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I am
beginning to realize that I need some professional help, and yet I am having
a hard time accepting that. I have always tried to figure my problems out
by myself, and yet have never been able to do this. I have lived outwardly
as a “normal person” . . . while interiorly hiding terrible
guilt feelings and mental anguish. I do not dare tell anyone the truth about
me, that I have lived with secret interior misery and despair. I spend a
lot of time helping others, while all the while feeling like a total
hypocrite. . . . This problem is not new—looking back,
I can see a pattern of real spiritual scruples and false guilt from [my
childhood] and had a real spiritual dilemma that I did not know how to
handle and did not trust the adults in my life.
So, when a priest yelled at me . . . and kicked me
out of the confessional over asking a scrupulous question, at that point
I decided I would never go to confession until “I figured it out.”
The problem with scruples got worse and worse and I lived a double
life. . . . For [many] years, I only went to confession
and Communion once a year, which was a terrible anguish for me as I longed
to be able to be normal like everyone else. I tried to disguise the fact
I never received the Sacraments from my family and
friends. . . . I finally got fed up with it all and decided
to find out once and for all what sin was all about—what the big deal
about sex was. For the next 3 years I had a hidden side of me that got addicted
to learning about evil (on Internet), although exteriorly I was the same
as usual. [Eventually] I . . . realized I had wasted the
best years of my life, had never loved or been loved, and I had health problems
and depression. I had spent the majority of my life hiding the anguish inside
of me and not being able to turn to anyone. . . . [Now]
I am struggling to practice my Catholic Faith again. Yet, I am running into
the same old scruple patterns.
I decided to turn to an anonymous priest for help, and e-mailed
an “ask a priest website.” Here is . . . his response which was
upsetting.
If you can help me, I would appreciate it.
Dear Friend in Christ,
You say you don’t want to encourage scruples. With all due respect,
you entire message to me is classic scrupulosity. You are beating yourself
up and badly!! The more you frustrate yourself as to whether this or that
is a venial or mortal sin, the more you focus constantly on the frustration
of having the impure thoughts, then the more you are going to fall into the
pattern. You really need some professional help because you are a walking
advertisement for why one must be careful of living a life of scrupulosity.
You can get better with professional help and, I will bet you, you will not
be hurting yourself so much with all these gyrations of scrupulosity and
false guilt. Good luck. Get help now. God bless.
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 very child born into this world
is born into a pre-existing social world of language, science, technology,
art, literature, and so on. But even more profound than the mystery of the
sum total of all this factual information is the mystery of the child’s
own body. The child finds itself literally at the mercy of biological
processes—eating, vomiting, defecation, urination, bleeding, reproduction,
and death—that it can neither control nor comprehend. And so the child
will feel—rightly so—that the world “knows” something
that he or she does not know. Right from the beginning, then, the child is
located in a profound emotional space of “not knowing” and feeling
“left out.”
It’s an awkward and
uncomfortable place to be. And so we all devote considerable energy to overcoming
the feeling of “not knowing.” We might seek out intellectual knowledge
through formal education. We might engage in scientific research. We might
join country clubs, gangs, cults, cliques, or any other social organization
that purports to offer some secret “knowledge.” We might search
through myriads of pornographic images hoping for the special privilege of
seeing what is usually kept hidden. We might seek out “carnal
knowledge” through the body of another person and attempt to locate
the psychological agony of our bodily mystery in the pleasure—or
pain—of the other. Or we might create our own
fantasy worlds—with thoughts and images
of eroticism, heroism, revenge, or destruction—in which we can “figure
it out” on our own so as to possess the power and recognition we so
desperately crave.
Nevertheless, all the
“knowledge” in the world is nothing but a thin veil that hangs
over the dark anguish of helplessly “not knowing.” Standing before
the veil, suspecting our “not knowing,” we feel confused,
wretched, weak, and useless.
As for that priest, O Lord! where
is his tact and compassion? He sort of has the right idea, yet still he misses
the point. In fact, I have reproduced your long letter and his comments here
just to show how psychologically complicated the matter about scruples can
be.
The Unconscious
Conflict of Scruples
When you
are tormented with scruples you are essentially caught in an unconscious
conflict, such that even as you are confessing your sins you are secretly
trying to hide them.
In fact, you might be afraid
that everyone who reads this question will know exactly who you are—and
yet you are just one of millions, in every parish of every diocese of every
country. I’ve seen this problem with men and women, with the laity,
with religious, and with priests. It’s all the same thing: “If
anyone knew what I was really like, they wouldn’t want anything to do
with me.” So even as you try to confess—even as you ask for
help—you are trying to hide.
Confessing the
Psychological Motive
The solution to this dilemma
is that you don’t have to confess the psychological thoughts and fantasies
that cause your scruples; instead, you must confess the underlying
motive for the thoughts and fantasies.
In case I just lost you, don’t
worry; I’ll explain.
Every once in a while, for example,
while I’m praying the Rosary, I will find myself
drifting into fantasies—often sexual, but
not always—based in memories from things I did in the past. Once I notice
what’s happening and break out of the fantasy, I say, like a good
psychologist, “Why am I thinking about such-and-such right in the middle
of the Rosary? What’s going on?” And then I put the Rosary “on
pause” and start examining what has been happening to me recently and
how I feel about it all. In that examination
I usually discover some event from the day that left me feeling helpless
or useless or weak in some way. And then I make myself deal with that event
by confessing my weakness and helplessness and beg God for the strength to
endure the pain and for the guidance to deal with the problem. In other words,
the fantasy is a sort of intoxication, a drug-like “hit” that covers
up the pain I don’t want to accept. Once I recognize what’s happening,
I can stop it, and I can repent whatever it was in me that failed to
bring the pain directly to God in the first place.
And that, in essence, is perfect contrition. And as the Catechism
of the Catholic Church says (see § 1452 and § 1458), we don’t
have to confess venial sins because they can be resolved by perfect
contrition.
The Role of
Psychotherapy
Now, all of this is well and
good for a psychologist, but what is the average person to do? How can you
get to “the underlying motive for the thoughts and fantasies” if
you don’t even understand the language of the unconscious?
Well, that’s where psychotherapy
can be useful. In competent
psychodynamic psychotherapy you will learn the shocking
fact that everything you think and say and do has underlying
unconscious motives. Through repeated encounters with
the unconscious in
dreams and daily actions, as interpreted by the
psychotherapist, you begin to learn how to make honest
self-examinations of your life. In effect, you
will learn the language of the unconscious
defenses that keep producing those troubling
thoughts and fantasies and that keep you stuck in old behaviors: you will
learn about the deep emotional pain in your past from which those defenses
protect you, and you will learn how those defenses continue to function even
in the present. Especially, you will discover how you lie to yourself and
deceive yourself in every moment. And then, knowing all this, you will have
the resources to resolve those defenses, see through your spiritual blindness,
and change your behavior.
The point of all this is that
you don’t have to flagellate yourself because of
guilt about your thoughts and fantasies; instead,
you can interpret the thoughts and fantasies
to get to the real issues about confusion, weakness, and helplessness that
need to be healed.
Self-scrutiny
Without Psychotherapy
Sadly, finding a devout Catholic
psychotherapist can be as difficult as finding a needle in a hay stack.
Therefore,
 I
have made this website to teach you that you can accomplish through devout
prayer almost the same thing as psychotherapy.
 You
can receive insight into your personal psychology directly from the
Holy Spirit. After all, how do you think
Saint John of the Cross or Saint Teresa of Avila made such intense spiritual
progress at a time when psychology as a science didn’t even exist? They
did it through prayer based in
self-denial.
Nevertheless, the
fear of the self-denial part holds back many people
from any spiritual progress. How can you hear the “still small voice”
of the Holy Spirit if you’re always drowning it out with television
and movies and music and sports and all other
entertainment? It’s simply impossible.
To make any substantial spiritual progress, you have to
detach yourself from a world that does nothing
but infect you at every turn with its
sin and corruption.
Those who find their
“knowing” in the secular world are too arrogant and self-sufficient
to look beyond humanism, and for that very
reason they are always being deceived. But for those who aren’t deceived,
God—the epitome of what’s hidden from human eyes—resides beyond
the veil of human knowledge. In fact, to push past one’s weakness and
admit frankly that there is something more beyond “knowing” is
a confession in its own right: a confession that we aren’t deceived
by the veil, a confession that what we are looking for is profound
humility before God, and a confession that,
without God, we are broken and
wretched creatures, no matter how much we know
about the world.
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In fact, it’s
our desperate need to find a sense of “self” through
identification with the secular world that keeps
us enslaved to the fear that the
fraud of our “selves” will be discovered.
Only when we die to ourselves in Christ do
we experience the peace and security of His real presence that can never
be lost. |
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 So it’s your
choice. However you do it—through psychotherapy, or through intense
self-denial and prayer—you can learn to listen to and interpret your
fantasies, rather than act them out or fear
them, and thus you will be guided into real healing
for your psychological pain. Then, when you have learned to be
wretched {gracefully}, and can trust in Christ’s
mercy and His inexhaustible
love for all sinners, there will be no scruples
to obsess you. You can remain confident that no matter what you do, Christ
will never abandon you and that He will ceaselessly call you into
repentance and draw
you back to His grace.
Self-help
Counsels
The absolute key to overcoming
scruples is one clear concept:
repent. That is, admit what you have
done. Admit it to yourself. Admit it to God in prayer. Admit it to a priest
in Confession if it is a mortal sin. Just put it into language. Don’t
expect God to knock you off the altar rail as a sign from Heaven to tell
you that you are in a state of sin. You have to use your own
free will to take
responsibility for yourself.
If you keep stumbling and falling,
just keep repenting. God is infinitely patient, and, if their
love is sincere, there is a place in Heaven for even
the weak in courage. You may not be given responsibility and trust and counted
as great in the Kingdom—in fact, you might be more like a menial
servant—but at least you won’t be in
hell.
If you are
uncertain whether you have sinned:
1. |
Read the
Catechism of the Catholic Church to find out
what things are sins. Accept unconditionally, without grumbling or
protest, what the Catechism says. Then repent. |
2. |
If you can’t
find an answer in the Catechism, then search this
website. Then repent. |
3. |
If you can’t
find a clear answer anywhere, then say to yourself, “I’m not sure
I really sinned, but I love God too much to take a chance. So I will assume
it was a sin.” Then repent. |
What the
Catechism of the Catholic Church says:
1452 When
it arises from a love by which God is loved above all else, contrition is
called “perfect” (contrition of charity). Such contrition remits
venial sins; it also obtains forgiveness of mortal sins if it includes the
firm resolution to have recourse to sacramental confession as soon as
possible.
1458 Without being strictly necessary, confession of everyday
faults (venial sins) is nevertheless strongly recommended by the Church.
Indeed the regular confession of our venial sins helps us form our conscience,
fight against evil tendencies, let ourselves be healed by Christ and progress
in the life of the Spirit. By receiving more frequently through this sacrament
the gift of the Father’s mercy, we are spurred to be merciful as he
is merciful.
1855 Mortal sin destroys charity in the heart of
man by a grave violation of God’s law; it turns man away from God, who
is his ultimate end and his beatitude, by preferring an inferior good to
him.
1861 Mortal sin is a radical possibility of human freedom,
as is love itself. It results in the loss of charity and the privation of
sanctifying grace, that is, of the state of grace. If it is not redeemed
by repentance and God’s forgiveness, it causes exclusion from Christ’s
kingdom and the eternal death of hell, for our freedom has the power to make
choices for ever, with no turning back. However, although we can judge that
an act is in itself a grave offense, we must entrust judgment of persons
to the justice and mercy of God.
  
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Read a letter by Saint John
of the Cross
