Carrie: Hello, OCD Warriors. My hope and prayer is that you have gotten so much value out of our healthy Perspectives on sex series.
And today I have some special guests with me, Greg and Stacey Oliver. They are sharing their personal experience and professional wisdom to talk about compulsive sexual behavior.
Hello [00:01:00] and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD with Carrie Bock. I’m a Christ follower. Wife and mother licensed professional counselor who helps Christians struggling with OCD get to a deeper level of healing. When I couldn’t find resources for my clients with OCD, God called me to bring this podcast to you with practical tools for developing greater peace.
We’re here to bust through the shame and stigma surrounding struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories of healing and helping you replace uncertainty with faith. I’m here to help you. Let go of the past and future to walk in the present abundant life God has for you. So let’s dive right into today’s episode.
One of the reasons for doing this episode is to let you know that if you are struggling with both OCD and pornography addiction, or other sexual compulsive behaviors, that you are not alone and that recovery is possible. [00:02:00] Welcome to the show. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? We actually have two guests on the podcast today.
Greg: Yeah. Hi, I’m Greg Oliver, and I’m here with Stacy. I’ll let her talk in a second. But we live in Birmingham, Alabama, and we have a nonprofit recovery ministry called Awaken that we started in 2015. We have built a community and we provide help and resources for people who struggle with unwanted or compulsive sexual behavior, and also sexual betrayal trauma.
We’ve been building a place where people who struggle in that area can come and find some help and get back to living the life that they were created to live.
Stacey: That’s about it. It’s a good summary. Yeah,
Greg: Good summary.
Stacey: The kind of big summary, but I mean, it’s all true. I, like you said, was devastated and what a journey.
I mean, just processing all of that. I was raised on the mission field. My parents are missionaries and so gonna Bible college, and this is not the story that you’re supposed to get when you pretty much obey the rules. I wasn’t perfect, but I think that was really [00:03:00] hard. And then just the trauma and betrayal and all of that and getting angry.
I have always been able to find anger. I don’t go quiet whenever I’m mad. It would serve if you had a temper to go quiet sometimes. But I do have a temper, but I didn’t cuss, and that’s where I found all the words. So I was so mad.
Greg: You didn’t cuss prior to. Did not. But after, yes, of course. I,
Stacey: I might have said one cuss word or something, but yeah, I found them all.
I just had to process it and get it out. I felt so guilty, and my therapist is like, Stacy, God knows your heart. Just pour out to him and if you don’t get it out and you try to step it and try to be prettier, it’s just gonna come out sideways. It was a process. Yeah.
Carrie: Greg, I think this is a really great lead in to the next question, which is, you were in ministry, you had this secret addiction.
I’m sure there were plenty of times where you just wanted God to take that away from you, or just let me get out of this. Help me find that way of escape. And it was this [00:04:00] silent struggle. I think there’s a lot of men in the church who feel like, no, this is a issue. It’s just me and God. I don’t need, and my wife.
I don’t need to go tell anybody about it. I don’t need to seek help. And what would you say to someone that feels like they’re stuck in that? Secret place of shame, but also kind of telling themselves, oh, well God will fix me.
Greg: I would say, I get it. I’ve been there. That’s what I wanted too. And the other thing I’d say is it doesn’t work.
And the reason why it doesn’t work is because sexual addiction, no matter how it manifests when I say sexual addiction, that can take the form of pornography, compulsive masturbation. Hookups, hiring prostituted people, whatever. I mean, there’s a number of ways in which sexual compulsion and addiction manifest, but if that’s what you’re dealing with, it is clinically understood to be an intimacy disorder.
And so what we’re trying to do is get our connection needs met in isolation, and that doesn’t work because for true intimacy to take [00:05:00] place, that requires at least two people. If I’m either involving nobody, ’cause I’m just using technology, or if I’m using people that I don’t even know or don’t have relationship with, there’s no true intimacy there.
And so even if I’m trying to find help for my problem, I can’t find lasting help if I don’t find a way to connect and be known and be able to show up authentically. That’s the scary part, right? Because especially people who maybe not especially, I was about to say, especially people with Christian faith, I think there’s a different flavor to it when you have spirituality that has a moral component where you know and believe that what you’re doing is wrong, which can enhance the shame that a person feels and can tempt us to drive further into isolation.
And just let me, just, me and God. Well. If just me and God was the way that he wanted to do it, then he would just answer the prayer, snap his fingers and just change. But one of the things that I found really compelling about confession in the Bible is that there are two key passages that I think tell [00:06:00] us different things about confession.
One is in one John one, when it says, when we confess our sin to God. That he’s faithful and righteous to forgive our sin. But then in James chapter five, it says that we are to confess our sins to one another so that we might be healed. We get forgiven if I confess to God, but I’m gonna limit the degree to which I can heal if I don’t bring other people into it.
And it’s not that God couldn’t heal me between just me and him. But the word suggests that he has chosen to make other people a part of that process. The just me and God doesn’t work. There was a time that I wished that it did, like I have relationships and friendships that are so rich and so deep, and people who really know me.
And that concept used to terrify me, and now it’s just something that I hunger for.
Carrie: I think that we see throughout scripture just how God has created us for community and so many scriptures about being in the body of Christ and loving one another. And if we don’t truly know each other are [00:07:00] we aren’t close, then it’s really hard to do that at its fullest, deepest level.
God wants us to do, and I think you kind of exposed another lie about pornography specifically that some people believe it’s like, well, oh, I’m not hiring prostitutes, or it’s just me. Maybe it’s someone that’s not married. And they would say, well, no one’s getting hurt in this process. It’s not that big of a deal.
I’m not married yet. I don’t know. They’re convincing themselves, like maybe their way of remaining some type of sexual ethic or purity. What would you say to somebody that’s like single and struggling with this of, well, it’s not a big deal.
Greg: I’d say that somebody is getting hurt. You are getting hurt.
Carrie: Yeah,
Greg: because repeated sexual activity.
Conditions, your brain and your body to expect and respond to a certain set of stimuli. If I am conditioning myself as a young man to look at pornography and masturbate whenever I feel any sense of arousal, but not only then anytime I feel any tense [00:08:00] emotion or anxiety, because a lot of times sexual release is not even happening because I already feel aroused.
We learn how to use it for emotional regulation. If I’m feeling. Antsy, it’ll calm me down. Or if I’m feeling sluggish, it’ll kinda get my heart rate going. And so I am basically hijacking my brain and my nervous system and my body and training them that anytime I feel a certain way, or just to get into a cyclical pattern, every so often my body is expecting that sexual release.
So rather than sex being what it was created and designed to be, which is a relational outflow of intimacy that’s being built in a healthy relationship between two people now, it’s very object based. It’s like it’s orgasm on demand. It’s whenever I feel like it, I can have it. And the other person, I would say to a single person that it’s hurting is your future spouse.
If that’s something that in your future. If you take this object-based sex on demand rationale or conditioning into your [00:09:00] marriage, then there’s this latent belief, or maybe on the surface belief that sex is gonna be the solution of all my problems. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard men after they got married say, well, I thought that once I got married I would never masturbate again.
Because they think it’s the only reason they’re masturbating is they don’t have a healthy outlet for sex. Compulsion isn’t about like the behavior is serving something deeper, there’s a deeper desire than just to have an orgasm. And so when you can have one with your partner that doesn’t cure the underlying thing that’s broken, needs attention, I would say you’re hurting yourself.
You’re hurting your partner. Not to mention the people who are in pornography, many of whom don’t wanna be doing it, and the whole issue of. Sex trafficking and all that. People don’t even think about what seems like a victimless crime really isn’t because it does hurt a lot of people and sometimes that hurt is time release.
Carrie: I know you’ve talked about this a little bit. Addiction is, it’s like an answer. It’s like a solution to a greater problem, and then it [00:10:00] becomes the problem. And so many people focus just on sobriety and white knuckling and you know, that doesn’t work. What are some of those deeper issues that really drive people to these types of behaviors?
Greg: Yeah, I mean, deeper issue, that’s the phrase, because when there’s a narrative that, well, it’s just about arousal. I mean, I started when I was young and somebody showed me something and I liked it, and so I started. There’s curiosity for sure that plays into it, but the deeper issue is something that becomes evident when I’m using my preferred method of acting out to escape from or to numb difficult emotions.
If every time I feel stressed out or every time a young person. Gets yelled at by their parents or is studying for a hard test, they end up acting out. Then there is a deeper issue going on that’s namely, I don’t know what to do with my difficult or my big or my strong emotions. Some people call ’em their negative emotions.
I don’t think there are any negative emotions, but there are emotions that are [00:11:00] unpleasant. What do we do with those ones that are hard to live with? Well. We learn what to do with them, and for a little while it distracts us and it numbs and it escapes, and it helps us to get away from them. But then they come flooding back and we get to a point where we kind of know before we act out that this isn’t gonna really help anything.
But by that point. We’re already kind of functioning in that addictive cycle. We’re in our ritual, like the trains left the station, and so I’ve talked to other recovering people who are like, they’ve been sitting at home or at their office, and they haven’t even acted out yet, but it’s as if it’s already happened, and so it just gets to be a really helpless feeling.
One of the things that sobriety and pursuing recovery gives us the opportunity to do is discover what those deeper issues are, what those wounds that haven’t sometimes been identified, definitely not processed or healed are ’cause they go way back. I know I’m talking for a long time, but another thought that comes to my mind is.
Pornography, masturbation are [00:12:00] strategies, and by that I mean it’s something that I’ve learned and I’ve adapted my life to pick that up as a way of self-soothing or of trying to provide for my own needs. And it’s not dissimilar to what an anxious toddler will do when they’re sucking their thumb. And we wouldn’t say that a toddler’s doing anything wrong, but what they’re doing is in their body, they feel like something’s off.
I don’t know that anybody’s gonna come and help me feel better, and there’s something I can do with my body to soothe myself. And what we hope is that that child is being attuned to, is being able to securely attach to their caregivers who will teach them as they grow. When you feel these things, you can ask for help.
But gosh, so many of us didn’t have that. And so that adaptive strategy just grew along with us and thumb sucking turned into masturbation, and that turned into pornography, and that turned into hooking up. We may be older now, but it’s the same childish strategy that we adopted when we were kids. That can be one of the many deep issues.
In therapy, we can explore [00:13:00] how the things that happened in our lives affected us and contributed to where we’ve ended up.
Carrie: I wanna touch too, on sexual trauma because so many people have experienced abuse and I think it’s a lot, it’s still hard, but it’s easier for women to open up about sexual abuse.
Than it is for men, and especially if that was childhood sexual abuse and there are all kinds of lies and things that get attached to those experiences that people have had. Sometimes people will act out based on what was done to them and then feel immense amounts of guilt about that. And I’ve talked about that kind of throughout the series, but getting that help for any type of abuse that’s in the background is for great as well.
Greg: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that if we. Try to get healthy. And by that I mean if we try to stop using the thing that we’ve been using to cope without seeking to heal the root issue, then we’re gonna feel worse, not better, because we’ve taken our helper, we’ve taken our caregiver off the [00:14:00] table. And like you mentioned earlier, this is something that helped us until it hurt us.
And so if all we do is get sober. From the thing that we’ve been using to try to make ourselves feel better without getting the true healing, then yeah, that’s not gonna last very long. We’re gonna go back to it or we’re gonna jump to something else.
Carrie: I’m curious about your approach to this, like gospel centered recovery.
I had some interactions with someone that was in some type of like. Sex addict anonymous group, and there was very much a lot of energy surrounding making sure that you didn’t fall back into old patterns. Once you’re a sex addict, you’re always a sex addict to that type of language. I’m just curious about that.
Not to say that we just need to kind of like completely not have our tendencies on the radar, but how do you balance that sense of I’ve been forgiven, I’ve been through some recovery, I’ve received grace. I have new patterns with trying to not constantly look over your [00:15:00] shoulder. Does that make sense?
Greg: Yeah. I mean, we have different elements within our community because we have our recovery portions of our community for men and for women who they themselves struggle with a compulsive or addictive behavior. But we also have a women’s community for betrayal trauma that Stacey oversees. There are still unhealthy patterns that these women, after they’ve established some safety and stability, have the opportunity to look at themselves.
Like what I hear you asking is how does the gospel inform the approach? And once you’re an addict, always an addict, or, hey, you have your unhealthy things too. So what does the gospel do to make a difference?
Stacey: Yeah, I mean, from my personal journey, I think the things that I struggle with, people pleasing doing this kind of work.
I’ve learned to not worry as much. Whenever I meet with a lady and I share whatever she needs help with or share my story, I don’t worry very often if I’ve ruined her or offended her. ’cause I’ll be telling my story and I might say some cuss [00:16:00] words, ’cause that was part of the process, and then I don’t hear from her again.
It would be like, oh, did I say one too many cuss words or any cuss words? I don’t really think about that much anymore, but the people pleasing and like it’s still there or my way of controlling isn’t as obvious ’cause I’m not like take charge kind of person and tell people what to do. But if I don’t know what to do, typically with Greg, I’ll have my anxious ways of trying to get him to come through and make me feel safe.
I will be ask him questions really in the context of recovery because I don’t understand addiction, I can only understand it so much.
Greg: But even those tendencies stick around even as you get healthy. Yes. And so from the recovering addict standpoint, you will go to some of these communities and you hear, well, once you’ve struggled with this, you’re always gonna struggle with it.
And I agree, and I disagree with that. Mm-hmm. Because I do think that something that has had such a grip on your life in an addictive manner, whether it’s control or unhealthy relationship dynamics, or whether it’s a [00:17:00] process or a substance addiction, like. If I don’t continue to nurture the healthy new way of living that I discover in recovery, I could find myself right back there.
I always have the potential. Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead and he died again. So it’s like just because God does something wondrous or even miraculous. It doesn’t mean that I can’t choose to return, but what I do think the gospel introduces in our community that’s different is we have a higher power with whom we relate, and we see Jesus as the one who is pursuing us and cares more about my health and wellbeing even than I do.
People who don’t have a relationship with Jesus who go to a faith neutral recovery community, that’s still helpful in having a higher power. Many of them would say, this community is my higher power. Right? Because it still is something that’s getting them out of their own head. It’s something that’s getting them out of trying to be their own problem solver because they’re [00:18:00] bringing someone else into it.
But for a Christian to feel like they can invite Jesus into the struggle. That’s really comforting. It’s actually a hurdle that a lot of people have to get over because so many people in addiction recovery have spiritual wounds that have made them feel like they can’t go to God, or that God is either unable, disinterested, or too scary to seek his help.
But once we discover that that’s not his heart, that he loves us, that he’s pursuing us, it’s not that we don’t still have the potential to go back, but something that we have now that we didn’t have before is the knowledge. When I’m triggered, I don’t have to do this anymore. And when you weren’t in recovery and when you weren’t connecting to God for his help, that wasn’t a reality.
Like if I’m all by myself in my active addiction, I don’t have a choice. Like this is going to happen eventually one way or another. And just to know that there’s another way that this could go is so freeing. And I talk to guys and I sponsor guys who are like, man, I [00:19:00] slipped up. But in talking about it, they’re like, I actually know I had another choice.
I decided, screw it. I’m just gonna do this right now. And then they deal with that. But just having an option because you have a God who has given you his strength, that’s greater than your strength, is really helpful in a program that emphasizes our own powerlessness over this addiction.
Stacey: The other day, it was an example of this on my end of, we’ve been in recovery almost 17 years.
Greg has been sober and has not relapsed, and yet it’s been real rainy and cloudy. And I was about to leave and he was gonna be home for a few hours before an elder meeting at our church and. Old Greg would have those dreary days and just feeling blah, and he was feeling, feeling
Greg: funky and tired and lonely
Stacey: could be the pathway to acting out.
But I just said, I think I did a good
Greg: Yeah, you did. I was
Stacey: very aware and I was like, Hey, I don’t want this to come out wrong. I just gotta say that I’m feeling anxiety about leaving with it being so Jerry and you being in a blah [00:20:00] place and it just amazing. ’cause I don’t live in fear.
Greg: It’s that surrender in that moment.
Yes.
Stacey: Kind of answer the question. Like, even on this side, those fears don’t necessarily go away, but I know how to address it. And I said what I said and then I was like, Lord. This is his job now? Not now, but like if anything happens with his thoughts or whatever, like I’ve said what I needed to say and then he’s gotta do his work.
So that was a huge reminder for me of why it’s important for me to keep connected to community and continue to do my work. Mm-hmm. To just speak honestly and clearly, not passive aggressive or, Hey, do you think you should maybe see if anybody wants to get dinner with you? Because I don’t care if he gets dinner with somebody.
I don’t want him to be home. That’s not speaking. Yeah. Clearly. So that’s what I have been working on for years. Yes.
Carrie: I think this idea of surrender is obviously really, really hard. Surrendering over to God and recognizing that we can’t choose things for our loved [00:21:00] ones. I mean, that is so hard and really huge.
Recognizing that we’re not going to get it perfect out of the gate. So a lot of people with OCD deal with perfectionism and feeling like they’ve gotta micromanage their own sanctification process instead of letting go and really trusting the Holy Spirit’s work in their life. I’m just curious. What you could speak to regarding that?
Just that process of surrender and like learning trust, because I do really believe that our trust is developed over time and
Greg: yeah, I just keep thinking about what you said about people who are trying to do this on their own. Nothing has helped me get out of my own head, like having another person that I just say my thoughts to out loud because there have been plenty of times that I’m having a thought that in my own head makes perfect sense.
As I’m saying it out loud to another person and I see them kind of smile and I’m like, oh, wow, I’m really obsessing about that, or it’s been swirling around in [00:22:00] there and I need to just say it out loud in order to be able to see that’s not what’s really happening right now. Something that I would have a lot more trouble surrendering to the Lord because I’m complicating it in my own head to have someone that I trust, and a lot of times for me, it starts with a person.
If I wanna ultimately process that with God, I will be able to do that more easily. If I first practice with a trusted friend, sometimes it’s Stacy, sometimes it’s a friend in recovery. Sometimes it’s my buddies who are therapists. I just say, I need to share some things. ’cause I feel like I’m getting in my head about this.
That’s so valuable. I mean, sex addicts anonymous. In the Green book, they describe. Sex addiction as an obsession and a compulsion. If your listeners are people who largely struggle with obsessive compulsive disorder and maybe they’ve gotten that diagnosis, think about if you uniquely have extra trouble obsessing about things or being compulsive in how you approach things.
And then the thing is [00:23:00] something that even if you don’t have that diagnosis. Is obsessive and compulsive. It’s like, oh my gosh. Like you’re just throwing a thousand pound weight on somebody’s back and it’s too much weight to bear on our own. And that’s why I think if we’re going to experience surrender, then we have to find somebody who can help us bear that burden and somebody who can say, I hear what you’re saying.
But I don’t think that’s what’s happening right now. Or what about this? Or sometimes people will say, I never do anything right, or I never make the right decision, and somebody else can say, but do you remember yesterday when you were triggered and you called me and you ended up not acting out like that?
Was you making the right decision? We’ve gotta have people reflecting that to us because we can’t trust the way that we’re often interpreting things or processing things in the moment.
Carrie: I think that’s so huge, and I see that in terms of people who are struggling, obviously with any kind of recovery, whether that’s like mental health or addiction, is they don’t see their own progress.
A lot of times they see [00:24:00] all the areas where they’re not doing well, and as a therapist we’re able to say like, point out well, but yeah, how you handled this situation was differently. Or do you remember six months ago like what you were struggling with? And then they’re like, oh yeah, I remember this one thing would’ve been really, really hard for me.
Greg: Or even sobriety, I mean, because there are people who really have struggled with getting obsessive about their day count. And one of the things that we do in our community is we don’t do this every meeting, but we do it once a month so that it doesn’t get too much emphasis. But we do acknowledge recovery milestones by handing out sobriety chips.
There’s 30, 60, 90 days, six months, nine months, and then the year marks. And we emphasize that getting a chip doesn’t make you better at recovery than someone else. And having a slip doesn’t mean that you’re not taking it seriously, but it’s an opportunity to rejoice with those who rejoice. It’s an opportunity for us to be grateful for the work and the change God is bringing.
It also brings us hope if we come into it thinking there’s no way that [00:25:00] anybody could ever get sober. ’cause we see that they can. But I’ve had people who have obsessed and the obsession over the day count actually is working against them. And I had a guy who was two days away from hitting 90 days. He was really looking forward to that chip and he got stressed out at work and he ended up acting out at 88 days.
He called me and he was just destroying himself verbally. I mean, he was despairing. He was calling himself every name in the book. And when he stopped long enough, I said, I can understand your disappointment. I get it. Can I ask you about something? He goes, yeah. I said, when was the last time you went? 88 days without acting out.
And he just started crying. And he’s like, I’ve never gone 88 days without acting out. And I said, well then why aren’t we talking about that? People who get caught up in these obsessive spirals, they’re not obsessing about all the things that are going right. They’re obsessing about all the things that are going wrong or that could go wrong.
Oftentimes, we need people who can bring hope back into the [00:26:00] conversation.
Carrie: Yeah. That’s really, really good. I wanted to ask you one more question in terms of pictures that may come back into your mind. I think that this is something that some of my listeners really struggle with. So I’d say, okay, I’m not acting out anymore.
I am not engaging in these compulsive sexual behaviors, but sometimes the pictures may still pop into my mind and I feel immense guilt about that. Or then they’re trying to control it by some type of mental compulsion, which of course doesn’t help the process. So can you talk a little bit about that with just how people handle that, because obviously we can’t erase those pictures from your mind or anything of that nature.
Greg: Well, trying to erase them I don’t think is helpful. Trying to ignore ’em and act like it’s not happening is not helpful because again, we’re staying internal and that’s gonna get us all stirred up. I think. I mean something that I’ve done in the early days and weeks and months and years of my own recovery, when those invasive thoughts would come in.
Is, I would speak about them out [00:27:00] loud. One thing that I believe and still believe is that invasive thoughts are a tool that our enemy, our spiritual enemy, tries to use to discourage us. When I would have these memories of things that I had done pop into my head, if I was by myself or if I was in a place where I could do this, I would say, yep, that’s what I did.
But that’s not who I am and that’s not what I’m doing now. I would kind of speak to it, and it helped me, even if I wasn’t with anybody, to say it out loud so that my ears could hear my voice saying it for me, that is an exercise in doing what the Bible says in, is it first or second Corinthians 10 that says, but take every thought captive to Christ.
It’s like the thought is there. I can’t make it go away, but what I can do is say, I want that to be submissive to Jesus because that thing that I’m remembering is something that I’ve confessed and something that Jesus has forgiven, like in taking a captive to Christ. Part of that for me is reminding myself.
Of the [00:28:00] fact that Christ doesn’t remember it because the Bible says that God has separated me from my sin as far as the east is from the West. And so if I believe what Jesus says he does with my sin, then I can say, okay, I remember that because I’m still in a fallen body in a fallen world. And that makes sense.
I have an enemy who hates me and doesn’t want me to progress. So yeah, I’m just gonna name it what it is. That is something that I did, but it’s not where I am now and I’m choosing not to give it power. And if we have a trusted friend that we can call or a sponsor even better, just to say, this thought came into my mind and I don’t wanna just dwell on it.
I wanna name it because sometimes naming it, there’s a theologian named Steve Brown and he talks about like when the demons are like flying in our face, like his imagery for these memories. He’s like, grab that demon, kiss it on the lips and just throw it into the light. It’ll disappear. ’cause he is like, demons thrive in the dark, but they die in the light.
Just exposing those thoughts to light is something that has been really powerful in my life [00:29:00] and in a lot of people that we work with.
Stacey: And I think the spouses as well.
Greg: Yeah. Married. Yeah, because
Stacey: I dug too hard and I wanted details of the acting out. Mm-hmm. Situation that he had when all this came out and I ended up having to do EMDR over it ’cause it would not leave my brain.
Yeah. But I tell people that and I do it too. Like, yeah, he did that same thing. That’s not where he’s living now. He’s not doing that now and he does not want that. So I can stop thinking about it, talk to a friend, and don’t let myself just keep replaying those
Greg: excessive memories. It’s like it’s when those happen, there’s a part of us that can get really triggered to revert to kind of a child consciousness.
’cause we’re taking that memory and we’re overlaying it onto our life now. And it feels very much like that’s something that’s happening now. But by staying connected and learning through therapy and through safe connections with people who can lead us spiritually in our lives, we learn how to stay an adult in that moment.
Right? And say, I always think about, and I [00:30:00] refer to the scene in the first Jurassic Park where the kid was freaking out because. The guy who was in the car with them had left them. He had abandoned them. And he was like, he left us. He left us. He left us. But then the guy who was with him now said he grabbed him by the shoulders.
He looked him in the eyes and he says, but that’s not what I’m gonna do. And so it’s like reminding that young part of us that’s afraid, that thing that we’re remembering is gonna come up again. It’s like, yeah, but that’s not where I am now. And there’s a lot that’s happened and there’s a lot of healing that’s taken place.
It’s learning how to stay in that adult consciousness. We have been so used to letting the kid take over and drive the car. And that just happens over time. It happens over time. Work and surrender,
Stacey: rewiring those neuro pathways.
Greg: That’s it. Yeah, The insidious thing about that too, just to add one more thing, is it can start with guilt and shame as we remember it, but that can easily morph into euphoric recall.
We get in that vulnerable, emotional place where we feel guilty and shame. Then as we remember the things we did and now our emotions, our capacity is diminished. Now we can actually experience arousal remembering some of those things, and we’re not fortified to stay in the present. We feel that first hint of shame coming on.
Name it. Find somebody that you trust that you can talk about it with, who can help you. Remember, [00:32:00] that’s the past. It doesn’t have to be the present.
Carrie: And I think that that’s encouraging for anybody to say these things take time and they take practice and they take intentionality and they take community.
And professional help. A lot of times you’ve gotta have a full wraparound of support there. But I loved what [00:31:00] you said about the thoughts and this being a way to take them captive and reminding yourself, I’m not there anymore. Like I’m here in the present. God has made me a new creation in Christ and it’s an amazing work in my life, and I know that I’ve done a lot of trauma work with people who have come out of various addiction backgrounds.
Come a long way, but they were still holding onto so much guilt and so much shame for things that happen during their active addiction.
Carrie: This has been a really great conversation. I think that our audience will really be blessed by it, and I appreciate both perspectives of you sharing.
Greg: Well, Carrie, thanks for having us on.
Yeah, thank you. It was nice to meet you at A A CC and just to have a chance to talk about what we do and yeah, it’s, it’s a joy and a privilege.
Carrie: I love having people like Greg and Stacy on the show who can talk from a place of lived experience, but also how the power of the gospel and sanctification therapy community have all worked together to bring them to a different place than where they started.
As always, you can find more information about our guests in the show notes or by going to our website, kerry bach.com. Thank you so much for tuning in today. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you. Christian Faith and OCD is a production of by the Well. Counseling Opinions given by our guest are their own, and do not [00:33:00] necessarily reflect the views of myself or by the well counseling.
This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area.
