(CNN) -- When she was 12, Jennifer Traig's hands were red and raw from washing them so much. She'd start scrubbing a half an hour before dinner; when she was done, she'd hold her hands up like a surgeon until her family sat down to eat. Her handwashing compulsions began at the time she was studying for her Bat Mitzvah. She was so worried about being exposed to pork fumes that she cleaned her shoes and barrettes in a washing machine. "Like a lot of people with OCD, I tended to obsess about cleanliness," said Traig, now 42. "But because I was reading various Torah portions, I was obsessed with a biblical definition of cleanliness."
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OCD with religious obsessions is called scrupulosity
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St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of Jesuits, and Martin Luther may have suffered from the condition
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Exposure therapy helps patients face uncertainty
Her @placeholder flared up around ages 12 to 13, and again from 16 to 17.