What Moral Scrupulosity Feels Like

It’s admirable when people strive to be decent and morally upstanding, especially when they are setting an example to others. However, sometimes there is something sinister and overwhelming that drives certain people to be good. Moral scrupulosity is a type of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) that urges a person to become intensely preoccupied with being a good person.

Sadly, it also causes a person to feel extreme anxiety, guilt, shame, exhaustion, and fear of being exposed as a fraud. It is as if they have a voice in their head constantly criticizing their actions, shining a spotlight on their mistakes, and making their small errors feel like unforgivable sins.

Being a decent person takes effort, and it’s not always easy to make the right choices. However, moral OCD causes intense distortions in a person’s view of themselves. Even a person who has a solid reputation can end up feeling like a moral failure because of the intrusive thoughts that surround moral OCD.

As with all forms of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, it is possible to treat moral scrupulosity. First, however, you must understand how and to what extent it is affecting you.

Not Just About People-Pleasing

On the surface of things, moral scrupulosity often looks a lot like people-pleasing. People-pleasers need more than the average amount of reassurance from others, and the same is true for those with moral OCD. Both people-pleasers and those with moral scrupulosity try to keep others happy, and both want to be seen as kind, thoughtful, generous, and decent. The difference lies in their inner monologue and motivations.

People-pleasers feel the need to make others happy and to keep the peace in every environment. They will compromise their boundaries, disregard their personal preferences, and allow themselves to be taken advantage of to a degree. However, people pleasers do not experience the same inner monologue and intrusive thoughts as those with OCD. Also, people-pleasing habits greatly differ from OCD compulsions.

Moral scrupulosity hijacks a person’s conscience and takes over their actions. As with other kinds of OCD, there is a voice in their head constantly criticizing and challenging them to do certain things, or ridiculing them for not doing certain things.

For example, something as simple as drinking from a plastic straw can spark internal turmoil for someone with moral OCD. A people-pleaser might feel a twinge of guilt for the environment while sipping from a plastic straw. A person with moral scrupulosity will inwardly berate themselves for hours, framing this simple act as hypocrisy and moral failure.

What Moral Scrupulosity Sounds Like

There are two components to every type of obsessive compulsive disorder: intrusive thoughts and ritualistic or habitual actions. Moral scrupulosity is a ridiculing, criticizing, and sometimes threatening inner voice that spurs panic, fear, anxiety, and shame. It might be an echo of someone you know, or it might take on the quality of your own voice, but more cruel.

You will have thoughts like, “Who do you think you are, pretending to be like this?” or “You are being fake, and everyone will notice.” Sometimes your efforts will be singled out, and you will have thoughts like, “No matter what you do, you will never reach the standards you should,” or “You should have felt worse about that.”

None of these thoughts comes anything close to being positive, encouraging, or uplifting, and only results in you feeling worse about yourself. Most of them will have you questioning your self-worth, and some will cause you to wonder if you are a sociopath, a narcissist, or something worse.

Moral Scrupulosity in Action

Moral OCD mostly exists in your head. As with all OCD, the intrusive thoughts frequently lead to compulsive behavior and ritualistic habits. Many of these habits don’t appear to be obsessive or compulsive, but they are connected to the feelings that come from moral scrupulosity.

Some of the most common habits connected to moral scrupulosity are confessing, apologizing, and seeking reassurance. Feeling constantly guilty or on the verge of moral failure will lead you to scramble in an effort to save your reputation or prove your worth. You might have constant conversations with your spouse, partner, confidante, or pastor about your failures, or you might obsessively journal your fears and anxieties.

With moral OCD, you likely replay conversations over in your head, especially if you hurt someone with your words or were dishonest about something. Even when you feel as if you performed well socially, you still review your words and actions.

You will search for flaws, mistakes, or breaches of social etiquette, which you will use to berate yourself afterwards. These performance reviews become a ritual of sorts after any interaction or conversation you have.

Sometimes you will feel compelled to balance the scales with your actions. For example, in penitence for drinking from a plastic straw, you might donate more money than you can afford to a wildlife rescue fund. Actions like these, while hardly ever practical, become important ways for you to prove your morality and challenge your hypocrisy. They are also a way for you to punish personal wrongdoing and prove that you have leveled up your inner goodness.

Besides having a harsh inner-monitoring system, engaging in costly good deeds, and feeling compelled to confess your wrongdoing constantly, moral scrupulosity also leads to rigid rule-keeping. For you, rules are less about maintaining order or discipline and more about heavy ethics and social purity.

Guidelines become commandments, and failure on your behalf to comply with the code is an intense moral failing that you will struggle to repent from. You will likely also avoid getting involved in anything that feels morally gray or ambiguous. This leads you to pass up certain job opportunities, relationships, or hobbies if they seem like they will lead down a morally dubious path.

Free To Fail

As with all forms of OCD, moral scrupulosity is treatable with certain therapies. Forefront among these is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP). Recognizing the impact of your thoughts and actions is the start, and from there, you must be willing to feel uncomfortable as your worldview and belief system are challenged.

Recovery from moral OCD can only be gradual. You cannot change intrusive thoughts and compulsive actions overnight, nor would it be healthy if you could. CBT challenges the inner beliefs that surround moral scrupulosity, and ERP exposes you to different thoughts and challenges you to try new actions in response to them.

At first, it is unnerving to replace automatic thoughts like “I am a terrible person” with new thoughts like “Even when I make a mistake, I remain a decent person.” In time, your reflexive thoughts and actions begin to shift, and you will find yourself less preoccupied with your own failures and more focused on your triumphs and breakthroughs.

Somewhere out there, faith exists without fear, and love overrides guilt. Grace is not simply a concept applicable to other people who have earned it. Grace is a force that changes those who are most in need of it and most undeserving of it. Although it might be hard to believe, life does not have to be this difficult forever. Not only are you capable of change, but you are worthy of it.

Dealing with any type of OCD is overwhelming. Simply knowing you have an issue is only the start; now you must get help for it.

We host an online catalog that lists the details of many different counselors, where we hope you will find someone who can help you. If you would prefer to speak with people to arrange a meeting with a counselor, our reception team would love to help you. We hope you will find someone who can help you recover from OCD for good.