Why Your Self-Love Shouldn’t Be Tied to Your Religion

When I was on a walk one windy afternoon, I came to some troubling realizations. First, I only respected myself when I felt I was being obedient. Second, I struggled to have self-compassion when I made a mistake. Third, and ultimately, if I didn’t think I was being righteous, I couldn’t love myself. 

Does that sound familiar? If so, this blog is for you.

Religious-based self-love

When your self-love is rooted in your religious beliefs, that means it is conditional upon things like:

• Whether or not you’re following the “rules”

• If you’re spending your time wisely

• If you’re serving people enough

• If enough people love you (because that means you are righteous)

… And the list goes on. 

However, the harsh truth is that if the positive feelings you feel towards yourself fluctuate so much, especially when it's dependent on how you believe you are measuring up within the religious context, you don’t actually have true self-love at all.

Religious discourse and self-love

I’m not suggesting that all religions, or even that any specific religion, promote individuals having these types of beliefs. In fact, there are plenty of religious people who don’t experience this type of unhealthy relationship with self-love. 

But for those that do, I think it’s important to take a moment and acknowledge that, especially for those individuals who have Scrupulosity Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), it can be easy to get the discourse mixed up.

For example, OCD can cause concepts such as what it means to be humble, how to interact with guilt and the best way to go about repenting to be confusing and muddy.

But this doesn’t mean that religious people who have Scrupulosity OCD can’t have a healthy relationship with self-love.

How to move away from religion-based self-love

In order to untie your self-love from your religious beliefs, it’s important to stop focusing so much on obedience and what your actions do/do not say about you as a person. But I’ll be the first person to admit that it isn’t always that simple!

Most of us with Scrupulosity OCD have a deep-rooted fear of doing anything wrong. We worry that if we stop focusing so much on obedience, we will stop being obedient enough, and therefore that we will face some negative consequences.

But I’m here to point out the OCD-ness of that line of thinking – the fact that if you keep buying into that reasoning, OCD will always be able to keep you trapped! I would even go so far as to say that if you always believe that, you will never be able to recover from OCD.

So how can you take the steps to face that fear? Try thinking of it as an experiment. What would happen to your relationship with yourself if you didn’t repent everyday? If you didn’t hate yourself when you messed up? If you didn’t try so hard to be good enough all the time?

You might find that even though it feels scary, it might not actually be that scary at all.

Finding true self-love in OCD recovery

Recovering from OCD is all about running towards your values. It can take some time to figure out what those values are because OCD has been dictating what they are for so long. That’s why you may currently believe that you are just a person who really values self-discipline and obedience and righteousness. 

However, what I have found as I have recovered from Religious OCD is that I actually don’t value those things as much as I thought I did. And that opened the whole world up – it made room for me to love and accept all of who I am.