Feeling guilty and scared after an incidence at a religious place – how do I stop thinking it’s punishment?
I recently went to a very spiritual/religious place with my family. I’m not very religious myself but I went along because it was a family trip. While everyone was waiting for darshan, I sat near the place where the saint used to sit and do paath and started reading a book on my phone (a random PDF I already had). I didn’t realise that the book had some explicit/inappropriate parts and I ended up reading them there without really thinking about where I was sitting. Later it suddenly hit me that maybe it was disrespectful to read something like that in such a sacred place. The next day I got food poisoning and started vomiting. Now I’m physically fine, but I have this lingering anxiety in my chest and my mind keeps going to “what if this is some kind of punishment from God for what I did”. A part of me knows this is probably just coincidence and anxiety, but another part of me feels intense guilt and fear. Has anyone else struggled with this kind of religious guilt or magical thinking, where random bad things start to feel like punishment? How do you cope with it? The anxiety in my chest...idk i am already on a SSRI
Posted Jan 31, 2026, 1:40 PM UTC