The Scrupulosity Self-Help Trap: Is Your Faith a DIY Project?

I come from a family that loves DIY (do-it-yourself) projects. My dad just renovated my horrible 1977 kitchen. My husband just replaced the insulation in our attic. My mom quilted me a table runner for my dining room table. And I happily spent an afternoon installing black acoustic foam panels in my little basement studio (check it out here, if you haven’t seen my new YouTube studio)! But all this DIY work got me thinking about scrupulosity’s self-help trap. You know, DIY projects aren’t just for the house or yard. Some people turn spirituality into a do-it-yourself experience.

And that’s a project that never makes us feel good.

Let me describe for you the DIY thought spiral of someone I’ll call Ella.* Ella was anxious because she didn’t know if she was saved. She thought and thought and thought about what the problem could be, and she came to the conclusion that she didn’t believe she was a sinner.

That was her problem–or so she thought.

Ella’s thought process took her back to when she had first confessed Christ. Had she really wept and felt true conviction for her sins? Did she truly, truly see herself as a despicable sinner in need of Christ? Or had she merely confessed Christ as a way to escape eternal death? She became convinced that her situation was dire and needed immediate DIY renovation efforts.

Ella tried to forcefully convince herself of her own sinfulness and felt quite guilty about the fact that she didn’t feel guilty. She read books about the doctrine of human depravity and she tried to wrangle her mind up to a high pitch of emotion–preferably to the point of crying. “I try to make myself cry,” she said, “So that God knows I’m sincere about wanting forgiveness.”

These attempts became cyclical. She returned to them over and over, searching for relief in her frantic DIY efforts.

But at some deeper level, Ella resented this cycle. She dreaded having to manipulate her emotions in order to feel accepted by God. She dreaded thinking about her salvation, but she couldn’t stop thinking about it. No matter how hard she tried to feel her sinfulness, Ella never truly reached a place of deep, abiding assurance of salvation.

Ella’s husband, pastor, and biblical counselor gave her conflicting advice. Her husband said to just ignore it and focus on the love of God. Her pastor (who had never heard of religious OCD) urged her to search her heart for any “strongholds” that could be preventing the work of God’s grace. Her biblical counselor used scripture to argue against Ella’s thoughts, but this only made her feel worse.

What was happening?

Was it possible that Ella had fallen for scrupulosity’s self-help trap? Was she trying to achieve in her own power a work that was wholly God’s? What is the scrupulosity self-help trap, and how can we avoid it?

Scrupulosity’s Self-Help Trap

About a year ago, I published a blog post with one of the most significant ideas I’ve written in relation to assurance of salvation: the problem of viewing salvation as a formulaic, mechanistic set of steps, each of which we must get “just right” in order to be saved. (You can view that post here.)

Scrupulosity’s self-help trap is an extension of this concept. We begin with a formulaic view of salvation as the correct completion of a set of steps rather than a dynamic, relational experience of faith in Jesus. Once we’ve bought into the “step mindset,” the self-help trap is the idea that we are both responsible and able to get those steps just right.

And that getting the steps just right is what we think will provide assurance of salvation.

Case Study: Sam’s Long List

Someone we’ll call Sam* had a very comprehensive formula for salvation. The simple version of salvation sounded like this:

1. Confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus Christ
2. Believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead

But when I sat down and had a conversation with Sam’s OCD mind, that list grew much longer. Both points could be fragmented into many more steps and sub-requirements:

1. Confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus Christ
   • Make sure you understand who Jesus is so you know who you’re confessing
   • Make sure you confess Christ while feeling your great need as a sinner, and that you’ve confessed every sin perfectly
   • Make sure you feel sincere and aren’t coming to confess Christ for the wrong reasons
   • Make sure you don’t have any blasphemous thoughts at the same time you confess Christ
   • Make sure you use precise and heartfelt language when you confess Christ
2. Believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead
   • Make sure you never doubt any part of the atonement or resurrection story, not even for a second
   • Make sure you believe with the right kind of faith (not just “head knowledge”) and that you really “feel” your faith
   • Make sure you aren’t just believing because it’s what you grew up being taught
   • Make sure you think about these grand truths every day and feel a sense of worshipful awe every time
   • Make sure you believe that the risen Christ is your Lord of your life and is truly in charge of your daily decisions

Sam had so many steps to follow, and they must all be done perfectly or else he had no peace. Unfortunately, he never had ANY peace, because he couldn’t manage to get his brain to follow every step perfectly. This is what drove him to compulsively “make sure.” It was his own form of self-help.

I can do it. If I try hard enough, I can. I can. I can.

But, my friends, he couldn’t. He was living in chronic defeat–because self-help is a valid category only for certain domains of life. Self-help might be useful for learning how to ace a job interview, how to seal a leaky basement, or how to keep a tidier house. But to bring self-help into the domain of spirituality is to reject grace.

You can’t get the steps right, no matter how many sub-tasks are on your own list. That’s why there’s grace.

Living from Grace Versus Scrupulosity’s Self-Help Trap

Many people are afraid to live from grace because of the stereotype that “grace” means lawless living and spiritual carelessness. Oh how many times I’ve heard people with scrupulosity discount grace and lean into their own DIY efforts because grace “feels too easy.”

But to truly live from a place of grace is not so much about outcomes (high vs low spiritual standards) as it is about process. You see, the person living from legalism and the person living from grace may look exactly the same on the outside. Perhaps:

• Both avoid vices like drinking, nightclubs, gambling, and cussing
• Both attend church regularly and pay tithe
• Both wear modest clothes, avoid bad movies (or any movies at all), and extravagant spending
• Both get up early to pray and read the Bible
• Both are involved in church evangelism and mission trips

We might even say, in the words of Paul, that both could go so far as to “give their bodies to be burned.” But one person does these things out of legalism, the other person out of grace.

This isn’t about behavioral outcomes. It’s about process. Everybody can do good works, but only those living from grace find it to be an easy yoke, and a light burden. Here are the two formulas, side by side, for your comparison:

To live from a place of grace is different from merely understanding the theology of grace. It affects the entire mindset behind our actions. It arrests the urge to “do things” in order to be secure, and it allows us to blossom and produce the sweetest fruits from a place of already being secure. Living from a place of grace is easy and light for several reasons:

1. You do not have the responsibility to stop sinning, even though a spotless life is still the goal. Instead, God has the responsibility to produce the peaceable fruit of righteousness within you. Your job is simply to yield your heart to Him and trust the work He is doing. This is the “righteousness which is by faith” (Galatians 5:5). This is what it looks like to lean on the work of “Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and present you faultless” (Jude 1:24).
2. You do not have the insecurity of getting things “just right” in order to prevent spiritual abandonment. You live each day in a secure attachment with God, knowing that your mistakes and errors will be handled lovingly, and that your relationship can weather anything. From this place of security, you can approach Scripture with curiosity rather than self-protectiveness, and you can go boldly on new adventures for God rather than orbiting anxiously around yourself.
3. You will finally have the freedom to discover who God really is, and who you really are. Have you ever been in a relationship where most of the conversations nervously center around…the relationship itself? Anxious relationships suffocate us. There is no room to just “be” and learn about each other. Similarly, when we live from a place of grace, we will have the breathing room to see who God really is–not just studying about Him from a lens of how to escape your own destruction. And when you stop focusing on how bad/lost/reprobate you think yourself to be, and you see yourself as the beloved child of God that you are, you’ll truly know yourself, too. You’ll be able to work through questions like, “Am I doing this ministry because it’s really God’s calling, or because I think it gives me brownie points with God?” or, “If I’m a night owl and have my best focus at night, am I really bringing my best and most authentic self to my 4am worship time?” When you realize you don’t have to earn God’s love, you will finally discover who God created you to be!

Why We Struggle to Live from Grace

Perhaps you read these ideas about living from a place of grace and your heart yearns to experience this. You want nothing more than to lay down your burden–but, you’ve tried so many times before. What makes us so “stuck” on our own self-help efforts?

We conducted a small survey of 115 individuals with and without religious OCD, and the results were exactly as suspected. Christians with obsessive-compulsive disorder were much more likely to feel that their standing with God depended upon spiritual perfection, and much more likely to try forcing spiritual realities like faith, love, or a desire for God. You can see the numbers in the infographic below.

For the question, “Over the last three months, how often have you tried to force yourself to ‘feel’ spiritual realities like faith, love, compassion, or a desire for God,” respondents with OCD were more than 6 times more likely to say this is “always” their reality than respondents who did not have OCD, and 6 times less likely to say it is “never” their reality.

For the question, “Over the last three months, how often have you felt that your relationship with God depends on religious perfection,” a full 50% of respondents with religious OCD said “always” or “often,” compared to a cumulative 16.67% of those without OCD.

While these survey results are preliminary findings, these statistics indicate that Christians with clinical obsessive-compulsive disorder are much more likely to struggle with spiritual self-dependence than other Christians. This is not surprising, given what we know about the OCD brain and the circuitry issues related to risk assessment and error resolution.

May I suggest that if you are a Christian with OCD, the true resolution of your addictive DIY efforts must involve a dual approach–not only a deeper understanding of grace, but also practical help from a therapist trained in OCD management. This is not merely a spiritual problem. It bridges the space between spiritual health and mental health, and it seems appropriate to receive help in both domains.

Some problems can only be explained in multiple domains. If you have a broken car and cannot get to church, this is both a physical and a spiritual problem. If a psychologically abusive spouse prevents you from raising your children in the faith, this is a spiritual, relational, and psychological problem. If you are a missionary getting kicked out of the country because of visa issues, this is both a spiritual and a legal problem.

Religious OCD is a spiritual problem. But it is also a psychological problem, and possibly a biochemical one as well. As such, it needs multiple modes of treatment.

If you are wondering where to look for the psychological side of help, I would suggest you begin your search with the International OCD Foundation’s database of providers.

Conclusion

Scrupulosity’s self-help trap is subtle because it disguises itself as devotion. On the outside, the life lived from legalism and the life lived from grace may look almost identical. But inside, the difference could not be greater. One is driven by anxiety, always straining to earn love and security; the other is carried by the Spirit, rooted in God’s prior love, and freed to serve joyfully.

If you’ve been caught in the cycle of “making sure,” trying to squeeze out the right emotions or follow all the steps just so, remember this: salvation was never placed on your shoulders. It rests on Christ alone. The gospel does not say “try harder”—it says “trust Him.”

To step out of the self-help trap and into grace is not to become careless or lawless. It is to shift from anxious self-effort into secure attachment with a God who already loves you. From that security flows real transformation, real obedience, and real peace.

So when scrupulosity whispers, “Do more, feel more, try harder,” let grace answer back: “It is finished.”

Best wishes on the journey,