Courtney Schmidt is the administrator of a Facebook support group that has hundreds of members who each, like her, wanted a place to go for encouragement as a Christian with obsessive compulsive disorder. In fact, Schmidt says that her struggles with OCD brought her closer to God than anything else, even though she had an unhealthy performance mindset in the beginning.
“There’s a particular type of OCD called scrupulosity. And that is an obsession with religion. And for me, it turned into being scared that I wasn’t religiously perfect enough. So how that would work is I would be scared: ‘Oh, what if I’m not obeying the Word of God? Am I saying something wrong? Am I doing something wrong?’
“As a Christian, we know all of our sins are forgiven. However, there’s a little side note in the Bible about an unpardonable sin. … I knew that I was forgiven, but the obsession that I had gained was that I was not forgiven. And I was praying constantly for forgiveness and on loop and trying to do things that would make me worthy.”
Finding a Christian therapist, along with the encouraging fellowship she received through her Facebook group, is what really helped her out of her lowest points by reshaping her perspective, Schmidt says on the Charisma News podcast on the Charisma Podcast Network. The therapist in particular would remind Schmidt of the truths of God’s Word and combat the cycle of lies in her head.
“A lot of it was her putting it into perspective and saying, ‘God does forgive you’—and not saying it too much, because that gives in to the OCD—but it would be saying, when it comes down to it, OCD aside, ‘God loves you. … He understands what you’re going through,'” Schmidt says. ” … There’s a lot of times you feel lost—[there’s] that little part of you [that says to God,] ‘Have You forgotten about me?’ So it’s really that encouragement of, no, God is still with you; God is on your side.”
Although Schmidt hasn’t been miraculously healed from her OCD, she is in a phase of recovery, thanks to God and the help of people around her. To listen to the rest of her story, hear the entire episode here.
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