I am a Christ follower, wife, and mother. I seek to bring a calm, compassionate, and hopeful approach to my practice. I am direct and transparent, ensuring no guessing games or hidden analyses. I believe in taking my own advice before sharing it with clients as we strive towards physical and emotional health together.
I’ve been a licensed professional counselor since 2009, but I’m still learning every day. I’ve been practicing EMDR since 2013 and became an EMDR consultant in 2019, which is the highest level of training in EMDR.
I also host the podcast “Christian Faith and OCD.” This started with a hesitant “yes” to God in 2020, and has grown into a world wide ministry.
No Longer Plagued by Fear and Depression: A Personal Story with Stormie Omartian
Stormie is a bestselling author who personally connects with readers by sharing experiences and lessons that beautifully illustrate how God changes lives when we learn to trust in Him.
Stormie’s struggle with anxiety and phobias Her horrible experience of growing up with a mother who has mental health disorder Overworking to cope with trauma and depression Finding hope for the first time and surrendering to God What does the process of forgiveness look like for Stormie The power of praying through fear
From Ashamed to Advocate: A Personal Anxiety Story with Jeff Allen
“I deal with anxiety almost every day at some level. And sometimes it’s worse than, or sometimes it’s better than other times, but anything to help people understand that they’re not alone.”
Jeff Allen, a mental health advocate and host of Simple Mental Health Podcast shares his journey through anxiety, how he overcame shame and stigma around seeking help and taking medication.
How Jeff discovered he had an anxiety disorder.
Backlash he received from churchgoers for opening up about his mental health condition.
Spiritual doubt process that he went through
Prayer, medication and therapy
His journey of spiritual deconstruction and reconstruction
A Personal OCD Story of Experiencing God’s Presence and Grace with Peyton Garland
“OCD has been the gateway to God and grace for me.” Peyton Garland author of Not So By Myself shares her story of OCD and her journey of going to therapy.
After seeing a therapist, her mother and grandmother followed after her and sought professional help for themselves.
Peyton’s experience of contamination OCD
What it was like to go to therapy for the first time
Getting help with brainspotting (type of therapy)
Growing up in a strict church culture and how her faith changed over the years as she grew to know God.
Growing up in home with a parent who has PTSD
Ripple effect on her family after she decided to seek help
How Peyton’s husband works with her on compulsions
God breaks into lonely places. He works best in the mess.
Panic Attacks, OCD, and God: A Personal Story with Mitzi VanCleve
Author Mitzi VanCleve shares her own personal story of experiencing anxiety, panic attacks, and OCD and ultimately, how God has used these things for good in her own life.
Obsessions Mitzi experienced even as a young child
Mitzi’s experience with scrupulosity OCD
How she made the decision to take mental health medication as a Christian
Experiences of mental health stigma from Christians
Learning about panic attacks from a magazine articl
Wrestling with God about having OCD
Carrie’s Story of Anxiety in Dating with Now Husband Steve
Carrie and Steve talk about anxiety during the dating process and Steve involvement in helping Carrie work through it.
Carrie’s Anxiety about putting herself out there to date and how that brought her back to therapy
Challenges of Christian dating after a divorce
Accepting the anxiety and difficulty trusting as part of the process of getting closer
Advice to singles in the church
One Therapist’s Story of Discovering Her Scrupulosity OCD with Rachel Hammons
How Rachel discovered she had been struggling with scrupolisity OCD.
How to determine if this is a normal level of spiritual concern or could be OCD
What is Scrupulosity OCD?
Learning how to sit with discomfort and ambiguity
Getting to know the character of God and filtering information through that lens
I had the privilege of interviewing Shelly Rainey, a mom, motivational speaker and author. Shelly shares with us her journey through anxiety, grief and loss and how she relied on her faith.
Going through a deep, dark depression and how God carried her through.
Learning to deal with her situation differently.
Seeking professional help for her anxiety and depression
How God slowly restored her.
Inspiring others through her book, The Fragile Heart.
Hope for Anxiety and OCD, episode 39. On today’s episode, we have a personal story with Shelly Rainey. Shelly has a pretty amazing story about the connection between anxiety and grief and loss. I was blown away by her story and how much she has overcome with the help of the Lord. So without further ado, let’s get into the interview.
Carrie: Shelly, welcome to the show and tell us a little bit about yourself.
Shelly: Well first, thank you so much, Carrie for having me on your show. I really appreciate it. Well about me. Let’s see. I am a mom of a beautiful 16-year-old daughter, a wife of a super amazing husband. And I’m also the author of the inspirational book.
The Fragile Heart and hosted The Turning Point Podcast. And recently I launched The Inspired Life by SLR and basically, all that is, is just a ministry that’s geared towards women who are trying to navigate through pain and depression and grief and all of that. And what I do is I offer a resource. And the community to help during those rough times because you know, when you’re going through hard times like that, the worst feeling is the fact that you feel like you’re alone. Right. What I try to do is just basically say you’re not alone.
We have a whole community here that we’re basically wanting to help in any way we can, whether it’s through an encouraging blog, or some of the free resources that I have through eBooks or the podcast or anything.
And, yeah, it’s great. And I just launched it while maybe three weeks ago. So it’s brand new.
Carrie: Wow. That is. Yes. Okay. So you wanted to come on and tell us a little bit about your own personal experience with anxiety and depression. Yes. I basically have experienced anxiety and depression at different points in my life. And I can just remember dealing with a little bit of it when I was a teenager around the age of 16. And I don’t know if that was just like a typical thing to just have these depressing moments, but I did. And that was like the first time. But most of the time I can say that feelings of depression and all of that and anxiety was usually attached to for me traumatic situation. And for me, I’ve lost three children.
I remember I was about 27 when I lost my first daughter. She was still born when I was about seven and a half months pregnant. And I recall that was one of the worst times for me when it comes to dealing with depression because it lasts such a long time.
And it had gotten to the point where I was tired of dealing with the pain and the sadness, and I just wanted it to go away, but I was at a dangerous point. I was at a dangerous point with it where I actually considered suicide. And because I just wanted the pain to stop. Of course, you know, I grew up in a family where we were taught to rely on our faith, you know, and trust God through all of the hard circumstances.
And, you know, watching my parents, they were like the living examples. When hard times hit, you know, you just rely on your faith and God carries you through. But for me, that was just a dark time for me. And I felt like it was kind of difficult to rely on my faith and the foundation that I grew up in because it was just, it felt like I was overwhelmed by the grief, by the sadness, by the depression, the anxiety, all of it.
And it was pretty difficult. And I can recall just getting to that point where I was like I can’t take it anymore, but it’s something how, when you’re in the darkest place and it’s like your foundation that comes back to you. I can recall sitting down in the floor with a bottle of pills and I just stopped and I began to pray and I said, God, please help me.
That’s all I could do. Please help me and let me just tell you instantly, it’s just like I felt overwhelming sense of peace and I’m like, wow. I was like, I was getting a big hug at that moment. I was like, wow, this is a feeling that I haven’t had in a long time. And I can recall, you know, just going through that and having the support of my family and everything where I was able to come up out of it, of course, but it just took a long time.
And then as time went on, I had a miscarriage maybe two and a half years later, and I felt a little bit of depression coming back. But it wasn’t something that basically overtook me because I was getting married three weeks later. I’m getting married and my life-changing. I think that kind of overshadowed my feelings, where I was able to tuck them away and compartmentalize.
And focused on my wedding, you know what I mean? And I was good, but of course, every now and again, the sadness will come back up. And with me, I was going through a situation where the doctor said I could not have children, and it wasn’t too long after my husband and I were married.
I found out I was pregnant again, and I was petrified. And I was like I can’t endure that again. I can not go through another loss. I’ve already had two. Have an enemy to do another one. And so we prayed and let me just tell you, it was like, God carried me through that entire pregnancy because even though it was rough and I was on bed rest almost the entire time, but that’s where our miracle daughter. She was born healthy and she’s like I said, she’s 16 now. Yes. Yes. And so it’s just like, everything is going along just great. But I remember back in 2008, I found out we were expecting again, and this time it was a little bit different because although I delivered very early, I think we were about seven and a half months pregnant again.
And our daughter, Victoria, she was one pound four and a half ounces. She was very tiny, but the doctor said she had a strong heart and everything was going great. And I was just so excited because I’m like, yes, another miracle. God did it again. This is just great. 21 days later, she took a turn for the worst and she passed away. And let me just tell you. I’m at a different place in my life when this was going on because I. relied on my faith more. My faith had increased three years, you know what I mean?
Carrie: So it was different going through that loss than going through the earlier loss things.
Shelly: Exactly. And I think with God showing me the miracle of my daughter had a lot to do with that.
You know what I mean? And so after this loss, I didn’t feel hopeless, but sadness was still there, you know, depression didn’t grip me the same way, but it kinda saw that I had my moments and I said, you know what? I’m going to deal with this situation a little bit differently. And that just began to write just because I couldn’t sleep at night. I’d set up with cry a lot and the question came to my mind. It seemed like Lord, you chosen me to endure a lot of pain and I don’t understand why. And I just began to write and write and write and write. And next thing I know, actually finished my first book, which is The Fragile Heart. And I said, you know what I want to do with this situation? And all we know that healing, it’s a process, right?
It doesn’t happen overnight. But I figure if I just continue to move forward with something that I could eventually get to the place of his. And so, you know, after the book was released and everything, I remember God telling me, just share your story. And so I just began speaking at conferences and events, and I had a lot of book signings and it’s just like God just kept me busy for a couple of years with that.
And just sharing my story and just watching the effect that it had on it. A lot of different people, I’m just like, wow. You know, and it’s like, as time went on, I began to understand a little bit of why, just a little bit. And I would get out there Carrie, and I would just speak to large crowds and just get out there and talk about hope and healing and restoration and go back to my hotel room and just collapsed in tears.
Because I’m sharing my story and I’m believing it and I trust God, but that goes to show you it’s a process because I was not fully delivered myself. I was still dealing with those times. And with God showed me something through all that. It’s like my faith increased each time and I found that I had to lean on him more and more, even more so than before.
And with that, if you can imagine just feeling like you’re totally broken, but bit by bit God was slowly but surely restoring me. But in the end, it was just like I was the stronger person with more determination, more substance. It was just like, he made me all over again and that’s the awesome part about it.
And so now when I look back being on the other side of it, I’m like, okay, God, you actually really revealed the why. So I get it. It was bigger than me, basically. It was much bigger than me.
Carrie: How do you deal with going through that publicly. I know there are a lot of women out there that have miscarriages very early. And so they don’t necessarily have to tell anyone and they tend to suffer in silence. I think more and more women are being more open about pregnancy loss, which is a beautiful thing because a lot of women go through it. However, when you’re seven and a half months along, people are already doing things like throwing you showers, probably you have baby stuff in your house. And now all of a sudden you have to tell these people that Hey. Our child is passed away. What was the element of everything going through it publicly hard.
Shelly: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And with my family, we’re very close-knit family. We have a very large family and it’s like, they have gone through the entire process with me.
And so, you know, with everyone knows my history and everything I had gone through. It’s like they were kind of sold on pins and needles, of course, but with my daughter, Victoria, after she was born, I mean, my great, my grandparents flew in from Texas and different people flew in just to meet her because they knew that I endured so much.
So it was a beautiful time in the beginning, but like you said, having to walk that out publicly. It was hard. And with me, I am the type of person I’ll put on a smile and unless you know me, you would think I’m okay. And so I would have this instant thing where I’m okay. I don’t want you to be sad about it. It’s okay. I’m going to be all right. I will go into that very quickly.
Carrie: Yeah. The brave face that you put on for everybody.
Shelly: Absolutely. So that’s how I dealt with it publicly put on the brave face and when they see me, they’re like, okay, she’s all right. She’s going to be fine. But in private I fall in the pieces.
And so, yeah, it was pretty tough, but I think the hardest part for me, especially when we lost Victoria, was my daughter. Hannah was so excited about being a big sister. She’s like, I’m a big sister. And she used to wear this one shirt all every day. She wanted to wear it every day. It’s like, she says I’m going to be a big sister.
And the sad part was coming home and having to tell her. Your baby sister’s in heaven. I was in my brain. I’m trying to figure out how do I word this? How do I explain to a three-year-old? And that’s how I put it to her. I’m like she’s not coming home, but she’s an angel and he’s watching over us now. And of course my daughter asks all of the questions.
Well, why can’t I see her? I just saw her the other day, you know, that type of thing. So that was difficult. However, as time went on, we were able to deal with it better. In the older she had gotten, my daughter, she began to really begin to accept and things like that.
Carrie: So talk to us about maybe the intersection between like anxiety and grief. Obviously, you talked a little bit about anxiety when you would get pregnant again, it was like how is this going to go?
Shelly: Yes, the anxiety. I think that’s torture. I’m just going to tell you that, that feeling of just anxiousness, just all of the time.
And it was just horrible for me and grief, you know, that’s the sadness, that’s the heaviness, but the anxiousness and the feeling like you’re going to have a panic attack and your breakout and sweats. And it’s just that whole just uneasy. That portion was very, very difficult for me.
And I actually experienced it recently and about to 2019, I believe because I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease and I was put on a lot of different medications in this one particular medication was by way of infusion. And everything totally changed for me and the career I worked in for more than 20 years, I had to stop. And it was just so many different changes going on, but one of the side effects that even of the medication was anxiety and depression. And let me just tell you, on top of dealing with my whole scenario changing and sometimes going through excruciating pain, all of these things and to have anxiety on top of all of that, I felt like, oh my gosh, I felt like I’m losing my mind here. I was just always on edge, you know? And I actually began, of course, I prayed about it and you know, God help me deal with this and please give me peace. But I also began to seek professional help because I’m like I need something to bring this thing under control.
Carrie: Yeah, I think that that’s really important part of a lot of people’s journey. And one of the reasons that we have this podcast in the first place is like to reduce shame surrounding getting help because sometimes people in the church think, well, I have God and God is all I need. I can just talk to the pastor about it and I’m good. And I don’t need like therapy therapies for like, you know, the really crazy people or something.
Shelly: Yeah, exactly. It’s just like the stigma that comes along with it. And I can recall going to the doctor because I told my doctor, I said I can’t deal with this any longer. And she suggested, and she said, I know you’re a woman of faith.
And she had that talk with me like it’s okay. It does not mean that you’re trusting God any less. The doctors are here to help. Just like you go to the doctor, you come see me. It’s okay to get help. And it’s like, okay. And with her actually helping me get through that whole stigma, which was awesome. It helped. Let me just tell you it helped a lot.
Carrie: That is awesome. I’m so glad that she was able to kind of point you in that direction. Were there specific things that you learned either in therapy or just through this journey that you found helpful and kind of helping your body calm down?
Shelly: Yes, it was a couple of things and of course, spiritually I’ve learned some.
Things and God’s hands even more because with my personality, like to control everything. I like to be in control of my time and control of everything that’s going on around me. But of course, when you’re dealing with life, sometimes it’s difficult to control and it’s hard to maintain control.
And I find myself having to lean on God and having to relax and have the meditation time and my prayer time and just go into that quiet place in as far as going to therapy, they taught me how to, you know, with the breathing exercises and things like that. Just a little relax.
It’s okay to just allow yourself to relax. And for those times where I just felt like I could not get it together. It’s those are the times I really had to pray hard and said, okay, I need your help here. And he would always show up for me. I have to say that because sometimes we feel like we’re in this battle, especially when you’re laying down and your mind’s racing and everything’s going.
And then when you’re at a place where you say, you know what, God, I’m going to release. I gave it to you. I’m going to leave it there. And I’m just going to relax and get some sleep because if you have it under control. I mean, it just had to be a place where I went to in my faith where I had to totally trust God because sometimes we trust them a little bit, but we’ll give him something, but then we’ll grab it back.
And then we put our hands in it and that was me. Let me just tell you, through dealing with anxiety and depression. It taught me how to really lean and depend on God and trust him to work out the circumstances that were going on around me.
Carrie: That’s really good. I think there is something to be said about that connection between anxiety and us, trying to control all the elements of our lives.
And it’s impossible. It’s absolutely impossible. We can’t control relationships that we’re in. We can’t control our health. We can’t control life tragedies like you were talking about. And so when we learned that, okay, that control stuff is God’s department and I can really just rest. He’s king of the universe.
He’s got it under control and I can take that step back and just, just breathe. It helps us so much. Yes, it does. It does.
So, how do you feel like specifically, this journey has grown your faith? I know that you’ve talked about it a little bit, but has it affected how you see God?
Shelly: Yes. And it goes back to what I was just saying about trusting him more. I’ve learned to trust the process. I’ve learned to just kind of go with it.
Because in this life there’s a process and it’s like, God has a plan already predestined. He knew back in 2008, when I lost my daughter that I would be in this place right now at this particular moment, sharing that story and all the while when I was going through it, I’m right in the middle of it, I don’t see anything, but what’s in my immediate surrounding and my immediate view. I can’t see down the line, but he can. And so what I’ve learned is basically trust the process. And I could not say that to you some years ago, because back then I know I was like, okay, I don’t understand what’s going on. I need to figure it out. I desperately need to figure it out, but not so much anymore because again, Through time through going through various situations and God’s showing up each time remaining consistent how he is. It’s just like, I’m learning like, okay. If I put it in his hands, he’s got it. He already knows how it’s going to work out in the end.
I don’t know. But you know, eventually, I’ll get there, but it’s just, again, again, for me, I just learned to lean on God more and just trust the process.
Carrie: Yeah, I think there’s an element too, of thankfulness of what we do have that grows so much when we’ve been through tragedy and loss.
Shelly: Absolutely. It’s just like for me, the smaller things, just enjoying life, just enjoying family, just making memories, making the most of things that happen because when my dad passed away a couple years ago, one thing I learned from that was just continue to make memories as opposed to trying to always… because sometimes we have this idea and especially when it comes to our parents like they’re going to be here forever.
You don’t fathom that they would actually leave us, you know? And that was the case with when my dad, you know, it was so unexpected, but after, you know, going through that circumstance, it was like, okay, I need to appreciate the small moments now. Every moment that I spend with my mom or my family or whomever, it’s a moment to make memories.
And so I’m more appreciative of time now. Right?
Carrie: That’s good. I think that that’s really good. And it’s a good reminder and lesson for all of us. Absolutely. So towards the end of the podcast, I like to ask every guest to share a story of hope, which is a time where you received hope from God or another person.
I feel weird asking you that question because I feel like that was our whole episode today. So I don’t know if you have anything else that you want to share, or maybe you can share about what it’s been like speaking to other people and sharing your story.
Monica: Yeah, absolutely. Because I think about this one in particular moment, and I remember I was doing a conference. And just share my story again, like I was talking about earlier and I can recall, you know, just kind of, so they’re going through everything. And at the end, I had this moment where we had music playing and I had everybody just to write down something they were going through and ball it up in a piece of paper and kind of toss it in the basket, in the front of the room.
So we’ve gone around and the music is going and this young lady came up to me afterwards. And she had tears in our eyes and I will never forget her, but she grabbed my hand and she said, I thought that my circumstance was hard. She said, when I came here, I felt hopeless. I felt like I’m just going because my friend invited me.
She was, and she told me, she said, but listening to your story and listening to, you know, she could hear the pain and different things she said, but talking about how. We’re able to overcome. And she said I’m watching that big smile on your face. Now she said, I feel I’m leaving, feeling lighter. I’m leaving feeling with a sense of hope.
And she hugged me. She said I appreciate you for just getting up here and just do your bravery to share your story and thank you so much. And it just gripped my heart because it wasn’t necessarily about me, but I just felt in that moment that, wow, God used me as a vessel to actually help somebody else. And that was just the most amazing part of everything. And this is what it’s all about. You can just reach one person. It’s worth it.
Carrie: That’s awesome. Are you essentially in full-time ministry now?
Shelly: Basically Yes, basically. I just started the new online ministry with the community of women who basically have gone through pain, whether it’s losing a loved one or divorce or.
I mean, because we endure a lot of different heart situations. And it comes from different areas, but it’s all the same pain. And that’s the area of ministry that God has me in.
Carrie: Awesome. We’ll make sure to put links to where people can find you and find the book if they’re interested. Thank you so much for sharing your story. I think that that’s going to be impactful to people.
Shelly: Well, thank you so much again, for having me. I really, really enjoyed being able to share my story and just knowing that it just, hopefully prayerfully will be able to help somebody.
Do you want to stay most up-to-date about what is happening with Hope for Anxiety and OCD? You can follow us on Instagram. We are at Hope for Anxiety and OCD podcast, which I’m pretty sure is like one of the longer Instagram handles I’ve seen. And we’re also on Facebook as well, facebook.com/hopeforanxietyandocd. Thanks for hanging out and listening today.
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 guest is a certified life coach, author and motivational speaker, Monica McLaurine. Monica and I had a great conversation about what self-care really means and why it’s so important. Monica also shares some insights on how to help kids deal with bullying based on her book, I Told My Kid To Fight Back.
What are examples of self-care?
Learning to do things a different way
Self-care is for everybody. How do men practice self-care differently than women?
Hope for Anxiety and OCD, episode 38. On today’s episode, I am talking with Monica McLaurine (see our show notes for spelling on that) about self-care. What in the world is self-care all about. We hear a lot of people talk about it. It’s a big buzzword. And I feel like this episode is timely right now because people are coming back to their rate of busy-ness maybe that they had before COVID, hopefully not as busy, but getting back into routines and activities that we were doing prior to all of the shutting down and restrictions, more places are open and more activities are available.
Monica is also going to talk with us a little bit at the end about some books that she’s written and talks she’s given on bullying.
Carrie: Monica, welcome to the show. Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Monica: Hello Carrie. Thanks for having me. My name is Monica McLaurine. And I am a certified life coach, and I’m also a two-time author, two books, and I also have some motivational speaking experience. So I am a lover of Christ and a follower of Christ.
And I’m just excited to be here to talk with you on today.
Carrie: I’m excited to have you on, I think we’re going to have a good conversation today on self-care. So, this is something that a lot of people are talking about. You know, it’s a buzz word. “Oh, you gotta take time for yourself. You gotta have self-care.”
So how do you define that for people?
Monica: When I think about self-care is simply what it says is taking care of yourself. And most times people don’t even realize that they’re not taking care of. They don’t realize it, it comes in many forms. There are several different types of self-care, whether it’s physical mass, where you may get out and take a walk or go sit under the stars at night, bird watching whatever it is out and about, or whether it’s emotional, saying no, which is sometimes some things that I struggle with saying no, whether it’s social.
When I say social, this is one of the things that I’ve really, really struggled with is asking for help. A lot of times, like myself, I’m just going to talk about myself. I am happy to help anybody else until I just can’t do anymore. People will ask me, do you need some help with that? I’m like, oh, I’m okay. I’m fine. I have it.
Asking for help, that’s a partisan, right? A lot of people are still working from home currently. So when you think about your environment, decluttering your office or your home. That’s a big thing. My sister-in-law, bless her heart, she is an organizational, very clean person and things are in disarray. She can’t tolerate it.
It pushes her into anxiety. And also going along with that, when you think about professional self-care, if you’re working from home, are you actually taking a lunch break? Are you actually taking a break? Oftentimes I’m guilty of going downstairs to give me something to eat. And then I turned around and come right back upstairs and I’m eating and I’m working.
And so don’t take that mental break and it’s a necessity for self-care or even if it’s just spiritual, meditating. I just recently started meditating because I didn’t understand it at first like what is that? But the sittings feel and allowing yourself to get in the process of being calm because I do suffer from anxiety. So I had to try some different things to make sure that I took care of Monica and meditation was part of that.
Carrie: Just the concept of slowing things down. I think that’s probably our biggest barrier to self care is learning how to hit the pause button. That was something essentially, in some ways we had to do it during this time of pandemic and Coronavirus, things did have to slow down. What I’m seeing now is that like, when we’re recording this, we’re approaching the summer and people are getting vaccinated and they’re getting out more and it’s like I turned to my husband like a week ago and was like, I feel like we’re in pre-pandemic life like our calendar is actually filling up with stuff.
And so it’s an opportunity for us to have a conversation and to say, Hey, where’s our date night at on this calendar? We’re running over here and doing some for church. And then we’re doing something with our friends over here. We’re married. This is important. This is a priority. And part of that, what you’re talking about with the relationship in the social domain, like making sure that you have time for the people that are most important to you life.
Monica: We had to learn to do things a different way. If you did a date night, date night might not be out of the restaurant, but it might be in the backyard. Or if you’d like to go out with your friends and do a happy hour, do do it on zoom. You really had to learn to do things a different way.
Carrie: Right. And those social connections. I think what this has taught us are so important for ourselves like we were made to live in community. And that’s an important thing. I loved what you said there earlier about boundaries and saying no to things in order to take care of yourself. It’s that whole, you’ve got to put on your own oxygen mask on the airplane before you put one on your child. And it’s interesting to me that on the flights that I’ve been on. I haven’t flown in a while, but the flights that I’ve been on, they come around and they look at each person it’s like a real serious thing. It’s like, okay, now I understand that you need to put on your own oxygen mask first
Monica: And we help anybody else until you help yourself first. I
Carrie: f you can’t breathe, that’s not good situation. And so many times we find ourselves in the busyness or the rush of love whether it’s owning our own business or raising kids or serving at the church. And the next thing we know, we’re like emotionally have no time to just sit and rest and breathe and reflect. For me, I know that those periods are what I need to get refueled and recharged to be able to go out and do the other things that I do, especially because I’m an introvert. So there’s this balance. And we had a whole podcast on introversion. If you haven’t listened to it, you know, definitely go back and listen to it because I loved that one. That was one of my favorite, just so identified with it, you know, just needing the time away from people. So that you can go back and engage, you know, with others is yes. Yes. At your own space and your own speed. One thing I did in terms of boundaries recently for self-care. I’ll just share a personal example.
Mother’s day, this year was really hard for me. I have a history of having foster children. I wanted to go to church, but at the same time, I didn’t want to be balling all over the place and, you know, snotting on everybody. So I kind of made this agreement with my husband because he was gonna be greeting that day.
And I said, Hey, I’m going to come to church and I’m not going to greet with you. And I’m not going to stay around and hang out after I’m probably going to be pretty emotional. It’s just a day where I think about, you know, my foster children and missing them. And that’s my context of being a mom since I don’t have my own little.
And this is kind of what I need. I need to just kind of go in, right when service starts, sit in the service, get the word, get the worship, and then I need to leave. I don’t need to kind of hang around and, and cry or anything like that because I know other people are going to be super happy and celebrating.
And I certainly believe there is room there’s room in church for tears. Don’t get me wrong, but it’s kind of just one of those situations where for me, that was what I needed to take care of myself. I needed to not be around people at that point, I needed to go to the car and get my tissues and cry and have a conversation with God and kind of finish up.
That was my finishing of the worship service was in the car and that’s okay. And I didn’t have to feel bad or guilty about that whereas I think in the past, I would have felt like. Oh, I’ve got to feel happy because everybody else around me is happy and I need to be really like celebrating moms. And, you know, you have a mother and you should be thankful.
You have a mother. I mean, there’s so many conversations I think I would have had with myself in the past, but I just like created this space in this room to just have my feelings and take care of myself and do what I needed to do. And that was really the best fit for me.
Monica: Absolutely. And it’s great that you realize that it’s okay to feel like that.
A lot of people like you said, feel guilt or feel like you have to be a certain way. Everybody’s entitled to how they feel. And that’s how you felt at the moment. And you empowered yourself to set those boundaries. That allows you to feel how you feel and that’s awesome. And it’s great that you were able to do that for yourself.
Carrie: Thank you. Why is this topic important for you personally? Is this something that you had view struggled with burnout in the past or with not taking care of yourself?
Monica: Absolutely. I was always on the go go, go here there. And working in my daytime job. I was all over the community, going to the office of one over here that they’ll do this particular program.
And then I’m fighting traffic to go to work. I’m fighting traffic to get home from work. I mean, that would be so many times that I will pull in front of my house. And I would just sit there for like 20, 30 minutes. It’s like I couldn’t move. I was like exhausted. And one of the things that I realized that my body would get to the point where it’s really sick of me. It’s like, oh, okay.
You won’t slow down? Okay. I’m going to slow you down. And it shuts me down for like two weeks. I’ll get bronchitis, I’ll get like really sick and why I have no other choice but to sit down. So if I can avoid that, I had to do something different in order to avoid that because I don’t like being sick. I like being able to do what I want to do when I want to do it.
So it was very important for me, not only for my physical, it was important for my mental, I mean, just burning out, just exhausted, just getting to the point where I had nothing else to give. I was like there’s gotta be a different way. It’s got to be a different way. I can do this. And so that calls me to really look into, see what self-care really meant and what it involves.
Carrie: I’m glad you brought up that physical aspect of illness because there was a lady that I worked with many, many years ago. She was in her thirties and she got shingles and it was really due to stress because she was working seven days a week. And our bodies, we have to listen to that. God gives us these cues that when our bodies are run down, they’ll let us know.
Oh, I just feel like I need to rest today or I need to slow down or I’m getting sick all the time like you were saying. We’ve got to listen to those cues and signals of like a warning sign to take better care of ourselves.
Monica: Yeah. Shingles is very painful. I’ve had shingles, you know, my mom had had. As has shingles is a very painful experience to go through.
And so we have enough hustle and bustle as it is. So why get yourself to the point where you got to add on where you get sick or you get shingles or your blood pressure goes up, or you have heart issues. We’ve got to learn to do things, to take care of ourselves because if we don’t take care of ourselves, who we are?
And ultimately we can’t take care of anybody else or be there for anybody else. If we are not mentally, emotionally prepare and rested and whatever it takes to make sure we’re getting that self-care that we need.
Carrie: Right. One of the things that you and I talked about before we had you come on, the show was that there’s this concept, maybe with males where they hear the word self-care, and they’re thinking about some women that are painting their nails or going and getting a pedicure. Tell us a little bit about that like, how do some of the men maybe that you work with, or that, you know, practice self care?
Monica: It’s really funny that you asked me that. I guess a couple of months ago, I did an experiment on my Facebook pack page asking me, and what do you do for self-care? And the responses were all over the place.
They didn’t really think about it like what is self care? And then you had somewhere the guys were saying, well, that’s girls, that’s not something that. You know, we as men do, then some talked about it. They’d like to go get a hair cut or they like me, and like to get pedicures too. I had a lot of people that said that they said they go and work out or go play video games.
But only if you said that they will take the time to go and talk to somebody about what they’re going through. That is kind of what I expected, but it makes me sad because everybody needs to be, everybody needs to talk through something with someone else. Everybody needs a confidence, I don’t a confidant.
I don’t care who you are. And that is a part of self-care. All of that is a part of self-care. It is in no way strictly for female. It’s is for everybody. And it really made me think what I add a suggestion yesterday, just yesterday. They said, well, maybe we need to call it something else. So it doesn’t seem like that’s just for women, but it also makes me sad.
I’m wondering if we, as society has created an environment for me and when they feel like they can’t do certain things. That they masculine traits them that they shouldn’t do certain things like I saw something today. They said, what kind of man goes to celebrate has a birthday dinner?
I’m like, what you, yeah,
Carrie: just these, like, I don’t know, man-made expectations that we put on men. Like somehow you have to be a Superman.
Monica: Right. And when you think about it and I have been fortunate and I’m honored that some guys feel like they can talk to. And they’re going through something and they’re frustrated and of course, you know, the life coach had me and I’m trying to talk to them while they’re going through.
And then they’re so in a zone while I realized I had to just stop and just listen. Met them, you know, they will say, well, who are we supposed to go to the top to where we’re going through something we’re frustrated, what are we supposed to do? We don’t have the opportunity. And they’re so afraid that if they allow themselves to become vulnerable, that it will be brought up later and thrown in their face, you know?
So I wanted them to see the different options and what self-care looks like. And not only that, they’re entitled to do it as a human being and it is needed. It’s okay to go to sit. I call it couch time to go and sit on someone’s couch and have a conversation and to talk to someone to help you think through it because counseling is not anything for somebody to tell you what to do is to help you to work through it, to find out what’s best for you.
And I am very open about my experience of going and getting my couch time, going to therapy. That was the best thing I ever did in my life. It amazed me because me sharing that I’ve done it. Other people said, well, I went to cause it was like almost like a shame.
So I was like, yeah, I went to and I mean, I’ve helped other people close to me and I’ll help you look for something. You know, if you have insurance, it’s just like getting insurance, you know, in most cases, you know, find you somebody who might take your insurance, or even if, you know, they don’t, a lot of times they will work with you, you know, or maybe offer some free sessions, anything.
So just trying to get where their mind is to get them thinking about what that is, and then not being afraid or shame to do it so that the men, it has been interesting talking to them and listening to them and what their thoughts are, what they felt like society felt like that’s and stuff.
Cause it’s not for me. They should just be okay. That should be there, man, up. Just do it. So it’s pretty interesting.
Carrie: Counseling can definitely be a part of self-care for sure. Mental and emotional health. There’s something about just saying it out loud, sometimes all these things that you’ve been thinking in your head or that you’re convinced of and needing an outside perspective to say I’m not so sure about that. What about, you know, what about this way? Have you thought about it? You know, this way or, oh, that’s, I know you’re convinced of that, but that’s not how I see it. When you tell it to me, you know, you kind of say it back to them. Okay. So you’re saying this it’s, it’s just interesting and can be really freeing.
I know that there are things that come out when I either start talking about something or writing about that I didn’t even realize consciously, I was thinking. Just all of a sudden it was like, oh, oh, I guess I do. I guess I do feel angry about that now that I’ve said all that, but I didn’t realize that was bothering me so bad.
Monica: Right. Until you brought that up. Yeah. I don’t like that either.
Carrie: Right. Yeah. So I know that sometimes Christians can push back against self-care and say, okay, well, we’re really supposed to care for other people, love one another. And that needs to be our primary focus. We’ve got to push this focus in on yourself.
That’s selfish and we need to kind of shove that to the side. What would you say to that?
Monica: Yes, like I mentioned earlier, It seems to be a stigma attached to self-care and going to get help and saying that you need help. And I think it’s unfortunate because I am a believer. I am a love of Christ. I’m a follower of God, but I also believed the God allows in his place, people on this earth to also reach us on the earthly level.
He allows us to access doctors. People have different specialties and he allows that to happen. And he put those here for us to use them. And it’s not a bad thing. It is okay. It doesn’t minimize your relationship with Christ. It doesn’t say that you don’t trust your belief. You don’t trust your relationship with Christ. It has no negative relation to your belief or your relationship. So those things they help, they give you somebody that you can go and talk to. That is completely safe. Whatever happens in there, unless you’re talking about hurting yourself and somebody else. You got to put that in there.
It’s a safe place. You don’t have to worry about spilling everything and then going outside and your friends know what happened, but I went to my first therapy session, it’s crazy because I went because I was encouraging someone else to go. And I was like, okay, well, if you go out, go right. So I go in with what I wanted to talk about and what I was going to discuss in there.
And while I was in my first therapy session, I heard God speak to me clearly and said, she cannot help you unless you tell her everything. I heard him. He said that to me.
Carrie: It’s huge.
Monica: it was huge because things that I thought no longer were an issue or issues that I had in my childhood, all that had to come up out. All of it had to come up.
And I remember I was in tears. I was just like, oh my God, how am I supposed to go to work after this. But you can’t change what you don’t acknowledge.
Carrie: That’s true.
Monica: And one of my favorite people, I say, she’s my mentor, but she doesn’t know it. And she doesn’t even realize it exists. Yama, Vanzant, where she said, villains buried alive, don’t die.
Carrie: That’s true.
Monica: So I had to get all of that up because that affected how I was in adulthood, things that happened as a child. I had to get that up. I had to get it out so I could deal with it, acknowledged that it was a problem. And now I can start my healing process. So I think that was important for me to hear because like I say, going to get therapy or sitting down, talking to a life coach or any of that, you don’t have to worry about being expressed or shared with anyone else, but my therapist and I love her, she helped me talk through it. She helped me to see it. Okay, well, this is what you’re doing. If this is what you want to go and do in the future, how can you do it? And you’re doing this and this, how can you have this and this?
And how are these things going to help you get to what you’re wanting to do? It helped me to map out, okay, well maybe I need to cut something else out or maybe I need to carve some time out for myself so I can think, or maybe I need the carve some time out to where I can’t always go and take care of someone else that I need to do some things for me in order.
So I can share those things with other people. And the biggest thing I remember is just hearing God clearly say she can’t help you, If you don’t tell her everything. I felt like that was God giving me permission.
Carrie: One of the things that I realized when I was looking at self-care and the Bible.
I think it’s the beginning of Mark. There’s a point where everyone’s trying to come to Jesus and they’re trying to get healed, you know, and they’re hearing about some of the miracles that he’s doing and he actually quietly slips away from the crowd and goes away to like pray and to be with God. So there’s this sense that Jesus even models for us, times where people really needed him or wanted something from him.
And he chose at that moment in time not to give it to them or not to continue to give until he got recharged through prayer and through that connection with God. I think that that’s a great model and example for us. The other thing that I think about, and I wrote a blog post on self-care a while back, I don’t know if I ever transitioned it over to the Hope for Anxiety and OCD blog, but I’ll try to do that if I haven’t already. It’s on self care.
And I talked in there about, you know, there, the second greatest commandment is love your neighbor as yourself. And if we don’t love ourselves, what does that mean for our neighbor? Kind of thinking of it, the verse in reverse in a way. I know for me, the times in my life where I was the least gracious towards others, or I was the least forgiving towards other people or loving, I was also that way towards myself.
It was like a mirror. And so the same, thing’s true for self-care, I can speak kindly to myself. I can speak kindly to other people. Sometimes self care begins in the mind in terms of what we put in our minds and what we receive in there. So that was just a couple of thoughts that I had kind of Christianity and self care.
Let’s talk about, if people aren’t engaging in self-care, maybe they’re listening to this and they feel like they’re living the life that you used to live, where they’re just going all the time and doing everything for everybody and feel like they can’t cut back. What are some small ways that people can start practicing self-care if they don’t feel like they have a lot of time to do this. Because I think sometimes when I tell my clients, you need to start practicing self-care they’re like, I don’t have time for that.
Monica: Yeah. I have one client in particular where we’ve been talking about that for a year, and then finally it took her a minute to get it.
But when I say to people who feel like they don’t have time, the first thing is, and it might sound cliche is just to sit there and to breathe.
Now people and myself included, I was like, I’m breathing already, what do you mean
what I’m doing that next, but actually sitting there or laying there and purposely just hearing your breath, concentrate on your breath. It’s kind of taking your mind away from what you may be dealing with, would you want through? And like I said, I do have anxiety in my trigger. My main trigger is anything medical.
Imagine going through the whole coronavirus thing, going to the, I mean, it affected my sleep, it affected everything. So the first thing is just to breathe, just sit there and purposely breathe. Not thinking about anything else, just breathe. That helps me a lot with my anxiety as well. And then next people feel like they don’t have time, but sometimes this go for a five-minute walk, five minutes.
I’m in, well, I’m not talking about walking from one building to the next it work I’m talking about Just a brisk, you know, not even a brisk walk, just a walk and allow God to speak to you. I know sometimes when I haven’t worked out in awhile, I might be working out or walking and I just hear God speak to me.
I’m like, okay, hold on, hold on. I can’t get it off. You know, it allows me to clear my mind and just really question yourself when it comes to self-care. Think of yourself as worth it. You are worth taking 10, 15, 20 minutes a day. I don’t care. Another thing I like to do, I have an adult coloring book.
Now, I have a coloring book. I’m not thinking about what I’m going through. I’m like, okay, well, what color am I going to color this flower? Oh, am I stand in between the lines? It helps me to get my focus on something else. And away from something that could cause me to go into my anxiety attack or causing me not to sleep.
It’s another calmed down method.
And there are several things that you can do to help you, whether it’s decluttering, whether it’s going to spend time with your friends and family if they’re a source of peace. Just find out what gives you your peace. Everybody is worthy of peace.
And everybody is worthy to take the time to get to your peace.
Carrie: I had a client one time that said, I don’t have time for all that self-care stuff. And this was an individual that was working 12 to 14 hour days. And I said, okay. I just want you to try one. We try one thing for me. Will you see when you get to work in the morning, we just take three deep breaths before you get out of the car and they agreed to do that.
And sometimes when you start small, you’ll see how it grows into something bigger. And maybe that might grow into that individual saying, Hey, I’m actually going to take my lunch break today. I’m actually going to take my 30 minutes or an hour and you may have to leave the property to get that lunch break.
But if that’s what you need to do, then that may be what you need to do.
Monica: If you need to take a break from social media and on my personal Facebook page, That’s mine. And most of you take it as something that’s funny, something laughing. I’m sharing pictures of my niece and nephews, my family, my personal page.
It’s fun for me. And if stuff starts to get too bad or I see something negative, or I feel like I’m taking in too much of something. I can turn away from it because you, I give myself permission to that or that, because it can take me, is this too much? Sometimes people say, have you watched this movie?
I’m like I can’t handle that right now. You have to do it and notice, okay, it’s not girly. It’s not, basic feminine is something that you need for your emotional, physical and your mental health. You have to do it. And it’s like if I have something said, or whether it’s writing, writing something down or as my meditation, or if it’s just sitting and doing nothing.
I quite enjoy that. Sitting there and not doing anything. I know that that’s okay. And I know it’s necessary. So just small little things, take a breath, go for a brisk walk, start journaling, do some meditation, visit with friends and family, whatever it is that can bring you some peace or center you, start there.
Carrie: And if you’re looking for those pockets of time, you’ll find. I definitely believe that we spend so much time on our phones, scrolling through social media. And a lot of times that’s not a good way to relax. It’s almost a way to disconnect, I believe from whatever’s going on around us in the moment.
But a lot of times its too much input and it’s too much stimulation and going on, especially before bed or things like that. We’ve got to watch out for that. And I definitely agree. Sometimes you just need to put the phone down, get off social media and say, okay, I’m going to go do something helpful and productive in my life right now that brings me peace and joy. Oh, that’s good. Tell us a little bit about your books and speaking opportunities that you’re involved.
Monica: Thank you for that. As I stated earlier, I am a two time author and it was interesting. My pastor spoke into me, you know, I do a lot of things on bullying and social media and empowerment, and self-esteem things of that sort.
And he was like, you should write a book about that. I was like, who me? What a book, who am I to write about? Right on my first book, which is called Becoming Comfortable in my Own Skin: The journey to loving me. it helped me to evaluate myself. It starts from me wanting to lose weight. And I saw a picture of myself and I just really wasn’t happy with that.
And I said, okay, well maybe I have this medical condition and that can help me give me a. You never take care of it. Right. And I was healthy as a Lark and the problem lie within me. So I was working two jobs and I was working out five days a week. And during that time, you don’t have a lot of time to do other things.
But at what I did have time for was to deal with Monic. I realized how I didn’t love myself like I should out. I didn’t even like looking at myself in the mirror because I didn’t like what I saw. So during that time, it was not so much about losing weight, but it’s the discovery of myself at 38 years old.
And while I was on that journey, I was share certain things, which I believe God led me to do. And I know he did because of the inbox starting. And people just like, okay, well, what are you doing? Or how did you get through this? There were a lot of people who never said anything but will come ask up to me.
If they saw me in church and say, you’re really doing a good job. You know, just there was a purpose behind that. So that was my first book sharing my journey and what I did. And that’s also devotional at the end of it to help you, to start a new habit. I said 21 days, you create new habits, but I’m giving you a 30 day to put what in there, whether it is starting a new business with it as a weight loss journey, whatever it is, 21 days for 30 days to start doing something, to accomplish a goal.
And I was embarrassed at first, but when we go through things like we go through our testimony as far as testimony and that is to be shaped. So my first book is my testimony. It is my journey. And then my second book is called, as I said earlier, I do a lot of things on bullying in social media.
And while we’ll be out and about doing things, I would encounter a lot of parents who came up like I did. Somebody hit you, you hit them back and so forth and so on. The title of the book is called. I Told My Kid to Fight Back. Examining generational differences in bullying yesterday and today trying to let people know we cannot do or handle bullying or social media like we did when we were coming up for one. We didn’t have social media.
We didn’t have those pressures. Thank God for that. And then if you’re telling your kid this view, know that they can even defend themselves. Have you even talked to them about that? Do you know if they can defend yourself? And 99% of the time when I asked that question, they said, well, no, I don’t know, but they got to learn.
But when you’re doing that, you’re creating an environment where your kid may feel like they cannot come and talk to you because maybe they’re not prepared. There was a mother who talked to me and her daughter was getting bullied at school and she was like, you need to start taking up for yourself. You need to fight back.
You need to do this. And the daughter burst into tears. She was like, I don’t know how.
So I’m trying to show how things were when we were coming up and how things are now, and they’re completely different and you cannot handle them the same way. If you want your kids to fight back, that’s fine. But at least prepare them. Think about the repercussions and even parents discipline their children.
I talk about that in this book too. There was a particular young lady where mom was disciplining her. And of course it went viral. I talked about that in the bottom of video that I saw that was CNN, which is international news. What type it is out there on social media, on internet, out there forever. So that following your child for the rest of their life, you gotta be careful in how we do things.
So what we did in my program and around bullying and social media, that led me to write this particular book. Oh, those are the two books that I’m really. And both on Amazon and paper back and on cable and you can get them on Amazon, or you can go to Monica, lauren.com purchase some there.
Carrie: We can put the link in the show notes too, to your website so people can follow you there, or if they want a break tonight. Yes. And if they’re interested in some life coaching sessions, they can also contact dot com there as well. So we can set up some things.
Monica: Well, thank you for giving me the opportunity to share my little trick.
Carrie: Yeah. So at the end of every podcast, since our name is hope for anxiety and OCD, I like to ask the guests to share a story of hope, which is a time where you received hope from God or another person.
Monica: I was really thinking about that question, really thinking about that.
What comes to me is right before I started writing my book. I had been encouraged to write my book. And within six weeks I had lost like 20 pounds. Right. And I kept hearing from God, I need to share my story, share my story, share my story. Like I said, I was embarrassed and I was also a same problem was never the best student.
I was an, a, B, C, D student all throughout my life. So share my story, write a book. I was like, I was my worst enemy. I kept doubting myself, but I believe that if God gives you the vision, he will qualify you to do what he asked you to do. And I believe I went through what I went through and go to, to share my story and encouragement that I got from God is to share my story, which is what I started in doing.
Whereas I’ve started doing and sharing it on social media. I’ve also, I’m in a process of starting a Facebook group out by my anxiety, and for the people who love me to help people who are suffering from anxiety and also help the people who love us, who don’t understand what anxiety is, how they can help.
Good support system. So I’m in the process of putting information out there to share it. And I invite other people I’m hoping. And hopefully you, I can invite you to that particular Facebook group and you can share some things, some tips and things. So my hope was that allowed me to go through these things to be an inspiration and share my testimony to others.
So even though I was my own self-worth, I mean, my own, my own worst enemy and self-doubting myself, he encouraged me and created opportunities for me to do what he asked me to do. I pulled that together by saying, be your best to. Your best believe in yourself, never give up on yourself because where you started doesn’t necessarily mean that’s where you’re going to eat.
Who would’ve thought that I would have written two books? Like I said, I wasn’t a good stuff. I wasn’t, you know, I wasn’t all that, but when I stopped giving my feelings, doubting myself, being my own worst enemy, as I have accomplished and plan on accomplishing more than I ever thought I could by just allowing myself to be a vessel for God, always believing.
Carrie: Thank you. I always believe in you. And believe in what God has called you to do. If I didn’t believe that God really wanted me to do this podcast and spread these positive messages, I would have quit it a long time ago, because I can tell you that it’s not always easy. And there’s definitely been a lot of roadblocks. And it’s been a huge learning curve for me along the way. But what the piece that’s kept me going really believing that God wants me on this path and I will be on it as long as I feel like he’s leading me to do that. And the day he says, it’s time for the podcast to go, you know, the podcast will have to go, but I really just kind of wanted to echo some of the things that you were saying about that.
There’s all kinds of things that we don’t believe that we can do, but if God has called us to them and we have spiritual confidence and assurance in our faith then God will give us the tools that we need to be able to move forward and do those things that he’s asked from us.
Monica: He will put you in the right position, right?
What you need in order to accomplish.
Carrie: It’s been a really great conversation on self-care and just some good encouragement at the end. So thank you so much for sharing with us.
Monica: Thank you so much Carrie for having me. I appreciate you.
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I hope this interview sparked some ideas about how you can better care for yourself.
I want to say a special thank you today to two of our supporters on buy me a coffee, Tony and David. If you aren’t familiar with the, buy me a coffee website, this is a website similar to Patron. If you’ve heard of that one where people can go on and donate to podcasters and other creative. There’s a lot of time, energy and yes, money that goes into hosting a podcast.
So if you feel so inclined to donate, you are welcome to, and the link to that will be in our show notes. I am so thankful to God for his provision of resources, to be able to do this podcast. Thank you for listening to this.
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 it may be comforted by God’s great love for you.
Today, we are privileged to have pastor and author, Steve Hinton as our guest. We had a meaningful conversation about doubt and faith. Pastor Steve also shares his journey of finding hope in the face of doubt and childhood wounding experiences.
Doubt as a normal part of one’s faith experience
What is the root of doubt?
Why wrestling with God is a good thing?
How to hear and discern God’s voice in the midst of doubt?
Embracing the mystery of faith
Seeing God through pain and suffering
How can we help those who are hurting see that God is good?
Pastor Steve Hinton’s book, Confessions: Finding Hope Through One Pastor’s Doubt
Hope for Anxiety and OCD, episode 37. I imagine that if you’ve been following God for any length of time, at some point or another you’ve had some questions and doubts come up. How do we know that God is really good and maybe hard to come to a certain understanding of God due to past woundedness getting in the way. We’re going to talk about doubt today with pastor and author, Steve Hinton.
Carrie: Welcome and tell us a little bit about yourself.
Steve: Thank you very much. First of all, I just want to give a thumbs up to you. The whole question of anxiety, especially today, the past couple of years, everybody’s past year, everybody’s been worried about the physical aspects of COVID. Suicide hotlines are off the charts and nobody’s really talking about the whole anxiety.
I just want to encourage you and what you’re doing. I think there is a connection to me, I’ve been in vocational ministry about 27, 28 years now. So I’ve seen all kinds of anxiety and, and had to work through some of that myself, just from some wounding in my early childhood. I grew up in the Northern Panhandle of Texas, which is kind of a conservative area.
I grew up with a general biblical Jesus worldview, but I really didn’t know Christ until I was a young teenager. I had to work through some father figure issues in my life. Couple of dads were in there. And then when my mother remarried, when I was about seven or eight, He adopted me. Jim Hinton adopted me the father one year, but he had to work through his own issues from his own childhood.
All that to say is, you know, a lot of times people get their idea of what God is, who God is by the father figure in their lives. So that bled into the book that I had written Confessions: Finding Hope Through One Pastor’s Doubts and doubts a big topic today. Carrie, I’ve been married for almost 30 years. And we have four young adult children. I’m kind of an adventurous guy and I’m looking forward to having this adventure with you.
Carrie: Awesome. So are all your kids out of the house yet or not yet?
Steve: Just about our third is going to junior college here in the Houston area. The youngest is a college in another state.
My oldest works for a church camp in the state of Washington. And then my second one completed a tour with the Marine Corps and he’s about to do a contract, a security contract, actually for the army in Kuwait here in a month. So we’re almost to that empty nest place, but you know, we can see the light.
Carrie: There’s a line at the end of the tunnel. I’ll just watch out sometimes they become a boomerang generation and boom, bring back. So hopefully yours will say stay launched and you and your wife can enjoy your time.
Steve: Yes.
Carrie: That’s awesome that you have been married for so long, having that type of background and having, you know, being involved in your children’s lives because so many people grow up in a broken situation and then they end up repeating that same pattern.
Steve: Yeah. And that was a big prayer for me, Carrie. That was a big goal for me coming into marriage and coming into parenthood thinking, man, I want to do this fight and not saying that to throw my mother or anybody under the bus but also looking at the right care, looking at society as a whole. We just have way more dysfunction played out today than what we witnessed 20, 50, a hundred years ago because a lot of these root issues that we’re talking about the anxiety, the doubt A lot of those are the fruit of people growing up with the traditional nuclear family, not intact like it was a number of years ago. So some of the anxiety is a by-product of how we’ve constructed life today.
Carrie: I think that sometimes when I talk with Christians in my counseling practice, there’s some shame maybe around having doubts about God or just through church ministry. People say, well, I know that I need to have faith. I know that I need to trust God.
They really struggle maybe with some sense of shame about having these doubts, do you feel like that’s a normal part of our faith experience?
Steve: I think it’s a practical part. I think it’s a reality today. And I resonate with what you’re saying there with the shame, and that’s actually one of the reasons I wrote the book so that people would see, here is a vocational pastor, a guy who’s vocationally in the ministry, and he wrestles with some of these questions and he’s come out of the other end. Therefore, maybe there’s hope for me as well. And even on the shame picture, you know Carrie early on in the process when I was finishing up writing, I had to ask myself this question, how raw do I want to be? Because on one hand, there’s going to be people, for example, in ministry or people who seem to feel like they’ve got it all together who might look at what I’ve written in a judgmental way, but then I thought I’m not writing it for those people.
I’m writing it for those people who are really wrestling. Maybe with the journey of doubt, asking, what is the root behind it? And I think you’re right, some people think, yeah, if I, if I really had faith, I wouldn’t be wrestling with this. But asking what is the root behind the doubt?
Just one needing more data, Luke chapter one, God shows up and says, by the way, Mary, you’re going to have. And her question is how will this be? In other words, she accepted what God was saying, but she’s looking for some clarification. Sometimes the doubt and people maybe who are listening in and maybe they don’t know Jesus yet.
Sometimes the root of the doubt is really not data, but it is an expression of rebellion. As long as I could push this issue off, as long as I can pretend to be an atheist or agnostic, I can push off responsibility. And then also, maybe just, again, looking at the root. Is somebody doubting because they see the promises of God,
they’re trying to walk in faith, but they have these triggers and it’s really not so much about God as it is something that happened to them early in their childhood that just totally got them off rails. And they’re not able to connect the dots and, you know, they need to talk to someone like you Carrie to pull all these pieces together to realize that our God in heaven is not our biological father or our mother or our aunt or whoever that might be.
So I think doubt happens, Elijah in the Bible, a huge man of faith, but in First Kings chapter 19, he wanted to die. He was wrestling with fear and he was also wrestling with exhaustion. So trying to acknowledge doubts there. Okay, how do we couch it? What’s going on? What is behind it? And just being honest about it.
Carrie: Just having a sense of prayer of, I believe, but help my unbelief.
Steve: There you are. I liked that. Yeah.
Carrie: Yeah. I know there are some things that I’m definitely wrestling in questioning God about things that I believe that he’s spoken to my life and I don’t see the fruits of that or their fruition of that vision. And it’s really hard, but I think the wrestling part is so important. It’s an important part of our relationship with God. I don’t think it’s wrong to question at times and say, Hey, help me understand this. You know, I believe that you were speaking this into my life, but then this is what actually happened. And that just brings us closer to God to even have those conversations. It’s a different level of intimacy.
Steve: I liked the way you finished that. You know, Carrie, the level of intimacy because sometimes the doubt will force us to move closer. We’re no longer functioning on this vending machine relationship with God. You put in your dollar bill, your quarters, your credit card, and then you get what you want.
And then sometimes like a good parent, God says, no, or God says not now. And part of the trust is stepping back and saying, okay, God, I don’t understand, but I’m going to trust that somehow. We’ve got to reframe things. Maybe there’s something I’m not seeing clearly. Okay, God, I’m going to be patient and wait on you to clear everything up.
Carrie: Right. I wanted to add something to what you said earlier about God is our father, but God is not like your biological mother and father were to you because they’re human and they’re imperfect and God’s perfect.
I would also say that sometimes people have spiritual leaders like pastors or other people in the church that they’ve really been wounded by, and God is not those people either. And so if people have been wounded by spiritual leaders who led them towards paths that were not biblical, or, dumped a bunch of extra rules and legalism on them and excluded them from grace. God wants us those people to have a different kind of experience with him where they understand his true character.
Steve: I think you’re spot on there, Carrie. And even in my own life, one of the greatest mentors in my life, a wonderful man of God, incredibly brilliant, but he’s very stoic, very logical.
I tend to be very ADHD and I want to go save the world and go see the world. So I’m going, into adulthood trying to process this. I don’t function the way my uncle functions. How does that play into God? And obviously, my uncle loves God and I love God and God’s doing this, but not this.
And then I start to doubt, well, did I hear from God, right? Or does God even liked me or what do I do now? So one of the things I do carry to encourage other people is I just try to point them to Jesus again and again, and again, even people who don’t know Jesus, I try to say I get it.
There are a lot of people out there who have wounded you, who have done things, maybe even false teachers, but I try to point them directly to the person of Jesus Christ, both divine and human. And that’s the perfection. No human being, no woman, no man, no matter how good they are is perfect, but Jesus Christ.
Carrie: How do you feel like God spoke to you in the midst of your doubt as you were wrestling with some of these things?
Steve: A lot of it Carrie is just keeping my nose in the Bible on a regular basis, even times when I don’t feel it. We have to ask ourselves what are we listening to. If we’re listening to the media, the world 24/7, that’s going to cost a lot of doubt.
If we’re listening to God’s word, who are we with, I believe we’ve got to be connected to a local body of Christ. So in some of the darkest hours, I try to listen to the still small voice of God, which means you got to shut up and be quiet. But also, we’re trying to hear God’s voice.
Okay. Well, God’s given us the revelation through the scriptures. So being in the scriptures, especially the Psalms, especially the Psalms over and over and over again. And just wait.
Carrie: Waiting is so hard sometimes when you really want an answer. I went through a divorce. That’s something that you probably don’t know about me. It was a pretty traumatic divorce a few years ago, and God told me through that process through basically three different situations like I sensed it in my spirit that God was telling me. You’re just not gonna understand that. And you need to let go of your need to understand because I wanted it to make logical sense and it just didn’t make any logical sense. So there was a mentor at church that also spoke to me as I was trying to process it with him. And he said almost the exact same words that I sense to my spirit. It was just like “Carrie, you’re going to have to let go of this need to understand because it’s just not going to make sense to you.” And I feel like there was one more situation at like came in threes and I was like, okay, God, I’m sorry that you had to tell me three times.
I’m sorry. I didn’t listen the first time, but I hear you loud and clear. This is just something that I’m not going to be able to understand. And that’s something that’s really hard for people with OCD to sit with their level of uncertainty and doubt about the situation. I don’t know if you know that but they call OCD the doubting disease. There are always questions.
Steve: I had not heard that, but that makes sense. There’s probably a connection with that and these control issues that I want to, why am I doubting because I want to control it and I can’t control it.
Carrie: Yeah, absolutely. Just trying to like wrap our minds around spiritual things. Sometimes God is so much bigger and beyond where we are that we’re not going to be able to keep humanly comprehend him fully. We’re only getting the bits and pieces that we can receive. I think there’s just so much more, and I’ve learned, I guess, through some of that process also to embrace some of the mystery of my faith, that it’s faith that’s part of the process is that there are going to be things that I don’t feel know or can’t fully explain and that’s part of my connection with God.
Steve: I think I’d put us to Kado on that. And again, part of the reason I wrote the book was to show, here’s a vocational guy who’s been in ministry for a long time, and he’s still wrestles with doubt. I have more questions now than I had when I first went to Bible college when I went to seminary, but by getting to a place where I’m able to say, okay, God. I’m okay. There are some things I’m never going to figure out, which actually means you’re bigger than I am and being at peace with that. So I think that might be a component of the doubt, being able to just rest in and again, looking at Mary. Mary, didn’t have all the details figured out, but she was able to say, okay, God, I’m your servant. You’ve given me a thumbnail sketch of what’s going on here and I’m going to trust you with the rest.
Carrie: Yes, that’s so good. So I know one thing that can come up in, in therapy and, you know, you had your kind of own share of childhood. What I would call attachment trauma with caregivers and other people have had other experiences in childhood that maybe they went through an abusive situation and they might really be struggling with.
What would you say to someone who struggles with this idea of God being good? Because maybe they’ve experienced a certain level of trauma in their past, and you had some things that you talked about in your book in terms of growing up without a father or having various father figures in your life? And so it’s hard for us to wrap our minds around, like, okay, if God’s good, why would he allow us to go through these very painful situations? Or why would he put us in that particular family that hurt us?
Steve: Yeah. Again, affirming them, listening to them and trying to understand them and be in their shoes. I think sometimes leaders, we try to answer too quickly until we empathize with them and then hear them. There’s the whole theological aspect the fact that we have free will, that’s why people make dumb choices. There actually is no good unless there’s the opportunity for evil, the opportunity to go against what is good because we would just be robots without them.
And then again, reframing that what we do, for example, what we think success is. You may have people in your practice who have huge incomes and huge salaries and they’re on speaking towards and things like that, but they have zero relationships with their spouse or their kids, but would we call that successful? The world would. But in my years of vocation and vocational ministry, any time I’ve been with someone when they’re on death’s door, if there is ever been a regret, it was always a relational regret. I wish things were better with my kids. I wish things were better with my spouse. It’s never a regret of I wish I made more money or something like that. So maybe reframing what is success, what is good. I’ve talked a lot about being in the Bible and I’m thinking of the apostle Paul. If anybody would have their prayers answered, it was the apostle Paul, but he made it very, very clear and talked about the thorn in the flesh.
There was something in his life that was causing all kinds of trauma and he prayed more than once. And God says, “I’m leaving this there for your good and my glory.” So I would tell people to keep their life in the word, keep pressing in, be in the church, because these are people that can encourage you.
And you go back and you look at Thomas, you know, refer to him as doubting Thomas. He said I’m not going to believe. Well, if you look at a context, Thomas was not with the other apostles. The first time Jesus appeared to him, Thomas was out of the community and Jesus came back around and said, Thomas, look at my scars and stop doubting and believe.
But that’s an illustration as to why I say care, you’ve gotta be in community to work through these doubting issues.
Carrie: Community is really, really powerful. One thing I’ve realized, I think through processing literally now hours and hours of traumatic material with people is two things. One, those hard situations are what builds our character.
So if we didn’t have those difficult and challenging situations, we wouldn’t be as compassionate as we are today. If I hadn’t have gone through my divorce, I wouldn’t have the understanding of grace that I have today that I’m really so incredibly thankful for. And it has allowed me to extend grace to other people. It’s taught me so much about forgiveness and so many different things that I could go into there. I talk about it in my initial episode, but if we don’t go through some of those hard stuff like God uses that in a beautiful way to really like the working of things together for good, like Romans 8:28 talks about in our lives.
And if we didn’t have all of that, we wouldn’t be the people that we are today. And God uses those things to sanctify us and grow us closer to Christ. One of the other things that I’ve realized through processing childhood trauma with Christians is often people will have this spiritual experience. It’s like once the trauma part gets cleared up, they’re able to see, look back through a different lens and recognize that God really was there for me.
And he was there the whole time, working behind the scenes. And he was always with me. He never left me. He preserved me through all of the challenging, dangerous, whatever, fill in the blank things that I went through. And that’s a really powerful experience, I think for people as well, to recognize and acknowledge, and just in terms of wrestling with the role of suffering, I guess, in our lives.
Steve: Yeah. There’s tons of volumes on suffering and how that fits in. It circles back around to the whole question “If God’s good, why is there suffering?” And again, reframing our world and in our worldview and in our philosophy and our theology.
The reality that God allows things to happen to refine us and thinking about my own story. I came out of high school with all these doubts about who I am, went into college, and I realized pretty quickly that God had called me to preaching that aspect of ministry. And I was pretty good at that. The art, the craft of homiletics and in writing. And I began to put my identity into that. And then when I go through a period of time and I went through a period of time where nothing is working right. And then I began to realize, it’s not about my identity as the preacher. It’s my identity as Steve, just Steve.
And that’s illustrative of getting to a level of depth, relationship with God If I had not had gone through these tough times. We may say, “Where are you, God? What’s going on?” Well, the bottom line is, there’s a lesson in that.
And we do come out of that with more grace to people, more compassion to people. And we’re able to minister to people at a deeper level that we would not have been able to do so If everything happened at exactly the way we wanted it.
Carrie: Right. What do you hope that people will experience by reading Confession?
Steve: Carrie. I hope they have a smile on their face. There’s a lot of raw material in there, but there’s some funny stuff. And I hope that they’re able to say “I get it. I’d been there.” And you know what? there are other people who’ve gone through the tunnel. I think there’s hope I can get through the tunnel as well.
I hope that it will be an encouragement to people that they will press further and deeper into the presence of Jesus and no matter what they’re going through, they can come out at the end of the tunnel stronger and then be able to share that with other people.
Carrie: Right. One of the things that I appreciated you sharing in the book that I felt like it would be good to bring out is this sense of like struggling with has God really forgiven me for my past mistakes. And this element of it took you a while to kind of work through some past sins. I don’t know how you would say it if like the devil was holding them over your head or you were, but it just was something that like kind of kept coming back up and coming back up for you.
A lot of Christians can really identify with that, that wrestling of really like how can we rest in God’s forgiveness and have that assurance?
Steve: That’s a good question, Carrie. And I think you’re right that I’ve had two or three monumental peaks where I was able to look at things and say, “yeah, I own it.
I did it. That was me.” I think that’s part of the process. We can’t blame other people. We got to own it. And then being able, to surrender it to God and realize that that whole Jesus died on a cross thing. It is finished. That’s a real deal. But again, I want to come back to the community. that’s the beauty of the church.
I’m not talking about my local church, although that’s true, but the universal church that has a body. We encourage one another. And for me to affirm other people and affirm the grace and then receive that back as well. That’s why it’s so important that we have people in our lives that we be people.
And then we have people in our lives to remind us of the things we know. We may have it in our head, but it takes a little bit longer to move that 12 inches down from our head to our heart. And that’s why we got to keep repeating it again and again and again.
Carie: Yes, absolutely. Just keep repeating like the promises that we have through scripture and in Christ. This is so important. We can’t forget those things.
So at the end of every podcast, I like our guests to share a story of hope, which is a time where you received hope from God or another person.
Carrie: One immediate thing, here we are, we’re recording this in may, and I know it’s going to launch later, but one immediate thing is a big debt that I took about 12 years ago because I was just so certain I was following God’s lead and everything fell apart. And over the past couple of months, it’s interesting Carrie to see, here are some things I have been praying about for years that it just seems they’re falling into place. So maybe again, part of the reason I wrote the book is to say, here is a narrative to show that God is faithful and we can look at the faithful stories and in the lives of other people. But I think that that would be a situation where I’ve been praying about a few things for years and just over the past month, they’ve just been coming together. And maybe that’s an encouragement to folks to not give up. Just keep on keeping on.
Carrie: Yes, that is really good. And there is something about persevering in prayer and waiting for God’s timing.
Steve: Yes because God’s timing is better than ours. Sometimes we’re not ready. Sometimes we are not ready for it. Sometimes other people aren’t ready for it. So it’s a waiting for it.
Carrie: Absolutely. This was a really great conversation. I really appreciate you coming on and talking with us about doubt today. That’s good.
Steve: Well, Carrie, thank you for the opportunity. And again, I just want to encourage you in what you’re doing because it is so vital, especially in our world today, people need hope and thank you for giving that to people.
Carrie: Thank you. We will put all the information in the show notes. The link to where you can find the book and get in touch with Steve, if they would like.
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God in his amazing, perfect timing knew that I needed to have this conversation with Steve when I did. It was such a blessing to be able to talk about these things. And I hope it was a blessing for those of you who are listening as well.
If you’re new to the show, we are all about reducing shame, increasing hope and developing healthier connections with God and others, specifically for Christians who may be struggling with anxiety or OCD.
For more information, you can find this online at www.hopeforanxietyandocd.com.
If you’re searching for a little extra encouragement in the middle of the week, you’re welcome to follow us on Instagram or Facebook. Thank you so much for listening.
Hope for Anxiety and OCD is a production of By The Well Counseling in Smyrna, Tennessee. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum and audio editing is completed by Benjamin Bynam.
Until next time. May you be comforted by God’s great love for you.
Carrie Bock, LPC-MHSP has appeared on several different podcasts to cover a variety of topics and to promote the Hope for Anxiety and OCD podcast.
Ayan Robin Dixon of Circle 31 International Women’s Ministry interviews Carrie about her experience as a former foster mom.
Joe Sanok interviews Carrie about how to start a private practice and transition off insurance.
Adam Kol asks Carrie’s advice on how to use insurance coverage for counseling, how to obtain low-cost or free opportunities for counseling and how to find a therapist that’s right for you.
Tracy Lowery asks all kinds of questions about everything from finding a counselor to understanding suffering as a Christian.
Brian and Carrie discuss prayer and anxiety by using the movie War Room as a jumping off point.
Carrie breaks anxiety down in an easy to understand way in Jeff Allen’s first episode.
Carrie discusses the process she has created for attracting and onboarding the clients she enjoys working with most.
I had the privilege of interviewing Brooke Randolph, a licensed mental health counselor and a Brainspotting trainer. Brooke shares with us her insights and knowledge on Brainspotting. She also gives some advice for those who are considering adoption based on her experience as a single adoptive mom and as a Brainspotting consultant specializing in adoption.
What is Brainspotting? How does it work?
How was Brainspotting developed? Who discovered it?
How can Brainspotting help with anxiety and OCD?
What happens during and after a Brainspotting session
Can Brainspotting be used with all ages?
Brainspotting training
Comparison between Branspotting and other forms of therapy.
Hope for anxiety and OCD, episode 36. On today’s episode, I have an interview with Brooke Randolph who is a brainspotting trainer and therapist. Brainspotting has some similarities to EMDR in that they’re both seeking to work at a brain level to help people heal from internal disturbance. So it was neat to have that conversation and look at some of the similarities and differences.
If you caught our episode with Peyton Garland, which was a personal story where she talks about her experience with OCD and her experience with brainspotting. I know you’re going to want to check out this episode as a follow-up.
Carrie: Brooke, welcome to the show.
Brooke: Thank you.
Carrie: And tell us a little bit about yourself.
Brooke: Well, I am a licensed mental health counselor. So I’m a therapist who lives in Indiana, but I also in licensed in Massachusetts and I run a group practice here in Indianapolis. So we are currently up to 10 clinicians. I am also a single adoptive mom to a 14-year-old boy. So that makes me rugby mom those days of the week.
Carrie: Wow. Okay. I know very well about rugby.
Brooke: I very much enjoy rugby. I like showing it to people. So maybe you can come to a game and I can keep you past that.
Carrie: That would be interesting. How old was your son when you adopted him?
Brooke: He was six.
Carrie: Oh, okay. Awesome. Let me tell you about how this show actually came about. So we had a guest on our show Peyton Garland, and she came out with a book called Not So By Myself about her experience with OCD. And she was sharing about the book and how she went through brainspotting with her therapist, or was still in the process of going through those sessions. And I said, oh wow. I haven’t had anybody on about brainspotting. That would be really fun. So then I found you on Facebook and we got connected. And so we’re here to learn all about brainspotting today, how it can be helpful for anxiety and OCD. I’m super excited about that. So maybe we can just start by, just tell us a little bit about brainspotting even like how you would explain it to a client maybe that was coming in for the first time.
Brooke: Yeah, brainspotting is really exciting. It would be what I call a power therapy that helps us get deeper into the neural networks of the brain. And really what it does is it’s going to allow the brain to heal itself. And as we tune into what’s going on in the brain and what’s going on in the body, the brain is able to lead the processing in a way that’s so much more efficient than when we try to talk through something. Because when we’re talking, we’re really only going towards that neocortex, that front part of the brain. And the neocortex is not involved in regulation, which means it can’t make you feel better. And so when we’re feeling anxious or upset about something, it’s going to be much more effective If we can utilize the parts of the brain that are involved with regulation to help us process those things so that we’re not only doing the processing but also calming the brain and the body at the same time.
Carrie: That’s really good. I like that a lot. We can really get in there. I don’t know if you want to call it defenses in our thinking part of our brain, right? There’s all these layers that protect us maybe from our emotions and keep us from really going there, but when you’re able to find therapies that tap into that like the limbic system response, then that’s a whole different ball game.
Brooke: When I also explained to people, I worked from everything from children who were adopted internationally at young ages to really five functioning achievers. And if these high functioning achievers could have thought their way out of the problem, thought their way out of how they’re feeling, they would have done that. Many of them are much more educated than I am. If they could have thought their way out of it, they would have done it, but they can’t. So we need to go in deeper into the brain.
And then for these other, these kids who may have memories that are not stored in the English language, because they were in another language at that time, or maybe they’re implicit memories that are pre-verbal and you can’t process those things from the neocortex. That requires language. So we need to be able to get more into the body and deeper in the brain.
Carrie: Right. I’m curious for you because I think therapists find different therapies to be trained in. I have a theory on this. I’ve never done any research, but my theory is that we find things either that have helped us. We’ve seen these things, help our clients, or it’s just kind of aligns with our personality.
How did you get involved in training and brainspotting like becoming trained on that?
Brooke: Well, I’ll tell you the story, but it’s probably goes to that part where it aligns with my personality and the deeper I get into brainspotting, the more I recognized that the principal tenants are just right along with my theory of counseling. But for me, I work primarily in adoption and I have these very early trauma, early parental separation kinds of cases. And I knew that there were like our therapies like EMDR that were really effective like we have plenty of research to show that, but also knowing the potential for overwhelm. And I’m very protective of my adoptee clients, especially my young adoptee clients. And so knowing that potential for overwhelm, I was just kind of dragging my feet really on that.
And then someone came and told me about brainspotting and I heard about it from somebody I trusted. And then I went and did a bunch of reading and I immediately started referring my clients to “okay. I think you also need to go do this.” And so here’s somebody locally. We had a few people locally who were already trained. And so why don’t you go do that? And then meet with me every other week and meet with them. And a couple of my clients did try it and one of them just put his foot down and he said, “I’m going to go see anybody else. You need to get trained now.” You know what I said? “I’m going to get trained in this.” I’m definitely like I really believe in it. And he was like “you need to get trained now.”
And what are the DVDs and started from there and did the training at home. And then very quickly helped to bring a trainer to Indianapolis so that we could have a training here and did that. And then just continued from there until the point that now I’m a brain spotting specialist trainer.
Carrie: Wow. So you’re actually training other therapists to do this as well and supervising people that are in that process. That’s pretty awesome. Yeah. It just seemed to fit and it was really helping your clients and then you decided to get trained in that. How exactly does it work? I know that’s a hard question.
Brooke: Yeah. So, I mean, Most people want to compare it to EMDR. Brainspotting was kind of discovered and developed by David Grant who was a master EMDR trainer. So he was very influenced by EMDR, but he was also very influenced by somatic experiencing and insight-oriented relational therapy and some other kinds of things.
And so they all kind of play a role. We get from somatic experiencing is really being aware of the activation in the body. We’re talking about OCD here. And so if we have someone who has some compulsion to pull a hair or to touch something or to turn right, but asking them to really locate where in the body is that starting and turning them into making that brain-body connection.
When you make the comparison with EMDR where they’re using rapid eye movement, brainspotting is actually a fixed eye position. And so one of the ways that I explain to people about this is that a fixed eye position is going to be less activating. And you really just think about it. If you were staring down like this tiger who’s just staring at you, that’s really intense. But if you start to imagine that tiger pacing back and forth in front of you and your eyes have to fall, like suddenly the anxiety starts going up a little bit and people can feel that when I’m presenting at a conference or something then I just demonstrate like walking across the stage like they can feel it like a fixed eye position is less activating than eye movements. And so that’s just part of how we are able to make it. More flexible, less activating. If necessary for people, we can really make adjustments in the moment, which is what I like about it. That we can be very attuned to the specific client and what they need and help them have the processing that they need, whether that’s helping them turn up the activation. For people like me with chronic pain, who’s learned to ignore my body or turning down the activation for people who have just had too much trauma and can’t go all the way into.
Carrie: Yeah. I’m glad that you went into that because when you started explaining it, it sounds like it’s really good for people who have these app reactions with EMDR, where they’re just sobbing uncontrollably and they’re feeling just really intense sensations in their body and have a tendency maybe to want to get out of that. But you’re saying it also works for people that have difficulty accessing maybe body sensations or emotions. It can help them develop that process.
So there are some similar components in terms of it’s a mind, you say it’s a mind, body emotion therapy like you’re making those connections.
Brooke: Yeah. They say it’s a brain-body, mindfulness-based therapy. I’ll check the website to make sure I got all the words that are in.
Carrie: Do you usually start with some mindfulness activities? Is that part of the preparation before you go in and do the more traumatic work?
Brooke: It completely depends on the client. So one of the principles of brainspotting that I really love is there is no protocol. Because we’re very focused on the client, then a relational attunement and being attuned to the client. Therapy can’t be attunement based if there’s a protocol, if there’s steps that are involved.
And if we’ve decided that these steps are these steps for everyone, then it’s going to miss some people who that might not be because some people are going to need in-between steps and some people are going to need to skip the steps like I was that high achiever or in school and was always frustrated that they were teaching to kind of the lowest common denominator, which is what they have to do.
But for me, It missed things for me. My education wasn’t attuned to me, but I want therapy to always be attuned to my class. So we don’t necessarily have a protocol. And so for some clients, we may be doing mindfulness activities ahead of time. We may be introducing other things. Some people may come in and just start telling us about the presenting problem.
And we already noticed that they’re on a fixed eye position. And so we may just invite them to stay on that spot, whatever it is that they’re looking at it way. And let it go from there. And so that may not be the full set-up necessarily, but they’re getting into it. And so we can kind of work. It’s very flexible. We follow our clients and what they need.
Carrie: It’s very interesting because I think my personality goes to like a “that’s too unstructured for me” like having a little internal moment. I think I really like structured therapies.
Brooke: Do you like it as the therapist or r do you like it as the client?
Carrie: I think I like it both because I think if I’m the client, I want to know where we’re going and what we’re doing. And I want it to kind of have a logical sequence to it and feel like there’s a good beginning, middle and end. And I think even with therapies like EMDR that have protocols, your therapist really has to know how to tailor that to you as the client. Kind of what you’re saying in terms of attunement. I think that you can have attunement with some of those structured therapies, but you just have to be very careful if you find like your therapist that you’re working with is like too rigid. And they’re like, we have to do this now like you said, we have to do this next step. And that next step, you may not be ready for.
Just for the people listening out there, I think you have to communicate and advocate for yourself as well to say “I don’t know something about this. This just doesn’t feel right.” Or maybe I’m just not quite ready for that deeper level of processing things yet. I’ve in my own work over the last probably couple years now, I’ve been incorporating ego state therapy, which has made the EMDR process more tolerable and a lot less in terms of reactions, more attachment, needs getting met.
That’s a whole another story, but this is interesting to me because different people are going to respond to different types of therapies in different ways. And one of the reasons I like to talk about so many different types of therapy on the show is not so we can have a discussion about, oh, this one’s better.
That one’s better, but more like to give people options like here’s your menu because I think a lot of people go into therapy and they’re like, yeah, I tried therapy. I’m like, Yeah but what did you do, like tell me more about that because there are a zillion different therapy techniques out there.
There’s a zillion different therapists personality styles. And it’s very hard to say like, oh, I’ve tried therapy. Like I’ve tried green peas and I don’t like him, you know, there’s just so many options out there. So this is, this was really interesting. I think you’ve kind of, you’ve talked about how.
This is a little bit different form of trauma therapy in a sense you’re kind of combining, like after they find the fixed eye movement, are you combining a little bit of talk therapy like if they want to tell that story or if they’re wanting to talk about the experience or what they’re noticing in their body?
Brooke: Oh, absolutely. I always say to clients, you can talk as much or as little as you want to. And what it looks like is different for each individual based on what they mean. I think as a client myself, I initially was much quieter and would have to say things out loud when I felt like I was like a broken record like you kept coming back to the same thought, but I found that I continue, I’m much more verbal that it kind of keeps pushing me forward. So I think it’s going to be different for people even in different stages.
Carrie: Right. For part of your training or certification process, did you have to have this done to you basically? Did you have a practicum where you practiced on each other?
Brooke: Yeah that’s built into all the trainings. All the phase training and all the speciality trainings all have kind of demos and practicums and debrief from there s we have that opportunity to experience it. And we really do encourage therapists to do their own work and to continue to do their own work. And so finding whether that’s a practice partner or a peer support group, or just finding your own brainspotting therapist and sticking with that.
Carrie: Yeah. That’s definitely so valuable and something that really helps us grow as therapists is to be the client for a period, for a season and come back around to it when we need to, as things come up in our personal lives or our professional life. Probably one of the biggest variables that’s made me a better clinician. I’d say getting my own therapy.
So, can you talk with us a little bit more specifically about how you’ve seen maybe this be helpful, brainspotting for anxiety and OCD?
Brooke: Yeah, I mean, in general, it’s just going to help lower that activation and we can see that pretty immediately. OCD, there are setups and discussions around that particularly. And what we’re doing allowing the brain to process, but also giving the brain something new. The brain is holding on to that obsession or that compulsion because it feels good in some way.
And so until we get something that’s better, it’s going to have a hard time letting go of that. You can think of that similarly to like any kind of addiction. If I really like eating Stroop waffles, my son really likes eating Stroop waffles. And to just say, I’m never going to do this again is hard, but when you say like, I have this thing, that’s better but I’m going to have this really sweet mango and not only does it taste good, but then I feel better and I have more energy. And once your brain can recognize that, it’s a lot easier to let go of what might be overly sugary or something that may be beneficial for you. I mean, that’s a fluff example.
Carrie: Sure. Well, I think it’s important for people to understand that our brains do change, can change and do change over time. And that we may be kind of stuck in this well-worn neural pathway that’s not working for us, a maladaptive neural network. And we can make changes to that and forge a new path in our brain. It’s not easy. It takes some time and practice just kind of like walking through a new path in the woods takes time and practice and intentionality, but it can happen. So that’s part of this process.
Brooke: We know neuroplasticity. And this just seems to be a faster way to get to it, but even then when we can’t always explain it to see the changes that come about and how it seems so much easier to do something different suddenly after doing brain spotting.
Carrie: Do you find that people pursue this after having received some talk therapy at times and feeling like, yeah, I’ve kind of talked maybe through some of my traumas, but I don’t really feel like they’re fully processed or I’m still having the effects of some of them.
Brooke: Yeah. I think if the people who are looking for brainspotting, it’s either because they’ve tried something and it’s not answering everything for them or someone else’s recommending it to them. Generally, although I do have people who are just doing an internet search and come up and they’re like, oh, so I read this thing on your website.
Yeah. And that sounds really interesting. Let’s can we do that? Yes, of course. You know, so I think there’s probably lots of ways, but it’s not as well known at this point. Most people are going to come at it after they’ve tried other things.
Carrie: Great. Do you know, like when brainspotting was developed?
Brooke: in 2003.
Carrie: Okay. So it’s a newer form of therapy maybe that hasn’t had as much research as other things.
Brooke: Right. I mean, research takes a lot of time and a lot of money, the library of researches is smaller. This, you know, it’s much more experiential colloquially, all kinds of spreading kind of that way. Grassroots at this point.
Carrie: Okay. And you said the brainspotting can be used with all ages.
Brooke: In fact, Monica Bauman from Austria recently wrote a book. She wrote it in English, Brainspotting with Children and Adolescents. And in that book, she tells this amazing story about working with an infant.
Carrie: Wow.
Brooke: And it’s an amazing, beautiful story.
Carrie: So towards the end of every podcast, I like to ask our guests to share a story of hope, which is a time in which you received hope from God or another person.
Brooke: That’s a great question. I think I have moments of hope most days. I think, you know, looking at the possibility. Some recent ones would just be conversations.
I’m having with people who are for me, the National Association of Adoptees and Parents. And they’re wanting to get me as part of their committee. And like, these are all the different ways that you can make a difference like that to me has a lot of hope in that. We’re looking at that, looking at the vaccine, coming out for adolescents next. For my family, that’s really helpful. My son is really looking forward to that. It will probably be the first time he’s gotten a shot that I won’t have to have held him down because he believes in that. So that’s hope. And for us, that’s hope that we may be able to travel again. And just all the things that we are looking forward to.
Carrie: Do you have any advice for people that might be looking into adoption as an option?
Brooke: Yeah, start your therapy. Now my recommendation, and really explore that and explore what is bringing you to adoption and get lots of different perspectives, because I think there are some messages out there. And if we are in a silo, you may not realize how very different other perspectives can be.
Carrie: That’s good. That’s good to have just kind of a well-rounded perspective on adoption. Do you say that and, sorry, this is an interest of mine only because I’ve been a former foster parent. So would you say start your therapy now because these kids are dealing with so much emotional baggage or they’re bringing that with them and that’s really going to trigger up your own emotional baggage.
Brooke: Yes, absolutely. So you, as a parent, whether that’s an adoptive parent or a foster parent. I’d probably say any parents, but you need to be working through things so that you can best show up for your kids. You can’t lead them to any kind of healing that you haven’t been able to find for yourself, that if you are struggling with being impatient. I mean how you’re what were you going to teach your kids patience. Finding those things and also absolutely. You said it wonderfully like they’re going to stir up anything that’s unprocessed in you. And I would say anything in everything. Kids and partners are really great at helping us reveal our areas in need of growth.
But just also, you know, adaptive parenting and foster parenting is really advance, It’s therapeutic parenting. It is hard and you need support and they have additional layers and additional issues that continue throughout their development and for you to be able to show up and help them with those things. You’ve gotta be able to take yourself out of that equation. You can’t be taking it personally. In one of my presentations, I talk about how, whenever my son in early ages would say like, you’re not my real mom, but I never took that personally because it wasn’t about me. I was literally about how he was feeling in that moment.
But now when he tells me you’re the best mommy ever. I don’t take that personally either because I also need to look and see that, where is this coming from. And is this actually a sentiment, or maybe he’s saying it because he has a need to connect and can I meet him where he needs to connect and again hearing the needs behind everything.
Carrie: Or he’s trying to butter you up really well for something.
Brooke: For Sure. That may also be it. He is amazing at like getting that voice to change when he needs something. And in some ways that’s really effective. And so just kind of rewarding that, wow, I see that you can use such a kind respectful voice when you want this and helping them see that, Hey, you can do this.
Carrie: Awesome. Well, we will put links in the show notes to your practice and where people can contact you and find out a little bit more about you. So since you’re licensed in two states, I assume you’re doing some online therapy as well.
Brooke: Yes right now, I am completely virtual, so I’m doing all of my work on telehealth.
Okay. For now. And for the foreseeable future, we’ll just kind of take it step by step and see what the future brings.
Carrie: Gotcha. As so many therapists are doing right now. So it makes sense. Well, thank you for sharing your wisdom and insight with us on brainspotting. And it was a good learning experience for me as well, to just see how things compare to what I’m doing and who knows, you never know, I may end up getting trained in that too one day.
Brooke: Yeah, of course. I think having an awareness of lots of different tools and theories is always beneficial. And then also finding those things that you really connect with that you guys have into and know really, really well is really important.
I feel like in this short amount of time that I’ve had this podcast, we’ve been able to cover several different forms of therapy, which has been really neat because I love letting people know that there are treatment options. That’s part of increasing.
I am working on making our website a great resource, not just for our podcast to host the show notes, but also to have blogs and other articles that are helpful for individuals on there.
If there is a topic that we haven’t covered on the podcast, or you don’t see on the blog anywhere, feel free to reach out. I would love to hear your show suggestions or article suggestions. You can do that through the contact page of our website www.hopeforanxietyandocd.com anytime. While you’re there, feel free to subscribe to our email lists to keep up with what’s going on with the podcast. Thank you so much for listening.
Hope for Anxiety and OCD is a production of By The Well Counseling in Smyrna, Tennessee. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum and audio editing was completed by Benjamin Bynam.
Until next time it may be comforted by God’s great love for you.
Hope for anxiety and OCD episode 35. Today on the show, I am interviewing a counselor as well as a special needs Mom. Diana Robbins shares some really great wisdom, on the show today, she asked specifically if we could not share the diagnoses of her children. And so out of respect, we didn’t do that, but I’m sure that regardless of your child’s diagnosis If you are a special needs parent, I know that you will get something out of this episode. We talk about everything from how it impacted her marriage, to how it impacted her faith and relationship with God. So let’s dive right in.
Carrie: Hi, Diana, will you tell us a little bit about yourself and why you wanted to be on the podcast today to share your story.
Diana: Yes, Hi Carrie. Thanks for having me on. I am a wife of 26 years to my husband, Chris and a mom to two teenagers, two teenage sons, and we are also blessed to have our 13-year-old niece living with us. So we’re a family of five. We have been living in Singapore for the past three years, but before that, I was a stay-at-home mom and a homeschooling parent in Houston, Texas.
And in Singapore, I’ve resumed my practice as a grief and trauma therapist and have a practice and do a lot of volunteer work with those who are recovering from trauma and loss in their lives. I wanted to share my story because I have to encourage people who are battling anxiety or OCD and that especially the people that love them to the moms, the dads, other family members that are supporting those who struggle with anxiety. I really like to encourage them as well.
Carrie: Right. And I know that we have people who are struggling that listened to the show, and we also have loved ones that tune in people that have a spouse or boyfriend, girlfriend or child with anxiety or OCD and they’re really trying to understand that individual better because maybe they don’t have the anxiety themselves and can’t necessarily relate personally, but they’re trying to kind of get some more information. So that’s part of a little bit about what we’re doing with the show today. And I think you have the personal, professional and practical information. So it’s a little bit of you’re coming at it from both angles.
Diana: Well, I’ve certainly been gifted with experience in all of those things. And we’re great.
Carrie: What was it like for you as a parent to find out that your child had a developmental disability? Can you take us a little bit through that process?
Diana: Absolutely. So when my children were born, my first son was born. We recognized pretty quickly that he was struggling. And no one really knew why. So it took a process of about three years to get accurate diagnosis. And in that time there was a lot of stress, a lot of worry about what was happening and my husband and I were just doing the best that we could to manage, helping him grow and develop. So when the diagnosis finally came and there were several, it was a mix of relief. It was just really helpful to have at least partial answers to what we were dealing with everyday, but there was also this overwhelming grief that set into that, what we were dealing with would be lifelong and not something that we can just fix quickly and the struggles, and there’s some grief for him as well.
Carrie: I think that makes a lot of sense. You know, there’s kind of multiple emotions as you’re going through that as a parent like, okay, we’re going to be in this for the long haul.
And at the same time, it’s nice to have some kind of idea of what we’re dealing with so that we know how to treat it, or what avenues to pursue professionally.
Diana: Yeah, absolutely. There were a lot of other emotions mixed in with those two main ones and we have fear. I became just this really fierce advocate.
Immediately I went from being just the mom to being an advocate and a student I had a whole new realm of life and learning that I had to adjust to the diagnoses, how to best support my child and I had a lot to learn. So I became an avid student as well. And, that was really challenging for us.
On a spiritual level as well for both me and my husband to receive the diagnosis. And so I think that I look at that time in our life as one of the key spiritual moments that we are crises that we had to overcome really.
Carrie: What kind of challenging behaviors and situations did you experience with your children?
Diana: Well, I would say we faced struggles really across, you know, social, emotional and behavioral levels. All of them. The behaviors that were most challenging were the perseveration type behaviors. My son was really fixated on certain things and you would need a lot of order, a lot of routine, and he would also find really odd passions at a very young age. One of the cutest ones, but also most frustrating was in became very interested in vending machines. It makes it not pass a vending machine in town without having to put a quarter in it and watch, you know, something from out. So if there is a vending machine at the grocery store, have a new machine when we were driving on the road that he saw through the window, we had to stop and we had to see the vending machine and purchase something and go through that whole ritual, or he would become very distressed and have a lot of meltdowns or temper tantrums and things. It was just very overwhelming to him to not be able to engage in these behaviors. That was really challenging. It really interrupted our daily life. As you can imagine, trying to get anywhere and do anything that those kinds of behaviors were maybe the hardest for me as a mother.
Carrie: How did you manage those things and find the balance of giving your son what he needed while also maintaining your own sanity as a parent?
Diana: That’s a great question. To be honest, I didn’t do that so well, a lot of the time. I tried, I tried to find that balance, but it was a daily struggle and some days I lost that struggle, but overall I learned some really important lessons that I think helped me grow in that over time. My husband and I really believed that it was important to help our children become as involved in a typical developmental trajectory as possible.
We wanted to accept them as they are and help them to integrate into life as best we could. Normal what people consider normal life as best we could. And, and that was always something that we had to balance carefully because we didn’t want to push them too hard or to make too many concessions to the things that they were struggling with.
And I don’t know that you ever feel that you’ve got that balance perfectly at any given time, but we did see that it was helping them grow and become more and more able to engage in the world. So we tried to challenge them only as much as they are supported. I was a principle that we have. I actually learned that in graduate school from one of my mentors and he said that we need to challenge people so that they grow, but we can only do that as far as we have supported them to be able to do that.
So that principle was really important in our home. We really manage their home environment. Home became our secure base. So I can’t control things outside in the world that they’re going to encounter and make it orderly and make it routine. Home became our place to really be able to give them that safe place to engage.
When my second son came along and had some of the same challenges, that became especially important because it was the one place that they could really be themselves and it was safe to do so. And they had all the things that they most needed right at hand. We might home be everything that we could for them. But then when we went out, we would limit our time outside. We would take short outings and eventually grow those into longer, more demanding situations. And then we just taught a lot of coping skills. I did a lot of preparing them at home so that when we went out, we had objects that they could take with them to help them be able to stay focused, to help them be able to manage anxiety and feel safe and secure when they went to church or they went to school. Those kinds of things.
Carrie: That’s so huge. I think kids knowing what to expect, This is where we’re going, this is what we’re going to be doing. This is kind of a little bit of what it’s going to look like. And here are some tools that you have, like when you do get anxious or when you do get bored, I think so many times we just kind of don’t break it down enough for children.
I don’t know if that’s the right way to say it, but I think that especially any children that are dealing with anxiety or OCD, they need the explanation in simple language, because we may assume that they understand what’s going to happen, but that doesn’t mean that they do.
Diana: Absolutely. That’s so critical. Giving very explicit and simple instructions was a key part to their success. I had to learn to give maybe one instruction before I gave another. And allow them to process very simply at first to really help manage that anxiety and keep it at a level that I wasn’t adding to the overwhelm.
Carrie: Right. I know that this is probably something that has come up on the show before or may come up in the future like kids and spouses are really good at stirring up our own stuff internally. And so can you talk a little bit about how some of these behaviors or thought processes triggered you and how you dealt with that?
Diana: Yes. I think that was probably the hardest challenge for me was recognizing. And my kids struggle how much I was struggling myself. Even before I had children, I hadn’t recognized how much anxiety I had myself until I was trying to help my children who had anxiety. And I could see it so much more plainly and as they struggled, then it would trigger us for a deeper struggle in me, all of those fears, all those worries. My own sense of overwhelm, just trying to get us all through the day was when sometimes just become more than I could handle effectively.
So I think that I learned a lot and learning how to help support my children and how to manage my own anxiety and how to be compassionate with myself just as I was trying to be compassionate with my children and to set them up for success, I needed to do the same thing for me in order to support them well.
Carrie: So in a sense, as you are learning how to manage your own anxiety then you were able to teach them certain things that would help them and kind of, as you’re calmer, they’re probably calmer as well.
Diana: Yes, that was really important. I learned very quickly that our children respond so much to the way that we show up for them. If I’m calm that helps communicate calm and steadiness to them that they respond to. When I’m anxious, or I allowed their anxiety to trigger my own, then we have a real problem because then we’re all upset and all overwhelmed and it makes it much more difficult to just to complete anything that we’re trying to accomplish.
So I found that it was so important that I was really grounded and really calm when I approached any tasks with my children and that I could manage my own anxiety privately as best as I could before I really engaged with them was very important.
Carrie: What was the process of finding support like whether that was professional supports or just other parents who could understand what you were going through, spiritual support, all of that.
Diana: Well, it was difficult at first because we live away from our family. My husband and I have never been able to live close to family. So we built it. And God was so gracious in that he put us in an area where there are wonderful therapists all around us. And we had many. We had developmental therapists, occupational therapists, physical therapists, speech therapists.
Carrie: Wow.
Diana: Yeah. And for both of my sons, they had a very intense schedule therapy, which is part of why we began from schooling just to be able to manage the schedules that we all had. I needed to really be able to educate them from home. And so the homeschooling community also really became a support for our family.
I just made a real effort to get out there and meet other moms and to learn all I could. I looked for support groups in the community and there were some, but they were mostly for older children with the same challenges and adults with anxiety. Those kinds of things. I actually ended up starting a support group so that I could have that support.
It was a wonderful experience. Brought other from spilling parents around that had children with different special needs and tried to talk about the unique challenges of raising kids in home all day with their needs and trying to educate them because that’s a big job. Having that support was really critical to our success.
But I also want to say that I found a neighbor who became a very dear friend to me. She had children the same age, roughly as mine who did not have any developmental challenges, but she was gracious and loving. Actually, I had two neighbors at the time that were that way and loved us well. They brought my children for play dates. They took the time to learn about their behaviors and how to manage them so that I could have a break sometimes while the children played with their children. I don’t know that anything else was more important to me in that period of our life, just to have their support, to be able to connect with moms around things that didn’t have to do with disabilities or the challenges that my kids were facing.
That was just really essential to me.
Carrie: I hope that provides some encouragement maybe for people who are in a situation where they might be able to support and help another family through the process of helping raise their children because you never know, like what kind of impact you could potentially have in people’s lives. And we all need each other, parents I think in general, just need each other, but especially, so when you’re raising a child that has specific needs.
Diana: Yes, I feel that it will encourage people. I know my friends if they were speaking with you today would tell you that they felt that the relationship with our family taught them a lot too, but it was beneficial on both sides.
Although it wasn’t a tremendous ministry to my family. And I feel like it certainly probably benefited us more than anyone. They will tell you that it benefited them as well, that they learned a lot from having our children be part of their children’s lives and watching them play together.
And we of course tried to really reciprocate to those families as well, not just to receive from them, but to post them in our home and to show love to them as well. And I think it was just some really beautiful relationships that developed as our children grew up together.
Carrie: That’s a really beautiful story. Let’s talk a little bit about how this is impacted your marriage because I’ve heard that statistically, people who are raising children with any kind of special needs have a higher divorce rate than average. How did this affect your marriage and how did you and your husband work through some of those bumps in the road?
Diana: Well, that’s a great question. I could probably talk about that the entire time we had today. But I was thinking in general that raising children with special needs and the anxiety and things that came with that for them really challenged our marriage more than anything else that we’ve faced, but it’s also been the way that God has strengthened our marriage probably more than anything else. So it’s been both a really difficult and wonderful thing at the same time. We’ve learned several survival skills that I’ll share in case they’re helpful to others. But one is how important it is that we actually communicate in a healthy way.
I think when you have typical challenges and marriage and parenting it’s difficult anyway, good communication is important, but when you have children with special needs and the constant demands of that, it becomes even more important because you have so little time together and you need that time together.
Where you’re alone to really have this really clear communication that’s very healthy. We had to accept each other’s limits. That was really important. And to recognize when my anxiety or his anxiety with dealing with the challenges was too high. And to step in not with any judgements, but to just try to step in for one another and say, Hey, you know, I’ve got this situation. I can take it from here for a little bit, you know, go grab a cup of coffee or, you know, go work in the yard a bit. I’ve got this. And to really just understand that there’s only so much we can take. We’re human too. And to make room for us to have our own limits was really important. We make amazing at dividing and conquering tasks. We developed that pretty early in the marriage to survive. And some, we just took on the task that we each were best at and did that really well and work together as a team. And that was really helpful to me because we weren’t constantly reinventing the wheel to get through every day.
We just knew what we needed to do. And that helped a lot. That reduced my anxiety a lot to know that he had certain areas covered and I didn’t have to think about them and, and then I would handle the others. So, yeah, I think those were some of the main things that we learned as far as tips, but encouraging self-care. My partner was really important too.
Sometimes we have recognized ourselves when we’re really overwhelmed and anxious. We see it for our children that we couldn’t always see it for ourselves. And so my husband and I learned to help one another recognize when we were at that place. And to encourage self-care not just a temporary break, but how has your spiritual life going.
You had to do a hobby that you enjoy or to connect with a friend to call your family does most of the really important things that we did for one another.
Carrie: Right. Good. I think some of that’s good for, for any marriage, some of the principles that you just outlined, just a sense of knowing your strengths, knowing your limitations, learning how to communicate with each other. That’s an ongoing process, I think for married couples. Very good insights there.
How would you say that this journey with your children has impacted your faith?
Diana: Well, you hit on probably the first thing I always say about it already, Carrie, you said that recognizing limitations is important. And that was the first thing I think that I had to learn spiritually was that there are limits, I think before having children and these challenges in our home, there really, hadn’t been very much that my husband and I hadn’t been able to tackle together very well the challenges that we hadn’t been able to overcome. And just through hard work and effort, and you can’t fix anxiety, you can’t fix developmental challenges with hard work and effort. You can’t power your way through that.
And so we had to learn that we have limits and our children have limits. And that it was okay. It really humbled us, I think and deepened our need for the Lord in ways that I don’t think we would’ve grown and recognized until the children came into our family. We became very aware that we need a God for everything. And I wish that I had had a deeper sense of that before, but really the Lord used our children and their needs to drive that point home.
And I’m thankful that he did.
Carrie: It just ended up leading you to like a greater place of dependence on God.
Diana: Absolutely. And it really caused me to really shrink life down to its basic elements for many years.
Our story is much different now, but in the early years of dealing with all of this, I was really happy to get a shower. If I could everybody say all the toddlers, you know, or we’re doing well. We had gotten through the day, their basic needs are met and my basic needs were met, I was really, really happy.
That was a successful day. That was a triumph. But in doing that and having this very small circle in life, I realized that I can focus more on the Lord too like I have so many fewer distractions and the quiet because life was so basic and it really helped my husband and are both, I think, focused on eternal things more, to become more in touch with the fact that things may not be what we desire or sometimes even feel that we need them to be here, but that we have an eternal hope that we can cling to that even if things don’t get better. Here that we will be okay. That this is not a forever situation. And that hope became very real to me in those years. For sure.
Carrie: How are your sons doing now?
Diana: I’m really happy to report that the prognoses and things that we received when they were young has really been blown out of the water.
I guess if to say we’ve gone from home homeschooling lifestyle so that we can just manage behaviors and allow them to learn in a safe environment for them to maybe in our costs the world and going to competitive international schools and you know, all of these things that are anxiety-producing for anyone.
And my son’s been able to manage that extremely well. My oldest is going to university in the fall of this year and. He’s graduated without really much support anymore academically or socially at school or emotionally at school. He’s really impressed. All of us, I think with the sheer amount of effort and work and perseverance that he’s demonstrated over the years.
And my younger son is right behind him and he’s in 10th grade this year. He’s finishing that up and plans to get a university as well, which are things that we just never dreamed of, you know, really being potentials for them when they were young. And we were getting all of this news. So we have a lot of joy in this season, seeing all that God has done the ways that he has not just helped us overcome that a lot, many of the challenges, although that’s wonderful and we’re thankful for that, but really the people that he shaped us into through these struggles and seeing that character formed in my children as well. And that love for the Lord that they carry with them because they’ve had to depend on him so much is a great encouragement to me, probably the best thing.
Carrie: Right. I think that’s something that we’ve seen with really all of the personal stories that we’ve of people we’ve had on the show that I’ve struggled with anxiety or OCD is that they’ll say it caused me to know more about God. It caused me to grow closer to him. It was part of my sanctification process of becoming more like Christ. And I think that your story really fits in, with all of that. And when we’re in the middle of it, it’s so easy to get bogged down with the day-to-day trials that we’re facing. And a lot of times we don’t see the bigger picture until maybe sometimes years later. And then we take a step back and we’re like, wow, God really used that situation in my life for good, but when I was in the midst of it, I just couldn’t see anything good about it. And I was just there just going through the motions, just trying to survive like you said.
Diana: Yes, absolutely. And I think that that perspective is so critical. It’s easier to have when you’re looking backwards like I am now. It’s so overwhelming, sometimes that all you can do is just kind of ask the Lord to come to you in that place because you don’t have anything to reach out to him with. That’s such a wonderful thing that he does, that he does come into our mess. He does come into the chaos. He does come into all of the things that we can’t manage on our own. And, and brings his peace when we don’t have it. And when we experienced that, it helps us understand that there is something more than what we’re struggling with.
Carrie: Right. So I feel like your, your whole story has been hopeful, but because I always ask this question to every guest, I’m going to ask it to you. What is the time in your life where you have received hope from God or another person?
Diana: There have been so many times that the Lord himself has done that and he used other people to do that for us. But I think I’ll share the one where it was one of my darkest moments. I was much older. We were both really young and really struggling, kind of at the crisis point, I guess, for their challenges. I had one of those days where I really couldn’t even have my own thoughts. I was just trying to keep them happy and getting through their day.
And we had a lot of outbursts, a lot of meltdowns and a lot of anxiety that day. All the way around with both of my sons and with me, myself. And I finally put them in their rooms for quiet time, which was my saving grace that they had by at time every day. And I just kind of collapsed in a heap on the floor.
And I told the Lord really clearly that I needed him to change that situation, or I needed him to change me because I didn’t know how to go forward even one more step. And that feeling, even as I talk about it, it’s still just really present. It was such a moment I had really come to the end of myself and as I was crying and telling him these things, I just felt his presence really powerfully.
And he reminded me that he was with me and that he was, he was going to be enough and he didn’t tell me how he was going to do that. He didn’t impress on my heart, the plan for the next five or 10 years or anything like that. But he just met me in that place. And I just felt his presence.
I was encouraged by scripture and things that I needed so desperately in that moment that reminded me that there was more than that one moment that I was stuck in. And at that point, things really changed in our family. We became a family that wasn’t driven by the challenges and just constantly reacting to them, but a family that was looking beyond them to something more. And that shift made all the difference in being able to cope with the anxiety that we were all feeling and changed us I think. It’s certainly changed me forever to find him there.
Carrie: Yeah, that’s awesome. I loved what you said earlier about just God really entering into those places with us. You know, the, whether it’s the mess or the loneliness or the heartache or the, I just can’t do this anymore. One more day. I just can’t seem to do this.
That he’ll be right there and that he pursues us in that process. I love that.
Thank you so much for being on the show and telling your story. I know that it’s going to encourage and inspire some other people.
Diana: Thank you for having beyond theory. It’s a privilege to get to meet you and to hopefully share our story in a way that will maybe help somebody else keep going too.
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There are so many amazing special needs parents out there. So shout out to you if you are in that category. And I hope this episode was encouraging to you. If that’s the case, stay tuned for future episodes where we’re going to be talking about everything from brainspotting to self-care to dealing with doubt.
You can find us online anytime at www.thopeforanxietyandocd.com.
Thanks so much for listening.
Hope for Anxiety and OCD is a production of By The Well Counseling in Smyrna, Tennessee. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum and audio editing is completed by Benjamin Bynam.
Until next time may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.
I had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Roseann Capanna-Hodge, a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC), Certified Integrative Medicine Mental Health Provider (CMHIMP), and a Board Certified Neurofeedback Provider (BCN). She is also the founder and director of The Global Institute of Children’s Mental Health and Dr. Roseann and Associates.
Dr. Rosean shares with us her knowledge and clinical experience in treating PANS (Pediatric Acute-onset Neuropsychiatric Syndrome) and PANDAS (Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorder Associated with Streptococcus).
What should parents know about PANS/PANDAS? What are its signs and symptoms?
How are PANS/PANDAS diagnosed? Is there a test for PANS/PANDAS?
Dr. Roseann: Wow, I’m so excited to be here, Carrie, and have this conversation.
Carrie: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?
Dr. Roseann: My name is Dr. Roseanne Alanna Hodge, and this is my 30th year in mental health in supporting kids, their families and adults using only proven holistic therapies like neurofeedback, biofeedback, and of course, psychotherapy.
Carrie: Awesome. What type of training does it take to become a certified integrative medicine, mental health provider? That’s a long title.
Dr. Roseann: Well, you know, here’s the deal. Since I literally have only been an integrative mental health provider my entire career, there was no certification. There was nothing years ago.
I started out with going to the basement in a library and looking at microfiche and doing my research that way. And then I bought literally hundreds of books about integrative care, everything from nutrition to exercise, supplements, genetics, and did a lot of that training. So when these certifications became available because if you’re a licensed mental health provider, depending on what state you’re in and in my state, Connecticut, my license allows me to do work as long as I’ve had training. And so I always try to do highest and best and get certification. So I have certification to be an integrative mental health provider. I also have the Amon certification. I’m also a certified neurofeedback provider. It really just means you’ve done extensive training in a certain area in order to guide your clients, your patients, whatever you call them to that area.
Carrie: Okay. And your specialty is working with children and adolescentsts
Dr. Roseann: Yeah. And families.
Carrie: Okay, awesome. So why did you want to come on the show today and talk with us about PANS or PANDAS?
Dr. Roseann: Yeah. So I am somebody who specializes in PANS and PANDAS, and it is something that is dramatically on the rise.
And what is it? Is that they’re separate disorders that have the same infectious or toxic trigger. And there’s also another one in there, autoimmune encephalopathy, but PANS and PANDAS is a sudden onset of a mental health issue because the body has a misdirected immune response starts attacking itself and has an inflammatory effect, which then can produce a wide variety of psychiatric, neurocognitive and physical issues. And autoimmune encephalopathy is the same, except it’s not a sudden onset and why I want to talk about it. Like I said, it’s on the rise and infectious disease triggers are a very common source of mental health problems in the time of COVID. You know, we’re all seeing people with long holler symptoms affecting their cognition, right? Whether they’re calling a brain fog or they’re having psychiatric problems, I’ve had more than one person with psychosis as a result of COVID but there’s more than that. Right? So we have depression. Yeah, right. And, and there’s, it’s a very, very common source of anxiety, depression, EDD like- symptoms.
And I want therapists and people out there in the world to know about it. And, you know, we specialize in OCD in our center because we specialize in PANS and PANDAS. And other than one or two people who have OCD that come to us, all have a primary diagnosis of pans and pandas. So people are just not making this connection in my mission.
I’m on a mission to change the way we view and treat children’s mental health. I mean, that really is my mission, but I want people to know about this because not only am I somebody who treats and started working with people with Lyme disease almost 24, Is it 25 years ago? Somewhere, a long time ago, Carrie
And then I of course get my own child who gets Lyme disease at 22 months and develops PANS, but It is a horrible journey for any person, a child or an adult that has, you know, PANS and PANDAS, Lyme disease, because what happens is the first people that they see medical people, miss it. Then they get slopped into mental health providers who then say, “Oh, this is a mental health problem”.
They don’t understand the physical components. And you asked about like I do integrative work. I mean, What does that mean? It means that I really am studying about mind and body. And I don’t want to get the spirit out of there, but I’m really working on mind and body connections. And we are not educated enough as therapists, but parents are not educated.
They’re not getting educated that their kid could have a mental health problem. That results from something that could be medically treated, not with an anti-anxiety or antipsychotic, but with anti-inflammatory antimicrobial drugs to address what’s causing that root cause of that mental health problem.
So it’s something that’s incredibly common. One in 200 kids, the research says have it. And even though it’s called pediatric acute onset neuropsychiatric syndrome, it can actually now be an adult-onset. So we’re no longer just making, you know, saying it has to occur.
Carrie: So kids who have PANS or PANDAS when they go to get mental health treatment and the parent brings them in, oftentimes I imagine they’ll be misdiagnosed as either having anxiety, OCD, ADHD. Is that right?
Dr. Roseann: Tic disorder, separation anxiety. Yeah, absolutely OCD. I know there’s a separate category in the DSM for oppositional defiant disorder. It’s not real. it’s a symptom of another issue, So, you know, whether things are your depression and OCD on that spectrum, you have internalizers and externalizers and odd kids, or externalizers. It’s really the behavioral manifestation.
People haven’t done their due diligence to figure out what it actually is that sourcing this anger and non-compliance. Sorry people that are listening. Parents, they’re refusals.
Carrie: Right. So how do people get diagnosed? How do they come to a place of a proper diagnosis? What does that testing process like?
Dr. Roseann: Yeah. So first I have to say whether it’s Lyme disease or PANS and PANDA, there is no single test of the diagnosis. And this is so critical because people will go down rabbit hole after rabbit hole, after rabbit hole, looking for an official diagnosis. And particularly if the source is a tick-borne illness and there are hundreds of types of tick-borne illness.
We really often only hear about Lyme. Sometimes we hear about Bartonella or BBCA. They have very, very much impact to your mental health and some of your more severe psychiatric conditions, including schizophrenia, bipolar and there’s research to substantiate some of the things that I’m talking about.
They have a high rate of tick-borne infection. So. No single test. Okay. Are there tests civil? Of course. But as I mentioned with Lyme disease, Some people say it’s the most genetically evolved bacteria on the planet. And because it’s been around since prehistoric times they’re finding it.
They definitely found it coming over with Columbus in 1492, but people are saying prehistoric times, And so this bacteria can hide inside of a cell. So that means standard testing may not pick it up. And then there’s a whole controversy about what tests people are using and not, but in pans and pandas, there is a panel called the Cunningham panel.
It does not mean if your child is negative on that, that they don’t have PANS and PANDAS. So you have to look at clinical symptoms. And do they meet criteria, PANS and PANDAS? You know, there’s going to be a sudden onset of a problem or a deep acceleration of a preexisting condition. I like to talk about this because people really don’t understand this.
So you could have ADD. And then it’s literally off the charts, right. Or a low level of anxiety and then sudden onset of OCD. And that can be a confounding variable because people like, well, my kid always like saying chest, you know, but then literally overnight. So, and sometimes it’s really easy to see Carrie because.
People will come to me and say, oh, my kid got, the case of somebody who came to me recently, he got COVID and within 10 days he is psychosis.
Carrie: Wow.
Dr. Roseann: So pretty easy to make that connection.
Carrie: Sure. That was really fast.
Dr. Roseann: Yeah, with physicians still wanted to send them to the psych hospital and I was like, what is going on? We got to treat it. So we got him to where he needed to go. I think it’s really important that people find a provider- PANS and PANDAS trained provider. And you can do that by going, there’s a great national organization called Aspire Care where you can go to epidemic answers and they have providers listed there.
Carrie: Okay. That’s awesome. I think that that’s really great. This is a sudden onset of psychiatric symptoms, but it’s based on a physical medical problem and part of the problem that we have sometimes is we don’t always know, is something mental health-related or is something medically related. And we talked about in one of our very early episodes on the show, kind of ruling out medical conditions for mental health disorders.
What are some things that parents might see if they think that their kid might be struggling with this? what are some signs or symptoms to look out for?
Dr. Roseann: Yeah. I want to say that if you’ve had chronic anxiety or chronic stress or long-term any type of physical or mental health problem, you’re going to have physical effects on your body.
Your body is not designed to run on empty. And when your nervous system is hyper stress-activated, you’re going to start getting nutrient depletion. You’re going to get physical problems. You may have hair loss, your thyroid might go down. So whether that’s the actual source or something that’s worsening it. Really taking a functional approach through lab work is really important. So what are signs of PANS and PANDAS? We can only connect the dots looking forward. I mean, looking back not looking forward. And so these are things that people see. So when it’s really sudden, and sometimes people will come to me.
I know when they write down a date that it started. I’ve got to consider PANS. And it wasn’t like, oh, the grandmother died, or you know, they got bullied. Whatever it was, it isn’t something traumatic that happened often when it’s really sudden overnight, and you will hear stories of this, then all of a sudden they woke up.
And this is very common OCD, very, very severe to the point where they’re doing obsessions in compulsive thinking and behaviors. So they cannot function at all. Right? So these behaviors and intrusive thoughts may be going on for hours on it. And it wasn’t present there before, or was present at a very mild level.
So the level of how it destroys your functionality is a big red flag. You also can have regressive behaviors, so you can have a loss of bladder functioning. Right? Frequent urination is one of the hallmark signs. And this can occur in adults too. It’s not just kids, a loss of handwriting or coordination is another one or a loss of academic skills, math and reading, being the two most common.
And then, you know, you’re going to, you’re going to look for things like. Vocal or motor tics, a real extreme level of anxiety. And, and, you know, I mean, as somebody, a professional who spent so much time with OCD and anxiety, these are conditions that are misunderstood. You know, most people think about OCD as only compulsive behaviors, hand-washing and whatnot.
It always starts off as intrusive thoughts, right? And often the nexuses worry it’s anxiety. And then it’s, what we call a maladaptive way of coping with anxiety. So some people are like I’m going to go and work out. I’m going to go pray. I’m going to go to my spin class with my bestie, and we’re going to socialize when I’m feeling anxious and you find these healthy ways to cope. But OCD gets in there and there’s this habituation and it can really ignite like a wildfire due to the negative reinforcement cycle in the brain. And what happens with neuro-transmitters reinforcing us, but what it looks like. And these kinds of things. If there’s sort of a wax and weaning, all of a sudden your kid might need reassurance a lot and they weren’t a kid that needed reassurance, separation anxiety can all of a sudden show up.
One of my dearest friends, her daughter was totally typical and got bitten by a tick and within 30 minutes became a different human being. She developed severe separation anxiety within 30 minutes, her mom is a psychologist. She had to quit her job, and unfortunately, she didn’t really respond to a lot of treatments.
So she wound up getting tick-borne illness and then strep on top of it. So PANDAS, it’s strep only, but PANS is any infection or toxic trigger. And most of these individuals have layers of infection. So they could have scars. Like, my max had nine co-infections from ticks, Scarlet fever, a bunch of other things, you know, it was a lot of work to clean him up.
So a variety of symptoms can result that are mental health-related and they can be quite extreme behavior can be frightening. Not to speak in a way that’s saucy or inappropriate. Because I’m a PANS’ mom, parents will come to me and say, I literally thought my kid had a demonic possession. They just flipped out, you know, just can be very, very extreme, whether it’s an internalizing where they’re scared or extreme rage externalizers and then, you know, psychosis can happen in this as well. And it can be really, really frightening. And the most recent research, early, 2021, which is in my book, it’s going to be okay. Is saying what I knew. That these kids have paradoxical reactions to psych meds.
No surprise, because the issue is inflammatory response, infection and toxins, and every psych med has a toxin load. There isn’t a psych med that doesn’t have a toxic component. And so you add that into a system that’s already flooded and overwhelmed by infections and toxins. It actually worsens things.
Carrie: They can’t tolerate the medication cause their system’s already on overload.
Dr. Roseann: Overload. And, yes, they’re anxious. But the source is not neuro-transmitter genetics. That’s what everybody wants us to believe. So this is surprising to people. When I talk about this, most people, I hope people are listening, and this is why I do this.
You know, why am I doing this? I want you to think about it, right? So if you’re a therapist, you’ve got somebody on your caseload. This is who they are, who they are. And if you’re a parent or a friend to somebody, you might be like, holy moly. That’s what happened to Becky’s kid. And you want to say, this is an episode that I want you to listen to because I learned a lot.
And that information can just really change the trajectory of not only that individual, but their entire family. I mean, this is a devastating thing we knew within like six months that my 22 month-old had Lyme disease. I already was integrative. I already am in the Northeast with the top experts in the world.
He’s 16 and I’m telling you it took 14 years. And I won’t even tell you how much money, because it is not attainable for most people, because a lot of my friends have lost their homes and marriages. It is extraordinary what we did to get him better. And that is the norm and it’s rabbit hole after rabbit hole, after rabbit hole.
And I didn’t have the same issues as other people, because most people are forced to go in network where they’re challenged you belittled. I mean, when you hear some of these stories of what happens to people, it’s frightening. I mean, I, when I talk about cases, I. Give information that hides and protects there’s identity.
I mashed them up. I like to say I’ve had people who were tied down in psych hospitals, even though their titers were showing that they had off the charts. I had one client who had the highest strep titer that the hospital has ever seen and they refused to treat her for strep.
Carrie: So tell us a little bit about what the treatment is usually like for PANS and PANDAS.
Dr. Roseann: So there’s a treatment triangle and it involves antimicrobials really getting at that infection and then anti-inflammatory treatment and then mental health. Because even though this isn’t a biochemical problem, this is very traumatic. There are mental health components, parents need a lot of support.
They may have had a totally typical kid who now is hijacking the family, you know, financially behaviourally everything, and they’re not equipped to deal with this. And so they need a lot of support for themselves on how to really kind of get through this and, you know, really set these loving limits with their child and support them through this.
It’s very, very challenging.
Carrie: Absolutely. Parents that have children with mental health issues or physical issues need a lot of support and a lot of help. And unfortunately, a lot of times are judged is just, well, you’re a bad parent because your kid’s acting out and that’s not the case.
Dr. Roseann: And sometimes kids are called bad. I did a summit and my friend, JJ Virgin was on and Bob Hope’s granddaughter, Miranda hope is on and myself and we all have the same story. All three of our kids were kicked out of preschool.
Carrie: Wow.
Dr. Roseann: Yeah. And my kid was called a feral animal, by the teacher. Now what human being would tell a mother, your kids, a feral animal.
And each of us had horror stories. Right? JJ Virgin’s son was left outside in Palm Springs in September, outside the room locked out because they said he was a bad boy.
Carrie: Wow.
Dr. Roseann: Yeah, so we have to change that, that’s not okay. And one in two children in America has a physical or mental health problem. That’s ten-year-old data. That study is being updated. I can’t even imagine what it’s like right now. So we have to be way more tolerant and accepting and loving.
Carrie: So tell us a little bit about your book, Dr. Roseanne, It’s Going to be Okay, which I love that title. So tell us what it’s about.
Dr. Roseann: Well, thank you. I love this title. So I tell every person that I work with, it’s going to be okay. And that’s the first thing that I tell them because they need to hear that because you feel alone, you feel scared, you don’t know who to trust, and you definitely don’t know what to do. And you know, people find me in all these different ways. It’s unbelievable. And I work with people in person and remote and all different ways.
So this book is going to be okay. I lay out the eight pillars, what I call hope and healing. And I show people how to reduce mental health symptoms using only proven holistic therapies. And it is all there. All science-backed ways are over 40 pages of research citations. So I want people to know this stuff that made it and heard about.
But I can feel comfortable that they’re safe. I can try these out and as overwhelmed as we feel as parents in general, but when you have a kid who struggles, you feel even more overwhelmed, I encourage parents to get this book. Start with one thing. And when we do one small action consistently, it can create a lot of change.
And so I’m really, really excited. This is truly the 30 years worth my work in one book. And I really want parents to know it’s going to be okay and show them how to do it.
Carrie: Awesome. Awesome. So towards the end of every podcast, I like to ask our guests to share a story of hope. So a time where you’ve received hope from God or another person.
Dr. Roseann: Yeah. Well, you know, when you ask me this question, it’s actually hard for me to answer because I feel very connected to God. And so when I struggle in that moment and being a special needs, mom, times two, I have learned. That I have to be in the moment and really try to appreciate the moment. And so I think that I’m most connected when I’m with my kids and I am actually having fun and trying to laugh, not trying to laugh, laughing, just being there.
And so I have the blessing of having a million moments like that every day, being present and connected and having a lot of love around you.
Carrie: Okay. Okay. Hey, so every day, moments of hope for you, with your family.
Dr. Roseann: Yeah, absolutely. And, and I’m so lucky that I’m able to bring hope to people because at a time when I feel that people have the lowest level of hope and trust I’ve ever seen in these 30 years, it’s a conversation that I’m starting wherever I go, which is why I start off by saying it’s going to be okay, because people need to hear that like they’re feeling overwhelmed and out of hope. And I just think taking the moment to be extra kind to anybody who’s in your presence just goes a long way. And I know it sounds really hokey, but people are so lonely and disconnected and scared very much so. And I think they were before the pandemic and the pandemic has really thrown some fuel on this fire.
Carrie: Yes, I would definitely agree with that for sure. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom with us today.
Dr. Roseann: Thank you for having this conversation. And if you think that, you know, your child has PANS or PANDAS, find a provider. I say this wherever I am, nobody ever regrets getting help. The only regret is when they don’t.
Carrie: I knew a little bit about PANDAS from my previous work with children. However, I’ve found this interview to be very informative in terms of thinking about, we always have to look at the holistic picture of anyone’s health, whether that’s a child or adult, how are they impacted physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. And if you’re looking at things from a holistic lens, instead of only being treating one or the other, usually something ends up missing in that picture. Unfortunately just with the way our current medical system is often doctors and counselors and psychiatrists aren’t always communicating together in the best possible way.
So it’s important for parents to really be the best advocate for their children in providing the linkage between some of those areas.
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I wanted to announce to you all that our next free webinar for hope for anxiety and OCD is going to be sometime, probably in mid-September. I would love topic suggestions for this webinar.
What would you like to dive into a little bit deeper? What would you like to have questions answered on about? So there’ll be a very short, you know, 30 or 45 minutes of teaching for the webinar. And then I want to leave time at the end for questions. So if there’s something that you would like to see some helpful teaching on and be able to ask some questions, feel free to contact me through our website, www.hopeforanxietyandocd.com.Thank you so much for listening.
Hope for anxiety and OCD is a production of By The Well Counseling in Smyrna, Tennessee. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum and audio editing is completed by Benjamin Bynam.
Until next time may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.
This episode is for those who are curious about what it’s truly like to be a therapist. People wonder things like, how can you listen to so many people’s problems?
Today’s show is also unique because my husband Steve took over my role for a day as a host and prepared the set of questions himself. It’s always fun and exciting to have him both on the show and in my life.
What is it about therapy that I enjoy most?
My life as a therapist and scope of work
Difference between private practice and working in a community mental health setting
How I get through my busy day feeling good
Balancing my analytical side and creative side
How I feel when I got to the end of the whole process with my clients.
My goal for my clients
Steve and Carrie share their most recent personal story of hope
Hope for anxiety and OCD, episode 33. This is your host, Carrie Bock. And in case you’re new to the show, we’re all about reducing shame, increasing hope, and developing healthier connections with God and others. Today is a very special show as I am joined by my husband, Steve Bock, he is saving my bacon because we had an episode that I was going to come out and the recording just didn’t come out very good. And I didn’t feel comfortable putting it out there into the world for you guys to listen to. So he decided to come up with some questions that our listeners might be interested in related to being a therapist.
Carrie: Welcome back, Steve.
Steve: I’m happy to be here. You did not ask me to be here, which makes it different this time. I had suggested it because as with anything we get in a pinch sometimes. As your husband, I have an obligation to try to help where I can. So I suggested, well, why don’t you just let me ask you a bunch of questions and see how it goes.
Carrie: You’re very helpful as always.
Steve : You’re all too kind.
Carrie: So what’s up? I haven’t seen these questions ahead of time. So what do you have for me?
Steve: Okay, well, Carrie, today is your day to be on the couch. As a therapist, you have people on the couch, right? And you talk to them and they just opened up to you.
Carrie: Now they’re on their own couch online
Steve: Now they’re on their couch online and they get to be in the comfort of their own home or their own car. Today, you’re on the couch. The questions are for you. I’m not per se trying to help you in that sense. I’m no therapist. God knows I’m not a therapist. So Carrie, what is it about therapy and helping people being their therapist? What is it that you like about that?
Carrie: Wow. The biggest thing for me is just the life transformation that I get to see in people like watching them come in. A lot of times, pretty hopeless. I feel like I’m at the end of my rope and everything I’ve tried. I just haven’t gotten better. I’ve done maybe some self-help or talk to some friends, or maybe just try to do everything internally themselves. And then they get to this pivotal point where they reach out for help to someone. And as you get to know people week after week, after seeing them on a regular basis, there’s just an element where you’re care and concern for someone that you have in the beginning. It grows obviously over time, the more time that you spend with people. I want to see my clients succeed, I want to see them do well. And so when they come in after working with me for some time and they have a smile on their face and they haven’t been smiling in a long time or they say, “Hey, I had a win this week. This is what happened. I was able to have an OCD thought come in. And I knew it was OCD this time.” And I just was like, “okay, I’m going to let that thought pass” or they come in and say, yeah, that situation that normally would have really triggered me and made me anxious. It didn’t make me as anxious this week. I was able to kind of catch my breath and breathe through it. So it’s all these little opportunities to see people, really change the directory of their lives.
And I know it’s not just for their lives, it’s for their kids’ lives. It’s for their marriages that are being changed. And that just lights me up and makes me want to go to work every day.
Steve: Okay, well, for those who maybe haven’t listened much to you, or like me. They’ve heard it, but haven’t really listened. What is it that you do? Do you just give everybody therapy?
Carrie: I definitely don’t give everybody therapy. That would be out of my scope of practice. And it’s funny because I used to get calls all the time for marriage counseling. I think because I was a Christian and I would have to tell people I don’t do marriage counseling at all. In fact, I haven’t done marriage counseling since I was in my practicum in graduate school. And I’m pretty sure those couples are not together anymore. I would not be a good person to do marriage counseling. I also don’t work with addictions or anybody that has a severe anorexia or something of that nature I don’t work with
My tagline that I tell people is that I am a Christian therapist who helps people with anxiety and OCD overcome wounding childhood experiences in order to live more full lives. And I do that now in the comfort of their own homes via online therapy.
Steve: As Carrie Bock, you wake up and I know this pretty early in the morning. You’re not a lazy person. You get up, you put a lot of preparation into what you do. You have a plan, you have ideas. You don’t share those with me because in your world, you can’t. So you keep that all mustered up inside somewhat.
The first person that you meet with comes along and something’s already probably gone wrong. Somebody at the front door knocking on the door while you’re trying to be in session or a cat walks in or out or whatever the case is you deal with that, not a big deal. You handle that. Things go on all throughout the day though that are out of your control and you have to somehow keep enough sense about you to help someone. And you do very, very well at it I think.
The first session goes by and you’ve absorbed everything that that individual has said. Now you’re going to session two, the same thing. Session three, session four. Maybe you get a lunch. I don’t know. Maybe you’ve just scarfed down lunch, you’ve tipped your food in your mouth, and now you’re running back to go meet with someone, how do you not go nuts like how do you take all of that in absorb it all and then calmly say, and how does that make you feel because I’ve got that in my head and I bet that you never say that.
Carrie: No, therapists don’t just have one line that they say that’s so annoying. Wow. So how do I get through the day to day seen multiple people with multiple problems and hearing all their stories?
That’s a really good question. Well, first thing I will say about the lunch. I’m not a person that scarves down food and runs back to work. For me, my lunch is more of a time. A lot of times now that I’m home, I get to go in and I’ll cook a little something. It doesn’t have to be anything major, but lunch is kind of my downtime, my relax time, where I can clear my head a little bit or shift gears and think about something different.
As far as seeing one person and the next, sometimes sessions can be really heavy like you’re talking about some pretty traumatic things or the person was very emotional and that can be hard. I think, to transition and shift gears, for me, it can look like a lot of different ways. It can look like maybe getting up in between sessions and stretching. Sometimes it’s just going to get a drink of water. Obviously, I have to go to the bathroom throughout the day. You know, those types of things that I do in between session to kind of help reset. One of the things that has helped me probably the most is that therapists that I realized a long time ago was that these are not my problems.
There are other people’s problems because I was such an empathetic person that I would take on other people’s problems as my own. And even when I was in the early days of working in community mental health. Essentially, I felt like the message was you’ve got to fix these people. You’ve got to make them better like whatever you have to do to do that. You have to bend over backwards. I really got burned out in that job. And I didn’t even realize that I was burnt out. I didn’t have the self-awareness to know that. Through that process though of going to my own therapy, I realized I have to take a step back and take the wide-angle view really to say at the end of the day, these people are living with these problems on a day-to-day basis and I’m here to help them. I’m here to support them, but I’m not here to fix them and I’m not here to fix their problems. I’m here to be kind of the guide and the person that walks alongside them and shows them potential different paths that they can take, but I can never make anyone do anything.
There’s something really freeing about recognizing that, that everything is optional. People want to dive in and do the work then I’m happy to help them do that. If they’re not ready to do that, that’s okay. And I can be patient and wait with them until they are ready to dive into some things. I think for me because my therapy is less of insight-based and more action-based that the people who aren’t quite ready to take action, they either don’t tend to see me or they tend to drop out one of the two, but I hope that answers the question.
Steve: Yeah, it does. And that leads me to another question actually. We all need help from time to time, right? You’re around me enough, you know that I tend to store things in. I’m not going to tell, I’ll tell y’all complained to you all day, but I’m not going to tell people my problems. I’m not good at that, right? There are people who I am sure have a problem, and they don’t recognize it. There’s an outcome of it. They’re aggravated and they don’t know why or they’re doing something to themselves that they shouldn’t or saying things they shouldn’t or treating a spouse or a family member, whatever, in a bad way or whatever it may be. But what do you tell them to notice those types of things? Like at what point should a person notice that? If that makes sense.
Carrie: Are you talking about how do people become self-aware enough to realize that they need therapy?
Steve: Yes.
Carrie: Okay.
Steve: See? You put it so much better than I did. I say it in like 5,000 words, you say it in like 10 or less, but yes.
Carrie: Well, we always look at the different domains of a person’s life. And I think that you just named some of those off. So when you’re looking at what are your relationships look like, are you satisfied in your relationship with your spouse or significant other? What is your work like? Are you getting in trouble at work because you can’t get along with your coworkers and then the other would be maybe school. If the person is in school, a lot of times when kids are failing, it’s not just because they don’t understand the subject matter. Sometimes they have emotional things going on or mental health struggles that they’re dealing with.
So we look at those kinds of different domains of life. What’s someone’s functional level at home? Are they just laying in the bed all day, depressed on a Saturday and really all they can do is go to work and go home. That might be an indication that someone needs therapy. Usually, people seek help when one of those domains is impacted in some way, shape or form like, okay my anxiety is at the point where it’s affecting my ability to drive to and from work because I’m afraid of driving on the interstate or my OCD is impacting my relationship with my spouse because I’m having all of these obsessions about my spouse. And then I’m seeking reassurance from them. Just some couple of examples there
Steve: On a similar question, what advice would you give someone if they had a family member or a friend. Of course, we all think the other person needs help and not us, Sometimes you see people and you’re like, man, they really need some help, honestly.
And not in a mean or a cruel way like, “oh dear. Oh my, go get some help.” You’re not trying to be mean, but they really do need help. What advice do you give somebody? Because that type of a thing is usually, I would think you bring up that topic and they are going to let you have it. I don’t have a problem. Who do you think you are? And that it’s one of those things that probably could split a family or a marriage or whatever up. What advice do you give somebody to reach out to their friend or their family member and say Hey, you need help?
Carrie: If you know what the barrier is I think that it’s a little bit easier. For example, if someone’s saying, well, I don’t have time to go to therapy, then you might present them with some different options. There are therapists that keep all different kinds of hours. Well, maybe we can find you someone, that works on the weekends. Maybe we can find you someone that works late into the evening.
If it’s a financial barrier, trying to figure out, okay, well, are there some things that we could look into, some lower costs, sliding scale university counseling center, EAP program through your work. Okay. Let’s try to remove that barrier to therapy. if it’s a matter of ”I’m not really that bad.”
I think that’s probably the thing that keeps most people out of therapy is like, “well, yeah, I’ve got some obsessions, but there’s that person over here that I’m comparing myself to and they really can’t function. They’re washing their hands 20 times a day. I’m just over here, ruminating about stuff, staring off into space.”
It’s not really affecting me as bad. It’s not really great to compare us to other people. It gets us in all kinds of trouble in a variety of ways. But I think that’s probably the biggest thing that keeps us out of therapy is pride because it takes a certain level of humility to say, “I really might benefit from getting out of my own head and talking with someone and maybe I do need some help.”
It’s hard for people to admit. I think if that’s your family member, really my first step would be a spiritual one would be to pray about it and to say, okay, God, I believe that this person really could benefit from help and will you please soften their heart so that when this opportunity prevent presented itself then they might be more open.
One of the nice things about having the podcast is it’s really been a bridge for some people to seek out therapy. I’ve had emails from various people saying, “Hey, I heard your podcast. And this was what I realized about myself. I was listening to someone else’s story. Then I realized, Hey, that’s me. I have some of those same thought processes in my head or I’m going through some of those same struggles with anxiety.” They hear a story about how someone else sought out help and hey, this person sounds pretty normal. They sound okay. And I consider myself pretty normal. And Hey, this therapist, lady, she doesn’t sound awful or weird or kooky. Maybe I could go seek help.
So really that’s one of my prayers, I think, for the podcast and one of the beautiful things that’s come out of it, as people are writing and saying, you know, Hey, I am going to go to therapy after listening.
Steve: That’s actually helpful. And I think a lot of your listeners would probably think that very same thing because I think we all have people in our lives that we come across. And maybe even ourselves. Maybe we were thinking of someone and it turns out, “oh, maybe I need some help.” So that’s good.
I’ll ask you this. What is something that an individual should do prior to getting therapy they’re looking for that therapist. And do they call just any therapists? Do they start by calling the therapist first? What do they do?
Carrie: Yes. Thank you for asking me this question.
Steve: I knew that one. That was actually the first question I wanted to ask you.
Carrie: This is something that Steve has to hear me vent about a lot because people often do not do their research before they just start kind of calling willy nilly. The closest person to them that they can google. We have an entire episode actually on this, and I can’t remember the number, but it’s how to find the therapist who’s right for you. I also wrote an ebook about this topic that you can find in the store on finding a therapist who’s the right fit for you on the first try.
I’ll give a couple of key points you need to kind of think through what is it that you’re looking for in terms of what you’re looking for from a therapist, as well as how are you going to pay for therapy over time. Is it something that you are trying to get your insurance to pay for? Can you afford to pay out of pocket?
What’s your monthly budget? All of those factors really need to be taken into consideration before you start calling people. Please, please, please use the internet. It’s a beautiful tool out there. Do your web searches find out as much information as you can online. If you need certain requests such as scheduling, insurance
You know, you’re going to have to ask your boss to leave early at the end of the day. You know, get some of those things in place and so forth. Know what your therapist that you’re looking at specializes in. That’s a big one. I just talked about people seeking me out for marriage counseling and there was nothing on my website or anywhere in anything that said anything about marriage. So like I said, a lot of times people just start calling numbers and honestly that’s going to lead you to more frustration in the long run if you don’t do your research. Use websites, get as much information as you can from there and then start calling or email.
Steve: Fair enough. And for the record, I probably sit on the wrong side of that. I have this wonderful wife who is very good in helping me find doctors and find what our insurance covers and what it does not. And I am very, very thankful for that. And my advice to you, if you were the one sitting there like me and saying, “oh my gosh, I’m terrible at that. I am all the bad things that she just named.” Get help from your spouse, your friend, somebody cause it’s worth it. So thank you for helping me on that.
Carrie: And I try to be patient and remind myself that people are in crisis. And when people are in crisis, they don’t retain information very well, but they read, or they don’t always make the best decisions.
Steve: Sure. So let’s get back to you. We talked earlier about your day to day, when you get up and you, you plan and oh my gosh, 15 things have already gone wrong in my day. Then you do all this therapy throughout the day, then you’re finished. You have to put up with this husband of yours who comes home and says, “oh my goodness, let me tell you about my dandy day.”
And not that I want to complain about things, but we all do. And then you say, well, all right, let’s eat dinner, let’s talk. And then you have work to do, or you have an idea or you have to, whatever it is because we’re busy. Our lives are busy. Where do you get your go? I don’t know. Another way to put that. Where do you get your energy to continue?
Carrie: Exercise is a big one for me. I really try to exercise three times a week and you know that because you live with me and you see me do it. And I have streaming workouts that I do sometimes we’ll take walks as well, and that’s always good. The walks for clearing my head. If I’m with you, I’ll talk to you about different ideas that I have for the podcast or things that I want to do business-wise. And then if I’m by myself, I’m usually either decompressing or I’m praying about situations in my life that are going on. And it’s just been a really great release for me. That gives me energy. I try to eat decently. I am definitely not perfect in that area, but I tried to make sure that I have time for myself to do things that I enjoy lately. That’s just been paint by number here and there when I have the time, we’re obviously doing some house redecorating right now. So that’s taking up both of our times. It’s been a lot of work.
Steve: You do stay busy. There’s no doubt about that. We both do, but you definitely stay busy and there are days I wonder, how is this woman still standing up? Because as you said, you do all those things and yes, you exercise and yes, you know, there are a lot of paint by number, which I think is actually really cool that you do that.
I don’t think I could do that for multiple reasons, but I appreciate that you’re able to do it and it seemingly takes away the stress a little bit. Do you feel that that does help a lot doing things like a hobby like that?
Carrie: I think so. One thing I’ll tell you when I used to do community mental health work and just to give people an idea, I talked about this on a previous episode on the EMDR episode, but we were literally going into situations where we had no idea what we were going to find. I mean, we were going out to people’s houses. So someone could have just gotten in an argument before you walked in the door and you’re experiencing the fallout of that. You show up and the kids you’re working with just got suspended from school for a week for bringing something to school they weren’t supposed to. Just endless amount of stress and nothing was predictable. I would bake a lot during that period. What I realized was that I was baking because I knew that if I followed all the steps, I knew exactly what result I was going to get. And that was therapeutic for me at that time to do that. I realized that was why I was doing it.
And now something I’ve realized about myself is that having some type of creative outlet for me is helpful because I’m so analytical and so consumed with problem solving and thoughts and things of that nature that to shift gears over and to do something that’s more creative and fun and spontaneous is a good balance for me to balance out the analytical side and the creative side, which has been a great thing. I went through a season of rock painting a little bit before the pandemic and a little bit while we were dating, I’ve kind of gotten away from that and now, but that was fun. I like arts and crafts a lot. So I tend to do some type of artsy thing.
Steve: Yeah. It’s fun to watch. I think you do well with it. So let’s go back. Let’s talk for a moment. Young Carrie, let’s go back, At what point did you make that decision of Hey, I think I’ll be a therapist? That seems like a dandy idea for life. Let me try to help other individuals with their problem. When did you decide that? Why did you decide that?
Carrie: When I was in high school, I was super interested in sign language and there was a college. It was actually a junior college at the time near where I grew up that had a sign language interpretation program. I had been to a church in the area that had a sign language interpreter. That was my bent of where I thought I would be going with my life. And it was a two-year program I could get out and do interpretation. Then I was in a psychology class in high school. And I thought this is the most interesting stuff that I’ve ever read in my life. I just wanted to digest all of it and read everything I could get ahold of. I’d get a hold of old psychology textbooks and just read them. I knew that there was something to that. So when I went to college to study psychology, my professors were either involved in research or they were counselors. I didn’t like research. I thought I could do counseling. And so it wasn’t this big aha moment or calling.
I think like with so many times in our lives, God uses the little pieces and puts them all together. And then later we look back and go, oh yeah, God was really in all of those little situations that I didn’t realize he kind of steering me on this path.
When I remember that when I saw my first client in practicum. So we had one semester. And then our second semester, we were already doing therapy. That was terrifying. I didn’t know anything at that point. However, when I got done with that first session, there was just this feeling that came over me of like this is why I’m here, like this is what I’m supposed to be doing with my life. This is why I’m alive. That moment for me just solidified everything that I was doing. And That’s how I became a therapist. I couldn’t imagine really doing anything else.
Steve: Do you remember your first case, your first person?
Carrie: I do.
Steve: And how was that? Were you like terrified and don’t let them know you’re terrified, but were you like scared?
Carrie: I’m so appreciative of this woman. She was very gracious to me. And I think that she got something out of it, even though I didn’t feel like I was able to give her a whole lot. And I think it was more just about her showing up, saying some things out loud to someone that she didn’t talk about to other people. Receiving some type of supportive feedback and just having a safe environment that she was able to go on and do different things in her life. I guess is the best way to explain it. And it was also where I learned that couples counseling wasn’t for me, that wasn’t with her. I was seeing her individually, but I saw a couples and I was like “I don’t really feel comfortable with this. This doesn’t seem like my cup of tea.” So I stayed away from that.
Steve: Wow. And then from there, you worked with another company for a while. And then at some point you went into your own private practice. Was that also scary?
Carrie: Yeah, it was terrifying. It really was to go out and start my own business. I don’t come from a family of business people.
I don’t rub shoulders in my day-to-day life with entrepreneurs. So thinking about leaving a very stable job that it didn’t pay great, but I knew exactly how much I was going to get paid. I had health insurance. I had benefits and to step off and leave that for something that was less certain was scary.
Funny story, I had a couple of different side jobs while I was building my practice initially. And one of those was that I was a grocery shopper. I was a personal shopper for Shipt before people really knew what Shipt was. They would see my shirt in the grocery store and they would say “Shipt, what is that?” Because places weren’t doing that. There wasn’t a Kroger pickup. This was several years ago. So it’s kind of a funny story that I was probably one of the first thousand shoppers for Shipt. I was done. I had shopped on a Saturday after working. I think my full-time job during the week because I was still at the full-time job.
I shopped for maybe 10 to 12 hours on Saturday to make some extra money. And I was in a JC penny store kind of saw this little ring and it said on the ring, if God brings you to it, he’ll bring you through it. I wore that ring until we got engaged, actually. So from that point, I start med started my practice.
It was always an encouragement for me that I knew in my heart and in my spirit that God wanted me to do this. And if he called me to do it, he was gonna bring me through it.
Steve: That’s really cool.
Carrie: Yeah. I remember when I started my practice, I was actually mad at God because I had a good situation in with a group practice for a couple of years. So what I was talking about with the ring was when I became fully self-employed, I was working in a group practice, but I was a 10 99. I didn’t get benefits. And when I jumped off and started By The Well Counseling in 2017. I was mad at God because I had become so comfortable in my current life. I didn’t want to leave it.
I was like, okay. I finally, in two years I had built up my practice. I had a consistent, steady flow of clients and then things change with the group practice. So I was kind of at this fork in a road where I was forced to make a change. I’m so thankful for that. Now I’m thankful that I did branch off and start my business, but I remember going out to the parking lot, praying walking around the parking lot of this big office complex that we were in just saying, God, why, why God, I don’t want to go do something different like I just got used to what I’m doing right now. What I felt like the Lord was trying to teach me in that moment was comfortable is for when we get to heaven. And if we want to follow Christ, we’re going to have to be okay with being uncomfortable, stepping outside our comfort zone, when he calls us to the water like Peter. I don’t know how this is going to go, but I’ll take that first step.
Steve: Yeah. So, you had to walk and you did not sink. Did you?
Carrie: No, I didn’t. And I will say too that I had two supportive friends that were therapists at that time. One was my friend, Sarah that I had on the EMDR episode. And the other was Jessica who was on one of our early episodes on diagnosis. I asked both of them, do you think I can do this? And they said, absolutely, you can do this, Carrie it’s not going to be that bad. And I was like, okay. You know, so I had God on my side, but I also had supportive people who knew that I could do it.
Steve: What would you tell a young person that is thinking maybe not even as young as 10, maybe they’re in high school and they think “Maybe I’ll be a therapist.” That’s a great idea. You know, I don’t know why I have to be crazy, but what would you tell them?
Carrie: Wow. If there is a high school or out there that wants to be a therapist, my biggest thing would be to encourage them to go sit down with a therapist for their own work individually.
I honestly think that is what has made me the best therapist that I am today is going to therapy for myself because it’s allowed me that opportunity to be on the other side of the couch like you said, and experience what it’s like to go through some of those hard and painful moments. The days that you don’t want to show up, and you don’t want to talk about your problems or you question, does this therapist really care about me or she just kind of like cashing and paycheck here? What’s that really about? I think that would be my biggest recommendation because you can get all the trainings in the world, but if you are not self-aware yourself, that’s gonna hinder your work.
I really believe that you can’t take clients to places that you haven’t been yourself.
Steve: You’re saying did you a therapist that you admire and listened to them or, you sit on the couch? And talk to that therapist.
Carrie: No, I’m saying you get therapy for yourself because that would be a good indication of what it’s like to hold that emotion in the room, even though it’s your emotion, you’re not holding someone else’s emotion.
I mean, certainly, you could
Steve: It’s a start.
Carrie: It’s a start. And I have had people contact me that were interested in becoming a therapist and had a question here or there had needed to interview someone for school. And I’ve done some of those as well. Don’t 50 people email me now about how you want to be a therapist. I don’t have time for all of that, but I think it is helpful to talk to people about who are interested in doing what you’re interested in doing. I will say that It’s a process to become a therapist besides just going to school, you do have to go to school, but then on top of that, there’s a whole licensure process afterwards. It takes you depending on what state you’re in. It takes you about two to four years to complete.
Steve: For the licensure.
Carrie: For the licensure process after schooling.
Steve: How long for the schooling? Or does that vary?
Carrie: You would go to undergraduate school and get a degree like in psychology or social work, and then you would go to graduate school and get a master’s in counseling or a master’s in social work, If you wanted to be a licensed clinical social worker.
Steve: That’s good. I just feel like there’s probably someone out there that they’re listening and maybe it’s not a young person, but maybe a mom or grandma, like, oh, that’s a great idea. So yeah. Hey, try to help them out. But obviously, you don’t tell me what happens day to day, per se.
You are very, very basic. You do not tell me individual’s problems. You are very HIPAA compliant for that listener that thinks that maybe you tell me everything you do not. It’s usually a scenario of I sure wish people would go and look at what their insurance covers or something very broad that way.
But in the idea of not breaking any HIPAA laws here.
What is a difficult personality for you? What is a challenge even?
Carrie: A challenging person to work with?
Steve: Yeah, not just that I’ll make it a two-part question because typical me, I have 50 questions that go to one. Yeah. What is a typical, like what’s a challenging person to work with, as you said, and also what is challenging about your job and maybe that’s one in the same, but something that every day you have to deal with it, it’s just part of the deal.
Carrie: Hmm, that’s a good question. I think probably what’s funny about this question is clients that are listening are probably like, “oh, I’m the difficult one.” And they’re probably not at all like, no, you’re not the difficult one. I think people who want to stay married to their symptoms and say, oh, well I just have anxiety. This is the way it is. And this is the way it’s going to be. I tend to not have those people because they’ve read my marketing and they’ve probably gone somewhere else. I don’t tend to keep people who have poor boundaries because I have pretty good and strong boundaries myself. So if there are clients that don’t respond well to boundaries and I have to set a boundary with them, they tend to self-select off and not come back, which I’m okay with.
I think that’s the thing about this job in terms of being in private practice, where I was before you have to work with whoever comes in the door when you’re working in a community mental health setting. However, when you have a private practice, you’re marketing to a certain type of clientele, it’s very different feel.
So you tend to attract people that you enjoy working with. And I would say that the same is true for me. Ultimately, people who don’t want to change probably are the most difficult to work with. And I probably am not the best fit for working with them either because I tend to work well with people who say, “Okay, I know this is going to be hard and I know it’s not going to be easy.
And I know I have a lot to work on, but I really want to get better. I really want to heal and I’m willing to do what it takes to do that, to get to that result.”
So that tends to be who I end up attracting and working with as far as like difficult situations that happen with the job. Sometimes it’s difficult when you enjoy working with a person, but then they drop out of therapy for whatever reason.
So sometimes you might be working with somebody for a long time and then they move out of state and it’s hard to say goodbye because I’ve had people that I’ve worked with for a couple of years, and then you feel sad because they have to find a new therapist and start telling their story over again.
But also I feel a sense of loss of not being able to work with them anymore. And I think people don’t really talk about that or think about that from the therapist perspective a lot of times, but we have feelings too. And I think about people that I haven’t seen in years, but I remember working with them and if they come to mind, I just pray that they’re well and that they’re doing good wherever they are because a lot of times I never hear anything back.
I don’t know how life is for them now.
Steve: Sure. And I imagine that must be difficult because most of us like to be around people who are well off doing well, not well off, but doing well. Maybe that too, but doing well. But most of us, I think we gravitate towards people who are healthy, who are life’s great, life’s dandy, they’re upbeat, whatever it is. And yet, in your case, you’re helping someone. And then when they get to the point where life’s dandy, well, you don’t hear from them anymore. Just the same. You get to hear the issue. Whereas the rest of us, maybe we get to hear how great life is and what they’re not saying.
So that would probably be difficult.
Carrie: Yeah. When you finish working with someone and you get through the whole process. It’s a little bit like a graduation. There’s this closing of the chapter and it’s bittersweet and it’s like, yeah, I’m so proud of you for all the hard work that you put into this. And you’re ready to like spread your wings and fly now. So it’s sad to see them go, but at the same time very happy because it means that they’re functioning well on their own. And that’s always the goal for me for therapy is to have people functioning well on their own.
Steve: Sure.
Carrie: So getting, it’s kind of weird, like in this career getting fired as a good thing, you know, for the right reasons.
Steve: Right. It’s reversed.
Carrie: Yeah.
Steve: It’s reversed for sure. And that’s neat for Carrie. I have enjoyed interviewing you. It was definitely on the fly. I think I wrote down five, six questions maybe. And just kind of ad-lib through. I’m not the type for those of you who know me. I am not the type of person who just does things on the fly like that I like to prepare them a little bit.
Carrie: I do too.
Steve: Yeah. And you need to so for us, this is very different. And I just thought what a neat concept, what a funny thing for us to do because neither one of us are alike, and so for you, that’s very daring because I can come up with some off the wall questions and it can be a bit on the ADD side or all over the place if you will.
I hope didn’t have to hone me in too much. I hope the questions were good.
I had fun and I hope that you did it as well. And most of all, I hope that the listener enjoyed this a little bit.
Carrie: Yes. I think that they will. I think probably a lot of people have questions about what is it like to be a therapist.
So this was a little bit of a glimpse into that, but you know, there’s one more thing that we forgot.
Steve: Oh, no.
Carrie: The story of hope. Would you like to tell our listeners about the story of hope? I think it’s a joint story really between the both of us. Can we tell them about your job?
Steve: Oh, yes. By all means. For those of you who can’t see inside this speaker that you’re listening to, I had this look at Carrie like what are we talking about? Where are we going? Is this a famous question I should be asking or answering? I’m a little lost.
Carrie: So at the end of every episode, as you know because you were on before, we like to tell a story of hope, which is the time where you received help from God and another person.
And I guess there’s two sides to this story. So I can start and tell some of my side and then you can finish up the story from the point where we were dating
Steve and I were praying and praying about him getting a new job. That was important for multiple reasons. One of the reasons was that for him to once they started going back into the office, he would have to drive from where we’re at in the suburbs into downtown Nashville.
And that was going to be an hour minimum, probably each way for him to make that trip. We knew that that commute was going to be stressful, but also he was just looking for a change. There were very specific things that we prayed for. And always we knew that it was going to be in God’s timing.
Whatever happens, we’re like, okay, God, we know that you’re good. And we know that you have a plan for Steve, and we’re just asking for you to come through at the right time.
Steve: Yeah and that definitely happened. Things work. And I spent a long, long time in the search process. I’m sure a lot of people who are listening have, if you’ve ever looked for a job now is not the easiest time, but it’s not an easy search anyways. That process isn’t easy.
I did want just any job. Sure. I wanted to be particular. I wanted to enjoy what I was doing and to have a challenge. I’m just that type of person. I like a good challenge. I was able to find that and I enjoy it. I like it. I go in each day and every day there’s something new to learn. And of course, maybe you’re thinking, well, you just started this job not that long ago. So you’re in the honeymoon period here, Steve, and that’s true. However, there’s always something I like. And also I like being around people a little bit. So I get to see people. I get to smile. I get to see people where I work who have been healed.
And so they come. I see them on one side, come in and they’re looking a little, you know, sad or in pain or whatever. And then they come out the other side and I can’t promise you that if they feel a hundred percent, because chances are, they just had something done that didn’t feel too great, but they get relief.
And so I like seeing that. I like seeing, you know, people getting help. And so I found some of the things that I could do And be useful in that way. So nothing against my former job, just, you know, sometimes we need to change. sometimes that’s just the way life is. So anyways, that is my hope. I don’t know if that was a perfect way to answer that, but we’ll go with it.
Carrie: I think it’s a great story of hope because it’s about keep praying and keep believing that God has good plans and good things for you. And he’s going to show up when you least expect it, at just the right time to answer that prayer. So we are both very thankful and very blessed.
Steve: I will say this because it’s just a thing with me. Carrie’s going to roll her eyes at me for this one but it’s okay. If this went well today, you can thank Carrie. If it went bad, well, you can email me and gripe and complain. It’s all my fault.
Carrie: He always says this about food, whatever we take food somewhere. That’s what he likes to say. Well, Steve, we’re going to have you back on episode 50 because it’s around our anniversary. And so we’re going to do things that we learned in our first year of marriage.
Steve: Oh. So many things.
Carrie: And then we’re going to go eat seafood.
Steve: That’s my favorite part. I cannot wait. We need a moment of silence just for that.
Carrie: Well, thank you so much for listening, our faithful listeners. And if you know anybody that wants to be a therapist, maybe you can pass this episode along to them.
They might like to know a little bit about what a day in the life of a therapist is like. God bless everyone.
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.
