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.
In this episode, Carrie is joined by Courtney Reissig, author of Teach Me How to Feel, where they dive into the profound role of the Psalms in navigating life’s struggles. Courtney shares her personal journey of using the Psalms during a traumatic experience and how they provided comfort and language for her emotional and spiritual journey.
Episode Highlights:
How the Psalms provide language for the struggles and emotions we face, offering comfort and connection to God during difficult times.
The impact of trauma on emotional well-being and how the Psalms helped Courtney process her own traumatic experiences.
The importance of being honest and raw in prayer, embracing messy prayers as a natural part of the healing and spiritual journey.
Practical ways to incorporate the Psalms into your daily devotional life, especially during seasons of uncertainty, grief, or emotional turmoil.
Insights from Courtney’s book Teach Me How to Feel, which uses the Psalms to help readers navigate their emotions and find language for their struggles.
In this episode, I’m joined by Courtney Reissig, the author of Teach Me How to Feel. Together, we explore the transformative power of the Psalms in our spiritual lives, particularly in times of struggle, prayer, and meditation.
Courtney shares her deeply personal story of enduring trauma during her last pregnancy. Six months before a life-threatening placenta abruption, she felt drawn to study the Psalms. Little did she know, those ancient prayers would become her lifeline during three weeks of hospital bed rest, as she faced the uncertainty of her and her baby’s survival.
Through her experience, Courtney found solace and language for the pain, fear, and darkness she endured. The Psalms echoed her emotions—feelings of abandonment, sorrow, and anxiety—showing her that she wasn’t alone and that God truly understands our struggles.
Courtney also discusses her journey of healing postpartum, her battle with cervical cancer, and the profound lessons these trials taught her about processing trauma and leaning into God’s presence. We talk about practical ways to use the Psalms in daily life, whether as prayers, in times of crisis, or as a source of comfort during uncertain moments.
Listen now and discover how the Psalms can transform your walk with God, offering hope and healing in the midst of life’s challenges.
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
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.
Join Carrie in a solo episode as she speaks about anxiety and shame around money and how to cope with it.
Episode Highlights:
Common financial traps
Evaluating your finances and making good financial decisions
Thought processes and limiting beliefs about money and how to reframe them.
Honoring God with your finances
More helpful tips and advice on dealing with financial anxiety.
Episode Summary:
In this episode, I’m opening up about a topic many of us struggle with: anxiety about finances and the shame that often comes with it. I’m not a financial expert, so please take this as a conversation between friends rather than professional advice.
Financial anxiety doesn’t discriminate—it affects people across all income levels. You could be struggling to pay rent, or you might have plenty in the bank but still feel anxious about “what if” scenarios. The root of this worry often runs deeper than numbers; it’s tied to emotions, past experiences, and even societal pressures.
I also want to address the shame tied to financial struggles. Well-meaning advice like “just budget better” can sometimes feel dismissive, much like telling someone battling emotional eating to simply eat less. Our choices with money often come from emotional places, and understanding that can help us move forward with more grace for ourselves.
If you’re in a financial hole right now, I want you to hear this: there is hope. It might mean making difficult changes or seeking professional guidance, but step by step, you can move toward stability.
Lastly, let’s be mindful of the stories we tell ourselves about money. Instead of thinking, I’m terrible with finances, try saying, I’m learning to manage my money better. Small mindset shifts can lead to big changes.
Whatever your situation, know that you’re not alone, and there’s always a way forward. Let’s navigate this together with hope and compassion.
Transcript
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.
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.
I’m thrilled to share this week’s episode with you. I had the chance to sit down with Jen Roland—a Christian writer, speaker, mental health coach, and personal trainer. Her story is all about finding God’s grace in the ups and downs of health and wellness, and I think you’re going to find it so inspiring.
Jen opens up about her journey, starting with her early love for fitness through team sports and how things shifted after becoming a mom of three. Between sleepless nights, stress, and the struggles of losing baby weight, she realized something had to change. What started as a goal to fit into a bridesmaid dress turned into a much deeper transformation when she invited God into her health journey. She discovered that health is about so much more than looking a certain way—it’s about honoring God and taking care of your whole self: body, mind, and soul.
We also talk about the amazing benefits of exercise, especially for anxiety. From stress relief to more energy and mental clarity, Jen reminds us that even small steps can make a big difference. Her story is a beautiful reminder that it’s okay to start where you are, to rest when you need to, and to trust God in the process.
Whether you’re struggling to find balance, dealing with chronic pain, or just need some encouragement to keep going, this episode is for you.
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.
In this episode, I talk about anxiety, goals, failure, and New Year’s Resolutions.
Episode Highlights:
Why I don’t set New Year’s Resolutions
Why people with anxiety may shy away from setting goals
Self-Evaluation & Setting Personal Goals
Where does fear of success come from
Overcoming failures
Aligning your goals with God’s will
Verses and Scriptures discussed: Philippians 2:12-13, Isaiah 1:17, Ephesians 2:19
Episode Summary:
Transcript
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.
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.
If you enjoy the podcast and want to support what we’re doing, or if you’re looking for self-help materials to assist you on your journey of managing your anxiety and OCD in healthier ways. Audio teachings, relaxation exercises, and my book on how to find a therapist are provided for self-help via monthly subscription, go to www.patreon.com/hopeforanxietyandocd Subscribe to our newsletter: https://hopeforanxietyandocd.com/
Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD episode 55. If I’m looking at my calendar correctly, this episode is going to be coming out a week before Thanksgiving. I wanted to let you know that at the podcast we do take off the week of Thanksgiving and the week of Christmas. So I don’t post episodes on those weeks before we get into celebrating these important holidays towards end of the year.
I wanted to talk with you about surviving the holidays when you have anxiety because there are specific challenges that people with anxiety face in regards to parties, gatherings, gift giving that it can really increase your stress this time of year. And I wanna help you really reduce some of that stress so that you can have a restful positive holiday season.
If you would consider yourself an introvert and you haven’t listened to episode 19, Thriving as an introvert in an Extrovert world, I would encourage you to go back and listen to that episode. Holly Gerth and myself talk about surviving big gatherings and parties as an introvert. And that’s the first thing I wanted to talk with you about is when you have anxiety, sometimes these large gatherings, even if there are family gatherings, there may be extended family that you don’t see very often. Or you may be gathering with say like your husbands, coworkers, and you don’t know them, obviously because you don’t work with them every day. Sometimes those types of environments can be a little bit more anxiety-provoking. Definitely go back and listen to that episode If you haven’t.
Some of the tips we talked about in there were take an extrovert with you to the party, get there in the beginning, because then you can kind of slowly acclimate yourself to the environment and see people come in versus coming into an already overwhelming situation.
Knowing your limits and knowing when it’s time to go is important. And if you’re with, um, a friend, spouse or erode with somebody, definitely knowing how to communicate to that other person that you would like to leave is important. Sometimes you may have a code, word, or phrase that you want to use with your spouse like “Hey, don’t we need to get by such and such store before it closes. Oh, we really gotta get home and let the dog out.” I’m sure that you can come up with something where you and your spouse will be on the same page and kind of be in line with each other, like, yeah, we’re ready to go.
I find when I go to large gatherings, sometimes just taking a moment to sit down, maybe away from where the big crowd of people is that really seems to help me in particular. So that may be something that helps you just standing requires a little bit more energy. I know that that sounds silly in itself, but you may just need to kind of take a miniature time out from all the activity you could go to the bathroom. You could step outside if there’s a, you know, indoor-outdoor element to this gather.
My overall point is that it’s good to have a plan going into some of these social interactions to help make them less overwhelming for you. You may not want to plan too much before the gathering so that you have time to rest and relax a little bit versus rushing from this thing to that thing, to that.
If you’re traveling for the holidays. One of the things that I have found the most helpful, whenever I take a trip and I understand you can’t always do this, but if you’re a highly sensitive person, introvert person with anxiety, It’s helpful to have a half a day to a day before your trip. And then definitely a day when you get back before you have to jump into your work or school routine, a lot of times we’re just. It’s like we’re out the office door and then we’ve gotta go straight to catch the plane and then get back in the Sunday night before gotta go back to work on Monday. That’s highly stressful. Try to give yourself a buffer on the edges of your trips to be able to get things in order. You know, there’s always these last-minute things that we end up having to do before a trip or after a trip.
We have laundry and different things that we have to do. Give yourself a little bit of a buffer of time if you can, if you’re going to reduce your stress around Thanksgiving and Christmas, you want to prioritize the gatherings and parties that are most important for you to attend.
I know there are some people, stepfamily situations and maybe there’s stepparents on both sides of the family and they’re ending up going to three and four Thanksgiving gatherings. That’s just a lot, that’s a lot to deal with. It’s a lot to bring food for, and that can be too much for your system.
And so some people would say, well, I mean, but, but we just have to, I mean, the family is expecting us and. We have to be there. And I would really argue that and say, you can see your family any day of the year. A lot of times, unless you’re traveling and they’re out of town, then that’s not necessarily the case.
Obviously, we have family that’s in Florida, but we can’t see them any day. But if it’s a situation where maybe you can plan to have more quality time with those family members around a different date or where it doesn’t have to be holiday related so that you’re not rushing from, “Okay, well, we’ve got mom’s Thanksgiving.” That’s from noon to three, and then we’ve got dad’s Thanksgiving, which is from four to six and we have to drive in between pick up a pumpkin pie on the way over there. All of that just can be very stressful for you. Let’s talk for a moment about challenging family relationships. I’m not gonna assume that you get along well with everyone in your family.
And so some of those relationships may cause you stress. It’s important to know just internally within yourself, how much of certain people that you can handle. And what I mean by that is that if, you know, you can only handle a day or two at a time around a certain person don’t plan to spend five days with them. That’s just a recipe for disaster.
Oftentimes it goes back to, we do things out of obligation or we feel bad, but you have to know within yourself like what you are capable of. It’s important to be. Gracious towards other people as much as possible. And we have to love everyone, but I understand that there are going to be people that rub you the wrong way. And you may not like all of your family members or your in-laws or other people that you’re interacting with in gatherings.
It’s understanding that you are an adult and you have a choice. You can decide that this Thanksgiving or this Christmas that you want to run off to boa Bora, just you and your best friend or you and your spouse. And you do not have to go and do all the things that you normally go and do. I worked with a client on this one year and it was incredibly freeing for her. She didn’t believe me at first that she could say no to some of the family gatherings, but then decided to go away for the holiday instead and see her family at different times where she could really invest more time in those relationships.
Have more quality, depth time versus just seeing this family member for a few minutes and that one for a few minutes, while they’re running off to do something else. Letting go of the half twos is important. So many times we convince ourselves that we just have to do things that we don’t have to do.
I remember there was one time that they had moved a holiday event. I was planning on going to with the foster children. I think it was a Thanksgiving event and we completely missed it. I did not go. And I wanted to. However, what I realized was that it wasn’t the end of the world that I missed that event.
Yes. I was a little disappointed and yes, there were some people that I was wanting to see and would enjoy their company. But at the end of the day, the world did not crash down because I missed one holiday event. It was okay. Don’t be afraid to say. If you know that what someone is asking you to do is going to be too much for you.
We all have different limitations at different times in our life, and sometimes we’re going through things and we can only do so much. And it’s okay. It’s really okay to acknowledge that to ourselves. It’s okay to communicate that to other people as. No is a complete sentence. That’s something that I tell my clients regularly when they’re having trouble saying no, you don’t have to give a lengthy explanation.
You can just say no or no. Thank you. So when you’re prioritizing your gatherings and parties, it’s very easy to get overloaded. I talked about the step-family situation, but there’s also just situations where you may have a Christmas party for your work Christmas party for your spouse’s work. The church is throwing a big Christmas production over here, and then, you know, your, your kid’s school has a function over there.
You really just need to put everything on the calendar and evaluate it and say, okay, Are we really able to give our time and energy to these things. Maybe we really want to invest more time and energy into our kids’ function and maybe just make an appearance at the work party. You know, you know how that is just kind of, yeah, we’re gonna show up a little bit later, say hi to a few people. Be a part of maybe a gift exchange and then head out and that’s okay.
It’s okay. That you don’t have to be 110% for all of these events decide what is most important to you that you’re putting on your calendar. Let go of expectations. That’s going to be a perfect Thanksgiving or perfect Christmas.
The reality is that we’re in a COVID world.
Still. We were hoping that we would be out of it before this holiday season, but this is where we understand that ships are sitting in ports right now, and they’re not able to get there or unload items. There may be Christmas presents that you want to buy for your kids, certain toys that aren’t available. And your kid is not gonna die if they don’t get that perfect toy on Christmas morning, you know, Santa Maye have to write them an IOU shipping delayed will come in January. I know there have been times in the past for Christmas, where I really wanted to give people little gifts, packages of cookies. And I spent so much time and energy in my kitchen making hundreds of cookies and cake balls and all of this type of stuff.
And I look back on that and I was. That was just for that season of my life. When I had foster children, that was a little much, I was trying to do a little bit too much and went overboard and now granted people did appreciate it. And I do try to do nice things for, for other people that I know around Christmas.
But my point is, whatever you do it doesn’t have to be perfect. And it’s not going to be perfect most likely, especially with some of the challenges that we’re dealing with in our world today. The last thing I want to encourage you with, which is also very important, is to have a budget and stick to it.
Oftentimes people really overextend themselves at Christmas, go into all kinds of debt. It’s just not healthy. It causes us a lot of financial stress and in turn emotional stress. One thing I learned this year is that in the Philippines, employees have something called the 13th-month payment, where they get basically an extra paycheck towards the end of the year.
And that helps pay for Christmas and things like that. End-of-the-year bills. Maybe I thought this is an incredible idea. Everyone should have this. However, in America, we don’t have that as a standard level of pay and so forth. So we have to create our own 13th. We have to make, be diligent about setting aside some for savings every single month so that when you get towards the end of the year, you have some money to spend on Christmas presents for the family and so forth.
If you sit down and budget, you know how much you’re going to pay for Christmas gifts, who it’s actually important to buy a Christmas gift for? I think sometimes we have this perception that we have to go overboard and buy a gift for every single person that we interact with. And obviously, that’s not the case, but sometimes we put this pressure on ourselves or we think, “Oh, I’ve got a bad Christmas gift for that person.”
But because they’re gonna get me a gift and there’s this, this obligation and emotional stress, you know, I can’t think. Of a single time that I’ve ever been offended, that I didn’t get a Christmas gift from someone. I’m pretty sure there probably have been times where I received an unexpected gift from someone that I, I didn’t think that they were gonna give me a gift, but you know, it, we’re just in a spirit of giving.
And that’s the important thing to remember. It shouldn’t be out of like obligation or we have to, you know, some families to, to help with finances will maybe like draw names and each person gets a different person in the, in the immediate family or the extended family. And then that way we’re reducing the amount of money that we’re spending around Christmas.
And we’re also able to get good gifts for each other. I think sometimes when it comes to holiday spending like we way overthink things or we make them more complicated than they actually have to be. So have a budget stick to it. That’s gonna reduce a lot of your stress. I know it’s a little late to be saying to save money, you know, all throughout the year, but now, you know, going into next year, save a little bit of money every month for Christmas, it will help you out tremendously.
You can put that towards presents, towards travel. If you’re having to travel with family. It’ll be great. And finally, let’s take the opportunity this Thanksgiving and this Christmas to not forget what it’s all about. We can get so caught up in making the food, attending the gathering, spending time with people that we miss the point.
Thanksgiving is an opportunity for us to be thankful to God for everything that he has blessed us with this year. And to be thankful for our friends and family that we celebrate with Christmas is an opportunity for us to celebrate Christ. Birth is an opportunity for us to reflect on the fact that he chose to come into the world in the humble way possible as a baby.
To be a part of our world and eventually give his life for us.
Don’t get lost in the commercialization that you forget, the simple and that you forget what’s most important. If you have children talk with them regularly about why you’re celebrating these holidays, read the Christmas story, focus on those things more than opening presence.
Find opportunities to give to others who have less than you. I think this is such an important part of the Christmas season. One thing that I’ve done for the last several years is adopted. A foster child through Casa to be able to buy Christmas gifts for them. And I know that when I was a foster parent, this was super helpful for us to be able to have other people who would buy Christmas gifts for our foster children.
And I know it meant a lot to them to receive those gifts while they were going through a hard time of being separated from their family members. For the last few years, I’ve bought Christmas gifts for teenagers. And oftentimes they want things like name-brand clothing because they just wanna fit in like every other child that they’re interacting with and going to school with.
And sometimes they want really simple things. Like hair ties. You may be, you may be in a really difficult situation this Christmas and. Not feel like you have a whole lot to give, but I’m sure that even in those situations, there’s something small that you can do for someone else. Even if it’s just take them a meal or bake them some cookies, just to let them know that you care and that you love them.
Christmas is about love, joy, and giving to others. Let’s not lose celebrating our Savior. Let’s not lose our focus in the midst of all the activity.
I hope this episode was helpful for you. I really appreciate you taking the time to listen. I want to encourage you to get on our email list. You can do that on our homepage@wwwdothopeforanxietyandocd.com towards the top.
You can put in your email address and you’ll actually get a audio relaxation to listen to as well as a gift for signing. I’m trying to email out once a week information about our upcoming episodes and other things that are happening with the podcast. So don’t miss out and sign up for our email list today. Thank you so much for listening.
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Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD Episode 54. I have been wanting for a little while to talk about medication as an option for anxiety and OCD. So that is what we are going to do today. I know that a lot of people have questions about whether or not they should get on medication. Whether they should look at that as an option or whether they should stay away from it.
So hopefully this episode will give you a little bit more information to help you make an informed decision about whether or not you want to pursue that as an option and maybe dispel some myths that people have about medication for mental health conditions. So today on the show I have with me Jennifer McGlothin, who is a Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner at Safe Harbor in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
Carrie: Welcome to the show.
Jennifer: Thank you so much for inviting me.
Carrie: Tell us a little bit about your background and what you do on a day-to-day basis.
Jennifer: So I have been doing psychiatry since around 2009. I graduated from Vanderbilt with my Masters in Psychiatric Nursing, and I’ve always been in a clinic setting, primarily community mental health until August of 2020, which is when my friend and I opened our own private practice. As far as psychiatric nurse practitioners in the medical world, we’re primary utilize is as medication management, we have the ability to do therapy. But that’s not really where we sort of fall on a day-to-day basis. When I was in a clinic that was my all day, every day was just seeing people back to back doing medication management.
And so August 2020, sort of out of necessity and God’s guidance, my friend and I opened our own private practice with the idea of being able to start to treat patients the way that we knew it needed to happen and to be able to provide a safe setting that they could come in and tell their stories and be heard and get the treatment that they needed.
Now day-to-day is a little bit different because we’re an owner of that, but we still see patients every day, but then that’s just sort of peppered in with administrative stuff of running the business. It sort of depends on the day whether we have new patients or just return patients, some days are telehealth some days are in the office, just kind of, depending on what the patient’s preference is at this point, especially since COVID has kind of changed the face of psychiatry telehealth is utilized a lot more. But our primary role and expertise, I would say probably, is medication management.
Carrie: Okay and I think some people get very confused as well by the terms psychologist, psychiatrist, licensed counselor. And so it’s important for people, sometimes people will contact me and ask me about medication. I’m like, hey, I’m not a medical doctor, that’s not what I do. I don’t have that training. So typically the psychologist is someone with a Ph.D., but they don’t prescribe medication, and psychiatrists or psychiatric nurse practitioners are medication providers. So this is for people who are kind of wondering about some of those titles or maybe confused. I know some of the terms sound similar and so it’s easy to get that confusion there. So I know that even though I’m a therapist, clients will certainly talk with me about medication. Should I get on medication? Should I not? Maybe they’ve had experiences with medication in the past. Maybe it was helpful, not helpful, so forth. And I think it’s understandable. Sometimes people look at anxiety as a physical condition. Some people look at it as a mental health condition and from what you’re seeing, sometimes people may pursue that medication route first.
Whereas others for anxiety, whereas other people may pursue a therapeutic route. First, I would imagine that you have some people that come in there that are being seen for anxiety, but then you start to ask more questions and identify that what they’re really dealing with is OCD. Can you tell us about that?
Jennifer: It depends. It really runs the gamut, whether they, when they come in to see us. Sometimes, they’re treatment-naive, which means that they’ve never seen a mental health professional before, or sometimes they’ve been doing mental health for 20 years. And once you start asking questions, we are asking questions about all disorders really. So we’re asking about depression. We’re asking about bipolar disorder. We’re asking about anger. We’re talking about sleep and appetite. We’re really looking for, what could the potential diagnoses be? Sometimes OCD will come out as a potential diagnosis because there are a lot of aspects of OCD that people don’t necessarily associate with it because it’s not as well known.
So typically when people think about OCD, they may think about the money who washes their hands a lot, or they may think about somebody who puts things in a certain order. Do things by color. One of probably the lesser-known forms would be really common, intrusive thought that they’re going to do something that’s completely outside of their personality and fear that they’re going to do it. So the fear that I’m going to drive my car off the road, even though there’s no desire to do that, they would never do that because they don’t want to hurt themselves. They don’t want to hurt anyone else. But the idea pops into their head that like I’m might do that. Or an idea of maybe I did something that I don’t know about is something I’ll hear a lot. I think that I turned off the stove, but maybe I didn’t actually do it. What if I thought that I said this to my child actually didn’t it, it will be this sort of questioning of themselves. The more that we’ll talk about that it will really kind of move more into the OCD realm.
What that does is it will sort of just change your treatment perspective a little bit, as far as what you’re going to do in medicine and therapy, then it becomes talking about really what OCD can look like. And it makes sense that people who are in a high state of whether it’s anxiety or OCD, they’re dealing with some distress and may have hesitancy about it taking medication.
Carrie: What do you tell your patients who are concerned about starting a new medication or switching medication? Because the last one wasn’t helpful for them.
Jennifer: The very first thing that’s most important for any patient is that, and it’s not always conveyed this way, but I think this is super important for anyone to know is that it’s always their choice. So no matter what the provider says, it’s ultimately their choice at the end of the day. Because when you leave that room, the patient is the one who’s taking the medicine and the patient’s the one who’s going home with it. When you’re coming to see me, for instance, I’m giving you my opinion about what I think is best, but ultimately it’s your choice.
I think a lot of times in medical situations, people can feel kind of powerless and they feel like they have to listen to exactly what the provider says. And sometimes it is good to do that, but if you don’t feel comfortable with the situation, then you don’t have to go along with that. So I think the first important thing is to know it’s always in your court and then also be really educated on what is the purpose of the medicine and that the idea is to make things better. If the medicine you’re taking now is not making things better then we probably need to make a change, really talking about what’s the goal. What do you want? What would make things feel more manageable to you? What would that look like? Then figuring out how do we get there? When they’re anxious about that, you have to really break it down into, we’re just wanting to improve things. This is why this is how, and sometimes I think that education and knowing that ultimately they have the final say is really helpful for people.
Carrie: This is really huge. I think that we don’t emphasize enough, like empowering people to make the health choices that are best for them. Yes. There are experts who can say, hey, these are the medications that are commonly prescribed. Here are the side effects. We believe that in prescribing this medication, the benefits for you are going to outweigh the side effects, but ultimately you have to weigh that option and everything is a potential risk. Empowering people is so key in that. And I liked what you said about it, just ultimately it being your choice.
Sometimes I’ll have people in therapy who want to try therapy first before they try medication. I always tell people I’ll work with, whether you’re on medication or not, it’s not really a big deal for me, but it’s interesting because sometimes we’ll circle back around to that medication conversation after they’ve been in therapy for six months or so. And they’re not seeing the progress that they’d like to see, then I’d say, okay, can we circle back around to this wagon? And can we evaluate this as an option? Will you go talk with someone and just see what your options are? What they think might be helpful for you. And I know that oftentimes people are started on a lower dose of medication, just to make sure that their system is going to handle it well.
Jennifer: One of the things that I’ll talk about when somebody comes in and they’ve never been medicated before, or they’re just coming in because they’re not really sure what needs to happen. And it’s not a very clear-cut case of like, we absolutely need to do something today. Sometimes when I ask the person, okay, do you think you need medicine? Do you feel like this is really impairing your function? And sometimes they’ll say, yeah, I think so. When it’s like, okay, well, I’m willing to give that a try, and sometimes they’ll say, I mean, I think I could do therapy for a little while first and like, I’m okay with that too. So let’s go that route and that kind of, once again goes back to making the decision, but I want to know what’s their opinion. How do they feel like their functioning is affected by the symptoms that they’re experiencing, being able to hear that is really helpful sometimes. And then, when you’re in school, one of the slogans that you’re taught about medicine to start is to start low and go slow. So that is basically just trying to minimize the amount of side effects that someone experiences. Sometimes that, unfortunately, means that they’re not gonna see the efficacy as early as you would hope.
In other words, they’re not going to stay, their symptoms decrease as fast as you would like to stay, because symptoms are too high to match the low dose that they’ve been started on. But then you get into a situation where if you start them on a higher dose, they’re going to have a lot of stomachs upset or they’re going to be too sleepy and they’re not going to be able to get up the next day and then that side effect is not going to be tolerable. So then they’re going to stop the medicine anyway. So once again, it goes back to that balance of trying to, I use a seesaw a lot as like a, not a visual, but to kind of explain that we’re trying to balance the seesaw. It goes back to that idea of trying to balance that risk-benefit, balance that out.
And I think that piece is another thing that’s super important for people to understand is what’s the timeframe that I’m going to start to see a difference, because if they’re expecting that they’re going to see a difference in a week, but the reality is four to six weeks. And they’re not told that it’s going to be hard for them to maybe stick with the medicine. And so it’s really important for people to know what we are looking at? What’s the timeframe? When should we start to see a difference? Are we going to see a difference in this dose? If symptoms are really high right now, and obviously not all of that, a hundred percent predictable, but you can give them an idea of what you would maybe hope to see, kind of give them a little bit of a window in.
Carrie: Those are some great points that you made in terms of having to increase dosages at times because people aren’t at a therapeutic dose. Sometimes people end up dropping out and stop taking the medication without talking to their provider. That’s one thing that just drives me a little bit bad. I’m like, no, if you’re not happy or you don’t feel like you’re getting what you need, you go back to that person and you explain, hey, I’m not seeing the results I’m wanting, or I’m having these side effects or there are always different things that can be done or like you just said, they may tell you, okay, well, we’re going to increase your dosage because it doesn’t look like you’re at the therapeutic level or you need to stay on it for sometimes four to six weeks to see the full results from it. I think sometimes people go into the doctor’s office and they’re not always hearing or receiving all the information that they need because they’re distressed. Right.
And so it’s hard to remember everything that was said and the guidance that was given. So if I could tell, make any recommendations to people it’s please don’t stop your medication. Please stick with it, call your provider, talk with them because some of these medications, it’s really not good for you to stop suddenly.
Jennifer: I also, unfortunately, think that the education piece for patients is not always there. Sometimes they’re not always getting everything they need to get as far as what are the side effects? How long should I wait? Like it’s more just, here’s the prescription first Alexa, 20 milligrams, I’ll see you in two months and that is no information whatsoever. And that is completely on us as a provider. And that drives me nuts because it’s like, it’s so important to me, for my patients to know why they’re taking, why they’re taking it, what it does because I want them to be educated about it because they’re part of the treatment team.
Carrie: It was important for people not to see, I think, any medication really as a miracle cure. And I think sometimes people go into taking psychiatric medication, whether it’s for anxiety, OCD, depression, or something else. And they think, okay, well, I’m just going to take this medicine. It’s going to solve all my problems and similar to, if you put somebody on a blood pressure medication for high blood pressure, you wouldn’t just say, well, just take this medication you want also for them to make some lifestyle changes that would support what that medication is working on.So talk with us a little bit about that too.
Jennifer: I use diabetes as an example. A lot of the time I will say, this is very similar. So like someone with diabetes, they take their insulin, but then they also check their blood sugar and they exercise and they have to watch what they eat. It’s a combination. And so that’s when we talk about that. The best results come from a combination of medicine and therapy and that medicine is just one tool in the toolbox. It is not the end. All be all, and medicine can help you cope, but it doesn’t teach you how to. And super important for people to know that you have to learn the coping skills medicine can help lower your anxiety, but life circumstances, there’s gonna be times that anxiety is going to spike and you need to know what to do when that happens and medicine doesn’t teach you that. So that’s where that other piece of the puzzle comes in. Whether that’s a therapist you’re seeing your past, or you’re seeing you’re doing a workbook at home, whatever it is that you’re doing something to learn what to do in those other moments, because it’s not a matter of if it’s going to happen. It’s a matter of when. And so we have to plan ahead for that.
Carrie: What different types of medication would you say are commonly prescribed for anxiety or OCD?
Jennifer: For both of those really it’s antidepressant and anti-depressants are first-line treatment for anxiety. And so I’ll have a lot of people come in and there may be already on a medicine that came from primary care and they’ll say, well, I have anxiety and they put me on this antidepressant and I’ll say, well, that’s actually appropriate because the antidepressants are first-line treatment for anxiety. The five medicines that are FDA approved for OCD are actually all antidepressants. The most common medicine probably used in OCD specifically is probably Prozac. There are four others after that, that are sort of used in varying order.
There are some medicines for anxiety that can just be used as needed that we like in our practice. We use an antihistamine sometimes that’s as needed. There are actually a couple of blood pressure medicines that we use as needed for anxiety. Providers will use benzodiazepine for anxiety that is not favored where we are, because those are very addictive medicines and they actually make anxiety worse in the long run and they call short and long-term memory loss.
There’s links to dementia. It will fix it quickly in the moment when you’re having an anxiety bite, but long-term, it’s going to make things worse for you. And so that’s something that we in our practice avoid because it’s not fixing the problem. So when you’re looking at an antidepressant for anxiety, what that’s actually doing is it’s adjusting the brain chemistry. All of the ones. When we look at anxiety and OCD, because of course the OCD is an anxiety disorder that all targets serotonin in some way or another. They’re adjusting the levels of serotonin in the brain. So we’re actually changing the brain chemistry, ideally back to where it needs to be. So kind of a way I sort of describe that to someone as like the thermostat is stuck and we’re trying to race that we’re trying to sort of teach the brain how to relearn the patterns for which chemicals need to be there and what capacity.
Another important thing I think if it’s just anxiety and especially if someone’s in therapy, is that medicine doesn’t necessarily have to be forever. It’s something that until you can build the coping skills to learn how to manage most situations. And we have sort of put unquote, retrain the brain for what chemicals need to be there and what capacity for long enough, then you can try to come off of the medicine potential and do it on your own. OCD is not necessarily doesn’t fall into that category so much. That’s more of something that’s managed, like someone who has diabetes, that’s just managed throughout the year. But for some disorders, our goal was to try to fix it at the beginning. So it’s not a lifelong thing.
And I think that’s a common misconception too sometimes is that you want to put me on medicine and just keep me on it forever. Not necessarily, we could potentially fix this problem now so that it’s not a problem for it. And it’s dependent on different things as far as what episode they’re in and how long they’ve been on meds and there’s varying factors. But I think a lot of people don’t know that that’s a possibility.
Carrie: I think that’s a really great point that you bring up. One of the common concerns that people have is whether I’m going to become addicted to this medication somehow dependent on it and I’m not ever going to be able to come off of it. So from what you were just saying, these first line of defense medications, the anti-depressant. People aren’t going to become addicted or dependent on those, right?
Jennifer: Not at all. No, they do not have any addictive properties whatsoever. I think sometimes what people might get confused about would be to say that if you forget to take your medicine one day, you might feel kind of bad. Like you might have a headache or you might have a stomach ache, but that is just simply your body reacting to not having something that it had every single day, but that’s not a quote unquote withdrawal effect. There’s a difference in that.
You have to be able to, to know that like, if you come off of these medicines and anti-depressant specifically, you’re not going to go into a physical withdrawal. There are some that are more difficult to come off and others, but if your provider knows how to appropriately taper you down, it minimizes what we call discontinuation side effects. Just knowing how to do that is important. And obviously the provider communicating how to get off of it is important.
Carrie: Right? So that people can do that safely and effectively.
Jennifer: If you just stop your medicine suddenly you are probably going to have side effects because you’re going from a hundred percent to zero. All of a sudden your body is probably going to react very negatively to that.
Carrie: What should people look for in terms of choosing a psychiatrist or a psychiatric nurse practitioner?
Jennifer: The ultimate goal is somebody they feel comfortable with is important. I think to have the ability to have an open dialogue, to express concerns about your medicine at our clinic. Like we are a team and it’s a delicate balance to figure out what the correct path is. And if my patient feels like they can’t tell me that their medicine’s not working or that they’re having a side effect, or they feel like I’m going to get upset about that. It’s the relationship that needs a little bit of work because that’s not what we’re there for. Like if someone comes back and they tell me they stopped their medicine, sometimes they’ll say, they’ll come in and they’ll say, you’re going to be so upset with me. I just stopped my medicine over the weekend. And it’s like, I’m not upset with it. That was your choice. I’m sure it wasn’t probably didn’t feel very good.
So let’s just figure out what we’re going to do next and be able to have that open conversation without judgment and figure out what the best path is. I think I hear a lot of times stories where patients feel like they’re unheard and they just keep taking meds when they feel they’re not working for whatever reason, that’s not a good situation either. I think it’s also important for somebody to have humility because I’m not too proud to break out my books and look something up or to call somebody or to figure out. Because you just can’t know everything. You have to know what your limits are and you have to be willing to research something or to know when it’s time for you to call in somebody else. And if you have a provider who doesn’t do that, I think that’s hard for you, maybe to build a relationship sometimes.
Carrie: I think what you’re saying is really true of any medical professional that you work with. You want to feel heard, you want to feel understood. You want to feel like, okay, this person has a plan. They’re offering me some guidance and not just guidance, but really some education on, instead of just here, take this medicine. Really providing some good education on the medication, why they think that would be a good medication for you and with the symptoms that you’re dealing with, what the potential for side effects are when they might see those wear off, so forth and so on. I think that it’s huge to understand that we have to be our own best advocate when we’re going into these situations, because we have to be able to communicate what’s going on in our own body. And sometimes people have a hard time with that. I think really communicating what has been going on with them
Jennifer: Because it makes it difficult. Sometimes if the patient is not telling everything because they don’t feel comfortable for whatever reason, then as a provider, if we don’t know the whole story, then we can’t adequately treat. I think a lot of times we don’t maybe get the whole story because of fear of judgment or shame or whatever. But I know in our practice, that’s not our job. Our job is not to judge or to guilt someone or to shame them. Our job is to figure out, okay, how do we move forward? How do we get back? Let’s figure out what our best plan is, but you can’t do that. If you’re not comfortable enough to share what’s going on, really got to find somebody that you can build that relationship with.
Carrie: Awesome. So as we’re getting towards the end of our 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.
Jennifer: I think for me, probably one of the most hopeful things was sort of born out of something really traumatic in 2009. 10 days after I got married, I had a very traumatic car accident and we spent our first month of married life in the hospital. And I was in a wheelchair for like three, nine specific three months until I could walk again. And just with the amount of prayers and people coming by and my sweet husband’s help driving me back and forth to the doctor, changing stuff at our house, like going to work and then coming back and picking me up and taking me to physical therapy.
And I was able to walk a month earlier and basically made what would be considered pretty much a full recovery. Over 10 years later, no real complications and have been able to sometimes use that story for people who have had something really traumatic physically happen to them. And they’re in that moment of why, what am I going to do? This is terrible and being able to say things like, listen, you can come out the other side of this, like I know right now it does not feel like that, but if you put your faith in Him, you can come out the other side of this and being able to use that sometimes in my practice.
Carrie: That is really encouraging and hopeful because when you’re in that, the middle of that situation going okay, what am I going to be able to walk? When am I going to be able to do things for myself?
Jennifer: Normal stuff. Yeah.
Carrie: That must’ve been a very hard situation. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your wisdom about medication. We’re going to put the information in the show notes for a safe Harbor in Murphysboro, and they also have telehealth appointments. So if you’re in Tennessee or in the area at all and are looking for a new provider, now they know a little bit more about you.
Jennifer: Yes, we are accepting new patients. So give us a call.
Carrie: Awesome.
Jennifer: Thank you so much for having me.
Carrie: You’re welcome.
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I hope that you found this interview valuable and helpful. I wanted to give you a quick update on our subscription service for the podcast. There have been just so many struggles and challenges as I’ve sought to do this in our original. I saw that we were going to be able to have a good monthly subscription service on the website, buy me a coffee that I had been using for people to give to the show who wanted to give and what I realized as I got further into the functionality. That I wasn’t able to share all of the audio files and different things that I wanted to be able to do on that website. So I’ve actually created a Patrion page that we’ll put in the show notes for Hope for Anxiety and OCD. If you’re not familiar with Patrion, it’s a website for podcasters and other creators to go on.
And it gives the opportunity for people to be able to support what you’re doing with a monthly gift that we have a smaller, monthly amount that you can give. If you just want to help support our editing efforts and help pay for our assistant to do social media, reach out to guests and so forth. If you’re looking for a little bit more self-help materials, I created a higher tier on Patrion for those of you who are listening to the show, but just feel like you want more content and more information. We’re going to have monthly question and answer times. I’m sharing some thought hush audio on there for dealing with difficult thoughts, whether you have anxiety or OCD, just very practical strategies, audio that you can listen to you exercises that you can go back in and practice over and over and over again until you feel like you become better at managing the anxiety and OCD that you’re experiencing.
So that’s something that’s of interest to you. You certainly can hop on for a month or two, try it out if you don’t like it, and you can cancel it at any time. If you do happen to hop on and try it out, I would love to hear what you think. And if some of those things are helpful and as well as if there’s any ways that we can make improvements to that subscription service, because I definitely want it to be of value to you. We’ll leave that link in the show notes, if you’re interested and thank you so much for listening.
Hope for Anxiety and OCD is a production of by the local counseling in Smyrna, Tennessee. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum. Until next time may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.
Anissa is a certified yoga therapist who helps traumatized women release the trauma from their bodies through yoga therapy.
How Anissa developed her interest not just in yoga, but yoga as a therapy
How has yoga therapy helped people whom Anissa has worked with?
The difference between yoga and yoga therapy
How does yoga therapy release trauma?
What is a yoga therapy session like?
Related links and resources:
Anissa HudakIf you enjoy the podcast and want to support what we’re doing, or if you’re looking for self-help materials to assist you on your journey of managing your anxiety and OCD in healthier ways. Audio teachings, relaxation exercises, and my book on how to find a therapist are provided for self-help via monthly subscription, go to www.patreon.com/hopeforanxietyandocd
Carrie: Hope for anxiety and OCD episode 53. I am your host, Carrie Bock. And today we are talking with Anissa Hudak on yoga therapy. So if you know anything about our show, we are all about mind, body, emotion, spirit. God has created us with all of these different aspects of our being. And it’s helpful to understand that healing can come in many different forms for people.
I like that yoga therapy combines the physical healing of our bodies while also there’s a level of emotional healing because trauma can become stored in the body. And we get into some of that on the show today.
So without further do here is my interview. And this I’m so excited to have you on the show today to talk about yoga therapy.
This is just gonna be, I think, really helpful and informative for some of the, listeners who have experienced trauma. A lot of times there’s overlap between, you know, people who’ve experienced trauma and people who experience anxiety and OCD. So thank you for coming and talking with us about this.
Anissa: Well, thank you for having me on.
Carrie: Tell me a little bit about how you got interested in not just yoga, but further training to get into yoga therapy.
Anissa: Well, you know, life is a journey and nobody wakes up one day and says, “I wanna work with people who’ve had trauma”.
Carrie: Right. That’s true.
Anissa: I started in 2013, with a teacher training course in yoga, and I just loved yoga. I had been practicing for several years at that point, and I wanted to be able to do my own yoga practice and keep myself safe. I didn’t wanna have to go to anybody else’s class and be on somebody’s schedule. So I took a, a teacher training course. It was the level one. I had no aspirations of doing anything else. And within a month of me finishing the class, I had two job offers.
Carrie: Wow.
Anissa: And I kind of was like, okay, I think. Somebody’s trying to tell me something here. And so I had kind of gotten the bug. I really enjoyed the people I was interacting with in that class. And I decided I’m gonna take another class. And I kind of got that bug and, you know, I started teaching and it just kind of snowballed. So when I was signing up for some classes, I noticed that there were, classes for PTSD. At the time my husband was active duty military. We are stationed right outside of Fort Riley, Kansas. We had people, all kinds of, you know, men and women deploying coming back. We had tons of military in the community. I was like, I live in the belly of the beast here. You know, this would be a great thing to know to help my community.
Carrie: Right.
Anissa: And so I started on this track and I was in, first day, first class about halfway through and I sat there and said, “oh boy, the first person I need to work on is right here”. I hadn’t realized a how much trauma I had been through, how much PTSD I was really carrying around and how it had crawled into the nooks and crannies in my life and was actually holding me back. And I thought I had a really good handle on it, but I was like, I guess I don’t. And so it really became this self-discovery, self-healing. And in the process, I was able to help other people with it. And so it’s been a really amazing journey for me, not only personally, but also being able to help others.
Carrie: That’s incredible. I think that many people who have experienced trauma they find ways to survive, essentially survival skills and sometimes that’s cutting off their emotional experience. Sometimes it’s isolating in relationships. I mean, there can be a variety avoiding places and people and situations that make them triggered. It’s interesting to hear you say like, okay, well, I, I mean, I thought I had it together. I was, I was doing okay. Were there certain things that kind of came up in your practice or in that class that kind of were red flags for you of like, I really need to work on this.
Anissa: I think that what really took me back was when I was learning the science behind it all, what’s going on in the brain, what’s going on in the body. It’s all science-based. And I sat there and I was like, this should be taught to everyone in high school biology. We should all know what happens with our body. We’re all gonna experience trauma on some level. And we know that when we break a bone, we go to the hospital, we have an x-ray, we get a cash.
However, when we break our central nervous system, how do we reset that, we’re not taught that. And that was what really clued me in, because we were talking about symptoms and I’m like, I do that. I do that too. Wait a minute. Wait, you know, and that’s when I really realized, okay, I don’t really have a handle on this.
Carrie: And I think that’s so true. It’s not clear-cut for people, how to heal from trauma. A lot of times there’s a lot of different ideas and thought processes out there. And unfortunately, sometimes people think, well, I can talk about it. I mean, it doesn’t really bother me. I can talk about it, but they haven’t dealt with these other layers of emotion and trauma being stored in the body.
Anissa: Absolutely. You know, I have a therapist, I take medication. There’s nothing wrong. I there’s no shame in it.
Carrie: Right.
Anissa: However, there are more ways to skin a cat. And I don’t know why they say that. But there’s more ways to go about it. There’s so many layers to trauma and yes talking about it, working it out through your mind is wonderful. You know, sometimes we need a little bit of, you know, better living through chemistry and that’s okay, too. However, it’s in the body. We actually have muscles that trap emotion. And we need to release that or else you’re what we’re gonna, you know, progress in your healing journey.
Carrie: That’s really incredible. I mean, I, I think most people don’t know that, or haven’t learned that haven’t realized that, you know, you can have emotional releases, through trauma work that are physiological and in your body.
Anissa: And what’s sad is that this is not being taught in high school biology or, or what have you. But we all have this. We all need it. And that’s what really stuck with me. So not only did, was I learning this on a personal level and utilizing it, but also it kind of became, my mantra. I wanna bring this out. I want people to know what’s going on in your body.
Carrie: Right. And there are people, especially who have experienced sexual trauma who are cut off from their physical experience, you know, due to what happened to them understandably so and that can cause problems. Obviously, when you get into relationships and you want to feel good having sex and you don’t, or your body starts to react in a way that you don’t want it to, you know, maybe you tense up when you don’t want to. So talk with us a little bit about what you’ve seen, maybe in the people that you’ve worked with, is that some of, kind of what you’ve done or how you’ve helped people?
Anissa: Well, the word yoga means yoke and it means to bring together. The body and the mind.
Carrie: Okay.
Anissa: And you could sit there and you could talk about your rape if you will. And it’s not a problem. And yet your body, you know, tells the different story because you’re not connected. There are certain things that I do in the class that help people to connect with their body again. Some people are really angry with their body. They didn’t protect them. And so they are disconnected from their body. They don’t wanna be in their body and they start living. And, and that’s one of the things about PTSD is that you really live from the neck up.
Carrie: Yes.
Anissa: You forget about the rest of your body. And it’s really where on the map, we’re able to bridge that gap and get people to start. Feeling in their body in a very safe and controlled environment. And it’s not scary. I think of my job as I welcome people back into their bodies.
Carrie: That’s awesome. So tell us about the difference between yoga and yoga therapy.
Anissa: I love this. If we think of yoga as a big pie, If we split it down the middle and on one side we have fitness based yoga and there are so many wonderful techniques at different ways that Aerial yoga there’s, you know, Ashtanga and and coed, naked, hot yoga, and you know, all of these different things. And they’re great for a workout. Will it encompass your mind? Will it do similar things absolutely? Can you have an emotional release in one of these classes? Yes, you can. However, here’s the difference. On the other side, we have yoga therapy and all of have been especially trained for a specific thing. So we have yoga therapy for arthritis, cardiac rehab cancer. And so we all have our special, you know, niche that we work in. Being that it’s PTSD trauma and TBIs, traumatic brain injuries.
I have special protocols that I have to go through. If someone has an emotional release on the mat, I know how to handle that. I’ve been taught how to handle that. I know how to keep them safe. Everyone else in the class safe, myself safe and various other things. However, someone who is fitness based yoga, you know, teaches, they may not have that background. They may not know how to help you. Through that emotional relief, they might even kick you out of the class for being a disturbance. Now that’s not gonna be helpful if you’re having an emotional release.
Carrie: Right.
Anissa: So really finding what meets your needs is incredibly important.
Carrie: Yes.
Anissa: You wanna find a class that, that really caters to what your needs are, and if you can’t find maybe a yoga therapy class, if you talk with the instructor for a regular fitness-based class. They might be able to help you either in their class or find someone else.
Carrie: Now I would imagine that you would have to do this on a smaller scale. If you are working through, you know, traumatic release, you’re not gonna want a large number of people in there is that true? Do you tend to have like smaller base classes or one on one work with people?
Anissa: I do one on one. I do smaller base classes. That is my personal preference. I think it’s more intimate.
Carrie: Sure.
Anissa: I think we create a better bubble if you will. It, you know, it is a little bit easier to kind of keep, watch over everyone to ensure, the classes themselves are really about having smaller, emotional releases. They may not even know what’s happening. They may not even feel it happening. Now there is a technique that we can do that’s actually a, a larger emotional release. Those are done one on one. Those are done after I’ve gotten to know the student. I mean, they’re not gonna just walk through the door and say, Hey, I wanna do a major emotional release.
No, we’re not gonna do that. I need to know this person. I kind of need to know the background. I’ve had students who are with me for three months and they do it. I’ve had a student with me for over five years and we’ve never done it. It really depends on where the student is, you know, with their practice and, and with their healing.
Carrie: Do you find that people that you work with also practice outside of their time with you? Is that part of, the component that’s helpful?
Anissa: Some poses I teach for them to utilize outside the class. And sometimes a student will say, “you know, I was making my coffee this morning and I found myself in, you know, tree pose”. And they start living their yoga off the mat, which is really a beautiful thing. And they’re doing it really unintentionally. It just kind of subconsciously happens. And that’s really where the fun is.
Carrie: I remember from this has been years ago since I used to go to yoga classes pretty regularly. And I remember one of the teachers saying, “you know, eventually you’ll be in tune with your body enough to know what type of like, poses and stretching that you, your body needs that day, you know, based on just kind of how you’re feeling”. And I would imagine it’s, it’s similar in the emotional reality.
Anissa: It is when I queue oppose, there’s a lot of different languaging around it. I mean, you know, usually, in most classes they’re like, okay, you know, downdog and you know, updog. And I phrase my cues, like, I’m gonna invite you to join me in downdog giving people the power to make the decision when we’ve experienced trauma. A lot of times our power has been taken away from us.
Carrie: Right.
Anissa: And so this actually gives how we’re back and then I’ll say, you know, here we are, we’re in kneeling warrior one, and you have options with your arms. You can do this, you can do that. You can, what is your body wanting today? Where do you feel like you wanna be today? And that again, not only gives them options and their power back to make that decision, but also helps them connect with their body. What am I feeling today? Do I want my arms up? Do I want them to the side? And so that helps to bridge that disconnection, giving them power and connecting the body and the mind.
Carrie: Is there, a typical, I don’t know if length of treatment is the right way to say it, but is there a typical time frame that people come to see you? Do they usually come once a week for a few months or does it just depend on how much trauma they’ve experienced? Can you talk to us kind of a little bit about what that pattern is like?
Anissa: So pre-COVID when we all got to see one another.
Carrie: Right.
Anissa: You know, I ran cut classes three times a week. Sometimes, you know, I had somebody in three times a week. It really depends on the person and what their trauma is and how they’re dealing with it. They could be with me for three months. They could be with me for three years.
Each person is so individual. There’s no way to say that there’s a set time protocol.
Carrie: Sure.
Anissa: It’s kind of like chiropractic care. The more you do it, the, the better it is, the longer it lasts. And so, you know, that’s what I recommend. That’s why I ran three classes a week, but everybody’s schedule is different.
Carrie: Sure.
Anissa: So some is better than none.
Carrie: Yes. Yes. Some is better than none but works on a lot of different areas I’m sure. What kind of results are people seeing from, from doing yoga therapy?
Anissa: Well, one of the things they usually fall in love with yoga and that, you know, it usually becomes a lifelong thing at that point. They may not go to a trauma-based class, but they might find maybe a fitness-based class that they like, or a different type of restorative class, or, but they become a lifelong fan, which is kinda fun. And it’s really amazing to watch someone have a breakthrough on the mat. You know, you see the light bulb go on, you see something change and it’s beautiful. And it’s wonderful. And to know that you’ve had maybe just a little bit to do with that is really a blessing.
Carrie: Are you finding that people are less triggered by being in certain poses? Maybe that they were in during the the trauma, like, positioning of their body. I don’t know if that’s.
Anissa: Absolutely. You know, poses can definitely bring on triggers. And, one of the things that I like to do is I like to talk with my students before they even enter my class. You know, tell me a little bit about it, you know, why are you here? Okay. You’ve been raped. Okay. You know, as a two-time rape survivor, you know, I, I walk that walk I get it. And so I’m really careful about that. You know, one of the number one rule in my class is we do not use any straps. You know, lots of classes use yoga straps, and they’re wonderful things not in my class. We, we don’t use that. The lights remain on at all times. We don’t turn off the lights. I never leave my mat. And if I have to leave my mat, I announce it before I leave.
That way people aren’t like, why is she walking behind me? And you know, what is she doing? I hardly ever touch my students. I will cue something and differently and reword it. You know, X number of times to see if I can get them into the right pose in the right way. However, if I can’t and I do need to touch them, I ask them, I announce I’m leaving my mat. I go to them. So I, but I also keep in mind, who’s in my class. What if they’ve been dealing with what can’t we do, what should we be doing? How can I do an alternative to that pose so we can get the same result, but maybe in a different way.
Carrie: I think those things that you named as far as just from someone who’s been in yoga class before, I think that those things are huge safety features for trauma survivors because I have been in classes where. Teachers walked her around and where teachers did touch you. And some of them asked and some of them didn’t, some of them just kind of were like, nope, you’re doing this wrong. And let me move your body so you can do it right. I was like, I don’t like that at all. I don’t wanna be touched by somebody. I don’t know that I don’t feel comfortable with. So, I appreciate you spelling that out. I think that that’s so important.
Anissa: Those are absolute keys as to, you know, what we do because we don’t wanna re-trigger someone.
Carrie: Right.
Anissa: I mean, you know, we’re there to help. And so we have to have different kind of protocols. I said, the way I phrase questions, that’s again psychological, but so needed and so necessary for what we do. And so our class is incredibly different than what you’re gonna see or experience in a regular fitness based class.
Carrie: That’s good. It’s good to definitely know the differences and it sounds like you definitely have a lot more training than someone who’s just doing fitness based yoga. Is there a certain credentialing process that you had to go through?
Anissa: Well, I became a 500 hour R I T registered yoga trainer teacher.
Carrie: Okay.
Anissa: Again, I never set out to even ever teach. And so when I say that I kind of giggle because I’m like who would’ve ever thought. And then at that point I had taken so much class so many classes. I had done so much research. I had done other things that I was able to get credentialed through the international association of yoga therapists. And we have a governing body. I just went through my re crench my re-credentialing. It’s great to have a body over us that says, this is what we’re doing. You can go to their website. And that’s I A Y T.com and you can actually find a yoga therapist in your area.
Carrie: Awesome. That’s really great. I think having those certification processes and the governing bodies to making sure there’s some accountability that you have a certain level of training and that, you know what you’re doing, you know, so that’s, that’s huge. Is there anything else that you feel like be helpful for us to know about yoga therapy or about what you do, you know, related to helping people heal from trauma?
Anissa: I would say the most important thing is really when you are going to be employing someone to help you in your healing journey, ensure that they are going to meet your needs. But for instance, if you’re going to go see a therapist and you’ve experienced sexual trauma. Find someone that specializes in sexual trauma. And I will, I’ll tell you firsthand. I had worked with a lot of different therapists and I would progress on my healing journey, but I was still finding that I was going back to therapy and talking about it.
This last time I found a man, I had never worked with a man before you know, I had only worked with women. So I was like, I dunno how I feel about that.
Carrie: A little hesitant.
Anissa: I really was. And he specializes in sexual trauma. I have done more work and more healing with this man as my therapist than I’ve ever done in the past with any one person or actually all together, it’s been amazing. So when you find people who meet your needs, that’s really vitally important. Again, you don’t wanna walk into the yoga studio on the corner. And expect to have, you know, these, this brilliant thing happens, something else is gonna happen in there. And it may not be to your liking again, find someone who can meet your needs. And I think that that is key.
Carrie: That is huge, you know, making sure that you can get connected with the right person. I know that that’s absolutely essential for seeking therapy for different things. Sometimes you work with a therapist for a little while and they can only take you so far and you may have to find somebody else like you were saying that can take you to that next level. And it’s usually when you are looking for that next person that you’re looking for, something a lot more specific. Maybe then you were the first time.
Anissa: Absolutely. I think the other thing I would have to stress is healing, especially from any kind of trauma is a very individual thing. And people try different things and they say, like essential oils didn’t work for me. Okay that’s cool. They may not have worked for you at that point in time where you were in your healing journey, who you were as a person. Try it again in three months, six months, 12 months. Keep trying it again, because you’re at a different point in your healing journey. You’re a different person. Your trauma is different at that point. And so something that may not have worked early on might work later on. So keep trying things.
Carrie: I think that’s essential for maintaining hope and that’s a lot of what this podcast is about is help people know that there’s hope and theres healing out there, but so often it comes in layers. Sometimes clients will go through a round of therapy and they’ll be doing really well.
And then they’ll be back in six months and they’re like, I don’t understand why I’m still struggling with this. And I’m like, well, you know, you just, you’ve reached a different layer. It’s time for us to do a little bit of deeper that next level of work that you weren’t ready to do that a year ago. And now you are. So this is actually a good thing. This is a good part of your process to like keep going through that work. So I appreciate you saying that. So as we’re kind of winding down the episode here, 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.
Anissa: I had this really incredible experience. I talked earlier about having that large emotional release. I was in a teacher training class for yoga. And we did that. We, and it was the first time I had ever experienced it. And I was sobbing. I mean, I had such an emotional release and I was sobbing and sobbing. And then always like, you know, my luck. Right after we do this, it’s lunchtime and they’re providing us with a luncheon. Know, when you go to a yoga training course, you know, and they do that. You’re usually eating like nuts and berries, you know? So there was like salad, you know, you know, it wasn’t anything major, but, you know, so there’s, you know, salads or whatever, and I’m sitting there and I’m like sobbing into my salad. I sobbed for an hour and a half.
Carrie: Wow.
Anissa: And women, you know, these wonderful yoginis were coming up to me and saying, “are you Ok, dear?” I just released my salad and I, just go ahead. Just cry it out, just let it go. And nobody was affected by it. Everybody was like, just cry. Let it go. Let it go. You gotta get it out. And I wasn’t chastised. I was encouraged to cry. I was surrounded by all of these beautiful women. They all understood. They all got it. Nobody cared and there was such acceptance and peace around it.
It was just really lovely. And so when I have a student in my class who cries on the mat and it happens, that’s part of my job is to make people cry you know. I encourage them to cry, let it out. This is great. This is a wonderful thing. Let it go. And what I have found is that the other participants in the class, they start saying it too. And we create this beautiful, safe place for this person to do this release work. And I love how the other generally women in my class. Join in and do that as well.
Carrie: I think that’s so powerful because so many times there’s kind of this pressure of feel better, pat you on the back. it’ll be okay. You’ll be fine. And instead of allowing that emotional experience, which really in your case was like a gift at that moment. And so for people to be able to say, like that’s here and you can welcome it. And we’re here for you and we’re in support of you instead of like, go away and have that somewhere else. Or like, it’ll all be better. Just, you know, chin up girl or something like that.
Those societal messages are so I like that, you know, story because we need more of that in our just general society as we’re going through the world and loving on people and I know that I’ve been able to provide some of that for my clients, to who are never given that permission to feel as children or in their adult relationships. It’s just like, crying’s okay. You know, people apologize all the time for crying and we don’t need to like crying is a human thing let it happen. It’s all okay.
Anissa: Absolutely it is. it’s being human. We should never have to apologize for being human.
Carrie: Right. Absolutely, absolutely. Well, Anissa, thank you so much. For coming on, this was informative for me and I know it’s going to be for our listeners as well, and we will put links to your website in the show notes. If people would like to reach out to you, are you doing some virtual classes then?
Anissa: Everything now is online.
Carrie: Okay.
Anissa: And I’m actually in the process of getting ready to release a membership for women who’ve been sexually traumatized. And in there there’s going to be recorded sessions. There’s going to be live sessions. We’re gonna have lots of education and all kinds of wonderful things in there to help women along their journey. I’m super excited about it. I actually started working on this pre-COVID. But then, you know, everybody was here in my house during COVID. I couldn’t hear myself think now that we’re kind of back to someone normal. I can get back to what I was doing.
Carrie: Okay. Awesome, that’s great.
Anissa: Well, I appreciate you having me on thank you so very much.
Carrie: Thank you. I am so glad that you tuned in to hear the show today. If you like our show, please be sure to rate and review on iTunes or other platforms. This helps people find the show who are also looking for some great hope, encouragement, and support.
Hope for anxiety and OCD is a production of By The Well Counseling in Smyrna, Tennessee. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum. Until next time may be comforted by God’s great love for you.
Matt is a licensed professional counselor and the clinical director of Boulder Recovery. He initially sought a career in church ministry, but moved into the mental health field and started working with individuals recovering from sexual addiction.
The connection between anxiety, attachment trauma and sex/porn addiction
How does addiction develop?
How does addiction affect anxiety?
The link between childhood experience and addiction.
How does shame around unwanted sexual behaviors affect one’s relationship with God?
Carrie: Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD where we are all about reducing shame, increasing hope, and developing healthier connections with God and others. I’m your host, Carrie Bock. And today we are going to be talking about an important topic that affects a lot of Christians and non-Christians and that’s sex porn addiction.
We’re gonna talk about the connection between anxiety, attachment trauma and these issues. So if you’ve tuned into the show before you know that we’re not shy about talking about different issues that people face that are connected to anxiety. So here today, I have Matt Wininger, who is a licensed professional counselor and also the clinical director of Boulder recovery in Colorado. Welcome to the show.
Matt: Thank you, Carrie. Thanks for having me.
Carrie:So today we’re talking about sex porn addiction, which is an issue that many Christian men deal with. Do you see this issue as being as prevalent in the church as outside the church?
Matt:Oh yeah. It’s hard to understate the breadth of this addiction. I mean, we live in such a, um, saturated world when it comes to sex and objectification of women and, and men, and it affects it. Doesn’t, it doesn’t really seem to know like a boundary between the secular and the Christian world. Most of the men that I’ve treated both in secular context in, in Christian programs, uh, have been Christian.
I think that there’s just an increased level of, of shame around it for Christians and they, they seek out treatment, but this knows no bounds. It’s an epidemic really.
Carrie: Right. And really thanks to the internet. It’s very easy to keep the secret and keep it hidden. I mean, now, um, people have not just computers, but smartphones and tablets. And oftentimes this can go on for a while before anyone else really knows.
Matt: Yeah. I mean, it’s changed so much, you know, when you work with the older guys and we, I just, I see men exclusively for this. A lot of times they’ll talk about how it started, you know, magazines and print and things like that. And you just have to go to the corner store or, or whatever, to get a magazine or, or something like that. And, um, there was a little bit of a barrier there, you know, to have to leave your house and go and purchase something in person. But right now it’s, I mean, you can get, you can get some of this content for less than a dollar.
You can get it anytime you want. You can get some of it for free on your phone, in your pocket at any time. And there’s a myriad ways of hiding. What it is that you’re doing. And, and in some ways it’s more difficult to deal with than even some substance addiction, just because of the ease of access and that how easy it is to get it in terms of cost.
Carrie: That makes sense, because it’s also something that you can run into even when you’re not looking for it. And that happens to, to children sometimes on the internet, they’re searching for something else and this pops up and, you know, next thing you know, that’s, that’s a scary rabbit hole to go. From the outside, people really see addiction as a problem, but it actually starts out as a solution to a problem, help us understand kind of how addictions develop.
Matt: I believe that addictions arise to regulate an unregulated nervous Sy regulated nervous system. So what I mean by that is addiction arises to cope with sensations within the body that feel overwhelming.
So an unregulated nervous system is, you know, things that are shooting me up to an 11 in my nervous system, like rapid heartbeat, uh, difficulty breathing, those kinds of things, or crashing me down into what we would call kind a dorsal response or, or, or a frozen response. So there’s that fight or flight is at the 11 and the dorsal is kind of that negative one where I’m in that frozen.
And I can get a dysregulated nervous system in a lot of ways, but what we call that is just trauma, right? Where, um, something is overwhelming my brain overwhelming my nervous system. And I, I lose the ability to process. Whenever I get a, a memory that’s associated with that or an experience in my day-to-day life that’s associated with that.
I associated with that trauma. Then it’s gonna put me back in that place in my nervous system. So people talk about this all the time. Being triggered, you know, triggered by something, um, traumatic from the past. Well, it has an effect on our nervous system, not just, you know, the way we feel emotion, it can put us into that fight or flight space, or it can put us into that place of shutdown and withdraw or frozen.
That can lead to addictions as an outside source of regulation that I can reach out for something to calm my nervous system down, or to bring it up out of that frozen space. So guys will often say like, oh, I’m was so stressed, I’m stressed. And I just overwhelmed and I need to release or come down from that 11 or stress relief. Or I need to feel something. I was stuck in a depressive state and I had to like shoot up out of that at Boulder recovery, we use the Tena model, which is called trauma-induced sexual addiction. So it linked traumatic events to the dysregulation in your nervous system. And as your nervous system is disregulated, it cries out for coping cries out for relief.
It cries out to regulate. And if I had that early trauma between zero and 20 years old and a maladaptive sexual experience, like early exposure to pornography or, um, molestation or sexual abuse or something like that, and that stuff kinda wires together, that every time I need to cope. I can go to that thing that I was exposed to, and that feels, I feel okay for a little bit.
I feel like comforted or nurtured or calm or peaceful. I, my nervous system comes down or I begin to feel when I, when I was empty or hollow. And as long as if I keep going back to that as a young person into my teenage years and into adulthood, I keep going back again and again and again, again, and now I’m dealing with addiction.
This kind of rut and my brain has been formed and wherever the ditch is dug, the water’s gonna flow. Right. And so, again and again, and again, and then all of a sudden I’m what, what you described as a solution, which what was once, um, wanted, is now needed to feel okay on a day-to-day kind of basis. And that’s the transition between something that’s just coping.
And now that is addiction something that wanted or something that was a solution to a problem of how I felt dysregulated and emotion that I did not like, or was not comfortable. Has now become a problem because of the compulsivity around it and the way in which it is damaging my life.
Carrie: Right. And all of a sudden, there’s, there’s more problems that end up happening, like relationship issues. So do you find that a lot of times brings men into treatment?
Matt: Oh yeah. A classic thing in addiction, right? Like gotta hit rock bottom before you’re gonna really do something about it, but nine times outta 10, you guys are coming to see us. They got caught, but that’s what doesn’t tell the whole story because part of it is they are a relief.
They’re tired, they’re sick and tired, of doing this. They’re sick and tired of living that way. And when they do get caught, their whole life blows up and maybe they’re ready to give it up and maybe they’re not, but they’re tired of living that way. And just living on that rollercoaster too.
So sometimes guys come and see us because they really wanna work on themselves and they want to get better and they wanna find health. And then sometimes more often than not, it’s, it’s a, it’s a crisis, you know, it’s a response to crisis in their relationship,
Carrie: Right. In order to get help for these types of things, you really have to be willing to examine yourself and start to look at some of those painful feelings that you’ve been avoiding and that’s really hard work to do. And so oftentimes people don’t seek that out until their situation becomes too painful. That, that they’re forced to deal with that.
Matt: Yeah. And I think you’re right. And the crazy thing about emotions and trauma is that they’re going on all of the time, whether we acknowledge them or not.
And sure. And if I can like spend decades of just shoving it down and ignoring it. And I think that I’m dealing with it. That’s just false. It’s affecting my life in, in every which way emotions will be dealt with one way or the other. Either we face them and we deal with them and the pain and whatever else around them, or they’re gonna come sideways.
They’re gonna come out as passive-aggressive. They’re gonna come out as rage. They’re gonna come out as anxiety. They’re gonna come. You know, you, you can. Kind of joke around with guys about how, you know, they’ve been, they think that they’ve been dealing with anxiety by using their addiction, but really what they’re doing is just exponentially causing more anxiety in their life. And the thing that they’re trying to get a solution for is creating even more of the same, the irony in that is apparent, but oh man, addiction is going to the same thing again and again, and again, expecting different results. And so you can joke with guys, but it’s deadly serious that if you don’t get treatment, then it’s gonna escalate and it’s gonna get worse for.
Carrie: Right. That makes sense. That makes sense. You talked about this a little bit before, just in terms of regulation of the nervous system. Talk with us a little bit more about that connection that you’ve seen between. The early childhood experiences, the anxiety and the sexual addiction.
Matt: Sure. I kind of talk about it in two ways. Well, there’s attachment wounds that are kind of at the core of this, right? With that tr traumatic attachment wounds. So sometimes the trauma can happen outside the home and the primary caregivers don’t do a great job of dealing with it. Right. They try to ignore it or they try to minimize it or you, Hey, you’re fine.
We’re all fine. Everybody’s fine. And um, sometimes guys will tell me that was more damaging than the trauma that happened outside the home.
Carrie: I’ve heard that as well. Yeah, just the response or lack of response to it.
Matt: Yeah. And, and, and that’s really sad. You know, I worked with a guy who was kidnapped and when the police found him, his parents never brought it up ever again.
And he, that, for him that was more damaging than, than the actual event in the sexual abuse that happened during the kidnapping to have him describe it. There’s kind of that trauma that happens outside the home, but the real damage I think is done with the primary caregiver. So either in that kind of, uh, dismissal or denial or, um, minimization of emotion within the home, which we call like a cold box, the emotions there are cold.
You know, big caregivers have their back turned to the young person. Emotionally vacant would be another phrase there or the hot box where there’s a lot of emotion, but it’s chaos and there’s violence or abuse, uh, physical abuse, emotional abuse, psychological abuse, all the sexual abuse. So in the hot box, the kid is reaching out for connection and support and validation and love and all that stuff.
But in response, they’re getting hurt and they’re getting abused. Even if they’re being told that they’re loved, they’re not being treated that way. And in the cold box, the kids reaching out the same way again and again, and again, to get their needs met, but they’re being ignored or invalidated, or there’s this cold, emotionally vacant response as the parents are distracted by something else and they can’t or want pay attention to, to the young.
So what happens is in both of those scenarios, the kid will reach out again and again and again for connection and validation. And what they’re doing when they’re reaching out for that is they’re. Mom dad or whoever, uh, help me, help me understand my world, help me understand where I’m feeling, help me calm down, nurture me, cultivate me, comfort me.
All of those things. That’s how you develop a healthy nervous system is you co-regulate with a secure and safe person when you’re. As your brain and your nervous system develops. But if you don’t get that and they’re either abusing you or dismissing you or they well, hot box or cold box, then the kid eventually says, this person is not safe.
They’re not consistent. And so I cannot get my needs met through this person. So all guys that I’ve talked to that struggle with sex addiction have either said this out loud, or they’ve said it to themselves. I guess I have to take care of myself.
Carrie: Wow. So I have to be the one to meet my own needs because mom or dad is not available to meet those needs for me.
Matt: Yeah. And so what do I do right. I don’t have this person to co-regulate with, I don’t have this person to help physiologically help me form my, a regulated nervous system. So I have to rely on some, and then there incomes that maladaptive sexual experience, right? Oh, that made me feel good. I didn’t really like that, but it made me feel something and that was kind of exciting or interesting or powerful in some way.
And, and what if I go back there that can really, that, that can change my physiological state, obviously they’re kids and not thinking about it in those terms, but sure. They’ll go back. And they’ll go back again and they’ll go back a couple more times and then as they continue to age, it’ll be more and more and more and more, and it’ll continue to escalate until it’s compulsion or addiction.
Carrie: So, I mean, I think that’s great. I haven’t heard that the hot box cold box explanation, but I really like that. I, I think it does happen. In one of those two extremes in terms of attachment trauma, from what I’ve seen. And, and we have a previous episode of people wanna go back and with Laura Mullis, where we talk about specifically about childhood wounding, and is that the key to unlocking your anxiety, I think is what that show is called, but it’s very interesting, the connections between that, that you’ve made for us and sex addiction because I think a lot of times people look at addiction and their focus of treatment really is on abstinence. Like we need to just get you away from whatever it is. Yeah. And then you’ll be okay, as long as you’re not doing that, as long as that’s not available to you, as long as you’re not engaging with it, just kind of white knuckle get through it. And that’s not really ever dealing with the root cause of the issue.
Matt: Right. And the absence of a compulsive behavior does not make health right. If I’m dealing with an underlying traumatic issue where my nervous system has not formed or developed in a way that is. Healthy or, or lends itself to health, then, then not doing the compulsive behavior is not gonna bring me closer to health.
It’s gonna put more stress on the system. It’s gonna push me into other methods of coping. And that’s where we see guys that white knuckle, like you’re describing it where they’re just. Dry drunk and they’re doing everything to just not do the behavior, but what, like I said, what comes out? Sideways rage, emotional abuse, psychological abuse of their partner.
They’re manipulative, they’re controlling, they’re angry. They’re overwhelmed with all of these other things. And maybe they’re. There’s even, um, comorbidity with alcohol or, or something else to try to help them cope with it. So the, the elimination of the unwanted behavior is never the answer.
Carrie: Yeah. Talk with us about the shame piece, cuz I can imagine that you have Christian men that come there and say, “you know, I spiritually, I am free in Christ and I am a new creation and I’ve been made new and they’ve, I’m sure prayed about this struggle, maybe memorized Bible verses.” And they still feel stuck like in this cycle. And then they’re ashamed because they’re like, I can’t seem to get, get out of it. How do you guys address this?
Matt: On the one hand, Christian men struggle immensely with shame around unwanted sexual behaviors. And on the other hand, it’s not that dissimilar to, to other guys, but the things that are unique to the Christian experiences. I’m not just damaging myself and my own relationships.
I feel a brokenness and a separation in my relationship with God, which is a huge piece or the number one piece of my identity. There’s this spiritual stressor on top of the relational stressor on top of everything else, Christian men are carrying that around as a disruption within their own identity as, uh, men created by God.
For his perfect and for his glory, right? It’s an extra weight on their shoulders. Then, the odd thing is, and I guess it’s not too surprising that theologically, they won’t argue with you that you know, that I’m loved by God and that God forgives me and that God died for me. And that I am a new creation and all the things that you said, Carrie, but functionally, they don’t really act.
They don’t really believe it. So they have theological beliefs on one hand and functional beliefs on the other. So they will look around in the group of, of men that are doing group therapy together. And this, you know, God loves all of you guys. And the subtext there is God loves everybody, except for me, S is by faith for everyone, but me, but I have to prove it.
I have to earn it or the idea. That is sneaky because it’s so close to the truth that sin separates me from God. And that I have a disrupted relationship with God because of this addiction. Paul says in Romans there’s nothing height or depth or life or death or angels or demons that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.
So in a way, sin separates us from God, but Jesus has bridged that. Gap. And then we accept him in relationship and, as our savior and as the justifier and the one who’s made us right before God, then there isn’t anything separating us. And even addiction cannot separate us from God, even an addiction that feels, uh, shameful and dark and isolating.
So part of the treatment for Christian men is bringing into question some of their theological beliefs. And do you actually really believe. And do you function as if you do, and what would it be like if you actually functioned as if these theological beliefs were true? And what we find with Christian men is that trauma is the culprit yet again because trauma causes me to treat God and, and to project onto God, the caregiver relationships that I was wounded by.
So. As fast. Absolutely. Like if you talk to somebody who was abused by a parent and you get down to the nitty-gritty, their functional belief is that God is out to get them, that they are bad and that God wants to punish them or hurt them or withhold good things from them because they’re bad. And they deserve to be punished, which is hot box.
And if they grew up in an emotionally dismissive environment, emotionally, they. They tend to believe that God has his back to them and that they have to perform to get him to demonstrate love and care and warmth and affection for them. And they have to do the right rain dance to get God to respond.
And in both of these scenarios, religion, And superstition weasel their way in where Christian guys would be like, Hey man, I’m doing all the right things. I’m putting all the quarters in the pot machine and on, God’s not doing what I want him to do. I prayed for 10 years to, for him to take away this addiction.
And he’s not, or I’m a missionary or I’m a passion. I devoted my life to this and God is letting me down as if this rain dance and performance is gonna manipulate God into treating me the way that I wanted to. So now issues of resentment have popped up in their relationship with God. So it’s layered and nuanced, but one of the joys of working with Christian men is helping them come into a deeper understanding of the ways in which trauma has polluted, even their relationship with God, and seeing the rule on and, and see renewal around that super.
Carrie: Some of the greatest distances between our head and our heart. You probably have heard someone say that before, so we can know the right things theologically, and yet they haven’t really sunk down into our heart in an emotional level of yes. Like I am a child of God, like really able to sit with that and rest in it versus like, oh yeah, I know I’m God’s child like, well, yeah, I know. Yeah. You know, nothing can separate me from his love. it’s a different level there.
Matt: So, yeah. And that’s a, like, again, a function of the attachment that they experienced. Right. They were told that they were loved or they assumed that they were loved. So like an abusive parent, you know, I’m sorry, I did that.
I’m sorry. I blew up. I’m sorry that blah, blah. You know, I love you, right? No, I love you, right. Oh. And then what’s the kids’ response every time. I used to work with children and, and, and they’ll agree. And they’ll be like, yeah, I, yeah, I know, you know, little littles, little kids assume that their parents love them and that they are gonna respond to them.
The next time, even if all of the evidence tells them that they won’t. So it’s this cognitive understanding of what love is with a lack of experiencing that love. And it’s the same way for the cold box kids. So they talk to guys all the time and they’re like, oh yeah, I have great childhood. Dad came into all my baseball games.
We went on vacation or whatever, but when you get down to. Nitty gritty. Like there was no eye contact. There was no physical affection, no one ever talked about emotions. Everything was, you know, tamped down. And again, they’re being told that they’re loved, but they’re not experiencing that. So why would it be any different than their relationship with God?
My obligation then as a Christian is to assume that God loves me, even when I don’t or have never really experienced that love, cuz I probably wouldn’t know it even if it fit me on.
Carrie: Tell me about the recovery program that you’re involved with and what that looks like.
Matt: Boulder Recovery and our kind of sister program, the secular program begin again, Institute.
Those are 14-day intensive programs where we bring guys from all over the country to stay with us for two weeks. And they all come in together and they all leave together. So it’s kind of cohort model. We do intensive trauma therapy every day of that program. And we also do psychoed around trauma and addiction and attachment wounding and expose them to different trauma modalities so that they can get to the root of their traumatic experiences.
Feel through those experiences, learn how those have developed and perpetuated their a. Then we teach ’em about neurochemistry and dopamine, the, you know, addiction cycles and things like that. And so we, so we’re teaching ’em about trauma and how to feel their feelings. We teach them about the neurochemistry and the brain, and we teach them how their addiction is damaged, their relationships, and how that has developed and how that has happened.
And then we equip them to, uh, begin a strong recovery. So those are kind of the four major beats of the program over those two weeks. And that whole time we’re doing individual trauma sessions and group, uh, trauma work. It’s really helpful for guys. It’s a strong running start into lifelong recovery.
Carrie: Have you, do you have some data surrounding people that you followed up with say at 30 days or 90 days after your program or six months?
How, what has that looked like for you guys as far as success rates?
Matt: We have about like a 94, 90 5% satisfaction rating. It’s really high. You know, I don’t like to talk about that stuff because people that are those are guys that are just leaving the program. They really enjoyed it. And they, they really felt like they made a lot of growth, but they haven’t quite gone back to the real world yet.
And then the guys that we do hear from positively like that’s kind of a select sample size, isn’t it? Where they’re just. That you hear about, right? Yeah. But we do get a lot of positive feedback. We see a lot of success and we have a network of therapists all over the country that we refer to get referrals from.
They keep coming in and, and we hear from our refers all the time that, uh, guys are making breakthroughs and, and are changing their lives when they get back.
Carrie: That’s awesome. So do you see it as like a way for them to really kickstart their recovery process. And then of course, they’re gonna need follow-up like therapy to continue working through some of the hose things.
Matt: You’re not gonna be able to cure. You know, compulsive behavior and addiction in two weeks, but what you can do sure is crack some things open, look at things from a new perspective, do some deep dives because you can’t really do that in weekly therapy. You do, you, you make a, you make some big gains in, in a trauma session, but then you, you know, put your seatbelt back on and you go back to work or.
Go home. And then it’s the kids and job and stress, and it’s hard to get traction sometimes in those deeper issues. And what we can do is keep guys in the work for eight hours, 14 days in a row. And, um, you can see a lot of progress in a lot of change, um, through that kind of method. And so it’s a great avenue for people that are entering into recovery.
It’s a good thing for guys who have been sober for a while and kind of need a tune-up. And it’s a great opportunity for guys who have been sober for a long time, but are still struggling with residual effects of trauma. So we see all three types of guys. What I really enjoy is working with guys that are motivated and, uh, motivated to change, motivated to grow.
And that’s not all of our clients, by the way, like sometimes guys are like, decide they want to come see us register with us. And then somewhere in flight, I assume they decide that they’re not an addict anymore and they show up and they’re like, yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know if this is for me, you know, but at that point we kind of, we kind of got ’em, we got their keys and their phone and everything and, and the rest of the group can say, Hey man, I think this is a serious issue for you too.
So there’s some, sometimes we get some guys that are stuck in denial and, but we can work. We can work through that.
Carrie: So as we’re getting towards the end of the 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
Matt: Yeah, I was thinking about this before, cuz I knew you were gonna ask me that and I just get so much of that in my life. I’m blessed to have that, you know, guys will email me all the time. I have this one guy who just emails me a picture of his chip. Every couple months. So like, he’ll take a picture of an essay. They have these little coins. And he’ll just take a picture. He just send me his one-year coin and no, no text, nothing.
Yeah. It’s like no subject line. It was just like a picture of his, his coin. It’s always fun to get those, but I did get an email last week from a guy who just wanted to be an encouragement and just, Hey, I just wanna remind you that you guys changed my life. He was telling me how he is moved back in with his wife and, um, his kids.
And he’s been sober for nine months. He’s just really killing it. So it’s always encouraging to get those kind of emails and to speak with guys that are finding traction and how. Not just because they’re no longer like in the deep hole of addiction, but because they’re becoming authentic and whole people and the kind of people that you really wanna spend time with, not just people that aren’t doing a thing
Carrie: Yeah. It’s like there was something to replace the addiction with. Like, you can’t just get rid of it. You have to replace, put something back in there, like the health and the wholeness and the peace.
Matt: Yeah. And we just, we say authenticity because, you know, back when those wounds happened, when they were kids, that’s what they lost. They lost the ability to be authentic and they had to perform or hide or cope, but whatever they were doing, they weren’t being themselves. And that, that real and valuable person that was created by God and his image deserves to be returned to and explored and not hidden under this blanket of addiction. We talk about returning to authenticity. And that’s probably the highest compliment for American men is to be told that, you know, oh, that guy, that guy’s real, that guy, that guy’s a real guy. He’s real. Yeah. Awesome. That’s what we get to see. So very exciting.
Carrie: Well, I think that what you’re doing is great.
I hope you guys keep on doing it. And I know that you’re helping a lot of people and hopefully, this podcast will, you know, open people up to this as a hopeful opportunity for maybe someone. Maybe themselves personally, or someone in their life who may be struggling. Thank you so much for coming and sharing today.
Matt: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Carrie. You know, I appreciate what you’re doing too, bringing hope to people that are suffering from compulsivity and anxiety. And yeah, there’s a lot of that in the world right now. So thank you too.
Hope for anxiety and OCD is a production of, By The Well Counseling in Tennessee. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum until next time may you be comforted by God’s great love for you
