How to Live with Doubts

In general and with OCD

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

I have doubts. My doubts have doubts. Sometimes those doubts grow doubts until I’m in so deep that I forget what the original doubt even was and I’m not sure where I am or what I’m doing.

Some doubting is normal and healthy. It’s part of our creational design to keep us safe and conscientious. This morning I didn’t feel my phone on me before I left for work, so I had a doubt about whether I had it with me. It turned out it was upstairs. That doubt saved me time! That was a good doubt based on my senses and reason. But some doubts are just in the imagination and they drag us down paths of “what ifs” until we are lost and confused and anxious. When we doubt whether we said the “wrong thing” to someone even though we have no direct evidence in the here and now that we did, that’s an obsessional doubt (here I’m using the paradigm of I-CBT [Inference-Based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy]). Or if we’re afraid that our kids are in danger when there’s no evidence in the here and now that they are, that’s an obsessional doubt. Or if we’re doubting that we’ve harmed someone when there’s no evidence of harm, that’s an obsessional doubt. Of course, it’s always possible that any of these doubts are true, but it’s also possible that I’m going to start growing hair on the top of my head again. Just because it’s possible doesn’t mean it’s relevant to the here and now. We all have to learn to deal with doubts. And what I’ve learned is to focus on what God has given me to deal with in the here-and-now reality, not the world of my imagination, whether that be fears of things done in the past or worries about things in the future. I can’t say that I do this perfectly, but it has been a key to addressing my OCD and my general understanding of doubts.

It’s worth noting that some doubts are important to take seriously. When your senses (and as I-CBT teaches, this includes your common sense) tells you that there is something there, something you have direct evidence of, you should act on the doubt to try to resolve it. For example, when I sensed my phone was missing before work, I acted to resolve it. When I had doubts about the wellness of my shoulder based on the shooting pain I felt, I acted on that and saw a doctor who (eventually) discovered the problem. But in each case there was something really there that supported my doubt. If my shoulder felt fine and I just had a random thought that it could be injured, that would be an obsessional doubt.

Much of this is taken directly from I-CBT’s system. But I see it as a common sense approach to dealing with doubts. It accepts that doubts are possibly true, but that in our day-to-day lives we only choose to act on doubts, we only see them as relevant, when they come with some sort of sense information. If the doubt is just in our imagination, then we can let it go.

A point that I-CBT trainers like to make is that we use our common sense this way all the time. When we cross the street, we look both ways (using our senses naturally) and once it is clear, we cross. We don’t doubt our senses and check over and over and over and over again. We trust our sight and act. If there is no danger, we don’t imagine a truck driving at us and freeze on the sidewalk and refuse to cross. We trust our senses. There is no truck there, so I can cross. The point is that in some areas of our lives (especially for those with OCD), we stop trusting our senses and start trusting our imagination’s story.

I-CBT, as a secular account of OCD (and therefore, in my opinion, doubt), doesn’t have an explanation for why we should trust our senses. It just points out that we generally do and that’s how we generally navigate the world.

But as a Christian, I believe there’s more going on. If God gave us our senses, including our common sense, then even though they may be imperfect, I believe he desires us to trust them to make reasonable decisions in life. To drive cars, make meals, bathe children, do work, run errands, make judgement calls, and so on. Will we sometimes make mistakes? Yes! We will! Sometimes our senses will deceive us or we will miss something. But there is grace for that. Errors and even sins are part of the human experience, and the proper response is repentance and learning from our mistakes and growing. But we can overall trust our senses, prayerfully, and act. That’s what we do everyday in 99.99% of our lives, and with good reason: because God is provident over creation including our senses. It’s only when confronted by a doubt that makes us vulnerable that we begin to stop trusting our ability to use our senses to make wise decisions as God intended.

Does this mean that we can just label these doubts as “imaginary” and the feeling will go away? Not in my experience. The doubts are based in the imagination and therefore irrelevant. But the doubts are still very visceral for some people (especially if you have OCD). But here’s what you can do. You can notice reality. Notice that what your senses are telling you, and then notice that the doubt is coming from your imagination and therefore must be irrelevant to your life here and now. And then do the next thing. Go back to your work. Go back to playing with your children. Go back to exercising. Go back to reading. Demonstrate to your mind with your body that this isn’t relevant to the here-and-now reality. The feeling of guilt and urgency and anxiety may linger, but over time it will dissipate, in my experience.

God wants us to live in the real world. The imagination is a powerful world, and a beautiful world to play in creatively, but not a world to live in anxiously. God desires us to live in reality, to be grounded in his creation, not lost in fantasies of our doubts. When you struggle to know whether you are dealing with a reasonable doubt or an obsessive doubt, pray for wisdom and clarity, trust your God-given senses, and look for reality. Know that there is grace upon grace for you. That God is a God of compassion. And that “whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything.” (1 John 3:20). Which means, among other things, that even when you condemn yourself because of doubts, God knows your righteousness before him because of Christ’s finished work on the cross. Rest in that.

Whether you have OCD or not, we all must live with intrusive and obsessive doubts at some point or another. Waiting anxiously for a loved one to come home late at night and speculating about a car crash, hearing someone cough and worrying about getting the flu, or fearing you said the wrong thing. Whatever it might be. Some of us are more temperamentally prone to these thoughts than others. But in the end, we all must learn to trust our God-given senses rather than be seduced by the wilderness of the imagination. And that means trusting that God loves us enough to take care of us. Not that he won’t ever let any difficult things happen to us, but that he will work our good through those difficult times. Because he loves us. That’s his promise to us. So we focus on what is relevant in the here and now and trust in the One who preserves us through the here and now.

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For more on this method, particularly of treating OCD, see The Doubt Illusion.

Also note that this advice is not therapy or replacement for therapy. Seek a trained therapist if you are struggling. This is just my internalization of what I’ve learned from I-CBT plus my own wisdom, whatever that is.