Welcome back to the podcast OCD Warriors. As we’re getting towards the end of the year, I wanted to share a little bit of a personal episode for you and I titled this, Why I Am Grieving When No One Has Died.
Hello, 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. You may be familiar with grief and loss and what that experience feels like if you’ve lost a loved one. However, we often don’t talk about how certain life transitions that we have carry a sense of grief with them.
Think about graduating college or graduating high school. If you didn’t go to college, you develop these close friendship relationships. And it’s a super happy time, right? Everyone’s happy for you. They might throw you a party, give you gifts, you get money. Yay, rah rah. But then on the flip side, life as you know, it is definitely changing.
You have to leave your familiar environment. You may be getting your first adult job and it can be exciting and scary all at the same time. Oftentimes, we don’t take time to reflect how transitioning from one season to another can carry with it grief as well as joy. So that’s what I’m talking with you about today as I talk about this transition that’s happening in my practice, and I wanted to give you this information for two reasons.
One, to talk about normalizing grief outside of death, grief in transitions, but also to let many of you know who are inquiring about services from me. That I am closing the doors on my individual therapy practice. It’s even hard for me to sit here and say that out loud to you. I have said it over and over to many people that I have emailed in a form email recently.
I haven’t been super public about this. I think partially because it’s scary because it’s a new, because it’s very different than how homeless therapists operate. But it’s really just a process that the Lord has had me on, and this is the next step for me. I don’t know exactly what it’s going to look like.
I just know it’s going to look very differently than it has over the, say, the last 10 years of providing outpatient therapy. About eight of those have been with my own practice, and then two of those were with a group practice prior. And when I started out on this journey of getting out of community mental health that I was in, I’ve pretty much run the gamut of counseling that I have done.
I’ve counseled children and families in their homes. I have counseled people who are in residential treatment centers, people that are coming out of addiction or facing some serious mental health challenges. That feels like a very, very long time ago now. When I say it to you, but that was where I got started with.
Then moving into more of an outpatient counseling and then moving into private practice, having my own business. There have been a lot of transitions along the way. I made a very significant. Transitional decision in 2019 to say, Hey, I am had this practice in Nashville for two years, and now I am moving it to Smyrna.
That was a really big deal. Traffic wise, Nashville is kind of far in terms of dealing with traffic. It’s not far distance wise, but those of you who live in a city or a suburb and understand that transition or that commute. That was a struggle and obviously some people were commuting from other areas to get to me where I was in Nashville, so I wasn’t necessarily moving closer to any client, but I had made a big decision to say, Hey, I want to have a marriage and a family one day I want, and if I’m going to do that.
My practice location needs to be more closer to my home. And that was hard because it meant saying that if you’re going to see me, you’re either going to have to go online and we’re gonna have to see each other online, which was a newer thing. This was prior to COVID. People weren’t really as keen on that, or you’re gonna have to drive a significant distance.
Of course, I had no idea that office space was barely going to be used for six to eight months until. Everybody was online and I made a decision to remain online until my daughter was about one years old, that I would only come into the office in 2023. I got some office space in Smyrna, so I have been there providing individual therapy and intensive therapy as well as.
Online therapy for people in the state of Tennessee. What’s really shifted and changed over the last year is that my intensive therapy side of my practice has exploded. That was something that I was really enjoying and have been happy. That it’s grown. Of course, it’s hard to manage seeing people individually on a weekly basis, and then also having people come in often from out of town for a Wednesday through Friday intensive retreat type scenario.
I was able to move my clients all to Monday and Tuesday, do some shuffling there. That took a little bit of time, but even after doing that and also focusing on the podcast, focusing on Christians learning ICBT. I really got to a point where I was too busy this year busier than I would like to be trying to balance my family life and my work life, and it’s really been just a process of contemplation, prayer.
Dreaming about where things are going in the future that I have made this difficult decision to not take on any more individual therapy clients and to take time to wind down and finish up the work that I have with the individual therapy clients that I have now. I think I’m probably down to around eight clients, a few that I see every week, and then the rest I see.
Every other week right now, but this transition has been hard. The grieving process has been that several people have come back to try to get on my schedule or see me that I had been seeing for a long time in the past, and I had developed deep relationships with, and I said, I can’t see you anymore. I’m really trying to eliminate this part of my practice.
Let me try and see if I can provide you with a referral. It’s been so hard to tell people. No, that has been very painful. ’cause of course I love these clients and I want them to thrive and do well, and I know how hard it is to start over with somebody else. Steve and I were even talking about this in a friendship sense.
At a point I was telling him, I’ve been trying to get to know this one mom friend for about a year now. Off and on. We’ll get together and hang out. I said, there’s so much that she just has no idea about me. Like I’ve lived lives that she doesn’t even know about me. I don’t know that she knows that I was ever married before.
I don’t know if she knows I have a podcast unless she’s Googled me. Probably not. It’s not something that I’d say, Hey, I’m Carrie Bach and I have a podcast. When I meet people in my personal life, which is super interesting. I got called out on Front Street one time by somebody that said, Hey, I looked you up and saw that you had a podcast, and I was like, oh, oh.
Yeah, that thing. So imagine you’re sitting down to talk with somebody and trying to fill them in on this stuff that you know, your previous therapist just has this kind of vault of information about you. And people will even look at me and say, oh, you remember that story I told you? I was like. Yeah, no, I don’t remember everything and I do take a lot of notes, which helps me remember things and helps me stay on track.
But it’s just nice to have somebody that you have that history and have that background with when you’re navigating care. So I’ve been in this place of really wanting to honor my clients and the work that they’ve done. My past clients as well as, um, and people that would just kind of randomly pop in every once in a while and check in.
I’ve had to say no to that in order to say yes to the new things that God is doing, and once again lives and things being separate. I had people that were coming in for individual therapy that are not necessarily following along with podcasts, not necessarily even maybe knowing that I have an online course.
They’re just there for individual therapy and that’s what they want to do and receive. So they’re not necessarily knowing all these other things that are going on in my life and practice. I’m really thankful for this season that I had to sit down with people. Week after week after week and be a consistent presence in their life.
I think that that’s so huge to just provide a sense of hopefully unconditional love of Christ for people. When I started out in practice, many of the people, I was very insurance based and many of the people were not Christians, and they had no idea why I named my practice by the well counseling. They were like.
That’s cute. The Christians would always say, well, I came to you because I saw that you had this name and read your, your bio information and figured out that you were a Christian. I didn’t hide it by any means, but I didn’t have a openly Christian practice. When I started out, I was like, Hey, I am a Christian.
If you want something Christian, we can incorporate that, but if not, we don’t have to. Through the process of having this podcast has really shifted my practice to now pretty much exclusively Christian clients who are seeking the spiritual integration for their OCD or for their trauma. It’s helped me understand and realize my calling more to the church and to empowering Christians to get back out on the battlefield.
Be in the game, so to speak. I want to be that person on the sidelines that helps bandage people up and sends them back out to do great things for the kingdom. I’m thankful for that whole process and road that the Lord has had me on in this time of individual therapy. I think there’s really something beautiful about.
The level of consistency, the level of building trust that you can have with somebody. For some people it takes ’em a really long time to build trust with a provider, and some people have really been burned in the past, and that’s understandable. Just being able to be. Patient and walk alongside people until they were ready to share parts of their story has been a beautiful learning process for me.
I tend to be a little bit of a speedy rabbit going down the trail like, okay, you wanna do this? All right, let’s go. Here’s A, B, C, D, and have this tendency and need to sometimes pull back and slow down and meet people where they’re at. That’s something that the Lord has had to work with me on over time.
Definitely patience, but I am a big doer and go-getter. Some of you can really relate to that, whether it’s talking about work or spirituality or other things. I’ve had to learn to rest and to follow other people’s leads in terms of joining with them. If I’m not going to be doing individual therapy, of course that begs the question, what am I going to be doing?
And I alluded to this a little bit earlier in the conversation. As my intensive therapy offerings expanded, and I started to have more and more people traveling out of state for multi-day intensives, two to three days where they’re able to dive into some deeper level material work on trauma that they know is contributing to OCD.
Or maybe they wouldn’t identify it as trauma, but just early childhood messaging or experiences with caregivers that really led to self-doubt. That led to a need for a lot of reassurance that led to questions and with identity or feeling bad about themselves or being unable to trust their internal data, trust their emotions or feelings.
As I saw, just the huge value in all of this. The time that it takes for overthinkers to really sink down into their nervous system. Sometimes it’s just hard to get there in a 50 minute session where people are having to then go pick up kids or go back to work or talk to their spouse and connect in that type of way.
Trauma work can be done in 50 minute sessions, and I did that with EMDR for years. There’s certainly pluses and minuses to that approach. The difficulties and the challenges is that sometimes people can become very dysregulated when they’re going through trauma processing, and it takes a little bit of time to come out of that and regroup when you only have 50 minutes.
That really shortens your time for processing because then you’re leaving this time. For people to calm down and to regulate. It seems like if you give people more time, they become less dysregulated. That’s been my experience so far, is that people are able to move through the trauma process and it almost gives their brain this permission slip to go there, to go deeply, but then also to know like, Hey, we’re gonna package this up.
We have enough time to get through this. It’s okay to really get in there. Feel, get in there and cry. If we need to get in there and see the messaging for what it is to be able to change our thought process about something, it’s just been really incredibly beautiful work. I’ve seen people experience an immense amount of relief in these intensive sessions.
Usually, for those of you who don’t know, we do three hours in the morning, take a hour lunch break, and then do three hours in the afternoon. Sometimes people, of course, feel really spent after a day of therapy, but then if they’re coming in from out of town and really just only focusing on therapy, they can go back to the hotel and sleep it off if they need to, or just relax and decompress.
They don’t have to have that same level of. Pressure of, oh, I’ve gotta be on and go back and have all these responsibilities. I have people that are more local that maybe they just know they have two or three memories they wanna process and deal with difficult things that have come up in the last five years or so.
They have come in and processed those experiences and left feeling a whole lot lighter and a whole lot better. I know that typically when you have weekly therapy and you’re trying to do trauma work, life happens. Things come up, somebody in the family dies, the pet gets super sick. You are wanting to verbally process and get some validation surrounding some of those things.
Absolutely nothing wrong with that. What it does though is that it ends up like pushing and delaying the trauma work to the back burner, the trauma work’s, driving all the symptoms in the present. So it’s like if we can take this time to really dig into those things in the past that are keeping people stuck.
Then it’s going to help them cope in a healthier way in the future. I definitely have had many people that have had an individual therapist, either for trauma therapy or for OCD therapy who come for a few days to work on some of those deeper level things and then they can go back and follow up with their OCD therapists or with their trauma therapist.
It’s a really beautiful thing, and another option for intensive work is just. Deep diving into the OCD, looking at these different components of I CCB T, looking at how they’re playing out in that individual’s life, really helping people get down to what is it that you’re actually doubting in this situation.
So many times people just, they’ll look at that top surface layer level of what’s going on, and they will make their doubt specific to that situation. But one thing that I’ve learned is that there’s usually a deeper layer there. It’s usually not just about, this situation kind of goes back to some of that feared possible self.
What are some of the layers underneath this? How do your themes have somewhat common thread about them? Maybe it’s, I’m gonna be negligent in some way or another, or I’m gonna lose control somehow. I’m gonna be that person. And for people who have come and done intensive work and it has gone really, really well for them, some of them come back to do some more work because they know they have a lot that they need to continue to work on.
So it’s really been just this beautiful way of providing therapy, of seeing life transformation. I don’t wanna say it’s like better or worse than individual weekly therapy. It’s just different. And typically I will tell people if I don’t think they’re a good candidate for an intensive, we have a consultation ahead of time.
I send a lot of paperwork for them to fill out. We look at it all together and go through it. There’s preparation and planning involved. We don’t just dive off the deep end of the pool and say, yes, come here for six hours. We wanna make sure that it’s a good fit and that there’s a plan in place.
Definitely realistic expectations. For people. I wouldn’t want somebody who has had years and years of trauma and OCD to come in and think that three days is somehow going to cure everything that ails them in their life. The beautiful thing about EMDR is that you don’t necessarily need space in between sessions in order to make good progress because you’re tapping into that nervous system center of the brain you’re really working on.
The amygdala response, the fight, flight, or freeze, and you’re just making new neural connections. So time in between sessions doesn’t necessarily do anything for you other than it gives your brain more space to live out life and maybe possibly start looking at things differently. When you have weekly EMDR therapy, you may see in between sessions, different ways that you respond to triggers, and that may reinforce to you that it’s working well.
You don’t necessarily need that time in between sessions. A MDR is a past, present and future therapy, so you’re clearing out things in the past that are keeping you from living the life that you’re wanting, and then you’re looking at what are those present triggers, and then how would I like to handle them in the future?
When we have intensive therapy sessions, we’re able to cover all of those in the same retreat weekend. Maybe you are in a place where you just feel stuck. And you aren’t sure which way to go, you think. I don’t know if an intensive would be right for me. Definitely reach out to me through the website@curiebach.com.
Hit us up on the contact page and let me know that you’re interested in an intensive consultation or finding out more information if you want to even give me a little snippet and say, Hey, does this sound like something that we can work on together? Even if you have a therapist maybe that you have a good relationship with, but you want to go in and do.
Some deeper level work and then follow up with that individual therapist for ongoing issues. I’m totally open to that. We can communicate with back and forth with your therapist as needed to make sure that there’s just a really great continuity of care there. I am going to be working very hard on improving.
Expanding Christian’s learning ICBT. The online training program that I have, I have a self-help course right now and I teach it live twice a year. Now. We’re probably gonna be changing the name next year from Christian’s learning ICBT. To something else. I haven’t totally decided on that name yet. Been batting around a couple ideas.
I want the name to really reflect the transformation that people who are buying into that are receiving, because I think that’s important. Just Christians learning ICBT maybe sounds even a little bit passive to me. Sounds like something we’re doing, but not really a transformation that’s happening within a person.
The reason I think it’s so important for me to go into this course is I’ve got some professional reasons for that and personal reasons for that. One reason is we know ICBT is growing in the US and it’s really becoming more widely used. Even the clinicians that are trained in it. It’s really a process and there’s a depth to it.
You can kind of know something at a surface level, but then as you really continue to sit with the materials, you just go deeper and deeper and have a greater level of understanding. For me, every time I’ve taught it. It’s helped me understand the material a little bit better as I continue to study and prepare so that I can teach it to others.
Creating PowerPoints, trying to create visuals for certain aspects of the training so that people can understand it a little bit better. I’ve been incorporating a lot more examples of how this plays out with different themes, and I hope to take December to really be able to do that more to work on expanding the material that’s in the ICBT course.
The examples improve the PowerPoints, really look at the order and how things are taught. I have spent the last several months going through our last cohort and trying to incorporate over 600 pages that are in resolving OCD one and two, condensing them down to digestible bites for everyone. Really, the biggest challenge of that is that as the way ICBT is being taught, has shifted and changed, we’re moving away from this 12 module idea.
Even though all of that core information is still in there, it’s really been expanded and presented in a much different way. Some of the modules have been kind of incorporated with others, some have been moved around, but all of the information ICBT itself per se. Hasn’t gone through any drastic changes.
It’s just been expanded upon and explained in a different way. My commitment really stays the same. I wanna be able to provide an alternative to exposure and response prevention therapy for people that are looking for that. You can find plenty of people online who would say that ERP has saved their life.
And that it’s been very beneficial for them. On the flip side of the coin, we also have people who say, exposure therapy hasn’t been working for me, or It worked for some of my themes, but now I’m getting into some more mental compulsions, and it really hasn’t helped address those things. I believe ICBT is a beautiful option for that.
I want to be able to present to the Christian community because there are definitely plenty of pieces where I see it overlays with our faith beautifully, just in terms of finding our identity in Christ, resting in him, resting in the sensory information that God has given us with our external senses, but then also really being able to tune in.
And identify what are our true internal senses, our true desires, our true emotions about a situation, because OCD will cause all of that. To get really confused, and as I process ICBT, as a Christian therapist who’s also in touch with the Holy Spirit, my desire and passion really is to say. What is the spiritual sense data that we have in this situation, especially as you’re wrestling with scrupulosity?
What is the truth that we know in scripture to be true? And how can we use our spiritual senses in a way that is honoring to God and helping us align with truth and healing? You don’t have spiritual senses. I don’t mean that in like the sixth sense or something type of way. That’s not what I’m talking about.
But the sense of being connected to God and to the Holy Spirit. If you’re a Christian, I think you understand what I’m talking about. That can get very twisted and confused in terms of scrupulosity. So bringing people back to that anchor. Of who they know Christ to be is super important and helping people really dig deep into healthy theology about who God is.
If I have enough interest next year, I will also be leading a coaching group, which I’m calling a advanced ICBT group for people who are just ready for that next level. They’ve been through the training that I’ve offered. They’ve seen some relief and some results, but there are pieces that they’re still stuck on or trying to tease out in terms of developing their obsessional story or.
Getting in touch with what is my fear itself versus my real self? How do I write an alternative narrative in a healthy way? There are many different nuances, obviously, of I ccbt, and for people in my audience who have struggled to really find an individual therapists that can walk them through some of these pieces.
I’m providing this advanced ICB T group for them. That’s something that might interest you, or maybe you’ve had ICBT with another therapist, but something felt somewhat incomplete. Certainly email me and reach out and contact us through the website and let me know that group is in the process of forming right now.
But I will also be emailing our audience about it for people who have taken the self-help course, gone through that material and are wanting a little bit more. I have some people that start out with Christians learning ICBT and learning those skills and then decide to do an intensive, there’s so many different avenues available for you and the Christians learning I CCB T, or whatever we decide to call it next year.
The live training with the ability to ask questions as we’re going through each of the 12 weeks, and that is gonna restart probably sometime in early February. So if that’s something that you might be interested in, please let me know that as well. Always love to hear from you guys and what you have going on, even if you’re just doing some individual ICBT therapy.
In another state and you just wanna say hello. You’re certainly welcome to do that at any point. We love finding people who are interested in sharing their OCD story, so know that option is available to you as well. If you are grieving something right now and no one has died, just know that you’re normal.
And then it’s okay. And if you’re going through a scary transition, know that I am right there with you and it can be equally exciting and totally terrifying at the same time, the important thing is just following God’s lead in what you feel like he is wanting you to do. It’s our responsibility to be connected and in prayer.
And obedient and follower, the Lord is leading us. Even if that means saying no to some things so that we can say yes to other things and there is support for you, regardless of where you are on your OCD journey, there’s anything that I can do to help connect you with someone or to provide that support for you.
I would be honored to be able to do that and walk alongside you in this struggle. The best way to keep up to date with what’s going on with podcast is to join our email list@careybach.com. I hope to have some new free resources to bless you with as well. As soon as I can get those put out there, I will let you all know right here on the podcast.
Stay tuned because next week we have a special Christmas episode coming out. See you then. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you. Christian faith in OCD is a production of 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.
