{"product_id":"2940015766875","title":"Compelled: A Memoir of OCD, Anxiety, Depression, Bi-Polar Disorder, and Faith\u0026#x2026;Sometimes","description":"This is a book for anyone who has battled a mental illness - any mental illness. It is also a book for anyone who has experienced a crisis of faith - any kind of faith. Blue traces his lifelong battle with diagnoses ranging from OCD to depression to anxiety to bi-polar disorder to ADHD. Along the way, his faith proves to be both a help and a hindrance, and he is brutally honest about its role in the overwhelming battle. Whether you are the sufferer or someone who supports a friend or loved-one who battles the daily agony of mental illness, this book will encourage you, engage you, and challenge your assumptions about people who are mentally ill. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eExcerpt from Chapter 3: \u003cbr\u003eAt its core, OCD is a quest for certainty where certainty doesn’t\/can’t exist. The person who washes his hands a million times wants certainty that the deadly germs are banished from his hands, but he can never be sure. The driver who fears she has accidentally hit a pedestrian re-drives the same route over and over, looking for absolute certainty that she didn’t hit the innocent pedestrian, but there’s no way to be absolutely certain that that odd color on the sidewalk isn’t the blood of the child she just ran over who is now at the hospital or the morgue. Or the kid who is terrified he’ll be abandoned by his parents…he can never ask enough questions or stand in just the right spot to check on their early arrival so as to be completely certain that they will always come back.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eUncertainty dooms the sufferer of OCD to his torture chamber.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor the religious person, uncertainty will, at some point, attack his quest for peace through faith. Let’s face it: religion comes with plenty of uncertainty. Sooner or later, everyone on the quest to understand or know God will have to ask some difficult questions: Why does God allow bad things to happen to good people? Why does God allow so much suffering when he could simply zap the evil-doers? What does it mean to be saved? Unsaved? Is there such a thing as hell, and if so, how do I know that the sweet little old lady who used to live next door who wasn’t very religious but who was the kindest person I ever knew isn’t there? (See appendix for a fuller discussion of hell).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy inevitable questions about the black-and-white certainties of the Christian faith caused the struggle between my internal self and my external self to rage on. Spiritual questions plagued my brain from the time I was old enough to ponder such matters, but the stakes were high in my family, where failure to see things the Right Way was not acceptable. My family’s certainty mixed with my inevitable lack of certainty created a struggle within me between intellectual honesty and family acceptance – a struggle that persists to this day. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne of the certainties of my upbringing that troubled my uncertain brain was the question of hell. To make matters worse, in my early childhood, we were Southern Baptists to the core – no drinking, church on Sunday and Wednesday (and sometimes Sunday night just in case!), suits to church so Jesus could admire our wardrobes, etc. Dogmatic Christian groups are guilty of excessive certainty about countless uncertain things, like how long it took the world to be created, where the precise line is between those who are “saved” and “unsaved,” and that hell is a real place where anyone who hasn’t “accepted Jesus as his\/her savior” is going. Middle-school-Southern-Baptist-Tim, who had outgrown his fear of being left by his parents, needed some new way to be petrified of abandonment and isolation. Eternal damnation seemed like just the right thing for my brain to grab ahold of.","brand":"Tim Blue","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47167674515696,"sku":"2940015766875","price":4.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940015766875_p0.jpg?v=1763624466","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940015766875","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}