How to Avoid Avoidance When You Have Scrupulosity OCD

One of the most common messages I get in my inbox is people expressing their struggles with and concerns about how avoidance has come up in their Scrupulosity Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) journey. 

For some, avoidance of religious or moral triggers has been there since the very beginning as a reaction to intrusive thoughts about worthiness – for others, it’s a more recent development that stems from feeling overwhelmed by anxiety. 

However, no matter the reason avoidance comes up, the important thing to remember is this: it is, ultimately, a compulsion.

Avoidance might feel like healing, but it isn’t

About a year into my Scrupulosity OCD treatment, the exposures I was doing as part of my Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) therapy progressed in intensity. I went from being assigned to spend an hour doing something unproductive to going a day without saying a prayer. It wasn’t long before I found myself getting overwhelmed.

At one point, my therapist asked me to skip church one week, even though I wasn’t sick, as part of my treatment. Not only did this result in a Sunday full of anxiety, but it also made going to church the next week more difficult because I was feeling guilty.

Over time, this process snowballed, until eventually, I was coping with my intrusive thoughts and anxiety by avoiding all religious triggers, and I became stuck in the OCD cycle of avoidance.

During that time, it was easy to convince myself that I was healing because I wasn’t necessarily feeling bothered that I was not participating fully in religion anymore. Rather, I was fully focused on relieving my OCD anxiety.

But what I was actually doing was strengthening OCD’s power over me. I wasn’t healing – I was running away from healing because I was too scared of facing what overcoming OCD would entail.

How to avoid avoidance as a compulsion

All of these feelings and experiences with avoidance as a compulsion are valid. However, the reason it’s important to learn how to avoid avoidance as a compulsion is because without doing so, entering OCD recovery is not possible. 

In my experience, here is the most helpful way to overcome turning to avoidance when you have Scrupulosity OCD: Treat it as you would any other compulsion.

This means removing the emotional attachment behind your intrusive thoughts and compulsions. For instance, in the example I shared above, I initially gave into avoidance because I felt emotionally attached to the guilt of missing church. 

By developing the skill of reacting to intrusive thoughts with neutrality, it will be easier to resist doing the compulsion. 

There are many different ways to think of this concept, including:

• Moving towards what scares you 

• Sitting with discomfort without trying to fix it

• Being mindful

But no matter what way you say it, the principle is the same: the ability to respond to OCD with acknowledgement, but not fear, is what OCD recovery is all about.

Overcoming compulsive avoidance

As you work towards overcoming the compulsion of avoidance, make sure you are patient with yourself. OCD is a serious disorder that requires time to recover from, so beating yourself up for doing a compulsion is never the answer.

Additionally, working with a therapist to ensure you have the support you need and that you don’t move towards replacement compulsions, like reassurance-seeking, is essential. 

Lastly, remember that when it comes to OCD recovery, you’re working towards stopping the compulsion – not the intrusive thoughts. In other words, you can’t control what thoughts you get, but you can control how you react to them, and by doing that, those thoughts slowly begin to have less and less power over you.

For more information about avoiding avoidance when you have Scrupulosity OCD, check out

this podcast episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/simply-scrupulosity/id1789213077?i=1000761871965.