To add to the recent interviews we’ve posted regarding scrupulosity, here is an excerpt from The Imp of the Mind that illistrates successful CBT treatment of scrupulosity:
Father Jack, a priest in his late fifties, came to our clinic several years ago for help with inappropriate sexual obsessions that threatened to ruin his professional and personal life. For him, the worst thing he could imagine doing would be to be caught staring at a young woman’s private parts.
Seeing an attractive young woman walking down the street or talking with a female parishioner one-on-one, the priest would have the thought and urge to stare at her buttocks, breasts, or crotch. Over the years he fought this urge with all his strength but with little success.
He had been but a teenager when the thoughts began. When he had told his superior about them, he was told they would pass with time, and to be patient. Only they didn’t. It wasn’t that he had trouble maintaining his vow of chastity – that he was sure he could do. Rather, it was the vulgar images that played over and over in his mind and the way he felt compelled or stare at women’s private parts. The very thing he was most afraid of doing – the very thing that seemed most disgusting to him – why was he having these very thoughts and urges?
No one who saw him performing ceremonies in his church knew the torment going on inside his mind. Although he had taken the vow of chastity, his mind refused to cooperate. Finally he confided to a parishioner about the thoughts and images that were forcing themselves into his mind whenever he saw an attractive female on the streets or in church. He soon regretted this confession. He got a call from his superior, who told him about a complaint he had received from a parishioner and a warning that the father might be a dangerous man. Providentially, the superior had heard of obsessive thoughts like Father Jack’s, and he arranged for him to receive treatment at our clinic.
Father Jack told me that he had read my book and others about how to deal with obsessions, and he wanted to know if he had understood them correctly: Was it true that the best thing to do was to stop resisting his obsessions, and to put himself in the situations that triggered his obsessions rather than avoid them?
As Father Jack returned for his weekly, and then biweekly, visits, I was pleased to hear that he was feeling better…he now noticed that he no longer needed to fight the obsessions or to avoid attractive women on the streets of Boston. By letting himself look at whatever he wanted to look at; by letting whatever thoughts came simply pass through his mind; by recognizing the bad thoughts as nothing more than thoughts – he had cured himself of his obsessions.
Fortunately for Father Jack, simply stopping thought suppression and no longer avoiding places where he would see attractive women were enough to tame his bad thoughts.
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