top of page
Search

Is My Intrusive Thought OCD or Something Else? A Clinician Explains

nathanaelschlecht2
Aug 24
3 min read

Updated: 6 days ago

Slow-shutter spin through tree canopy and sky, rings of green and light
Round and round, waiting for the spinning to count as an answer.

In an interrogation room, the questioning never really ends when someone confesses. It ends when the questioner believes the confession, and those are not the same event. A person can say the words, get the tone right, watch the officer’s shoulders drop…. and still feel the next question forming before the door closes behind them. Confession is more like a temporary pause bought at the price of doing it again.


Religious OCD builds the same room inside a person’s own mind and appoints the person as both suspect and interrogator.


The mechanism is simple to describe and miserable to live inside. A thought arrives, something like what if I didn’t really mean that prayer or what if that thought I just had was unforgivable. The mind treats the thought as an accusation requiring a formal response. So, the mind responds…. re-praying the prayer with more sincerity this time, replaying the moment to check the tone, searching scripture or a pastor’s words for the exact sentence that will settle it. Each response produces a few minutes, sometimes a few hours, of quiet. Then the next accusation arrives, usually a slight variation on the last one.


This is where the confusion tends to live. From the inside, the whole process feels like devotion. Checking, confessing, re-examining…. these look like the marks of a serious conscience. A person in the middle of it will often say some version of I just want to be sure I’m right with God and mean it completely. 


Genuine doubt and religious OCD can produce identical sentences. The difference shows up in what happens next. A real theological question, a real moral concern, can be turned over once or twice, sat with, maybe brought to a trusted person, and then set down. It doesn’t need a ritual attached to it to feel resolved or have it resolved the way most honest thinking resolves, with information, with time, with the simple fact that a person examined it and reached a conclusion they can live inside. OCD’s experience of the same question doesn’t accept a conclusion because it accepts only the next round of checking.


There’s a marker worth watching for, and it’s whether the thought drags a compulsion behind it. A thought that can be noticed and left alone is doing what thoughts normally do, but a thought that demands a specific ritual response before it will quiet down, even briefly, is the other. The content of religious thoughts makes this especially hard to see, because refusing the compulsion can feel like refusing God rather than refusing a symptom.


None of this makes the fear less real while it’s happening. It relocates where the real work needs to happen, from the content of the thought to the structure underneath it. The question stops being is this thought true and becomes does this thought need a ritual to survive.


That recognition doesn’t arrive all at once because it tends to hold for a while, then slip, then hold again, a little longer each time.


A person doesn't have to sort this out alone. Naming which room a thought belongs in, conviction or compulsion, is easier with someone trained to see the difference from the outside.

Nathanael "Nando" Schlecht is the founder of Nando Therapy, a Licensed Associate Counselor and trauma therapist based in Tucson, AZ, specializing in complex trauma, dissociation, and nervous system regulation. He is trained in DBR, Brainspotting, Ego State Therapy, EMDR, and ERP (Exposure and Response Prevention). Offering in-person sessions in Tucson and online therapy throughout Arizona.



Related Reading:




Comments

bottom of page