My Advice/Request to Mature Christians Who Experience The Temptation To Give Unnecessary Spiritual Advice To People With Scrupulosity

There are just some Christians who are so zealous about saving souls that they give spiritual advice to scrupulous Christians without realizing their advice is not helpful. These Christians mean well.

 
There's an article on Clarifying Catholicism about scrupulosity called The Story of A Scrupe. The author talked about his own struggles with this affliction, including an episode of scruples in which he felt guilty about something related to playing video games. So he took the issue to his spiritual director and the issue was resolved.

A very zealous Catholic commented on the article and suggested the guilt over video games was not genuine scrupulosity, but the author's conscience working properly and the author was redirecting the pangs of his conscience by focusing on smaller sins that he actually wanted to repent of and not a bigger sin that he didn't want to repent of.

 
I replied and told them that this was unlikely because the mere idea of having committed a sin petrifies a scrupulous Christian. A scrupulous Christian is about a million miles away from redirecting genuine pangs of their conscience and refusing to repent. In fact, pangs of conscience are often more likely to be false ones that lead the overly-scrupulous Christian to anxious self-examination rather than genuine repentance.

The mere idea of offending God often terrifies the scrupulous Christian to the point that making decisions are a thing to dread. They cannot make a decision without thinking that either choice will displease God. 

 We have sinful desires like everyone else, but we are afraid of acting on them to a very unhealthy level. We often we feel we are not doing enough in the spiritual life. Forfeiting God's favor is something we fear to an excessive degree.  We are so far away from deliberately choosing to displease God or arrogantly disobeying His commands.

 
So my advice to mature and zealous Christians is this: when you are interacting with a scrupulous Christian, don't give them spiritual advice or suggest that they're sinning or refusing to repent of a sin unless you are that person's spiritual director.

If a scrupulous Christian tells you about an issue that they resolved with their spiritual director, that should be the end of it. Suggesting that they're sinning or refusing to repent of a sin will only make their scrupulosity worse. Telling a scrupulous Christian that they're not suffering from genuine scrupulosity in a certain case is not helpful.

I can tell you from experience that I have doubted myself when I tell myself that I haven't sinned. There are times when I've doubted that I have genuine scrupulosity. 

OCD, which scrupulosity is a form of, is called "the doubting disease" for a reason.

OCD is a trickster. Please, just don't reinforce the trickster in a scrupulous Christian. It will do them more harm than good. It isn't worth saving a person's soul by inadvertently causing them to get all tightly wound about their motivations behind a specific action or telling them they've sinned when they haven't.