People with obsessions want absolute security. They want to be perfectly certain in their life and in their decision making. The trouble is, in life there is no absolute certainty.
Reading this, my thoughts turned to obsessive behavior in the guise of religious scrupulousness, a subject of discussion for therapists treating the religious population. They discuss the question of how to know when someone has an obsessive compulsion.
That’s not what I want to talk about. For me OCD in a religious context raises a more fundamental question. When does religious law itself create obsessive compulsive behavior? Does the law make people stronger morally or does it actually overwhelm them to the point where they throw it all off?
It seems there are two aspects to this. When you are committed to a moral system, just as when you are committed to a relationship or to something critically valuable to you, your commitment is total. You don’t do things depending on how your mood strikes you. You do what is called for. In a relationship, you help the person in the exact way that they need help. The same is true in religious commitment. And the same is also true in other aspects of life.
Once I got a plant as a gift from a client at the end of the year of working with her. It was a magnificent, beautiful flower, but it was also delicate. It needed mineral water and it needed a very specified amount of water to survive. Needless to say I killed it. I felt terrible about it. I’m not very good at keeping up with nitty-gritty details like that. But the fact is, my good intentions were not enough. I couldn’t keep the flower alive by giving it “approximately” what it needed.
Then I thought of another more recent experience I had. After making a purchase they had a problem with the order because they had one digit on my credit card incorrect. You can’t give a credit card number with one digit wrong. It’s got to be exactly right, or it’s not right at all. It’s just not “it.”
This is the way it is with religious law. If you don’t follow the specifications of the mitzvah, you’re not doing the mitzvah. And it’s not only religious law but many areas of life where this is true. If you don’t pay attention to details you’ll suffer the consequences. What you’re trying to accomplish simply won’t work.
Yet, there are other times when the expectations and minutiae of detail, piling one stringency on another is so overwhelming that it defeats the purpose. The reality is not an obsessive-compulsive person pretending to be meticulous in following the law, rather the law creating obsessive-compulsive behavior.
What is required is for a person to do self-inquiry. Am I doing this because this is exactly how it has to be done or am I following my own obsessive need for absolute certainty, which is in any case impossible to have? (See The Doctor and the Soul, p. 191-195)