Catholic and OCD

The impact of OCD on a Catholic’s experience of vocation has been a soapbox of mine for quite some time. Vocation is a central theme in my book, which seems to be the primary reason people contact me for support. Oddly, I have found almost no research or even speculation on this topic.

This is one reason I feel called to the work I am pursuing. I would like to research the intersection of vocation and OCD myself, and ultimately write about it a great deal more. Thus, when I have thought about condensing my ideas into a brief blog post, I have always felt overwhelmed.

Indeed, I am increasingly convinced that vocation is not a wistfully-desirable side note to the thorny business of Christian living, but rather the mechanism through which the vital spark of Divine life in us is intended to inform everything we do. The impact of OCD on vocation then becomes, not an obscure academic interest, but an essential question for any Christian seeking to flourish in the face of OCD.

In order to make sense of this central role of vocation, one must be aware of the longstanding Christian tradition on discernment, a fraught topic for Catholics with OCD. When I was discerning my own vocation to marriage, my judgment was almost entirely eclipsed by my OCD. I have found that many of my readers share that experience.

In recent months, I have begun a deeper study of the Catholic tradition surrounding discernment, in hopes of understanding why and how OCD is so incapacitating to the process. I have many thoughts, and more still crystallizing. However, discernment itself is not the main focus of this post.

For today, I feel called to reflect on the contrast between my old, dysfunctional, static concept of vocation, and the dynamic vocational process I have been privileged to experience as I have grown and matured.

The Static Perspective

Due to my excellent Catholic catechetical formation, I understood the theoretical concept of a vocation fairly well from an early age. I was aware of the universal Christian call to holiness, and of the added dimension of a calling to a particular, committed state in life; and I even believed, on paper, that God calls some people to specific kinds of work or projects. However, because I had no experiential knowledge of an active discernment process, there was a disconnect between these intellectual beliefs and my day-to-day choices as a Christian.

Most of the time, I “coasted” on my moral formation. It is frequently possible to deduce what one is called to do simply by analyzing a situation in accordance with the Church’s teachings. For example, I could have confidence that I was not called to rob a bank, because that would be wrong. This method worked well enough for moral issues, but left me adrift when faced with prudential judgments, such as where to go to college, whom to date, and how to educate my children.

Even then, I would attempt to reach a prudent decision via a calculus of micro-analyses. I relied heavily on cost-benefit judgments, deferring to the opinions of others I deemed prudent, and logical evaluations designed to dig out “absolute” principles which could inform my judgments with certitude.

It is easy to see how OCD could get mixed up in that process. My intolerance of uncertainty made this open-ended sort of decision, well…intolerable to me. I obsessively analyzed and compulsively sought reassurance, which never satiated the beast of anxiety. However, underneath all that, I believe I was (and am!) compensating for a deeper lack of personal connection with God. The Catholic answer to “how can I know this is my vocation?” is not, “apply logic until you have eradicated all uncertainty.” It is, “God knows, and you can trust Him.”

Without that trust, I have always tended to view vocational discernment as a game of logic with deathly high stakes. Within this framework, I have also implicitly treated a vocation as a static, preformulated package that could be deduced once and for all.

The Dynamic Perspective

Before anyone accuses me of heresy, I want to be clear that I am not suggesting that prudence does not involve the intellect. I do not advise throwing caution to the winds and ignoring reasonable warning signs. But in my experience, this error lies at the opposite end of the spectrum from the error to which I am prone.

The Catholic tradition identifies virtue as a “mean”, a middle ground between two extremes. Thus, although one can certainly be imprudent by lacking caution and ignoring right judgment, one can also be imprudent by deifying reason into a sort of omnipotent faculty which can solve all our problems unaided. I believe I am more often guilty of the latter than the former.

People who trend significantly away from the mean in one direction are unlikely to wake up and find themselves suddenly at the other extreme. On the contrary, they often have to push themselves towards the other extreme in order to have a chance of reaching the middle ground. That has been my experience in the area of prudence.

In any case, it turns out that a vocation is a calling that occurs within the context of a relationship. It is not an abstract logic problem, designed for one to figure out by sheer intellectual prowess. On the contrary, the “correct” answer is merely what God is calling us to do; and the only way of knowing with confidence is to ask Him. In order for this process to move smoothly, then, our relationship with God needs to be characterized by trust.

While it is true that lack of trust can lead to disobedience to the calling, which can make one miserable, the answer to this problem is not to double down on one’s stance of distrust. This results in the attitude that, “I need to be even more wary, because I might get this wrong.” That wariness directly inhibits the growth of trust necessary for functional discernment.

In any case, I do not think most of us Catholics with OCD intend to disobey God’s call. On the contrary, we are terrified of misinterpreting it. Our anxiety is a result of pressure to make a choice, on the one hand, and uncertainty about which choice is correct, on the other. Unfortunately, that very anxiety and lack of trust in both God and the validity of our own emotions as signposts pointing to Him blocks us from turning to the one person who could give us clarity. Oh, we undoubtedly try to turn to Him, but we have no instinct for how that process should look or feel.

I have come a long way in my relationship with God, my sense of trust, and my ability to discern His will, although I still struggle a great deal. Despite these challenges, I feel like I have finally glimpsed what it could be like to experience an ongoing, dynamic conversation with God about what He is calling me to do. As an example, I want to paint the picture of how I ended up in graduate school.

At the time of that discernment, I had already drafted most of my manuscript, started a website, and done a good deal of networking. As I worked, I noticed an increasingly lively awareness of God’s goodness carrying me forward. In reflecting on my life, I had begun to notice how God had been pulling the threads all along. I felt like I was hearing the swell of a symphony, beginning with a single violin. In fact, during that time period, I would often experience moments when I was almost literally hearing an orchestra as pieces of my life swung into perspective.

I began to research mental health degrees. I did not think I could complete a program that required clinicals, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized I could not in good conscience help people the way I wanted to help them without a clinical degree. I made a couple of inquiries. Before I knew it, I was speaking with an admissions advisor.

At the same time, I was engaged in an ongoing dialogue with my husband. The prospect of this undertaking was exciting, attractive, made me feel purposeful and alive; but would the toll on our family be too great? Could we manage it financially? Would our children suffer? Would my husband suffer?

My husband encouraged me to move forward with the process. At each juncture, we decided to take the next step and just, “see what happens.”

I applied.

I was accepted.

Then, one week, I started classes. Lo and behold, I was in graduate school. It would seem that my discernment was complete.

My journey since then has not always been easy. Graduate school has been a serious undertaking, which has changed many of the patterns of our family’s daily life. Nevertheless, I have continually been carried along by a sense that God wants me here, at this step, in this moment. I have grappled with the difficult work, and questioned God’s will for me many times; but that process has only served to mature me.

When my trust and connection with God has faltered, He has pulled me back on course, sometimes communicating through tangible circumstances when my anxiety has impeded my ability to hear His voice again. For example, He used a medical emergency to convince me that I needed to drop to part-time academic status, a choice I anxiously feared would be the “cowardly” way out of my difficulties.

The revelation to me has been the discovery that I can cooperate with God’s will, not just in the large choices like enrolling in graduate school, but in each moment. Sometimes He is calling me to relax an academic expectation so that I can focus on my family. Other times He is calling me to focus on studying a specific topic which will end up being meaningful to my family.

I have concluded that God did not just call me to “become a counselor.” Rather, He called me to take the 1000 steps in that direction that have gotten me to my current point. Where will it all lead? I do not know, but I trust that He does. In a paradoxical twist, I have discovered that there is a “correct” answer, not just for big choices, but for each moment; but this is a relief rather than a source of anxiety, because I do not have to deduce it on my own. I just need to ask.