Matt's Audio Letter of the Week

All right.

Hello and welcome to today's FBL, or Feel Better Letter.

This is Matt, and I hope you’re having a great week.

Today I’m going to talk a little more specifically about a niche or subtheme of OCD called scrupulosity.

Scrupulosity is when OCD and fear essentially latch on and project onto God—your salvation, eternal life, sin, and anything related to one’s faith.

It happens across every religion, so scrupulosity is really a categorical term for when OCD becomes religious.

Now, I want to talk about why scrupulosity has nothing to do with God. I know that might catch you off guard, but as someone who’s gone through scrupulosity and no longer struggles with it, and who’s helped many people overcome it, I have a pretty good idea of what it’s like and what the healing journey looks like.

The first thing to understand is that scrupulosity is not a God problem—it’s a fear problem.

A lot of people will say, “Well, my mind keeps saying this or that—what if I committed this sin, what about the number 666, what about eternal salvation?” Or it might latch onto existential questions like “What is God?”

The fear creates a doubt or concern, and you think that finding the answer will appease the fear. But the whole thing that drives scrupulosity is fear and guilt.

Now, in almost every major religion, the defining characteristic of God is not fear, rage, or guilt. It’s almost universally described as love—benevolent, abundant love.

So when people say, “God is creating my fear or guilt,” that’s against the nature of what most of us believe about God. Fear doesn’t come from God. It comes from us—our own limitations, our own minds, our nervous system. We project fear onto God.

If God were the cause of fear—and God is universal, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent—then every single person on earth would experience that same fear. But that’s not the case. Even within your own congregation, some people struggle with scrupulosity while others have a completely different relationship with fear, faith, and God.

That’s why scrupulosity is individualistic. It’s your own fear being projected.

And when you try to solve scrupulosity as if it were a God problem, you’ll never win. There will always be another doubt, another concern, another thought. You’ll keep seeking answers outside yourself—whether through a clergy member, a religious text, or rituals.

But once you realize that fear is within you, and you are the one projecting it, you can approach it differently.

So here’s the key point: if you’re dealing with scrupulosity, you have to let go of the idea that it has anything to do with God. It has everything to do with fear. Only then can you work at it correctly.

If you approach it from a God perspective, you’ll project your own fear and limitations onto God and sustain the fear loop. That will keep you stuck.

But if you approach it from a fear perspective—understanding the fear loop and how it works—you can begin to confront fear, release it, break the loop, and transcend fear. As you rise into higher levels of consciousness, the truth about God becomes self-evident. It’s not a source of fear—it’s peace, revelation, and trust.

And that’s very different from performing religious behaviors to try to appease your fear and convincing yourself it’s about God. If you’re doing things no one else is doing, holding yourself to rules no one else follows, that’s a self-created idea rooted in fear. If it doesn’t apply to everyone, then it doesn’t apply to anyone.

So when you’re operating from fear, it’s important to become aware of it. There’s a big difference between fear and faith.

Faith is trust. When you have faith in God, you feel trusting, peaceful, safe, and still. Fear, on the other hand, feels contracted, worried, and guilty.

Faith isn’t just an idea in your mind—like “I think this, therefore I have faith.” Faith is an embodied state.

And when you see scrupulosity this way, you realize the only place you ever need to work is within you. Cultivating a true state of trust will completely transform your understanding of faith.

I hope this was helpful. I just wanted to share some thoughts on this.

We’ll be releasing a new scrupulosity guide soon, and I’ll make sure to send out the link when it’s available.

Wishing you a great day and a great week, and I look forward to talking with you soon.

-Matt