Carrie Bock is a Licensed Professional Counselor in Smyrna, TN who helps people get to a deeper level of healing without compromising their faith. She specializes in working with Christians struggling with OCD who have also experienced childhood trauma, providing intensive therapy for individuals who want to heal at a faster pace than traditional therapy.
My guest today is an experienced Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) practitioner and author, Ingrid Ord. Ingrid talks about the connection between ACT and Christianity.
How did Ingrid develop an interest in ACT?
What is ACT, and how does it work?
How does ACT help with anxiety and OCD?
Bible characters who went through hard times and learned to accept their situations.
Carrie: Hope for anxiety and OCD, episode 65. If you’re new to the show, I’m your host, Carrie Bock. And we are all about using shame, increasing hope, and developing healthier connections with God and others. If you’ve been a fan of the show for a long time, you know that we love to discuss different types of therapy here. I could be helpful for people who are struggling with anxiety or OCD. I like to do that because you always hear people say, “Eh, I tried therapy. It didn’t work for me”. Did therapy not work because it wasn’t the right modality for you? Did therapy not work because you didn’t have a great relationship with your therapist? There are so many variables there that we could die suck.
Today on this show, we are talking with Ingrid Ord, who is a therapist and author of ACT With Faith. ACT is a type of therapy that we’re going to be talking about today. And that stands for Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. If you want the long name, this wasn’t a therapy I knew much about. So, it was interesting to learn from Ingrid. And I know it’s a therapy that’s being incorporated more and more in OCD treatment. I hope you enjoy this interview.
Ingrid, I believe that therapists choose modalities like therapy that align with them personally and professionally. So I’m curious: how did you become so interested in acceptance and commitment therapy, also called ACT?
Ingrid: I’ve been working for a number of years, right? The modality I was in before I went to CBT and REBT was client-centered therapy, which fit me very well. REBT, Rational, Emotive, Behavior, Therapy. And it can be quite very proactive, and I found that quite hard. Then I found ACT, and suddenly, there was a therapy that did everything I’d been training up until that point. But allowed a much softer, gentler approach to actually being in the client’s space and not pulling them into your space.
Carrie: REBT is pretty confrontational.
Ingrid: It’s very confrontational, and you have your disputations. It works really well. They were male lawyers.
Carrie: Certain populations might be necessary for us.
Ingrid: Certain populations. The thing with ACT is that it seems to work at the cold front. It’s one of the few therapies I’ve found that when the patient or the client actually needs it, it works for them.
Carrie: Okay. So, tell us a little bit about what ACT therapy entails.
Ingrid: Well, very much as the name says, within the acceptance part, it’s about willingly accepting that we have experiences that we don’t want and going into the experience. And being with it because these experiences invariably tell us something very important about our values. If I’m anxious about something, it’s probably because it’s something that there’s something in there that’s very important to me. So, if I’m anxious about meeting someone, it could be that it’s very important to me to make a good impression on this person. And why is it important to me? Maybe I’m envisaging a future relationship, a job, or something like that. It’s important to be within the experience itself. It’s tempting not to want to be there, to distract ourselves, and to all the denial stuff. And so the link between accepting what we’ve got in the moment and committing ourselves to taking action will take us in the direction of our values. Never mind what’s going on. What’s very attractive to me?
Carrie: So there’s a sense of I’m accepting that I have anxiety about maybe going to a job interview because I want to look good or I really want a new job, but even though I’m anxious, I’m still going to work through that to the point where I’m committed to saying, I’m still going to put myself out there for this opportunity. I’m still going to the interview, show up, and do my best.
Ingrid: Yes. So you take public speaking is a common problem with many people often, you know, seen this done in, in workshops and I do it myself is to acknowledge to the people there, how anxious I am, but I’m here because this is very important to me putting this across is a very important thing. And so I brought my anxiety was me, and I’m doing it anyway.
Carrie: That’s good. I imagine that you’ve seen that it can help people with anxiety work through avoidance because avoidance feeds that cycle of anxiety and worsens everything.
Ingrid: No, yes. I have a very dear friend in the app community, Robin Molson. She showed me in one of the first workshops. It’s a series of concentric circles. We’re right in the beginning of the circle, is what you are not wondering. And then the next circle will be what you do to avoid it. And then the next circle will be the results of what you’re doing to avoid it. And then there’s another biggest circle, the results of the results. So you end up with a little problem in the middle and the huge amount of consequences from actually avoiding taking action and sitting, you know, doing what you needed to do, whatever it is that you need to do that you’re anxious about.
Carrie: I’m curious about this in terms of OCD. Where people are taking action, but they’re doing things that they don’t want to be doing. They’re engaging in compulsions, trying to get out of repetitive thought patterns. What would ACT say about that?
Ingrid: Well, one of the first things within there is the good old exposure exercises that you do and help the person to expose themselves to the situation so that they actually feel the anxiety. OCD is a specialized sort of area in that not that you have to be specialized, but you need to realize that the obsessions and the compulsions are there in order not to feel the anxiety. So you help the person go backward in the process to hopefully not do the compulsion or let the obsession go. And then, they will feel the anxiety and expose themselves to the feeling of the anxiety as being something totally normal. It’s going to happen.
You have anxiety and are doing all these things to stop yourself from feeling anxiety. That is totally normal, but now it’s all become a big problem on its own.
So we need to unpick that take you backward so that you see that you actually can feel the anxiety. And live and get on with things, and it goes away. It always amazes me how people are so amazed that it goes away that you will stop thinking about this. You will, and it will go away if you stop listening to it and arguing with them.
Carrie: Right. And I think sometimes, in OCD treatment, that first step is really developing an awareness of how this plays out in a person’s life. And then being able to separate, like, I am not my OCD. I’m dealing with OCD.
Ingrid: Oh, yes.
Carrie: But it’s not my character. I may have these obsessions about hurting someone, but that’s not my value system. My value system is in loving people and caring for people. And that’s been shown through their behavior.
Ingrid: Yes, absolutely. And it’s strange that you should mention that about, you know, not me and my values system. Very often that is a factor within OCD is that things are occurring, obsessions, compulsions that are totally in opposition to what their value systems are, which, of course, creates an immense amount of guilt and shame and so on, and actually help the person to understand that because it’s in your value system. That’s why you have these. The very fact that you’re so afraid of that means you’re going to have the obsession of the compulsion.
Carrie: And we’ve talked about this before on the show, I think in your relationship to scrupulosity that people.
Ingrid: Yes.
Carrie: Those who are more spiritual and who have a connection to God are more likely to struggle with scrupulosity if they have OCD. I think that I can really see how this would be helpful for people with that sense of, there’s say, acceptance over the issue. And then you even said something earlier about taking it along with you. Can you talk with us a little bit more about that? Cause I know that that’s also a principle.
Ingrid: I often use the metaphor of a backpacker over the shoulder bag and say, look, you’ve got this thing, and it’s stuck to you, and it’s not going to go away. It’s like one of those magnetic games: as you move, it’s going to move with you. So instead of spinning off, trying to push it away, put it in your backpack, put it in your sling bag, and go and do what you want anyway because it won’t leave you.
So go ahead and do it. And it really helps to visualize it as well. So sometimes, I’ve had somebody visualize a little purple man who was giving her absolutely. I guess you should put them in the bag about herself, esteem, and all arresters and take him with you. And, of course, she must always be careful not to disrespect the mind. You’re not showing disrespect for the mind because the person needs to know your mind is doing its job. It’s just doing it in a bit of a weird way right now.
Carrie: It’s trying to protect you.
Ingrid: We always need to be careful not to undermine the mind’s job and get the person to feel that their mind is somehow defective. That’s actually a very important part of actors. There is nothing wrong with you. You’ve got problems because there’s everything right with you.
Carrie: Oh, wow. This is a very interesting reframe for people.
Ingrid: Isn’t it wonderful?
Carrie: It takes off that shame layer, really.
Ingrid: Yes. And the fear of, you know, am I losing it? I always joke that the least funny joke ever is of all the things I’ve lost in life. I miss my mind the most.
Carrie: I’m curious for you: how does ACT therapy align with faith in God and biblical teaching?
Ingrid: Actually, that’s a very close fit because the stitching with the thing I’m trying to avoid and actually sitting with it and willingly accepting it is much easier as a Christian because I have got the added strength of grace without being a Christian. I willingly accept that struggling against this thing will make me worse, but that’s just pure straight logic, and I learn it through experience, and that’s how it works. But now that I’m a Christian, I know that all things work together for the good of those who love the Lord. And so whatever I’m experiencing is somehow going to work towards my good. And if I am in it and with it and thinking about God’s promises, you know what He has promised me here, it increases my faith.
Carrie: Everything is purposeful. I think one thing as Christians that we fight against sometimes. Is, you know, okay, God, why am I going through this? Can you please take it away so that I don’t have to deal with it anymore because it’s uncomfortable and it’s painful. And I know that you have the power to do that. And instead of, like you were saying, really leaning in and saying, okay, there must be some purpose that this experience is here.
Ingrid: Yes.
Carrie: And God has allowed it in my life for some reason or another, you know, maybe it’s to help somebody down the road. That’s going to be going through a similar experience; maybe it’s to grow my character internally, and I could see how this therapy could help you lean into that.
Ingrid: Sometimes it’s to help me to learn something that I really need to learn. You’re like recently after I tell you at the end, but we’ve been living on a boat, and I tend to live in my head, but you can’t when you’re on a boat, and I’ve seen some many beautiful things and outside that I wouldn’t have been part of. Cause that would have been busy in my hand.
Carrie: I know for me right now, I’m dealing with some chronic back pain related to my pregnancy. It’s taught me so much about many different things, but really relying on God, understanding my limitations, and having compassion for my clients with chronic pain. I think that it’s not over yet. So, I think there are probably still more things that I will learn or somehow will grow from this experience of going through it.
But it is hard to accept when you’re in the middle of it. You know, it’s like, I can take my back pain with me to exercise and recognize that I don’t feel like exercising because I’m in pain. But when I start to do the stretching and the yoga and the things that I know will be good for me and the core exercises, I start to feel better. And I know that what I’m doing is not exacerbating anything. It’s trying to help the other muscles support my back and support. So I can see that in what we’re talking about today.
Ingrid: And would you say that it would then help you with empathy was chronic pain patients who sometimes seem to be quite childish, or it helps to have empathy with that to say, I know it feels really, really, really hard.
Carrie: Sure. Have you seen in terms of biblical characters that you’ve studied how they may have accepted a situation and then acted based on it?
Ingrid: One of the things that mean a lot to me is the three Hebrew children, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, being thrown in the fire. And they said,” I think it was never that our God could save us from the fire, but even if he doesn’t, we still weren’t worshipping here.” That’s been a lot to me. There’ve been a few occasions in my life where, you know, you’re up against it, and it’s like, do this or else. And even if God doesn’t save me. So that’s one and the other one, really his job, even though he slays me when I trust him.
Carrie: Yes.
Ingrid: I struggle to get through this without getting emotional. But there’ve been very, very hard times in my life where that’s resonated in my head that God, I don’t know what you’re doing. And it feels like this is killing me, but I trust you.
Carrie: Tell us a little about the book you wrote, “ACT With Faith.”
Ingrid: Well, I wrote it initially. The audience I chose was non-Christian therapists because I believe that there are many out there who are highly competent and would be very willing to work with Christians. With their own belief because, you know, ACT has a pragmatic Trist criteria which states that whatever the client believes is the truth in that room at that time. So even with a non-Christian therapist, Christian clients’ truths are what’s important.
So, I thought I’d put out there what Christian truth is in terms of the six ACT processes or the six major processes lined in ACT. So, the therapists could relate process by process to various aspects of Christians’ beliefs. And I also wanted to give them eight for their Christian clients. So I put in a whole lot of appendices, which a client hands out, but if there’s something they don’t understand, like grace, they can hand it to their clients, and their clients can see how it relates to the whole ACT process.
Carrie: I like that a lot. Who has been resonating with the book, or have there been other people as well that have picked up on it, maybe clients that have read it and resonated with it or a Christian therapist?
Ingrid: I found it actually at a wide range of people because many clients have resonated with it. And people who are not Christians. People have come to me to say, “How can we adapt this for Muslim clients?” or I am trying to help and explain to them that the way I work is to say if I have a Muslim or Hindu or another religion, we have a religious book, and this is what it says. And I’m sure there are some things similar to this in your book. Can we see if we can find it? And there is something like if we’re dealing with marriage or relationship issues or whatever. People who are Christians who are not Christians
Carrie: That’s awesome.
Ingrid: In a very wide range of people.
Carrie: Towards the end of every podcast. I like to ask our guests to share a story of hope, which is a time in which you received hope from God or another person.
Ingrid: Kind of alluded to this, but in 2018, my husband and I both felt that God was indicating to us to leave South Africa and return to the UK. The unfortunate part about it was that we would have nothing because of, you know, exchange rates, etcetera. Various factors meant that we would arrive here was nothing. We have about, so we’ve lived on the boat. It wasn’t supposed to be for three or four years, but that has been that, and it’s been very hard. The summers are beautiful, of course. And that’s what I was alluding to earlier with, you know, at being outside, seeing the nature it’s beautiful. But winters are tough, and we applied for housing, and it’s taken a very long time; we were approved in June, and it’s been hanging on hanging on. And today we got the large vacation, the house we love is ready, we can move it next week.
Carrie: That’s awesome. That’s really beautiful. It’s hard to wait on those types of things, but praise God.
Ingrid: It’s very hard, it’s very hard to wait, and that’s been what I was, you know, about Joe, and I’ve been very ill on the boat at times, just saying to the Lord, “Okay, I know you have this in hand, I know you have it in half.” It takes you a bit longer than order a life.
Carrie: Yes.
Ingrid: I know we are both very excited about that.
Carrie: It’s really being able to trust that he’s going to take care of things.
Ingrid: And, of course, deal. But you know, we’ve had to do quite a lot of, you know, applying and sorting and working and, so we do our bit.
Carrie: Sure.
Ingrid: But God is there, and he’s in control. And he knows exactly, and we couldn’t have chosen if I’d had to draw a little cottage that I would love to be in. I couldn’t have done anything more beautiful than what we’ve actually got.
Carrie: I’m so excited for you to be able to move into your place. And thank you so much for having this conversation about ACT with us. We’ll put links to your website and the book in case people want to learn more.
Ingrid: Great. Thanks, Carrie. Nice talking to you. And I hope the rest of your pregnancy goes well or you don’t have a bad backache.
Carrie: Thank you. Thank you.
Have you had any personal experience with acceptance and commitment therapy?
I think it would be interesting to have someone on the show from the client’s perspective. I wanted to share with you something that I’m very excited about, and that is what we now have: a Hope for Anxiety and OCD Facebook group. I know not all of you are on Facebook. It has its good things and bad things about it for sure. However, we wanted to create an opportunity for listeners to really interact with each other. And interact with myself. I’m hoping this will really help expand our audience reach because there are many people who still don’t know about the show. While at the same time, getting to know those of you who are listening on a regular basis. We will put a link for you to that group in the show notes and hope you will join us over there. Thank you so much for listening.
Well Hope for Anxiety and OCD is a production of By The Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of myself or By the Well Counseling. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum. Until next time, be comforted by God’s great love for you.
Hope for anxiety and OCD episode 64 today’s episode is a solo episode where I wanna talk with you about how we unintentionally increase our own suffering. This is something that I feel like God has taught me through a process of more recent suffering. And I wanted to share it with you because even though my suffering was physical and then it turned into emotional suffering was like secondary.
As a result of the physical suffering. What I realized through the process was that people do the same things with emotional pain. So they experience emotional pain due to anxiety, O C D depression, other mental health issues. And then there’s this increase in more emotional pain in response to that initial pain and suffering.
As I’m recording this right now, I’m about 32 weeks pregnant. But when I was going through some intense physical pain, it was a lot earlier in my pregnancy, probably around, you know, weeks, 15. 20. I started experiencing this back pain. That was unexplainable. I didn’t know where it was coming from. I didn’t think I had done anything specific to have the back pain.
It was in a weird spot, but I was trying all of the self-help things that I knew to do. To help it such as, you know, providing heat for the sore muscles, looking up exercises, you know, what are some good back exercises during pregnancy? It got to a point where it wasn’t getting better. It was just progressively getting worse and worse and worse to the point where it was a daily occurrence.
And then I was essentially living for. The time that I could lay down, I would sit up, meet with clients. And then if I had any kind of break lunch or after work, I’d just lay down and collapse and put the heating pad on me. And that was about what I could do for several weeks. I would try to stretch or do some light exercises.
Sometimes I ended up aggravating some other areas of my body. What I. As I was experiencing that physical pain was that then there came some emotional pain that got latched in and connected to it. I started having. All kinds of thoughts about my pregnancy. Maybe I shouldn’t have gotten pregnant. Maybe this wasn’t a good idea.
At my age, if I had known I was gonna have to go through all of this physical pain, I wouldn’t have done it. I was angry at my doctor, who I felt like had set me up for failure because she had told me going into this process that I was healthy. I was angry at myself for not knowing more or not knowing how to fix this issue.
I was angry at God. You know, why have you allowed so many people around me to have good and healthy and you know, relatively pain, free pregnancies. And I’m over here suffering with all of this discomfort. So early on, and I know I still have over half of my pregnancy to go, what’s going on with that?
These thoughts would just keep churning around in my head. I couldn’t seem to find some kind of resolution for them or some kind of landing point to get to. And the thoughts themselves increased my own suffering because. . I was starting to think things like, okay, I have this many weeks of pregnancy to go.
I’ve got 23 weeks of pregnancy to go. Am I going to be in physical pain this whole time? Because I’m at a certain size right now, but I’m only going to get bigger if my back can’t handle this point in time. Then what’s gonna happen when I am in the third trimester where everybody says you have back pain, like I already have back pain in the second trimester and I can’t handle it now.
How in the world am I going to be able to handle it later? I went through. A two week period where I cried every single day, I was completely depressed and hopeless. My doctor had told me, well, you know, maybe this will get better. Maybe it won’t. And that was not what I needed to hear at that point. I needed her to give me some hope of let’s try X, Y, and Z to help these things.
Get better for you so that you don’t have to continue in suffering. But I had really held onto that, that this pain might not go away for the rest of my pregnancy. I remember one day I was lying in bed and I just started crying before I even got out of bed. And Steve came by, I was like, you know, what’s going on?
I don’t even wanna get outta bed because I know I’m gonna be in pain today. And I know I’m gonna have to deal with that and I don’t wanna deal with it. I don’t wanna do. When I got to really my lowest point, which is very scary to talk about, but I wanna share it because, you know, we all have really, really low points in our life and we have dark thoughts that we don’t ever talk about.
And so I. Just wanted to share one of mine, I guess, for, to make somebody out there feel a little bit less strange or less crazy in some way. I remember just praying and, and asking God that, that I could not be pregnant anymore. And that he just needed to take my baby because I could not handle this pain for.
20 more weeks. I could not do it anymore. And just cried and cried and cried. And I felt so guilty. Like I must be this absolute, horrible person. Like I just prayed. And I asked God to take my baby. Like how awful is that? So in the midst of going through this whole process, I had these emotions surrounding knowing that I have other people in my life who have been unable to have children that I love very much and other people in my life who are in the process of trying to have children.
And I thought, you know, you’re really ungrateful. You’re awful for thinking these thoughts because these people would love to be pregnant and they would love to have children. Certainly compounded to the emotional distress. Then not only was I feeling certain feelings and having very distressing thoughts, then I was compounding it by telling myself how wrong I was to have these thoughts and how wrong I was to have these feelings.
None of that help. Whenever we tell ourselves you don’t get to feel that instead of actually acknowledging our own feeling, we’re increasing our own suffering. Similar to thought sometimes feelings just happen. They just come up and we don’t even know why they’re there, but instead of shoving them down, trying to ignore them, not acknowledge them.
It’s better for us to be able to say, okay, I’m experiencing anger. Where I’m experiencing sadness, I’m experiencing anxiety. It’s okay for me to acknowledge that feeling. And then it’s also okay for me to be able to say, what can I do to help myself express release this emotion? Let it go and allow myself to enter into a calmer space or a happier space.
Those two things are not incongruent with each other. I just want to help you understand that sometimes people think if they acknowledge their emotion, that they’re going to somehow be stuck in. That typically isn’t usually the case. It’s more typical that if you acknowledge it and are able to process it and kind of allow it to flow through you, like a wave goes up and then you express it in a healthy way, hopefully, and then it comes down.
You’re able to release it and get to a place of feeling better. The more that you try to fight the wave, the longer it tends to stick around in an unhealthy sense. During this process, I was seeing a counselor who I ended up firing kind of funny because I really didn’t like what she had to say, even though she was right.
She told me that I needed to work on mindfulness skills and I. I don’t understand this. Like I know how to be mindful. I teach people mindfulness practice. I have a podcast episode on mindfulness. Like what, why are you telling me about mindfulness? Like how is that actually going to help this chronic pain issue that I’m dealing with?
After I fired her, actually went on Amazon and started looking for a book on. Mindfulness and pain. I found this book called you are not your pain by Birch and Penman. That absolutely transformed my experience with my pain. Having the physical pain is one thing or the emotional pain, but what Birch and Penman talk about is that we have primary suffering and we have secondary suffer.
Primary suffering is a physical sensation of pain or for people with anxiety. There’s a physical sensation that comes along with that. So it might be like a rapid heartbeat or difficulty breathing. There might be just a lot of tension in your body when you’re anxious. And so that’s the primary suffering.
Your primary suffering could be mental as well. Like constant worry. You know, I just can’t seem to get away from my thought process. It’s just going all the time and worrying about the future. But secondary suffering is like that piece that comes next. It’s that piece that we add on. So for the person with the rapid heartbeat, the secondary suffering is they tell themselves I’m dying.
When really they’re having a panic attack and understandably so when people first start to learn that they have panic attack, sometimes they don’t know. Sometimes they really do think they’re dying, but after you learn, oh, okay, this is a panic attack. This is something different. Then it’s like, you can reframe it and say, you know, there’s a difference between telling yourself my heart’s beating really fast and telling yourself I’m dying.
So my primary suffering was. Physical pain, but my secondary suffering was, I’m never gonna get out of this. I’m gonna have it for 20 more weeks. I don’t know how I’m going to get through this. I can’t do it anymore. I can’t face another day. God, why won’t you take this away? All of those things, the regret thoughts about I shouldn’t have ever gotten.
You know, I, I did this to myself. Why did I do this? Why did this happen? God, why did you allow me to become pregnant? If you knew I was gonna end up in this pain, all of that churning stuff is the secondary suffering. What I talk about in this book, you are not your pain is that mindfulness will help decrease your secondary suffering.
And as you decrease your. Secondary suffering then sometimes your primary suffering decreases as well. Not always, but at least you will have a different perspective on your primary suffering than you did before. One thing I learned for myself is that secondary suffering involves a process of grief and loss.
In my experience, I could remember thinking, I went into this thinking, I’m gonna have a healthy pregnancy. I’m gonna be a fit pregnant person that continues to work out. I had these expectations right. Of what it was going to be like. And then my expectations were completely blown out of the water.
Because all of a sudden I couldn’t work out. I couldn’t even do day to day life stuff that I needed to do. That was really hard for me to sit with knowing that when I used to be a member of the Y for example, I would go to these Zumba classes and there would be pregnant women in there dancing around and doing just fine.
And. You know, I thought that that was gonna be me one day and it wasn’t. I had to grieve that and be, really allow myself to be sad about that. I had to allow myself to be sad and also angry about the fact that I was now having to do extra things, such as go to physical therapy that I didn’t plan on doing and didn’t want to do quite frankly.
I didn’t want to go to physical therapy and do these exercises and have somebody poke on my back. I didn’t want to do those things, but that was what I needed to do. It was okay for me to be sad about that. It was okay for me to be angry. I really missed my workout. Endorphins a lot. I miss them so much.
And I realized that through that process, that was something that I had to grieve. I was never one that said, yes, I like to work out. I absolutely wanna do it. I would always tell people, I love the effects of working out. I love the fact that I can sleep better. I love the fact that I feel better physically and emotionally, I had to grieve loss of social experiences.
Things that I was invited to or things that I wanted to do where I had to tell people, you know, I don’t know if I’m gonna be able to commit to that or not, because I don’t know how I’m going to be legitimately feeling on that day. And I had to admit to people that I had limitations. That I wasn’t sure if my back was gonna be able to handle sitting for that long or standing for that long or whatever the situation entailed.
That was hard for me. I had always been so healthy and one of the things that God showed me through this process was how much pride I had put in my own physical health as something like I have control over it. I think that’s a very. Probably American mindset of like, well, you know, if you just eat the right foods and you exercise and you’re gonna be in good health, the reality is we don’t have control over that.
Guys. You could be a super healthy person and wake up tomorrow with cancer. We’re not in control of our health. A hundred percent, like we think we are. And that was something that I realized that it was out of my control, that was distressing for me. And I had to come to a place of humility and surrender to say, okay, this is where I’m at in my life.
This is a part of my process. I will tell you though, that during that two weeks where I was so depressed and so angry, I knew that I was in this grief and loss process. I knew that I hadn’t come to a place of acceptance. It was like, I couldn’t quite get there. I didn’t know like what I needed to get to that place of acceptance.
Maybe you’re at a point in your life where you’re dealing with anxiety and you hate it so much. Or you’re dealing with O C D and it’s like, you’re constantly trying to fight it because you hate it so much. And maybe. You need to get to that point of acceptance that for whatever reason, this is my season right now of suffering.
It may feel like it’s been a very long season and I hear you on that, but we can’t make positive changes and move forward. If we aren’t willing to first, except where we’re at really think about that. You can’t move forward. If you aren’t accepting of where your starting point is. You can’t run a marathon overnight.
When you’ve been sitting on the couch, you can’t expect your emotional self to be able to do certain things. If you haven’t exercised those emotional muscles, when you’re dealing with secondary suffering, you also have to guard your heart and mind in terms of what other people tell you because other people’s experience.
Are not your experience. If there’s anything that will teach you about the dumbest things people can say to you, it’s when you’re pregnant. I mean, it’s just absolutely unreal. Some of the stuff that people come out with, but I had different people tell me, oh, when I was pregnant, that was just the best that I felt in my whole.
Girl, granted, some of those people didn’t know that I was dealing with chronic pain when they said that to me, but I thought that is exactly what I don’t need to hear right now, because that’s certainly not my experience. Then you start to think to yourself, what’s wrong with me? If they had that experience, why couldn’t I have that experience?
And I’m sure this has happened to you. If you’ve dealt with anxiety for any period of time, you’ve had someone come up to you and say, oh yeah, I used to deal with anxiety. And there was this revival service at church and they prayed over me and I’m no longer anxious and I’m just walking in the Lord’s victory.
And if that’s someone’s story, like, that’s awesome. That’s great for them, but that’s not a lot of people’s story. Um, not the people that I’ve worked with anyway, that. Typically been their story. We have to be careful not to compare ourselves to other people. We have to say, this is a journey that the Lord has me on.
And he’s the one that gets to speak into that journey. And other godly people get to speak into that journey. But no one else can tell me exactly how my specific journey, whether it’s with pain, whether it’s with anxiety, whether it’s with pregnancy, whatever it is, nobody can tell me exactly how that’s gonna go for me, except for God.
He knows what that path is like. After I went through my two week crying period. I started to seek God for some answers. Okay. What does it actually mean to depend on you on a daily basis? What does it actually mean that your power is made perfect in weakness? Of course, these are things that I’ve heard.
My whole life, but I didn’t know how they applied to my specific situation. I’m not gonna say that that God showed up and spoke to me audibly or anything of that through that time, other than God just gave me peace to do the next thing. My planning self who loves to plan and set goals and knows what she’s doing next week and next month really had to reign back in and be put on.
And say, I’m gonna do what I can do today. I was in a bit of a survival mode. I had to be okay with that. Going back to that acceptance piece, I had to be able to accept, you know what, right now I’m just in a survival mode and I’m just looking at things day by day. Sometimes not even day by day, sometimes just morning, afternoon, evening.
What is reasonable? For me to accomplish right now, a lot of things fell by the wayside. During that time, I wasn’t super happy that they were falling by the wayside, but I also knew that I was doing the absolute best that I could do. There were a lot of dinners that didn’t get cooked. There were a lot of grocery shopping trips that didn’t get done, maybe laundry progress notes for therapy.
There were a lot of things that had to be done later. I came to a place of acceptance that I’m doing the best that I can do in this moment. And that’s all I can do moving forward. It’s super important for us to understand what kind of season that we’re in, because oftentimes we are longing for a different season.
We’re longing for someone else’s season. We’re longing for a season that we used to have in the past, instead of really examining God, speaking to him in prayer and examining ourselves to say, Okay. What season is it that you have for me right now, at this point in time, that applies to so many different areas of our life.
I knew that a lot of my secondary suffering had to do with catastrophizing futuristic thinking where everything’s horrible, terrible, awful. I’m never gonna be able to get outta this pain. You know, how in the world am I going to give birth? If I can’t even get around. All kinds of thoughts that were happening to me after that two week period of crying, I don’t know what the shift was for me.
I know I was able to talk with my doctor who recommended that I get on an antidepressant genuinely. I was depressed. Maybe that was my wake up call that I wanted to shift and change things and look at them differently. I didn’t want to get on an antidepressant at that point. Not because I don’t believe in antidepressants, you know, we’ve, we’ve certainly talked about reducing shame surrounding medication on the show.
I’ve, I’ve been on an antidepressant in the path. That’s not a problem. But what I realized was that my depression was secondary. To my suffering with pain. And if I could work towards reducing some of my suffering surrounding pain, I wouldn’t be depressed and I would be able to move forward. I was able to talk with my doctor about why in the world did this happen, or how did I end up here?
Because I think I was taking responsibility for somehow being in this position. Like I talked about before, just kind of that feeling like I should be in control of my own health. What my doctor told me basically was that we don’t know how people are gonna react or how their bodies are gonna react when they get pregnant.
There’s lots of things that happen with hormones that I learned about that can affect your ligaments and your muscles, and really just throw things outta whack all over your body. Even though they’re trying to help certain areas of your body be prepared to give birth. That conversation I know was healing for me.
I know I also had some conversations with Steve and with our doula who I had recently hired at that point that were healing conversations for me to help me get back on track. All I can say is that God gave me some type of clarity of mind at some point, to be able to sit down, write down specifically some of these repetitive thoughts that had been coming up.
Some of the things that I had been thinking over and over and over, such as I regret getting pregnant was one of them that I wrote down. And God gave me these words to counteract these thoughts. Instead of saying I regret getting pregnant wish I had never gotten pregnant. And then I wouldn’t be dealing with this painful experience.
I wrote down that I’ve waited many years to have a family. I didn’t choose chronic pain or difficult pregnancy, but I choose my daughter and it’s not my fault that I’m in this pain and I don’t understand why it’s happening, but I know that it is happening. I had a thought about this pain will last the next 16 weeks until my daughter’s born.
It’s only going to get worse as I get bigger. And then I wrote down, but God knows how the next 16 weeks are going to go. It could get better. It could get worse. I can only deal with today’s pain today. If there’s pain tomorrow, I will not be able to deal with it until tomorrow. That for me was probably the biggest revelation and goes back to that place of mindfulness, right?
Like I can’t deal with tomorrow’s anxiety. I can only deal with today’s anxiety that I feel right now here in the moment. You cannot predict how O C D is going to go for you in one year. In two years, you can only say, okay, what can I do about these obsessive thoughts today? What can I do about the compulsions that I really wanna engage in today?
As you’re more mindful, you notice that some days are better than others. That was my experience. I did go through several weeks of physical therapy. My process, I thought was going to be much more linear than it actually was. I thought, okay. I’m gonna go to therapy, I’m gonna do these exercises. I’m gonna practice like I’m supposed to, and then it’s gonna be kind of this straight diagonal line upward.
Why I had this idea. I have no idea because I work with people all the time on emotional pain and I. Tell them constantly. That’s not how it works. You know, you have some ups, you have some downs, you start to feel a little bit better, and then you have a setback or you have a major trigger that happens.
And that doesn’t mean that you’re not making progress. It just means that it’s not that neat diagonal line. So kind of comically looking back on it. I’m like, why did I think that my pain was going to be any different, but I really did. And that was interesting because, you know, no one had really communicated with me what this process was going to be like in terms of physical therapy and, and working through this pain.
And this discomfort, I did have some pretty significant setbacks of experiencing pretty intense, pure forms, muscle pain, and spasms. If you don’t know what your pure form muscle does, it basically turns your leg from straight to out and it’s in your butt. Let me tell you when that muscle is in pain. You know it because I could not even roll over in the bed without that acting up and aggravating, that was very disheartening to me to have my back start to feel a little bit better.
And then this muscle completely go out of whack. I had one side that I was able to get better and then, you know, not too long after the other side majorly acted up and was got me down kind of in the bed for a little while. Even through that experience, I was able to learn if I sit too long, that’s not so good for me.
If I stand too long, that’s not so good for me. If I alternate heat. Nice. That feels a little bit better. I just had to try out a lot of different things. I really relate that over to anxiety as well as you start to kind of notice. What your experiences, what your triggers are, what kind of things have, have been helpful to you?
What kind of things haven’t been helpful to you? Then you can start to adjust how you approach the anxiety. One of the things that they have you do in the book, you’re not your pain is kind of go through some different activities and look at, you know, did your, did your pain increase with these activities?
Did it decrease? Did it stay about the same. And as you’re really kind of like just tuning into that whole process, then you’re able to have realistic expectations for yourself. A lot of times what we do is as we start to get better, then we put too much on our plate. And then we have a setback because we expected too much out of ourselves.
This can be a yoyo cycle, like for anxiety where maybe you engage and then you withdraw. And then you engage and you withdraw because you engaged a little bit too much, for example, or you tried to do too much. Besides mindfulness. Another thing that can be helpful for secondary suffering is gratitude. I had to get to a place where I was thankful for the things that I could do or be thankful for the days that I could do them because there were some days that I couldn’t do them.
And as I was able to develop more gratitude that allowed some of that pain to lessen, there is this interaction we have to understand between our mind and our bodies. There’s a two-way flow to it. Right? So our body is listening to what our mind is telling it. And then our body’s experience is kind of.
Traveling back up to the mind and informing it, you know? So there’s this two way street that’s happening all the time that we’re inter interacting with. And if we don’t take care of both of those components, then we’re going to be missing something. I’m really thankful that. I got to share this part of my story with you today, because it makes me feel like I didn’t go through all that in vain.
And maybe when somebody else has a thought that is, is really dark or out there, they’ll go back. And remember this episode, you know, maybe you feel less alone today in your experiences. I think if there is something that I could go back and encourage my earlier pregnant self with, it would be to go ahead and embrace physical therapy.
I had a really hard time with this for some reason, which is ironic because I’m always telling people that it’s okay to get help. But for some reason, in this experience, I was super ashamed of going to physical therapy. Somehow, I was supposed to be able to figure this out myself because I had been doing fitness and stretching and yoga and different things for years.
And I also didn’t fully understand the concept of physical therapy. Nobody took the time to. Break it down for me and explain these people are specifically skilled to be able to diagnose where exactly your pain is coming from. And in my case, it was being referred from a different area, which is why it didn’t make sense.
They can help you with specific exercises to target those specific areas. I think my concept of physical therapy prior to pregnancy was. Well, you know, if you have surgery, you get physical therapy, or if you had an injury, you get physical therapy. But I thought who gets physical therapy for being pregnant?
Apparently it’s a thing. And a lot of people do because there’s so many things that happen with your muscles and all of that and ligaments and different things, stretching out. If I could go back and tell my earlier self something, it would be it’s okay to get this help. And it doesn’t mean that you’re doing something wrong.
It just means that you need the knowledge, skills, and abilities that these people have in order to get yourself to a better place. I think in a similar way, some people don’t understand exactly what mental health therapy is all about. They have these pictures from TV, like, oh, you’re gonna lay down a couch and someone’s just gonna ask you about how you feel.
There’s a lot more to it than that. If you’ve been listening to our show, you know that, but we have these misperceptions right. About what getting help is like, and that keeps us from actually getting the help or we think is that really gonna help me? Or can I do this on my. I want to let you all know if you didn’t know that we have an email list where I’ve been really striving to send out emails every week.
This has also been a one step forward, two step back I’ll I’ll do it for a few weeks and then fall off the BWA and do it for a few more weeks, but I’m really striving to be consistent in putting things out there that are helpful and beneficial for you guys. If you want to join our email list, you can do that by going to hope for anxiety and ocd.com.
There’s a way on the homepage for you to be able to subscribe. And as a gift to you, you also get to listen to my color breathing, exercise that some of my clients have really enjoyed over the. I have some great interview episodes that I’ve been saving up for you guys on different types of therapy.
We’re gonna talk with someone about somatic experiencing therapy and about acceptance and commitment therapy. So I’m super excited to share those interviews with you guys pretty soon. So stay tuned. Hope for anxiety and OCD is a production of by the well counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bach, licensed professional counselor in Tennessee opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the use of myself or by the well counseling.
Our original music is by Brandon Mangram until next time may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.
Joining the show today is Jon McLernon, a fitness coach and emotional eating expert. Jon shares with us his traumatic experience that changed his life and shaped him to be the person he is now.
What happened to Jon while he was on a humanitarian mission in South Africa
Impact of the traumatic incident on Jon’s mental health
Using food as a coping mechanism
Making the decision to forgive
How did Jon forgive and move into a place of compassion?
How Jon started to become a weight loss coach
How Jon helps his clients create life-changing transformations.
Carrie: Hope for anxiety and OCD episode 63. Today on the show, I have a special interview for you with coach Jon Mclernon. I’ve been holding onto this episode for a little while and honestly thought about not publishing it due to some background noise interference that comes up at different points. However, when I went back and listened to the interview recently, I felt like coach Jon’s story of how he got to a place of forgiveness was so powerful that I wanted you guys to hear it because he went through something that, no one should ever have to go through and it was traumatic and he talks about how he coped with that in a negative way. And then how he came to forgiveness, how he got back on track. It’s just a really great personal story.
The reality is, is that if you’ve been living and breathing for any amount of time on this earth, there’s been someone that’s hurt you, that you’ve needed to forgive. And hopefully, this episode will help you with that process. Jon, you had a traumatic experience and that really changed the trajectory of your life. Told us about that.
Jon: My wife and I sort of embarked on a global cold trotting adventure, I guess you could say. And we spent about three years of our life just traveling around the world. And one of the places that we landed in was, so with Africa, we, we’d met some South Africans in our travels and they invited us to come down to South Africa to help them work on a particular, it was a government program. It was an NGO or a government-funded but privately run. It was called Hospitality Youth Internship. And so what we were doing is we were working with underprivileged, young people, kind of teaching them life skills and helping them to be more employable and then placing them in internships before basically with potential employers to give them a chance to grow themselves.
At that time we were living on a nature reserve. Eastern Cape and South Africa, and one night I had went back to our cabin, kind of the layer of the reserve was the buildings were kind of lined up in a bit of an L shape. So you had, like a dining hall on one end and there was the dormitories for the students. And then there was, like the washroom facilities and tucked into the woods. A little bit was off to the side. Was the instructor’s cabin. And so I’d been walking back there. Everyone else was in the dining hall, you know, enjoying dinner and whatnot. It should have clicked, but it didn’t, because when I was out there everything’s peaceful and quiet that something that was missed by the door was ajar the cabinet. And when I opened it, there was three men in there, that were actually sitting down and eating food or table and, and it didn’t really register with me that some of it was a mess. There was a fourth guy outside of the cabinet, and see who hit me over the head with a rock and it stunned me and so on.
So essentially their intention was to try to beat me to death, basically. That was quite a really traumatic thing to go through and kind of skipping over some of the details probably for the sake of brevity as well, but in an incident like that, like, I don’t think anything in life really properly prepares you to experience something like that. Some of the things that stick out in my mind were like they were smiling and laughing and that, you know, while they’re inflicting this on me.
Carrie: And these were people that you didn’t know and they didn’t know you and all of a sudden they’re trying to kill you basically.
Jon: I sort of stumbled across some, I believe they were bid ransacked or cabin and whatnot, but it turns out the night before they’d they had to actually be in your death, a farmer that they’d robbed.
And so they were kind of on this spree of doing this. And so it was nothing personal, but me and the individual, it just so happened to be where they were. Then there’s also kind of a reason why they do things the way they do, in trustingly in a sense. And that is that they could’ve just said, “shop me or stab me or something like that”. But in a sense, being that I was white, I am a representation of something that they feel that historically oppressed them. And so in an interesting twist, it’s kind of like they’re trying to take back something they feel is taken from them.
They want to inflict, a kind of punishment and demonstrate their power over you and really like, make you suffer in the experience. It kind of speaks to sort of the place that they might be at psychologically that made that, that worked to my advantage because I, I was able to sort of, I was stunned in concussed and widen, bruise and so on, but I was able to kind of fight my way to my feet. And at least escape to where the others were. The aftermath of that was nothing that I was really prepared for. You know, I come from Canada, we have our ups and downs and our issues, but we’re pretty open, friendly country.
I had a lot of things, a lot of, kind of intrusive thoughts, like entering my mind, a lot of unprovoked or unexpected emotions that would come on very, very strongly thoughts of doing harm or violence, other people. And so on, that’s not who I am as a human being. That in itself was incredibly troubling and difficult for me to deal with. Because the part of the logical part of my brain says, “this is not who I am”. And yet here, these thoughts are coming into my head. I’m being triggered by things that would never have in the past triggered me. And so it really felt quite unequipped to deal with that. And one of my ways of coping was actually to use food to kind of, I would say, I call it, change the channel in my head. I shouldn’t say kind of, I became a binge-eating food addict essentially. And that was one of my coping mechanisms.
Carrie: Okay. So there was just a lot of intense anger after this trauma. And part of that was just your mind, like trying to make sense of everything that happened to you. It was like this double whammy of, here I am essentially sacrificing some time and energy to help people in this humanitarian organization. And then I’m seen as, like this, racial enemy that gets beating. And, you’re not a racist person.
Jon: So it felt like a huge injustice. Everything about the situation felt unfair. It was four on one, it was a surprise attack. I was jumped at night, you know, I was by myself, that kind of thing. I was in flip-flops and sweatpants and a t-shirt just in a very good mood because we’d had wonderful interactions with our students. And to be clear, none of our students were involved in these. They were victims of this, but then none of them were involved in this.
This was separate to what they were doing. And so just a lot of it felt incredibly unjust. And I think I have a strong sense of fairness and justice. And so having this happen to me, really angered me in the sense that, you know, it wasn’t fair. In a nutshell, it really went against my sense of fairness. And of course they knew nothing about me, but the fact that yes, we were essentially volunteers with a stipend working for this organization in a sense, the goodness of our heart, because we felt inspired by the mission that they were trying to do. Maybe it happened only two weeks after we’d arrived in South Africa as well. Just a lot, everything about it felt like, very frustrating.
Carrie: All right, that makes a lot of sense. Just not knowing how to deal with all those emotions that came up, all those thoughts that would come up, you know, as intrusions. And you were like, I don’t like this. I don’t know what to do with it. And so then this avoidance, which is really, really common and trauma took over and you filled that space with food?
Jon: It’s, I’m ex-military as well, but I spent six years in the Canadian military and the navy. And as an engineer. But we’re also obviously trained as soldiers too. We’re soldiers, you know, first sailor, second or trade was third. I only share that because I am trained in terms of, of combat and things like that. And so there were definitely thoughts in my head about even things like setting traps. Because kind of what happens down there is also like, clearly we stand out because we are a visible minority, but like, you know, we were broken into many times as well and it just compounds it, it feels like you’re constantly under attack or under assault when you’re living down there for nothing that you’ve ever done. And so, you know, I had thoughts of, like setting traps and really trying to even, like encourage people to break into our hosts so that I could inflict harm on them and try and exact, maybe revenge or vengeance for what had happened to me.
But there always be this voice in my head that goes, this isn’t who you are. This is not who you are. This is not what you would do. So I really felt this tension between like the sense of identity and who I am as a human being and these things, these thoughts and ideas that were coming into my head. But looking back, I believe they were an attempt to try and reconcile something that was taken from me. You know, they really took away my power. They took away, you know, they victimized me and so on. It was almost like my attempt to take back what was taken from me.
Carrie: When did you recognize, okay, this way of coping with this trauma is not working for me anymore?
Jon: Truthfully, it was probably a couple of years after the fact. Because some of the other, what would I say, mitigating factors? I had a sense of an idea of what masculinity was and what it meant to be a man and so on. So that also came into play really in influencing how it felt about everything, including how I felt about myself, looking back. I realized like my whole life I’ve actually been an empath. I have a very big heart for people, a very big heart of caring and love, but for most of my life that actually kind of hidden and suppressed these things because I felt like, if people saw, these aspects of my nature, my identity, that they would see me as a weak man, not realizing that. Of course, that’s, that’s a completely flawed idea about it.
So that came into it as well. So again, this idea, these huge emotions coming up, and I was seeing myself as an emotionally irrational person. When, you know, prior to this, I’d kind of been, my wife used to tease me and even call me the 10 men a little bit. And so to have all of this and have it outside of my control felt very, very disempowering as well. It was probably and why is in the backstories because it didn’t really have any idea of touch she even recognized that I was traumatized in a sense, like it’s, after the minutes, like I’m strong, I can move past this.
They’re not going to win. And so on, because of that, I didn’t necessarily seek out specific help for this. I just kind of used my own coping skills, but I would say it was probably six or seven months after the fact that I first realized that my weight had ballooned up to 328 lbs. So we go back to Australia where my wife is from and realized I can’t, like I can’t keep living like this. At that time, I was 30 years old. This is if I keep on this path. This is gonna be a short life for me, that’s not what I want. So I have to try to make some changes, but I didn’t know what to do to even make changes. And so I started with trying to lose the weight. And prior to that, I’d been an athlete.
I’ve been pretty good shape. Most of my life had never really struggled that much with my weight. And so now that was another compounding factor. Here I was, I had this sense of identity as an athlete who was in pretty good shape. We went to the gym regularly, that kind of thing to now being this obese person who struggled to move. So there was that as well. And along with that came like the self-loathing and the self hatred and, and feelings of unworthiness and being unlovable and so on, all of that sort of came into play as well. And so I started to turn my attention to trying to lose weight, feeling like that would correct some of this stuff that was going on.
Carrie: How did that go? How did the weight loss journey go for you? Did you try a lot of different diets?
Jon: I did. I would say name a diet and I probably tried it now. I imagine like, since that time, cause there’s a period of time where I’ve lost weight and kept it off now for a number of years, I would say that. I tried, like paleo keto. I was even raw vegan for a period of time, low carb, low fat, just a lot of different eating protocols. Flexitarian, Mediterranean and so on. And none really could stick and I couldn’t figure out why. I’m, I’m pretty, well-educated, pretty good handle on this. And it was a struggle to try and understand, why could I know all this stuff?, but I couldn’t seem to make it stick on my own life.
I can even help other people. I was good at helping other people. I’m a natural coach, but I couldn’t help myself. I went on for a few years of, like yo-yo dieting, losing some weight, regaining it, losing it, regaining it. And even that sort of struggle itself. Again, compounding everything I felt about myself, of being a failure about really just again, being sort of this unlovable loser. Thankfully, my wife is just an amazing human being who was with me and by my side through all of this and never once like, lost hope or faith in me. Which is a real testament to her character.
Carrie: I think so many people go through that shame cycle that you’re talking about there with, okay, I’m gonna do this diet gung ho and I’m gonna get the food and I’m gonna plan the meals. And then next thing you know, they, we’re working really hard at it. And either they don’t see the results that they were expecting to see or they’re not able to stick with it. And then it creates this, oh gosh, I’m a failure. I’m never gonna lose this weight. I’m just gonna be heavy forever. And they just end up in this spiral of negativity just makes you wanna eat more really.
Jon: Well see the brain had learned the pattern. That when I feel stressed or uncomfortable in anything that I don’t wanna feel. I can just eat food and change that. A lot of people, myself included when we embark on the journey of losing weight and we decide we’re gonna make this change. And transformation is very exciting in the beginning because we’re starting to picture how we’re gonna look, how we’re gonna feel, how life is going to be different.
But I think there’s this idea that somehow, because we’re a virtuous or a good person or something that the universe is gonna conspire to create the perfect conditions for us to lose the weight, because we’re a good person who wants to do a good thing. And the reality is a lot colder than that life doesn’t stop throwing you curveballs and punching your junk when you try to make a change like that.
So you actually have to, and I actually had to navigate this attempted transformation in real life while still sort of carrying around the emotional burdens of these beliefs, the trauma and so on. And then the yo-yo cycle just really perpetuates the cycle of shame, guilt, regret, a sense of failure and so on. I amassed a lot of that with the persona of the jolly fat guy, as well. You know, I was even at one point nicknamed the Garber eater, that’s quite, quite a handle to have.
Carrie: The garber eater?
Jon: Because I can eat a lot of food. I took a sense of pride in my appetite, but also, you know, if there was some good leftovers that somebody had, that they were just to scrape in the garbage, you know, say like a half eaten steak, I’d just cut off the parts where, you know, maybe their fork and knife and touched and be like, why are you throwing away this good food? If it’s gonna waste and miles to go to my waste, that was actually my thinking. And I think it would physically cause, like a pain at my core when I watched food being thrown away, that was like perfectly edible and good. And maybe some of that was connected to the fact that for me, food really represented a poor solution to dealing with my emotional struggles.
Carrie: How did you find some more positive ways to handle your emotions? What was that process like?
Jon: I go back to a coach who asked me a really impactful question that I see it legitimately changed my life. And it’s interesting to think that one question, when you follow that back, one question can actually change your life. And it started with, he said, if you make a list of all the things you love and value, how far down the list we have to go before I see your name and that one stopped me dead in my tracks.
Carrie: Wow!
Jon: Because it’s like, I’m not on the list. It wasn’t even that it was near the bottom. That was not on the list. I think I remember, like, I haven’t cried very often in my life pride, you know, when I send my wedding balance, that’s like, that’s the only time in my adult life that I really remember, like for most of my life ever, ever shedding tears, not because I’m ashamed to it just really hadn’t. And that moment, I just like when I was by myself, I just started crying because I couldn’t understand, like it had never entered my conscious that I was allowed to be in the list of things I love and value. Let alone near the top of that list.
So it really spoke to how I felt about myself. If I look back, I had this historical pattern of like basically setting myself on fire to keep others warm, just giving and giving and giving and constantly giving them myself. And I think it really stemmed from a real core of my being the sense of identity that said, I’m not good enough. And I have to do this. Otherwise people will just in my life will just abandon me. That was yet again, another contributing factor that made like the weight loss such as troubles. That question was like a really, it at least started the wheels turning that I need to find my weight onto this list. And I didn’t even know how to do that because it wasn’t something that ever I had ever thought about before. And maybe even I would have felt, I would have felt like a sense of shame around like being given a compliment.
Carrie: Ok.
Jon: Or being told I was good at something I’d often just want to like brush that off. Even though, like I’m quite capable of quite intelligent, you know, if I could say, like, I’m a good man, a good husband, a good father, a loyal friend, all these things. But if anyone had told me that I would try to brush it off. I didn’t want to receive the compliment graciously because of how I felt about myself. I didn’t feel I was worthy or deserved that.
Carrie: Just make you really uncomfortable.
Jon: I then squirmed in my seat and just really wanted the light to be sort of turned away from me again. One of the things that I, and then my coach had me do was to try to pay myself a genuine compliment, like look at myself in the mirror as the president was and pay myself a genuine heartfelt compliment that was grounded in reality, because in the persona state of the jolly fat guy, for example, it would be something that everything was a little bit exaggerated. You know, it was a larger than life kind of character, both physically. And in my sort of presence, I was loud.
I was vocal that kind of thing.
It couldn’t be this exaggerated compliment because a lot of that is just rooted in insecurity. It had to be a very genuine one. And that process of saying the compliment and then sitting with all the feelings that came up, not trying to push them away, not trying to shoot them away, but just sitting with them almost like observing them. And so maybe another piece of that puzzle would be when I started practicing meditation. I think it’s now shifted, but you go back like 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 years ago.
The idea is around meditation, where it’s something for like monks, you know, maybe Buddhist monks in a monastery in the Himalayas or something like that or you have to burn or hippies or you have to burn incense and hum and things like that.
Really, it was just about trying to quiet my mind and have a singular focus. And for me, it was actually just the breathing rhythm box, reading four in four out four, hold, sorry, four and four hold for, out for hold. That was the first one, you know, just something really, really simple to calm the nervous system down, even learning that practice helped me to start to become more mindful of the thoughts that enter my head. And that was one of the ways that I started to deal with the intrusive thoughts actually.
Carrie: I like that so good.
Jon: Just as a side note, as a kid, I didn’t know what I was doing at that time. Let’s see I was laying in bed at night, maybe five, six years old and had sort of scary thoughts of monsters under my bed or whatever. I would actually visualize the hedgehog driving a bulldozer and he would push those thoughts outside of my head. It’s kind of like off the edge of a cliff. So it was funny that was sort of visual tool that I developed as a little child to deal with sort of uncomfortable thoughts in my head.
Carrie: Okay. That’s interesting. So, how are you able to forgive the people that hurt you?
Jon: That was a process as well, that I made the decision to forgive because I wanted to be free from the experience. Ultimately, I realized that if I was to forgive them, that it was not about absolving them for what they had done. But I was really about setting myself free from what I had experienced. And I got tired of being angry. Rage is exhausting.
Carrie: Yes, yes.
Jon: And it’s not fun. It’s misery so it’s exhausting misery. And I was just so weary because again, it was not who I am as a person. I realized that, okay, I have to forgive them. It was in Istanbul, living with my brother at the time we were, we went back to Turkey for a period of time. My brothers lived over there for more than 12 years and I couldn’t sleep one night and I just got off and I said, “okay, I have to start the process of forgiveness, I didn’t know what it was gonna look like again, but I realized I wanted to forgive them because I want it to be free”.
I think what helped me is, I had to ask the question, “what must have happened in their life or their experience that led them to the place where not only did they think it was appropriate to do what they did”? It was actually there they’re almost like they were doing a good thing. I was the bad guy, because I don’t think first of all, I don’t think that human beings are born racist. And I don’t think that they’re necessarily born like with this idea that they wanna be a violent criminal.
Carrie: Right.
Jon: And so what happened to them in their life, in their experience that led them to this point in time in their life? I don’t know, but it probably wasn’t good.
Carrie: It makes sense.
Jon: So I started to develop a sense of compassion for them, which went against my sense of justice at the time. But I realized that again, I had to humanize them. If I was going to forgive them, they couldn’t just be like monsters. They had to be humans if I was gonna forgive them. And so I really started to reflect from their human experience and what would have brought them to this place. And the other thing I had to realize is I’m a Christian and I couldn’t say forgive them, but kind of secretly hold them at heart. And I wish that God would smack them. I have to be absolute forgiveness where I actually asked God to forgive them as well.
Carrie: Yes.
Jon: And to let go of all thoughts and desires for vengeance. It was one I got to that place and it was probably an there’s a number of months, really getting to that place of one of the steps I would say in terms of healing and moving past it. And I can say we’re actually only a couple of days off the ten-year anniversary of this happening to me. And I’m deeply grateful that I had that experience because of how it has changed me. How I’ve become a more caring, compassionate, empathetic person. So it didn’t turn me into a bitter person. I went through many years of struggles, but because of those struggles, I now have a much deeper understanding of really a people’s humanity and in their experience. And again, it’s not to really, to absolve people of harmful or unhelpful behavior, but it’s to understand why that behavior occurs and understanding that to potentially be an agent for change. Could we see in other people’s lives as well?
Carrie: I’m glad that you talked about that being a process of forgiveness, because I think a lot of times people look at it as it should be some kind of like one and done thing, but really it’s a matter of when that anger comes up, you know, dealing with it in that way of saying, okay, let me get over to the space of compassion for others and for understanding that I’m not the one responsible for justice in the sense that’s God’s department. And it does, it takes time, especially when you have big things happen to you. Sometimes that forgiveness is a process.
Jon: And you’re right about like, I couldn’t just sort of make the decision to forgive and then be free. It’s every time my brain wanted to revisit what happened to me too. You highlighted exactly, really to move into that space of compassion to say, like, I don’t want this anger, you know, and really asking God to help me to let go of it. And also like not feeling necessarily a sense of guilt for the thoughts entered my head. Because I didn’t want them. I didn’t want them there, but there was this period of time where I felt really conflicted, even at least thoughts entering my head because I thought, well, these are, these are sinful thoughts. These are harmful thoughts. They’re not thoughts that a Christian should have entering their head thoughts of carrying out violence and harming other people, even letting go of the guilt that I felt for that realizing that this was kind of my brain’s response to trying to reconcile what had happened to me. And that like in this experience, God, God was taking me through this experience.
There’s no shortcut. I think sometimes maybe there’s this desire that we try to be a Christian and try to serve God. But there’s this desire that somehow this will allow us to short circuit or shortcut the experience. But if we, if I was to take a shortcut around the experience, I would miss a lot of the value of that experience. And that’s not to say that I wanna go through something like that again, I don’t. But it was because I went through the painful experience. It’s like, almost like we have to get to like the lowest of lows to realize like how deep God’s love for us is. And we can’t really know it or feel it until we get to that place.
Carrie: Wow. That’s a good point. So tell us a little bit about what you do in terms of the nutrition coaching and your work with client.
Jon: So that originally started out about six or seven years ago, one ahead of nutrition and supplement store. So a physical bricks and mortar store. And so people would come in looking for a particular supplement to help them with a particular issue. I said that I started to become a bartender without local. And so people would come into the store and they would just start sharing their struggles. I would ask questions, “hey, you’re looking for this supplement help what’s going on”? Let’s try to understand this a little bit more. And very often that I’m saying, you know what, actually, you’re welcome to buy that if you want to. But like, I just want you to know that that’s probably not gonna help you with what it is you’re trying to get help it. And maybe I pointed direction or there’s something to help them, but ultimately I ended up coaching people.
So I started, you know, maybe I started out giving people calorie recommendations and meal plans and things, because that is what I thought people need it. But as time went on, I realized that those were really just like band-aid approaches. But really now I do what I call like brain driven, weight loss. And I’d almost like to call it, say like the side effect might include weight loss. In other words, the process that we’re really working on is a one of transformation and it actually needs a permanent shift in identity.
The idea behind a diet is a temporary change to create permanent results. And that’s never gonna be the case. If we’re going to create lasting change, we have to be transformed really it’s about walking people through that process because it’s incredibly the human beings. We don’t really create change on our own. It’s really difficult because we feel lonely and isolated, but why don’t we feel connected to another safe human being? If I could put it that way. But then it’s safe for us because the process of change is vulnerable. It’s moving out of our comfort zone. It’s moving into the discomfort zone. It involves growing. Think about like when a snake goes to shadow skin as an animal kingdom example, it goes to a place where it will be safe and secure because in that time that it’s going through that process, it’s insane so to speak.
So we can understand that a little bit like, when we go to transform, we’re moving into a vulnerable state and biologically our brain doesn’t like that because we have this hardwired sort of primal survival mechanisms. And so what needs to happen is we need to be in a safe space, so to speak where it feels like it’s safe to transform because we’re connecting to another secure human being. And so really there’s a relational aspect of the coaching that I’m doing is essentially holding space for somebody and then guiding them through that process. Yes, we’re essentially going to reverse engineer.
So we understand that fundamental principles of a healthy lifestyle. It really hasn’t changed because our biology really hasn’t changed that part of it is relatively simple as the human part that makes it complex. And so we walk people through the process of building out the foundation steps or building out the foundation pieces. And then learning how to implement these skills into their lives. So they actually become a habit or a routine behavior. So in the process of doing so, one of the things we need to do is bring a lot of unconscious habits and behaviors into our conscious awareness, because it’s the place of awareness that we can create change. And I like to add to that and say, it’s, it’s really the place of compassionate awareness. It helps us to create change.
We almost do two things. We take the unconscious habits that are unhelpful, bring them into our conscious awareness, refine them. And then we transfer them back into sort of our unconscious mind by basically by practicing these behaviors until ultimately we’ve done is we’ve crafted a lifestyle that suits the individual so that not only do they lose their weight. But because it’s become their way of living. And there’s also been a transformation in their identity. They can keep doing this because ultimately that’s what’s required to truly create change.
Carrie: I like that concept of changing from the inside out one and two to make major changes, having to change your identity, how you view yourself. And so many people are looking at themselves in the mirror saying, well, maybe like you like, okay, well I’m the jolly happy fat guy. And that really was your identity. And until you could see yourself differently, your subconscious essentially was like, we have to hold onto this weight. I mean, because we’re the jolly fat guy, like that’s who we are. And so until we, you start to see yourself differently, your body isn’t gonna fall in line with those changes that you’re trying to make that makes so much sense.
Jon: Well, it’s really interesting because there’s like this, could we say a dynamic tension? So our primal nervous system is really hardwired to seek out comfort and familiarity because that’s where safety lies.
But our soul, the essence of who we are as a human yearns for growth and development and bettering ourselves. There’s just this urge or drive. And so there’s this tension between these kinds of these two forces that are kind of pulling back and forth. Probably heard the phrase that we don’t really change until the discomfort of remaining the same outweighs the discomfort of creating change.
Carrie: Right. Just kind of as a closing question. If you could go back in time, what encouragement or hope would you provide to your younger self?
Jon: You can get through this. Human beings are immensely resilient. But we have to believe and have faith in the fact that we are, it is incredible what we can endure and move forward in. But the other thing is like, there is an end to this. There is light at the end of the tunnel. It’s going to be a difficult and painful experience, but there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Thing I would say is there is no shame in seeking help.
Carrie: Right. That’s a good one.
Jon: It’s the most beneficial thing I ever did was to open up and ask others for help. And it’s incredible that kindness that human beings will show you when you open yourself up to receiving help.
Carrie: Coach Jon, thank you so much for being on the podcast and talking about your personal story. I think that the really powerful and something probably a lot of people can relate to. Maybe they didn’t go through the exact trauma that you went through, but they went through something difficult and used food to cope or are emotional eating even currently. And maybe they can kind of pick up some tips from things that you shared of how to start making heading in a new direction. So that’s awesome.
Jon: Thank you so much for having me into, just to encourage anybody who might be struggling with things it’s okay. That your brain is doing what it’s kind of designed to do. We just need to, to, to work with your brain, the brain is wonderfully plastic. It’s called neuroplasticity. We can essentially rewire our brain. And so even if you feel stuck in these patterns, that can be changed. There is hope for you.
Carrie: Yes for sure. I wanted to take a moment to give a couple of shout-outs. One is to Betty. Thank you for being our first patron on Patreon. If you like, Betty would like to support the show. You can click on the link in our show notes. I also wanna say a thank you to Emily for writing us an encouraging note and letting us know what the podcast has meant to her. She said that she found the podcast during a difficult time in her life. And now considers us to be one of her top three favorite podcasts. So that’s awesome. It’s so encouraging to hear from our listeners. So thank you for everybody out there who’s listening.
Hope for anxiety and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, licensed professional counselor in Tennessee opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of myself or by the world counseling or original music is by Brandon Mangrum. Until next time be comforted by God’s great love for you.
I’m joined by Carole Leathem, mom, author and speaker. Carole has been caring for her spouse who has been battling anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts. She shares with us her journey of finding joy in her husband’s struggles.
Carole’s experience with her husband who struggles with mental illness-the most chaotic and dark painful times she ever been through.
Factors that contribute to her husband’s mental health condition
How their church responded in terms of the mental health crisis faced by her husband
How did her husband’s mental health disorder affect her?
How to cope when a loved one has a mental health disorder
Carrie: Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD, Episode 56. If you are new to our show,we are all about reducing shame, increasing hope, and developing healthier connections with God and others. Today’s show is on supporting and coping when your spouse is in crisis. I think this is going to be a great topic. We had another episode much earlier in the podcast where we talked about when your spouse has anxiety or OCD.
And here today, I have Carole Leathem, who is a speaker and author of the book, Finding Joy In My Messy Life. Carole, I have to say, I love that title because. I can relate. I feel like my life has certainly been messy at times and I’m sure other people can relate to that as well.
Carole: Yeah, Matt, I think right now everybody’s life is a mess in one way or another.
Carrie: Yes .
Carole: I’m happy to be here and talk about it.
Carrie. You had an experience ongoing experience with your husband who has struggled with mental health issues. Can you tell us a little bit about that story?
Carole: Well, my husband was a pastor and we’ve, we’re about to celebrate our 44th wedding anniversary in January. Five years ago, he started having some blood pressure issues and the doctor suggested that he retire.
So we did. He was going to do some sort of temporary interim work, and I was still working and about a few months into our retirement, he began to struggle with severe anxiety. By the end of that first year, 2016, the anxiety had moved into depression. By the end of 2016, he had to be hospitalized with suicidal thoughts and wanting to kill himself.
Our whole life just fell apart and I found myself a pastor’s wife, living on the other side of the pew, trying to figure out who I was,” What is this going to look like now? And then how am I going to support him? How am I going to support me? ” It was probably the most chaotic and dark painful times that I had ever been through.
Carrie: Wow! And I would imagine for men kind of going through retirement like sometimes men have such a focus on their career that it’s hard for them to shift gears and, and struggle handling that. Do you feel like that played a role in this as well?
Carole:I think looking back, I can see sort of the fingerprints or sort of the markers let’s say that maybe should have been alarming, but we just kind of lived through them.
So one was, he was very dedicated to his job and when we would go on vacation, he couldn’t check his. There were some control issues that started. I can look back and see now that that really weren’t severe, but they were sort of building, building, building. And then there was also a family dynamic like his family had this in their history and I was not aware of it
Carrie: Oh, wow.
Carole: until this happened to us. So stories started coming out. And so I do think that the job played a lot. The retirement did play a lot. “ How does that look, What does that look like?” You know, he retired earlier than he wanted to, so it hit us financially. We moved in with our daughter. So we lost some of our independence and I think there was just a whole lot of things that kind of gathered into the umbrella of the perfect storm.
Carrie: Okay. So I’m curious about how the church responded in terms of this mental health crisis, because it seems like a lot of times the church does really well with responding to physical health issues and maybe struggles with knowing how to respond to mental health.
I get one of two things. Whenever I talk about our story. And, and especially since my book has come out, one of two things happens when I began to talk. I get people kind of leaning in wanting to know more with, with sort of concern or sometimes a grateful smile. Like, “Hey, I want to hear, you know, you’re helping me here or I get total crickets.
And within the church, I think the church is still struggling to know how to deal with this from pastor to like church or parishioner. And when it happens to somebody within the leadership, it really sort of freaks everybody out, especially when they’re strong, they’re capable, they’re seen as a leader, that it comes out of nowhere and they people start getting, I think, afraid.
“ Well, if it could happen to him, it could happen to me. If it could happen to her husband, it could happen to my husband.” I think that there’s a denial that happens where we’d just prefer to sort of like walk away and not deal with it.And we did find that I found that a lot of people sort of pulled away. Some of them are starting to circle back around because they realize now that I need the love and support, I also think that it was good. For me to sort of have that pulling away in some ways, because some of the people who didn’t pull away said some really stupid things and said really hurtful, painful things, or, you know, trying to help, but not really thinking about what they were saying.
So, I think it’s the same in any type of crisis. We just don’t know how to deal with it. Especially with mental illness, they don’t know how to deal with it. And it’s oh!, running rampant through the church, right now?
Carrie: Absolutely. I was. And that’s why we need to talk about it. We need to have more of these conversations to say, “ Okay, you know, let’s educate the leaders and the pastors and let them know how you can help people in mental health crisis situations.”
Yeah. I think that’s huge. I love what you said there about denial because when you start to talk about mental health, there’s something where people have to kind of self-examine a little bit, and that can be super uncomfortable for folks because at one point or another, most of us have at least had some level of like mild depression or anxiety.
Those are their two most common mental health disorders. And obviously not, everybody’s at a diagnosable level. But everybody’s had a blue period. Everybody’s had a down period. Everybody’s had some anxiousness around a situation in their life. And so, to really be with somebody else who’s going through that, sometimes it can stir up your own stuff and people don’t always want to go there. It’s just much easier to pull back and avoid. And it’s a sad situation, I think.
Carole: When it first hit me. It took me a couple of years to verbally say out loud, “ My husband has mental illness”.
Carrie: Wow.
Carole: Because there’s just this sort of, “ I don’t want to be that person”.“I don’t want that to be my reality”. And then when I started researching, “ What did that mean?”, “I’m a digger, I’m an information person.” So I started like just going through and finding everything I can, which shockingly enough, there’s not as much information out there for the caregiver, for the person who’s not struggling, but loving somebody struggling. And so what I discovered is this, that mental illnesses is an umbrella.
Carole: and this umbrella has underneath it. Things like postpartum depression. We joke and tease about PMs, women having PMs, but that actually falls under the umbrella of mental illness because mental illness is anything that affects the brain when it attacks the brain, whether it’s depression, whether it’s anxiety, whether it’s fear that we can’t control, it controls how we relate to other people.
It controls how we relate to ourselves. It controls how we eat, how we sleep, and how we do everything in our life. And all of a sudden, we don’t want to realize that we can’t control this.
Carrie: Right
Carole: And it’s taken over everything, destroying our lives in a lot of ways.
Carrie: How did it affect you when your husband started showing these signs of anxiety and depression and suicidal thoughts?
Carole:I don’t think I really realized how far it had gone until a Wednesday night. He had been calling a crisis hotline, trying to find help. He was sitting in a chair with a hoodie over his head and, and not really engaging with the grandchildren. And we were in our son’s house. The only time I didn’t go into the room with him, when he went to call the crisis hotline, he came out and handed me the phone. And what happened was he had said the wrong thing to the person on the phone and started in motion what California calls the 51 50. California welfare code, which means he was now deemed a threat to himself, a threat to someone else.
And they’re wanting to send the police are wanting to send an ambulance and I’m standing there in the kitchen looking at my two-year-old grandson thinking, “ Oh my gosh, what has happened?” And I ended up having to finally convince her, the woman on the phone to let me drive him to a facility. And they told me where to take him. When I dropped him at the facility or I got to go in with him.
But when they finally realized that they could not talk him out of or find a way to feel safe, letting him leave, they literally kicked me out. Like I had an armed guard, walked me to the door, say, don’t come back. And when that happened, I remember it was one o’clock in the morning and I’m standing in the parking lot of the hospital, just sort of screaming, literally verbally out loud into the darkness.
“What the heck have happened to my life?”. It continued into the next morning and it wasn’t until the next morning when I sat down in the quiet of the house and I may, I have a strong faith and it wasn’t until that next morning, when I sat down with my coffee in the empty house. And just started crying out to God. like, “how am I going to deal with this?”
I am terrified myself. And really, I think we have to be honest with what we’re feeling at that moment. I was angry. I was afraid. I was confused. I mean, there’s all of these emotions, you know, that I’m trying to wrangle at the same time. I just think that it’s so easy for them, for us, to fall into the same trap because we’re now in the danger zone.
When we’re trying to deal with the understanding, we put ourselves into the danger zone, and there’s a critical point where we have to decide as a caretaker, as a loved one, as the person, who’s the partner of the husband or the wife, where we have to decide, how am I going to respond to this?
Carrie: Yes. That’s true.
Carole: So I think that’s that determines whether we’re going to stay healthy.
It really determines whether we are going to stay healthy ourselves.
Carrie: If someone who’s listening has a spouse who’s struggling, like from your experience, how do they make sure that they get support that they need? And it’s like this balancing act of trying to make sure that like your needs get met while at the same time, trying to support your spouse.
Carole: You have to be really proactive. The first thing I do, if we were on a video camera where I could turn the camera, I would show you that my window is covered in post-it notes. And the post-it notes are quotes. There are Bible verses. They’re statements that I make to myself. One of them says a scripture that I clung to that my book was actually written.
That’s the core bursts that my book was written on. You have to make a choice. Number one, to change your focus and what are you going to look at? It’s very, very, very, I can’t even say how many veries, easy for us to just want to crawl into the bed of life. Pull the covers up over our head and just ignore everything.
Carrie: Yes.
Carole: Thinking that that’s going to make me isolate. Don’t reach out, especially when people are starting to pull away, it makes it easier to isolate. So the very first thing I did was I called my.. well, I actually had connected with a friend right before this all happened and we had been friends for over 20 years.
And I’m telling her the story of not really understanding the behavior. And this was about maybe six weeks before he had to be hospitalized. So we were just going into the very critical sort of emergency part of his journey into the psychiatric hospital. And she told me it was so funny that day. She told me, she said, “ How many years have we been friends?”
And I said,” Oh!, over 20”. And she said, “ You know that I’m a retired”. And I said, “ Yeah, I know you’re a retired nurse.” And she said, “ What you don’t know is, I’m a retired psychiatric nurse.” And this is what I think is going on inside of bill. And so when we are willing to open ourselves up now like I blog about it, I wrote a book about it.
I talk about it everywhere. That’s not what the normal average person is required to do, but you do need to look around you because I found that there were perfectly placed people like my friend, Nancy, who was a psychiatric nurse, and she continues today to be one of my strongest advisers, supporters, encouragers.
And then I myself said, “ I need therapy. I need help because I need to deal with me. I have to take care of me.” And right on my window, I have it written: “ If I don’t take care of me, I can’t take care of anybody else.”
Carrie: Yes
Carole: If I want to stay married, if I want to stay healthy, if I want to keep from getting emotionally unstable, I have to take care of myself.
So I have all kinds of things that I do under the umbrella of self-care. And I say umbrella over and over, because I really do think that, that we are in a storm and I have this picture of this umbrella where God is kind of like the umbrella. And so when I refer to umbrella, it’s just kind of become this idea in my mind that everything you’re not in this alone, you have to have help.
I have all of these different umbrellas in my life. And so you have to get help, get counseling yourself, do physical things, make sure you eat well, make sure you sleep well. Make sure you do something fun. I have seven grandchildren and they give me so much joy. So, I’m always trying to find ways that I can go do something with one of them, because it’s going to take me away from the fear or the pressure or whatever.It helps me stop thinking for a moment.
Carrie: Yeah. That’s great. I, you know, so many of the things that you’re talking about are, are awesome. We have entire episodes on some of those. We have episodes on self-care. We have an episode that’s coming out before this one on sleep and nutrition, so many good things.
And I think a lot of people take that for granted. They don’t realize that there’s a foundation that you have to build healthy mental health on and things like sleep, nutrition, exercise, social support, self-care,. Those are all great, like foundational bricks and building blocks that are going to help you be able to work on the next level of your mental health sometimes, which is whether it’s dealing with past a few, you know, triggers and all of that.
Did you have some of that come up for you? Like when you went to therapy, like things started to kind of unravel that you learned about yourself. Like, “ Oh, this is here. I didn’t realize that.”
Carol: Yeah, well, my dad was an abusive alcoholic, so my younger life was chaotic. Moving into adulthood. I carried all kinds of baggage with me and I had already began to deal with this.
So if I had one hot button, uh, that we would call that, that one thing that would push me over the edge emotionally, every time it would be the word rejection. Because when you are rejected as a child, it’s really hard going into your adult life and not carrying that with you because you just, you always feel why did my father not love me?
Why did this happen to me? This happened right before our 40th wedding anniversary. And I had spent so much time learning to trust. There was an experience that happened in the hospital where the psychiatrist made my husband looked at me and he was yelling at him and he said, “ Look at her.” And he forced him.
Like, he forced my husband to roll over in the bed and look at me. And he said, “Do you want to do this to her? Do you know?” And he’s yelling into this room. Well, yelling is another hot topic for me. All of a sudden, my husband looked at the doctor said, “ Do you really want to do that to her?” And my husband looked at me in the eye, closed his eyes and rolled away , the ultimate rejection.
And I will tell you, Carrie, I still, to this day, I’m recovering from that. And it’s been five years, almost five years. Well, by the time this airs, it will have been five years that I’ve been dealing with this. And I think that our past really plays a part. The beautiful thing is, is that I was, I’ve been able to over the last five years, creates some really practical ways that when his anxiety and control turns into blame and anger towards me, I have found some incredible ways that I can deal with it without it destroying me while, I’m putting myself back together from that rejection, I’ve actually been getting stronger and stronger because I’m using those tools, that foundation that you talked about from years of therapy, getting over that. But I think there’s just some things that never go away. And it was sort of shocking to me to realize how much rejection played a part and still plays a part in how I have to choose every day to find that joy, to find that commitment to stay on the course that I believe that I’m supposed to stay on, which is to love and care for my husband.
Carrie: Awesome. Do you feel like joy is a choice? Cause I mean, you, you know, your title starts out with finding joy. So, do you feel like that’s something that we have to be really intentional about?
I think a lot of people think about joy is like either have it or you don’t somehow.
Carole: Yeah. And I think that the word joy is, is a very misunderstood word. So the morning, the reason joy is in the title of my book is this, the morning after I left him in the psychiatric hospital, I was sitting on the couch.
I was drinking my coffee and I opened up my scripture because,as a pastor’s wife, as a Christian for all of these years, that’s the first place I would always turn when I’m looking for comfort, when I’m looking for hope, when I’m looking for something that’s going to help me sort of set aside all of these negative emotions and say,” Okay, God, you’re really there. You’re going to take care of me, whatever.” So I flipped up in my scripture to where I was reading at the time in the book of James and the first scripture I look at is James Chapter one, Verse two, where it says, “ Consider it all joy, My brothers, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith is going to produce endurance.”
And I remember reading the words, consider it all joy. My brothers, when you encounter various trials, Lambing the bookshelf and looking up. And I talked to God in a very real way. I get mad and I verbalize it out loud. There are times when I’m walking down the street and people are like, “ Who’s she talking to?”
But I snapped at him. I said, “ Really?” I said, “ Really God, my life is falling apart. And this is the scripture you give me to consider it joy?”. How in the world do you consider? So I looked at it in a different version and it said “ Considered a sheer gift.” Well, that’s even worse because I really don’t want this gift, but then my eyes focused in on one word. And I’m telling you that morning before, really? I didn’t even know where my husband was, but at that moment, two things changed for me, consider it all joy, when It didn’t say consider it all joy which means we need to understand as humans, that that was going to happen. And when it happens, we need to understand that God is not only there, but He’s already provided and is going to continue.
And I have story after story, after story, even down to last week where just crazy things happen, where God shows up. So joy is a choice because my joy is not founded in the circumstances. My joy is founded in that relationship and trust that I have believing that God is in control because right after I saw that word, I slid down into another verse, a couple of verses later, and it says your faith-life is going to be on display for everyone to see.
Now I was already a speaker. I was already a blogger. I was already very sort of traveling around and talking. I worked in Hollywood for many years, so I understood what it meant for your faith life to be on display. And I got this vision of God saying, “ Girl, I got a plan for you and you’re going to help all of these people that don’t know where to find help when they’re in your circumstance and carry that as what has been happening.”
A week doesn’t go by that somebody doesn’t reach out, who’s overwhelmed, who’s searching and I’m able to just lovingly say, “ Okay, here we are. I get it. I know exactly what you’re going through.” Sometimes I cry with them. You know, sometimes I can encourage them. Sometimes they just need to listen and know that there’s somebody out there.
Carrie: That gets it.
Carole: That’s making it work. That’s getting it. Joy is definitely a choice. It’s a daily choice. Sometimes it’s some three-second choice, you know, sometimes I have to say, “ Okay, joy, I’m going to choose joy. Okay. I’m going to choose joy.” And then there are days where I might be laying face down on the carpet, just crying and sobbing. And yet I’m still choosing joy.
Carrie: Yeah.
Carole: I’m still choosing joy.
Carrie: I think people misunderstand joy, you know, and they, they believe it’s like happiness or some kind of like warm, fuzzy feeling. But to me, joy and hope are very similar because in a sense, joy is saying, “ I know something good is gonna come out of this, even though it’s a really bad situation right now.”
And it’s, I don’t see anything good about it, but I’m choosing to delight in God and in what he’s done in my life and what I know he’s going to do. Like, I know that somehow this story has a good ending.
Carole: Yeah. And I think when we choose joy, it opens our eyes to the possibilities of things that are around us.
If I didn’t choose joy, then I would miss those moments with my like tonight, I’m going to go tonight with my 15-year-old grandson, I’m going to serve baked potatoes in the booth at the football game, while he marches in the band, I’m going to go and I’m going to do that. Um, and I’m choosing to do that.
Now, some people will go “ Where’s the joy, where’s the fun in that?” But what you’re doing is it’s a mindset of just living. You’re going to keep living. And so many times when we face crises, especially when we’re loving, like my relationship. I lost my identity as a wife, as a pastor’s wife, and even as a mother for a period of time, it was hard because I had to redefine, what does this look like inside of me?
And yet when we choose joy, then we open ourselves up to the possibilities of what is going to happen because of this. You know, I asked myself sometimes, “ I didn’t sign up for this.” You know, “ Why did this happen to me?” Somebody asked me one time,” Why did, why, why did God do this to me? What did I do to make him so mad?”
I was like, “I don’t even know. That’s not even in my wheel. That’s not even something that ever crosses my mind.” But when I do start saying, “I didn’t sign up for this, I didn’t deserve this. I didn’t ask for this.”, all of a sudden the focus has changed from what’s the possible, “ How am I going to survive this? How am I going to get healthy in spite of this?” is changed to the problem. It’s changed to focusing on the negativity. It’s changed to focusing on the things I can’t change. I can’t change what’s going on in my husband’s brain.
Carrie: Sure.
Carole: I can’t fix it. What I can do, is I can control how I respond to him. I can control how I’m going to deal with it. I can control how, and what my outlook is. And when you say, “ Yeah, something good is going to come out of it” . I really believe that. Well, I’ve already seen so much good come out of it.
Carrie: Yeah. Just that’s a huge mindset shift because I do believe that a lot of people get stuck there. And I don’t think it’s wrong to question God or to say, “ Why I don’t understand this.”
“I’m not getting it”. But we don’t want to get stuck in that place because then we’re missing out on this other piece that you’re talking about. Like, you know, let’s stop focusing on all the things that are negative. The things that I can’t control and okay. “What do you have for me, God, in this season of my life, as I’m going through this struggle, right now?”
Carole: Yeah. I tell a story in the book of, I was standing in my garage one day and I was just mad. I was done. I was mad. I was just standing in the middle of the empty garage. All the cars were gone. It’s the cement and its winter and it’s cold. And I stomp my foot and I just yelled out loud at God, “ What the heck did I ever do to you?”
And in that moment, I realized that I started to giggle because I thought, look at me, I’m like a three year old throwing a tantrum here. So I went over and I picked up a roll of blue painter’s tape and a measuring tape off the tool bench. And I created a three-foot by three-foot square and I measured it out and I taped it off.
And I said, “ I looked up at the ceiling of the garage and I said, “ Okay, God, do you see this square?” And I’m yelling at Him.” Do you see this square?” And I said,” I am stepping into this square and I’m going to let you take care of everything outside of this square.” And when I stepped inside of this square, I all of a sudden the pressure lifted. And I realized that what I was doing is I was trying to take it on all myself.
Carrie: Oh
Carole: And I think that we tend to do that. I’m responsible for making sure he takes his medicine. I’m responsible that he takes the doctor. I’m responsible for this, I’m responsible, I’m responsible. And what made it worse was that the medical professionals at the time were telling me. “ Keep him alive. Just keep him alive until we can find the medication.”
“Just keep him alive until we can figure this out.” “Just keep him alive. And every time they would say,” just keep him alive.” It put more weight into that basket of me being responsible that I’m carrying around. And the most freeing thing was for me that day, when I stepped into that square was I realized I could not keep him alive.
Carrie: Right. Right.
Carol: I could not control his choices. I could not watch him 24/7. I could not make the medication work. And when I realized that ,it was like a deep, like letting a deep breath out. And then I started to breathe normally again, I now can draw a three-foot square with my imagination when I start feeling the pressure and I will step into it.
I will draw it in a grocery store. I’ll drive, I’ve drawn one on an airplane. Whenever that pressure of, of when I’m not giving it up and realizing that I’m not in control, I’ll draw that and step into the square cause that’s me sort of giving up the control.
Carrie: That’s huge. That’s absolutely huge. I think that’s a great practical visual for people to have as well.
One of the things I like to ask guests who have had, you know, a personal story and talk about their own experiences is if you could go back in time, what encouragement or hope would you provide to your younger self?
Carole: That’s an interesting question. I would probably say that “ You don’t need to be so hard on yourself.”
And I would probably say, “You can’t protect them because I’m the oldest of four children.” And another thing I talk about in the book is how I took on the responsibility of those three children. When my parents would fight that I was the mother, I was the protector. I was, I look back now and I think I didn’t have to be that strong.
I think I didn’t have the childhood that I probably could have had because I just sort of poured myself into that. I tried to be the mother. I tried to be the protector and then my mom loved it. Because I took all the responsibility on, then it happened, it was even more required of me to do it. And so I think if I could look back at that younger self, I would say, “ You don’t have, you’re not responsible.
This is not your job. This is not your responsibility. You need to find ways to trust.” And at 16, when I did become a Christian, when I did become a believer of that all shifted because all of a sudden that new relationship that I had with God, all of a sudden, I really feel like I began to understand that, okay, there is something bigger out there in the universe that is controlling and I could never control my parents, or I never could control their choices.
And so that has really, I think if I had learned that earlier, it might have, I don’t know that it would have ever changed the dynamics of what happens now. But I think, I just wonder sometimes if I had known that in the early years of our marriage, how could that have changed it? Not regret, but you know, really looking back and going, okay.
So if I can learn that now, how is that going to change and moving forward? Because I think we can only be where we’re at. When you asked that question about going back and talking to my younger self, I think sometimes that can be a dangerous thing only because we might go, oh, well, you know, if I had learned that I wouldn’t be in this situation.
Carrie: Sure.
Carole: And I think there’s a danger for us as humans to go, oh, well, we’re at the point of no return. And I always liked to say, “ If I’m breathing, then that means my life isn’t over yet. And there’s still something for me to do. There’s still something important for me to be here. No matter how bleak it looks. There is a purpose for me to be here.”
Carrie: Right? Absolutely. Tell us where people can find you. If they’re looking for you or your book, or they want to book you as a speaker, where can they get a hold of you?
Carole: My website is Carol, uh, Carol with an E, C A R O L E caroles journey.com. And my email is carole@carolesjourney.com .And then my book is available through redemptionpress on their website or Amazon, wherever really, uh, books are sold online. All of my social media handles are at carolesjourney. I try to keep it all at caroles journey because I do believe life’s a journey.
Carrie: Yeah
Carole: And then we meet people. I love when we meet people like Carrie now, you and I, our lives are intertwined. And you know, now we’re a part of each other’s journey might be just for one short leg of the journey, but you don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. So carolesjourney is kind of my ministry.
That’s how I brand everything. They, I have a website, I have all my social media and if somebody has questions, I, I love if somebody knows somebody who is struggling, who has a spouse or a loved one, who’s struggling. I love to encourage pray for, just try to, you know, we need each other we’ve desperately need each other.
Carrie: Absolutely. I know that I have had spouses reach out who listened to the podcast and who are trying to support their husband or wife. It could be a boyfriend, girlfriend, daughter, son. Whoever’s in their world is very important to them. That’s really struggling with anxiety and OCD, depression, any of those things under the mental health umbrella that you’re talking about.
I think this episode in particular is going to be so encouraging and helpful for them. And I appreciate your willingness to come on and share your story.
Carole: Thank you. Thank you very much, Carrie, for having me. And as we go into the holiday season, that’s a really hard time, especially if you love someone because you need, I almost feel like we need the extra support and encouragement during the holiday season.
That’s just for me, I still have not decorated for Christmas. I know, it’s so bizarre just because I’m thinking this year might be the year I actually do it. I don’t know. We’ll see. But I think that there’s just, it happened for me right before the holiday season. And so we started going into this season and I start,
Carrie: The reminders.
Carole: I’ll wake up in a funk and I’ll go, “ What’s going on?”
And then I’ll go, “ Oh, I know exactly what’s going on.” I just really encourage everyone. Please just reach out, find somebody to reach out to. Don’t isolate.
Carrie: Yeah. It gets the support that you need for sure.
Carrie: Well, thank you so much.
Carole: Thank you, Carrie
Carrie: I hope that you were inspired by Carole’s story. We love to talk with people who have personal stories about anxiety or OCD.
So, if you or someone, you know, would make a great guest. Definitely fill out the contact form @hopeforanxietyandocd.com. Thank you so much for listening.
Hope for anxiety and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling in Smyrna, Tennessee. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum and audio editing is completed by Benjamin Bynam. Until next time. May you be comforted by God’s great love for you.
Courtney Reissig, a mom, author and speaker is joining me on the show today to share how God used the Psalms to prepare her for a traumatic and life-threatening pregnancy experience.
How Courtney started diving into the Psalms
Psalms as the language of the realities of life
How Courtney processed her emotions
How she worked through her trauma and what she learned from it
Carrie: Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD, episode 62. I am your host Carrie Bock. And today, I am joined on the show by Courtney Reissig, author of Teach Me How to Feel. She’s written other books as well.
We were talking about using the Psalms in our spiritual journey without using the Psalms to connect with God and in prayer and meditation. So I’m really looking forward to this conversation.
Courtney, I know that you had a difficult experience that was traumatic for you and prompted you really to dive in, and study the Psalms, in more detail. Can you tell us about that?
Courtney: I had a traumatic delivery with my last son, and it was actually like a medical crisis, but I actually started diving into the Psalms about six months before that, and was truly interested in them and how they fit together and how, as I learned more about them, I realized the Psalms was giving us language for the realities of life.
It was so interesting at the time. But I didn’t know, that the Lord was using to preparing for what was to come. And so, I had spent that six months diving into the Psalms. And then when I was 33 weeks pregnant, I had a placenta abruption, which is the Medical crisis full abruption is sudden death for the mom and the baby, but mine was partial.
And so I was admitted to the hospital for three weeks as we waited for either to stop or for him to be needed to be delivered. Really, what happened to me. And that time was kind of hospital bed rest is really , really traumatic. I felt like everyday with a life or death situation with whether or not I was going to have to deliver him, whether we be okay. On those days, I couldn’t read anything. I couldn’t read the magazine people brought me, I couldn’t really watch TV, but I could read the Psalms.
And I spent so much time in the Psalms in those days, reading and processing and journaling about them. It’s not for I really start that I’m using the Psalmus. You’re not the first person who had walked through something that was life or death. And the Lord really met me there and showed me that He understood my frame and understood my struggle and was giving me language for what was going on.
Carrie: Yeah,So did you feel like, even though you could really describe like what you were feeling exactly. It was almost like when you opened up the Psalms, it, it really was like, oh yeah.
That’s, how I’m feeling right now.
Courtney: Yes. Oh yes. I mean, there are so many songs where I opened them up and was like, yes, that’s how I feel. I feel as though God has forgotten me. I struggled a lot and actually after he was born kind of that. And I struggled with guilt over that because, I lived and I had the best-case scenario, but I still had all of that trauma that I had to work through.
And even then I had a lot of darkness and postpartum depression. And even in that, the Psalms really helped me see that I was not the first person who had felt darkness or felt like God’s hand was against me or felt like I had sorrows in my heart all day or anxiety in my heart all day. So it really did give me words when I didn’t have other words for what we know.
Carrie: Um, that’s good. How did you process those emotions as they came up? Just, you know, feeling like God had forgotten you or maybe other concerns that you had, you know, sadness, anger, fear?
Courtney: Yeah. It’s really understand talking to your friend about how kind I processed it at night. And I, it took me a long time to realize that I’m an internal processor. And so a lot of people didn’t know that I was struggling for a really long time until like six months after he was born. I had shared that I was really struggling. I think for me, I just had to really work through my own thoughts in my own head.
And through writing, primarily for me is just a big way for me to internally process what’s going on, that was a big thing for me. I find that when I’m deeply, deeply struggling, that I’ve got to write to get it all out before I can never talk about somebody else, which I’m a natural born talker, which so people don’t think that that’s how I process.
They usually think that I brought those through talking about it. Cause everything, but when I’m really, really struggling, I work it through with writing and then reading. I didn’t have a lot of quiet moments. It was my fourth son by the time this happened. I had four children, four and under, there were no quiet moments.
My husband was really gracious and gives me time to process. And I will say too, I eventually did go to therapy and that was really helpful. I needed someone else outside of myself and outside of my circumstances to really kind of help me work through what we had walked through. And I still remember I canceled number of times that I had a really good friend who finally was like, I’m going to come watch your kids and you’re going to make that appointment.
Carrie: You thought, I don’t have time for this, or you were avoiding it because you knew it’d be uncomfortable to talk about?
Courtney: I think I knew I needed it. Like, I think I knew like deep down that I really needed just to like an hour, a week to sit and process. And I was gonna have that unless someone had given me that time.
Yeah. I think I was just like, I didn’t have the time. I just didn’t have the time or the energy. It seemed impossible to me. Yeah.
Carrie: Yeah. That was just really loving what your friend did to just kind of step in and say, They all l take care of your kids so that you can go take care of you.
Courtney: Right,and I think sometimes we’re afraid, I think as moms, maybe it’s women in general to kind of say I’m willing to do that, it feels too self-focused and we are kind of conditioned to be like, we’re always dying to self and I think we’re supposed to die to self. Because Christ, I just like drive to himself.
Carrie: Right.
Courtney: But we are also not God, you need help sometimes. And so, sometimes the most self-sacrificing that you can do is to help and you can help others. And I think, that’s what my friend saw in me is that I needed that so that I could serve and the way I was called to serve.
Carrie: I know some people, when they go through trauma and then they get to the end of experience, they’re like, okay, it’s over. I lived, I should be fine. Like, I shouldn’t be having those residual effects. Like, did you understand that it was. The trauma that was impacting maybe emotional experiences that you were having, or was it kind of like you learned some of that later? Like after the fact?
Courtney: Yeah, that’s a really good question. Cause I don’t think I understood that fully in the moment. And it’s been helpful since I’ve come to realize that I have that It’s helped me love my kids well through it, I had a few people in my life who understood enough of what we had walked through and had lived long enough to say,
Carrie: You’re going to have to be working through this for a while.
Courtney: It took me a while, like a few years to realize that there were these things that would happen. And I wouldn’t understand why I would all be dealing with it again, even it was in my mind seemed to be kind of unrelated. It’s only been as I’ve learned that I’ve learned part of the process of working through trauma is that eventually, I think hindsight now allows me to say, oh, I was not in a good place then, because that I’m in a better place now.
Carrie: Sure.
Courtney: Yeah, I don’t think I fully understood in that moment, but I’ve walked through the trauma scene. Then, so I was diagnosed with cervical cancer during COVID.
Carrie: Wow!
Courtney: Yeah, and I was really, really unexpected. All the markers to catch it, just kind of fell through the cracks for me. And, um, so I had radical hysterectomy really quickly because I had walked through the trauma with Ben. It didn’t make it easier and didn’t make it less traumatic, but it did make me more aware of what I was going to need to process what had happened. And the healing emotionally from that was better the second time around versus I just felt like I was blindsided by what happened with him.
Carrie: Right, right. Yeah. It’s interesting. Because so many times when we’re in survival mode, we are not aware that we’re in survival mode. We’re just kind of making the next day happen. Like, I’ve, you know, in your situation, it’s like, I got four kids and somebody is going to feed them.
Courtney: Right. And you don’t realize that you’re like deeply not okay. Like, you’re like a hair trigger away from like blowing up. And I’m thankful that the Lord brought me through it and then allowed me to give me some clarity to see so that I’m aware. I mean, trauma happens all throughout our lives.
Carrie: Sure
Courtney: And so I’m not naive enough to think it won’t happen again, but.
Carrie: What guidance, like you can give us on using the Psalms in our day-to-day prayer and devotional life?
Courtney: I’ve used them all different ways. Right now, my life, I’ve been really convicted over the last year that my prayer life is really lacking, it’s always been, like more of a struggle in my own life to just find, to be purposeful in prayer. But so many of the Psalms are prayers and written as prayers
Carrie: Yeah.
Courtney: And so one of the things I’ve done over the last year has been to pray the Psalms and just pray them based on whatever’s going on in the lives of the people. I’m praying for at the time or my own life.
I think that’s one way to use them is to use them as prayers. Many of them are prayers. I think another way to use them, is to read them when life is hard and read them to find familiar friends who also understand that life is hard. You know, I read them a lot when I was writing the book, I write them a lot.
When I was walking through this trauma, I read them a lot when COVID first started, because everything felt so uncertain and crazy. And I have found in every one of those seasons that the Psalms get the human experience. I think I’ve heard a Tim Keller, wouldn’t say. That part of his devotional reading is he reads, a Psalms everyday because we’re always walking through something that the Psalms understand because God is the author of the Psalms and he understands us. And so I think for anyone, it’s a really helpful tool. And seeing that we have a God who sees no matter what we’re walking through.
Carrie: Yeah, Just sense of relate-ability that we have to. I mean, it’s the human experience. It’s anger, it’s sadness. It’s uncertainty. It’s fear. And for me, I think it opens up and gives us permission to have a messy prayer life.
Courtney: Yes, absolutely.
Carrie: So just say, this is how I feel and it’s messy right now and I don’t care what’s going on in my life. Like it’s crazy.
Courtney: .Right, and I think sometimes we’re afraid just to be like that because we, depending on, like our theological tradition, we are so prone to wanting to have it all put together and to sound like we’re trusting the Lord and that everything’s going okay. And I think that’s the reality of the Psalms is that they’re not afraid of the struggles. And they kind of reorient us to acknowledge that.
Carrie: Hmm.
Courtney: Stop pretending that everything’s perfect and that we’re able to respond rightly to everything at all. Any given time.
Carrie: Yeah, the, we don’t have to have polished prayers all the time.
Carrie: Right? Yeah. I love that. Tell us about your book. Uh, “Teach me how to feel?”
Courtney: Yes, that book was born out of our experience with Ben and it kind of takes us through 24 different Psalms and walks through how the Psalmus experiences, the feeling, and then how this almost experiences God. There’s also a study guide that goes along with it to kind of help you add more depth to it.
If you’re trying to really kind of work through the Psalms, but the heart behind it was that a person who is walking through something could take any, could open up and look at any emotion that they’re feeling at any given time and find language for their struggle. There are short chapters. They’re designed for, like, if you’re walking through struggle, you need something
short and accessible.
There are a variety of feelings. There are happy ones like joy and forgiving and different ones like that. And so it’s not all sad songs, but it’s really intended to show you the breadth of the songs and the breadth of how God gives us language and the different struggles and joys and sorrows of life.
Carrie: Hmm. Good. How can people get in touch with you if they want to kind of find out more information?
Courtney: About the book?
Carrie: Yeah. Or just if they want to get in touch with you, um, do you do speaking engagements sometimes or?
Courtney: Yeah, I do. Um, I don’t do them as much as I used to, so COVID really slowed down what ended up speaking that I did. And then, um, it kind of gave us, like a little bit of a reset. Is this what we want for our season of life right now?
And so, I don’t accept a lot of speaking engagements throughout the year. I accept maybe like one or two outside of Arkansas where I live, and I’m also on staff at my church recently. So that takes up a fair amount of my time.
And I have a website that I. Should I update more than I do Courtneyreissig.com, but I feel an urge to write something. I primarily put it on Instagram, so it’s just my name. Courtney Reissig.
Carrie: Okay. Awesome. So when you were struggling, if you could go back in time, like what encouragement or hope would you provide to your younger self?
Courtney: Hmm. That’s a really good question. So I would provide, to my younger self, I would say trust the long game. That’s kind of the thing that I would tell younger Courtney, is that what seems like an impossible thing right now, it seems like God’s not going to work that out for you right now. God plays the long game in life.
And so it’s kind of the message of someone, where the one who meditates on God’s word day and night is like a tree planted by streams of water. And what we know about trees is that they don’t grow overnight and transformation doesn’t happen overnight.
And so the life spent in the world. And what life spent trusting in the word made flesh Christ is one that grows over lifetime. And so that means that there are seasons like summer where everything is going really well and the trees in full bloom, and then their seasons, like winter, where it seems like nothing’s happening.
And I think I spent a lot of time in my younger, in my twenties and towards the end of my thirties now. So most of my thirties, not trusting the long game, not trusting that God was working, that God had a long-term purpose in view when He was working in my life or not doing anyone else.
I think it’s probably the greatest struggle of these younger people, in general, is we’re so instantaneous and that’s not how God works.
Carrie: Yeah, I think that’s so good. Just to have a little bit more for ourselves of an eternal perspective. What God’s doing right now, you know, we may not see the fruits of it for many years. Something that we’re investing in, you know, you could be investing in kids or teenagers and you may not see the fruit of the day to day what’s you’re doing until many years down the road, you know, or the difficulty that God’s bringing you through right now is the difficulty that you’re going to be helping somebody else walk through and 10 years. Right?
Courtney: Right, right. I mean, there’s in our own life. We’ve seen in just the last few months, an answer to prayer that we’ve prayed for 10 years.
Carrie: Wow!
Courtney: And I mean, that’s just a long time. And to be honest, like there’s, there was like whole years where I stopped praying for it, you know, because I just don’t think it was going to happen.
So I think that it’s the benefit of getting older is you get to see God work over the long haul that you don’t see when you’re younger.
Carrie: Yeah. Yeah. That’s great. That’s good. Hopefully that encourages some, some younger people out there that are wondering why something isn’t happening right now.
Courtney: Right. Yeah.
Carrie: Well, Courtney, thank you so much for taking some time out of your day to talk with us about these things. And I hope it expands and encourages people’s prayer and devotional life, or if they’re going through a hard time to really just dig into the Psalms and see what God is going to show them and teach them through that.
Courtney: Well. Thanks for having me.
Carrie: I really hope you enjoy this episode on the Psalms. In a couple of weeks we have a really powerful interview about forgiveness that I wanted to share with you. So, if you’re struggling with forgiving someone in your life. You may wanna tune in, in a couple of weeks to that episode.
Just a friendly reminder that we have a couple different products on our website for sale. We do have some t-shirts. If you want to share the news and share your excitement about Hope for Anxiety and OCD. We also have an e-book on finding the counselor who is right for you. If either of those things are an interest to you upon over to Hope for Anxiety and OCD.com.
My assistant and I are also working on putting together a facebook group which will be an encouraging, supportive, positive place for hopefully to be able to connect with us and other listeners. But definitely be on the lookout for that.
Hope for anxiety and OCD episode 61. On today’s episode. I am choosing to fly solo to speak with you about anxiety regarding finances and overcoming that as well as shame. That people carry around related to their finances. One thing I want to say in regards to this episode is that I am not a financial planner or advisor by any means.
So take that into consideration as you listen to this episode and make decisions about whether you want to follow any of this advice or not. I had a guest that I interviewed that I was going to air. Um, to talk about this issue and it just, I didn’t really feel like it jived with our audience or was going to be relatable to all of you, especially since we have a worldwide audience.
And I felt that that position was a little bit more Americanized. I also want to point out though that it doesn’t really matter how much money you have. You still may have anxiety about your financial situation. There are people with a lot of money in the bank, maybe who have obsessions about having a certain amount in their savings because they’re afraid of something catastrophic happening to them. Maybe they’re afraid of losing their house or losing their job. Maybe not having family members that they can fall back on to help them. So understand that it’s not just people who. Are struggling financially or who are dealing with poverty that have anxiety about finances.
But I really do believe that it affects people across the demographic range, whether you’re in poverty in the middle class, or whether you’re even rich, you can get anxious about your finances. This topic is really relevant for everyone. I wanted to talk about shame in this episode as well. People who are very well-meaning are trying to help others with their finances, even within the church context, unfortunately, can at times perpetuate shame.
It’s a little bit like people who are trying to lose weight and someone comes to them and says, well, it’s easy. I mean, all you have to do is eat less and exercise and that’s really, and that position may really be minimizing the struggles that that person is having emotionally. Maybe they’re dealing with emotional eating, or have some type of eating disorder.
They may be obsessing over eating or not eating certain things. There may have been some traumatic experiences in their life contributing to their weight gain. So it’s not as easy as, okay. Here. Let me give you the two to three-step process and it’s gonna change your life and you just have to implement it.
Anytime we approach someone with that type of quick fix scenario, or someone comes at you with that, I think you have to be very careful because typically our problems are not that simple. Many of our financial decisions unfortunately are made emotionally or impulsively. If we don’t take this time to really stop and think about what is it that we want for our family’s future, then we can just kind of get blown in the wind in bad financial decisions. And unfortunately, the thing about finances that I’ve realized is that it’s very easy to get in a difficult spot financially, but it’s a lot harder to get out once you’ve kind of fallen in that financial.
And there are so many different things that people face that can get them in a difficult spot. Financially. One is the reality that the rent mortgages, the cost of living increases overall has gone up drastically. I think about the first apartment that my first husband and I rented was probably, maybe $600 a month, maybe a little bit more than that. And in the process, we were looking at staying there for another year and our rent was going to go up a whole hundred dollars a month. And at that point in time, that was like, whoa, like, I don’t think we can do another a hundred dollars a month and ended up looking elsewhere for a place, cuz we weren’t super happy there.
But I promise you that if you go to rent, that is probably same apartment right now. And this is granted, we’re probably 15 years down the road, but the price has probably doubled. It probably would cost you about 1200 and it was a one-bedroom apartment with a loft. It wasn’t anything huge or special. If you are in a place where your rent or just cost of living has gone up drastically.
And oftentimes our salaries don’t follow that. You may really have to take a hard evaluative look at what do I need to do in order to save money. Do I need to move farther out? But then with that consideration, you have to consider gas expenses and. Do I need to look for potential opportunities to work from home where maybe I can live a little bit farther out from the city easier.
I think since COVID, a lot more people have those opportunities and have been able to live in an area, maybe that’s a little bit more rural or more outside of town where they’re not having to be so close to a city center, having to drive into work every day. And that may not be a possibility for you.
That’s not a possibility with everyone’s career. Some people have to go into work in order to do their job. I had to take a hard evaluation when I went through my divorce, looking at my mortgage, do I sell my house and go rent somewhere? That would’ve possibly been maybe the easiest case scenario. When I started looking at how much rent was at the time, it made more sense for me to keep paying my mortgage.
And even though I knew I wasn’t going to be able to pay my mortgage on my salary alone, I knew that I could get a roommate. Was it the most ideal situation or my favorite thing ever to have roommates? Not necessarily. There were bumps and challenges in the road at different points as happens whenever you live with people.
If you’re in a position right now where you have to live with family because that’s what you can afford and maybe it’s not the greatest, but you know that that’s the best financial decision for you. Sometimes we have to buckle down and do what we have to do, and it’s not easy. Another way sometimes that people can get into a difficult spot financially is they may have made a poor investment.
They may have whether that was in a house or a car, and now you’re upside down. You owe more than what it’s actually worth. You’re stuck with this extra debt, whatever the situation. The biggest thing I would say from the emotional side of things is to not beat yourself up, if that’s you, because I think it would be so easy to go back and live in that guilt shame of saying, “Oh gosh, I wish I had never bought this car or I shouldn’t have made this investment over here. I should have gotten a house in a different neighborhood.”
Whatever the situation is, you can’t go back and change. Beating yourself up is not going to help. The problem is really just adding insult to injury. It may be a situation where you get some good financial help, coaching, talk to a financial planner, get some advice on what’s my best step oving forward here. Maybe you’ve had a situation where you’ve had a lot of medical bills, maybe you’ve been sick and had to miss some work. This is something that Steve and I definitely can relate to right now because we have a lot of medical bills coming in for what was happening with his eye issues.
And now pregnancy issues. There’s always some kind of medical bill coming into our house at any given time. Those are things that you can’t fully plan for. You can plan to have savings, but oftentimes that can get quickly depleted if you have a high deductible plan, which a lot of people in and speaking from an American context, lot of people have a high deductible plan now that maybe several thousand dollars.
And it might be hard for you to save up that money or to have that in the bank ready and available at any time. I know for me, it’s a situation where I’ve had definite thoughts recently about, whether are we going to be able to take a vacation next year. Like what’s going to happen. But, you know, you just have to take those things one step at a time. I’ve found in the process that some places are more willing to work with you than others. That’s just a situation that you’re in. So if you can talk with someone from the billing office about what the expectations are, having them let you know ahead of time, you know, is my amount that’s going towards my deductible.
Do I have to pay that? When I come in. Is that something you’re going to bill me for later? Can I set up a payment plan? Unfortunately, what I’ve seen with a lot of people who maybe have big bills or have medical bills coming in is that overwhelm can lead to an eventual shutdown. For example, I’m overwhelmed about this medical bill.
It’s large. It’s more than I can pay. So then I just shut down, avoid it. I put it in the back of the drawer and I don’t pay anything. That’s definitely not what you want to do. You want to take a moment, breathe, evaluate, say, what can I afford to pay on this medical bill right now? One thing that’s helpful with medical bills is that typically you can’t be sent to collections.
And look this up on your own, because I did a little bit of research a while ago. As long as you are paying on that bill and making a good faithful effort to pay on it regularly, you’re not going to be sent to collections. Some of that may vary by company to company because some companies will send you to collections after say 90 days. So make sure that you’re aware. And if you have to call and talk with somebody, it’s better to do that than to avoid the situation entirely, because what happens when we avoid things entirely, they tend to get worse and you don’t want this situation to get worse for you. It’s already difficult enough that you’re having to deal with it.
You may be in a difficult financial situation because you’ve lost a job or had to make a sudden move. You’ve had a sudden life change. That’s happened to you, whatever the situation is if you would say, okay, I’m in a financial hole right now. And it’s absolutely stressing me out because I don’t know how to get out of it.
We always talk about hope on a show. And I think that’s so important that we talk about how. There is hope for your financial situation. You may have to make some difficult changes or hard choices, but you can get to a point where you get out of that hole and get to a different place. You may need some professional financial help for someone to look at all the numbers for you and map that way out for you.
I’d like to talk about two common, but completely different themes that we hear in regards to teaching in the church surrounding finances. And one, I talked about a little bit earlier, which is that it’s just easy. You should be able to do it, create a budget, spend less than you bring in, et cetera. And that creates shame, obviously, because we have all kinds of things that get wrapped up in terms of spending.
You know, some of us grew up in a family where finances were never talked about. Some people grew up in a family where every time their parents got money, they just blew it. So they never learned how to have restraint, self-control, how to budget, how to manage money. And obviously that puts you at a disadvantage when you’re trying to learn how to manage it on your.
Some people grew up in families where love was bought. So gifts were a big thing or a lot of money was spent giving to people. And maybe you wanted to continue that, but haven’t been able to, because of your financial situation. So you spend above your means to provide gifts and what you believe is love to other people in the family.
There are so many different thought processes that people can have surrounding money. And oftentimes these thought processes go back to childhood. For example, you may have a belief about yourself that I am no good with money. Now, if you tell yourself that you’re going to live by that principle. And so it may be better for you to say to yourself, I’m learning how to manage my money.
I’m growing in new financial knowledge. I’m talking to others who know more than me to try to learn about this issue. I’m reading books. If you are doing those things and you’re really seeking out the help that you need, I promise you will not continue to be bad with money anymore. Another belief that people may carry is that they never have enough money.
And this goes back to maybe growing up in a little bit more of an impoverished environment. Maybe now they’re doing okay though. Maybe now they’re in the middle or middle to upper class, and they’re still holding on to this belief of I’m never going to have enough. This can drive people to be anxious, workaholics, working multiple jobs, believing they have to have a certain number in the bank account or certain amount of income that can really create a lot of stress.
If you’re holding onto that financial belief, you may need to look at reframing that to, I am content with everything that I have everything that I need getting into a space of gratitude will really help you get out of a scarcity mindset. One thing we have to remember is that when we are in that fight-flight or freeze response, and we’re trying to make a financial decision, it’s not going to go well for.
The reason is when you’re in that panicked fight fight free state, your higher levels of thinking are turned off at that point because you’re in survival mode, short-term, thinking, what do I need to do just to get through this? versus a more balanced, long-term mindset. If you have ever bought a car, you know how this goes and how people really try to play on this, like car sales are very good.
They know exactly what they’re doing. They will convince you that you have to make that decision right now about whether or not you’re going to buy that. Because it is going to disappear into thin air and the $500 off they promised you is going away right now. And they tried to get you really into this state of worked up of making this decision.
And next thing you know, they’re showing you stuff that’s out of your price range. This happens. Anytime you go to buy something that you will tell someone, this is my price range, and they will show you something completely outside of it, case in point, Steve and I bought a mattress recently and I was choking with people about it later because I said, you know, she gave us several different mattresses to lay on after we told her our price range and the last mattress That we laid on was $2,000. I did not come in there with any intentions of spending $2000 on a mattress. It was a very nice mattress granted, but it was almost just comical to me that she felt the need to have us lay on that one, you know, see how wonderful it is, isn’t that great. And, you know, we have these financing offers and so forth and so on.
You have to be very careful and understand the psychology behind sales scarcity time limitations really educate yourself on some of those things before you go shopping, make sure you’re in as calm a state as possible when you’re making especially large financial decisions such as on a car house, furniture. Those things are gonna be more money for you. Another message that you may have heard in the church is similar to kind of a, you know, name it and claim it type of thing. God wants to bless you financially. He owns the cattle on a thousand Hills. He wants to open up the windows of heaven for you.
So this seed and give to our ministry and God will multiply it. Whatever the message is, that’s out there. I’m sure that you have heard some version of each of those. Here’s the reality based on going back to scripture, Philippians four 19, and my God will meet all your needs. According to the riches of his glory in Christ Jesus. Interestingly enough, this verse is found in a passage on contentment. It says, God will meet all of our needs according to his riches. It doesn’t say that we’re going to have everything that we. It doesn’t say, if you accept Christ, you’re going to be a millionaire. Steve will tell you that some of the most blessed people that he’s met were not blessed financially, but they were blessed spiritually.
They were blessed relationally. They were blessed in many other ways. God does want to bless us, but it’s, doesn’t always come in the financial realm. We have to understand that there are many different ways that God can and does bless us. I do believe that there’s also the parable of the talents, that if we are responsible with what God gives us, we will naturally be entrusted with more to take care of.
The opposite is also true. If we don’t take care of what God gives us. We may not have it anymore. We are not always ready to receive what God has for us. I’m not just speaking financially. Although I do believe it applies financially, but sometimes we aren’t ready to receive a different job opportunity.
We may not be ready to receive a relationship. God may be working in our lives to prepare us for that next thing. But our character may not be where it needs to be in order to receive that. I want to say something here about giving. Oftentimes we hear about tithing and giving in the church. These are certainly biblical concepts and there’s plenty of scriptures to back tithing giving to the local church, as well as even above that giving to other organizations that are helping other people or other Christian causes. Why does God ask us to give certainly he can do anything and doesn’t rely on us to give money to the church or to give to other organizartion. He can meet needs in any way that he desires.
I believe that God asks us to give because it keeps us out of a space of greed. If we put God first in our finances and say, okay, I’m gonna dedicate this first 10% over to you. And I’m going to give how you’ve led me to, to other cause. That keeps us from making money a God. And a lot of times, if we’re obsessing, ruminating have a lot of anxiety about finances, you know, we have to be careful because maybe we’re making that an idol in our life.
That’s something maybe that you might need to just genuinely self-evaluate for yourself, have I put this money and this effort in paying my bills and getting certain things or accomplishing certain things in life above God, when we give it puts us in a state of gratefulness for all that we do have, and all that God has provided for us.
It’s really amazing sometimes when you stop and you go back and look at difficult, maybe financial situations that you’ve gone through, I was on someone else’s podcast and it was, it was kind of comical because I was trying to make this analogy right about coming to counseling and how. You know, if you’re having a problem with your car, you know, you don’t just lay hands on it, you take it to the mechanic.
And I was kind of saying, if you have these emotional problems, praying is good, but you don’t just do that. And you go to somebody that can help you with those emotional problems. So as I’m making this analogy, I say, no, no, wait, there was this time where I could not afford to get my car fixed. I had to get an emissions test that was coming up.
I knew there wasn’t anything majorly wrong with the car, but I was gonna fail because my check engine light was on. And sometimes those things can be temperamental. If you know anything about cars, sometimes the systems. Just kind of go a little wonky and one thing is off and your check engine light’s on and it’s not really anything to do functionally with the car.
So I said, “no.” I remember I prayed for my check engine light to go off and it did. It didn’t go off right away when I prayed about it, but it did go off several days later. And I really believe that God heard that prayer and came through for me so that I didn’t have to take my car in anywhere. And I certainly wasn’t in a space to get a different car at that point.
I say all that to say, you never quite know. Like how God is going to come through for you and never underestimate the power of prayer and the power of knowing that if you are a child of God, that he loves you very much, and he wants to make sure that you are taken care of that includes financially in terms of being able to make sure that your bills are met and taken care of what I would encourage you to do.
If you are anxious about your finances today, take a moment and stop, look around, start to become really, really thankful for all the things that you do have, whether it’s running water, electricity, a yard, a car, whatever it is that you can be thankful for today. One of the things that changed my life when I was going through my divorce was I read this verse in James 1:17 says “Every good and perfect gift is from above coming down from the father of heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.” What I realized when I read that verse was going through a difficult season financially, as well as emotionally was to say, okay, if there’s something good in me regardless of what it is, whether it’s tangible or intangible. That means that God put that good thing. There it’s a gift from him. It’s something that I can be thankful for. Gratitude helps us with so many areas of our life, but specifically when we’re talking about financially, It helps us get to a place of contentment where we can step back and say, you know what?
I don’t really have a need of anything. Maybe you’re in a space where you’re anxious about finances because you genuinely cannot pay your bills or you genuinely do not have enough food. And what I would say to you is that it’s okay to get help. There’s no shame in that. If you go through a season. Where you have to go to the food pantry because you lost your job.
Don’t feel bad about that. If you are a single mom with no child support and your husband has left you and things are really rough for you and someone’s offering to help you don’t turn that help away. It’s okay. To receive that you need that in this point in your life, you may not always need it. And you know what, you’ll probably one day be able to give back to somebody else, even if it’s just a listening ear or to be able to say, yeah, I’ve been there.
I know how hard that is. If you’re consistently unable to make your bills, you may need to look at a major life change in circumstances, whether that’s moving, sharing space with somebody, getting a different job that pays you more money. These are all big changes. Sometimes that have to happen as hard as they are to do and to implement.
We touched on this earlier. But my other advice, if you’re feeling stressed financially is to really look at some of your beliefs surrounding yourself and your relationship with money. Are you the type of person that always has to have new things? Are you trying to keep up with some type of status? Do you believe that you’re just always going to be broke?
Do you believe you have to have a certain amount of savings and if it drops below that point, then you just panic. Do you think it’s bad to have money? If you do, you will not hold onto it. You’ll seek to get rid of it. Just so some people believe that Christians should be wealthy. Some people believe that Christian should live in poverty.
And somehow that gets you closer to God. Neither of that beliefs are accurate. You can have a lot of money and honor God with that money. You can have a little bit of money and honor God with that money that you have. Third thing I would say, if you are anxious about money is to pray and really seek God as a provider of all your.
The scriptures tell us that God knows our needs before we ask, but obviously, he wants us to have a relationship with him. He wants us to depend on him. He wants us to ask for those things that we need, start to keep track. Of those answered prayers of those ways that God comes through in the difficult times financially, you will be able to go back and look at those and see how God has worked in your life.
The fourth thing that we’ve already touched on is get help if you need it whether that’s reading a book about finances, going to a class, talking to a financial advisor, getting some type of financial or debt counseling. Allowing others to help you when needed, if you are dealing with financial shame because of maybe negative choices that you’ve made in the past or negative beliefs that you have about yourself related to money, know that God is gracious.
And loves you, wants you to learn from this experience that you’ve had so that you don’t make the same decisions in the future. Sit with the guilt, ask for forgiveness, and then move forward into new behaviors and actions. Don’t keep beating yourself up over and over again for the same. Recognize shameful messages that may be coming from the church or other well, meaning people and choose not to receive those for yourself.
There are many stories of hope that I could give you about finances. And I already talked about one a little bit earlier in the show. This story of hope is actually about giving and financial surrender around the end of the year in 2019. I talked with Steve about our church’s end-of-the-year offering.
That goes towards local and global missions. I had thought that it was going to be easy to give money to this end-of-the-year offering. Unfortunately, what happened was that there were several catastrophes that occurred right around that time period. I can’t remember exactly, but we may have had a home repair car repair and unexpected medical.
Come up. It was several things at one time that had depleted the money that I was planning on giving. I had a specific fund within my business account that I had set aside for a specific purpose. I felt like God was showing me that I needed to give that money to the end-of-the-year offer. I cried so much during this process because I knew that God wanted me to give this money, but I had no idea how that money was going to be replaced.
I was anticipating at some point in 2020, needing those funds for different things. Of course, at this time we had no way of knowing the pandemic was going to happen. That stimulus funds were going to be going. That money ended up getting replaced relatively quickly. My business was pretty busy in the beginning of 2020 because everyone was at home and ready to go to counseling.
So something that I was worried about and didn’t know how God was going to provide for. God already knew and saw into the future. That wouldn’t really be an issue for me. My business was going to be fine, to be honest with you, I can look back and say, I don’t miss that money that I gave to the church.
And honestly, I don’t miss any money that I’ve ever given for the Lord. And for things that I believe he’s called me to give to you, I believe at this point in my. It was about surrendering and trusting God with everything that I had and not holding anything back from him, really trusting that he was gonna be able to meet and provide all the needs for my business.
And for me personally, I hope that this episode has been an encouragement to you or provided some helpful guidance or tips. If you’re dealing with anxiety about finances, I know that it’s a real deal. I’ve experienced it personally in my own life at various points. And I am here to tell you that God is good and he is a great provider.
So last time we talked about making fitness changes. This time we talked about financial changes. What other changes are you seeking to make in this year? Let us know anytime @hopeforanxietyandocd.com. Thank you so much for listening.
Hope for anxiety and OCD is a production of By The Well Counseling in Smyrna, Tennessee
Opinions given by our guests are their own and not necessarily a reflection of the views of By the Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. Our original music is by Brandon Maingrum.
Until next time may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.
Jen Roland, a certified mental health coach through the American Association of Christian Counselors, Christian writer and speaker is joining me on the show today to talk about fitness, mental health, and Christianity.
Jen’s personal fitness journey
Her initial motivation to lose weight and get fit.
Jen’s unhealthy obsession with fitness and how it caused stress and anxiety
Inviting God to her health journey. What did God show her that changed her perspective about health and fitness?
How exercise and movement can help with chronic pain
Christian view of health and fitness
Practical tips on how to start exercising when you feel overwhelmed.
Carrie: This is Hope for Anxiety and OCD episode 60. Just want to say happy new year to everyone out there. I know that our last episode at the end of December was about, making a new year’s resolutions and goals and why goal setting is important. And I know that some of you out there who are listening, probably have some goals surrounding. Getting in better shape or starting an exercise routine. And we know that those things can be really helpful for anxiety.
So today on the show I have with me, Jen Roland, who’s a Christian writer speaker. She’s also a certified mental health coach through the American Association of Christian Counselors and a personal trainer. Jen has her own experiences with anxiety that she’s gonna talk with us a little bit about as well. So thank you for coming on the show, Jen.
Jen: Thank you, Carrie.
Carrie: So tell us a little bit about your story and how you got so interested in these different connections between fitness, mental health, and Christianity.
Jen: Sure. Well, I’ve always been interested in fitness. So growing up, I was always very much involved in team sports. I played team sports throughout middle school and high school and even in college. I joined the club teams and played softball and volleyball. And even after getting my first job as a high school, actually middle school. And then I was a high school science teacher. I was able to maintain a modified level of physical activity.
But once I had kids, I found that a lot of that really fell by the wayside. Team sports were the first to go cause it was just too difficult to drag our kids to softball games and things like that. And then quickly after that, any consistent exercise routine that I have. Also came kind of to an abrupt halt. And so what kind of came along with having little ones that I ended up having three kids each two years apart, there were lots of sleepless nights that led to poor food choices. I gained some weight and I really struggled to lose the baby weight from my second child.
So adding in not getting enough sleep and not eating well, I definitely had increased stress. And I didn’t have a way to release that stress through physical activity. You know, I didn’t have those natural endorphins that stimulate those positive feelings. Initially, my motivation for starting back with a Fitbit is her chain was actually kind of self-centered, but I’m gonna talk about how that evolved over time. As I kind of invited God into my health journey, but initially, it was because my sister-in-law asked me to be a bridesmaid in her wedding and I had to wear a bridesmaid dress.
So, I was determined to lose the baby weight from my second daughter, who was one at the time. And I wanted to get in shape, you know, and I wanted to look good in this bridesmaid dress so that I was gonna do this workout program. I made up a calendar. I wrote my workouts every day and what I was gonna do. And even though it took me, you know, it was a three-month program. It took me five months to do it, but I still did it because I just tried to commit to, you know, looking at that calendar crossing each day off as I went along and on the days, I didn’t feel like doing anything.
I just told myself to do something, even if it was like five minutes just to do something, put your workout shoes on, you know, do a couple minutes. And most of the time it would turn out to be a decent workout. And so I did finish it and I felt like I was in great shape and other women that I was friends with at the time that had little ones started noticing that, you know, I had lost the weight that I was looking stronger and more fit. And so they started asking me what I was doing. Well at that time I wasn’t teaching anymore. So I ended up using my background in science and nutrition and human physiology. And I went into health coaching. I became a health coach and personal trainer, and I started helping other women. Develop these fitness routines and hold them accountable to following through. Even if it took them like me, you know, a lot longer than they expected it to. And they were seeing results.
But what happened over time was that the pendulum kind of swung to the opposite extreme. And I started becoming a little bit obsessive about those habits to the point where I was measuring out all my food and I was measuring the success of my day on whether or not I had gotten my entire workout in. And so it actually became a source of stress and anxiety for me, there really was a struggle for quite a few years for me to find this balance. Between caring for myself, like in a healthy way, while also caring for others in between like self-discipline, while also giving myself grace by didn’t get the workout in. And it really wasn’t until I invited God into my health journey that He began to show me that I needed to do things a lot differently.
My faith had grown a lot over that time from when I had had the children. And as I started to grow up, as I started kind of inviting God into my health journey, He really did show me that health was about so much more than physical health, but that included my mental. And my social and my spiritual being and it, they were all very much interconnected. And I wholeheartedly believe that. He showed me that my priorities were kind of out of whack and that the spiritual training really needed to be prioritized over the physical training and that self-care and fitness.
We’re not merely a means to achieve this, you know, ideal body, but rather a way that I could honor God. And my body is a gift that He had given me for the purpose that He had created me for which a lot of that at that time was parenting, but has developed into much more than that. And so he really began to weigh the shift the way I looked at it. And I really contribute that change in perspective to inviting my God into that and bringing my spirituality into my journey with physical health. And then about three years ago, I was so very much into health and fitness.
I started experiencing chronic pain. That doctors thought was a back issue and I found out two years later, was actually a chronic condition called, Small fiber peripheral neuropathy, which is uncurable without a cause. They don’t know the cause of it. So I’ve been dealing with chronic burning pain in my legs and my feet for the past three years. And I have found the most other than my faith. And I do take medication for pain as well. I have found that movement and exercise, especially aerobic exercise is absolutely essential for my physical, mental, and spiritual wellbeing and to minimize. Really the pain that I’m having, because it really does stimulate those endorphins, which are painkillers.
So my passion is really like whole person wellness because I really don’t think you can address anxiety without looking at the physical person and what’s going on socially, spiritually and physically, and then mentally as well. So that’s really become my passion. And I think inviting God in, he has directed me toward now this ministry that I have and, and helping other women, you know, move towards health and wholeness.
Carrie: I think that you make, you know, a couple of good points there that I just wanted to capitalize on. One was that
you started out with something that was healthy and it went to an extreme and it became unhealthy. And that’s, I think, important for our listeners to know that, that can happen in any area of our lives really is to just gonna pay attention to that. Especially if people are prone to obsessions or anxiety, is to start to evaluate and realize, like how much space is this taking up in my mind and in my life.
And is it gone too far at some level?
I really interested a lot in what you said about just the chronic pain and how you’ve noticed that movement has been helpful for that. Because I think that a lot of people, when they experience pain in their bodies. Her first thought is, I shouldn’t move. I should go lay down or I should rest. How do we know if it’s a situation or is that something maybe a medical professional or a trainer can help us with, like in this pain, do we move or do we rest?
Jen: That’s a really good question. I mean, it reminds me of like the chronic pain cycle. I mean, a lot of times with pain, we avoid activity and we avoid movement, but what that does, this actually perpetuates the anxiety because now we’re isolated or sedentary. And as our muscles tense up and we’re getting isolated from other people, that only further exacerbate the anxiety that we’re feeling. I think it does make sense first to evaluate what the problem is. For example, when they thought that I had a herniated disc and that was the source of the pain, they told me I should rest because in that case, resting and keeping the pressure off of my back was what I would have needed to do.
But once I realized that it was actually a nerve issue and that exercise was not. Making it worse, but actually exercise was providing the circulation and the nutrients that my nerves needed to be able to heal and to be able to continue to function. I knew that while my body hurt, moving was good for me. I would say there are some times where rest is needed first and that’s where the medical professional would come in. But if you have, there’s a difference between. Chronic pain and acute pain, acute pain, you know, which is like less than three months, which is usually from like a traumatic injury and things like that. Oftentimes rest is needed first.
However, with chronic pain, most of the time movement is not making it worse because at this point it is extended beyond, you know, the normal amount of time that someone would expect for that to heal. And your body is sending these pain signals and it could be for a variety of reasons. Sometimes there’s no tissue damage at all other times there is. But in my case, once it kind of crossed over into chronic pain and they knew this was not a back issue, there was no harm in me moving. I do have to be smart about it.
So if I exercise and I am absolutely wiped out, like within two hours afterwards, the point that I just, you know, I’m exhausted on the couch, I’ve done too much. And that’s a good general rule of thumb. If you two hours later, just can’t go on with your day because you’re so wiped out, then you’ve over done it. So that’s why later, when we talk about starting a routine, it’s important to kind of ease in and go about things gradually. But the other thing is in addition to starting small and kind of easing in, this I was gonna say about getting into it wasn’t about gradual. With chronic pain the movement is oftentimes what we need to, to get over that anxiety, that fear further harming ourselves and the movement is actually improving our mental health and our physical health.
Carrie: So I know we’re always being told to exercise and move more. Especially in America a lot of times we have more sedentary lifestyles. What are some benefits of exercise?
Jen: There are so many benefits. I know most of us know the physical benefits of exercise. Things like increased strength of our muscles, of our bones. It lowers our blood pressure. It’s improved cardiovascular, endurance and health, but some of the other big benefits of exercise include that it’s a stress reliever who is a great way for us to relieve stress. It releases endorphins, which are those the body’s natural painkillers that also stimulate those feelings of pleasure. So they actually do reduce feelings of pain and stimulate feelings of pleasure. We have an increase in energy. So contrary to what most people think. If we feel kind of tired, a lot of times getting, especially getting outside. In the fresh air 0and doing a first go off will actually increase our energy levels, not decrease them.
I remember what I was, the other thing I was gonna say before about overdoing. It is that if it increases our pain level, that’s something to look out for. If I, when I do impact activities, it makes my nerve pain worse. So I do shy away from doing those. And I stick to activities that when I do them, I do. I may not feel great doing them. And that sometimes true is exercised, but I feel a relief. I feel good afterwards. And so that’s a good way of knowing that as well as people are kind of easing back into a routine, you know, am I exhausted to really move or am I experience increase in my pain, but if it’s the same or even a little bit better for a period of time, then that’s a good sign that movement is actually helping them. Move it again, can produce anxiety. It can help us sleep better with anxiety.
I remember when I was really struggling with anxiety back in like 2016, and I had such difficulty falling asleep at night and movement. Again, especially that aerobic exercise. We’re getting your heart rate up, whether it’s walking or jogging or cycling or swimming, which has become a favorite of mine now on with chronic pain. I sleep so much better when I exercise is, and it’s a way where, you know, when your body is tired, it’s just so much easier to fall asleep. That’s another great benefit of exercise as well. But I know as I mentioned before, you know, my story about wanting to get fit to get into that bridesmaids dress.
I think a lot of us think about benefits to ourselves. Naturally we think, okay, well, these are all the benefits to my health, but where it really changed for me was where I started looking beyond my own health and looking at the people around me. And then even to, how does it benefit or how does it bore a fire God.Right? And so I started thinking about, well, gosh, like if I’m healthy than I am, or as healthy as I possibly can be, right? I’ve got a chronic illness. I have chronic pain.
There are some things that I can’t do with my kids. I can’t run around in the backyard for 45 minutes and play tag because I will be in a lot of pain, but there are still things I can do. And by exercising and taking care of my health. I am able to be more present for my kids, I’m able to help them have good health. Does that example for them, even though mommy can’t do everything, mommy is still making an effort to make the, her health a priority. I think it makes me a better spouse because I’m in a better mood when I’m able to have that release of whatever stress or tension that I’ve just been carrying around. And I know, you know, not only does it help me physically be more comfortable because it lowers my pain, but, you know, I think we’re just more comfortable with our bodies when we know that we’re taking care of them. And we know that that affects, you know, how we interact with others, our intimacy with our spouse, like all of those things are impacted by exercise, but, you know, we even take it even bigger than that.
Our bodies God’s word says that our bodies are temples of the holy spirit and that’s 1 Corinthian 6:19- 20, it says, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the holy spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God. You are not your own. You are bought at a price, therefore honor God with your body so we can honor God with our body”. Through physical fitness. It’s actually a way that we worship God by showing you, we care enough about the body He’s given us to take care of it. And there’s also a verse in Ephesians that talks about caring for your body as well, to care and nourish your body as Christ cares for the church.
So they want, you know and want us to care for our bodies, even though they are temporary, they’re not eternal.
Our souls, they’re important because they’re the only house that our souls have to live in here on this earth. And so if we’re gonna be a reflection of Christ out to the world, well, then we need to be nurturing and caring and fueling our bodies and our minds. Right? And our souls with the right things. So whether that’s good food or good company or God’s word, you know, what we fuel ourselves with is ultimately what’s going to come out is what we’re gonna pour out to everybody else. And so we wanna make sure that it, that it’s good. And then it’s wholesome that it’s nurturing and that it’s caring for ourselves.
Carrie: That’s really good. That’s really awesome. I think so many times, unfortunately. What I’ve seen in church is that people want to talk about our minds or our spirit, and they neglect the physical body. And that’s what our mind is in. That’s what our spirit is. God’s spirit is housed in. And so if we don’t pay attention to our physical bodies, we’re missing just such a crucial piece there in terms of spirituality.
So let’s say maybe somebody is listening to this episode, because they don’t currently have an exercise routine and they wanna get started or they want, they know they need to take more care of their physical health. What would you suggest to them? Maybe they don’t know where to start feel overwhelmed.
Jen: The first thing I would say is to kind of, to evaluate where you’re starting from. So I mentioned before, just if we try to just jump right back in to where we were, that’s where we do find a lot of times that we are prone to injury. I mean, it can be very humbling. I mean, I know after quite a long time of not doing any exercise at all. And because I was on bedrest thinking, it was my back and it didn’t get better and they extended it. And so I had no physical activity for at least the better part of a year after being very active. And I did notice that it was affecting my mental health and I knew that I needed to do something. And I tried to, I joined a gym,and to start swimming, which has been great for me and anyone that deals with chronic pain.
I mean, I asked for that like as a Christmas gift to have money for that, because I knew, you know, that there was a cost involved, but it’s been very worth it for me.
So starting off in the pool for me was really good. There’s water aerobics classes. And, you know, there’s, Y there’s a lot of local lifewise and things like that. I have a low cost, you know, to join the pool or aquatics class, but think about where you’re starting from. Because if you try to just jump in and go to the first, you know, hit class at the gym, then you’re likely to feel discouraged or to get injured or to be in so much pain afterwards that you have zero desire to go back. So think about were you starting from, and then gradually increase it. So like, if you’re doing absolutely nothing right now, that’s okay. Right? There’s no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus, like just, okay. Where can we start? And I highly suggest just doing a walking program.
I mean, the new year’s a great time to start because the spring is when there’s a lot of,like, five Ks or like the color run or things like that. That can be very social and fun while also encouraging physical fitness. And so that’s, I remember doing that years back, whether you walk or run, it doesn’t matter if you sign up for something like that, it gives you a date that you there it’s April or May, and that you’re working toward, that you can put on the calendar and you might do like a couch to 5K program. Or we might just start walking like 10 minutes a day.
As a personal trainer, I do highly suggest that you focus on like consistency over performance. So rather than say, well, I’m gonna walk three times a week for 30 minutes, I would say, well, can you just walk 15 minutes? Every day or six days a week? Because when you build that habit, even if you have one rest day, but when you do three times a week, what happens is, well, it’s only Monday I have the whole week I’m gonna start. I’m gonna do it tomorrow. And then Tuesday rolls along and it just gets put off.
But if you can make it a habit, it really does your body comes to expect it to eventually crave it. That movement and walking is a great place to start. I would say, try to choose something you enjoy. And there’s some people out there to be like, well, I don’t enjoy anything, but you know, it could be gardening. It could be, again, walking with a friend or a neighbor, they could be cycling, whether it’s stationary cycling or running a bike. I said, I did, I ended up doing swimming. I didn’t love it at first, but I got underwater headphones and it became like the new running for me because I used to run. So I put my earbuds in and I listened to music and I swim and I came to love it because once I got over the hump of this is miserable because I’m so out of shape this, it became enjoyable for me. It really becomes something I look forward to doing.
Carrie: Tell us about when you were a busy mom and you were getting into a fitness routine, like how did you schedule that in? What did that look like for you?
Jen: When I was the busy mom and I had the little ones. I found ways to exercise a Chrome. And I actually do have some really short, simple and workouts that I’ve put on my website, which is www.JenRoland.com and under resources there’s exercises. So I have like 10 to 15 minute exercises and that’s what I would do. So I literally just got free weights and I had an exercise mat. There are a ton of free exercise videos that you can look up like on YouTube or online. You can find, you know, a beginner yoga, you can find a beginner, a cardio class, you can play it.
Sometimes I bring my like exercise mat upstairs and I would like lay it on the floor by the playroom. And I would do, you know, and it was frustrating sometimes. Stop, but except even on a, such a good day, I might get 10 or 15 minutes in, in the morning. And then I try to finish it up later in the day. And I learned to be okay with like splitting up a workout that was 25 minutes into two or three parts and being like, I still did it, right? Free weights and a map basically is what I used for the longest time. That’s all I had and that’s all I needed, but I was able to do strength core. And then for cardio, I’d either put the kids in the double stroller, which was a great workout and push them around. Or, you know, eventually we later did get a treadmill, but I’ve had a bike I’ve had to look to goal. So throughout the years I found some way to get some kind of aerobic exercise in. So I think any, whether they’re working in or outside the home, I think there are ways to make it work on a budget of even nothing right now.
Carrie: Sure.
Jen: You know, even if you were to invest $50 in some free weights, like you could do a lot of workouts with that. And I do have some strength and some, some cardio workouts and one of them, I just use a stairwell and that’s it. And it’s a short little cardio exercise to get your heart rate up when you can’t get outside or can’t leave the house. There’s a lot of really good I’m free resources out there that people can use. And then there’s others that you can pay for if you have the money and you want a subscription to them.
Carrie: Sure. I think that we over-complicate things sometimes, or we make excuses. I don’t have that 25 minutes in my day, but what you were just saying was like, well, what if I did, you know, 10 minutes in the morning and then 15 after the kids went to bed or something like that, what if I took part of my lunch break, if I have an hour lunch break and what if I took 15 minutes of that or 30 minutes of that to walk? Those are doable things that I think a lot of times we don’t think about, or we just, we make some kind of excuse for why we aren’t able to do something.
I know since COVID, I have been exercising at home, I had a gym membership and I was doing the classes and everything else like that. And then with COVID of course, all of that changed. And I bought a streaming service and ended up streaming workouts into the house. And that’s been just really great for me to be able to physically and mentally to have those workouts in, on a regular basis. And I do miss it when, when I don’t have it now I’m pregnant. So now I’m doing the prenatal yoga and the, those type of workout. It’s very different than what I was doing before, for sure. I mean, you know, changing body, you have to change your, your movement and your activity level. And there’s definitely some pain in there as well that I’m trying to deal with and work around and stretch out. But Hey, they say exercise is good for labor, so I’m rolling with it.
Jen: And you bring, you bring up a really good point too, is that like pull that warmup and that cools down, you know, like that’s just even just like the stretching, we forget about things like that, but that’s really important as well. You mentioned streaming, I streamed workouts all the time. And my husband was able to set it up so that you can just, pass through laptop like screen onto the television. Right?
Carrie: Right.
Jen: So we put a TV in a room where I do my workouts. And so rather than having to like do it off this little screen on my computer, I had it on the TV screen. And that’s how I would do a lot of my workouts as well. But having that warmup and that full down is really important as well.
And I loved having that calendar if you buy, if you string a program and you buy like a program, they usually come with workout calendars, and there’s something satisfying about like, just crossing off each day as you go along and seeing, I did one more cam on one day closer, really just focusing on the process of getting in the habit of making physical activity a habit.
So there’s eventually, like you said, Carrie something that you look forward to do, and then you actually missed it. If you don’t get to do it and just, rewarding yourself to along the way with a healthy reward, like maybe it’s, you know, at the end, I’m gonna go get a pedicure or something like that. Something that’s not gonna derail your progress that you’ve made,
Carrie: Right.
Jen: But that’s going to reward you in a way that just also helps you relax and things I did, is things you’re struggling with. I think pedicure or massage or just meeting a friend, you know, for coffee, all can be just great ways of rewarding ourselves for disciplining our body, which is a good thing. You know, also biblical as well, too, that we’re disciplining our bodies.
Carrie: How do you incorporate spiritual practices into movement?
Jen: That’s a really good question. One thing that I wanted to mention, you had mentioned at the beginning, that I have a certification as a mental health coach through the American association of Christian counselors. Well, before that I did a behavior change certification through ACE, which is not Christian-based and it was very different in talking about behavior change versus mental health and sustainable long-term change. And here’s one point that I feel like is just really worth emphasizing is that without the holy spirit in our lives, without God and invited into our health trinny, the best that we can hope to achieve is to change our outward behavior.
We are disciplining ourselves to change an outward behavior without truly having that deep heart level change as to why we’re doing it and why it’s really important that it’s deeper and bigger than ourselves, but that it really involves God and it’s honoring glorifying him. So when we invite God into our health journey and we have the holy spirit in us, that’s when we can achieve like true heart level, sustainable change.
Okay. And that’s only through the power of the holy spirit in us. And so as we are engaging in physical fitness and we are inviting the holy spirit to give us the strength to endure.
To the push through what might be a difficult workout to overcome the, the will of just being lazy and staying in bed. He is giving us the power to do more than change our behavior, but to actually change our hearts so that we begin to see it as a way of worship. And so some ways that I have done that. One of the It gets ways. I was like, cause I mentioned music and like I used to run to, to certain playlist and when I couldn’t run anymore. And that was hard. Just like you said, it’s so hard doing like your prenatal workouts when you’re used to doing other things. And I used to be doing insanity and these, you know, pull ups and chin ups and it was very difficult to not be able to engage with those things.
But one thing that I found helpful was like to take the music with me that I found swimming and that was a robotic for me, but I will listen to worship music when I swim. And so bringing, you know, music and it doesn’t have to be Christian, but like music therapy is a real thing. It is therapeutic and I have playlist depending on what I’m even feeling. I’m sure other people probably do too, whether it’s just like, let’s go get them playlist, or I just need to relax. I’m in a spa kind of playlist and you might play one when you’re walking and a different one when you’re doing, you know more intense workout, but I actually have ones for how I’m feeling. So I have a let go and trust God playlist. I have a finding comfort in God’s presence playlist. I have a song to overcome hopelessness playlist, and those are all actually my freebies library.
So if you go to my website and subscribe you’ll have access to all of them they’re on Spotify. But worship was, is a huge way for me to bring spirituality into fitness. Another one is walking wholeheartedly, admit that I’m guilty of like 99% of the time walking with earbuds in because I like to listen to podcasts. I’ve been listening to a bunch of yours recently carried. I was listening to one on nutrition and I was listening to one on mindfulness. And, and so I’ve been, I listened to podcasts. I listened to my Bible app. I listened to music and I realized that in doing that, there were times I would complete my walk and I really didn’t even notice like what was going on around me, because I would be like constantly looking at my phone or just, you know, my mind would be elsewhere. I got a really good tip from someone else that I’ve tried to incorporate into my life. And that is to go on a walk without your earbuds, without your phone and do one of two things. The first would be just to be like mindful and notice what’s around you.
Carrie: That’s good.
Jen: You notice the beauty of the leaves changing color right now. This morning, it was, there was a bird sitting on the tippy top branch of the tree. And like, it was, it was just really kind of comical looking. And I, I noticed that. Just noticing, I mean the littlest things, we had a bunny in our backyard this morning. That was super cute. But just being able to notice that being mindful, that lowers anxiety, that mindfulness is, is also needed for emotional regulation and to notice what we’re feeling and to be able to go to God and say, God, you know, I’m feeling this right now, you know, and maybe identified as whether it’s loneliness or boredom or anxiousness or fear. Just practicing that mindfulness is key.
So try going for a walk and just noticing what’s around you and not having those ear buds in. And the other thing would be to take an index card with you with a, a positive affirmation of this could be a scripture verse, or it could just be inspiring quote, but it coming up. Some kind of fear or a lie that you’re struggling with. Okay. So for me, my thoughts would oftentimes, especially with my health, they would just I worry. I would worry and it didn’t help that other people with my condition would say things like, well, aren’t you worried? You’re gonna end up paralysed. Well, aren’t you worried that you’re not gonna be able to like drive your kids around anymore? Aren’t you concerned? And I would get an earful of, plus I would get an ear full of things I should try. Will have you tried this? Have you tried this? Have you tried this? And it was very anxiety provoking for me.
Carrie: Sure.
Jen: And so my verse was Philippians 4-8, which I’ve also now framed. I have that on my wall. But whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right. Whatever is your, whatever is lovely. Whatever is admirable. If anything is excellent and praiseworthy, think about such things. And for me, that was the changing my thought taps. And it was like, there I go again, I’m thinking about the future. And I realized that like anxious people,of eyelid, let’s say. When I’m showing with anxieties, because I’m living ahead, I’m thinking ahead. I’m grieving losses that haven’t even happened. Whether I’m gonna be paralyzed or whether it’s just gonna get worse. And I’m not on my retirement, I’m gonna be just stuck at home because I can’t travel. And rather than worrying about these things. But haven’t happened to just, I think of like a fishing rod, reel it in. Where are you right now? Be here, there are joys. And there are things to be experienced right here.
Let me focus on those things that are true, that I know that are true, that I know that are praiseworthy. That’s where I need to be thinking about. So that’s a big verse for me. So just walking and every, maybe five minutes, just reading that verse out loud. And while your neighbors might look at you a little funny because you’re, you know, doing that, there is something about the movement and the auditory and putting it all together where I really think that can be very, a very powerful tool to renew our mind.
So if you can say it out loud, just like sometimes we’ll do positive affirmations in front of the mirror. And speak it aloud to themselves. There’s power in that versus reading it and just reading it internally and not saying it out loud. So when you combine that with movement, I think there’s just, it just adds a whole nother level of depth to it, to help it really sink in.
Carrie: Sure. Towards the end of every podcast. I like to ask our guests to share a story of hope, which is a time in which you received hope from God or another person.
Jen: Well, I thought a lot about that and the things that came to me if I thought back to when I was struggling with it most, which is when I was going through some marital issues back in 2016, through 2018.
And my husband and I were in counseling. And I just remember feeling like I shouldn’t be struggling with it.
So I just wanted to speak some words of encouragement and then share a little bit about how God used that period of my life. I wanted to say that we can walk with the Lord and still struggle with anxiety. It is very possible to be walking closely with God and still have these difficulties. All of us have difficulties and limitations, and they’re there for a reason.
Carrie: Sure.
Jen: God is using them. Anxiety, It’s, it’s not your identity. It’s not who you are. It’s just a result of living in a fallen world. That is plagued with sin and disease and illness and very difficult circumstances, especially with what we’ve all gone through the past year and a half, never for a moment. Do I want anyone to think that having anxiety that is shallow with anxiety makes them any less of a Christian. Being on medication doesn’t make you any less of a Christian? I knew there were some people that led me to question how I could take an antidepressant for pain and also be a strong believer and that, you know. I used to be praying more and that’s just not true.
There are definitely cases where people just have lower levels of serotonin and exercise does help that as well. I don’t want to get too off track, but if you do have a lower level of serotonin, which definitely can happen, people that have depression, anxiety. Exercise also helps that, and there are foods that have tryptophan that you can also eat that your body uses that tryptophan, to produce serotonin. So things like turkey and bananas and salmon, and you can Google like foods with tryptophan and that can help raise your serotonin to a normal level, which may help your mood.
But, you know, in some people they need that medication and that, that can actually help balance their brain chemistry to what it’s supposed to be. So God gives us Jesus, you know, for hope, but he gives us doctors and nurses and counselors and coaches for help. And he wants us to reach out to those people. Just like, it’s not a weakness to reach out to Carrie for counseling, if you need counseling, right? If you live in the same state and you wanna connect with her for counseling. God gives us counselors to help us through hard things. And he gives us doctors to also help us where our biochemical environment may not be exactly what it should be. And it, that doesn’t mean it’s a long-term thing, but there’s no reason to be ashamed of that.
So I know what it’s like to struggle with anxiety. I know what it’s like to be on medication as well. And I’ve come to see, you know, over the past five years that God has really used it in such a way that I can now see it as like a gift. And here’s why I say that because we were like, there’s no way. There’s just no way. Okay. The reason I would say that it’s a gift is because it has drawn me closer to God. It has, you know, it’s what encouraged me to seek counseling, my husband and I to get into counseling. Us to both seek the Lord.
We’ve both been transformed.
Our marriage is stronger. I have grown tremendously, both spiritually and personally. Okay. And it’s really showed me that I have to let go of the things I can’t control and focus on the things I have agency over. And in doing that in letting go of control, I feel like I’ve really been able to receive what God has planned for me, which right now is turned into a ministry of serving other women.
When we try to grasp tightly and control everything near actually, like clenching our fist in a way that we’re unable to really receive what God wants to teach us through our struggles. And that’s why Bernay Brown. She wrote that book, you know, the gift of imperfection. It’s our imperfections that draw us closer to God. And in drawing closer to God that we really discover who we really are and how he wants to use our anxiety for our growth. So I would just encourage everyone that’s going through that today, that God is going to use it just to keep seeking him with your hands open for what he has to give you. Remember that He is gonna use it for your good, He really as for your growth and scientification, and just to, to just seal that relationship, that union with him even more so.
Carrie: Thank you so much for coming on, and talking with us about these things. I really appreciate it.
Jen: You’re welcome. Thanks for having me.
Carrie: I really appreciated Jen’s perspective in the Christian Integration into this episode. I want you all to know in a transparent node, that I’ve really been struggling to keep up with everything that’s going on with the Podcast a last couple of months. It’s been a riff time with my pregnancy and you hear me talk about that this, a little bit of our upcoming episodes. About back pain that I don’t with. And It’s been a journey. And I hope to actually do a Podcast. Sometime in the future to talk about mental health and chronic pain, anxiety.
How those things interact with each other? Because there’s so much linkage that I don’t feel like people talk about these things. What is like to go through a chronic health struggle and not know when the end day of that is going to be. So, there’s so much that I want to do. I want to really get our website fully up to date where it needs to be. And I want to be pouring more efforts and to make sure that our newsletter goes out every week. I just want be able to do such of those things. So, I’m sitting on the acceptance that I am not where I want to be with this Podcast. I assure that, because it’s a lesson to all of us. That sometimes we go through things and we have to take a step back. And we have to acknowledge our limitations and we really have to dig in and take care of ourselves.
Fortunately, my recording season is over. I am now focused on just getting everything out to you guys over the next several weeks. For I’m going on maternity leave. How much I get out there and remain to be seen? But, we’re gonna do the best that we can. I would love to hear from you and you can reach us anytime on our website. Hope for Anxiety and OCD.com. We have a contact form on there. And we love to hear from real live actual people who’s listening the show. Because a lot of at we get, you know, junks bin, on there. So, leave us a little note and let us know which you like about the Podcast. What do you like to see different and anxious suggestions? Thank you so much for listening.
Welcome to hope for anxiety and OCD Episode 59. I am your host Carrie Bock. And today we’re having a solo episode on anxiety, goals, failure, and New Year’s resolution. Maybe you’re starting to think about your new year’s resolutions or goals for next year. Maybe you’re not, some people just say, “ I don’t set new year’s resolutions. That’s not for me.”
At the beginning of every year, you will set New Year’s resolutions and often resolutions fail for a variety of reasons. I don’t set new year’s resolutions per se, because they remind me more of making a wish before you blow out your birthday candles. It’s kind of like, “ Yeah, this would be a nice thought or guest year, but there’s really no plan to complete it.
I really believe in setting goals. Goals are specific. They have a plan to help you get there. And you’re going to know if you achieve them or not. There’s some type of measurability to them. And later in the episode, I’m going to look through some previous schools that I’ve said and talk with you about whether or not I achieved them.
And some goals that I have for the upcoming year, especially specifically for this podcast. Just a reminder, in case you missed my last episode with Steve, where we talked about having a baby next year and how that’s going to impact the podcast. We are going to an every other week show starting in January.
So we will have a show next week for the first week of January. And then. Beyond an every other week schedule after that, just in case you are like my mother and diligently tune in every week. I hope it’s not just my mother that does that. Maybe there’s some people out there that really like the show and try to tune in every week.
If you don’t and you’re catching up on old episodes, there’ll be plenty of time to do that as well. I want to talk with you about problems you may run into in terms of setting goals. If you have anxiety or OCD. There are some reasons that people who experience anxiety may not set goals. You may feel overwhelmed.
Maybe you feel like you have so much that you want to do that you want to accomplish and you feel overwhelmed at the idea of actually trying to do it all. It doesn’t really matter what that goal is. Whether it’s to get in better physical shape, get out of debt,eat healthier this year, you can become easily overwhelmed by any of these goals.
They seem really big and really insurmountable. So you may get to a place where you say, well, I’m just not going to try, because I don’t know how to break that down into smaller steps. I have no idea how to get to where I want to be. And so forget it. Just give it up. You may not know what you need or want. I know that sounds strange.
So this is something I run into a lot. When people come into counseling, they’ll say things like, I want to feel better. I want to have less anxiety. And in the beginning, that sounds like a good goal. Feeling better, having less anxiety, but we really have to dig in and ask some more questions in order to help make those, a goal. For someone saying, “ I want to feel better.”
What does feeling better look like? What kind of things would you be doing if you were feeling better? Well, “ I would be exercising on a regular basis. I would be spending more time socially with friends.” Those are some things that you can actually get down and measure and create specific objectives to meet those goals.
You may not feel worthy of achieving certain things. Some people learned maybe in their family of origin, not to want things, because if they wanted something, they knew that nobody was going to help them get that. This can lead to people leaning on self-reliance or it can lead them to saying things like, “ Well, you know, I just, I don’t know.I just don’t really want anything.” Because they don’t want to be disappointed.
As Christians, we don’t have to deny our wants. Sometimes people think that somehow more Godly, but we do have to submit them over to God to see if that’s something that He has for our lives. And sometimes it’s a matter of timing.
We may want something from God or for Him to help us achieve a certain outcome, but we may not really be ready to receive that. I can definitely think of plenty of times in my life where I wanted something, but really wasn’t ready for that responsibility. I think about that in the professional realm, in terms of starting a private practice, there was definitely a lot of times
Before starting my private practice that I wanted to do that and wasn’t able to, but now I can look back and say, “ Everything happened at the right time, the way it was supposed to, because if I had tried to start something earlier, I wouldn’t necessarily have had the confidence to follow through and persevere in the difficult times.”
I can also say that with having a child, a lot of people have children in their twenties and there’s nothing wrong with that. For me ,personally, I don’t think that I was ready to be a mom in my twenties. I guess if it happened back then, I would’ve had to figure it out and rise to the occasion and it probably would have made me a better person, but having a baby now that I’m older, it’s caused me to process things very differently.
And I think in general, I’m a much less selfish person than I was in my twenties. I feel like I will have more to give to this baby than I would have back then. So God’s timing in that sense for me is perfect. When we submit our desires over to God and our wants, we can pray and say,
“ Okay, God, this is what I’m desiring.Is this in your will for me?” or “ God helped me desire the things that you desire.” And then you’ll start desiring things of the kingdom, rather than just things that you want for your own purposes or your own gain. Sometimes people don’t set goals because they actually fear success.
I know that sounds pretty strange to say out loud, but sometimes people will wonder what would happen. Like, “ If I got that dream job? Will my family look down on me then?” , “Would people judge me?” , “ What are people gonna think of me if I do this or that ?” All of those things can really get in our way. And we can be afraid of all kinds of things related to success. We can be afraid of achieving more. We can be afraid of making more money, but most typically fear of success comes down to our relationships.
We’re afraid that somehow if we’re more successful, that’s going to negatively impact our relationships. So that’s something that you also can take to God and pray about. And a lot of times, fear of success may come from family of origin issues and it’s a good process to work through some of those things.
I had to work through some thought processes about money, really, for counseling several years ago. And it was a hard process, but a really good process for me to understand that I could help people and also make money because those two things seem to really be an opposition to each other. That was part of my overcoming some fear of success for myself.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, you may not be setting goals this year because you fear failure. You may be saying, “ Well, I’ve been trying to lose weight for the past three years. And I haven’t done it. So why am I even going to put that out there as a New Year’s resolution or as a goal this year?” It’s important for us to understand why our goals failed in the past.
Prior to starting this podcast, I had created an online course for anxiety management and I spent about an entire year creating it, marketing it. I had Facebook ads and I had decided at some point, then I was going to shift gears and make it about panic attacks and to be more specific, switched a few things around and marketed more of that.
I will tell you that I spent a lot of time, energy and money on something that was an epic failure. I did not sell a single course, and most people would call that a major waste of time and money. It took me a long time, probably over a year to try something new and even longer to understand that I had to take this as a learning experience.
I needed to go back and dissect, understand why the course failed and figure out how to not make those errors again the next time I did something. Had I not taken that evaluation time, I would not have started the podcast ultimately. Setting goals or reevaluating what we did or didn’t accomplish last year is an important part of our process.
But we can’t just say, “Well, I failed. So I’m not going to be able to do it again.” We have to understand what failed in terms of my course, I did not have a public platform or a persona or an ability for people to know, like, and trust me to get to that point where they felt like I was the person that could help them manage their anxiety.
In the process of this failure, recovering from the failure, I started to just digest more podcasts, to understand marketing your ideal audience and how it works, how people connect with you via social media in different places. And trust me, I am no expert on any of this stuff because I’m continually also asking myself how we can grow the podcast. But there’s a lot that I’ve learned over the last few years since I had my epic failure of trying to sell that course.
So if you haven’t lost weight in the last few years and you’ve really wanted to, or you haven’t been able to stick to your budget in the last few years, and you’ve really wanted to, first of all, we’re going to have a couple episodes coming up on each of those things on anxiety surrounding finances, and really just how to get started in a fitness journey if that’s one of your new year’s resolution.
So I’m excited about those upcoming shows, but also just take some time to evaluate for yourself, “ Why did these goals fail? Was it because you didn’t have the support that you needed?” “Was it because there’s lies, maybe your limiting beliefs that you’re believing surrounding these issues? I mean, some people may believe, well, there’s just, “ Everyone in my family is heavy and is always going to be fat. So why bother trying to lose weight?”
You may want to set a different goal for yourself. Maybe you want to set, instead of just focusing so much on weight loss, maybe you want to just say, “This year, I’m going to get in better shape and decide what better shape looks like. I’m going to be able to walk this far without getting wounded” or “ I’m going to be able to do this many sit-ups or this many push-ups by the next three months, six months
Sometimes those goals feel a bit more achievable than weight loss. And then we start to feel a little bit better about ourselves. One of the reasons I wanted to do a couple of shows around fitness and money is because people look at these two areas and they think, well, “ If I just create this plan, I should be able to execute it and go do it.”
However, a lot of times we have these emotional barriers. They get in the way of being able to do some of these things that we want to do. And that’s why that self-evaluation process is so important. And if you have a hard time self-evaluating, you may want to sit down with another person, a friend, somebody from the church, or it could even be a counselor.
You know, I have had people come in for emotional barriers to weight loss, and that’s some really good work that can be done in those areas. Going along with the fear of failures , sometimes we’re too hard on ourselves. We don’t achieve something and we can be our own worst critic. And there’s a lot of value in our society that we place on achievement, at least in American society that may be different in other parts of the world.
There’s this feeling that , like our worth is based on what we achieve or what we accumulate. Sometimes life just happens. You know what I mean? We’re not in control of all factors. There are things that we may not be able to achieve or goals we might not be able to complete because of situations outside of our control. It is interesting because I was having a conversation with my friend, Erica.
And I said, “ You know, this year I’ve probably been the least productive that I’ve been in the last several years. It’s because I got pregnant and there’s all these different challenges that have come with pregnancy of being able to sleep at night and dealing with restless leg syndrome. And the first trimester, I had morning sickness, which news flash has really like all day nausea.
It’s awful. And I’ve had to sleep a lot to get your extra rest. My perspective on it was like, well, I’ve been the least productive, her perspective on it was, well, Carrie actually you’ve been the most productive because this is a goal that you’ve wanted for yourself and your family. It’s just, the productivity looks very different, trying to take care of yourself and allow God to grow a tiny human in your body.
I’ve also been married for about a year and obviously time allocation is a lot different when you’re married than when you’re single. I remember being single and when I was creating that course specifically, I’d just stay at the office really late. Sometimes I do some extra work or I’d come home and I do more work.
And now, evenings are really important for me to have that time with Steve. And even if it’s just sit down and watch a little TV together. Eating dinner together and just talking about our day and how things are going. You may have had life changes, whether it’s getting married, having a baby moving across town.
I mean, there’s so many different things , getting sick. Maybe you got diagnosed with an illness this year, and you’re just not able to do as much as you were able to do before. And that’s okay. I would say really just be gentle on yourself. One thing I’ve had to realize is like I’ve had to lower the expectations for myself and know that just in this season, it’s okay to do that.
It’s okay to lower your expectations sometimes and go back to what is the simplest form of self care that I need to focus on right now, whether that’s getting enough sleep, eating well, whatever it is. I want us to talk about, “ Why are we even talking about goal setting on this podcast? Why is that important?”
It is important for us to set goals because if we don’t set goals or make efforts to change in this new year, we are going to end up in the same place that we ended up last year and stuck in the same patterns that we ended up in. And as Christians, we are partners with God in our own sanctification process.
What does that mean? Well sanctification, if you don’t know, it’s just basically a big word that means , becoming more like Christ and that’s after we’re saved, that’s our work as Christians, we don’t work to get saved. You know, salvation is by grace. But after we get saved, it is our job really, to partner with God in working out our salvation.
That’s what Philippians 2:12-13 tells us is, “To work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill His good purpose.” So we can’t do it all on our own. We have to work with God and rely on him. There’s another scripture, Ephesians 2:10 that says, “ Where we are, God’s handiwork created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. “ We have been prepared by God to do good things. And we need to sometimes examine and ask him and explore what are those good things God wants us to be doing in this year? And we can’t expect to grow as Christians, spouses, parents, employees, if we don’t take the effort to work on it, and you have the opportunity to create goals for different areas of your life.
So you may decide that you want to create some goals in the spiritual or ministry area. One of our goals one day is for Steve and I to go on a mission trip together that really has been thwarted by two things, one COVID and travel restrictions,and two me, getting pregnant as far as me being able to travel and so forth.
Hopefully next year, at least maybe Steve will be able to go. That’s what we’re hopeful for, that things will have calmed down enough with COVID for him to be able to go on a mission trip. And then maybe in the future years, we’ll be able to go together to do that. We’ve also talked about becoming more involved in a local organization that’s near and dear to both of our hearts, which is called Isaiah 1:17 house.
And it’s not just in Tennessee, it’s in several states. I think mostly in the Southeast, but it is quickly expanding. If you want to look up Isaiah 1:17 house, they really provide food and temporary housing to kids that are coming into DCS custody, who just need a place to stay, or they need a meal until they can find them at the proper foster home for them to be in.
They are currently building the Isaiah one 17 house in our community, which we’re excited about, and it should be done early next year. So depending on how things fall with the orientation process or me having the baby, I may have to wait a little bit to get more involved, but that’s something is, I guess you could say is one of our ministry goals as a couple together.
You can create relationship goals that may look like having a date night. You know, in a prescribed like, time period, maybe we want to go on a date once a week or twice a month, just to kind of, depending on what your life circumstances are. Maybe you want to decide that you’d like to pray with your spouse together.
That’s something Steve and I have been doing more of this year and I definitely would like to continue that it’s just brought us closer to God and really closer to each other. You can set goals financially, maybe something that you’re saving for. Maybe you’d like to save for a house. Maybe you’d like to save for a family.
Maybe you’d like to pay off certain bills that you have, whether it’s a car or some credit card debt. That’s just kind of been out there lingering, I think at the beginning of this year, Steve and I had talked about paying off some bills that we had, and we definitely did a lot of home improvement type stuff.
So those were certainly in our goals, that house just been here for 10 years and it’s older than that. It just definitely needed some work and some investment this year. So we were able to do that actually are going to be able to pay off some bills that we weren’t necessarily expecting to pay off this year, like my car.
So very thankful and grateful for that new consent career goals for yourself. Maybe you’d like to move up into your company, maybe like to get some kind of new training or certificate program. Maybe you would like to go back to school. Really think through if there’s any career goals that you’d like to make. This year, I was able to be a part of a 16- week training program, combining EMDR and ego state therapy.
That was something that really boosted my career and that I’ve really enjoyed getting to know more about. I also took training on combining EMDR and OCD. That was super helpful. Next year I’d like to get trained in something in the EMDR community called, “ The flash and technique.” I’m not as focused on career training next year due to having the baby, but I will have to get some CEU credits.
I shared this in Episode 50 with Steve. But one goal that I have for next year is financial and a career goal that really is for the podcast to be able to break even this past year. I’ve invested a lot of time and money from my counseling practice into building the podcast, paying for editing, paying for social media help with the website.
And we now have a Patreon set up for the podcast where you can become a monthly subscriber or patron of the show. You can receive some teachings and help on anxiety, real life activities that you can practice, go in there and practice them over and over again, until you get better at them to help with your thought life or just calming your physical body informational sessions in there on mindfulness and different things.
I’m very excited about this and also want it to be valuable for people who are looking for more self-help materials. Maybe you’ve been listening to the podcast for a little while and have gotten a lot out of it. Maybe you just entrusted in giving five to $10 a month, or maybe like to make a one-time gift. We have the ability through, Buy Me a Coffee to make one-time gifts.
And if you’re interested in being a monthly subscriber, you can go to Patreon. And I’ll include links in the show notes for both of those. One of my goals for this year really that did not work out and fail was that I wanted to be able to sell a digital product. And I had created an ebook on finding a therapist, which I think I’m going to just go ahead and include that for the Patreon members.
It is for sale on the website. I really haven’t had any sales or traction from that. However, I have gotten some clients who have listened to the podcast and decided that they wanted to see me for therapy. So that’s been a good blessing, but I haven’t sold any digital eBooks or anything like that. I had originally thought about creating some downloads or creating a course.
And have decided really to move towards this subscription model, because I think it makes most sense for the podcast itself. If you disagree and want me to sell individual audio downloads on my website, definitely contact me through hopeforanxietyandocd.com. I’m very interested in seeing what self-help stuff people are looking for and how I can help you get that.
So much of entrepreneurship and podcasting is a lot of trial and error type work. Maybe that helps you or encourages you in your individual goals. The first thing that you try may not work out and that’s okay. You know, it’s okay to go back to the drawing board and say, “ Do I need to persevere through this? Work harder on it?”
Because sometimes we need to do that. Sometimes we actually need to stick with something and persevere, but there are other times where we have to evaluate and say, “ Okay, maybe that wasn’t the direction I needed to go in. Let me take a step back and figure it out. How can I go in a different direction?”
That’s going to be more helpful for myself this next year, in terms of goals for me is to really figure out what my work-life balance is related to being a mom and figuring out what the best schedule for myself and my infant is going to be trying to figure out childcare plans. It’s going to be a challenge for sure, but something that I feel ready to take on.
And I’m excited about just this new chapter and new season of life. I hope that this episode has really encouraged you to examine yourself, evaluate last year and really look forward to this new year and say, “ Okay, how can I make some helpful and meaningful goals for myself? How can I work through these fears that are getting in the way and the anxiety that’s getting in the way of me being the best self that I can be.”
And as Christians when we are the best self that we can be, that benefits the kingdom of God and also benefits the other people that we’re in relationship with in our lives for our story of hope, because I like to include one in every podcast.
I wanted to give you guys a little bit of an update on Steve’s eye situation and the pain that he was experiencing. So we talked about that episode in Episode 50, about how there just wasn’t clarity surrounding what was causing this eye pain. And one of the things that was thrown out was you can go to physical therapy and try to work on this cranial nerve that runs from your neck and it runs behind the eyes as well.
Though, we had no idea that you could go to physical therapy for your eyes. However, he’s been going to benchmark physical therapy in Smyrna, and we are just so thankful for Kim over there who has been helping him. I am recording this in November and as of today, you know, he’s been in physical therapy for about a month and they’re expecting him to have to be in physical therapy for maybe another month and should be finishing up by the end of November.
So certainly by the time this episode comes out, he has been making just amazing, great strides in physical therapy. It’s been helping reduce his eye pain that he was experiencing. Which feels like such a relief for us in just an absolute miracle answer to prayer from God. We are so very thankful. The journey has been really rough as we talked about in episode 50, but he seems to be getting better in terms of the eye pain.
There’s still a lot that we don’t know about the vision loss, but we place more peace about that because we always believed that the eye pain was somehow involved or causing his vision loss. And that doesn’t quite seem to be the case in his particular situation from just what we know right now. So this situation has given us a lot of hope that God does hear us, and He does answer prayers and He will leave us and guide us in getting the healing that we need.
And I believe that for you to whoever’s listening, if you are in need of healing physically or emotionally, spiritually, whatever you need, God is able to provide that for you. And He loves you so much. It may be a journey to receive that healing, but He’s going to be with you every single step of the way.
And please get some Christian communities around you as well. Who can love you and support you on that journey. I hope that we’re a part of that community for you. If you listen to our show regularly, I hope that you all had an amazing Christmas and blessings as we go into the new year. You can always contact us online anytime at www.hopeforanxietyandocd.com.Let us know what you’d like to see more of or what you’d like to see less of in terms of the show.
Hope for anxiety and OCD is a production of By the Well counseling in Smyrna, Tennessee. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum and audio editing is completed by Benjamin Bynam.
Until next time. May you be comforted by God’s great love for you.
Today’s special is a certified humor professional, certified stress mastery educator, master listener and author, Sporty King. Sporty talks about using humor as a coping tool for anxiety and other mental health issues.
Laughter is a part of humor but not a requirement.
Sporty’s view on these two different extremes: people may take themselves too seriously or they may make everything a joke.
How Sporty became a master listener at the same time a public speaker
The healing power of laughter and the study of healthy humor
Helpful advice for those who mask their feelings with humor
How Sporty use humor to help people master their stress and anxiety
Carrie: Welcome to Hope For Anxiety and OCD. I’m your host Carrie Bock. And today on the show, we are talking with Sporty King, who is a Master Listener, Stress Master Educator, and Certified Humor Professional to talk with us about humor. I did not know prior to meeting Sporty that you could be a certified humor professional, but I find this very interesting and intriguing. And I think we’re going to get into a great conversation today. Even though you’re a public speaker, why would you say that you’re a master listener? That seems like a contradiction a little bit there.
Sporty: Great and say that’s part of the beauty of life and humor is the contradictions. Listening is actually the number one communication skill.
So what happens is, we tend to hear people say that they’re motivational speakers, you know, they’re speakers, but the truth is you have to listen when you speak, you should be sharing. And so you share the information that went in and you’ll see then, later on I taught her some things that will really show you why I call myself the master of listening.
And, the reason I also came up with that moniker is instead of saying, I’m a master, a master of ceremonies, I’m a master of listening. I will listen throughout in a conference for instance, awards, a banquet or whatever. And I listen to the things that people say, and then I do what I collect the words and then at the end, I will actually create a poem on the spot that grabs the spirit of what went on in that tribute or the conference as well. And so that’s why , another reason I call, the master of listening.
Carrie: Wow. That’s impressive. Poems on the spot. Awesome. You told me that laughter is a part of humor, but not a requirement. So tell us more about that.
Sporty: Yeah, you see, humor is actually the quality that makes something amusing or laughable, whereas laughter is actually the biological reaction. So laughter is that outward expression of humor. So, you know, it’s just like we hear people say I got a good sense of humor. You can have a sense of humor and not actually not laugh, at all. Gosh, let me tell you this last batch that I just had earlier in my speaking business, a disease called R R F D
Carrie: Ok?
Sporty: And it stands for reflex dystrophy or Reflex, Dystrophy, Sympathy, RDS. And so I’m speaking to this group as I’m talking and I’m laughing and I’m talking. And about 10 minutes into the presentation, one of the persons in front of us said, “ Sporty” because no one laughed while I’m talking.
And she said, “ I just want you to know that we are really enjoying you. But this disease is a cross between cancer and arthritis and actually laughing is painful sometimes.” So it gives you another look at, when people talk about being speakers, we got to reach your audience and go with their moods. You can’t always do that because you don’t know, you know, someone who you think is looking stoic or uninterested may be the most involved, engaged person in your audience. But you don’t know whether to have a disease or what type of trauma they’re going through in their life that they are thinking about, so they, you know, say may not be responding the way you want them to.
So that’s just, you know, one of the early lessons I got in my speaking career, and I love it.
Carrie: Somebody took a nap one time while I was speaking at a conference and I just figured that they really needed that nap at that time . I tried not to take any offense to it, but I was like, “ Man, this is rough here.” I wasn’t even after lunch or anything.
Sporty: See? Because that laugh at large you see from speaking after lunch, I’ll open the session by saying, “ Welcome to sleep therapy.”
Carrie: Yeah
Sporty: But, but yeah, maybe your voice was so calming that that allowed them to get that rest that they need.
Carrie: There you go.
Sporty: Again, switching, switching things up.
Carrie: Yeah. One of the reasons that I wanted to talk about humor on a show that has to do with anxiety, is because I know somebody who’s tuning in right now going, “ Why in the world are they even talking about this on the anxiety show here?”
But I noticed that if people aren’t careful that they struggle with anxiety, they can really fall into two different traps. And one is, they may take themselves too seriously and they have a hard time just finding that sense of humor and maybe making light of some things that happen in our lives. I think that’s a skill that we all have to kind of develop to, I don’t know how to stay sane and get through some difficulties. But then on the other trap, they may make everything a joke and just kind of joke their way through life and avoid really diving into some of those difficult feelings they might actually need to feel. I’m curious about, you know, your thoughts on those two different extremes.
Sporty: So let’s jump right on that word you use twice, feelings. Say because the key is no emotion is wrong. And sometimes we have to recognize how you feel. You should feel nervous . You should feel anxious. You should feel excited. You should feel great. You should feel sad. No emotion is wrong. But the key is how do we choose to then deal with the emotion?
Like you say, “ I’m not taking myself too seriously?” or “ Am I hiding how I feel with jokes?” I see anxiety and excitement as fraternal twins. We both recreate a reaction in the body of what’s about to come and how I’m going to perform. “ Am I being judged because we’re judging ourselves?” All of that is there. We can just as quickly make it trivial, but the same way you say, “ Oh my God, I don’t think I’m going to do well. I’m feeling scared. I’m nervous.” We can just as easily say, “ Man, I’m excited. I’m about to do a great job and make a difference in people’s lives.” The brain doesn’t say, “ Oh, Siri here. That’s correct. That you’re nervous. You’re scared. Now the brain goes with what you are telling. Sometimes, like I said, it’s not necessarily going to be easy, but it’s a commitment. And so, if I’m taking myself too seriously, the key becomes the world throws around and that is truth, truth, and trust. You know, you’ve got to be honest with yourself because sometimes , the people who take themselves too seriously, I think it is because they, they won’t let anybody else in who will say to them, “ Hey, look, you’re doing this.” And then therefore now to have a chance to correct it.
Carrie: And sometimes humor, you know, requires a certain level of vulnerability because you don’t know, like, is the other person going to find this funny? Are they going to get it? Or they, you know, sometimes you’re dancing on that line of, they’re going to be offended by the joke I just made or something of that nature too.
Sporty: Yeah, I’m a member of a, you mentioned my CHP, is it Certified Humor Professional. I’m a member of an organization called A A T H and it’s just the “ Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor.” We believe in the healing power of laughter, but also in the study of healthy humor . So say, you know, when you’re wondering, “ How is someone going to react to this?” Well, flip that coin and , “ How am I going to deliver this?”
Carrie: That’s good. So for people who use humor to like, hide their feelings, do you have any ideas or recommendations about how they might start to shift to that a little bit?
Sporty: It’s funny because I think when we, even, when we think about that humor style for most people, young and old, I think even a lot of young people know Rodney Dangerfield. And that was his style, just totally self-deprecating humor. You know, it’s funny when you have to figure out,
“ Does he really feel that bad about himself or is he aware that sometimes the humor actually can trivialize and cut that anxiety down, make the anxiety? ” No, you don’t have the best of me, master of listening.
I’d like to use the English language and massage it. Right? So ,Hope as the name of your show. I hope it’s one of my, I call them my act formations because their acronyms, that are affirmations and my act formation for hope is, “ Having OverPowered Evil” . So therefore if you get into that state where you are, that to me, that’s how you can laugh in anxiety’s face.
“ Oh no, you can’t beat me.” See, we can beat. If our problems just popped up one at a time, we have no problem. We can beat them one at a time.
Carrie: Sure, sure. That makes sense.
Sporty: Yeah, the challenge is when they come in DRO and then we think that we can’t. And so now we backed out. I actually, I know I want to round the field on that, but I take that back to where I’m saying a person, who’s making a joke.
That could be a way of standing up to their anxiety and saying, “ You know what? Hey, I’m not going to take it that seriously. I am going to get through this and see things come out in a positive vein for myself.”
Carrie: I know sometimes when you look back on a situation, not when you’re in the middle of it and you’re anxious and you’re in the middle of it and you’re worried and you’re anxious.
It feels so real. And like, it feels like that bad thing really is going to happen. But sometimes after you’ve had some time and distance from it and the bad thing didn’t happen, you can look back and it can be funny. It’s like, “ Oh wow! I can’t believe I was so worried . I was so convinced that that thing was going to happen and actually it just never happened. “
Sporty: Self-fulfilling prophecies. When we decide bad it’s going to happen. We just need to wait for it to catch up. Even if you think, look at comedians, the best jokes are the truths. They don’t make a lot of those things up.
Carrie: Sure. Yeah. Absolutely. You are also working with people who are, uh, you know, coming back from deployments or are getting ready to go on a deployment with the military. And that’s some of where you use the stress mastery education. I’m curious, how do you help people use humor to help master their stress?
Sporty: My form of using it is similar to what I, what I did with the HOPE thing. I call it controlling your vocabulary, rather than allowing your vocabulary to control you. See ,if we can put all of the stuff together that I talked about, the AATH, stress mastery that the act formation controls your vocabulary. And if you decide that I’m going to have a positive vocabulary, it actually helps you again, because your brain is going to go with whatever you say and you tell your brain, “ Hey, we’re in a great situation right here. We’re not anxious and nervous. We’re excited.” And in fact, one of the biggest examples, people are afraid of public speaking. They get up there and they say, “ Oh my God! What if I screw up?”And you know, “ What, if I knocked my notes over?”, you know? So they come up with all of these reasons and no one’s going to pay attention and you could just as easily. And again, I used the word easily, but I never ever realized. You can say, “ Man, when I get up here and I start talking, I am going to knock the shoes off of these people.”
Okay. So you can, I saw this on TV. So now all I have to do is be the hero that I saw giving this speech on TV because you’ve been asked to speak. So sometimes we erase the gift in favor of the challenge. And so you’ve been asked to speak that that was a gift to you instead of you accepting what has been given to you, you decide, but I’m not the right one.
Hey, sounds like, “ Bows this to me, you know?” , I mean.
Carrie: Not me. I don’t think I can do this task. Yeah. I mean, that leads into my next question, which is, “ Do you believe God has a sense of humor?”
Sporty: Absolutely do. And I think that if you believe in God, think you kind of have to, because if you believe in what’s, the premise of, of us is that we’re made in God’s image.
So if we are made in God’s image, we have the characteristics of God. Therefore, our sense of humor is a characteristic of God’s . We are the living sense of humor of God.
Carrie: Yeah. That’s awesome. Absolutely.
Sporty: I’ll check with Him on that by the way.
Carrie: You’ll, you’ll ask Him. We had a funny experience in our household this week, actually. We sat down to pray at the dinner table and my husband’s no sooner as he gets, “ Dear God”, out. Then we started to hear this music and it’s like, uh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh. And we’re like, “ What in the world is that?” The ice cream truck was passing by like right at the time where he goes to pray. And it was like trying to pray the pop goes the weasel , just doesn’t doesn’t quite seem right. But it was just so funny, the timing of that happening, and we very rarely get ice cream trucks that pass by here. So at first we didn’t quite even know what it was. Like, “ What is that noise? And we just started laughing at the table. It was good. I know that there have probably been times in your life. Has there been a time where you.
Look at something and maybe you said, “ No, I’m not going to do that.” Or, you know, “ I don’t really think that’s what I should be doing.” And then next thing you know, God like, somehow leads you in that direction in some kind of roundabout way. And you ended up doing that thing that you didn’t think you were going to be doing?
Sporty: Uh, there’s a novel, right? One of, even first, which is talking about prayer, I would like to connect that to humor. One of the things like, for instance, I was a master of listening at an event , that was a fundraiser and they asked me to do the invocation. That was on the board and this way back, and I was known for my zaniness.
So I get up to the mic and I say, “ God, It’s me again, Sporty and my board members held their breakfast like, “ What is he doing?” And I said, “ And I’m glad to say I’m in a room full of other people who, you know, by first name. And see? So there is humor that does not require this crack up laughter. God, again, God has a sense of humor. So you, you don’t always have, I don’t believe you always have to have this big reverent prayer to God, as much as you have to talk to God. And let him know that, you know how you feel because He knows.
Carrie: Sure. Absolutely.
Sporty: Pop goes the weasel. Okay. We’ll pass the potatoes and share the gravy. Make sure you pray first.
Carrie: That was pretty good.
Sporty: There it is. As these things happen in our lives, you’ve got to see the funny. You don’t always have to be funny to see the funny,
Carrie: Yeah.
Sporty: So, even as you’re talking about the one thing, I mean, God, like I said, there’s a million things that I said I wouldn’t do. In fact, one of them, I’m doing one of them right now.
And that is, I live in Charlotte. I’m a native New York. I worked in corporate America, 18 years. I worked at the Wall Street Journal. I started as a messenger and when I retired, I was an advertising sales manager. But the reason I say that is because while I was there, I said to myself, “ I’ll never leave the Wall Street Journal.”
Carrie: Yeah. I am gonna retire here.
Sporty: Yeah. And, “I’ll never leave New York. “ Well, they transferred me from New York to Maryland. When they promoted me to a sales rep, then they transferred me from Maryland to Chicago when they promoted me as a sales manager. And then when I retired and decided to be an entrepreneur, I moved myself to Charlotte.
But somebody, even when I first relocated from New York to Maryland, my boss was so surprised that I was even interested in the position when it was open, when I went in to him and he was like, “ Really? You would leave New York?”
Carrie: That’s funny.
Sporty: So that may not be a huge example, but in all of that, what is also where at that time, when I started to journal, I didn’t have a great sense of spirituality to myself. I was just living the way I once lived. I wasn’t reckless on anything, you know, but I didn’t really connect. And I think this is sometimes a challenge for people. I didn’t really connect to my spirituality ‘til about 38 years old. And where I, like we talked about earlier in retrospect, when, when I was in Maryland, North Carolina was my sales territory and I stood on a corner in Charlotte and I said, “ I like it here. I think I’ll move here one day.” 25 years later, is actually when I moved here, but I had that conversation with myself in 1985 and then it was, so I must’ve been probably 20, 28. And then, because it was when I was 38, that I was able to look back and see that that was my first conscious conversation with God.
And even when I moved to Charlotte in 2010, people said, “ Goodness, you took 25 years? “ I said , “ No, I use 25.” And again, just change…
Carrie: Changing the words. Yeah.
Sporty: Now you look at it.
Carrie: Absolutely. Yeah, that’s awesome. I know I was just batting around some different ideas with one of the counselors in our office one day. And we were talking about, I said, “ You know, I want to do a little bit more than therapy.” I’m enjoying what I’m doing, but I think I just needed a challenge. I needed something like kind of to keep me more fresh and new. I said, “ Maybe I’ll write a workbook, you know, for people with anxiety or maybe I’ll work on some self-help type stuff, as well. “ Why don’t you start a podcast? And I was like, “ A podcast, like what?” And I was like, “ No.” I was like, “ I just, I don’t know what I would talk about if I started a podcast.” And now we’re over 50 episodes in. So I guess I didn’t run out of things to talk about. But I look back on that and I think that’s God’s sense of humor. Like God knew that I was going to end up taking this path and falling along here. And I’ve enjoyed it so much.I enjoy meeting people and talking with them and having all kinds of great conversations. And I learned a lot and other people learned a lot too. So it enriches me and enriches other people.
Sporty: Do it so smoothly. I mean, I love how things reconnect. It takes us right back to what we talked about, where you have to accept again.Rather than look at it as you know. Oh no, I’m not going to write a podcast. Excuse me, Carrie. I’d like you to write a podcast.
Carrie: And sometimes people see things in you. Like we need those other people outside of ourselves to speak the positive things into our life or the gifts that they see that God has given us.
We’ve talked about this on the show before, but it’s like, it’s important to like, for us to be in community with people who are able to kind of call some of that out sometimes and say, “ Hey, you know, I see this in you. Have you ever thought about that? “ I mean, that in itself is a blessing for sure.
Sporty: Yeah. And you know, it takes me back to what we were saying about anxiety, people taking themselves too seriously. How I help people deal with stress. One of the main things, other than telling them, you know, control your vocabulary, do not compare yourself to someone else.
Carrie: That’s huge. Very huge. Nothing will rob you of your joy and peace and all of that more than comparing yourself to other people. I really believe that. Everyone is on their own journey and their own path. And unfortunately, I think someone said this and I don’t remember who it was, but it’s like, “ We used to only compare ourselves to the people that we knew, the people that were around us and in our inner circle.” And now we can compare ourselves to anybody in the world. We just get online, get on social media. And it’s rough, it’s hard.
Sporty: In fact, even with my New York roots, one of the ways that I keep myself grounded, crazy things go on and I will say, “ You know what? This has been going on all along. We didn’t know it.”
Technology has, this is a part of, this is what technology did. Put new stress and anxiety into our life because now we have more information that we didn’t have before. So that whole thing of a simple life that’s gone
Carrie: You’re Amish.
Sporty: Yeah. There’s a joke that you cannot or can make . Is it a striking joke? It’s not. It’s one of those, they are proud of what they do. And I say, Therefore. Yeah, that’s right. That’s the thing. And, I didn’t know what was going on in California, so I didn’t have to care about it. And so now, like you say, you’re on all this technology and you’re modeling yourself out of somebody who you don’t even know their real, true persona, because who they’re showing you on the screen may totally be the opposite of who they are.
Carrie: Right.
Sporty: One of my favorites when I do my presentations and I’m talking about stress, cause I always say, if you don’t like the way things are changed, the way you look at them. And I open that with a slide that shows a jail cell and empty jail cell and the caption is she met him on the internet. He said “ He lived in a closed community.”
Carrie : Oh my goodness. That’s a closed community. Maybe not what you thought. Tell us how people can find you and get in touch with you.
Sporty: Sportyking.com. It has all of my connections to all of the social media. I’m on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, “ Fussbook” . That’s what I call a Facebook because everybody’s just complaining.
Carrie: My dad has come to call it, “ Face lift” , and he’s not on there, but that’s what he likes to call it is facelift. I don’t know why.
Sporty : But also, I might say, at Sportyking.com, I do three audio broadcasts a week. So similar to you. It’s a podcast. Well, Monday I do a quick 2-minute Inspirational message. Wednesdays, I do one of my Wednesday messages is called GLUE Wednesday, and my glue is G L U E. God’s Love Undoes Everything where I’ll, I’ll talk about how we have to recognize that Wednesday is not hump day.
Wednesday is actually the middle of a traditional seven-day week that keeps things together. So we don’t need to honk. We don’t need to get over it. We need to find ways to keep it together. So again, just playing on words and bringing the calm. And then Friday, I call it a GIFT Friday and gift, G I F T , to God Is For Today.
You know, because everybody says, T G I F but I, I say, well, “ TGIT, Thank God is Today.” And , “ Thank God Is Tonight.” Let’s make sure that we recognize that God is for today. Do you know what you took when you talked about it earlier about how, when you’re going through something and you’re in the middle, poetry is how I started my speaking business.
And I wrote a poem called, “ How far is the middle?” Because see, we don’t really know when we’re in the middle, because we don’t know when that situation starts and or when it’s going to end, it’s going to end, right?
Carrie: Yeah. That’s huge.
Sporty: So you’ll find those three broadcasts on it and people can subscribe to them.
It’s free. In fact, you don’t even have to subscribe. You just want to watch one and enjoy it. That’s fine. You have options.
Carrie: So towards the end of every podcast, I like to ask our guests to share a story of hope, which is a time where you’ve received hope from God or another person.
Sporty: That one is actually very easy for me. It’s the hope of how He has allowed me to, to handle grief. When my mother died, I was the one in the room with her to see her take her last breath. I had to turn that and I was able to turn, flip it very easily, actually. And that’s again, that’s the gift of God. I said, “ You know, I’m the only one in the family that could have handled this.”
Yes, I was torn apart and yes, I went through my whole crying bit and everything like that, but I had said, you know what? And my sister and I had just switched changing of the guard. Who’s turned. Was it the watcher? Uh, about an hour ago, my sister would’ve lost her mind. But I had to see that as the gift that God gave me, even though your listeners can’t see it right now, you know, I’ve got on a shirt that says faith and faith is F A I T H Feeling As If There’s Hope, recognizing that the only thing you cannot do is give up.
And that’s what God has constantly allowed me to feed into my life and then share with other people’s lives. In fact, let me do a quick thing with you. I want you to answer me. This is a cliche. This is what I would say. Also control your vocabulary. This is a cliche and I want you to finish it. Okay. All right.
“ When one door closes…”
Carrie: Another door opens.
Sporty: Good. But now the Sporty King remix, “ When one door closes, go for the windows”
Carrie: There you go. Don’t wait for the other door to open.
Sporty: That’s right. ‘ Cause it may not be your door. And what we do is we have to recognize that, they’re using more doors than they are windows in a room.
And once you see what you have to choose from, once you make better choices in life, see that, that’s why I say the cliches. We gotta be careful of those cliches and the comparison of ourselves to someone on the other side of the world, because they’re saying things that may not apply to what’s going on in our lives.
So really be careful about that, but definitely go for the windows. You get another chance. To make one more choice because each of us does. And my closing comment is that, “ We do the bravest thing that we can do every day and that is lay our heads down and go to sleep.”
Carrie: Yeah, that’s good. I really appreciate this conversation and I know that our listeners do too as well, so thank you for being on the show.
Sporty: Thank you so much.
Carrie: Just a reminder, no episode next week for Christmas week, but I hope that you have an amazing Christmas holiday celebrating with family, friends, church, community. We’re going to be back the last week of December to talk about new year’s resolutions and goals. And then I have several interviews coming out in the beginning of the year that I think you’re going to enjoy.
If you would ever like to give a gift to the podcast, you can find out how to do so. In our show notes. We have a subscription through Patreon and we also have one-time gifts that can be given through, “ Buy Me A Coffee.” All of that money really helps to go towards editing. Our social media is assisting to support us, continuing to be able to do the show.
Thank you so much to those who have supported us.
Hope for Anxiety and OCD is a production of By The Well Counseling in Smyrna, Tennessee. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum and audio editing is completed by Benjamin Bynam.
Until next time. May you be comforted by God’s great love for you.
Aaron is a parent coach for parents of kids at risk and the host of a parenting podcast called Beyond Risk and Back. Aaron shares with us his valuable insights on parenting a teen in crisis and his own journey of recovering from addiction.
How did Aaron get involved in working with teens?
Common issues within the families Aaron has worked with
What are the causes of drug abuse and other dependency issues among teens?
Reasons why being a teenager is hard today
Some common things that loving parents do that aren’t helpful for their children, especially children going through a crisis
Carrie: Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD Episode 57. I am your host Carrie Bock, and you have been listening to our show for a while, you know that one of the things that we talk about are healthy relationships . And today, I’m very excited to have Aaron Huey on the podcast talking about Parenting Your Teen in Crisis.
Aaron is a podcast host of Beyond Risk and Back. And he also coaches parents with teens who are in deep crisis. And, he is going to give us some examples of some situations that he’s walked parents through, who have very challenging situations with their teenagers. Welcome to the show.
Aaron: Carrie, thank you so much. I loved having you as a guest on mine, and I’m really honored to be on yours. Thank you.
Carrie: How did you get involved in working with teens and parents?
Aaron: Well, it started way back, I was one of these teens and being in crisis for me meant living the life of experiencing being abandoned by my biological father. I was bullied mercilessly in school.
I was sexually assaulted when I went to acting school after high school. And these things led me to utilize weed and alcohol and LSD as a maladaptive coping strategy. I just did not want to feel the pain that I was going through. And I, I, the way I say it was this, “ When I was high, I was happy when I was sober, I was suicidal.”
So I had a lot of beautiful, loving people telling me, “ You got to get sober. You have a kid, you have to work.” But I didn’t have the language to say to them, “ When I’m sober, I’m ready to die.” And having had some near, some close calls as a child with my suicidality, I was very afraid of dying.That led and the, in my moment of sobriety, my, my moment of grace,my intimate communion with Divine love and forgiveness on May 21st, 1998, set me on a path of that 12-Step in recovery, which is bringing the message of hope to people who still struggle.
I was running a kids’ camps in the years afterwards, and a teen rites of passage program, and we had a parent. The other thing that I was doing was driving around Boulder, Colorado on, on Friday nights and Saturday nights, picking up teenagers who had contacted me saying, “ I don’t want a party this weekend.I want to go to a meeting.” So the parents would say, “ Yes, take my kid to a meeting.” And so I would go to 12 Step meetings on the weekend evenings. I ran a martial arts school during this time. And I had a parent who just called me one day and said, “ Can my kid just live with you?” And yeah, and my wife and I discussed it and it wasn’t that they had a bad relationship. It’s just that at home, this kid just kept spinning sideways, no matter what they tried and spun out. The motivation was not working. So could we just create a whole new environment? So we took this kid in. That mom told her sister who told her friend and that friend called us and said, “ Can my kid come live with you?”
And we said, “ Yes.” And a week later, Carrie, we had six boys and four on a wait-list. It was literally like we were being told what to do. And we, you know, you, you have to listen. And the 12 Step decrees that you say, “ I am here to give hope to the addict that still struggles.” But right away I saw it was the whole family.
Patch Adams was a mentor of mine at a very early I mean, for a very short time, but he said, “Your grandmother doesn’t have Alzheimer’s. Your family has it . Treat the family.”
And so right away, even at the very beginning, when we were just this sober home model, the kids doing martial arts with me, going to meetings, heading to the gym, doing family meals and them, doing online school, just restructuring the day with a lot of love and more love.
And when they did angry, risky things, we tried to find love and communicate love until they took over the work of love. Loving themselves so much that they fit the pot. And, right away, we started in on the fans. And that was the key to our success. The more we did the work, the more people wanted to do the work with us.
We started taking in interns, we started taking insurance. We moved to a huge, you know, 16,000 square foot lodge on 40 acres and staff housing. Everything like that. And we became one of the top treatment facilities in the United States, highest success rate, top 50 healthcare provider award in 2019, and then 2020 top 100 innovators of healthcare.
And, 13 days ago, I closed down the facility because insurance companies decided that my property was a high risk property. And my property insurance went from $20,000 a year to $470,000 a year. And we were utterly devastated that the insurance company would not be supportive of a childcare facility that had the success that we had.
So, in 13 days we closed it down. I’m continuing my work with families and parents and doing parent intervention and working with teens. But, we found that our success did not come from the work we did with the teens. We did good work. We did cool, cool stuff. We work with wolves. We were very art-focused. We were very unique. Holistic.
We would get our own 12 steps. Like, we had a good kids’ program, but the work we did with parents, no one else did to the level that we did it. Our intervention on parents is where our success came from. So that’s what I’m going to continue doing. Moving forward is how can I help parents keep their kids out off jails institutions and Morkes,
Carrie: That’s absolutely so true from my experience as a counselor and I used to work with children and teens, oftentimes, we would see teens go to residential centers and the parents didn’t engage in counseling. They maybe had like one weekend or something of that nature for parents.
And then the kids went right back into that environment and the whole cycle started over again. So absolutely, it is important to address a whole family in these types of situations.
Aaron: Here’s the thing, I, the way we would explain it was like this to parents, because they would want to come in and say, “ Fix my kid.”, drop their kid off, to pick them up in four months and everything the kid was doing, they’re not doing anymore. And everybody’s happy.
Carrie: Sure.
Aaron: Number one, the moment your happiness is based upon the actions of someone else, you are in survival mode. Because that is how lizards think,” If only the Hawk would stop hunting, I could bake and warm myself on the rock. Right. But the Hawk didn’t. These kids are not making bad choices. They are expressing the language of the entire family out loud, their confusion, their distress, and the trauma becomes their language. Their behavior is their language. So to think that if a child changes what they’re saying, everybody’s going to be happy means that we’re not actually listening to what they’re saying.
Number two, at home, let us just say everybody in the family is speaking. When a child goes to treatment, we’re going to teach them the language of recovery. Let us call it Spanish. And so the child becomes fluent in recovery language, in Spanish. Now the Spanish speaking child comes back home to an English speaking family.
What do you think the child has to do to survive the family dynamic? They have to go back to their old language. If the parents don’t change the language, then the child’s language will change back to the parents’ language. The parents have to change the moment a child, let me say that word again, child, is responsible for the happiness in the home for the self-care in the home ,for the harmony of the home is the moment the parents have lost control of the whole.
Carrie: Give us an idea of some of the issues that the families are facing that you’ve worked with.
Aaron: It’s a broad subject, but I can tell you, the teens are expressing the distress, the trauma, the dis ease through the mental health issues through self-harm through video game dependency, social media dependency through drug use, whether or not people think that cannabis is a drug.
It does change brain chemistry. You can, it does all the research shows that it does. Is it heroin? Absolutely not. And I’m sure you are working as a counselor, you’ve seen, I have never, in 20 years of working with a kid who is struggling with drugs or any dependency issue, I have never not found trauma. Not once.
Carrie: That’s huge.
Aaron: There’s always trauma. Understanding trauma is a key for parents in this, because we will always find trauma with mental health issues, co-occurring with dependency issues. Self-harm is a dependency issue. When kids are cutting, it follows the exact same cycles as someone who is using it. So, as a facility, we specialized in dual diagnosis and we were trauma engaged . We will always look for the trauma and any parent that says, “ But my kid has none.”, has two things going on.
Number one, parents go online and take the ACE quiz, ACE Adverse Childhood Experiences. Do it for yourself and do it for your kids because you will find a root and those roots create the fruits. It is not a kid’s bad choices. I hate that term bad choices that families are struggling with. It’s the risky choices that children, teens are making, and that’s the fruit.
And you cannot pluck a fruit and demand the tree gives you a different fruit. You have to go to the roots. Epigenetics is the root. Your own trauma is the roots. The divorce you had, which may be you and your ex are best friends. It’s still a little T trauma. It could be a big T trauma to your kid. So what we see in families, parents always want to avoid, you know, the therapist sitting down and saying, “ Tell me about your mother.”, because nobody wants to be blamed for their children.
But, if there is a failure point in the family system, we cannot expect the child to fix it.
Carrie: Yeah. I think that there’s an element there where school systems and bullying, and it’s how we handle those things as parents, I think is important, you know, trying to make sure that your child has a positive educational environment.
It is very easy for children to just get labeled as a bad kid. Like, they’re non-compliant, they’re not cooperative, they’re not doing what they’re supposed to do. They’re difficult, You know, they’re the strong-willed child, whatever you end up labeling them as, and then it taints everyone’s view and interaction of them from that moment forward.
And that happens in all of those systems that you talked about.
Aaron: Well, I know, I mean, so much of this has to do with us stepping back from the results. And the actions that the child is taking and the results that they’re getting, which are less than favorable results and step back, and look at systemic failure. Regardless of what end of the political spectrum you are on, I bet that 99% of us believe that the political system has failed. We all share a common belief , that the education system has failed. Now, I’m not saying teachers. Teachers are warriors. They do it for the outcome, not the income, anybody who does it for the outcome, not the income : soldiers, ER, nurses, teachers. These are the warriors of our society
Carrie: Absolutely.
Aaron: And are really doing it for the right reason. But the system, the political system, the military system, the things that these people are working under, have failed our children. The healthcare system has failed our children and our families. These are massive systems.Now take another step back , and look at how we are sitting in the midst of a global pandemic. A belief that the air you breathe, the people you love. If they touch you or breathe near you, it could kill you. And in America, 700,000 people have died from being breathed on. This is a level of fear and failure that we are living with that I have to ask the question, “ Does anybody feel safe? Can you, do you feel safe walking outside?” We were told that violence is on the rise. Suicides on the rise. Drug use is on the rise. People are standing in the streets, screaming at each other. Nobody thinks they’re on the wrong side of history or the wrong side of the spectrum. Nobody thinks they’re the bad guy and our own backyards are filled with weeds that need away.
And we’re wondering why 25% of the children ages 13 to 17 are displaying clinical anxiety issues. This is the result of systemic failure. Now, labeling kids bad because of how they’re handling, leaving a child bad because of how they’re handling systemic failure,something that they have no recourse to change. How do we allow ourselves as adults to say that, “ Kids are making bad choices?” when what we see with adults is systemic failure.
Carrie: I think that leads kind of into the next question is, “ We have more and more teens that are facing severe mental health issues. Do you feel like it’s harder to be a teen today than when you and I were growing up?” I mean, there’s different challenges with social media and all of that.
Aaron: You know, this is, this is such a powerful question because it is something and I love Facebook. And as a gen X-er and being connected to the gen X and the boomer communities and having millennial kids and working with the younger generation, the I gen, or the gen Zs, there is a belief that these kids are somehow less resilient than we are.
That somehow these kids don’t know how to pull-up by their bootstraps. There are a few points we have to look at. Number one, psychoanalysts, and psychologists are saying that there’s a truth to that, but that’s environmental. It is like, there’s an environmental poison that is affecting it, that we have to take a look at.
So what are these environmental poisons that are making these children less resilient than we are? Number one, we, in the past 20 years, the research on trauma, pretty much indicates that the gen X generation and the boomer generation are walking wounded, that we are traumatized. We have denied it, compartmentalized it and buried it.
And our parenting reflects that we have not addressed our own issues. Right. We still think therapy is for crazy people. And then our children are crazy for needing it and it’s just flat out wrong. Trauma is much, PTSD is much more prolific and prominent than we ever thought.
Understanding things like autism and ADHD and OCD and anxiety and depression, really understanding this, has led a lot of adults to go, “Oh, well, I’m depressed.” Like, “ Yeah.” You are like, “ We’ve all had to live with it. How about you go do something about it?” So that’s number one. It’s that we know more and it looks like these kids are being affected by it. We are just treating them for it. Number two, can you remember when you were in elementary school? You know, I mean really, really young age and or middle school or even high school and the last time, that was the very last one in primary school where you had to practice a live shooter drill?
This is something that we didn’t have to deal with. And if you watch the videos of what just took place in Texas, that the kids were filming with their phones, watching the police, open the door and say, everybody hands up, we’re knocking down your barricade. And , they pushed the barricade over , three policemen walked into a classroom with fully automatic weapons, fully loaded, fully armored, saying, “ Is everybody okay?”
And when you hear the children go, “ Yeah” you hear the trauma.
Carrie: Right
Aaron: Because someone opened fire in the school. We didn’t have to live with that. Number three, the anarchy of the internet. Can you imagine, as a child having full and total access, uncontrolled library cards, limitless borrow to the library of Alexandria.?
Everything. The sum total of human knowledge is available to our children in their pockets and 30% of it is pornography. Can you imagine a library with 30% of that library, those books were pornographic and the other 70% was everything else. That’s the internet. So we have all those things . And now we’re going to call the children less reserved?
We are going to call them, but they need to just buckle down. You know what? They did not ask for the ribbon for participation. They did not ask for a graduation ceremony from second to third grade when we had to wait till we were in high school, you know, who is giving it to them? The adults.
Carrie:Right.
Aaron: We can not say that they’re more fragile. If we treat our children like glass, they will grow up breakable. And when we do not pay attention to the cracks, they will shatter. So this cannot be something that we look at the children, we go, “ You should be better.” We have to look at the adults and go, “You should do better.” And that’s hard. We don’t want to hear that.
We love our kids and we are trying our hardest and we are working with what we have that got us here. You want to get there, you have to do something different. And I say, “ I’m not going to call you enabling. I’m not going to say you’re codependent.” I’m going to say , “ Everything we did as parents got us to this point, what can we do differently to get away from this?” That’s the work.
Carrie: I’m sure there are plenty of parents out there that feel like, you know, they’re doing a good job and I wonder what are some common things that you see, maybe well-meaning parents do that are not helpful for their children, especially children going through a crisis or trauma?
Aaron: Well, what a beautiful question, Carrie. And I’ll say I, although I had a completely absent biological father, I had an amazing dad who adopted me when I was four years old. And I got to say, my mom was extremely progressive. She had great ideas. She was a good mom. She was a work at home mom. She was head of the HOA and the theatre. She was active in our community. She was a late J league leader and a late J league instructor trainer. So she was constantly teaching other women in the community to support them and being modeled. My dad was a hardworking businessman in the community who was respected and he was an amazing dad. I had incredible parents And I bet that bottle of vodka in their liquor cabinet to this day, because it’s the same one that was there when I was a kid, is still half water because I replaced it.
You have to understand that one of the mistakes we make as parents is no matter how good we do, your kids are still affected by other environments and traumas. Your kids are still affected. It’s hard with parents who have adopted their kids, just have given you everything except parents who’ve adopted kids.
You haven’t given them their biological parents. And if you don’t understand the wound that that creates, then you will never understand that it won’t matter how much love and support you give them. You cannot fill that void. You are not designed to. That means a different kind of work than you’re doing.
So that’s one thing, is thinking that somehow it’s something that we’ve done or not done is the root. And we go through the list of all the good things we’ve done and say, “ I don’t understand. You’re just acting out.” “ What are you acting out for?” Second, is that parents don’t really do the education about mental health.
When kids are dealing with anxiety and depression, you have to understand, that this is not about willingness. This is about capability. Depression is not a feeling. It cannot be solved by getting up and going jogging. It can be solved by getting up and going jogging every day for 90 days. That can be the beginning of the solution, but we also may need pills, it’s pills and skills.
But the mistake we make is thinking that this depression is an attitude and actually depression is a description of brain chemistry. The brain’s functioning is depressed. The brain is depressed, not the emotion. The emotions are sad, and hopeless. The brain’s chemistry is depressed. Anxiety is not an attitude.
It’s a response from the amygdala when the environment matches the picture of a trauma. And so it sets off an alarm in the body and the body goes into shutdown mode. And understanding this, understanding why your kid is attracted to cannabis, understanding why your kid is attracted to cutting and what’s going on in the brain.
That’s the work. It’s not we punish because we think it’s about willingness.
“ My kid’s just not willing.” I have to wonder if our kids are not capable because we’re punishing their inability to do something. We are making it worse. And that’s one thing that I see as good parents, mistake capability for willingness.
Carrie: Right.
Aaron: Second thing I see, good parents do is, the moment the kid starts spinning out, the kid becomes the focal point. The kid becomes the patient of the family. And so, mom and dad are talking, mom and X are talking, dad and XR talking, the other siblings are talking, aunts and uncles are brought in on the situation because dad’s on the phone with his mom and saying, my kids just blowing sideways and mom’s telling dad’s sister.
And then everybody gets together for Christmas. And there’s this tiptoeing around this kid. Who’s struggling and they feel it on a psychic level and the child becomes the patient. And everybody says, “ This child needs to change energetically, psychically or verbally out loud.” This child, all of a sudden, is the black sheep of the family.
When, in truth, the parent changed the dialogue to say, “ This family is struggling with depression and is really hard on little Johnny.” “ This family’s dealing with anxiety.” “ This family is dealing with self-harm issues and we’re all doing our work, and everybody does their work and everybody recovers.” And we say to the kid, “ Hey, we’re all going into recovery. We know this is not just about you.”, that you are actually talking the family language out loud. Have that courage as a parent to say., “You’re speaking the family language out loud and you’ve shown us a lot of things that we could do differently. And we didn’t know how to do it differently, but because of you and because of how you’re going through the struggle, we’ve realized we all have to make some changes.So we’re in and we’re with you and we’re together.”
Carrie: I liked that. I interviewed someone recently who had a spouse that went into the psychiatric hospital and she shared her story about how that really triggered up some of her own stuff. And she went to therapy to help herself and also figure out how she could support herself.
But she knew that she had to put on her own oxygen mask first. And I imagine it’s similar with parents like,they have to be willing to read the books about, you know, depression, get some help, read some materials, learn different styles of communication, whatever it is, like you said, doing their work as well. And then, being able to communicate to that, to your teenager, I think is so powerful to say like, “ Hey, I’m in this with you. I’m learning new things. I know that I don’t have it all together.”
I think that that vulnerability as a parent is really powerful.
Aaron: It’s amazing Carrie, because you have perfectly demonstrated the trap we fall into as parents about avoiding the work and thinking that, you know, reading the book about depression so that we can help our children, is the work. That’s actually the third thing you do. That’s not the first. Right. And I love that you said that because that is the first thing we all gravitate to. “ My kids got anxiety.” “I better get online and learn about anxiety.” And we study and we print out articles and we call our, our spouse and we call our moms and we dig and we, we give the article to our children. We are still making the child first. We are still totally and solely focused on this child. The first thing we do as parents when our children starts to struggle, if we find out God forbid, we find out that something has happened to our daughter or our son, and they have been sexually assaulted, they are being bullied at school, the first thing we do is like, “ What can I do for them? “ And we think that’s good parenting. Well, what we forget is that when our child has a suicide attempt, we are traumatized.
Carrie: Right.
Aaron: And, when we are traumatized because of something that happened to our kid or something that our kid does, they steal the car, they wreck it, they total it, the police show up and they are smashed out of their mind on drugs. And we had no idea they were even using it. You are traumatized. Now, what you’re doing is parenting from that place.
And when we are traumatized, what happens? We stopped sleeping. Well, we stopped eating well. We stopped drinking water. We stopped moving our bodies and we stopped breathing on purpose. And if one of those things slips, if one of those things goes away, the other four will follow because it is a domino of biology.
The moment. I am not sleeping the moment I am not eating. Right. My blood sugar levels are crashing up and down. I have coffee because it’s morning.I don’t eat until one o’clock and I have a total sugar crash. Shall I eat? And what am I craving? I’m craving something. That’s going to jack my energy right back up.
So, it’s a lot of carbs. And so I jumped right back up and then he came and I’m just on this roller coaster of blood sugar and I am not drinking enough water. My system is no longer lubricated on coffee and I’m soda and I’m energy drinks, and I’m doing whatever to sustain beause I gotta be there for my kid.
I got to do the right thing for my kid. And I’m not sleeping that night because my system’s all jacked. And now I’m supposed to come up with a good consequence. It’s actually gonna focus my kid on their strategy and not my emotions. There is no way to be a good parent from a bad place. You cannot accidentally parent your child out of a crisis.
Well, you have to do it on purpose, which means number one, parents, you take care of yourself first. You do the fab five: sleeping ,drinking water, eating nutritious food, moving your body, and even if it’s only one, even if it’s for an hour, I don’t care. Breathe on purpose. Not accidentally breathing through the day, but actually, go, “ Whoa, Aaron, you are not breathing.” Oh, you know what? I just practiced self-care.
Carrie: Yeah.
Aaron: Now, the second thing I do is more important than now wanting to go parent my child. The second thing I do is I tend to my adult relationships because children can not relate to my emotional experience. Children cannot relate to my level of fatigue, fear, anger or anxiety with what’s going on in my home.
I have to find other adults who relate and I’ve got to be with those adults. I got to join a support group. I don’t care if it’s on Facebook or if it’s in your church basement. You join a group and you find other adults in your community who are going through what you’re going through. And if you can’t find them,start one.
Be that parent who says, “ Hey, I need other parents who are struggling with kids and call it, “Parenting teens that struggle.”, I don’t know. I just made that name up. “ That’s the name of my group on Facebook folks. Join me!” , but just start it if you can’t find it. And I’m also talking about your marriage or your exes, your, your parenting partners, your loves.
You have to tend to your adult relationships because that’s your support system. You got to go vent with your husband and be like, “…. I can’t take it anymore.” And your spouse goes, “ I was intense. Are you doing okay? I’m just listening. I’m just, being here. Don’t expect my feedback at this moment. How you’re doing?’,and you’re just, you’ve got to have these huge fear, frustration,anger and anxiety and fatigue experiences with another adult. So self-care first, adult relationship care second. Now you’re ready to go parent.
Carrie: You have really hit the nail on the head there. We have to have an outlet for our intense emotions when we are dealing with someone that’s going through a crisis, meaning that we’re experiencing the crisis and the trauma ourselves like , this is real work. And I think what you’re saying is that a lot of people, focus the same level of energy, but they’re focusing on the wrong areas. And if they would disperse some of that energy towards themselves, towards healthy relationships, then they will have that energy that they need to give to their child.
But it won’t be like this overwhelming overarching smothering, “ We got to fix your energy” , because they’ll have dispersed some of that.
Aaron: The anger, fatigue, fear, anxiety, and frustration that we bring to our parenting forces the children to focus on our emotions, emotions aren’t leveraged. Emotions are not consequences, especially in our kids become teenagers.
We have big, huge emotions. Teenagers could beat you in that game. They can go way over the edge. You, you have big tears and hollering voices and all of a sudden they call you a name that you have to go look up. You’ve suddenly found yourself in an urban dictionary going, “ Wow. That’s what that means. Geez, that kid was, oh, I’m devastated.”
I’m not saying you can’t have emotions. I’m saying you can’t use those emotions as consequences. You can’t leverage those emotions to get your child to focus on their strategy. That’s what consequences are supposed to do , is to get the child to look at what they’re doing and go, “ Oh, that didn’t work.”. But to see your emotions and you, “ Gimme your phone! ” They’re not going to focus on losing their phone . They’re going to focus on how you took it. The truth is , when I coach parents, I care less what the parent does and more how they do it. Because there’s two ways to take a child’s phone. Well, there’s actually a thousand, but I’ll give you two choices.
There’s this way, “ I can’t believe you did! You can’t send pictures like this. You’re under. Gimme your phone. No, you can’t have it back. I’m enough. I’m enough. I’m tired. I’m done!” or “I’m really sorry you’re going through this. Now we have agreements in this house that I’m willing to provide a phone and internet, as long as there’s no lying, stealing, sneaking, cheating, or breaking the law and you know this. I also know that being a teenager is really hard. So, I’m going to go ahead and manage your phone and the internet for two weeks. And as things change, I’ll change what I manage. I’m really sorry. I love you and I know you’re going through some rough times.” Now on both of those, I’m taking the phone away on one of those before I ever talked to my kid to have that level of voice, that level of calmness, that level of connection before correction, alliance before compliance. To have that, I have to have been resourced. I have to settle my own nervous system. I have to remember, I got to hit my knees in conscious prayer, not just those desperate nights when I can’t sleep and I’m crying out for some intervention from the Divine. But actually saying, “ At 12:30 today, I’m going to spend some time with my book and some time with my God. And I’m just going to ask to be shown the light in all this darkness.” And to be deliberate in your prayers, to write down a list of things you want to ask for to communicate clearly, what I do know is that you are actually writing down the list of what you’re going to ask God for, is you, using your prefrontal cortex? , not your survival, “ God, someone helped me!” You have to come out of survival mode if you want your kids to thrive,
Carrie: Right.
Aaron: You cannot accidentally parent your child out of crisis. It does not, never ever know how , no way works.
Carrie: Tell us about how people can find and get in touch with you.
Aaron: I have a few freebies. I want to start with first and foremost, Carrie, thank you for the opportunity to talk to you, your moms and dads, and the people listening to your podcast. I really appreciate the opportunity. Parents, I have a free Facebook group called , “ Parenting Teens That Struggle.” I moderate it. My daughter moderates it as well.
I have some other therapists that I really know, like, and trust. Who are in there, Avani Dilger, Kaia, and you got to see , “ Kaia on notes by Kaia on Instagram” . She’s awesome. And Carrie, if you can get her as a guest, she is a wonderful, wonderful woman. And this is just, I have 1600 parents on there who are just supporting each other.
And these are parents who are in a pretty deep crisis and it’s just a place to go up and email and go, “ Here’s everything that’s going on with my family. Oh my God. I’m so embarrassed that no one else is going through this and I’m terminally unique. And 15 to 30 other parents would go, “ Oh no, I, I that’s exactly what I’m going through.”
And that’s the moment of tending to yourself and tending to your adult relationships that you go, “ Oh, thank God. I am not alone.” , because you are not. Parenting teams that struggle on Facebook. I post videos. I post podcasts, I answer questions and other families engage with what you’re going through. The second thing is , that my podcast
“ Beyond Risk And Back.” This is for the parents of kids who are really struggling. And this is where I interview the experts. People like Carrie, to talk about OCD and Anxiety, to come on and give you their advice. So, not everything’s coming from me, but I’m just a conduit where the experts can speak through my medium.
And I have learned so much from people like you, Carrie. And I know in your show, I called you. I was like, “ I got to know about OCD.” because there’s, “ Oh, my God. I’m so OCD.” And then there’s OCD.
Carrie: Right
Aaron: OCD is devastating to watch anybody that you love go through. And to hear from you , to give you to my audience, to have my items go, “ Oh, okay. Now my kid’s just a little type of …”
Carrie: Peculiar.
Aaron: Yeah, peculiar versus , “ My child is counting steps to the door and if they don’t get the right steps, they go back.” , and you know this is interfering. This is dysfunction . So beyond risk and back parenting teens that struggle. And then third, if you go to brabapp.com, B R A B A P P Brab stands for Beyond Risk And Back, brabapp .com for the same cost as a week’s worth of coffee. I put up 56 parenting sessions, in a red, yellow, and green course and you can take the classes. The red is the deep crisis. The yellow is , the at-risk and the green is , things are going good, but man, they could be great. This child is a world changer. “ What do I have to do as a parent differently to inspire this kid to the next level of expression and connection with the world?”
So all of these are everything that I have ever taught a parent and I made it extremely affordable because I want every parent to feel supported, not just the ones who can afford treatment. Let’s be clear, folks. Treatment is expensive mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually, and financially. So, let’s try changing the home before we go ask the kid to change ,so that the home can feel better.
That’s the backwards way of doing it.
Carrie: So towards the end of every podcast, I like our guests to share a story of hope since this is called Hope for Anxiety and OCD. And so this is a time in which you received hope from God or another person.
Aaron: On May 21st, 1998, I stopped using drugs and alcohol for good . On May 20th, 1998, I hit my knees and I asked for a miracle. I had been a minister since 1996. I’ve had a very colorful spiritual life. But despite my promises to God, despite my promises to my daughter, despite my promises to who became my ex-wife, I loved drugs more to the point where the shame and the guilt forced me to my knees. And I said, “ I can’t stop. You have to stop me. I’m not going to quit. You have to make me quit. And I’m asking for a miracle. I’m asking to be shown that there’s something outside of this. Because otherwise this is going to kill me and I’m slowly dying. You have to bring me back to life.” The next morning I got up and I went to work and I got in my truck and I got high as I was driving to work and my truck died and my parents lived out in the country outside of Longmont, Colorado.
And so I had to walk about a mile and a half to get to a phone so I could call my dad to come pick me up. So I got my drugs and I got my paraphernalia and I started walking, leaving my truck on the side of the road and up ahead on my left, as I was walking down, this dirt road was the small, and it’s the quintessential picture in your brain of an old country church, right? Little white building, single room steeple and cross in the front, quintessential Norman Rockwell painting that you could imagine. And so I’m walking towards it. I hear this noise….and I know what’s coming and my heart starts pounding. I know that I’m about to get what I asked for, which was the end. It was my personal Babylon, was showing up. And as I’m walking, I’m getting closer. I’m staring at this church trying not to look at it and it’s just…and it’s getting louder and louder as I’m walking toward and I’m terrified. And all I did was say, “ Stop me. “ And now I knew that I was about to get stopped. I’m standing across the street from the driveway to this church and the noises now… like the worst scratching TV, FAS. And it was so loud. And I turned and looked and Christ was standing there and he said,” You can put down the drugs now for the rest of your life and never look back. “
Carrie: Wow.
Aaron: And the feeling of love and forgiveness that I experienced in that moment to that overwhelm of pure unconditional love. The thing that I had always been searching for and had never found. It just washed me and I threw them, took my drugs out of my pocket and Carrie, I swear on everything I had that bag hit the ground and the wind with and blew it out.
I threw my pipe and a ditch and I burst into tears and the noise was gone and the experience was over and I walked. And if that was the end of the miracle, then this will be a nice, short story, but I’m going to have to take you deeper into what happened next. So I went and I hit the phone. My dad comes and picks me up. When I get home, I call work, “Tom. I’m not coming in.” They’re not surprised I’m absent all the time. Because I’m always going. And I go up to my room and I call the triangle club, the 12 step group there in Longmont, Colorado on main street. And I said, I, I had called them two weeks prior and the line was busy and I, I promise you, that I took that as a sign from God that I was overreacting and that drugs weren’t that bad. I had lost my home, custody of my daughter, and my marriage. I was living either in my parents’ house at 28 years old, or I was living in the back of my truck, and drugs weren’t that bad. But that’s how insane this thing is. But this time when I called that the night of that first experience, May 21st, I called the 12-step and somebody answered on the first ring and they said,” Triangle Club”, and I said, “ When’s your next NA meeting? I think I’m an addict.” And the guy said, “ Where are you? I’ll come get you.” And I said, “ Don’t do this.” He goes, “ It’s okay, man.” And I said, “ Don’t you say it. I’m not ready to hear it.” , and it got all quiet. And he said, “ I love you. It’s okay.” And I said, “ I can’t do this right now.” And he goes, “ Every hour, we have a meeting. If you need a ride, someone will get you.” And I hung up the phone on him. And there was that love of a stranger. Somebody who didn’t know me didn’t know my past and he was willing to say, “ I love you.”
Carrie: Wow.
Aaron: So then the next morning I wake up and I go downstairs and I’ve decided I have the day off. So I’m going to a meeting and I go downstairs and my parents are watching TV and I kid you not, they’re watching clean and sober with Michael Keaton. And I sit down on the couch and I’m like, “ I can’t believe this.” And like, “ This is a sustained miracle and I’m exhausted.” And I sit down and I turn off the TV and my mom goes, she has this funny way of saying it. It’s very dear. She goes, “ Excuse me?” And she was being goofy. And I look at her about to break her heart. And I say, “ I’m not going to a meeting at work. I’m going to a 12 step meeting. I’m an addict.” And my mom goes pale. And my dad, the man who raised me, not my father, but the man who gave me everything who had lied to, who had stolen from and hurt his younger biological children.
He looked at me and he goes, “ Whatever you need me to do, I’ll do it because I love you.” And it was those three experiences of unconditional love that I just said, “ That’s it. That’s what this is about. I don’t love me, but everybody else does have this thing that I’ve always been seeking for, has been seeking me.
And I just have to let it in now.” And that’s what I say to families and to teenagers is “ A – I love you, and B what you are seeking is seeking you.” And that was the miracle I got on May 21st, 1998. And then on the 22nd, the miracles continue. A biker who yanked me back into my chair at the 12 step meeting who told me to sit down and shut up for once in my life and maybe I’ll learn something, who became my sponsor, the police officer that pulled me over after my first meeting and said, you know who I told him?, “ I, it was my first meeting. It’s the first time I didn’t have drugs in my vehicle in seven years and I didn’t have to lie.” And he looked at me and he saw the big stack of 12 step books in my truck, and he goes, “Keep going back at works . If you work at and you’re worth it.”, which is what we say at the end of every 12 step meeting, he told me he was a member.
Carrie: I understood. Yeah.
Aaron: And 23 years later, the miracles still continue. And that’s been my life for 23 years. I was born 23 years ago. And the sadness, these are tears of joy, folks because I have such a beautiful, blessed life.
I have a daughter, I have a son. My ex-wife and I are friends. I love my parents and they did so well. My brothers and I get along, my business is successful and all I do is the 12 step, and bring the message of hope to people who still suffer.
Carrie: Yeah. Aaron, that’s such a powerful testimony, which is amazing. I don’t think we can ever underestimate the power of unconditionally loving another human being.
And we, when we bring in that unconditional love to someone else, we are showing them the love of God. That God has, you know, showed us, and so many times, like, tries to get our attention and we’ve ignored. And then, like you said, you, you have to allow it to come into you like it’s there for you, you know, understanding that unconditional love and acceptance is there for you, but you have to let it in sometimes, man, that’s, that’s amazing. Thank you so much for sharing the story and going deep with us on that.
Aaron: If there’s one thing I can say, I’ve not met the devil. But if the devil is here on earth, it’s addiction. It’s that low , only people in addiction understand how far the devil can take you down. Loving when things are going good, loving an addict who struggles, loving your kids. Those two things are when things are easy when things are good, love is easy. Love is good. But when you’re standing at the gates of hell, love is divine and it’s the hardest place to find.
Carrie : Yeah. Well, I just appreciate you sharing just all your wisdom for parents that are struggling that have teens and crisis.
And hopefully, this gives them some hope and some ideas that the things can turn around and yeah. Then just thank you for being here.
Wow. That was probably one of the most powerful stories of hope that we have had on the show. I am so glad that Aaron came and shared that with us. I know Aaron spoke of a show that we recorded together for his podcast.
I wanted to let you know, at the time of this recording, that, that hasn’t come out yet just in the nature of podcast recording and how we batch episodes. I believe mine is going to be coming out before his, when that episode does come out on OCD, I will link it to this episode, so you can listen to it. Aaron asked me some really great questions about OCD and it was a super great experience to be on his show as well.
So check the show notes here, or we’ll also be posting it on social media with links from our Instagram and Facebook pages. You can always follow along on either of those pages for the most up-to-date information about our show. And hopefully, it’s a way for you to receive a little bit of a daily dose of encouragement.
Hope for anxiety and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling in Smyrna, Tennessee. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum and audio editing is completed by Benjamin Bynam.
Until next time. May you be comforted by God’s great love for you.
