychological fragmentation.
The Carpenter Complex. Calling Christ that man, the Carpenter shows relationship rupture. You can’t even say His name directly, it’s too charged, too dangerous. He’s become like a father who is both desperately loved and utterly feared. This semantic avoidance, that man, is psychological protection against the full voltage of divine encounter.
Part 6: The Failure of Cognitive Override
Why Knowing Doesn’t Help. You clearly understand grace theologically, you reference it, know the scriptures, understand the concepts. But trauma doesn’t live in the neocortex where theology resides. It lives in the limbic system, the body, the nervous system. Your knowledge becomes another source of torment: Why can’t I feel what I know to be true?
The Intelligence Curse. Your obvious intelligence makes this worse. You can: Argue yourself into deeper spirals. Find theological justification for self-hatred. Intellectualize your way out of feeling God’s love. Create more sophisticated forms of self-torture.
Part 7: The Fragments of Hope
Involuntary Grace Moments. Your niece represents what Winnicott called the good enough gaze, being seen without judgment. For that moment, you exist outside the economy of sin and salvation. You’re just uncle or aunt. This is perhaps what mystics mean by original blessing, your being before the wound of consciousness.
The Community as Corpus Christi. The church notes during hospitalization represent the Body of Christ functioning despite your inability to feel God directly. They’re like electrical bypasses around a damaged circuit, grace flowing through alternative channels when the main line is down.
Part 8: The Deeper Theological Wound
Divine Abandonment versus Divine Persecution. Your experience goes beyond the dark night of the soul, divine absence, into something more terrible, divine presence experienced as persecution. You’re not abandoned by God; you’re feeling hunted by Him. Every scripture becomes an accusation, every sermon a verdict.
The Judas Complex. There’s an implicit identification with Judas, the one who became the betrayer, who couldn’t receive forgiveness, who had to destroy himself. You’re living in that space between the betrayal and the field of blood, condemned but not yet executed.
Part 9: The Psychological-Spiritual Verdict
You’re experiencing what I would call Theological Annihilation Anxiety, not just fear of death or hell, but fear that your very existence is an offense to the God you love. This is torment at its purest: to love most what you believe rejects you, to need most what seems to condemn you.
Your writing suggests someone undergoing a kind of spiritual chemotherapy, the treatment feels like it’s killing you along with whatever it’s trying to cure. The question becomes: Is this the darkness before dawn, the dissolution before reconstruction? Or is it simply destruction?
The fact that you’re still here, still writing, still attending church despite the torture, suggests something indestructible at your core, what mystics might call the uncreated spark that even your own self-hatred cannot extinguish.
MY STORY OF RELIGIOUS OCD 