Skip to main content

Author: Carrie Bock

Carrie Bock is a Licensed Professional Counselor in Smyrna, TN who helps people get to a deeper level of healing without compromising their faith. She specializes in working with Christians struggling with OCD who have also experienced childhood trauma, providing intensive therapy for individuals who want to heal at a faster pace than traditional therapy.

28. Play Therapy for School-Aged Children with Anxiety with Brittany Dyer, LPC-MHSP

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Counseling, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 28. Play Therapy for School-Aged Children with Anxiety with Brittany Dyer, LPC-MHSP

Today’s special is my good friend, Brittany Dyer, a  Licensed Professional Counselor.  Brittany shares her knowledge and expertise in play therapy.  

  • How does anxiety present in school-aged children? 
  • How does childhood anxiety present differently from adult anxiety?
  • Behaviors that may indicate a child has anxiety
  • Anxious parents with anxious children.
  • Things parents can do to help their child with anxiety.
  • What is play therapy? How does it work?
  • How to introduce therapy to your kids
  • How does play therapy reduce anxiety in children and even in adults?
  • Signs that your child may need a therapist 


Brittany Dyer, LPC-MHSP

Support the show 

More Podcast Episodes

Transcript of Episode 28

Hope for Anxiety and OCD episode 28. Today on the show, I got to talk with a good friend, Brittany Dyer about play therapy. If you remember from one of our original episodes back in the beginning, we talked with Anika Mullen about PCIT and how anxiety shows up in young preschool-age children. Today with Brittany, we’re going to be talking about how anxiety shows up in school-age children, and how play therapy is able to help with that and develop kids’ confidence.

Carrie: Tell us a little bit about yourself. 

Brittany: My name is Brittney and I am a licensed professional counselor and I am working towards getting my registered play therapy certification. I have an amazing supervisor, Jamie Langley. She is the president of the Tennessee Association for Play Therapy. We have an awesome supervision group that we meet once a month.

So I’m really excited about that. And I have a private practice in Smyrna, Tennessee, and I’m just across the street from Carrie.

Carrie: Which is fun. 

Brittany: Yeah. I have been back in private practice for a little over three years now. I took a little sabbatical. My husband and I lived overseas. We were missionaries in Haiti and in Thailand for a couple of years. And before that, I had been in private practice probably three or four years before that too. So we really enjoyed our time learning about other cultures. I feel like that really helps me in the counseling field as well, knowing about other cultures. Glad to be back here now and doing what I love, counseling and especially working with kids.

Carrie: There’s a wide variety, I guess of training that people can get in play therapy. Some people may say that they use play therapy and some people may say, “I’m in the process of becoming a registered play therapist” and that takes a while. Can you tell people a little bit about what that process is like?

Brittany: Yeah. So they actually have just changed the rules and I’m not a hundred percent up on them as I’m still working towards it. I just keep trying to knock things out. To become a registered play therapist, you do have to have a mixture of play therapy training. Like education we call them CEUs. You have to get a large amount of those. They have just increased those. You have to have a certain amount of hours of supervision with a registered play therapist who has the supervision certification as well. And then you have to get quite a bit of client hours as well.

Carrie: So people know this is on top of what you’ve already done to become a licensed professional counselor. So it’s like it’s another certification process of all, after graduate school, after licensure stuff. It’s quite a process, but it’s good. It sounds like a good process for people who know that they really, really want to do play therapy.

And that’s kind of like their niche and I think it’s interesting when people are looking for therapists to kind of know some of these differences, because they may see certain letters after people’s names and not necessarily know what all of that means. Or some counselors may say, I have training in this area, but they haven’t done the further study or the further continuing education to get certified or so forth. That’s a good process. 

We’re going to talk today a little bit about anxiety in school-based children. I had a guest on the show in one of the pretty early episodes who talked about anxiety in toddler preschool type ages. And so since anxiety looks different, a little bit different at different ages.

Tell us kind of how it presents in school-aged children.

Brittany: Anxiety looks different than it does with adults. Just a few things I guess to look for children that would be different than adults would maybe be like a clinginess to their parents or to another adult, to their teacher or anything like that because they’re looking for that security.

So clinginess would be one. Another thing would be irritability, a high level of irritability. So tantrums, throwing fits those sorts of things that parents really get irritated with. It’s not just a fit that they’re throwing it if they’re having a high level of irritability because maybe they’re feeling anxious about something.

And another thing would be lots of unexplained stomachaches or trying to avoid going to school. Those sorts of things would be signs to look for in children that would be different than adults. 

Carrie: Right and I think it’s easy for people to mistake defiant behavior just as my child’s having behavior problems versus really trying to dig in there and understand why they are refusing to do things. What’s underneath that? What’s driving that behavior?

So that’s a good thing for their parents to kind of be aware of. And also I’m sure that you find a lot of times that children who are more anxious have a tendency or a greater proclivity to having an anxious parent possibly. So the parent is dealing with some of their own anxiety and then the child’s dealing with their anxiety. And sometimes those two things can interact with each other in a healthy or unhealthy way.

Brittany: Yeah, absolutely, definitely. Not only is it biologically related, that maybe a child can have anxiety because their parents could have anxiety, but it could also be a learned behavior and environmental behavior because they’ve seen their parents acting in an anxious way.

And so then they begin to kind of display those symptoms as well. And they may be acting out in an anxious way as well, but again it can look different in the parent and the child. 

Carrie: I’ve noticed just from my work in the past, I don’t work with that many children now, but I did in the past.

This tendency for there’s great empathy for that child who’s anxious if a parent has experienced anxiety and there may be a tendency to kind of want to give in a little bit more to the avoidance, or just allow them to not do things that would be healthy or good for them to do. 

Brittany: Yeah. That can absolutely happen. Not that that’s necessarily a helpful thing but it can happen. 

Carrie: Yeah. How do you work with parents who maybe are experiencing some of that and having a hard time? Maybe encouraging their kids to do what we call brave behaviors? 

Brittany: Well, one of the things that I work with parents with is number one, recognizing if you have anxiety and the way that you portray your anxiety in front of your child.

So if you have anxiety and you’re acting out your anxiety in front of them, they’re going to pick up on that like we were talking about and they’re going to begin to exhibit those symptoms as well. That’s one thing is making them aware, but also kind of helping them learn how to not show those maybe in front of their kids so that they aren’t picking up on that. And that’s not something that they’re doing. Another thing that I would say would be to kind of teach them how to encourage their children to have those brave behaviors like you’re talking about. Encourage them to try things even when they’re hard. Kind of taking on that sort of a language like, “yeah, you can still do it. It might be hard. You can try. You don’t have to succeed. It’s okay to fail.” 

So again, talking with parents about those perfectionistic tendencies that a lot of these kids pick up on. Because that’s what we are as parents. A lot of times we portray them too. So talking a lot about those perfectionistic tendencies and helping them to kind of let’s reel those back a little bit and not project those onto our children so that they can just do the things that are normal for them to do and not expecting behaviors that aren’t normal for them to do.

Carrie: Right, because they’re not going to get it right all the time. We don’t get it right all the time either. Let’s talk a little bit about play therapy. How does that work? 

Brittany: The way that we in the play therapy field kind of describe it is that play is a child’s language. They may not have the language to verbally tell us everything that they’re experiencing. So we use play to be their language. Play provides them a safe place to express themselves because they may not have the language. Sometimes we as adults don’t have the language either because it’s hard to get down in that deep stuff that we’re going through but play is a safe way to be able to do that.

We can play out our emotions in a positive way. A child doesn’t necessarily come in and pick up a doll and say, “this is me.” And these are all the things that I’m experiencing. It doesn’t happen that way. They can choose different kinds of toys that symbolize what they’re going through and play that out in a more positive way, not necessarily in a way that we would sit down and talk about it as adults. It also helps them to work through their emotions and to learn how to regulate their emotions themselves, which also helps to boost their self-esteem. So if they’re working through their issues on their own, they’re figuring out how to do them, which again builds their self-esteem to say things like, “Hey, I can do this. I can handle this. I’ve done this on my own.”

And then it gives them a place to practice the skills that they learn while they’re in play therapy. We practice those skills over and over again as they’re playing. We do those in a fun way. We may use bubbles to do breathing exercises so that they can learn how to blow bubbles. Because if you blow a bubble quick and fast, you’re either going to get little ones or you’re not going to get one at all, but if you take a slow, deep breath like we teach people to do to help them to calm down then they are going to be able to blow a really big bubble, which is always fun. Then pop the bubbles, which is a release too. You’re having fun and you’re doing these things. There’s a lot of different skills that you can use while having fun but also teaching them different coping skills and things like that. Basically, play helps us to learn how to express what we’re feeling.

It helps us to learn those physical skills like coping skills. It also helps us, helps kids through touch, which is also a big thing with kids, 

Carrie: Sensory issues or things like that. 

Brittany: Yeah and then also emotionally just helping them to work through whatever issue it is that they’re dealing with.

Carrie: Do you find that some kids that are anxious maybe it’s almost like they don’t know how to play? They’re so serious or afraid of getting something wrong or anxious about engaging, maybe with different materials or trying new things that play process does kind of help loosen them up a little bit or be more open.

Brittany: Yeah, so sometimes it happens when I first come into the room. It takes them a while to kind of get used to the room and get used to what they can do and what they can’t do and can not be messy, those sorts of things. But as time goes on and they begin to see that they’re kind of in charge of how things go with boundaries obviously. I don’t want anybody to get hurt, but, but they’re kind of in control that they can. They begin to relax and they begin to play.  And then they begin to work through the things that they need to work through, which is part of that anxiety, and whether it’s perfectionism or just being worried about what other people think of them or whatever it is they begin to. We’ll work through those things.

Carrie: Socialization, I think can be a big aspect of those kids that are anxious about being in social settings that can help them too as they are interacting with you. I think it’s important for parents who are really thinking about bringing their kids in for therapy to recognize that it is going to look a lot different than if the parent went to therapy themselves. I think sometimes parents may unintentionally put this pressure on their child like, “you need to go in there and you didn’t tell Miss Brittany everything that’s going on with you, everything that’s bothering you.” And that they’re not able to do that as an unrealistic expectation a lot of times.

Brittany: Yeah, it’s definitely a learning curve when I explain to parents what we do in here. And I tell parents a lot of times, I’ll say you’re Tom may leave here and be like, “Oh, we did that. It was play.” And I’m like, “I promise that’s not all we did experience, but we worked on some things too while we’re in here.”

If you’re engaging with a child where they’re in control and you’re reflecting what they’re doing and you’re listening to them, change is going to happen because again, they’re able to just work through whatever issues that they’re dealing with.

Carrie: And I would hope that it should be an enjoyable experience for them because otherwise, they won’t want to come back. Right. There’ll be like kicking and screaming like, “Oh, I don’t want to go there.” Also, don’t tell your kid that they’re going to a doctor because that really sometimes can freak them out or make them think that they’re going to get a shot or have other kind of nervous expectations about what to expect.

Brittany: Yeah, I think that’s a good thing. As best as you can explain what they’re going to be experiencing while they’re there, but I try to do that when I meet with them to explain to them. And when they come in and they see the toys and you can tell they’re kind of shy and they’re like, “Can I play with the toys?”

I’m like “of course.” So again, trying to explain that. In my room obviously looks different than if you go to a doctor’s office and you sit there. On the table, there’s nothing to play with in there. It is a lot different, but I always encourage parents. I have this question sometimes, do I tell them that they’re coming to see you? How much do I tell them? And I say, tell them as much as you can so that again, they’re not anxious about coming in and worried about what the experience is going to be like. 

Carrie: Yeah. I think anytime we can prepare kids and let them know what’s coming and help them set up for success, I think that’s going to be really awesome.

So tell us a little bit about the ages maybe that play therapy is typically utilized for and what an initial first session might look like. 

Brittany: Play therapy can be used for all ages. Like I said, sometimes we have difficulty as adults expressing everything that’s going on. So play therapy can be used with adults, but play therapy is most appropriate for children ages three to 12.

I use aspects of play therapy with kids up to 18. And sometimes we use art therapy with adults too. And that would be kind of considered in the play therapy realm as well. But it’s mostly used with children ages 3 to 12 and that just allows for that age group where they’re more willing to play a lot of times. When you get 13, 14 and those teenage years are kind of like, you think that you shouldn’t, that’s kind of like the societal perception and so they don’t as much. They’re like, “I don’t really want to do that,” but it still can work for them too. 

Carrie: I know that I’ve also had adults in the office that had maybe very rigid childhoods where they didn’t get that opportunity to play or didn’t get the opportunity to express themselves and doing things like playing with Play-Doh or blowing bubbles.

Sometimes it’s a little uncomfortable for them, but it allows them to relax and be a little bit more free. So that’s true. There are elements certainly that can be used with all ages. What is the first session of play therapy usually like?

Brittany: Typically during a first session of play therapy, my initial session I asked parents to come in so that I can get that background information from them [00:18:44] and I can explain what play therapy is kind of what they should expect. And then I discuss with the parents what their reasons are for bringing the child in. What symptoms they’re experiencing and have been noticing.Things that exacerbate their symptoms and things that might help with their symptoms as well.

And what the things are that they’re noticing. So we discuss all of those things, as well as a medical history, family history, the development of the child just so I can get all of that background information to know, are there reasons why the child may be acting this way? What’s going on in the child’s life that may be kind of causing them to exhibit these symptoms, but also to know. When they’re playing, they’re not going to tell me exactly what’s going on. So I kind of need a background to know. If they’re playing with animals in a certain way, why are they kind of playing with them in that way?

So just getting all of that background information is for me to kind of know how to proceed and know what’s going on. And I typically like to meet the child during this first session if the parents want to talk to me individually without their child being there. That’s perfectly fine. But if I can meet the child on that session then that kind of gives us a leg up where they can come in.

They’ve already met me. They’ve seen the room and they know what to expect. When a child comes in for the first time, they come into the room, and most of the time they just kind of look around and kind of see what all’s in here and figure out what they can do. What their boundaries are I guess you can say, which are very limited unless they’re going to get hurt.

There aren’t very many boundaries because again, I want them to feel in control so that they can work through the issues that they’re dealing with themselves. So they come in usually and kind of figure out what they’re supposed to be doing because it is a little different. I mean, you don’t go into a doctor’s office and just sit down and play, that’s different.

So they kind of try to figure out what they do while their parents are waiting in the waiting room. If they want their parents to come back with them the first time or the first couple of times and that’s fine, they can do that. Usually what happens is the parents will come in and the parents will try to retreat out the door throughout the session.

Just so that, I mean, if a parent brings their child to counseling or to play therapy, then that there’s a reason and they want them to be able to be there. And then usually by the end of the first session, not always, but usually they become more acquainted with the room. They become more comfortable.

They become more comfortable with me and they begin to play. Again, not always, but they may begin to play and just figure out what I am supposed to do while I’m here. So even in the first session, you can kind of see that the anxiety decreases a little bit, just because “Okay, I can choose what I want to do. I figured out what I can do in here.” 

Carrie: Good. How have you seen play therapy be helpful for children with anxiety? 

Brittany: Just allowing a child to make their own decisions in the playroom really gives them a sense of power and control over things. Children don’t often get control over things in their lives because there’s always somebody telling them what to do. You have parents and you have teachers and those are good things. Children need people telling them what to do for an hour or 30 minutes to an hour. They get to come in here and they get to be in control and they get to decide what they want to do.

So that just helps them to just kind of take on that sense of power for themselves and be able to make things go the way that they want themselves to go. And that in and of itself reduces anxiety.

Carrie: That builds a level of self-confidence and mastery. 

Brittany: Yeah. And there’s also no judgment in my room if whatever they do is okay. And so that also builds that sense of self-confidence that, you know, if I do something bad, no one’s going to reprimand me for it. Now, if you’re going to do something that’s going to get you hurt. Then I’m going to set a boundary for you, but I’m not going to reprimand you for it.

You’re not going to get in trouble for it, but you’re going to see that that’s not inappropriate behavior. So even that just gives them that sense of self-esteem that’s building within them just to come to a place where they’re not being judged. And then that allows them to see themselves as good.

“I am a good person.” And so when we have that nonjudgmental attitude and we have lack of reprimand but teaching opportunities then children don’t really need to worry because they don’t have those things to worry about. I’m not worried if I’m going to get in trouble, I’m not worried about what this person’s going to think of me.

So those things help to reduce that anxiety with them too. 

Carrie: Right. Just a difference between if you are in a play therapy session and they grab the toy gun and start shooting all the stuffed animals. Probably most parents would be horrified. Whereas the play therapist is really thinking about what is this child trying to communicate to me by shooting all the stuffed animals.

You know, it’s just a random example.

Brittany: It’s not necessarily about the child shooting. And we would think about it. Maybe he’s trying to kill the animals.  There’s lots of different interpretations. It could be going on but it’s not quite as literal as we typically think about it.

Carrie: Yeah. Sure. Just finding different ways to kind of like, I’m sure as you’ve gone through your training too, the emotions that are coming out and the scenarios that are playing out, a lot of times kids will act out things that are going on in their families or at school with other children. If they have bullying issues or things like that.

And it’s, it’s been really interesting to see and sometimes you may walk away and not totally know that they worked through something, but not totally understand what it’s about until the parent comes back to you the next time. And they say, “oh, they seemed more comfortable on the playground when I took them to the park or they’re sleeping in their own bed now.”

So it’s a little bit harder, I think, maybe to measure some of the results, but you’re really just looking at what’s going on in their day-to-day interactions. 

Brittany: Yeah. Sometimes it definitely is hard to measure. And it’s not really our job as play therapists to understand everything that’s going on in their life, because again, it’s about them working through it. We don’t have to know exactly everything that they’re working through, but knowing that the space that’s provided for them to work through it, they’re going to do that. And I guess the results would be the parents come back later and say, “Hey, so-and-so has been really behaving well at school, which is really different than in the past.”

And you may not know exactly what happened to help them do that but the result is that their behavior has changed. 

Carrie: Yeah. That’s pretty awesome. I know that we’re talking specifically about anxiety but play therapy can actually be used for a wide variety of issues and behaviors that may result in children. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? And just kind of like expand out the window a little bit.

Brittany: Play therapy can be used for a number of different issues that children are experiencing. It can be helpful for children with depression. It can be helpful with children who are experiencing sexual abuse or physical abuse. It can be helpful for children who have been neglected, children who have been removed from their homes. It helps children with autism. It helps children who have low self-esteem. It really is beneficial across the board for any psychiatric problem that children are experiencing, ADHD as well. 

Carrie: Good. I think that’s helpful for parents to know.

Is there anything that you want to talk about in terms of, if there’s a parent that’s kind of on defense, maybe like, I’m not really sure if my child needs therapy or not, how would you help them know? When is a good time to bring their child in?

Brittany: So typically a good rule of thumb to go by is if their typical daily life is being altered by anything, whether that be anxiety, again, stomach aches, they don’t want to go to school headaches, things like that. If their daily life is being altered, then I would suggest contacting a professional.  And even just calling it professional, most of them are very helpful. And if you just have a question, should I bring my child in or should I not?

I say that anything is affecting them. Maybe they’re not sleeping well. Maybe their grades have dropped. Just different factors like that. Those things seem to be different than the way that they typically have been in the past. 

Carrie: Good. And I don’t think it hurts to potentially establish care with a provider and have them maybe evaluate your child for a few sessions, and then they can make a recommendation about whether or not they feel like further therapy would be helpful, or if it seems like the child is doing well in spite of maybe circumstances or changes that have happened in their life.

Sometimes parents when they go through things like divorce or major family changes or death, sometimes the kids bounce back and are very resilient and do well. But the parents were just a little bit more concerned maybe about, “I don’t know how this is going to affect them.” So I think looking at their day-to-day functioning level is a really good gauge.

As we’re winding down to the end of the episode here, I like to ask our guests to share a story of hope, which is a time where you received hope from God or another person. 

Brittany: My story actually kind of relates to what we’ve been talking about today and why I wanted to become a counselor. I lost my parents when I was in elementary school. They died suddenly. And I had a school counselor who was amazing, her name’s Jana Chambers. Thankfully, I can still be in contact with her. My husband and her son are really good friends. So I still get to see her sometimes which is amazing. She was my hope during that time. She really helped me. I don’t remember anything that we did, to be honest. I don’t remember. I remember we played, but I don’t remember anything specific. The only thing I remember is one time we had puppets out and that’s all I remember, but just going to see her and having that space where I felt comfortable and she was just such a comforting person and caring and listening.

I just remember feeling so light when I would come back from her office. That’s the only way I know how to put it. I felt light. She helped me so much and gave me so much hope for my future in such a hard time for me. So I am just so thankful for her and all the children that she influenced and helped throughout the years.

So I’m thankful that she inspired me to be a counselor and that I just get to pass along that hope to many other kids too. 

Carrie: That’s really awesome. That was something I didn’t know about you. And that’s a great story. Thanks so much for coming on and sharing your wisdom with us about kids and anxiety and play therapy. I think this is a great conversation for people to learn from. 

Brittany: Yeah, of course. Thanks so much for having me. 

________________________________

Just a reminder that this Saturday, the 15th at 10:00 AM Central time, I will be hosting a free webinar called Lightening the load, Reducing Shame for Christians. We’re going to be talking about the differences between guilt and shame, condemnation.  How to get out of shame and condemnation and get into a healthier relationship with God. It’s going to be about an hour. And I really hope that you’ll be able to join us. For more information please go to www.hopeforanxietyandOCD/webinar to sign up. 

I received a very sweet message from Will the other day who said that the podcast gives him hope.

That really meant a lot to me because I can look at the download numbers for the podcast. I can look at where people are listening from, but it’s always so nice to be reminded that you are each individual with unique needs and desires and experiences that you’re having. And so to hear from you on an individual level really means a lot, and it helps encourage me to keep going and keep doing what I’m doing.

Thank you so much for all of your feedback, love and support in this process.

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 be comforted by God’s great love for you.

27. Sending Hope and Love to the Not Yet Mothers

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Counseling, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 27. Sending Hope and Love to the Not Yet Mothers

This episode is for all the women out there who are hoping and praying for a child, for couples who are experiencing fertility issues and for those who are healing from heartbreak over childlessness. 

This is a compilation of stories of hope of my friends and different amazing women whom  I interviewed in the podcast:

(4:04) Story of  motherhood journey of my best friend, Christin Jasmin Wilson  

  • Christin’s dating experience. Giving her heart to the wrong man.
  • Feeling distant from God and coming back to him. 
  • Receiving God’s kindness.  A  God-chosen partner and her baby, Ellis.

Stories of Hope from previous podcast episodes:

  • (20:32) Summer McKinney being happy with her blended family while waiting for God’s perfect timing 
  •  (24:12) Holley Gerth and her husband are now grandparents to the kids of their adoptive daughter.
  •  (25:03) God brought Dr. Kraegel a beautiful child after multiple pregnancy losses
  • (35:40 ) Lindsey Castleman and her husband’s amazing story of adoption. 

(25:30)  My dear friend Michelle’s testimony and her infertility, foster care and adoption journey 

  • Going through deep, dark depression after 3 years of unsuccessful fertility treatment.
  • Staying the course with the Lord who blessed her and her husband with children through adoption process. 

(30:48) My own personal journey and God’s statement for me about having children.

Support the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/hopeforanxiety)

More Podcast Episodes

Transcript of Episode 27

Hope for Anxiety and OCD, episode  27. This episode is going to be a little bit different because it’s not a solo episode and it’s not exactly an interview episode. It’s really a compilation of some different stories of hope. Some that we’ve heard before and some that we haven’t yet. For those who have been following along with my story or listened to our first episode know that while I have a history of being a foster parent and had hoped to adopt, I myself am not a mother. As I started to do these podcasts interviews, there was a string of a period of time where we were getting a lot of stories about people’s process in terms of becoming a family, whether that was praying, and then having a biological child, whether that was adding to their family through adoption or other means there was a lot of discussion about timing. And it really got me to thinking God are those stories for me or are those stories for my listeners? As so many times, I believe it’s both that as we minister to other people that God finds a way to turn around and minister back to us.

In this episode, I want to send love to the other women out there who may be are waiting or praying or hoping for a family who are not yet mothers. So I compiled some stories of hope from different women that have been on the podcast and discussed this journey. I also compiled some stories from just other women in my personal life who I know who God brought them on that similar journey.

Before we get into those stories of hope though, there are two moms that I do want to take time to say thank you to. One of those is my mom who’s a big supporter of the podcast. I know that she listens every week. She looks for the episodes to come out and she’ll send me emails if she sees Christian articles or hears of people who are talking about mental health and she’ll say, “Hey, have you heard of this person? It might be somebody that’s good for you to interview.” My mom was flying a couple of weeks ago. She asked a woman on the plane, “Hey, do you listen to a podcast?” And a woman said, “Yes, I do. So then my mom says, “Hey, would you be interested in a podcast about anxiety and OCD?” And the woman says, “Yes, I would.” My mom gives her a little podcast promo card that I had made up. That’s some amazing grassroots marketing right there. And so, thank you mom for all of your love and support in this podcasting journey. And the other mom, I want to think is who I call mom Bock, which is my mother-in-law. Mom Bock is also a supporter of the podcast and she listens to the episodes and oftentimes God will put people on her heart who need that encouragement or support from a particular episode.

And she will send it to them and has received some positive feedback about episodes that she’s shared. So I appreciate her supporting and sharing the podcast with other people as well. I joke with Steve that our moms are brand ambassadors for the show.

And now you know why our first story of hope for the not yet mothers comes from my best friend, Kristin.

How did I become a mother? That’s a loaded question. Hi, my name is Kristin Jasmine Wilson. And this is my story to motherhood. I am 39 years old. This is important because maybe like some of you, I wasn’t sure I would ever become a mother. I can remember from the earliest time always loving and being around kids around babies.

I grew up babysitting started at a very young age, probably too young if you asked me, but I started babysitting as early as 11 for my next-door neighbor. She had two beautiful kids that I used to watch on occasion. And I can even remember Connie and my mother serving with me at the nursery during the second service at church just because I loved kids that much.

You can say that this might be a God-given desire. I would say that I had this idea in my mind that I would always be a mom, but in my mind, by age 25, I have met the love of my life in college, fallen madly deeply in love, become a psychologist. I even found a letter that I wrote to Ms. Love in high school. I wanted to be a psychologist and have three kids of my own by 2011 or something crazy like that. However, sometimes life just takes you on a journey and that’s not necessarily how things go for me. I went to high school and had two boyfriends maybe, and all of which lasted two weeks. My singleness was a really, really hard thing.

I struggled being single for a very long time. I went to college. While I was in college, I decided to get involved in the church that was right across the street from our school. I again loved kids so much that I started volunteering as a college student in the middle school ministry. Yes, working with middle schoolers.

I know I’m a rare breed but I loved the naivety and the gullibility and just the welcoming nature of that age. In working in the middle school ministry though, remember college, I always thought I would meet the love of my life in college. I never did. And in fact, after college I started working for a ministry and for a nonprofit that really just worked with middle school kids all the while, knowing that I wanted kids of my own all the while, really wanting to be married and not ever wanting to have kids without a partner in life. I know I have had a lot of friends that have adopted or wanting to foster, and they’ve done that single handedly and by themselves and my hat goes off to them. However, I knew for me, this was not a journey I wanted to enter alone. Just knowing my own personality. I knew I would need a partner and a friend.

And so I prayed to God many nights that he would bring me not only a man of God but somebody who I could have children with and that we could raise children together. And I will say that came, but it came not without tears and not without many, many years of doubting God of asking hard questions of crying out to the Lord have yet one more guy who I was attracted to and had feelings for.

Not return those feelings, not return that love. I can remember during college and a little after I spent some years, are those college times in west Palm beach. And one of my places that I would really kind of have heart-to-heart conversations with Jesus was on the beach. And I can remember there was this one guy, and I really just had fallen head over heels in love with him. And he had no clue and I was good friends with his sister and I knew she could tell that. I just remember like really asking the Lord. Why just, why, why? I just remember asking, am I oblivious to guys? What is it that allowed me to not be seen by guys?

And really, I look back now and I see that had those guys looked at me and seen me, I would have fallen head over heels with the wrong guy. And really my heart is so honestly flip it and I fall in love at the drop of a hat. So it’s only the Lord’s grace and mercy that has allowed me in this that really kept me for my husband of today.

So, again, college thought I would be married by 25. That was my cutoff date in my head, that did not happen. In fact, I remember at 25 I actually freaked out and was like, “Oh my gosh” I remember my mom had me at 25 and I’m really like far behind the timeline here because I wanted to have kids and I thought by that time I would have them.

However, that was not always in the cards for me. And in fact, it took me a long time to even work through what it looked like to actually be in a relationship and what it looked like to actually start to date, which then led to motherhood. All the while though, working with kids, all the while though, taking care of other people’s kids. All the while, knowing that I wanted to be a mother. I remember turning 30 and still being single.

Actually, 29 going almost 30, grieving that year of the journey of being single and turning 30. And I almost wish that whole year of 30 away, I think it was 32 or 33. When I was 32 or 33, I finally was like, if I ever want to have kids, that I need to actually seriously start dating, started dating some guys on, through a few apps.

And at first, had really a hard time even wrapping my mind around if that was acceptable, how would I believe? And so, again, just really challenged my own thinking, but kind of came to the conclusion that if I was ever going to get married, I needed to be around guys and talk to them and have conversations.

And so I went on a journey of just having dates and chronically and all of those dates, some were really fun and some are really, really bad. And I could probably tell you stories, but I don’t want to embarrass any of the guys that I went on dates with, but let’s just say there’s a few that really still have me kind of chuckling today.

Fast forward to 2016, I was talking to a guy who happened to live in California and actually had a daughter. I knew that was going to be a little tricky, but I had been laid off from the organization I was working for. It closed down and I didn’t have anything keeping me at my current location.

So I decided to move to California and see if things would work out. I honestly remember really just sacrificing a lot of my ethics and a lot of my morals for something that was only temporary and somebody that wasn’t real on something, and for somebody that wasn’t authentic. And I really think in some of those, in that particular instance, I had really become so sick of being single and just was trying to do things my own way and in my own timing. Honestly, at 35, I was feeling like I was the only 35-year-old woman who had never been married. I was feeling it was the only 35-year-old woman who didn’t have kids. By this time I had high school friends that have had babies.

I’ve had college friends get married and have babies. I had friends adopting babies. And I was just for a long time, felt like my life was on this pause track, where I just had no control. And so many people kept saying, well, why aren’t you married? Or you’re a catch, why are you still single? When are you going to start having babies of your own?

And I really hated those questions because I felt like it was my own fault that I was unable to be a mother at that time. So at 35, I got in this relationship and I just decided to try to make things happen of my own accord and was completely devastated when this guy really only wanted to use me for certain things and then spit me back out. So with that, I packed up my bags and I moved back to my home in Chicago and kind of worded off dating for a while. Actually, it was like, I’m done. This guy is stupid. And really my heart was broken into a million pieces and it was really partially my own fault for giving it to him without putting up boundaries to really safeguard my own heart.

And of course, during that time, my relationship with the Lord was non-existent because at that point, I felt like I didn’t trust him and I was angry. I didn’t want anything to do with it. That he didn’t love me enough to give me a husband and children. By the time I was 35, knowing that most women go through menopause and are unable to bear children in their forties.

So, that was hard. Sometimes, the life that I’ve lived is great. I’ve gotten to do so many things as a single woman. I’ve gotten to explore. I had gotten to travel and have had so many different experiences that I would not have had if I had been married and had kids. Maybe I would have, I don’t know. But at that point, I was just done with being a good girl and following the rules and thinking that, you know, God blesses you and honors you. I think if I were to put it into different words, I was trying to make myself follow this God in order to get the blessing. And so, in other words, it wasn’t really about knowing God or trusting him.

It was about I’m going to do this. So in the end I get this and ultimately that work. So for a small little time, I said I’m not dating anyone else. At the time I did have a dating coach, just because I was like, if I’m going to be dating and dating on an app, I might need some extra advice.

I was actually visiting her at the time and staying with her that weekend and this guy popped up on my app and I was super wary and super kind of, not even sure I wanted to talk to him. She encouraged me. I showed him, you showed him, showed her like our conversation and, and she encouraged me just to start a conversation.

And so we did, and he was actually from Chicago. I was already planning to move back there after having my heartbroken. Wasn’t about to stay in California. And from there fell in love and met my husband, my current husband. We dated, that was in 2017. We dated for a couple of years, got engaged February 22nd, 2019.

We’re married by June 22nd, 2019. I have also had a lot of friends that have gotten late married later on in life as well. So I’ve had a lot of friends, but like some of the ones that have gotten married, like late in their late thirties, they really struggled with infertility and struggled with having babies.

And I was not even sure that I would be able to conceive right away without some sort of help. And so we decided that when we got married and went on our honeymoon, we would not prevent, but not also not like put a lot of pressure, not try. And behold, we got pregnant within the first couple of months without even trying.

And I remember laying in bed after finding out and after like looking at the pregnancy test and really coming to terms with it and just hearing the song In Christ Alone play through my head. As like my song of coming really back to Christ and back to a relationship with Jesus like that was what had sealed and kind of redeemed and, you know, kind of brought me back and brought forgiveness to who’ve had was I think. I was slowly coming back there with just the introduction of meeting my husband. And there’s a lot of emotions and hurt that had happened. Because of my own decisions and my own choices that I think with me becoming pregnant.

That was my aha moment. It’s been a journey too. I’ll tell you that. Becoming a mom, especially at this age was not easy, at 38. When I got pregnant with him at 38. It was probably a lot harder than most people. I dunno. I can’t say I was never married at 25. But I did have a cousin who got pregnant around the same time and she was in her twenties.

And there’s a drastic difference of energy between a 20-year-old mom and an almost 40-year-old soon-to-be mom, but the gratefulness and the humility that I feel like the Lord offered actually allowed us to name our son Ellis Jason, which just means the kindness of God.

Ellis means kindness. I just really felt the Lord was kind and allowing me after all these years of struggling, I wanted to become a mom and just to have his kindness and giving us a son is truly a gift. So if you were like me, maybe you have dreams of becoming a mom and having children. I would say it’s not too late.

I would say that the Lord is good. He is kind. He gives life and brings us through things that only teach us lessons to then share and bring hope to others that might be in those same situations. We are not without hope. We are not without life. 

Carrie: It was really sweet to have Kristin share because I’ve seen her through this whole journey and the spiritual growth process that she’s been on.

I know her story is going to be encouraging for those of you maybe who are still single or have been through a long period of singleness.

Summer McKinney story from episode 15 also ties in with the same theme of waiting to be married. 

Summer: I have to look at my own marriage. I was single until 28, got married at 29, I came from a very large family and always wanted many children.

And of course, the older I got, I mean, I could do the math in my head. Okay, Lord, you know, this is it. It’s going to happen. Of course, that was before like, you know, people in their forties started having kids and stuff, but there’s like, “Okay, wait.” My large families are going to happen, but God was in the details. My husband and I knew each other from way back but just went our own separate ways and whatnot but we reconnected and I inherited three amazing children in our marriage. And one of my deal breakers was I wanted a child. And so my husband, we’re going to get married and he would have to agree that we could have a child together.

And he said, “okay.” So again, “Okay, Lord.” I have three children and I want that comradery. I want them to grow up with a younger sibling. And so my timing was shortly after. Let’s settle into married life and blended family life, but few years were going by and it’s like, “Okay, Lord. Is this going to happen?”

You know, just a lot of questions. And my husband kinda gave up like, okay, it’s just not going to happen. And it took us a few years. God knew. Again, being in the details and perfect timing. The bonding that I was worried about. The boys were in high school whenever we had our son and through college, one of the boys stayed home and commuted, and then the bonding was just amazing.

And it was just all of those fears and all of those concerns or those questions. It wasn’t my timing but the timing was just perfect. You know, it wasn’t always my way but it was God, God knew what he was doing and just being in the details. And so that to me was just the hope of a large family, the hope of the bonding and that unity among the family. And God just blessed it. And so when those doubts or fears or things come into play, whether you’re single or whether you’re in an empty marriage, or divorced, and you still have that desire, I think that God is in the details and his timing is amazing. It’s not always our time. That’s kind of, when I think about, big thing in my life where desire and hope and blessing come together. I would say it’s definitely my family unit. 

Carrie: Yeah, it’s amazing how God will give us those desires like for you, it was for to have a large family. And God totally filled that in a way that you couldn’t have imagined at that point in time like you were thinking that all of those children would be completely biologically yours and you ended up with a beautiful family picture and it’s amazing how God’s dreams are much better than things that we could dream on our own. And when we try to do it our ways or in our timing, it just never quite shakes out and we can become disappointed.

________

While Summer’s story didn’t look how she had envisioned, Holley Gerth’s story from episode 19 didn’t turn out how she anticipated either. 

Holley: My story of hope is my family story. I went through about a decade of infertility. My husband and I couldn’t have our own kiddos. So we ended up adopting a 20-year old who basically aged out of the foster system. And so she’s now 27. She got married and we are nanna and poppy to Eula and Clement.

And so I literally wore a ring on my finger that said hope for all those years. And the ending to our story is not at all what I would have imagined.

__________________ 

Our last few stories are stories about infertility. On episode 16, Dr. Irene Kraegel shared about her pregnancy losses. 

Dr. Kraegel: They were years for example where I had multiple pregnancy losses. I write about this in my book as well, too. And not really knowing how that would resolve and God brought us a child. And we have this beautiful nine-year-old boy that we love. And that’s something that brings me hope. 

_________

The next story is from a dear friend of mine that I have known since about 2014.

Michelle: Hi guys. My name is Michelle. I’m here with you today to share my testimony as well as my infertility foster care and adoption journey.

So I was married and divorced at a young age to my first husband. We did not have children together. And that was not something we had really tried to do, but when I met what would eventually be my second husband, I knew that I did want to have children. We were a little bit older when we got married, my second husband and I. I was 35. And so immediately after we got married, we did start trying to have our own child. Unfortunately, that was not happening for us. So we went to a fertility doctor and over the course of I’d say about a three-year span, we had approximately non-procedures done and close to $12,000 spent. That did not bear any fruit at the end of that three years, I think we were both emotionally, I was physically spent and both somewhat spiritually spent as well because we both prayed and prayed over this journey. And really, desperately wanted to have our own child. And at that time, we could not understand why the Lord was not providing that for us.

The way I was looking at it is there are so many people that have children that don’t even want them, but God, why are you not providing us with a baby of our own? And it made me feel unworthy of having a child. I was looking at it is God, if you could let this person who is abusive to their child or neglectful or abandoned their child if you can let them have one, what does that say about me? What does that say about the parenting you think that I would do God? And I really went into a deep, dark depression at the end of that three years. I began to resent my husband because I felt that I was the only one going through the emotional struggle, the physical, especially the physical struggle because all these procedures were happening to me.

And some of them were very painful and I felt like he was doing a small fraction of the work. And over time through scripture and prayer, I did grow to see that that was very unfair of me to think that way, but I’m human. And I felt that I had been abandoned by the Lord during that period of time. I was also very resentful of other women who during this phase were discovering they were pregnant and having healthy pregnancies and having these beautiful children. And what makes it probably even worse is my career was in early childhood education. So my career was children and especially babies and toddlers and those early stages of life.

That was my career. So day in and day out, I was seeing and working with these babies. It really brought me to a low place. So my husband and I eventually decided that we would go through the foster care program through the path classes, but I told him that he would have to do all the legwork of getting a set up for the classes that basically he would just tell me the time and place and I would just show up. And so that’s what he did. We went through the path classes. In three of those classes, I met other women who were in a very similar situation who felt almost identical to how I felt. They felt worthless and useless. And the way I felt during that period of time during that dark period is that I basically had one job to do.

The Lord made me a female, which meant I was supposed to have children and I couldn’t do the one job that God had given me to do. And I just felt just so inadequate and so useless that some days I didn’t want to get out of bed. Luckily, through prayer, through scripture, through family and friends who rallied around me, around us, my husband and I both and supported us and a God who never gives up.

He never fails us. I began seeing how, even though those were the things that I wanted, I wanted to have my own child, my own biological child. I wanted to know the joys of being able to tell family and friends that were expecting a child, to feel a life growing inside of me and seeing this beautiful baby when it was first born and caressing them against my chest, having all those moments through time and through prayer God very gently showed me that he had a different plan for me. Even though I kept questioning God, what is this? What plan is this do you have for me? I don’t understand. I don’t see it yet, God. He was just really patient with me and just showed me that I need to stay the course. So we finished the path classes.

We sold our small house and bought a bigger house so that we could accommodate children. And we knew we probably wanted to have multiple. It was 2015, we got our first sibling set. It was a brother and a sister and we actually got them on my daughter’s sixth birthday and my son Larry, he was seven about to turn eight. So we went from zero to 60 in 2.8 seconds. We had no kids and then we had two kids and it was the youngest child’s sixth birthday. So we scrambled to throw a little party. And our lives changed from that day like we could have never imagined.

We have been blessed beyond measure. Even in the rough times, we have been blessed because the Lord has stretched us. He has grown us. My husband and I have grown closer together. We have grown closer to the Lord and God revealed to me pretty quickly into the foster care process that his plan for us was to adopt children who needed a family. It took us three and a half years to be able to legally adopt our children. Then finally on January 30th, 2019, we were able to legally adopt Kimberly and Larry. And now our journey has not always been an easy one. There has been days where I have wanted to pull my hair out and say, God, what have I done? And then immediately I’m filled with all the love and joy that the Lord has put into our heart when he brought us these kids. They are amazing and we knew pretty instantly that we were meant to be their parents, that these kids were going to be with us forever. And it has been such a journey. It is such a blessing.

And my husband and I both feel that we just stayed the course with the Lord. He’s always sovereign. He’s always faithful to us. He never leaves a season. He never abandons us. He shows us what we need eventually in his time and not our own. So I just hope this fills you with some peace and some hope and knowing you’re not alone.

If you’ve been in a similar situation and that God does have a plan for you you may not see it at this moment, but he will reveal it to you. Just be faithful. I hope you have a wonderful day and I just push blessings upon you. God bless you all.

_______

Carrie: I really appreciated the vulnerability and the spiritual wrestling that Michelle shared in her story, because I believe that someone who’s listening is really going to be able to relate to those thoughts and questionings that she had and rustled with God.

On episode 22, Lindsey Castleman shared her amazing story of adoption with us.

Lindsey: During this time and being in this community group, my husband and I found out that we were not able to have children. And then there were six couples, four out of the six couples found out that they could not have children, which was crazy. I didn’t know it before we came. We weren’t like, “Hey, let’s do an infertility community group.” It just happened. And then we all discovered these things. Hopefully, it wasn’t something we all drank. So we were in this together. We started going through this adoption process for us, my husband and I. One day, one of the girls in the community group texted me and she was like, “Lindsey, my mom is in a Bible study with this woman who’s asking the whole Bible study to pray for an adoptive family for her nephew’s son like it’s kind of a big goal. And she was like, “My mom remembered you guys and community group, and would you be interested?” And I’m like, “What?!” It was kind of wild because I was actually at this church.

When I got the text message, I was literally in church and they were about to do this worship and they do this forever long worship. So I’m like, all right, some do I’m worshiping and I’m asking God, I’m like, God, is this our son? Is this what we’re supposed to do? And I heard a very clear yes.

And I don’t hear that kind of stuff all the time. A very clear yes. And so I said, all right, God, well, you’re going to have to tell my husband that you said yes. He’s a little bit more of my risk-averse kind of guy. I’m a little bit more of a risk-taker. So anyways, I called my husband because I was on a trip.

So he was back at home and I was in California and I called my husband and I said, “Hey, in our community group said that.. What do you think? And he was like, “I’m open.” And I was like, “oh my gosh.” That’s not usually the response I get. I usually get all the worry questions. And if you’re in the Enneagram world, he’s an Enneagram six.

So that makes a lot of sense. To make a long story short, even though I’ve already made it long we ended up meeting with that family. And then on a Tuesday, they told us that they chose us. And then we brought our son home that Saturday. We kind of look back and we go, “oh my goodness.”

Even just us being kind of obedient to want to serve, and not obedient and like little begrudging, but just like, “Hey, we really would like to serve.” Just how God placed us with all of these people that then placed us with our son who could not have been a better fit. And if I go into the emotion of it, I will cry right now but I’m not going to be staying in my head about it.

But just in that sense of we couldn’t imagine our lives without them. And so in this place of feeling so hopeless and infertility, God was already working behind the scenes and bringing us hope just through these things, we could have never orchestrated for us to be able to be parents to our son.

So that for us is like any time it’s like, “Oh, is God working on us? Heck, yes. He is. He is and he’s working today, like working today not just in biblical times. He’s working today. He is a God of hope and he is a relational God that loves us and wants to be so close to us. And that’s beautiful in that way.

_______

Carrie: I started out this episode by talking with you about how I am not yet a mother, either. I wanted to share with you where I am on my own personal journey in case that provides any extra support or encouragement to you. Steve and I pray about having a family. We’re very open to what does that look like for us since we are older. The most amazing thing though, is that one of the times I was praying about this, I feel like the Lord spoke to me, “Carrie, I’ve already given you many children.” I have to say I didn’t receive that in a sense of God’s not going to give me children. However, it made me actually so grateful and thankful because that statement is true.

I was looking back at some old pictures that I had under the bed before we were in the digital era. So they’re actual physical pictures that I have from times where I did VBS with children. Times where I worked at an afterschool program with children in the inner city. Times where I was involved in helping with youth ministry and middle school ministry.

Many of those kids obviously are not kids anymore. They’re grown up and some of them have children of their own. But when I received that word to my spirit and prayer, it gave me so much joy and encouragement that I’ve worked with children almost my whole life in some capacity. I know that God has used me to minister to the next generation even though that may not look like having children in a nuclear family.

So if that’s you, if you’re that person that’s maybe single and serving in the children’s ministry church, or you’re in college working at the afterschool program and investing in kids know that even though they’re not your kids they’re God’s kids and you are providing just a valuable service by loving on them, encouraging them, supporting them in their growth journey process, physically, emotionally, spiritually, whatever that looks like for you. 

Sometimes mother’s day can be a hard day or an emotional day for women who aren’t mothers. I’ve had people tell me that they don’t attend church on mother’s day due to this. If that’s you and you’re hurting on that day, I would encourage you to find something that you do enjoy doing and plan to do it on that day. Definitely take good care of yourself and you know what you can handle emotionally. Whenever your journey is whether you’re a mother, whether you’re not a mother, whether you’re not a mother yet, know that God loves you very much, that he has an amazing plan for your life, and things never work out exactly how we plan them out in our mind. However, we know that God is good. We know that God is loving. We know that God is pro-family and whatever that looks like for you. I just pray that this podcast encourages you in your journey wherever you are right now. 

Some of you may have listened to this episode because you’re in this season. For those of you who listened to this episode, and you’re not in this season, maybe you already have children and you’re just a regular listener to the podcast, there’s a good chance that God has put someone in your circle who is either struggling with fertility or questioning how can they be single for so long and have children, or they can relate to some of these other stories. Will you please just share this episode and allow it to be a vehicle of encouragement to the people that you know who may need to hear this. And if this episode has impacted you positively, please let me know. You can always reach out at www.hopeforanxietyandocd.com. Head on over to the contact page as always.

Thank you so much for listening. Hope for Anxiety and OCD is a production of by the wall counseling in Smyrna, Tennessee. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum and audio editing is completed by Benjamin Bynam. 

Until next time. Maybe comforted by God’s great love for you.

26. A Personal OCD Story of Experiencing God’s Presence and Grace with Peyton Garland

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in OCD, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 26. 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. 



Follow along with Peyton on Instagram @peytonmgarlandwrites
Book: Not so by Myself: A safe space where God doesn’t fix the loneliness, but sits with you instead

Support the show 

More Podcast Episodes

Transcript Of Episode 26

Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD. Episode 26. Our most popular episodes thus far have been personal experience stories. Peyton Garland shares her experience of struggling with OCD. How that’s impacted her faith, her journey of going to therapy. It’s really good stuff in here, guys. I hope that you enjoy the show today.

Carrie: Thank you for coming on the show, Peyton. 

Peyton: Happy to be here. 

Carrie: I’d love you to just tell us a little bit about yourself. 

Peyton: Sure. I am Peyton Garland. My husband’s name is Josh. He and I live north of Atlanta in Alpharetta, Georgia. We have two of the most obnoxious but sweet puppies in the world, Alfie and Daisy. So we are dog parents and proud of it. My husband is a pilot and I’m an author. So we’re both finding the careers that we love and thriving in them. 

Carrie: That’s awesome. Why did you want to be on the podcast and tell a little bit about your story today?

Peyton: I think mental health in this day and age is almost a buzzword. I think it’s something where people are finally willing to talk about it. They’re finally willing to listen, but I also think that the voices that need to be at the forefront of these conversations are people who do struggle with anxiety, who do struggle with OCD, who know what it’s like to be in a therapist’s office.

So this podcast just seemed to embody that ability to have real conversations with people who truly go through this stuff.

Carrie: At what point in your life did you start to notice like I’m starting to struggle here with my thought life?

Peyton: I had always been a worrier and I knew that, but the older I got the worst that got the more irrational the worrying became.

So like I said, my husband, is a pilot. When he first finished flight school, which was about two years ago, the only airport where he could get a job was in Indiana. So states away, hours away. He and I had just moved to a new town in Georgia for a new job for me. So new town, new job. I’m not near my family.

I’m not near my friends. Two weeks after we moved there, he moves to Indiana. I’m being by myself and being by yourself leaves lots of room for your headspace to just go crazy. And at that point, maybe two or three months into him being gone that’s when I said this worrying is not only irrational. It’s starting to impact me physically, too like I’m losing weight. I can’t put back on. I’m not sleeping. I eventually went to a therapist which in my small country town was not a welcomed thing. Therapy is almost seen as defeat like you couldn’t take it, you couldn’t handle it. Your faith in God wasn’t strong enough. I went to a therapist’s office, found out I have intrusive thought OCD.

And what I’ve learned with OCD is that often anxiety and depression are kind of buddies. They sit right beside OCD and they take turns. So I’m just on a big journey. Now I share a lot about that in my new book, Not So By Myself. Just how you’re not really by yourself in the quiet space, even when your brain is super loud.

Carrie: That’s so good. So it was a, you had a big stigma hurdle to even get in the therapy office coming from a small town, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Be the tough girl. 

Peyton: Oh yeah. Well, I’m so glad you said that. In my book one of the chapters, I talk about how all three of my great uncles and my grandfather were drafted into the Vietnam war. All four gone at the same time and when they came home, they quickly learned that in order to not talk about everything they’d seen, they were just to keep quiet. That silence was strength. Those two just seem to parallel and they passed that idea down from generation to generation to generation.

So my generation about the third or fourth generation, we’re sitting in a culture now that saying, “Hey, it’s okay to say I’m not okay. It’s okay to go get help.” And I think I actually was the first person in my family to go to a therapist. And the beautiful thing is I had a parent to follow after that. [00:04:37] I had a grandmother follow after that, and that was a very beautiful thing to kind of see loved ones, say, “Hey, you know what? There’s some things I haven’t been okay with. I have a dad who has PTSD and traumatic brain injury from serving in the military. So lots of people now getting help for hard things they’ve been dealing with for decades.

Carrie: I love that ripple effect in your story. It’s like one person starts in the family starts to experience some relief and change and hope, and then other people say, “oh, hey, that sounds really good. I want to get on board with that and maybe I’ll try therapy out as well.”

Peyton: Absolutely.

Carrie: Do you remember that experience of just being so nerve-racked and were you super scared to start talking?

How was your therapist able to help you feel comfortable even sharing some of these things that you had? You’d really just rattled around in your head and maybe talked to your husband about.

Peyton: Sure. This is crazy. You’re literally outlining my book chapter by chapter. 

Carrie: I haven’t read it either.

Peyton: One of the chapters is called green tea and therapy and it’s about my first time in a therapist’s office. Like I said I come from a good old country town. I walk in this therapist’s office and there’s like this spa music in the background. There’s bright but soft colors everywhere. I’m way out of my element.

I was not a yoga kind of girl. But my therapist just asks me a simple question. She’s like, “Hey, is there anything I can offer you to drink?” And I’m a green tea kind of girl. So I said, green tea, just give me some green tea. And I remember death gripping that green tea coffee the whole time.

I don’t even think I drank it. I just death gripped it because one thing I knew and this whole room of nothing I knew. My therapist started with the big question. She had to tell me about yourself like I got to know what goes on in your head. What’s going on in your heart and your spirit and your family.

When I left I had no mascara left on my face. I mean, I did, but it was like down to my chin on my neck. I still hadn’t touched the green tea. It was just an hour of me unearthing everything that had been there for over a decade, honestly. So it was a wild, uncomfortable, but relieving experience all at once. It was a whirlwind for sure. 

Carrie: Was that when you got the diagnosis of OCD? 

Peyton: Yes. So I have a dear friend, her name’s Wendy Nunnery. She’s an author too. She has it. And I had met her for coffee one day and we hadn’t been friends for long and she was just vulnerable enough to say, “Yeah, you know I struggle with intrusive thought OCD.

And she was telling me all the things she worries about. And I went, “oh my goodness.” Number one, I’m not by myself because I have been thinking some off-the-wall things and I can’t talk myself down from them. I’m always afraid of running people off the road. I overthink being near knives. I overthink changing a child’s diaper.

All of these things that I just thought I was literally psychotic, like there was some serious problem. This wonderful woman of faith is sitting in front of me, a mother, a thriving wife and she just lists everything that’s been rattling in my head for years. And so I sat back still wasn’t sure about therapy, but kind of a pin that had to be what I had. And once Josh left it was very, very unhealthy.

Like I was just in a place where I wasn’t functioning. I said we gotta get help and that’s exactly the diagnosis I received. 

Carrie: So in some ways that was probably a little bit relieving to know what you were dealing with because when people don’t know what they’re dealing with, then they throw all kinds of vernacular labels on themselves. 

Peyton: Right. My dad, you know, has PTSD and he had that when I was growing up. So I was around it. But PTSD almost stems from something very traumatic, which is what happened with him in the military in his line of work. But for me, nothing traumatic had actually happened to me and I couldn’t figure out why I was having a hard time.

As a good kid with good grades and a good family. I mean we had struggles with what my dad went through, but I must have been a bad person if I couldn’t control what was going on in my head. The level of relief and the pressure that just fell off me, that was a God thing. There was no way around that.

Carrie: Did you struggle spiritually during that time? Like why has God allowed me to struggle with this? And those kinds of questions, maybe that people with OCD face. 

Peyton: Yeah, I’m just going to send you my book when this is over. My fourth chapter is called church games. And so again, I grew up and not hating by any means on denomination, on religion, but I went to a very small brick and mortar countryside church. Women were told not to speak. I was told it was King James, or it was literally not the Bible and how dare you touch it. Women cannot lead worship. I grew up in such a rigid church culture that when you combine that with OCD, you’re quite terrified of God.

I got a credit card in the mail or a debit card a few months ago and my security code, well, I guess I can’t say it, but it had lots of the apocalyptic kind of numbers going on and I literally almost sent that back in the mail. I was like, “no, we can’t use that like, I can’t touch that.”  Wild, irrational thoughts OCD we’re paired with this very rigid church culture.

And I was afraid of God for years like he was just somebody that I was told to love, but I was scared of loving him because I was just scared of who he was or at least who he seemed to be. So yeah, I struggled spiritually for a long time. 

Carrie: Like maybe tying into some of the obsessions, like is God mad at me or am I going to go to hell.

Peyton: Exactly. Very perfection-oriented. But like I said not just a perfectionist or perfectionist with OCD which can take on a completely different level of fear, anxiety, and all the like.

Carrie: So what you’re saying is that you have intrusive thoughts, but you don’t actually have any compulsions. Is that so?

Peyton: It’s funny. So there’s several different branches of OCD like intrusive thought OCD there’s harm OCD, contamination OCD. With me, I do have a form of contamination OCD. I always had. I washed my hands a lot as a child If I spilled anything on me like a chemical. Cleaning panics me. I was afraid to be near chemicals.

So when COVID hit, my contamination OCD, the compulsion went through the roof like I had always been a hand washer. I’d always been a clean person. I started keeping a chart of how often I washed my hands. When the world shut down and we went home, I washed my hands an average of 57 times a day and I spent two-plus hours a day following through on compulsions with cleaning, with mopping, with wiping everything down with wiping my hands down my phone down. Just putting Josh in a Clorox fog as soon as he came through the door.

So there are definitely compulsions, but I see them most with the contamination OCD. 

Carrie: How has that affected your, your marriage, and your relationship there? Have you had to kind of train him on how to help you at times? 

Peyton: He is very gracious and I’ve been very blessed with someone who’s willing to listen.

He has been mentally a very strong man which is fantastic. Obviously, he worries about things. There’s hard things for him, but he is very mentally stable, which is what I need. I’ll be honest when we first got married is when it really started kicking up. I’ve learned change kind of messes with my OCD like getting married, buying a house.

I had just gotten a new job. Just all the things. And bless his heart he just thought it was birth control. He thought maybe it was him. I thought it might’ve been him. We didn’t know. Maybe only a few months later is when the piloting thing happened and he was gone and I got help. So for us it’s funny, but for him it was a breath of relief when I found out I had OCD. He went, “oh, okay. It’s not me. It’s something else.” Not that we can fix OCD but we now have something we can work with. We have a name and a face to it and he has been so good. What I love about him is he respects when I’m having anxiety.

He respects when there’s a compulsion where I’m just like, I have to follow through with it. There’s no way around it. But he also calls me to work through compulsions. He calls me to say, “Hey, let’s take a step back and rationally talk yourself down from this like we don’t have to wash your hands five times in a row. We can do four and walk away.

It’s okay. So there’s been a little bit of training on his part, but he’s really been gracious and I’ve been very thankful for that. 

Carrie: That’s awesome. We talked about kind of how to support your anxious spouse on a previous episode. So I’m curious about your experience on that. 

What was that process like of finding tools and strategies and things to help you in therapy?

Was that really hard and what kind of therapy did you utilize? 

Peyton: Yeah, so my therapist and I, we do brain spotting. I don’t know who all knows, but literally, I find a spot in the room where my brain just kind of seems to be at peace and attune. I like natural light, my brain and my eyes always go to a window where there’s natural light and my therapist just says, “Hey, let’s just start walking through what you’re feeling. Why you’re feeling this way.”

And every time brainspotting walks me back to what started a trigger, what started a compulsion, what started the anxiety that’s just built up and is now bottling over. So I love brainspotting because often my compulsion or my thought has nothing to do with what’s really bothering me. OCD is just really good at twisting stuff.

So I love brainspotting. It earths my head. It just brings it back to earth. But also we just learned really healthy techniques. Even things like social media can spike my OCD. Just because OCD can thrive off of just about anything it wants. I do 45 minutes of social media a day. I have a timer on my phone. That’s something she and I worked through. 45 minutes was a healthy number for me. When the timer goes off, I’m done with social media. Josh and I have what we call a contamination zone in my house. If there’s something that I just feel is completely contaminated and I don’t want to touch it. He puts it in a corner, in a room and we let it air out because in my brain letting it air out is safe. Just little things like that have made a huge difference for us. 

Carrie: That’s awesome. I’m going to get somebody on the show to talk about brainspotting now. I think that that would be an interesting episode, too. 

Peyton: That would be fantastic. I love it. I love brainspotting.

Carrie:  Yeah. We have talked a little bit about EMDR on the show and it’s similar.

There’s some similarities in terms of just kind of like really tapping into that brain level response and the nervous system. And like you said, when you trace OCD back, it doesn’t make sense. You’re like, “wait a minute, this goes back to that time when I was this age and this experience happened.”

I love that it really gets down deep underneath the presenting issue. Because it’s not actually about the stuff or the cleanliness. It’s about that piece underneath it, whether it’s a lot of times like dealing with uncertainty or loss of control or those types of triggers can be really prominent

Peyton: Well, that’s what wild is. Every time we brain spot and we work it back, it is either a very harsh church experience I had, or it’s just growing up in a household with a dad with PTSD that was undiagnosed for years. Every time, my brain has trillions of off-the-wall thoughts, but every one of them works its way back to one of those two things.

Carrie: Wow. Do you feel like you were a particularly sensitive kid growing up, more sensitive to people’s emotions or kind of absorbing everything?

Peyton: I’ve taken a bunch of Christian spiritual gift tests and discernment comes back every time no matter which one I take. But my mom did say as a child, I tended to know without actually knowing, like if there was a relative who was going through a hard divorce or someone just lost someone.

My mom said as a child, I gravitated to them. She said I’d walk up and sit in their lap. I would sit and talk to them. I mean, maybe that had to have been just God. Just knowing who needed some extra love. My mom swears as a child I could just walk in a room and I just knew who needed even just a “hey” or a hug.

Carrie: That’s good. We had Mitzi Van Cleave on the show before, and she talked really about how OCD was a part of her sanctification process. That there was this process of growth through affliction is what she talked about it. Can you talk about a little bit about that in terms of your spiritual journey?

Do you feel like you have some similarities there? 

Peyton: Sure. I’m so glad you asked that question. It’s one of those things where I think Paul mentions in the new testament that he had a thorn in his side. I think that’s a favorite thing to debate is what was the thorn in the side. But I think regardless, the reality is we each have a thorn in the side. I think on this side of heaven, we will eternally fight or struggle over, wrestle with and I think OCD is mine. There’s no magic pill for OCD. I’m not going to wake up one day and my brain is just going to be super chill.

The bittersweet thing that I love about this thorn in the side is it constantly calls me back to a place of grace. As a perfectionist with OCD, I’ve had to come to grips with the fact I cannot be perfect. The church is saying is you’re a human. You’re not perfect.

I always knew that, but that always wasn’t good enough. I was like, “no, I’m going to prove the church wrong. I’ve got this. I can do this.” OCD literally said “ha, no” like here’s something very irrational and very imperfect for you to imperfectly worry about. You know, go have fun, good luck. And so OCD quite forced me to accept that I’m not perfect. And because of that, growing up in a really harsh church culture and stepping away from it and wrestling with OCD, I can now look at God and say, “Hey, you know what not only am I not perfect, but you are.” And as churchy as that sounds, there’s so much grace in that because God has not put the standard of perfection on me.

And I know I can’t meet it, especially with the OCD. And so now it’s just grace and I had not lived under grace. I had not lived by grace. It was just a catchy phrase that at one point I thought would be a good tattoo on my wrist. But OCD has been the gateway to God and grace for me. And so for that I am always grateful.

Carrie: How did you make that perspective shift in terms of your view of God? Did that come through getting around like a healthier church environment? 

Peyton: Sure. When I was about 16 or 17, I just told my family, I said look I’m out. Not out, like I’m not piecing Jesus out, but I’m not here. I finally started studying the Bible and the Bible and the guy behind the pulpit were not lining up.

[00:20:43] So I said, look, I can either believe a man who’s like everybody else or worse, or I can believe God. And so I’m just going to go with God. That sounds like a smart decision. That’s the Sunday school answer, but it’s one that I’m going to adopt for myself. And so I stepped away from that church. I found a much, much healthier church which made so much of a difference. Within that church, I found women my age who were also not afraid to mention that they struggled with mental health and that right there was probably the ultimate game-changer. I was being around women my age who had been perfectionists. I don’t know if you know the Enneagram, but I am in an Enneagram one on the personality chart.

We are reformers. We are the spearheads for all that is just and good and right. But I was blessed to find women just like that, who turned around and said that I’m not always good. And just and right. I do struggle with mental health. And even through all of that God still sees me as good because he loves me and because he’s good.

And so that was the revolution in my spiritual journey. 

Carrie: I think finding the character of God. And I’m really connecting with the character of God who he says he is in the Bible and experiencing that in your life as absolutely a game-changer. I’m curious. This is a question for you from the trends of the podcast. Our podcast is for people with anxiety and OCD. But the most popular episodes that have been downloaded have been personal stories about people with OCD who have experienced that. Even more popular than our very first episode just like, Hey, this is the podcast. This is who Carrie is and all of that. What do you think? That’s because people just aren’t talking about OCD and the church.

Peyton: Oh, absolutely. When I wrote my book, not said by myself, my editor called me and she said, Hey, sweetheart, you got to lighten up on the church, just a smidge. You gotta pull back just a littlest. So I’ve talked about that with much more grace. Thanks to my editor. And my book, I think we talk about the soul in the church, but I also think if God created the soul, he created the body and he created the mind.

And we are called to honor all three of those. We are called to keep all three of those healthy to keep them in check. Iron sharpens iron, I think mind, body, and spirit. And I don’t know where the disconnect happened with the church and that aspect. I don’t have a clue, but nobody talks about your mind and your physical health either.

And if those two aren’t in check often the spirit’s not in check. And so we’re walking around almost wobbly like one-third of us is functioning like it’s supposed to in the church and we wonder why things still feel like they’re falling apart.

Carrie: And they’re not working. And this concept, which I’m still just wrapping my mind around is like the holy spirit lives in me like in my body that just really blows my mind.

So I’m like, does how I treat my body that has to interact with my spirit? I know it doesn’t change the holy spirit. I’m not saying that, but I mean how I interact with my body changes my spiritual health. It affects my spiritual health as well as my emotional health and physical health.

It’s just all interconnected. And I think you’re right, I think we do try to look at those things separately and don’t interact with each other. And if we want to be more healthy spiritually, we also have to be more healthy emotionally and physically. It just makes sense. I love that.

Talk with us about this concept in your book of not being alone that seems to be a big thing for you. Why did you title the book the way that you did and how does that incorporate with what you wrote about? 

Peyton: I think OCD was probably one of the most isolating things in my life. Like I said, even growing up, I was a worrier. My friends called me the worrier.

I was the mom friend like I was always 45. I was always isolated because I was the mom. I was the worrying one. I was the one who can not just ever let loose and have fun now, not in the name of sinful pleasure, but I was just never relaxed. I can never breathe and that was one of the most isolating things for me.

And so as I got older, life got harder, stuff got more serious intrusive thoughts just have a field day with that. I mean, because there’s just so much more stake. Once I got married like sexual OCD stuff went through the roof because never had I ever had sex. And now I have, and my brain is like, “Oh, here’s 5 million things we can take and run with.”

So I continue to get lonelier and lonelier because all of these thoughts made me take a step back, take a step back. I was not like everyone else. Something was wrong with me. Should I call the sheriff on myself like what is going on? And so when Josh physically left and I was physically by myself, that was probably one of the darkest places in my life because I had always been mentally and even spiritually isolated just from the church I grew up in and struggling with OCD. And here I am not physically alone and it took therapy. It took God’s grace. It took two or three very dear friends that made you realize you literally cannot be alone. And it sounds so churchy. It sounds so cliche.

But like you said, if the holy spirit is truly embodying you then I am called to believe that he is embodying every lonely space I’m walking through. So he is quite literally paving the way and telling loneliness to just step aside like it doesn’t have a place here, not in my heart, not in my spirit, not in my physical body, not in my mind. And so that’s how I chose the title, Not So By Myself. 

Carrie: So huge. I hope that as people hear this podcast and these stories that they recognize that within themselves too like I’m not alone. I’m not alone in my struggles and that God’s here with me and God can break into those lonely spaces. And I love that he just meets us where we’re at, you know, all of our mess.

Peyton: That’s what I say. He works best in the mess. That is where he thrives. 

Carrie: So cool. Towards the end of the podcast, I like to ask our guests to share a story of hope, which is the time where you received hope from God or another person.

Peyton: Oh, that is such a good one. OCD is just so wild. So harm OCD for me, I’m always afraid of running people off the road. I’m always turning my car around to make sure I haven’t run anybody off the road. There was one day I was in my little black Chevy car that I had gotten in high school and I was driving home and I just had one of those intrusive thoughts of I tried to pick up my phone because someone was calling me and I thought, “oh my gosh.”

[00:28:00] like for those five split seconds, you have no idea if you were looking at the road, what could have happened? So I just hit the brakes. It’s a quiet country town, but I still hit the brakes in the middle of the road. And I went to go whip my car around and somebody sideswipes me because I’m irrationally flipping my car in the middle of the street.

And I thought, “oh, my word. I have just caused a wreck. I have no clue if this person is okay. I don’t know how I’m gonna tell a cop I have intrusive thought OCD and that’s why I’ve had a wreck. So I pull off on the side of the road and this woman pulls off and I see her and she’s older and I think she’s 85.

I have partially killed her. She’s going to need a hip replacement. This woman gets out of her car. I’ve damaged her car like this was on me. She comes over and she grabs my hand and she looks at me and, and even in a small town, this was one of those random chances where I didn’t know who this was.

She said, “I just want you to know that this is God’s providential hand, that you’re safe and I’m safe.” And she prayed over me and just left. And I’m sitting here going, ”my insurance is going to go through the roof.” I definitely just clipped the back end of her car. So no insurance going up. I didn’t pay anything for this woman’s car.

I swear she was an angel. So that was just hope because that was a hard thing. Mentally, I was in a bad place. I made a bad decision as a driver and this woman just prays over me, gives me grace, and just drives off. And I will never forget that day. I will never forget her face, the street name, any of it as long as I live. That was some serious hope that I will not forget.

Carrie: Wow. What a testimony of God’s grace. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story. I think this has been great to talk about all the different things that you talked about and I’m sure it’ll be an encouragement to somebody.

————-

I enjoy getting to have these guests on because it really reduces the stigma and shame surrounding being a Christian and struggling with OCD. Maybe you or someone you know have had an experience such as overcoming a phobia or working through social anxiety, I would love to feature some of those types of stories on the podcast.

If that’s you or someone you know, you don’t have to be an author to be on the show or a public speaker or a therapist. None of those are requirements. Just reach out to me via our contact form on the website at www.hopeforanxietyandocd.com I look forward to hearing from you and being able to share more stories of hope with you in the future.

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 completed by Benjamin Bynam.

Until next time. May you be comforted by God’s great love for you.

25. Making Church a Welcoming Place for People with Mental Health Struggles with Dr. Steve Grcevich of Key Ministry

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, OCD, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 25. Making Church a Welcoming Place for People with Mental Health Struggles with Dr. Steve Grcevich of Key Ministry

I had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Steve Grcevich of Key Ministry.  Dr. Steve is helping churches learn how to minister to people with disabilities including mental health. 

He shares about what moved him to begin his mission of connecting churches with families of kids who have physical and mental disabilities. 

  • Different scenarios and social interactions in church that trigger the anxiety in kids and families.
  •  Barriers that make it more difficult for kids and families to be part of the church.
  • How to help kids and families with anxiety and other mental health issues feel welcomed and included in church.
  • Communication strategies and inclusion plan to help people feel more welcome in church.


Links and Resources

Key Ministry
Book: Mental Health and the Church

Support the show 

More Podcast Episodes

Transcript of Episode 25

Hope for Anxiety and OCD episode 25.  Today, I had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Steven Grcevich. I believe that’s how you say his last name. He also told me I could call him Dr. Steve. Dr. Steve is going to tell us about a ministry that God laid on his heart to start that helps churches know how to reach and effectively minister to people with a wide variety of disabilities including mental health. So without further ado, let’s get into the interview. 

Carrie: Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Dr. Steve: Carrie, thanks so much for having me on your podcast. I wear a lot of different hats. So in my tentmaking job, I am a child and adolescent psychiatrist. So I’m with physicians. I went to medical school, actually, I got accepted into medical school when I was 17 years old. It’s a little bit of a Doogie Howser kind of thing through an accelerated program. I have a private practice in suburban Cleveland. I teach at a couple of different medical schools, the child psychiatry fellows. I helped teach evidence-based medicine to medical students. Again, maintain a practice. I do some training for Mental Health Professionals and some of the surrounding counties. And then the other thing that probably takes up about half of my time is that almost 20 years ago, I was involved with starting Key Ministry, which I think we’re going to talk a little bit about today. 

Carrie: So, how did you get to that place of seeing a need for key ministries or a desire to start that?

Dr. Steve: This is probably about 25 years ago. I was on the elder board at my church. This is mid-1990s after the fall of the iron curtain.  We had a whole cohort of families who went over to Russia and Bulgaria and adopted some kids with some really complex emotional behavioral, developmental issues, trauma out of orphanages in Russian Bulgaria after the fall of the iron curtain.

And I’m sitting at an elder board meeting and the person who at the time was our children’s ministry director ended up on our ministry board later on down the road. I came in to do a presentation to talk about some of the struggles that these families were having in terms of staying engaged with church. As you can imagine that these were folks who had been very devoted, highly committed. These are people who are volunteering. They’re serving in leadership roles.

And then kids with other mood disorders kind of in that order. And so not like anything that we would go ahead and submit to a journal or as some sort of formal study. Over the next three months, I just did a survey of families as they were coming through the office for routine follow-ups.

There was one question, “what impact did the challenges that brought you and your child to our practice have on your ability to participate at your church or place of worship?” And I was floored by some of the stories that we started to hear. One in particular that was really memorable was that there was a family that I was seeing where they had a couple of little boys with pretty severe ADHD.

They started describing to me sort of what their experience was like going out, trying to find a church for their family on the west side of Cleveland with these two boys in town. Interestingly enough, they ended up at our church. And we’re giving their testimony at one of the services, talking about the impact that the supports that our children’s ministry was able to offer it had on their family. And the comment that the mom made is the people in the church oftentimes think they can tell when a disability ends and bad parenting begins. And so we oftentimes find that when we have kids with different emotional behavioral issues, and in my practice, I see this a lot, where kids who are anxious oftentimes manifests in anger, moodiness, and irritability.

I’m sitting there, listen to this stuff became obvious that there was an issue. And as God would go about orchestrating things around that time, I had one of the three original research grants for Adderall, which became the most commonly used medicine in kids with ADHD.

I got asked to travel around the country, do a lot of lectures to different medical groups, physician groups. And in the introduction, wherever I went I would say something about the work that our church was starting to do with families who were having some of these kinds of struggles. And the church started getting inundated with requests for help. Basically, Key Ministry came about.

Our current mission statement is that our mission is to help connect churches and families of kids with disabilities, for the purpose of making disciples of Jesus Christ. At the core of that, and sort of our original focus on what we saw as the unmet need was that our focus was on helping churches welcome and include families of kids with quote, unquote hidden disabilities, emotional behavioral, developmental neurologic conditions where the disability wouldn’t be obvious, say in a still photograph of that child. Johnny is just an absolutely wonderful lady. She did great work in terms of helping folks with physical disabilities be part of that. Around that time, the early two-thousands, we began getting like more and more awareness of some of the challenges. For example, families face when they had kids on the autism spectrum as more and more kids got diagnosed.

So, the next wave of this is that churches became very proficient or many of them became proficient. There were good models for serving families where they had kids who quote-unquote special needs. Basically kids with more severe intellectual or developmental disabilities, but by far and away, like if you take a look at the child population in the United States, 75% of kids with disabilities have primary mental health disabilities.

And there’s some fascinating research that came out a couple of years ago. Andrew Whitehead, who was a sociologist at Clemson University, went through about a quarter-million interviews with parents from three waves of the National Children’s Health survey. It’s done every two to three years by the federal government.

This is where they get these statistics that like one in 46 kids has autism, stuff like that. And interestingly enough, one of the questions that they ask as part of this is, “has your family attended a church or a place of worship at any point in the last year?” And what they found was that families who had a kid on the autism spectrum were 84% less likely than other families unimpacted by disabilities to ever set foot in a church. But it was 72% for families where they had a child with depression, 55% for kids with a disruptive behavior disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, conduct disorder, and 45% when we’re talking about kids with anxiety disorders. There’s actually 19% for kids with ADHD. In comparison to that, when they looked at other disabilities, like for example, Tourette’s disorder, kids with intellectual disabilities that didn’t have much of an impact in terms of church attendance at all.

And so when you start talking about sheer numbers and so in the population we serve, children and teens, probably about one in 10 meets criteria for a significant anxiety disorder. The number of kids and families who are impacted by these mental health concerns is far, far larger than the number of families who struggle with what we have traditionally referred to in the church as special needs.

So within the context of what we do in our ministry, there’s a lot of stuff that we do that we put on an annual basis. We couldn’t do it last year because of COVID, but the largest disability ministry conference in the United States.

We have a group that we moderate for 2100 special needs and disability ministry leaders from around the country. So we do all kinds of training consultation, offer all kinds of free support to churches.

My role specifically had been to work on developing a model for churches that are interested in doing mental health inclusion. So we have other folks on our team who will consult and work with, again churches that are looking to serve kids with sort of the traditional intellectual developmental disabilities.

[00:10:44] My piece has been developing a mental health inclusion model that churches can follow if they want to serve this larger population of families. That is probably, and it’s interesting, there’s guy Lamar Hardwick who’s up. Fascinatingly, he’s an African-American pastor of a mixed-race church in Atlanta who was diagnosed with autism in his mid-thirties, wrote this book called Disability in the Church.

And one of the points that Lamar made is that the largest minority group in the United States are individuals and families affected by disability. With all the conversations that are going on in terms of talking about diversity and the need for our churches to become more diverse, one of the places we need to start is by thinking about folks who have this range of conditions. Where many of them, the presence of their mental health condition or the presence of a family with that condition has made it impossible for them to be part of church.

Carrie: Can you talk a little bit more about that as far as what specific things were they encountering that were keeping them from being able to go to church? Like lack of feeling welcome maybe because their child had a disability or just their child being too anxious to be in a group setting. 

Dr. Steve: So what if we take a look at sort of mental health, if we think about sort of mental health collectively as a whole, in the model that we put together, part of what we train churches around is the idea of there being seven barriers. The first one is stigma. In that, for example, there was a study. This is maybe six or seven years old from Lifeway research, where when they interviewed quote-unquote unchurched adults, 55% of them endorsed the notion that people with mental illness aren’t welcome at church. 

Carrie: That is so sad. 

Dr Steve: And interestingly, in some of maybe the more theologically conservative denominations that are more focused on outreach and inclusion, like going back to theological devotee, sixties, seventies, and eighties tend to be the ones that have less insight and less understanding about the nature of mental illness. But no, this stuff is not necessarily a sin problem. There are things that people are born with. And as you know, in your practice, that there are ways in like the lives of individual people who wrestle with this so that there are ways that God uses this stuff in terms of drawing people into closer relationships and deeper relationships. So the churches that are most interested oftentimes in doing outreach and inclusion are the ones that in some instances are the places where maybe mental health concerns tend to be more stigmatized. So that’s the first one. 

The second one is anxiety. And I would argue that that in and of itself. Of all these barriers that’s probably the most common one and the anxiety disorders out of all the different mental health disorders are the ones that are most likely to keep the most people out of church. But we’ll talk about that a little more in detail. 

The third has to do with executive functioning and self-control. Pretty much every mental health condition that you think of ultimately, or to some degree will impact people’s capacity to self-regulate emotions, to modulate impulse control, to be able to plan to exercise self-discipline. And folks with conditions like ADHD would be sort of the prototype of this.

Again, there are many other mental health conditions, significantly impacted. If you’re a family and if you have a kid who has a hard time sitting still, or not shouting out in the middle of a worship service. I had a very memorable case. This was a family that came from out of State to see me.

This may be 15 or 20 years ago where the father was a Southern Baptist pastor in Appalachian, West Virginia, Virginia, somewhere like that, where he came up to see me. And actually, his family doc gave him the money to come on up to our practice where they had adopted a little boy who had pretty severe issues with ADHD and impulse control or aggressiveness.

Shortly after they adopted this five-year-old boy, he punched the son of the guy who was the chair of the elder board. And they fired the father for not having appropriate spiritual control over his family when it was obvious that they adopted this kid who had been through very traumatizing situations.

But when you think about like in the Bible and you think about scripture, like the book of James, self-control is very closely acquainted with sort of godliness and spiritual maturity. Ability to demonstrate that especially for kids becomes like really important. If they’re going to be able to fit into a lot of activities at church.

The fourth is sensory processing. Folks think about this as being an issue with folks on the autism spectrum, but it turns out that folks with pretty much every condition and DSM can experience issues with sensory stimulation. And it’s particularly common, in addition, autism among folks with anxiety disorders and ADHD.

And so that for some people like the bright lights, the very loud music, the very sort of stimulating worship environments. You see in a lot of the contemporary churches, for some folks becomes absolutely overwhelming to the point that it’s aversive. 

The fifth is social communication. We think about churches by nature are intensely social places.

And so if you’re somebody where maybe you feel uncomfortable with self-disclosure with other people or you have a more difficult time picking up on tone of voice, inflection of voice, body language, facial expressions, you’re really going to struggle in terms of like the interpersonal stuff that goes with those being active at church. 

The sixth is social isolation because as you know, think about folks with common mental health conditions, people with depression isolate, oftentimes as a symptom of that depression. Folks with social anxiety oftentimes they’re going to avoid situations where they’re going to come in contact with and meet a lot of people and make a lot of new friends. Families who have kids with mental health issues.

The kids are less likely to be involved with athletic activities are less likely to be involved in extracurricular activities. They are less likely to be in situations where they meet other families who will invite them to church. Not to mention the fact that for a lot of the kinds of families that like your practice serve and that we serve, mental health treatment can be fairly expensive.

And a lot of times, I mean that there are lots of treatment costs that these families are incurring either for themselves, for their children, and either finding babysitters or childcare is too expensive. Or when you have a kid where you just can’t let any 14 year old down the street come over and watch them. It was very hard to become part of the social fabric of your neighborhood or the community. 

And then the seventh one is past experiences of church because I don’t know about you, but about 30 minutes into child psychiatry school, I think I figured out that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree and that the kids who have these struggles oftentimes have parents who have these struggles.

And so part of the challenges is if the parent had an issue that kept them from being part of church, when they were younger, it’s highly unlikely that any of their children in particular kids who may have a similar mental health condition are going to be part of church. So those would be sort of the big ones that we ask churches to think about. Stigma, anxiety, executive functioning of self-control, sensory processing, social communication, social isolation, and past experiences at church. 

Carrie: One thing I will say about that, that’s interesting is there’s this thing with church, it seems like with leadership and wanting to reach people where you either get one of two situations with a church.

You either walk in the door and it’s almost like everybody attacks you. Like you have the football like it’s “so we’re so excited to see you and, oh, it’s such a great day. Have a good Sunday. Here’s your bulletin.” You know that you either get that response or you kind of sneak in the door and then you sneak out the door and no one talks to you. But then maybe you go home and you go, “No one talked to me at church today” you know, I guess they really don’t care about me.” So how do churches like find this balance and this fine line between reaching people and letting them know that they’re loved and cared for in that environment without overwhelming them? 

Dr. Steve: One of the first things that we try to help churches to do, because the level of understanding, again, from church to church, depending upon what kind of education the pastors have had, the people who are serving on staff at that church can vary so much. One of the places that we’ll start is by helping to kind of educate them about some of the things that they would anticipate being struggles in folks with common mental health issues and to kind of try to put them in their shoes here. I’ll give you an example of a little exercise that we would use as sort of like a little starter, like if we’re going in and if our team we’re doing a big training or if we were training an individual. 

Let’s imagine that Samantha’s family lives down the street from your church. Samantha’s a single mom. She has a nine-year-old son and a seven-year-old daughter. The nine-year-old son got invited to vacation Bible school loves it, wants to go church every week and is begging mom to take the family to church. The nine year old son has ADHD and dyslexia. His seven-year-old sister has a separation anxiety disorder and the mom has social anxiety disorder and agoraphobia.

Think about all of the potential places where something could go wrong and where they might encounter a problem the first time that they would go to attend a church. And so one of the ways I talk about this with families in our practice on the church leaders is that as you know from a lot of the research has been done in terms of neuroimaging. To try and understand what’s different in the brain in folks who struggle with anxiety disorders is that we know that they’re basically hardwired to overestimate or distort the level of risk involved with entering into new or unfamiliar situations.

And so think about what that’s like if you’re visiting a church for the first time. For their family, one of the places that’s going to start is I would bet that mom is going to be looking on that church’s website before she even thinks about putting her kids in the car and going, because the kinds of things she might be worried about would be, “Am I going to stand out?

Will I be dressed differently than everyone else? Will my kids be dressed differently than anyone else?” But there are enough sort of strange stories floating around. It’s interesting, my son-in-law and my daughter in medical school, down in Alabama. And I heard stories from my son-in-law when he first moved down there, it was like looking for a church and, “oh, he was a newcomer.”

And so everybody stood up in the church and came around him to lay hands on him, to welcome him. Yes. So again, if you’re a mom with social anxiety, even the most remote prospect of something like that, or having somebody walking around during prayer time, handing you a microphone, and asking you to introduce yourself, it would be terribly overwhelming.

So you get over that. You figure out how you’re going to dress and you get to church. How many social interactions does mom have to navigate the first time she goes before, she herself, is able to go into the worship center and sit down. So you have the greeter in the parking lot. You probably have like the greeter or the person at the main entrance or the entrance for children. Now because of there for the first time, she has to register both of her kids.

So that there’s like the children’s ministry volunteers who are at like the check-in and the worship center. And of course, they’re going to want to introduce them to the volunteer people who are teaching their Sunday school class. And maybe if the church isn’t too large, probably the guy, the children’s pastor or the student pastors probably going to come over and want to introduce themselves.

So by the way, when the daughter finds out that the expectation is that she will be hanging out with like other girls in the first or second grade Sunday school class, and not with mom on the other end of the building in the worship service, the daughter starts to have a meltdown because of her anxiety at the prospect of being apart from mom.

So by this time, they’re already like five minutes into the worship service, Mom gets to the worship center. And mom with agoraphobia finds there are only middle seats open in the front five rows in the worships. 

And then is there some time during the service where people are expected, like pre-COVID to greet each other and people are shaking hands and hugging on your way out. You have people who are a lot of places have like a welcome center for like new visitors. If you fill out the card, somebody may go ahead and give you a phone call afterwards.

And what if you find out that like people who joined the church, one of the things that you’re expected to do is you’re expected to very shortly thereafter become part of a small group with a group of total strangers in which there’s an expectation for folks to disclose fairly personal things. That’s why you tend not to see so many anxious people oftentimes at church.

And so part of what we’re doing when we’re working with churches is that, in contrast, to something like special needs ministry or something that’s a standalone program. This is not a program. This is a mindset. And so that we’re trying to get pastors and folks on staff at churches to understand some of the things that are going to get in the way, because like the best inclusion strategies are going to be things that are going to help everybody.

And in particular, one of the reasons why the ways that we had traditionally done disability ministry didn’t work and don’t work for the folks that we’re talking about is it the last thing that my patients want to do is to be part of something that’s going to single them out as being different.

And in fact, my kids and teens, what they want more than anything else to be treated just like everybody else. So, you can’t put them in a special needs ministry or you can’t expect the folks who we’re working with kids with autism or developmental disabilities to have a good handle on what do you do with the kid with profound social anxiety or the kid on the autism spectrum with 147 IQ who has no social skills and is very awkward in terms of how they interact with other folks.

Carrie: Have you had churches that did certain things to help with kind of getting people through that front door. That’s probably the scariest part is kind of the whole process of entering the worship area for the first time, dropping off your kids, those types of things that you just mentioned. What does that look like in a more anxiety sensitive, I guess. 

Dr. Steve: Okay. So coming back to like what we were talking about before. The more people with anxiety can visualize an experience, especially if they’re going to an unfamiliar place, the easier it may be for them to be able to get over that hurdle. So one of the things that we talk about when we’re working with churches and one of the components of what we have them think about doing is a communication strategy.

One component of that is to take a look at your website. And you want as many pictures, video. You want folks who are exploring the website to be able to have a good picture in their mind of what it is that they’re going to be able to experience. And so this is where this would be especially true is that I have kids in my practice where for example, they’re okay at going to church. And by the way, one of the ways that you figure out who the anxious kids are at church is walking into the worship center of the sanctuary, like when it’s time for the sermon and see who’s still sitting next to their parents. That’s probably like a pretty good bet. I have kids where maybe they can get to church and, you know, they can sit with mom or dad, but the prospect of going to like Sunday school would be overwhelming.

One really memorable kids. So there was in like third grade. This ADHD separation anxiety, some dyslexia kid ended up doing well with some cognitive behavioral therapy ended up in a private school that specializes in working with kids with learning differences. Didn’t hear anything from the family for three years.

Kid is in sixth grade and at the church where the family’s going, he’s not part of Sunday school, but he is going every Sunday with mom and dad. And the biggest event of the year for middle-school ministry was this weekend retreat. And the mom and dad were friends with the middle school pastor who put a great deal of pressure on them to have their child go.

Well, the kid was still struggling with lots of separation anxiety. And when the kid came home one day and considerably larger at this point, when mom informed them that they needed to go to the retreat, the kid became extremely agitated and aggressive. And if mom’s brother had to have just happened to drop by the house, this boy was so upset that she might’ve gotten seriously hurt.

So, the kid has separation anxiety. If we added the details that the middle school retreat is for a full weekend on an island in the middle of Lake Erie that you can only reach by ferry that only runs during the daytime. Can you imagine?

Carrie:  There’s all these barriers.

Dr.Steve: Yeah. So for example when you’re asking people to do something, that’s like a little out of the ordinary.

So with a middle school retreat or a high school retreat, or like churches where people go on mission trips, the same thing applies that an anxious kid would want to know. What am I going to be doing? Where am I going to be eating? Where am I going to be sleeping? Or they’re going to, you know, are they cabins?

Are there going to be bugs around? What’s going to be happening all day long? So that, to the extent that you can go ahead and help folks to visualize that whether they’re serving in a soup kitchen or going on like a weekend or like a week-long retreat to like Appalachia, or whether it’s like two days with other kids from middle school and high school. The more you can envision of what you’re going to be experienced and the more you can prepare folks the better. So, the same thing when you think about this with, in terms of say kids who might be dealing with some degree of anxiety. Making sure that you have maybe other kids around who are greeters, who come from a number of different schools.

So the kids are likely to see familiar faces when they come in the same way. Like for example, I think about some of our kids with anxiety who have difficulty transitioning when they’re going to a new school. Giving them the ability to come and check the church out, maybe in the middle of the week, when there aren’t a lot of people around and either to like meet in person or maybe meet by video their Sunday school teacher so that, here’s where your room is at.

Here’s where you’re going to be going. Here’s what you’ll be doing. The more preparation you can do with someone, for example, who struggles with anxiety, the easier time they’re going to have with it. 

Carrie: These are really good ideas. I think in terms of being able to visualize things I used to have before COVID and I went fully online.

I used to have all kinds of pictures on my website of the office. And I actually paid a professional photographer to come in and take pictures so that people could kind of see the journey from literally like the parking lot to the waiting area, to the hallway where my office was in the suite.

And it was really neat because the photographer actually told me that whenever his wife goes to a new restaurant, she looks up the pictures online just to kind of familiarize herself with the area. And I thought that that was really interesting. So, I think it’s a great idea for churches to use things like pictures or videos, which is a pretty simple solution.

To snap some different pictures and put it on the website to help people feel more welcome or they know what to expect when they’re walking in the door. 

Dr Steve: Yeah, I would add, I mean, there’s some very simple things that churches can do in terms of implementing a communication strategy that are very helpful when you’re dealing with families that are impacted by anxiety, other mental health conditions. In an earlier Lifeway survey, when they asked family members of adults with serious mental illness what they most wanted from their churches was for their pastor to talk about mental health-related topics from the pulpit. It gives everybody else permission to talk about it.

There was a fairly large, interestingly enough, Southern Baptist church here in Northern Ohio that we worked with, who they ended up developing an inclusion plan, where they won the regional award for cultural competence from the National Alliance for Mental illness.

So like some of the things that they did speaking into this is that they did a five-week teaching series on what the Bible has to say about anxiety to address the issue of people feeling more comfortable about self-disclosing. I was there on a Sunday at their worship services because I was training about 75 of their children and student ministry volunteers about how, what they could be doing in terms of interacting, including kids in their ministry.

So I went to a worship service and they ended up renting a video about three minutes long that day with one of the guys who was in their worship band, who talked about his experience with panic attacks and how that impacted his faith for a period of time and how he worked through it. The guy who is a founding pastor of the church did this wonderful. It’s about five minutes long. It was a Facebook video that they produced specifically for folks in the congregation of the church to share with their friends and neighbors who might be struggling. And he started off, “Hi, I’m Rick Duncan. I’m the founding pastor of Kyla Belly Church. And I want you to know that those of you who are struggling with mental health concerns are welcome at our church.

My father was a pastor. He struggled with depression. We know what this is like.” So something as simple as that, that that’s. So de-stigmatizing put in the hands of the people of the church to share it with their friends and neighbors who they know are wrestling with this. I mean, they’ve done a fabulous job. So, in addition, they have, they actually have a licensed therapist

who’s on staff at the church to be able to see folks who have issues. They have a celebrate recovery group. They offered NAMI groups. We are seeing like churches in our area. There are a couple of wonderful ministries that we work with. One is called Fresh Hope and the other one’s called Mental Health Grace Alliance. Where there are now networks like hundreds of churches that are doing Christian-based mental health support groups for teens, college students, and adults with mental health issues and support for their families.

And so, I mean, it’s just wonderful to see the way that like the resources are exploding. And, and I think that it helps that there probably enough folks on staff at churches with personal experience of this firsthand. That they get how it can be an issue for other people.

Carrie: I love that. I love that because what you said about. Some things being said from the pulpit or from the stage, it gives permission for everyone else to talk about it. And if we don’t talk about these things in the church, it just makes us feel like, okay, well we just, we just don’t talk about that here. It’s kinda like parents when they don’t talk to their kids about sex.

It’s just kind of like, well, that’s a taboo subject, I guess that’s off the table. And we don’t realize a lot of times how impactful that is. And especially because too often, we put people in leadership on pedestal pedestals and think they don’t have any problems, but they have problems too just like everyone else.

They have struggle and sin and things that God’s working on in their life. It’s so powerful when we’re able to have authentic vulnerability in the church. And I hate that so many times there’s too many barriers to respite to be able to do that. But it’s life-changing when that happens in a positive and healthy way. Too many of these things that you listed and this, the seven things, really keep us from being able to connect in community with other believers, the way that God has designed us to be in community and to stay connected and to grow closer to God and grow closer to each other.

Tell us about a little bit about your book, the Mental Health and the Church. 

Dr. Steve: Okay. So mental health of the church is basically sort of the detailed version of our inclusion model that we share with churches. The first part of that, we talk about that there are seven specific barriers that oftentimes make it more difficult for families and individuals impacted by mental health illness. 

We also give them seven. We also give them seven specific strategies or ways that they can like, think about how they might think about like responding. And so that, so that some of the things that are like really essential would be like having the church commit.

That they’re going to do an inclusion plan and that there’d be some education of the leaders of the church. The second has to do with the little acronym is teacher. So the first is setting up an inclusion team. The second is looking at sort of the ministry environments or the nature of the physical spaces in which ministry takes place.

So are there ways of making them more sensory-friendly? Are there ways, for example, to design we’re involved with a church where we were like helping them redo their middle school and high school ministry area so that kids who have attention issues would take away more from the teaching and the experiences that they have?

A stands for focusing on activities that are most essential to spiritual growth. So that if you want folks to be in part in a small group, it’s very important to train the leaders of your small groups, in terms of like how you welcome someone who might have issues with anxiety or someone who might be withdrawn because they’re struggling a little at that point in time with the exacerbation of depression.

C has to do with the communication strategy we touched on. H has to do with offering practical helps that in the Lifeway study. 

One of the largest disconnects between what pastors believed about their churches and what family said about their churches was that most pastors believed that their church had a current list of mental health facilities and professionals that they could refer people to. But 70% of families said that that wasn’t the case. One of the things that like the church that I go to does is that before COVID we had large respite events where we would have like 85 kids at the church on a Friday night. And probably the majority of them had a primary mental health issue, where again, the parents were able to get an evening out and then.

Our most popular blog post a couple of years ago was entitled, We had no casseroles. And it was about 60 minutes segment that was done, where they were talking about the struggles that parents in Virginia were having like the teens and young adults getting mental health service. And so the whoever from 60 minutes was interviewing the one mom and she goes, “You know, when our 13-year-old daughter broke her leg in a skiing accident and was in the hospital for a week for surgery every single night, somebody from our church brought us food. Six months later, when she overdosed and was on a psychiatric ward of the local hospital, we had no casseroles.” And so like, why do we, as the church think about like treating those things so differently.

So what are some practical things that we can do to help them? There is education and support, offering like a fresh hope group, offering like a grace group through Mental Health Grace Alliance, having NAMI doing their education and family support groups, making sure that the folks who are in leadership positions in the church get the training they need to understand.

And then our has to do with releasing your people for ministry. For this to work, folks on staff at churches have so much on their plate that they’re overwhelmed that the people need to take ownership of this because God has positioned all of us in terms of where we work, where we go to school in our neighborhoods. We all know people who struggle with.

And I actually think the best inclusion plan is having a trusted friend coming alongside you the first few times that you go to a church. Who can help to navigate the overly exuberant door greeters and some of the other challenges and help their friends and help their loved ones to be able to navigate some of the things that might make them a little more uncomfortable.

Carrie: Yeah, that’s good. That’s really good. I think all of this information is really helpful and I’m glad that you started this ministry and God put it on your heart because I’m sure it’s grown and there continues to be a need for it as more churches are becoming open to how can we include all people.

As we’re winding down towards the end here, at the end of every podcast I like our guests to share a story of hope, which is a time in which you received hope from God or another person. 

Dr. Steve: Well, I think that the thing that brings me the most hope is seeing the way some of the churches that we serve and other like-minded ministry servers are embracing and understanding this cause. That when we started doing this, there, I mean, there’s literally nothing out there that we have a group that we moderate for mental health inclusion, ministry leaders that not as several hundred members. We’re seeing churches implement plans and we’re seeing them welcome more people.

We’re into the hundreds now in terms of churches that are hosting Grace groups and, and, and, and, and hosting fresh hope groups. And when we get invited to like different conferences and have the opportunity to train, there are more people signing up for this mental health stuff than for any of the other things on the program, but these conferences.

And so it’s really encouraging that after a very long time when we see churches get it. I was at a very large church, training over 200 volunteers, one weekend it’s a church people would be familiar with that was very interested in doing this. And so I stayed for worship on Sunday and it was interesting because the lead pastor wasn’t there, but he knew what was going on. At the beginning of the worship service, he starts it off by saying “I’d like to start by praying for anyone who’s with us today who might be struggling with depression.” He didn’t have to do a whole sermon on it, but simply by doing, just simply by saying something like that the folks who were there that day, who may have been wrestling with stuff knew that they would be welcome and knew that it was okay to talk about.

Carrie: That’s good. That is very hopeful. Thank you for coming on and sharing your wisdom. And I’ll put all the links in the show notes to Key Ministries and the book and how people can get in contact with you. 

Dr Steve: Well, yeah, that would be awesome. And you know, I’d like to get together and say, hello. My daughter goes to Belmont University in Nashville, and she’s hoping to become a psychologist.

We have issues with anxiety and depression and things like that. So, I do get a chance to be in your neck of the woods fairly often. Ms. Carrie. 

Carrie: You’re welcome to sit down with me for lunch anytime. We’ll get together. 

Dr Steve: I’ll look forward to it. Thank you. 

_______________________________

My hope really for this episode is for people to share this type of information with their pastor or ministry leaders, small group leaders, children’s ministry leaders.

Your church really may not know that this help and support is available. And so this episode may be an open door for you to start to talk with the people in your congregation about some of your own mental health struggles. So, if it helps to share the episode with them and say, Hey, sometimes this is my experience at church.

I hope that this episode helps you do that as well. So I promised for our 25th episode that I would be giving something away and I am, I am giving a $25 Amazon gift card away to one of our email subscribers. So if you’re saying, “Carrie, how do I get on the email list?” It’s super easy. You go to www.hopeforanxietyandocd.com.

There’ll be a box up at the top where you can put in your name, and your email address, and then you will automatically get a free relaxation download. It’s something that I use with clients that people have found particularly helpful. You have two weeks to become a subscriber to qualify for the Amazon gift card.

And I will be letting the winner know by email and also posting about it on Facebook and Instagram as always. 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 Benjamin Bynam. Until next time.  May be comforted by God’s geat love for you.

24. Reducing Anxiety with Secret Keeping Horses, Bailee Teter, LPC-MHSP (temp)

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Counseling, OCD, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 24. Reducing Anxiety with Secret Keeping Horses, Bailee Teter, LPC-MHSP (temp)

Bailee is a local therapist who talks with us about using Equine Assisted Therapy to help with anxiety. We joke about how horses are HIPAA compliant, and I share my story of overcoming my fear of horses.   

  • Bailee’s story about how she became an Equine Assisted Therapist without being a “horse person.” 
  • What is Equine Assisted Therapy?
  • Different models of Equine Assisted Therapy.
  • How does equine therapy help with anxiety and other mental issues?
  • Human-animal emotional connection. God says take care of the animals.
  • Horses read and respond to human emotions like anxiety.
  • Stories about how equine therapy helps people with anxiety

Resources and Links:

Unbridled Changes Website
Bailee Teter
Book: Hope Rising-Stories from the Ranch of Rescued Dreams

Support the show 

More Podcast Episodes

Transcript of Episode 24

Hope for Anxiety and OCD episode 24. Today on the show, Bailee Teter comes on to discuss Equine Assisted Therapy. You even get to hear a little story about how I overcame my own horse phobia that I had developed from a bad horseback riding experience as an adolescent. Without further ado, here is our interview.

Carrie: : Tell us a little bit about yourself. 

Bailee: I’m originally from Texas and moved to Nashville in 2014. I came here to go to Lipscomb to complete my master’s in clinical counseling and ended up meeting my husband here, and so I stayed. We really love where we are and our church community has been such a blessing to us. So we really love it. 

Carrie: That’s awesome. 

Bailee: Fun fact, aside from equine counseling or equine-assisted counseling, I also direct a Christian dance program. So when people ask me what my job is I’m like, “I work with horses and I teach dance classes.”

Carrie:  Those were two pretty unique interests. 

Bailee: Yeah. They’re not anything I would have ever planned for myself. If somebody would have told me like in 2016, in the future, you’ll be directing a dance program and doing equine-assisted counseling, I would have been really stressed out about how to make it happen and really confused because I’ve danced my whole life but I did not grow up with horses. And so before I started working as an equine assisted counselor, I didn’t really have much background with horses. So that’s been a really cool story in and of itself. 

Carrie: Tell us how you got on that track because when people go to graduate school for counseling. Obviously, there’s a lot of different places that they can take that. And so how did you get into the equine-assisted route?

Bailee: Well, I didn’t go to school for equine. I actually have a really big heart for using creativity to help people heal and help people grow. Someday, a long-term dream of mine is to have my own organization that helps people connect to God through creative outlets. And through that comes healing. And so in the counseling program, I did my specialization in play therapy.

We did toys and sand tray and creative arts and music and all of these things were my electives in the counseling program. After school, I worked for a community mental health organization for a year and a half. I was really burned out. It was hard for me to be in an office. It was hard for me to be sitting still.

I felt really isolated. I didn’t feel like I had a lot of support just where I was. I was contracted into a school. And so I was at the school, but not part of the school. I learned a lot. I worked with a lot of different ages of kids and teens, and a lot of different things about case management too, but it was not the place for me.

I am not an office person, which you can see that now by the jobs that I have. So I had contact with a professor from Lipscomb and he knew for probably about six months that I was just really unhappy and I was searching and I was praying a lot like, “Lord, what are my options? Where do I go from here?”

I don’t even know if I like counseling. I just did this degree and now I’m confused and really burned out. And after about six months, one day, he was just like, “You know what? You need to go meet my friend. She’s interested in art and she does something with horses.” I was like, “okay.” So I went out to Unbridle Changes is where we are in Goodlettsville.

And I observed two sessions, two days of sessions. And she, at the end, Don, who’s the other therapist out there was like, “well, if your professor trusts you. I’m really good friends with him. I trust you. You want to join us?” That was that.

Carrie: That’s amazing networking right there. I love it when that works out.

Bailee: Yeah. And I feel like I’m not a good networker. So that was all God. 

Carrie: Yeah. I know for me, like when I’ve been in certain environments, whether it’s counseling or other things. Maybe you’re not this intuitive, but was there a feeling or a sense like when you went to Unbridled Changes, you’re like “Oh almost like I can breathe. This is where my soul is meant to be.”

Bailee: Yeah. Definitely. Every time I drive over the hill, when you get there, we’re at the end of a hill, we’re not long off of long hollow pike, but every time I drive over that hill and you just see, we think there’s about 50 acres of fields and horses. it’s just like I’m here. It’s a peaceful place. All of the staff members are believers. And so there’s just this connection. We all have that fundamental similarity. Even though we’ll see clients that are not necessarily Christian and we respect where they’re coming from and their stories, but just having that as the core. There’s peace for sure on the property and the horses add a big part to that for sure.

Carrie: That’s awesome. So tell us for, those who don’t know, which is probably a lot of our listeners haven’t had interactions with equine-assisted therapy. What does that look like? 

Bailee: Part of the story where I got involved too. I did not have to be a horse person to do this type of therapy. There’s different models. I am trained in EAGALA, which is Equine Assisted Growth and Learning Association. There are a few different models. I think one is called Path where they do therapeutic riding or the people ride the horses. And there’s some just different versions out there, but through EAGALA you have an equine specialist and you have a mental health person. And I am the mental health certified person. I did my training with another girl who is an equine specialist.  And to do that she had to have over 6,000 hours of working with horses and the horse background and all. Knowing their personalities and their behavior. We worked together and all of our sessions and clients keep their feet on the ground.

And very rarely do we teach them any kind of horsemanship. Sometimes in our program or for me, we’ll step outside of the EAGALA model and teach us a little bit of horsemanship so the kids or the adults will feel a bit more comfortable. But usually, we keep our feet on the ground and let the horses have free rein to interact with the clients, whoever they want to.

There’s actually some research that has come out, I think probably in the last 10 years. The most recent article I saw was 2017. There’s some preliminary research about something called coupling where horse heart rates and human heart rates will start to mirror each other when they’re in close proximity.

And so there was one research that had three different scenarios in this situation where the horse’s heart rate was closest to the human was when the horse had free reign in this situation. They weren’t being restrained. They weren’t behind the bar. They had free rein and they could choose to come and interact with the person.

So that’s kind of how a lot of our situations go. We’ll bring a horse into the arena. We’ll have a client create something out of props or toys. Kind of a very common one early on, it shows me what it feels like to be you. So they’ll build something out of toys or props or different things. And then we’ll kind of watch the horse.

And a lot of times that horse will approach like as they’re building and show curiosity and show like their sensitivity to what’s going on with the person. The reason horses are so effective is because they’re naturally prey animals in the wild. So like a dog, if it gets scared or if it gets hurt, it’ll fight back.

A horse usually won’t. It’ll run. They are so sensitive to their environment. They’re so sensitive to whatever is going on that when they look at a human they expect the human to kind of be quote unquote, “the predator.” And so they’re sensitive to what’s going on with people. And so if you come in showing a lot of anxiety, you’re carrying a lot of anxiety.

Even if another person could look at you and not tell, the horse can tell, and the horse will respond to you differently whether you’ve got anxiety, depression, trauma, they can pick up on some of those things. 

Carrie: That creeps me out a little bit. So if you go in there and you’re anxious, the horse runs from you, or is the horse kind of like a little more empathetic than that?

Bailee: I would say it depends on the horse. It wouldn’t necessarily run. Usually what we’ve noticed is it will kind of put its head up or it’ll be on alert a little bit. But in coordination with the counseling, we’ll say, “can you go help that horse be calm?” And so as the person is trying to help the horse calm down, they essentially calm themselves down as well.

And just that connection with the horse to the human. It’s like an externalization of whatever’s going on inside your heart. The horse will kind of act on it. Some of them are just really empathetic and can tell, especially the ones we’ve used a long time for therapy though, they’ll be gentle. 

Carrie: I’m sure there’s a selection process that goes into which horses would be good therapeutic leave versus not that’s already been done by the organization.

Bailee: Yes. EAGALA’s model is that any kind of horse could be used for therapy. The horses that we use most of them are all-natural Tennessee walking horses because the farm is also like a breeding farm. We have 25 to 30 horses, but also the equine specialist, that’s kind of their job to be able to know horse personality. Which ones are sensitive to the weather. Which ones are sensitive to kids versus adults. We choose which one we think would work best. 

Carrie: Do people usually work with the same horse over time, or do they work with different horses? Kind of, depending on what their needs are?

Bailee: That depends on the person too, and the situation. I have one client, she is really, really connected with a specific horse. Every time she comes, she at least has a little bit of time to spend with that horse. She just feels really comforted by this horse, really safe with this horse. So even if we have her doing something, and it didn’t feel do we have her doing something in the arena, she’ll always at least get a few minutes with this one particular horse.

And a few weeks ago she came and that horse, I actually got a little nervous cause the horse was just like laying on the ground. And I was like, “oh no, was the horse okay?” But it was just kind of a calm day. And usually if you approach a horse that’s laying down, it’ll get up.  Kind of that prey instinct as well.

But this woman was having kind of a rough week. She was feeling overwhelmed. She was feeling like there was a lot going on, but she’s so connected to this horse. She walked over there. The horse looked at her and then laid its head back down. And so she crouched down next to the horse and it was heading it and stroking it. And when she came back she was like, “oh, I feel so much better. I feel so much calmer here.”

Carrie: Wow. That’s awesome. I think what’s interesting too because I’ve looked into other kinds of therapy that use animals like animal-assisted therapy with dogs or things of that nature. And sometimes people talk to their animals and I have cats and I talk to my cat.

Sometimes I like to think we have little conversations. But there’s something about this sense of being in the presence of an animal. And now that I’m doing more telehealth therapy, there’s something about people having their animals in session too. [00:13:08] That’s really powerful. That certain level of comfort or draw that they can get from that. And I wonder if that’s a part of this equation too. A lot of times people who have challenges in their relationships, they feel like they can connect to animals more easily than the other people around them.

Bailee: Yeah. I can definitely see that. Because animals don’t judge us and they hold secrets very well. We’ve told clients multiple times if you feel like you can’t tell us something, you can go tell the horse cause they keep secrets really well. I definitely think there’s something to that relationship between human and animals. I mean, God created it that way. Even in the beginning, he said, take care of the animals. There’s a special connection there. 

Carrie: Your horses are fully HIPAA compliant. 

Baillee: Yes, definitely. They don’t tell the secrets. They keep them. 

Carrie: What are some of the issues that you see people coming in with? Obviously this is a show focused on anxiety and OCD, so feel free to speak to that, but I’m sure there are a variety of issues that people seek equine-assisted therapy for.

Bailee: Anxiety is a big one for sure. Just the nature of being outside in creation without the constant barrage of information and technology and in a new environment. I think the environment in itself helps reduce anxiety and then along with the horses. So we do get quite a bit of anxiety, trauma, depression.

I’ve been there for about two years. In the past two years, we’ve had kids that come with sensory issues that are also just looking for ways to cope with a lot of that and getting to touch the horses and feel the ground and smell the smells. That is just really beneficial for them.

Relationship things, family conflict, adjustment, a big variety, anything you would see a regular therapist for equine would work for as well. 

Carrie: I’ve always thought for myself that I should, at some point or another, pursue equine therapy because I don’t have a positive relationship with horses.

And I thought maybe I should try to improve my horse relationships at some level. I was scared. Absolutely somewhat terrified of horses for many years. Not that I had to be around them. It didn’t cause problems in my life enough to go to therapy over it, but I had a traumatic horseback riding experience when I was 16 years old and basically was just kind of thrown on a horse.

And it was like, “Hey, pull the reins this way to go right, pull this way to go left, pull back and say whoa if you need to stop.” And that was pretty much my horse instruction. There was no, let’s walk around the corral a little bit or anything of that nature. And the horse took off just running because there was a break in between us and the next trail horse.

And they were kind of trained to fill in the gaps. So that’s what the horse was doing. Just filling in the gap. And I was so nervous. I was of course very anxious and screaming because that was the only thing I was taught. And I’m bouncing on the horse and I get off of there and I was like, “I don’t like this. I’m never riding a horse again. This was an awful experience, blah, blah, blah.” And so I wish tried to push myself a little bit to do things because I feel like I’m always asking my clients to be brave and to try new things and to step outside of their comfort zone.  

About a couple of years ago, I was taking a day off and I decided to go to Land Between the Lakes. Have you ever been to Land Between the Lakes? It is a big area to fall. So for those who don’t know is this just this big like park area on the border of Kentucky and Tennessee. And they have all kinds of things. They have a place where you can drive through and see buffalo. And that was super cool. And they have a planetarium and tons of hiking trails.

I saw that they had this little sign that said horseback riding, and I had absolutely no plans to go horseback riding, but I thought, here’s your opportunity to get over your fear horses. And you should just go in here. Don’t give yourself time to talk out of it. Just get over there and, and talk to the people.

So I explained to them, I said, “Look, this was my experience. I had a very traumatic horse experience but I’d like to go horseback riding.” And they said, “This horse is so old. It will not run. It’s not even going to down upon you.” It just walks through the woods. It’s very relaxing. And I was the only person, I guess because it was a weekday and I was the only person on the trail ride with the trail guide. And so I worked through. I made friends with the horse before I got on and I worked through my fear of horses. So now I guess I don’t need to go.

I’ve always had a curiosity or an interest in it. And I think a lot of people don’t really realize that this is an opportunity for them. I would say, especially if someone has been through a lot of talk therapy where they have a hard time maybe articulating or opening up about things. Do you feel like pursuing these more creative approaches to therapy like a good avenue or a good route to try?

Bailee: Yeah, absolutely. I remember in grad school, I don’t even remember exactly which project it was. It was in research class and as a dancer, I’ve always been interested in the way that creativity impacts our brains and our emotional wellbeing. And I feel like we are more like God when we are creating than any other time. And so I did some research on just research articles and looking up things. And there were some studies, I think they came out of somewhere in Europe that said our brains connection when we are doing experiential therapy is so different than when we do talk therapy. Especially because we have learned how to build up barriers and convince ourselves how to answer and respond to things in very structured and safe ways when we use our words. But when we use art, when we use toys, when you do sand tray, when we’re moving, even being active, like with the horses, experientially, our bodies are processing things. Our minds are processing things that bypass the language part of our brain.

And so I definitely think that any kind of experiential therapy is helpful when people kind of get to a stuck place in therapy, or if they just want to try something different. I think that equine therapy is really helpful in combination with talk therapy. I kind of do a mix of both in my sessions, and I know that we’ve had therapists bring their clients out to the farm to do one or two off sessions with us just to gather more information or to gain more awareness for the client.

Carrie: That’s an interesting route too. I hadn’t really thought of that. So, if someone is looking for equine-assisted therapy, what do they need to look for? What kind of training would you recommend that they searched for?

Bailee: I think I mentioned earlier, I know of at least two different types of equine-assisted therapy. One is EAGALA, which is what I’m trained in. The other one is Path. They’re both therapeutic. Path is therapeutic riding, so you get on the horse. You’re engaging the horse a little bit, probably what you did when you went to land between the lakes, building that bond, that relationship with the horse.

There’s a really cool book that I read a couple of years ago. I think it’s called Hope Rising. And it’s just stories about kids somewhere in the Northwest who came out of a traumatic situation and they were paired with a horse who came out of a traumatic situation. And they learned and they became friends with each other and they grew and it was horsemanship.

So that was a very unique thing in that situation. There’s a lot of benefit to therapeutic horsemanship I think, like learning how to walk a horse, how to ride a horse, how to train a horse. But what I do is not horsemanship. Like I said earlier, we let the horses just be free and interact on their own accord.

So I think you would want to determine what you’re looking for in equine-assisted therapy. Primarily, if you’re looking for counseling, you want to make sure that you have a credentialed counselor. Somebody that knows what they’re doing and what they’re talking about. I would say somebody that aligns with your beliefs.

If you want a Christian therapist, you can find Christian equine therapists. You can find people that are marriage specific. There’s a variety around Nashville. There’s really quite a few. But then make sure that the people that you’re working with are also credentialed or trained with a specific program because you wouldn’t want to just show up to somebody’s house and they brush their horse and they call it therapy.

And it’s not really therapy. So you want to just check their background, their resources. And I would say too, making sure that the horses are treated ethically. Because if you’ve got a location, that’s got one or two horses and they’re seeing 20 clients a week, that’s not going to be good for the horse’s wellbeing.

They get burned out too. They give a lot in a session. We have quite a few that they have been so involved deeply in sessions that when we are finished with them, we have to tell the other therapists. “This horse needs a break. They’re done for the day.” So having like a variety of horses or just a plan in place for the horses get burned out. That’s part of the equine specialist job is to look out for the wellbeing of the horses. 

Carrie: That’s awesome. That’s really neat. It’s cool that they have that emotional connection and they get worn out as well. And then they need a rest. 

Bailee: They sure do. We’ve had some really, really cool sessions of just the horses feeling so much of what’s going on inside these people. I’m thinking of one specific incident.

We had a kid whose family was going through a lot of changes, a lot of chaos. There was some addiction involved and the kid kept telling me, “I’m fine. I’m fine.” And we were just like, “There’s no way you’re fine” like to that language, setting up that barrier. And we brought in the specific course, and typically we don’t tell clients the horse’s names because we don’t want them to have preconceived notions, we let them pick names themselves.

But I’ll tell you the horse’s name to make this story easier to understand. We brought in John Henry. It’s because if you have a best friend it’s named something and then we tell you that that horse has your best friend’s name it might change the way you view the horse.

And we want them to be as blank of a canvas as they can be, at least in the beginning, so that we can put our own expectations and our own projections onto the horse and deal with it that way. We’ve had people call a horse, that horse has called math. That one is English. That one is social studies. It worked out that way because they’re struggling in one of those subjects.

So there’s so many different ways that you can do it. This specific incident, this kid kept telling us he was fine and his mom was like, “I’m just not sure he’s fine like there’s so much going on.” And we brought John Henry into the arena and something happened, but John Henry started running circles. Running in circles, he started bucking, throwing his head around, just huffing and puffing and snorting. And this is a big horse, when he stands up on his hind legs he is tall. After he kind of calmed down and we looked at that kid and then we said, “well, what do you think about that?”And he was like, he had his arms crossed and he kind of had his brow frown and he was like, “Nothing. I don’t feel anything.”

And we’re like, but you reacted like your body reacted. We can see that you reacted and so that was a place where we were able to start getting some of those. We specifically noticed this happened, or he reacted this way even though his words didn’t want to tell us something was going on in his heart. And eventually it came to that. The way that horse was acting, represented how he felt inside.

Carrie:  Wow. That’s so neat. That’s really cool. Yeah. It’s almost like the horse gave him a language that he didn’t have, 

Bailee: Yeah. That’s definitely a big part of it, for sure. 

Carrie: Are there any other stories or things that you wanted to share about how you’ve seen equine-assisted therapy be helpful for people with anxiety?

Bailee: I had a couple that kind of came to mind when I thought of this question. Another John Henry story is he’s a really good therapy horse. He’s actually had some traumatic experiences, so he is very in tune with people. I think they say that horses will either go to the extreme where they’re really not interested in people, not interested in anything, or they will become really gentle and really sensitive. He’s a really sensitive horse.

So one of my very first sessions was actually with the kid who was experiencing a lot of anxiety and irritability, but he was non-verbal. And so his parents brought him. They were just hoping that something more hands-on and something more natural would be helpful for him. And so my equine specialist at the time, she gets John Henry because we know he’s a pretty good horse, like with kids. And she had him on a rope because she was a little nervous about how the kid would respond. So usually we let them go free, but she kind of had him. She was sort of controlling the situation and we were trying to get the kid, “Hey, come pet the horse.”

The horse can see that like no response from him at all. He completely ignored us, sat down on the ground, and started building piles of dirt. And we were like, “okay, this is not going how we expected it to go.” And John Henry is pulling at the rope and acting kind of irritable, kind of crazy.

There was like a few cats around and they were just like meowing like there was just a lot of chaos in the situation. And I told my equine specialist, I said, how about just let him off the rope and see what happens. She was like, well, are you sure? I’m like, yeah, let’s just let them off. And so she let him off and he made a beeline for the kid kind of quick.

And then he slowed down until he got to a really gentle last step right up behind the kid and put his mouth down to the kid’s head. And when he touched a kid on the head the little kid turned around and looked right at John Henry. And that was the first interaction of anything in his environment

we had seen him do besides the dirt. So for the rest of the session, that kid would play in the dirt a little bit and then turn around and look at the horse. And if he moved, John Henry would move and he would stay right there with him. And at one point the kid became really fascinated with this horse, his feet, which most horse professionals be like, “Don’t get near the feet. Don’t get near the feet.”

So my equine specialist got a little nervous, but then she noticed that horse wasn’t moving a single muscle. He was so aware that this kid was by his feet. He was so aware of what was going on with the kid that he was totally still. Just after that, the kids started opening up more, started interacting with us more. We got more eye contact. His parents said he realized he was less anxious at home. So that was a really sweet one just because it’s kind of unique in that he wasn’t verbal. He couldn’t do talk therapy.

And so using the horses and using the environment was really cool. And then I had another.. These are a little shorter. That first one was a little long. So I know, remember one, this client, she was in her mid twenties. She came from a really chaotic home environment, had a lot of trauma, anxiety, and depression including some suicidal ideation and she had tried talk therapy. She really didn’t connect with her therapist. It was not a good situation. So she came out to see us. And so we invited her to spend a few minutes outside with the horses.

Just a lot of times we’ll say, go make friends with the horses or go, just figure out what it means to be still with horses. Depending on what the people bring we’ll give them a prompt and send them out into the field with horses. And this time we just said, “What does it mean for you for your heart to be at rest? “What does it mean for that anxiety to come down and that depression to release?” And she stayed out there for, I don’t know, 10 to 15 minutes. She came back and her face looked completely different. And she had spent a lot of time with a specific horse. And I was like, “so what did you learn?” She was like, “Well, you know, I realized I don’t have to work so hard. I don’t have to fight all the time. These horses, I enjoy their company just because they’re here and they enjoy mine just because I’m here. I have value because I exist.” And that was just like such a light bulb moment for her and just totally shifted her perspective of herself and of her value in the world.

And then another one was a woman who is about 40 and she had walked through a season with miscarriage and just had a lot going on grief, anxiety in relation to like what would happen in the future. Just a lot of baggage that comes with that as well. And so we gave her the prompt to just go see where she feels like she can actually connect, which horse she feels connected to. And she ended up really spending a lot of time with one of my favorites and her name is Gypsy. The woman came back and she was telling us about why she felt like she connected with Gypsy. And she just felt so much calmer when she was with her like the horse could really understand her. And she spent some time talking to the horse. We don’t know what she said but you know, Gypsy HIPAA compliant, she keeps her secrets that she was just out there for a while. And she was telling us all these things and telling us about her season of the miscarriage.

And I was actually able to share in that moment that Gypsy had also had a miscarriage. And it’s that, like the client, she just started crying and she was like, “I just knew. I knew there was something she understands me.” So after that, each time she came back, she would just feel really connected to Gypsy and did a lot of work with that horse.

Carrie:  That’s so cool. Towards the end of every podcast, I like to ask the guests to share a story of hope, which is a time that you received hope from God or another person. 

Bailee: We could talk about this all day. 

Carrie: It’s a good topic. 

Bailee: It really is. And especially for the time that we’re in right now, we feel like hope is elusive to some people.

For me, I feel like it has been such an anchor. And I hope it’s definitely in the Lord, but in the dance program, I teach, I get to write a spiritual curriculum each year. And I felt like this year, the Lord put on my heart the theme to be the promises of God and just took that scripture from Hebrews 6 where God makes a promise to Abraham and he’s like, “I will bless you and I’ll give you many descendants.”

And it says that God had nothing bigger to swear by. So he made an oath on his own name and it says, when God makes a promise, he cannot break it. He cannot lie. And because of that, it gives us strength because we can trust that he is who he says he is. That hope is an anchor for our soul. I picture that as like putting my heart on something that’s stable rather than on like the world around me. I felt like that was so important for me in this past year because it’s the story of everything in 2020. Everything has shown to be shakable. The world has been completely shaken. Everything has been ripped out from underneath us.

Things have changed. People have died. There’s so much I want my students to know. I want my students to know that God is so firm. And that’s where I’ve really found my hope. When he says he will bring all things under his rule and he will renew heaven and earth.

He’s not joking. He’s not playing games. His word is secured. I’ve seen God do many things, transform lives, speak identity, serve on a prayer team at my church too, and just seeing him work in that. As I was thinking about this, I thought of just this cool concept. I had my first garden this past year.

And it was a total experiment. I was like, I don’t know if this is going to work. I don’t think I have enough sunshine, but here we go. And it was abundant. I had so many cucumbers that I didn’t even eat them. It was amazing. And so I’m planning for my next year. And last week I was doing some garden prep. So, do you know what one of the best fertilizers for a garden is? 

Carrie: Is it horse manure?

Bailee: It is. It is because they eat so well. All the grass. So last a couple of weekends ago, I got it from a place in town in Nashville, and I went over and got buckets full of manure. Buckets full of manure to transport in my car.

I don’t have a truck. And I came and I was like spreading it out all over my garden and just in preparation for this next season. And then it was just, God was just teaching me more through this. I work with horses all the time and we get the good parts of them. We see the way that they interact, we see their hearts, we see their compassion, but the manure is kind of gross. The poop is gross. The clients don’t like to walk around like, “Oh, it’s horse poop.” And I’m like, “well, it’s part of having a horse.” There’s some gross parts. And then planting my garden, what I wanted was those gross parts because that’s what eventually will break down and out of that becomes beautiful things.

And so just like the Lord takes our broken stuff and he brings redemption and beauty out of broken things is just the way the garden works. Come this fall or come this spring and summer out of that horsemen, there will be grown seeds of nourishment and beauty and that’s just been really hopeful for me.

If nothing, I feel like God is a God of redemption. He brings beauty out of brokenness. So just thinking like using horseman manure to bring beauty and a garden, that’s just given me some hope recently. 

Carrie: I love that. That’s really what the show’s all about is giving people hope and seeing that God can take the hard parts of our story and the painful things and make something beautiful out of it. Thank you for coming on and sharing all that. This has been Inspirational but also so informative. There were so many just different little nuggets that you got to share with us. 

Bailee: Thank you for having me. It’s so fun to get to talk about it. I love what I do, and I know a lot of people don’t really understand it. So it’s fun to get to explain a little bit more in detail. 

Carrie: Awesome. 

____________________

I love having these types of interviews on the show because we’re all about increasing hope here. And if you’ve found that one particular type of counseling didn’t work for you, or you feel like I don’t know that I could do the whole talking thing, or that’s not a good fit for my child, this might be something to look into as an option. 

We have some exciting interviews coming up on the podcast, as well as a very special mother’s day edition. Next week, I will be discussing a giveaway in honor of our 25th episode. So make sure that you stay tuned for that as well. I’m also asking you to save the date of May 15th. We are going to have our very first webinar on reducing shame. So what I’m hoping to do through these webinars is have a little bit more of a time for me to present some information, as well as have follow-up questions and answers. Or if you have questions about shame that you would like me to address during the webinar, I certainly can do that.

Please feel free to send those questions through our website contact form wwwdothopeforanxietyandocd.com. And we will see you on the webinar at 10:00 AM central time on May 15th. As always, 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 completed by Benjamin Bynam. Until next time it may be comforted by God’s great love for you.

23. Acupuncture and Anxiety With Encircle Acupuncture

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, OCD, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 23. Acupuncture and Anxiety With Encircle Acupuncture

Today, I had the privilege of having not one, but two guests on the show! Alexa Hulsey and Trey Brackman, both licensed acupuncturists came on to talk to us all about acupuncture and how it can be helpful for anxiety among other things.  

  • What is acupuncture and how does it work?
  • What happens during an acupuncture session?
  • Modalities acupuncturist use for patients who feel anxious about acupuncture needles.
  • Some theories about how acupuncture helps with anxiety 
  • Acupuncture and spiritual connection

Links and Resources:

Alexa Hulsey, L.Ac, Founder of Encircle Acupuncture
Trey Brackman, L.Ac

Encircle acupuncture
Community Acupuncture 

Support the show 

More Podcast Episodes

Transcript of Episode 23

Hope For Anxiety and OCD, episode 23. Today on the show we are talking all about acupuncture. I was able to interview Alexa Hulsey and Trey Brackman from in circle acupuncture. They are both a licensed acupuncturist and they talk to us about what an acupuncture session looks like and how acupuncture can benefit anxiety.

So let’s dive right in.

Alexa: My name is Alexa Hulsey. I’m a licensed acupuncturist. I have been practicing since 2005. And I am the owner of Encircle Acupuncture here in Nashville. We have two locations in Nashville. I like to say that I became an acupuncturist because I wanted to help people. And then I became a community acupuncturist because I wanted to help a lot of people. Community acupuncture is set up in a way to make acupuncture affordable and accessible to really anyone who needs it because we offer our services in an affordable way. 

Carrie: Awesome and Trey?

Trey:  How did I get into acupuncture. That’s almost 30 years ago. I got my first acupuncture treatment right out of high school and decided that that’s what I wanted to do after my own experience. I’ve been practicing now for 18 years in a community-based setting. And I did private room acupuncture for a long time and was really hard for me because I couldn’t do it with enough people and it wasn’t affordable enough for them to get it enough to be beneficial to them. And when I found Alexa, nine years ago, I actually went into one of her clinics to get acupuncture and I was like, this is what I want to do and how I want to do it. I’ve been with Alexa full-time for nine years this year. 

Carrie: So tell us a little bit about the difference between what you just said there about maybe a private acupuncture versus a community acupuncture clinic.

Trey: So private room acupuncture is one person in one room, typically on a massage table and community acupuncture, we have a big room and pre-COVID, 21 or two chairs in east Nashville. And in Bellevue, 13, 14 chairs recliners, and you’ll have a patient every 10 minutes and in a community acupuncture setting. Typically in private room, you’ll have a patient every 30 or 45 minutes. So you can treat a lot more people in a day than you can do in community acupuncture than you can in private room. 

Carie: Awesome. 

Alexa: Community acupuncture really gets back to the root of how acupuncture has been traditionally practiced for thousands of years in China and in other Asian countries. Acupuncture was typically done in groups. In some areas, an acupuncturist would travel to a village and just treat people in somebody’s house. And so our set-up, it kind of feels like a living room. Everybody’s in a comfortable chair and it makes it so that we can see more people and that way we can charge less.

Carrie: Awesome. I really liked that concept in terms of receiving care and receiving health in a community setting. Whereas a lot of times in America, our healthcare is so individualized and isolated at times too, because of that. That’s really neat. A lot of the listeners probably have never had an acupuncture session so we just want to talk with them a little bit about what does that even look like? 

Alexa: Sure. I’ll walk you through what a typical acupuncture session is like. We start like pretty much any medical appointment with you, filling out some paperwork, we’ll ask about your medical history and then we’ll do a brief intake with a new patient.

The goal of our intake is really to just figure out why are you here? What can we help you with? What’s really bothering you. And we try to really focus in on a patient’s chief complaint and what is going to be the thing that we really want to focus on. What patients will find often is that if we focus on one or two things for their first few treatments, then all of these other things that they might not have even mentioned to us also start to feel better because everything is connected. So it’s kind of fun when that happens. We really focus on a patient’s chief complaint.

We will recommend a treatment plan based on what they’re seeking help for and what our experience is in treating that condition. A treatment plan varies, but generally people need a course of treatment and not just one acupuncture treatment. So it’s like taking vitamins. You can’t just take one vitamin, you got to take a lot. So you’ll need a course of treatment. Usually, sometimes we have people come in once a week. Sometimes we want them to come in every day if their pain is so severe that they can barely walk. So we talk about a treatment plan.

And then we’ll have a patient, they’ll be in a recliner in our clinic we use points on the extremities. Patients will just roll up their sleeves and pant legs. They don’t have to change clothes or anything like that. And we will needle a few points on the head, arms, and legs. Usually, we’ll use somewhere between 10 and 20 needles during a treatment. Once the needles are in, we cover up the patient with a blanket and walk away. And then that’s when the real magic happens is when a patient is resting with the needles in. We typically let them rest for about an hour and then we’ll take the needles out and, and the treatment is done. So really most of the acupuncture treatment is the patient lying there, relaxing, doing nothing.

Carrie: That sounds like a good time to me, just relaxing and doing nothing. I have had acupuncture and I did find it to be super relaxing. And that’s one of the reasons that I wanted to have you both on the show because we’re talking a lot about anxiety. 

It’s interesting. The point that you brought up there, Alexa, about how when you work on one issue, you don’t always realize the domino effect that’s going to happen If you’re working with someone in terms of pain and then all of a sudden their pain is relieved. They notice they start sleeping better and then they notice it’s like a ripple that happens and that’s really neat. Or then maybe they come up with some other things like therapy, they come up with some other things that they want to work on once one thing is relieved. It’s like, “well, maybe can you help me with this too?”

Alexa:  Yeah, that definitely has, 

Trey: I would say 90% of the time. Yeah.

Carrie:  Yeah. In terms of anxiety and pain and other physical issues, sometimes when you have physical issues the anxiety surrounding dealing with those issues can be so great and almost worse than the actual medical problem that you’re having right now.

I know that happened to me a couple of years ago, I was dealing with some digestive issues and someone said, “Well, maybe you’re just stressed about it.” And I said, or “maybe you’re just stressed in general and that’s causing these digestive issues. And I said, “I don’t think you understand my stress is from the digestive issues” because I can’t figure out what’s going on and how to fix it. This is not a psychosomatic complaint. 

Alexa: Anxiety and depression are huge components especially of pain conditions. Dealing with pain for a long time that does become depressing. You start to think my life is never going to be the same again.

You become anxious about what the future holds.  And then those anxiety and depressive feelings can compound the pain that you’re feeling and taking a pain medication can help the pain, but it’s not going to do anything for your depression and anxiety. Whereas what we do with acupuncture is a much more holistic approach.

Carrie: Can you explain a little bit of from maybe what’s been studied about how does this actually work? 

Trey: Well, there have been a lot of modern-day studies that through MRIs and thermal imaging, that show that it reduces inflammation, improves blood flow, can stimulate hormone releases, balance your hormones, but how the body actually knows to do that when we take the needles and put them in these specific points, there is no definitive answer as to how the body knows to do that when we’re doing acupuncture, but it works. It’s been working for thousands of years and just in the 18 years I’ve practiced, just observing people come in and get better and reduce their pain or help their anxiety or their OCD or their arthritis in their knees, whatever it is, how it’s doing that, I’m not sure anyone has really discovered the real true one answer to that. 

Carrie: I’d love a good mystery and intrigue, but I’m also very intuitive. So I’m kind of in that camp of like, well, if it works let’s use it. You know, I don’t need you to always explain everything to me on a scientific study level.

Testimonials are very valuable. Do you think that this is a little bit of an offshoot of a question, but things like acupuncture and chiropractic and holistic wellness, a lot of times aren’t valued or paid for by insurance companies. Do you think that we’ll get to a point where we shift from a disease model to a health model at all? Do you think that we’re making any strides towards that?

Alexa:  I do think that we’re making some strides. Acupuncture is being used by the military and is being paid for by the military. There is talk of acupuncture being used by medicare to treat acupuncture specifically for treating lower back pain is going to be covered by medicare one of these days. Trey probably has been hearing the same line too, since he went to acupuncture school. I’ve since I enrolled in acupuncture school, I’ve heard insurance reimbursement for acupuncture universally is just around the corner. It still hasn’t happened. 

So our work around has been just, well, let’s not even worry about insurance. Just charge a price that everyone can afford. Our prices are less than a copay and now we don’t even have to worry about insurance. We don’t have to fill out insurance forms and that gives people a lot more flexibility because insurance will usually limit, some insurance does pay for acupuncture.

We will usually limit the number of treatments a person can get or what it can be used for. The way that we approach it is, let’s just let the patient decide what they need and just make it available to them. 

Carrie: And the community based acupuncture model, I just wanted to point that out that that’s not just in the Nashville area that people can actually go online and find community-based acupuncture in their area.

Trey: Yeah, worldwide. 

Carrie: Oh, worldwide. That’s awesome. 

Alexa: Worldwide, absolutely. There are clinics everywhere. If you do an internet search for community acupuncture, type in the name of your city. Not every town has a community acupuncture clinic, unfortunately, but it becomes more and more prevalent. 

Carrie: Whenever you guys want to come to Rutherford county, you’re welcome. It’s open invitation. 

What about if people are anxious surrounding needles, if people say, “I don’t really know if I can do that acupuncture thing, because she just said she was going to stick a lot of needles in me.”

Trey: We actually see that quite a bit and my personal approach to that is I’ll use four needles on somebody who’s typically a little bit anxious.

You can do a really good treatment with just four needles, especially for someone who has anxiety surrounding needles. And that first one or two treatments for them is about them getting used to the idea and feeling acupuncture needles go in and realizing that it doesn’t hurt. I have several patients that are still needle-phobic, but they come anyway because it really helps them, but they just put in their earbuds, turn on their meditation or whatever, their music, and they close their eyes and they just don’t watch and then they’re fine. Usually, I start very slow with them and just do four, maybe four, sometimes six needles, and go from there. 

Carrie: It could be a really good exposure for some people that have that specific phobia, it might help them have a more positive experience. But also the needle size that you’re talking about is a lot smaller than a typical needle.

Trey: Yeah. Two of your hairs together. They’re like 36 gauge. They’re tiny. 

Carrie: Yeah. So maybe that helps relieve some people’s anxiety here thinking about trying acupuncture. It’s not as bad.

Alexa: It’s truly not as bad as you think. A lot of patients report that they don’t even feel the needles. Which if you’ve never had it, it seems impossible, how can I not feel the needle going in me, but it is because they are so, so thin and fine. We did this more before the pandemic, but if someone wanted to bring in a friend or a family member who was anxious about the acupuncture, we would invite them to come in, just like say, “Hey, come sit next to your friend and watch what happens and just relax. See what it’s like.” It’s more difficult to do that now during the pandemic obviously because we have a lot more restraints on how many people we can have, but our model does allow for friends and family to come in together. So if somebody wants to try it and they want to bring a friend for moral support and the two of you get treatment at the same time, we can do that.

Trey: And we’ve had lots of children over the years and teenagers who have come in to get it and their parents will come and sit with them and hold their hand while they get their first few needles. We’ve done that as well for four kids. 

Carrie: Yeah, I think that’s really helpful for people to know that this is a good option for children and adolescents too. A lot of times people are looking for more natural remedies because they don’t necessarily want to put their child or teenager on medication right away, and this might be a good alternative option for them to look into. 

Alexa: Definitely. 

Carrie: Anything else that you wanted to say in terms of how you’ve seen acupuncture be helpful for anxiety?

Alexa: I think we could probably both speak to a lot of cases where we’ve seen acupuncture be helpful for anxiety. I would say that, that is probably the number two thing that brings people into our clinic. The first being pain. We do treat a lot of pain and the second is probably anxiety. We see so many people with anxiety. People don’t always have great results with some of the pharmaceutical options that are out there to treat anxiety.

They might have side effects, or they just don’t want to be taking that and they’re needing solutions. I don’t know how much we want to get into sort of the theory of how it helps anxiety. 

Trey mentioned that there’ve been some studies showing that acupuncture reduces inflammation, increases circulation. The way that we look at it is that acupuncture is going to basically remove blockages in your body. So we look at the body as a system of energetic flow and we call that energy Qi in Chinese medicine. Qi reaches every part of your body and it’s really what makes us alive. Qi gets blocked easily by lots of different factors.

And so we’re really using the needles just to remove those blockages and restore balance, and then the body does. The work on its own that it needs to do to be into a balanced and harmonious state with something like anxiety, a lot of times we’re working on the heart system and that doesn’t necessarily mean that someone with anxiety has heart disease, their blood pressure might be fine.

Their blood flow might be fine, but there’s an imbalance there in that system. The heart is the center of the emotions in traditional Chinese medicine and it gets out of balance easily when there’s a lot of external stressors. And so a lot of times we’re working on restoring balance to that system.

The heart system also is related to sleep. So people with anxiety often experience a lot of problems with sleep. So we can work on those things in tanem. Sleep is one of those things that we’ll often get better without someone expecting when they’re coming in for acupuncture. And then they’ll come back, like you said, after a few treatments and say, “oh, I’m sleeping better. And I wasn’t expecting that.”

Carrie:  That makes a lot of sense to me in terms of what you were saying about the heart because a lot of people who experience anxiety have a more rapid heart rate and their stress system is getting over-activated in times where it doesn’t need to be activated. It’s also connected to pain because the pain pathway in our brain also runs through that limbic system controlling the fight, flight or freeze response. It’s interesting how all of those things are interconnected and then when we’re out of balance, as you said, and something gets stuck, if you can release that it’s like the body already knows what to do to heal itself, which is very similar to a type of therapy I do called EMDR, which works at the brain level. And it’s kind of from the same premise like your body and your brain already know what to do to reach that point of healing. It’s just a matter of getting you unstuck. So that’s really neat. 

Alexa: Yes, absolutely. 

Trey: I always referred to it as getting out of your own way and letting your body do what it already knows how to do.

Carrie: That’s good. Let’s talk about maybe people who are coming from a Christian faith perspective. I did a previous show on mindfulness, which was super fun and we talked about origins of mindfulness and how that can integrate with Christian faith. I think when things come out of Eastern origin, some Christians are like, “Oh, that’s not Christian.[00:20:46] That’s more rooted in Buddhism and we have to watch out for that. It could be a spiritual practice that goes against our faith.” Would you mind speaking to that concern a little bit?

Alexa: Sure, absolutely. Our approach, first of all with acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine, spirituality is a huge part of health. And so it’s important that a person feels that their whatever practices they’re doing are aligned with their spirituality because that’s going to promote healing. Traditional Chinese medicine comes from a tradition of Daoism. It’s really rooted in Daoism and Daosim isn’t a religion, it’s a philosophy.

And it’s a way of looking at the world and the body and health based on observation of nature. So we take those observations of nature and then apply them to the body. So for example, we talk about the pathways of chief low in the body. We relate those to bodies of water, and some points are described as being like springs or like rivers or like wells because those points behave the way that those bodies of water would, it would behave in nature.

So Daoism can really be in alignment with any religious beliefs. And for that reason, a person of any religious faith can get acupuncture, can be treated by an acupuncturist, and still rest assured that the treatment is going to support their spirituality. It’s going to support their religion. It’s not going to be in conflict with anything that they believe.

Carrie: Do you find that some people have spiritual experiences, like when they’re receiving acupuncture like having a sense of spiritual connectedness? 

Trey: Yes, and that was one of the things I was actually just going to touch on in all the years I’ve practiced. I’ve worked on a lot of people who have come in and are Christian and a great many of them over the years have told me one of the things that they love about coming to acupuncture is that it allows them time to pray and when they get their needles because it clears out all the rest of the chatter that goes on in our heads. They turn their phone off. They take their smartwatch off and they truly just rest and it allows them to really actually be clearer about what they’re praying for, or who they’re praying for. And I have seen and heard that a lot over the years that it just clears out the clutter of the brain and it allows them just to focus on that one thing and in that way. 

Carrie: That’s awesome because I think I have had that experience in terms of receiving acupuncture. I don’t remember why, but I remember that I ended up crying one of my first few sessions and it was just this, I can’t really explain it other than there was a sense of spiritual connectedness to God in that moment through prayer. And just that sense of being able to just be and just rest and be present is really powerful. Something that we don’t do enough in our society is just allow ourselves to be and to rest and to give our bodies space and openness to heal or to connect with something outside ourselves. 

Alexa: It’s so powerful and it’s so healing when you can get into that state where you’re feeling connected to the divine and you’re feeling really in alignment with your own spirituality. It’s a huge part of healing and also when people are going through a difficult time with their health, they really rely on their faith to get them through that.

I love what Trey was saying about people using that time to pray because faith is what gets many of our patients through their most difficult challenges.

Trey: And when there’s a lot of people in the clinic when the clinic is full and everybody’s in there, and they have their needles in and they’re all in their space, you can feel the hum of the energy in the room where all the people in here are doing the exact same thing.

They’re there, they’re resting, they’re healing. They’re letting go of their stress, their anxiety and you can feel that hum when there’s two, three, four, five, six, seven, 10, or 12 people in the room, all doing the same thing. If you’re paying attention, you can feel that hum of all of them trying to heal and whatever level they’re trying to get it to.

Carrie: Does that feel like a lot of energy or does that feel like a release of energy? I’m just curious.

Trey:  It depends on the people. Sometimes it’s really heavy and strong and it’s like you’re parting it to get to the people and sometimes it’s light and airy. It depends, I think on who’s in the clinic and why they’re here and what they’re praying about or meditating about or focusing on while they’re here. So the feel of it actually changes. 

Carrie: That’s very interesting. 

Alexa: And it’s cool because in that way, each patient in there is contributing to the healing of the other patients as well. You’re creating this collective healing space. So we’re all helping each other, which is not a typical approach in healthcare.

Like you said, it’s usually very individualized, very isolated, but our approach is we all have something to offer. We can all give and receive in the process of healing. So it’s beautiful to be able to be a part of that. And Carrie, you mentioned about having an emotional release and that is not unusual at all for someone to have an emotional release during a treatment or after treatment crying. Sometimes people laugh.

And I noticed that especially with patients who are dealing with anxiety because anxiety can be so much work to manage just in your daily life. Just trying to navigate situations that people without anxiety wouldn’t find difficult when you have anxiety. It is difficult whether it’s going to the grocery store or having a conversation with a coworker.

So it’s so much harder to do some of those things that when you finally do get the chance to rest and relax, you don’t realize how much emotion you’ve been holding on to and then that release feels great and it’s an important part of healing. 

Carrie: That makes a lot of sense to me because it does take a lot of energy when you have anxiety, too, whether it’s to get through the day or sometimes that energy is used to suppress other painful emotions and that makes sense to me. 

So we’re kind of winding down to the end of our interview, but I do want to say that I’m going to put some links in the show notes for those who are local to look up Encircle Acupuncture and for those who are not local to look up community acupuncture near them so that people can join in on this experience.

Since the show is called Hope for Anxiety and OCD, I like to ask our guests to share a story of hope at a time that you received hope from God or another person.

Alexa:  I’ll go first. I feel so lucky because I get to hear stories of hope pretty much on a daily basis from our patients. It is very inspiring to be around. One patient in particular, who has really inspired me as a patient who a couple of years ago received a very scary cancer diagnosis. She had been coming to the clinic for a long time, just for various ailments, and then she received this diagnosis and it was so scary but she was determined to do what she had to do and she followed her doctor’s advice to the letter.

She did all of her chemo. She does all of her radiation. She did all of that. She put a lot of trust in what her doctor was recommending and at the same time, she also said, “I’ve got to do more. This is the fight of my life and so I have to be all in.” She did more research and homework than I’ve seen most patients do.

And she really became an expert on healing her cancer and she did, she beat it, and she’s more than a year cancer-free now. Even some of her nurses have made comments to her, like, “wow, you are really doing so much to heal.” And her response has kind of been like, “well, you know, I have to.” She’s a very spiritual person and really relied on her faith to get her through

the scariest time in her life. And I still see her every week and she’s doing great. She’s just to me, an example of courage in the face of something really scary and using that as an opportunity to learn. She’s come out of this even healthier than she was before. She’s a huge inspiration.

Carrie: That’s awesome. 

Trey: I have several. I could probably filter through but mine is oddly more personal, which is normally not what I would share. Nine years ago, Alexa and I hashed out an agreement on a little over nine years ago, hashed out an agreement on a napkin actually. And I lost the job that I had and I called Alexa that same Friday at like noon.

She called me back at two o’clock and I started the following week and it really has allowed me to do something I was ready to walk away from because it wasn’t fulfilling for me. And that totally changed in the nine years I’ve worked for you. We’ve treated hundreds of thousands of people, and it’s brought a lot of joy to me personally, and by extension to my wife and kids.

Carrie: That’s awesome. 

Alexa: And Trey I just love that we’ve been working together for so long, but I think everybody can relate to that feeling of just being in a place where it’s just not right and you want to change and it’s scary to make a change, but you can do it. It can transform into something that you love. [00:32:00] So that’s an inspiration to me too, I’m glad you shared that. 

Carrie: That’s awesome. Thank you so much for being on the show and for sharing with us, your wisdom and your experience with acupuncture and kind of letting all the newbies know what it’s like, and hopefully, it’ll encourage people to try it out sometime.

Alexa: I hope it does. Thank you for having us. 

Carrie: You’re welcome.

_______________________

I know I talked on this episode a little bit about my own experience with acupuncture. I wanted to do that because initially going into it. I was really nervous like is this going to be something that’s not in alignment with my Christian faith? And I did a lot of research, read everything on the website, as well as some other information on the internet about acupuncture and how it works and what the process was. And I said you know what, I don’t see anything for me personally that goes against the Bible or goes against the major tenants of Christian faith. I believe that acupuncture is one of the tools that God has given us to help heal our bodies and lead us towards a place of greater health.

And for you, it may or may not be for you and that’s okay. Hopefully, I won’t get any hateful emails on this issue. If I do, I’ll just ignore them and pay attention to the people that are enjoying the show. 

Speaking of people who are enjoying the show, did you know that we have people who are listening all over the place, including Mt. Juliet, Tennessee? Which is not too far from here. All the way to West Lake Stevens, Washington, and Paradise, Nevada. I know that we have some people who are listening in Europe, Africa, and Australia as well. So, where are you listening from? Let us know by messaging me on Instagram or Facebook, I would love to hear from you. And if you aren’t following us there, please do.

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.

22. Welcoming the Parts We Don’t Like (IFS) with Lindsey Castleman, LMFT

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Counseling, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 22. Welcoming the Parts We Don’t Like (IFS) with Lindsey Castleman, LMFT

Lindsey Castleman, a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist trained in IFS therapy holds the belief that we were all designed for relationship and connection with God, ourselves and others.

  • What is IFS (Internal Family System) Therapy
  • How did Lindsey get into Christian counseling
  • How did she incorporate Christian faith principles into her practice
  • Looking at the core of self through attachment and faith-based lens
  • Some parts of self want attention come in different forms like anxiety and OCD
  • Bringing all parts of yourself connected as God is three in one

Resource and Links:

Lindsey Castleman, LMFT
Dr Richard Scwartz- Founder of IFS

Support the show 

More Podcast Episodes

Transcript of Episode 22

Hope for anxiety and OCD episode 22. One of the things that I really love about this podcast is that I have the opportunity to meet new people and learn new things, which is super fun for me. So just know that as you’re learning along today that I was learning this information for the first time too.

I got to interview a local therapist, Lindsey Castleman. She is going to talk with us today about a specific form of therapy called Internal Family Systems or IFS for short. The cool part is that Lindsey is going to incorporate Christian faith principles in her explanation. So without further ado here is Lindsey Castleman.

Carrie: Lindsey, tell us a little bit about yourself. 

Lindsey: Hi, Carrie. Thanks for having me. I am a licensed marriage and family therapist and I have been practicing since 2014. Right now, I’m certified in emotionally focused therapy and then I’m also trained in internal family systems, which is IFS and then brain spotting. 

So those are kind of the specialties that I’m in, but I really have just enjoyed this journey. I’m in private practice here in Brentwood, Tennessee, and have been here for several years, but I’ve also practiced in a church. And then right now, I am the counseling director at a church here in Brentwood, Tennessee. I’ve got a fun group of people that I get to practice with out here, so I really enjoyed it. 

Carrie: That’s really neat. It’s kind of unique being in a church environment. There aren’t that many churches in our area that have counseling services within the church building. 

Lindsey: It has honestly been something one that I didn’t expect to have happened. I’ve actually at this place, I have experienced counseling here myself before and then just through a series of kind of pretty cool God moments that it just ended up to where we were able to partner and I was able to bring in a lot of my therapist friends, which is nice, but also some new therapists I didn’t know before. Just everybody that kind of sees clientele through just an attachment and faith-based lens, which is really where I lean in a lot of the ways that I work. 

Carrie: That’s really neat. It’s always good to have a positive jelling work environment. If you’re working with people that you’re friends with that’s a good thing. 

Lindsey: Oh, for sure and I know for me, and being in private practice on my own, not with the group, how lonely it can be.And so when I get to step outside my door and there’s people I know, and people I like, it lights the fire. It makes it more exciting to come do what we do, because then I’m like, “Oh my goodness. I’m not alone in these places.” Somebody else is in the next room going through the same thing I’m going through. So that’s really nice to just know and have that felt sense of somebody in the same building with you. 

Carrie: So we had another licensed marriage and family therapist on. We talked a little bit about that bent of counseling and that license. Tell us how you decided between becoming a licensed counselor or licensed marriage and family therapist.

There’s lots of different avenues that therapists can go down. How did you get into this realm of attachment and Christian counseling?

Lindsey: Part of it is personal, part of it is professional in the sense that for myself, I’ve been married to my high school sweetheart. I think this coming up this year, it’ll be 17 years. As we all know, in any kind of relationship, you will have friction, you’ll have disconnection. Things will go awry because it’s two humans, not perfect humans in relationship together, and that’s really what marriage is supposed to be designed to is to hold up that marriage to say, “We’ve got some stuff we got to look at.”

So going into marriage counseling ourselves for us as a couple was really, really great, really helpful. And then also I used to work for a ministry. I did their marketing, I did public relations, just things like that, even training. It was a small group ministry, I would get to sit in small groups. I would even lead small groups. 

The funny thing too is I would look at those small groups and I would be like, “Oh my gosh, all these people have so many problems like why can’t they just stop it?” Why can’t they just stop it like Bob Newhart like you got anxiety, whatever. Just stop it.

That was a little bit of my mentality. But as I started sitting in these groups and hearing these people’s stories, I started to see things from a bigger perspective. Nobody’s choosing this in that sense of like these are places that they turn to cope. These are places that they turned to because, in their family, there wasn’t a safe place to turn to. 

I’m fortunate that for me, growing up, I had safe places to turn to. So I think also why it was so foreign to me, but then I start to hear other people’s experiences and I was like, “Oh my gosh, they, they didn’t get what I got.” It was vastly different, which makes sense as to why they show up the way they do. 

You start to see things are connected. It’s going into systems. It’s systemic in that, just looking into LPC or LMFT, just everything within the LMFT track for me it felt like, it’s not just the one person, it’s the relationship with parent, the relationship with self, the relationship with other, the relationship with God. It all had to do with that sort of connection. That to me felt just really right. It felt like it fit even how I believe that God relates with us and how he wants to be our safe base, how he wants to be our safe haven. How he shows his care for us. How he’s available to us. How we can trust him. He never leaves us. He never forsakes us. All of these things felt like attachment. It kind of magnifies and really says in a way like, Hey, here’s how God designed us and I feel like a lot of people that study human behavior, the more they study it, the more they see that we are created for connection. It’s almost like it points back to our creator, that to me just felt really beautiful and I’m going “okay I can align with that.” 

Carrie: Yeah, that’s great. There’s a lot of people that have done research regarding attachment related to spirituality in terms of attachment to God and attachment styles related to how you interacted with your parents, affecting how you view God and how you connect with him, which makes a ton of sense.

Lindsey: Oh, yeah. That’s very common. Anytime we do an attachment history and we go through, there’s a lot of times where you’ll start to go, I see how you’re related to mom or I see how you’re related to dad and then when we start to move into how did you view God? How do you feel like God viewed you? A lot of times you’ll see those similarities based on maybe how they felt like dad viewed you or you viewed dad, or how mom viewed you or you viewed mom. There can be a lot of similarities in that, but then there’s also those instances where parents weren’t safe, but somebody modeled the love of God to them so they were able to see “God is different than what I got at home” if home was unsafe. So I’ve also had those two which have been beautiful in those ways. 

Carrie: Yes, that’s good. I wanted to have you on the show because I liked to talk with people and educate them that therapy is not a one size fits all approach.

And so there are many different models and theories regarding therapy. And so one of the ones that you shared a little while ago that you use is internal family systems and this is actually one that I’m not as familiar with, but I’m curious about it and would love to hear just kind of, like a brief overview, even just how you would explain it to clients.

Lindsey: Sure. Internal family systems for me, I honestly, truly didn’t know much about it until some therapists here in Nashville who I respect and admire were like, “Have you heard about this? This is pretty incredible” and for me, truthfully, I mean, truth be told, I usually work with couples. Couples are kind of a little bit more my jam and working with individuals was a little boring to me. There’s not as much energy. There’s not as much excitement. You’re not holding as much. Sometimes I catch myself yawning in session. I mean, there was just something where I was like I feel like I’m not getting as much traction as you do when you’ve got the other person there is that stimuli to really get things moving and going, and also to be kind of truth-tellers about what really is happening in the other person. 

When I started to learn more about IFS, I started to go, “Oh, Whoa.” I get like excited to do this. This is something where I feel like we’ve got movement going and it feels like it lines up with even what I’m trying to do with couples in the room.

It’s almost like what you’re trying to do within your client and themselves, it’s like to have a good relationship with himself, just like I try to do with couples. It’s like, “Oh, I get this.” This is like self to whatever’s happening within you and relating to it, because what you’ve probably seen, Carrie, even in your practices is like people show up that are very disconnected to themselves.

Carrie: Yes. Very true. 

Lindsey: Maybe they’re only in their head. Maybe they’ve got something in them that just comes and takes over and it like floods them. So there’s no relationship. It’s almost like it pushes them out of the way and says, I got this or the anger is going to come out in this way. It just started to make so much sense to me. So that’s kind of why I was like, Ooh, I like this, this kind of jives with what I like to see in couples therapy, just that relationship piece. But I’m going to back up to say, okay, so what is it? 

So what internal family systems is, is that there’s this idea, the theory, which I believe is more than an idea or a theory because I’ve watched it happen live and in myself is that at the core of us, we have ourselves in IFS terms. They call it the self for me, just a way that I look at it through the lens of faith, I find it as the image of God because I believe scripture says in all of us, we are all image-bearers of Christ. We’re all image-bearers of God. There is something that says, there are times when the self or for me, the way I view it, that’s not IFS that’s Lindsey lingo for it. That’s just me kind of putting it into my face frame. It says, there are times when, based on things that have happened in life, relationships that we’ve had where we have got more limited access to the image of God, to self because things have threatened it and we’ve needed to in some way protect that in us even thinking about like protecting our heart really, and we’ve needed to do that. And there are different ways that we protect those more vulnerable places in us. With IFS, they say, we protect with what’s called managers and we protect with firefighters and what we’re actually protecting are called exiles. I know this can all sound confusing, but you think of exiles, exiles are usually in some way they’re younger parts of us that were scared, that needed a safe place, that needed a safe haven and it didn’t happen. We didn’t get it in some way. What’s happening here is that we have developed ways to protect that from being hurt in that way, again, from being affected in that way again. 

The manager is going to be something more that says, “Hey, we’re going to come up and try to manage whatever pain is happening. We’re going to try to manage it.”

Maybe what we do to manage it is we keep you up in your head and we keep you always just analyzing. You’re never actually like feeling anything. You’re just analyzing everything. 

Carrie: That happens with OCD quite frequently actually that people with OCD live in their head. 

Lindsey: Yeah, totally and that makes sense. Then there’s also managers that will say, Hey, let’s just stay busy. Let’s just make sure everything is tidy in the house, or let’s make sure that we get all of these projects done. I mean, managers can come up in so many different forms.  

And then you’ve got firefighters. Firefighters are going to say, Oh, there’s the pain there. We’re not going to take time to manage the pain. We’re going to try to put the pain out the fastest way we can do that. We’re going to try to put the pain out. So let’s numb the pain. Let’s maybe even you’ll find alcohol can be in this place, even pornography can be in this place. It usually can feel a little bit more dangerous at times, but it’s doing its job. It’s trying to put the pain out. This is hard, but like even like suicide, suicide alley that can even fall into that category that says this pain is too much, let me tell you how to put this out very, very quickly.

What happens is, is that for a lot of these managers and firefighters, a lot of different modalities will maybe in some way try to push past them. Try to say, let’s just get to the exile or let’s just get to the heart, let’s get to the deeper thing that’s been hiding in there, but IFS says, “No, we need to work with the whole system.” We need to actually move into, befriend and we need to help these managers and these firefighters because when they trust us, when we can start to work with them, and teach our clients how to work with them, then we’re going to start to get access to these exiles that they really need our help and our attention, but we don’t want to get there without working with the whole system to get there if that makes sense. Because what they’ve found and even Richard Swartz who founded IFS, part of his work had to do with eating disorders, what would happen is he would say. “Hey, try to get rid of this eating disorder” like just try to stop it some way.

Carrie: Behavioral management.

Lindsey: Right, I think even if I’m remembering correctly, there was, he was working with a woman that was cutting herself. So he was trying to figure out like how to make that stop happening.

And then every time he kind of gave the client a directive to try to, in some way, get rid of that part of her, it would come back with a vengeance and she would cut herself even more like more harm would be done to the body and so he started to lean in and go “What’s happening here? Why is that happening?”

“And what would happen if I actually like leaned into?” It almost felt like a part of her that was coming in to try to do this to her. What if I leaned into that instead of trying to get rid of it? What if I leaned into that? Even for me, I love that picture of saying, “Hey, there’s all of these parts of us that show up.” What happens if we lean into them and get to know them instead of trying to throw them away, trying to push them aside, but we almost help them. And I’ll tell you to Carrie, the reason why I love that so much is because one, for me, it lines up with my belief of what it is like to actually bring our thoughts captive for me.

I don’t feel like bringing our thoughts captive or something that says, okay, bring them and then ignore them. 

Carrie: Just thought replaced, just think something else, that’s kind of what the church tells you to do a lot of times like “don’t think that.” 

Lindsey: Right, or just give it a scripture message, you know, but it kind of like bring your thoughts captive and captive is not like we’re not trying to strangle it.

We’re not trying to hurt it. It’s really like, bring it, bring it forward captive, like even thinking of captivity it’s like bring it forward and let’s talk to it. Because whatever is happening to it, needs help. Maybe in some way, this part of us has been in some way, it’s been in the dark for so long that it’s only been trained.

And again, this is me looking at it through the faith-based lens. Maybe it’s been the dark so long, which what I look at it is like it’s been trained by the flesh. Maybe it’s doing what it thinks is best, but it’s been trained by the flesh, which is not that healthy. And when we start to take it captive, when we bring it up, we can start to see what it’s doing and start to help it to be trained by the spirit because we’re taking it out of the dark. We’re bringing it to light so that it can start to see. “Oh, my goodness. It’s actually harming” like “this is what I’m trying to actually do, but by doing that, I am actually hurting other parts of the system.” I had no idea because we weren’t connected.” So it’s bringing in trying to make the whole system connected, all parts connected, which again, I love because from my lens when you look at Jesus, God, and the Holy Spirit, they’re three and one. So in a way, it’s kind of like there are three parts, but they all work together in that. That’s kind of what we’re wanting to have happen within us too, is have all parts of us work together instead of working against each other.

Carrie: What I really like about this is I think there’s a reducing the shame component in terms of accepting all parts of yourself. And as a therapist accepting all parts of the client that’s coming into the room because there’s so much time spent trying to hide ourselves from other people that the things that we don’t like about ourselves. And so many people have tried even before therapy from a self-help standpoint to squash certain behaviors instead of really examining like how was this behavior helpful or purposeful in my life? Like the person with an eating disorder. There was some reason that even though that’s destructive, there was a reason, like you said that developed as a survival skill probably to keep them in connection with other people in their life like if I could only be perfect. If I could only be this perfect size and I can get this acceptance and this love that I’m desperately craving. 

Lindsey: Totally. It goes back to really a big theme of IFS is all parts are welcome because the belief is, is that they’re all trying to show up to do something actually for

you. The thing is you’ve had it even shared to me in several different metaphors or images, which I love. One is like as an orchestra. You’re the conductor but all of these parts of you are the different horns, strings, things like that in the orchestra and you hear like the flute section is going out of tune. It needs your attention. You’re not going to go, “Hey, flute section, get out of here.” You’re going to say, “Hey, flutes, come on over your out of tune.” Let’s kind of see what’s happening. What’s going on? And you’re going to give it attention because it’s like the more that you ignore it, the more you push it aside, the more you push it down, the more you suppress it, dismiss it, all of those kinds of words, the louder and more out of tune it’s going to get.

It goes, you have to actually learn how to interact with yourself in a healthy way that shows compassion. And what I also love about IFS is, you know when you are in self or even when you know, you’re in it within the image of God, you know when you’re in this place because the way you start to feel towards these parts of you that want attention.

You start to feel towards them a sense of compassion, of creativity, of clarity. There’s a whole bunch of wonderful c words in there that you start to feel towards it because you’re starting to see it from this place of, “Oh my goodness. You’re trying to help me.” What happens is you get to conduct the orchestra, instead of then maybe the flute section, in the past could come up and kick you out of being the conductor and saying, “I’m going to conduct it right now.” You get to actually be the conductor. 

The other image that I’ve been given that I love is the same thing of driving the bus. You want to be the one to drive the bus. But then there are moments where you might feel scared, feel vulnerable, feel any of those types of things, and then all of a sudden, a part of you is going to see that and it’s going to say, “don’t worry, I’m going to rescue you. I’m going to take you out of that pain that starts to drive the bus. But you want to start to build such a sense of self that you’re able to go, “Oh, I know something’s happening in me right now” and instead of letting it take over, I’m just going, like, I kind of imagine it, like you’re driving the bus and a part of you is like a little kid on the bus it’s like tugging on your leg and then you’re like, “Hey, what do you need?”

Or it maybe, if you can’t listen to it that moment, “Hey, I’ll get back to you in an hour. Come back in an hour” Because there’s a lot of parts that come up for me, if I’m in session, I’m like, “I can’t tend to you right now.” In that way, because here’s what I know and even with kids because I’ve got my own, is like, if you tell a kid “go away, I’m not going to listen to you.” [00:24:24] It’s going to come back bigger, going to come back stronger, going to pitch a fit or gonna just tuck and go away and might not come back for what it needs. Either way, what you’re kind of imagining is these parts of you that wants your attention. Be it coming in the form of anxiety. Maybe it’s coming in the form of OCD. Maybe it’s coming in these different forms that once your attention that you bring it in and you start to help it. It might not always be like saying what’s true, it could be a fear part that’s showing up that’s scared and you might have to help it. It happens to me all the time, especially in session.

Like for me, there’s a part of me especially if I’m about to go into a session with very like angry, angry, and especially men. I notice that there’s this anxiousness that starts to happen in me and so I kind of bring it forward like you do a child and say, “Hey, what’s wrong? What are we upset with?”

“Scared scared.” Yes, I get it. I get it because they are bigger than me, know their anger is scarier for me and this is what I do, is I imagine God coming in, I’ll invite God in and I’ll invite God to just sit and to hold that scared part of me and to say, “Hey, you’re okay” and, and I know what to do when they get angry.

I know what to do. I’m okay and I know God’s with me. I also know where pepper spray is, just kidding. I can move in to reassure and I can also imagine and allow God to sit with that part of me, even during the session, and to say you’re okay. You’re okay. You know what to do. And you know that within this person that gets so big and gets so angry is also a scared little part of them too. So it helps bring that sense of compassion even towards the person you’re scared of in that way. 

Carrie: Yeah. I want to speak to something that you said about there are these parts that are trying to help because a lot of times when you have something like anxiety or OCD, people will only see the negative like, “I don’t like this. I don’t want to have it. I just want to get rid of it” and sometimes that anxiety is protecting from sadness. Sometimes it’s protecting from anger that they haven’t ever learned how to express in a healthy way. Sometimes it’s protecting from vulnerability like not being able to trust other people.

There are so many purposes a lot of times that or roles that anxiety can play in a person’s life and if you’re able to get work with that and get those needs met in a healthier way rather than worry or going in your head. Sometimes the going in your head protects you from the body sensation that feels really intolerable. I like this a lot. I started doing parts work with my clients in a kind of a different vein through ego state therapy about a year ago and at first, I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know how you felt when you learned IFS, but when I first learned ego state therapy, they talk about parts being fully adult and parts being children kind of similar to the exiles. And I thought, this is weird like I don’t know if my clients are gonna get behind this. I find it a little weird. So I just tried it with some people and I said, look, I know this is going to sound a little weird, but I learned this new therapy and I think it might be helpful.

Is it okay if we roll with it, you know, and you kind of know your clients that are, that are good with rolling with things. So I tried it on some people and it was so powerful and so transformative that I really started incorporating it with almost everyone. Talking about having different parts of yourself, because whether we are aware of it or not, we go through times in our life where we feel such an internal conflict. And I think that makes sense in terms of what you were saying, it makes sense in terms of our faith, in terms of the flesh versus the spirit in. In terms of I want to do the right thing, or I know what the right thing is, but I can’t seem to make myself do it, that struggle that Paul talked about. I really think that this element of parts of ourselves having these wounds that maybe haven’t been healed and if we can get to that place where we allow God to enter into that space and get that deeper level of healing, it’s just incredible where it can go. 

Lindsey: Oh, for sure and to watch it happen in front of you is fantastic and that’s one thing. But then also to allow yourself to do that same work that you’re asking your clients to do, that’s another thing where you can kind of move into like hair club for men like I’m a client but I’m also the owner, whatever it is. You’re able to move into that place and go, Hey, I know what this is like, I’m not trying this woo woo step on you, in the sense that I have not also tried to work out within myself as well, can be really, really helpful to say, “Oh” because sometimes what I’ll do is I’ll say, “Hey, here’s what it looks like for me” even giving that example of like when the angry man and how I allow myself or kind of invite God into sitting with that fearful part of me that it’s helpful even for my clients to conceptualize it and to go, “okay. Oh, and that’s how you practically use it” then they go, “okay. Okay. You do it” so maybe it’s not just me. It’s not just something wrong with me that I got to do this crazy out there kind of thing, but to be able to normalize it for them is pretty huge as well for sure. 

Carrie: So you teach people actually how to talk, how to maybe identify first of all, these different parts of self and then how to communicate with them in a healthy, healthy way.

Lindsey: Yeah, that’s a big part of IFS. They call it the six F’s and I wish that I knew all of them by heart, but really what you are trying to do is, first, you identify there is this part of you, let’s just for the sake of example, say it’s anxiety. So we know there’s this anxiousness in you.

Sometimes for me, I’ll even have my clients imagine, imagine the last time this anxiousness showed up in you, paint the scene for me, take me to that memory. When did it show up? What was happening? So they’ll start to kind of say, “Oh, it was at school and it was right before I was about to have a test.” Then I say, “Okay, so now, as you’re talking about this, this anxiousness in you, this anxious part of you, where are you even feeling it in your body?”

Like, can you just even know where does it stay in you? Where is it in you? Oh, it’s in my chest. It, yeah. What’s it like in your chest? “It’s flattering, it’s moving. It’s busy.” Could you just maybe just kinda notice it, take a breath, just kind of really like see if you can really get a good sense of it.

 

And then here’s the different part is that you then ask that anxiousness if it will step outside of the body. If it will kind of take a step outside and stand in front why the client is looking at it. 

I’ll usually ask the client either if they’ll be open and closing their eyes, or even if they’ll just find a spot and stare at it kind of like how you do when you daydream. Then they’ll see it. They’ll move it out. I’ve had people call it like, they’re like, Oh, you say, what is it? What does it kind of, what’s it like in front of you kind of what sends to you? I’ll have some people say it’s like just these ping pong balls going everywhere, or even have one person like “this looks like this weird dancing pizza.”

I was like, “okay.” That you just really try to help them see in that way, in that moving it outside of themselves, you’re not trying to get rid of it. You’re not trying to say, get out of here, but you’re trying to say let me see you in a way that I can get to know you. Let me be able to see you so I can know you more fully. As that happens, then you start to notice how does the client feel towards it.

Which I think Carrie, this is a little bit of what you were saying before the way people can start to see OCD or anxiety they’ll have, “Oh, I hate it. I want to get rid of it. I don’t, I wish it was never there.” All of those types of things, which make sense, but conceptually, we as IFS therapists know those are different parts.

That’s not the self. That’s not the core because that’s not compassion. It’s not understanding. It’s not caring. It’s not any of those things. Even curiosity, it’s not that. It’s judgment. It’s wanting to just get rid of it because it makes sense there’s all these parts that are, have developed that have said, when you do this, it takes you away from this. It takes you away from that. It makes sense to these other parts are going to come up because they’re going this isn’t managing well with us. And in a way, it’s not because you’re not, they’re not all connected. They’re not all working together in this place. Just kind of like if you were doing family therapy and you’re trying to talk with a child, but the child keeps looking at the parent so they won’t talk.

And then you asked the parent to move back, move away, move out of the eyesight of the child so they won’t be intimidated. So you can hear more what the child wants to say. That’s a little bit of what you do here with the part. You ask those parts that want to get rid of it that are frustrated with it. You listen to them because all parts are welcome and you make sense of it. Of course, that makes sense that you’d feel that way, but just right now, and these next 20 minutes, 30 minutes, will you step back? Will you just give some space for us to get to know this anxious part and why it shows up? And usually, they will stand back or usually it’s kind of like, they’ll just say like right at the shoulder and it’s kinda wild. Then they’ll step back and then you ask your client again to kind of look at the anxiety. Sometimes when those parts step aside, the anxiety starts to look different. Maybe instead of ping pong balls, it starts to look more calm. It starts to look more solid. Sometimes it starts to turn into looking like a person. Usually, in those moments, you kind of start to know, maybe you’re getting a little closer to maybe an exile, maybe not, but you kind of were still curious. And then you asked your client again, how do you feel towards that anxiety?

And if it feels like they’re more curious, like, “Whoa, it’s changed. What’s going on. I want to know more about it.” Then you start to kind of approach it and you ask the anxiety, right? What is its job? Why is it showing up? What’s it doing to try to help? Because we’re assuming that all of these different parts are trying to help in their own way, even if they’re backwards, even if they feel backwards. Then you move into that place to say what do you feel like your job is? How are you trying to help client? How you’re trying to help and it’s wild because sometimes you will get a sense like that anxiety will start to share a little bit of why it’s there.

Usually it’s like with anxiety, it’s like I’m here because I know that she can be scared about these things, or I know that she can be alarmed about these things and then I need to show up to let her know that this is happening, that these things could be happening again. And then you move into this place too of what does that anxiety feel like would happen if it didn’t show up like that? What would happen if it didn’t show up in that way? Sometimes be more vulnerable to whatever happened last time that they were unaware was even going to happen. Maybe they got blindsided by something. I don’t know. There’s all different.

Carrie: Different places they could go.

Lindsey: Completely. But even as the client starts to hear this from anxiety, they start to get almost a sense of like gratitude like, “Oh my gosh, I didn’t realize that’s what you were doing for me.” That’s so helpful because then we start to get the client to relate to anxiety in that way. “Oh, it’s trying to just alert me to this.” It’s trying to alarm, say that this is happening and it’s afraid this would happen to me. I need to bring it in and help it know kinda like I did with that. I’m okay. This man’s anger, I’m actually okay with, like I know what to do if he comes at me with it or if he comes at his spouse. I know what to do now because before that fear, when I love, cause I feel like fear is actually good and fear actually helps lead us to wisdom, if it’s in its healthy place. I was like, I’m good because you’ve had me scared about this before. So I went and listened to a lot of podcasts and I watched a lot of people do stuff with anger. So I am equipped now, I know now, that’s what you want. You want for these parts of you to be helpful, to be in the system is helpful.

And not to be in the system as like pushed out. And then there’s a whole other thing which it’ll take a whole other hour to talk about, but even just to then move into what’s underneath. What those parts are protecting and what do we do when we start to get there, because there’s a whole other protocol for there that’s also beautiful. But this kind of, what we’re talking about today is more, how do we start to befriend and work with and help really bring in and appreciate and train those protective parts of us and that’s what we want to start to do. 

Carrie: Yeah. I think this conversation is really helpful even if people don’t pursue IFS therapy, just to understand like how to get to a place of self-acceptance and understanding our acceptance by God of all of us, of our sin, our shame. Everything thing that Jesus took on for us, like we are fully loved and fully cared for. And if we, a lot of times we’re in the way, because we don’t see that, or we don’t acknowledge that, or we don’t live in that beloved space. I love how this helps people get towards that place in their relationship with Christ. I think that’s really neat. 

Lindsey: Yeah, totally and I love to, even with IFS calling right that core of a self and even what we do and how the self then talks to all these parts of us and really helps and can invite God in and things like that, that it does even lean towards one of the fruits of the spirit, which is self-control. That’s even kind of what this is modeling. What this is showing is literally how do we bring self up. And again, control is not the captive like I’m taking you by the throat, but it’s like control in the sense of “Hey, I want for us all to work together.” We’ve all got functions here. Being able to say we’re all working in harmony together and that feels really good.

That’s that place of self control.

Carrie: So I know we’re getting towards the end of the podcast here. I usually ask our guests to share a story of hope with us a time that you received hope from God or another person. So what does that for you that you wanted to share? 

Lindsey: Yeah. Truly, Carrie, there are countless times, which I’ve been super thankful for, and I feel like there was a moment for me where I realized that there was this person in my life and they were always looking for these moments of hope. These moments of where God is showing up and was very much like if you’re not present to see how has God showing up, you’re going to miss it. It’s been kind of neat to slow down and to go, “Whoa, Oh God, was that you. Oh, that was you.” I’ve just missed it or call it happenstance or coincidence, but it was you.

This kind of the memory I’m going to tell you about now is kind of cool because my husband and I, we just decided on a whim we were married, we were young, and we were just like, “Hey, how can we serve at the church? Let’s just go be Sunday school teachers. Let’s just do that.” We went and we were Sunday school teachers and there was this other couple that were Sunday school teachers with us and we hit it off. The four of us hit it off. So we would like go out on double dates, things like that. And then they said, “Hey, our community group just opened up. Would you guys like to join our community group?” We’re kind of like being recruited, which was kind of fun. It felt like reminded me of sorority days. So I was like, “Ooh, we’re being recruited.” We went and we were in this community group.

During this time and being in this community group, we found out my husband and I found out that we were not able to have children. And then there were six couples. Four out of the six couples found out that they could not have children which was crazy and didn’t know it before we became like it.

We weren’t like, “Hey, let’s do an infertility community group.” It just like, it just happened and then we all discovered these things. Hopefully, it wasn’t something we all drank, but so we were in this together. 

We started to go through this adoption process for us, my husband and I, and one day, one of the girls in the community group texted me and she was like, “Lindsey, my mom is in a Bible study with this woman who’s asking the whole Bible study to pray for an adoptive family for her nephew’s son like it’s kind of a big goal. And she was like, “my mom remembered you guys and community group and dah, dah, dah”, like, would you be interested? And I’m like, “what?” Now it was kind of wild because I was actually at this church that was like, when I got the text message, I was literally in church and they were about to do this worship and they do this forever long worship.

So I’m like, all right, some do I’m worshiping and I’m asking God, I’m like, “God, is this our son?” Is this what we’re supposed to do? And I heard a very clear yes and I don’t hear that kind of stuff all the time. Sort of very clear yes, and so I said, ”all right, God, well, you’re going to have to tell my husband that you said yes.”

Because he’s a little bit more of my risk-averse kind of guy. I’m a little bit more the risk-taker. Anyways, I called my husband because I was on a trip so he was back at home and I was in California. I called my husband and I said, “Hey, the girl in our community group said, what do you think?” And he was like, “I’m open.”

And I was like, “Oh my gosh” like, that’s not usually the response I get. I usually get all the worried questions and if you’re in the Enneagram world, he’s an Enneagram six. So that makes a lot of sense. To make a long story short, even though I’ve already made it long, we ended up meeting with that family. And then on a Tuesday, they told us that they chose us and then we brought our son home that Saturday. We kind of look back and we go, “Oh my goodness” like even just us being kind of like obedient to want to serve and not obedient and like little begrudging, but just like, Hey, we really would like to serve.

Just how God placed us with all of these people that then placed us with our son who could not have been a better fit. And if I go into the emotion of it, I will cry right now, but I’m not going to make it stay in my head about it. But just in that sense of like, we couldn’t imagine our lives without them. And so in this place of feeling so hopeless in infertility, like God was already working behind the scenes and bringing us hope. Just through these things, we could have never orchestrated for us to be able to be parents to our son. So that for us is like, anytime it’s like, oh, it’s God working on like, “Heck. Yeah, he is.” He is. And working today, like working today, not just in biblical times. He’s working today and he is a God of hope and he is a relational God that loves us and wants to be so close to us and that’s beautiful in that way. 

Carrie: That’s really beautiful. Yeah, I love that story.

We’ve had a lot of stories on the podcast recently about God bringing members into people’s families and they’re each unique and different, but it all just shows the intimacy like you were saying of God caring about the details and working everything together just right. So, that’s awesome.

Lindsey:  Yeah. He’s a loving father. It’s kind of nice to see and to feel that firsthand. 

Carrie: Thank you so much for coming on the show and not only sharing your IFS wisdom, but also incorporating the spirituality Christianity piece in there. I really enjoyed that, I think it was helpful in conceptualizing.

Lindsey: Sure. Of course, I have to fit that. I have to make sure that that all comes together because it’s very important I feel like in just healing with our hearts.

__________________________

What I really find compelling about this interview and what we talked about today is that God is able to meet us right where we’re at, and he loves you wholly and completely. Just as you are, right now and God also loves you enough not to leave you that way. 

If you can wrap your mind around God loving you just where you are right now in the midst of whatever you’re facing that is absolutely transformative and will be something that will help you break through any shame that you might be holding on to.

Since this is our episode right before Easter, I just wanted to say happy Easter to everyone and He is risen, indeed. 

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.

21. Is Healing from Childhood Wounds the Key to Unlocking Anxiety? With Laura Mullis, LCSW

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Counseling, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 21. Is Healing from Childhood Wounds the Key to Unlocking Anxiety? With Laura Mullis, LCSW

On this episode, I had the privilege of interviewing one of my mentors, Laura Mullis, LCSW

  • Why Laura switched from weekly therapy to intensive sessions
  • Difference between trauma and attachment wounding
  • How attachment wounding contributes to anxiety
  • How receiving love from God causes us to be able to love ourselves
  • Learning to meet unmet needs as an adult.

Laura’s website: Triumph Center

See more:
Can God Use Your Anxiety for Good?
The Power of EMDR Therapy for Anxiety

Support the show 

More Podcast Episodes

Transcript of Episode 21

Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD, episode 21. I had the absolute privilege to interview a mentor, Laura Mullis and I brought her on the podcast to talk a little bit about attachment wounds from childhood and how these can contribute to anxiety in adulthood. So let’s get into that interview. 

Carrie: So Laura, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Laura: Hello, my name is Laura Mullis and I am a clinical social worker from Moultrie, Georgia. That’s kind of in the Southwest corner of Georgia. I tell everybody about an hour from Tallahassee because I don’t expect people to know where Moultrie is. I am a therapist who offers a different type of therapy in the sense that I had my own practice and the way I set my practice up was that I offer intensive therapy where people come and they book a few days with me at a time and we really dig into whatever it is they want to change in their life. 

The other way that I am probably different is one of my main focuses is not just on helping people heal from the things that happened to them in their life, but also the things that should have happened that didn’t, and that’s called attachment trauma, which is something I’m sure we’ll get into later on into the podcast. 

About me, I have been working in the field of therapy in some capacity since 2004. So that’s 16 years and I started off in the field of substance abuse because in my own personal history, I’m actually in recovery myself. So of course we’re all wounded healers, right? So I went to go try to help people who were in recovery get the same breakthroughs I got. And as I started working in that field, I realized that majority of the people who I worked with had deep, deep, deep wounds that they were carrying from events that had happened to them in the past and just relationships that had really, really, really hurt them and so that sent me on a quest. I went on a quest and I’m still on my quest, but I don’t think the quest is ever done. My quest to try to figure out how to help people really overcome and heal the wounds that caused them to keep recreating patterns in their life or to keep living below what their full potential is capable of. And so until I’d be on a journey of many, many trainings and many, many learnings, I just tell people that I’m eternally curious. I will go learn about anything.

Carrie:  I love that you’re terminally curious because I think the best therapists are the people who are willing to continue learning and continue growing.

I’ve met people in the field, unfortunately, and you probably have too that feel like they’ve already arrived and you can’t teach them anything and that’s very frustrating. So I love it when people love to learn and grow. The quest is never over. And the cool thing about that is that you always run into clients with different issues that come up and it’s like, “Oh, well, I don’t think I’ve quite dealt with this before. This is a little bit new. What are we going to do here?”

Laura:  Yeah. Interesting thing. There’s always something new. I heard somebody say once before “wisdom is knowing you don’t know” and so I always hold that as my motto, that wisdom. I don’t know and if I think I do know then I’m missing a lot.

Carrie: So, let’s get into talking about attachment trauma and how you would define that.

Laura: Attachment trauma is basically I call it attachment wounding because trauma. When you think of the field, it’s so much about what happened and attachment wounding is more about what did not happen. So all of us were born into this world and are raised by somebody. It might not be your parents or paternal parents, but you are raised by somebody and those people who raised you almost leave an imprint on you based on how they treat you or what they don’t do for you and the imprint or the impression or the impact that they leave on you is that attachment wounding. So if you were raised by caregivers who didn’t see you, didn’t hear, didn’t value and, or raised you in a way where it was confusing, sent mixed messages, or raised you in a way where they didn’t know how to manage their own emotions, so then they couldn’t teach you to manage your emotions. Then you almost internalize all of that and you take that into yourself and then you grow up and you repeat all those patterns in your relationship with yourself and your relationship with others.

And so then when you go to a therapist and the therapist says, “well, tell me what happened.” You’re like, “I don’t know. It’s just my exist. Yeah. My childhood was good. I mean, everybody had problems. They didn’t beat me. I wasn’t hurt.” I wasn’t all the things that you think of when you think of trauma and people don’t really know that there’s was anything different because it’s just like the existence I grew up in. And so it’s really hard for people to share what did not happen or what happened that felt almost like it didn’t match what they knew they were supposed to receive. So that’s attachment wounding and attachment wounding I have found is really driven or kept alive by unmet needs.

So our needs did not get met in childhood and that caused a part of our brain to almost get stuck at the age at which the need wasn’t met. And then we are at times in our life responding out of that age or that sense of absence and what we then grow up and do, we then look outside ourselves for somebody else to meet our needs.

So we have these unmet needs. We grow up and we become adults with unmet needs. And then we want other people in our life to meet those needs and that’s just not going to work because they have unmet needs too and this causes a lot of the dysfunction in relationships and the world. In my opinion, everybody wants somebody else to meet their needs.

And so what I do is I help people learn how to start to identify the unmet needs from their past, and then meet their own needs. And as I meet their own needs, it’s almost like a cup of water that’s empty and it fills up one drop at a time and it just feels relieving and satisfying and the person feels more complete because there’s nobody that can meet our needs, but us.

Carrie: That’s interesting. How would you kind of put a spiritual overlay on that as far as God meeting people’s needs versus people meeting their own needs? 

Laura: So when I do the type of therapy, I’m a turn like curious so I have lots of tools in my tool belt, but the one I’ve found to help attachment trauma is called ego state therapy, which is basically like parts work.

And so part of what I help people tap into is almost a resource part of them who has all of the things that they needed when they were a kid and didn’t get. And one of the parts of them that I help them tap into is almost like a spiritual self if they’re open to that. Some people just are not ready to go theorem and I understand that, but if their spirituality is a cornerstone of their belief system then they have a part of them who is able to receive the love of their spiritual source and that part of them has the capacity to really, almost expand to meet their needs in life today. So I see it as in my own personal experience and going through recovery. I saw that in my life, I had first received the love, the unconditional love of God and out of that unconditional love of God, I could then love myself unconditionally. 

Carrie: Yes, that’s so good. 

Laura: And that was my path, I was doing exactly what I described at the beginning. I was trying to have my friends and my family and everybody else love me unconditionally.

And they’re just not capable of that. So it’s really tapping into that unconditional source of love, which then feeds your unconditional love for yourself and then you will just naturally know who belongs in your life. 

Carrie: That makes a lot of sense. I know that I see this with people where there’s a lot of grief that goes on over these unmet needs like “I don’t understand why my mother couldn’t just love me unconditionally. I don’t understand why she couldn’t love me as much as my sibling,” etc, etc. Do you feel like that’s a long-term ongoing process for people that part of this being able to meet their own needs, relieve some of that.

Laura: Yes. Being able to meet their own needs, relieve some of that but when you describe that to me, that tells me that there’s like a younger part of their mind stuck in a place where they may be in their forties, but part of their brain or mind still feels like they are a kid needing a mom to take care of them.

And so part of what I help people do is help those parts of the mind that are stuck in that almost bortecs of why can’t mom love me, because when you’re four, you need a mom to love you for survival. But now that you’re 40, you don’t really need a mom to love you. It’d be nice but you don’t need it. And continuing to try to go back and have a person who’s not capable of loving you, love you is actually causing you to have unmet needs of the present. So I feel like it’s a part of the mind that’s stuck back in that place of feeling it’s like they’re four or whatever age and feeling unresourced and incapable of taking care of themselves.

So part of the work I do is help those parts of the brain realize this is life today and you have the ability to have this for yourself. There is an element of grief to the work, but there’s a difference between grief and almost like avoiding sad and like avoidance sadness. So, some people will stay in this level of sadness and denial, and that’s actually keeping them from the deep grief that they need to come to a place of acceptance. “I can accept who my mom is, and I can accept that whatever happened to her in her past made it to where she just could not pass that down to me.”

Carrie: Do you think that people, even if they don’t get those from their parental or caregiver relationships like these needs that a lot of times they get them met in other relationships, and that provides that internal resource for them to be able to have that?

Laura: Yes. However, I think that a lot of times because of the unmet needs in the past, people can choose people to be in their life out of their wounds, and unfortunately, it just winds up recreating the wounds. So there is that rare bird who comes, who actually has a healthy marriage or healthy relationship and within that marriage in a relationship, they can almost have their adult life had their needs met, but they still have that unmet needs from the past that will crop up sometimes. It will show up sometimes and will wind up causing them to get in fights with their partner or pull away and avoid or shut down or be too anxious.

And about their person’s love and affection for the like this is all the ways that attachment shows up in life today is how we relate to other people. And so if you have a lot of unmet needs from childhood, emotional safety in a relationship is difficult to maintain. 

Carrie: So feeling like this person might leave me which could show up in a lot of different ways. If this person gets mad at me, they might leave me, or if this person gets too close to me or knows too much about me, they might discover my flaws and might leave. 

Laura: Yes, and so then people respond to that in different ways. They either pursue the person harder

and want the person to meet demands or want the person to check boxes, but those boxes aren’t going to bring the relief they need anyway, or they pull into their own shell and shut down, or they do both. This push-pull dynamic that comes up sometimes and all of it is because there’s not a sense of emotional safety inside the person.

Carrie: Right. What’s manifesting outside is reflective of what’s inside. 

Laura: And so I tell people, build the emotional safety inside and then things outside changed. 

Carrie: That makes a lot of sense and I think that sense of the healthier that you are, the healthier people that you attract into your life. 

Laura: Yes you do.

Carrie: And the opposite is true as well. Unfortunately, yes.

Laura:  I have people come to me and they want their spouse to be different. They want their children to be different and they want their family to be different and always say, listen, if you change your family changes, you can’t do it in reverse order.

If you change and who you are is different than they will just start responding differently to you or you will come to the place where you realize in order to get better, you have to create that distance. 

Carrie: Talk with us a little bit about how this issue of attachment wounding can cause anxiety to develop in people.

Laura: The place that we learn to feel internally safe is through our caregivers. So when a baby is born, it doesn’t have any way to manage the emotions or the feelings going on inside their little body. And so they are dependent on the person who is raising them to do things like pick them up and soothe them and rock them and soothe them for them. As that happens repeatedly over time, that baby will internalize the ability to soothe themselves. So if a person doesn’t have a caregiver who has the ability to soothe themselves then they do not have the ability to help the baby internalize that ability to soothe. So if you have a mom or dad or a grandma or whoever is raising you, who, when a baby cries gets anxious and panics or gets angry and then is trying to soothe baby out of that panic and anger, the baby is going to internalize anxiety, anger, frustration.

So we, in some ways, how we cope with the world at the core is a replication of how our parents coped with the world. 

Carrie: That makes a lot of sense. 

Laura: And in order to really develop your own ability to cope with the world, you have to get rid of, or heal what your parents passed down and it might not even be parents it could be bullying in school, could be different things. And what I’ve found is when it comes to attachment wounding, what happens is when we have an event happen in our life that is overwhelming or shocking, it’s like our brain turns on an internal recorder, literally almost like cutting on a recording system and it records people acting in that way and the message that they were sending us and the message at different times in our life. When we go through something that feels similar, we’ll turn it on and start replaying it in our heads as if that thing from the past is happening now. And so then when we have something in our life that’s upsetting or anxiety-provoking, we’re not just responding to it, we’re also responding to the messages inside our head. 

Carrie: The internal dialogue.

Laura: Yes, and that internal dialogue, if you hear it for so long, it gets hard to separate. Is it mine or was it theirs? Where do they even start? And so a lot of the work I do is helping to figure that out and kind of turn that dialogue that does not belong to the person off.

Carrie: The messages that other people have put towards us that weren’t true, but we adopted them as truth for ourselves.

Laura:  Well, we didn’t have a choice. You know, at times in our life we’re like sponges, we just absorb what’s going on around us and so we didn’t choose it, and then it gets implanted in our mind and we just don’t even realize it’s there. 

Carrie: Working with people that have had also major trauma experiences, besides just the attachment wounding. One of the things that I’ve noticed is that sometimes the worst part of that traumatic memory was the attachment piece, maybe where they told the caregiver and the caregiver didn’t believe them or they told the caregiver and the caregiver just didn’t do anything about the situation or they were put in a situation that was unsafe. Sometimes that’s worse than the experience itself. It seems like. 

Laura: Yeah, I agree with that. Also want to say that one attachment wound that I’ve encountered lately, in past few years, is really hard for people to explain is what I call an invisibility wound. So that’s when a child grows up in a home where they just did not feel seen. It’s almost like they existed within the home and parents carried on separate lives and this can come when parents are in the world we live in today. There’s a lot of demands and so parents can work long hours. Sometimes two jobs. Maybe one parent is out of the home all the time working and then when they are home, they’re taking care of the household and trying to maintain an orderly life and so the child’s needs just are not seen. 

Parents prioritize physical needs over emotional needs. And so when the child’s emotional needs are not tended to, they wind up feeling invisible and that invisibility wound causes a lot of anxiety because they now show up in life today and don’t know how to be seen when they are seen, it feels very foreign and unfamiliar and they want to try to hide. And it shows up as anxiety, panic attacks, overwhelmed, shame, all the things that cause people to own their shrink into themselves. 

Carrie: Social interactions 

Laura: Because they didn’t learn how to socially engage. I think that’s so important. So the invisibility of women is a big one. That’s in the attachment wounding family.

I’ve seen a lot of people who struggle with it, really struggled to try to explain what happened because it’s a lot of what did not happen.

Carrie:  A lot of no one asking me how I felt about a situation or what I’m thinking or what I’m needing. It’s just kind of like we all go through the flow of life and this is how it is.

Laura: Yeah, or go play. They’re playing in their room, so they’re fine. They were always quiet and didn’t ask for much. That’s not a child’s natural behavior. 

Carrie: Do you think that this can happen? A lot of times there’ll be a situation in a family where one child may respond externally. Like they may be throwing fits or rebelling at school or getting in trouble and a lot of times the focus is maybe on that child versus the quiet compliant child that just kind of goes along to get along with everybody. 

Laura: Yes, that’s another way that the attachment wounding can occur and that will increase in visibility wounds and the one that goes internal and the one that goes external while a lot of times learn, the only way that I can be seen is if I have to help. So then they grow up to engage in addiction and other behaviors. Same dysfunctional, but haven’t had a reason. One of the things that I always tell people is whatever you’re doing has a good and perfect reason for existing. it served your needs in some way.

Carrie: That’s good. That’s really good because our behavior isn’t just in some kind of vacuum. There’s a reason that we got to where we are and if we can peel back those layers and understand that process, that’s often a key to healing, but not just the inside of it, the actual working through it, working through the woundedness.

So talk with me about the people that come in because I probably have them come to see me and you probably have them come to see you that say, “well, I don’t want to blame everything on my parents. They weren’t that bad. I mean, they’re okay. I’m an adult now and I can’t just be going and blaming everything on them.”

Laura: Yeah, and I completely understand. I think that majority of parents are doing the best they can. And I think that this is another topic altogether but wounds are generational. What they didn’t heal, their parents didn’t heal, got passed to them and get passed to the children. You have to look at it from more of a 30,000-foot view sometimes in order to get the understanding you need.

What I tell people is that we’re not here to put your parents on trial. That’s not what we’re doing. We’re just here to know your truth exactly as you felt it and once we know your truth, we heal your truth and what will happen is that will radically shift your relationship with your parents today. It will radically shift your relationship with your parents today so that you can have a more adult-adult relationship with them. If you have a lot of unmet needs, then in some ways you’re staying in a relationship where you’re still the child and they’re still the parent even though you are an adult and you met. The people I work with, they have professional careers functioning, and raising their own kids, but when they go around their parents, they still act in that parent child dynamic and it continues to replicate the unmet needs. So if we can heal the wounds and just learn your truth, and you could be more adult-adult not just in your relationship with your parents, but in your relationships with others.

Carrie: That’s good because what we’re talking about affects people at work. It affects them at home and affects them in their intimate relationships. It affects them with authority, figures, parents, anybody. It’s really huge and once you kind of get down underneath all of those layers, then it have some healing there of these wounded parts, it can be really true formative. 

Laura: It really can. It truly can. 

Carrie: I’m curious how you got through this process of, cause I’m assuming that you were providing weekly therapy in the past, how did you make that shift from like weekly therapy to just doing intensives? 

Laura: So I was doing weekly therapy and one of the things that I do work with, which is, again, another topic altogether is dissociative identity disorder, which is people who have literal such isolated parts and multiple personalities. And in that, I figured out you couldn’t do hour-a-week therapy with them. It just does not really fit the way that their brain is structured and so I started to do intensives with them all starting with two to three-hour sessions and then working my way up. And I realized that I just like it better. I’m a person who believes that you can’t recreate moments. So what that means is if we’re in a session and we get to a big breakthrough and we have to just keep going through it, if all of a sudden we uncover a layer and it’s a new truth or a new understanding or a new trauma or a new attachment wound that we need to work on.

That it’s really hard to say, “okay, let’s stop here and come back next week and we’ll resume at that spot.” The mind doesn’t work like that almost. I believe once you get there, you just have to keep going and heal that piece, and then you can rest and go back in and kind of work on another layer because I realized with my an hour a week with people that we would get to a point like that and then they’d come in the next week and we’d be off on something else. And even though I said, “but that was really, really, really important.” It’s like, “Oh no, but now this is important.” And so we had a lot of places we got to that were never resolved.

Carrie: And that doesn’t feel good. I imagine not feel good to me. 

Laura: I imagine it didn’t feel good to me and it truly didn’t feel good to the people because I would lose sight of what we were even working on half the time.

I would say, well, what, what exactly are we doing here? So, uh, I’m thankful that my, the DOD clients taught me that the mind truly works better when you do it from an intensive approach. And what that means intensive, just so listeners can understand is people book days with me at a time and we do about six hours of therapy a day.

And I look at the mind almost like a ball of yarn, that’s all tangled up and so in that time we just kind of pull on a string and we just follow the stream and let the mind untangle itself and it’s really, really, really, really cool how the mind untangled itself. 

Carrie: Do people tend to just be really exhausted by the end of that day, after doing six hours of therapy?

Laura: Not really, you’ll be surprised that I think it’s more exhausting to open something up and an hour a week and then close have to figure out how to close it down and exist until another week. When they come, it’s almost like they know I’m coming here to work on this issue, whatever it is they want changed in their life, and I’ll provide it in a setting. It’s almost like a retreat, like a setting where people can go, there’s cabins and they stay in a cabin and we meet in the cabin. So the setup works also with the way the mind works, which is compartmentalization. I’m actually leaving my day-to-day life. I’m going to this place where what I do in this place is I work on myself. 

Carrie: Very specific purpose. 

Laura: And they know that this is what I’m doing here and they don’t have to worry about anything else except for healing. So I have found that it really for the people who are ready for it, because not everybody would be ready for it. But for people who are ready for it and want to take the journey, the intensive approach in my opinion is the best way to go.

Carrie: That’s good. That’s what it’s for. Just very interesting and different. And I think a lot of people don’t know that that’s even an option out there for them because so people have a hard time with like you talked about busy-ness of schedules, just even making an hour of therapy a week work for them and trying to deal with things like childcare and transportation issues and so forth and so on. So, it’s really awesome. We’ll put your links and so forth in the show notes for people so they can find you if they want to look you up that way.

Laura: That’d be great. 

Carrie: At the end of every podcast, since our podcast is called hope for anxiety and OCD, I like to ask our guests, what is a time that you have received hope from God or another person?

Laura: I guess I would say that one of my transformative shifts in my life was when I was in treatment for recovery from addiction. I was praying and I was praying for everybody else in my life, “Oh God, I want you to do this for this, I don’t want you to make sure this person remembers me and I want you to do this.”

And I was telling God exactly what I wanted him to do. It was like audibly, I heard God say, “All right, listen up. First, you work on your relationship with me, then you work on your relationship with yourself. Then you can work on your relationship with your family and then I will add who I want into your life.”

And that moment changed everything for me because I realized that that was the order. That was the order for healing. And I was kind of go top-down rather than bottom-up and I’ve lived my life that way for the past 19 years and every bit of it has come true. 

Carrie: That’s awesome. That’s really, really cool. I liked that God told you to listen up because you’re a very direct person and I feel like you would say that to somebody else.

Laura: I was just and all of a sudden I heard God say, “listen up.”

Carrie: I feel like God knows how to meet each one of us where we’re at and how we are and so you’re like this really sweet, gentle, kind person, but you also have like a directness in you too. And so I was like, “that just so fits”. 

Laura: Yeah. It was like, “boom!” I was like, “Oh, okay, I’m listening.” But it changed everything for me when I realized that and I also feel like in my work, it also shapes how I help people on their process. I feel like it helped me see a clearer path for not only how I got the healing I needed, but how people can get the healing they need.

Carrie: Yeah. That’s good. Well, thank you so much for coming on and sharing with us about attachment trauma. It’s been really good. Really informative. All right. 

Laura: Thank you, Carrie.

_______________

I think it’s so tempting for us to say, you know what childhood was in the past that doesn’t affect me now. All of that stuff is over and I’m over it. But a lot of how we act today is affected by how we were interacted with by our caregivers and the patterns that developed. And I have seen amazing transformation when people unpack those patterns and heal from those past wounds and allows them to move forward into a more healthy adulthood. So I wish all of that for you who are listening.

I have a very exciting announcement, which is that I am going to be doing Hope for Anxiety and OCD is first giveaway, I’m going to be giving away two copies of my ebook, finding the right therapist, which is about how to find the therapist who is right for you in order to enter, you have to be subscribed to the podcast, wherever you subscribe to your podcasts.

It doesn’t matter. Take a screenshot showing that you’ve subscribed or showing that you’ve written us a review. If you have written us a review, you will get five entries instead of one entry. So one entry for subscribers and five, for people who have written a review, you could take a screenshot and send it to the email address, giveaway@hopeforanxietyandocd.com.

Again, that’s giveaway@hopeforanxietyandocd.com to enter and you will have until the end of March in order to enter and I am so excited to be able to give those away. And I hope that that helps someone out there, but also encourages people to subscribe to our show and to tell other people about it.

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.

20. Overcoming Sexual Anxiety and Dysfunction For Women with Kelly Ehlert, PT

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 20. Overcoming Sexual Anxiety and Dysfunction For Women with Kelly Ehlert, PT

Discussion with Kelly Ehlert, PT, DPT, OCD, COMT, CDNT. Kelly is a Pelvic Floor Physical Therapist who works with women experiencing pain during sex. Kelly also opens up about the issues she experienced after giving birth to her daughter.  

  • Different messages about sex that can trip women up (moral, medical, media)
  • Common sexual issues in women
  • What is pelvic floor physical therapy and how can it help women?
  • Connection between stress (fight/flight/freeze response) and desire
  • Why we’re all normal in our own way

Kelly’s PT practice: Priority Physical Therapy
Book: Come as You Are

Support the show 

See more:

Supporting Your Anxious Spouse 

More podcast episodes

Transcript of Episode 20

Hope for Anxiety and OCD, episode 20. If this is your first time with us, we are all about reducing shame, increasing hope, and developing healthier connections with God and others. You can find us online anytime www.hopeforanxietyandocd.com. 

Today’s show has a special disclaimer that it may be distressing for some listeners and if you have little ears listening you may want to stop the recording and pick this up at another time when there aren’t children in the room. I have an interview to share with you that I did with Kelly Ehlert. We talk about something that I believe the church doesn’t talk enough about and that is sex. 

Sex is an amazing and wonderful thing, but a lot of times there are mixed up messages that we receive from a variety of sources. We’re going to talk about those on the show, and we’re also going to talk about sexual dysfunction for women specifically. What happens when things go wrong in the bedroom? What do you do about it? How to get help and hope for these situations. Kelly was open enough to share some of her personal story which I think just adds to what she does professionally, which we’ll get to a little bit later. So let’s dive into the interview. 

Carrie: Today on the show, we have Kelly Ehlert, and we’re going to get into what you do a little bit later. We’re going to maybe leave people in suspense for just a little bit to have this conversation about some of the messages that we receive in the media about sex through watching TVs and movies, but also in the church. Some of the conversations surrounding sex and baggage that women specifically can have from some of those messages and also experiences with sex maybe that weren’t positive because not everybody has a stellar, positive experience with sex.

Do you want to talk a little bit, maybe about your background or your experience like in the church, just in general and then surrounding these messages? 

Kelly: Yeah, thanks for having me. I grew up really conservative. I grew up at Church of Christ. I grew up outside of DC, so not quite the Bible belt but where sex was off the table. You did not do that till you got married. I heard things on the bus and behind the bleachers. You hear all sorts of things I don’t think I quite understood until later. I will say my mom was a nurse and I remember asking her about a blow job and why would somebody like that. I remember asking things, I don’t think I felt particularly shameful, but I also didn’t know what to ask or why certain things were. I went to Lipscomb. My husband and I met and we waited to get married. A lot of his background I think was the same. You meet, you wait, and then you figure it out when you get married. It’s kind of what we were joking about. We’re supposed to know what we do once we get married. There’s some magical thing that happens and your brain and your body know exactly what to do and in reality, it’s kind of a learned thing. Some of it to Nate there’s arousal, and there’s a certain procedure that your body goes through, but I think as women, ours depends on context a lot more than I think we realized.

Carrie: I think my messages were similar. I had messages in the church that were no, no, no until you get married and then somehow when you get married, it’s kind of like, “well, you know, sex is good.” All of a sudden this whole thing that I built up this idea around that maybe it was bad or shameful, or just not even knowing what to expect. And then all of a sudden it’s like, “woohoo” your wedding night’s supposed to be amazing and everything they’re following. And I had a really hard time in my first marriage trying to make that shift and switch of even seeing myself as a sexual being. I didn’t. And then from the school system, there was a lot of fear messages around sex and a lot of anxiety, like you could get an STD, you can get pregnant, something awful is going to happen to you if you have sex. So there was not really a lot of positive lingo about some of the things that we want to talk about, like God created us, women and men, as sexual beings. I had someone tell me when I was newly married, they said,” yeah, our parents talk about sex was kind of Adam and Eve figured it out and you can too.”

Kelly: And there’s so much more than that. It should be so much more and I think opening the conversation up earlier with your partner, your spouse rather than later is more beneficial. We have to be enlightened to the idea that communication needs to happen. I think we just assume. We put our assumptions on them when you know my husband and I’ve talked through quite a bit, I’m a physical therapist and we’ll get into some more of that, but I had a lot of issues after I had my daughter and there were several things that, the things that I didn’t like about myself, he had to tell me, “Kelly, I don’t care” or “I still love you despite that.” So I think a lot of the things kind of what I said a minute ago about the context is we sabotage ourselves, assuming that what we don’t like about ourselves is something that they pick apart when in reality that may be something they enjoy about us, or it may be something they don’t even think about.

Carrie: It’s not like even on the radar, one of the things that bothers me about movies and TV shows is there’s this idea or this message that you can just hop into bed with anyone at any old time and have great, amazing sex. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t known them before today, you can have amazing sex that evening, and you’re all wrapped up in the sheets and it’s wonderful. I think that puts a lot of pressure on people to feel like, okay, so then what happens if it doesn’t work that way? For me, what happens if I start to, maybe there’s something wrong with me that I’m not able to do this thing that I feel like everybody else is engaging in and they’re having a pleasurable experience. So let’s talk a little bit about some of the common sexual issues that women face. 

Kelly: Okay. I guess in my field, when I get folks is more postpartum, because I think that’s when people around that area, even if it was an area that was very secluded, you have a baby and all of a sudden everybody’s messing with your stuff.

And so it makes it okay to, to kind of get things checked. So generally I see postpartum pain with intercourse, either penetration, just that initial touch and even deeper. I’ve had some it’s called vaginismus where it’s like the vaginal canal and even everything around it, it’s almost like it shrinks up or tightens up. So anything around that region that whole vulvar region gets super sensitive to touch and a lot of it’s kind of mental with it too, because the body knows it’s going to hurt. So if anybody messes with anything or even just sitting the body tends to cringe and further feed into that. So we’ve got to work usually with one of you guys, a counselor to work through some of the why. And I’ve seen fractured tailbones postpartum where the pelvic floor is attached to the tailbone and it hurts with intercourse that way. I guess mainly kind of to answer your question, I see a lot more pain-driven issues and then the causes can be different, but there can also be a lack of orgasm if the pelvic floor is really, really weak and orgasm is just a contraction of the pelvic floor. So there’s less sensation. The less sense of you that feels good and so if it doesn’t feel good, then why do it? And we kind of go down that rabbit hole, but I’d say the biggest factor and what statistically we see is just a lack of desire due to stress. Your body’s chased by a lion all day long. I wouldn’t want to have sex, but it’s still in that stress mode. And I think all of us can identify with that over the last year where we’re just not in our typical state of mind and workplace. 

Carrie: So tell us a little bit about what you do and then we’ll talk a little bit further about those responses in the body.

Kelly: As a physical therapist, my background is an orthopedic physical therapist. I’m board certified in that. So anything neck, backs, jaws, shoulders, any kind of joint, but then also with my kids, I went down the women’s health path. So that’s an extra coursework to look at the internal aspect of the pelvic floor and the pelvic floor is just the insides of your pelvis. So it’s the muscles that help control your pee and your poo.

It’s the muscles that allow you to have pleasure with sexual intercourse or anything around that. It’s the muscles that help stabilize your pelvis and it’s the group of muscles that also help you kind of support all your organs up and in. So this part of our body, I never realized how important it was.

And I think it’s just a part of our body that I appreciate a lot more after having kids. But when you realize what it does for us, it’s amazing. You don’t realize when something is working well, how much it does until it stops working and you start noticing leaking or pain or heaviness or issues with jumping, that kind of stuff.

Carrie: That makes a lot of, a lot of sense. So do you usually get referrals from say OB-GYN who know that their patients are having issues and they would benefit from pelvic floor physical therapy? 

Kelly: Most recently, I started off more cash pay model. We’re starting to delve into some of the insurance, but most of my clients find me through word of mouth. I have very few referring practitioners. If they are then it’s Kairos and Pilates and massage therapists because they’re dealing with that population. And honestly, a lot of us, I think our generation, the thirties and below are a lot more proactive, so there’s a lot more looking and searching. And this topic, this conversation is way less taboo than the generations prior to us. So I think most of my ladies have found me because they’ve asked questions or they’re on Instagram. So, yes and no. I would say a lot more word of mouth in the last six, eight months span like general providers, like orthopedists and that kind of thing because I am a smaller practictioner but yes, that in the bigger groups, that’s where they get a lot of their clients.

Carrie: How do people know if they might be a good candidate for this type of therapy? 

Kelly: So there’s actually a really good screen that I have on my website. Anything from pain with prolonged sitting, sciatica pain with intercourse, like we mentioned, any leakage, even like abdominal pain and discomfort.

If you have constipation, all that pertains to the women’s health, physical therapy world. Issues with breathing. Any abdominal surgery, I think would be good because what we’re finding is there’s a high correlation with abdominal surgeries even abdominoplasties that scar can add here down. And we get, I think it’s like as high as 40% chance of bladder irritation, like bladder issues and then bowel obstructions.

So there’s a wide plethora of things that we kind of see and work on. 

Carrie: Yeah, let’s kind of circle back to that. Talking about the nervous system response and this stress response that keeps us perhaps out of desire, I guess, is what you were saying like if we’re really ramped up, it’s hard for us to have a desire to engage sexually.

Kelly: I guess the best, I’m gonna bring this book up. You guys can’t see it, but there’s a book called Come As You Are by Emily Nagoski can never say her name and it’s almost 400 pages that she really talks a lot of levels on, one, know your anatomy, which is probably the biggest thing being on this side of it is if you don’t know yourself how are you going to expect somebody else to know you too.

That’s kind of first and foremost, but she talks a lot about the stress cycle and how we, how we either feed into it or how we can work out of it when your body is in that constant fight flight or freeze, or if it’s had a trauma and that’s more what’s your kind of world is, I feel like you can probably speak more to that.

Whether you recognize it or not, the body holds that trauma, or there’s usually something mechanical that occurs whether you consciously or subconsciously recognize that feeds in. So when you’re in that constant stress node, your body’s in fight that fight flight or freeze your body is in survival mode. It doesn’t need to procreate. It needs to survive. Like you said, the last thing we need is to go have an intimate moment. Now for some 10 to 20%, according to Emily’s book, that actually derives sex, like that’s a turn on for them where the rest of us, the 80, the 90% of us, that’s a turnoff when our brain is busy, we’re on that hamster wheel we can’t kind of actively, maybe enjoy and participate as much. And as a female, that’s really what there is no pink viagra because we are so context dependent. we need the sounds. We need the smells. We need the kids in bed. We need to be loved like we need all these things usually in order for that switch to really go off.

And she has a really cool worksheet in there on figuring out what turns your brakes on and what turns your kind of your accelerator on and stress for most of us is a really big break step around or where it just. Your system just dies down and that’s the last thing it kinda needs. You’ve just got to figure out how to break that cycle.

Carrie: That’s interesting because I have had women say, well, I just don’t want to, but they have a hard time maybe even being aware we’re breaking down some of these different aspects of things that keep them in that fight flight or freeze mode or they’re so used to just living in that heightened state. And I don’t know what your experience has been, but I don’t think it always has to be a sexual trauma to cause these types of dysfunctions, it can be other types of situations that were maybe chaotic in your family growing up that leads you to be in that state and that may affect you sexually.

Kelly: Even just your assumptions, kind of going back to our conversation about maybe our preconceived notions. In her book, she talks a lot about gardens like your sexuality is your garden and our society and our culture and our family puts all these little weeds in there and we have to figure out what within that garden is truly what we believe in what was planted there by however we live and whatever we live. And so I wrote this down because it kind of helps me, I guess, break things down and help me identify personally, and then professionally where I believe. So she talks a lot about there’s three types of messages, there’s moral, a medical message, and the media message. And so kind of going back to what you said is that doesn’t matter where you are, just identifying I think what your beliefs are is huge. So she talked about one of the moral messages being were damaged goods like if you have sex or you like it and you lose your virginity, then you’ve lost all value. Maybe a century-old mindset of once you give yourself away, nobody else is gonna want you. You just need to accommodate your partner. I’ve watched a movie on Netflix, it’s kind of their whole role in society is to appease the male and make him feel good. It has nothing to do with what the female’s body is wanting to do. You just check that box.  And the other one is the medical model where you can cause damaged goods. Like you said, you can cause STDs and you can cause pregnancy. And it’s just very medical where you get this, then this, then you get aroused and you ejaculate and then you’re done, but there’s no emotion. And then the third message is around the media where you’re inadequate. You don’t know what you’re doing. If you don’t know 15 different ways to have an orgasm or 15 different positions in which feels good to you and your partner. You’re too fat. You’re too skinny.

There’s all these little messages that feed in too. I think what we, once again, we sometimes can sabotage ourselves. I think we take the enjoyment out of it because we assume that I shouldn’t enjoy it. It should be for him or society says, if I enjoy it, I must let, like, we put these names to it, but why is that?

And I don’t know. I don’t know the answer, I think just identifying the thought, maybe important in the beginning,

Carrie: I think a lot of times we don’t evaluate the messaging has been and so then if we have negative messaging, it’s important for us to say, “what am I putting in that’s different into my mind?” And hopefully something like this is a start to that to help people evaluate. What is it that I really believe about sex? What have I taken from the media from morally, from the church, from my family, from the kids behind the bleachers? And some of that information is way off of where we need to be.

I’m curious for you, how you shifted your thought process maybe on sex or had a more positive view of sex? 

Kelly: So definitely more of a personal conversation, but I think a lot of it is going through that book. I had a lot of pain after my daughter with intercourse and telling my husband, “no.” Being able to say no, gave me more power than I think I realized I had. But then I remember asking the doctor about it and she’s like, ”Oh, well that’s just typical rub some cream on it.” And that was eight, 10 years ago before I think the pelvic health world became so popularized, I guess in the last four to five years, I would hope in the next five years, we’re the first line of defense for postpartum. They clear you and then you come to see us for anything else. But I think being able to shift that mindset of it doesn’t have to be penis and vagina intimacy. It can be anything else like sex doesn’t always have to be, and you don’t have to necessarily get off. Being able to talk through, “I just don’t want it tonight” because I think I went a long time with it. Well, he needs to initiate it like that’s just the man’s role. He needs to want it in order for me to be okay with it. And you know, I have another couple of stats here, but 30% of people are responsive,

My husband comes to me 30% of the time I respond to that, only 15% of us are like spontaneous, where it’s like, “Oh, I want sex like, let’s go get him the rest of us.” They’re like, “Oh, I kind of want it. Oh, but he’s there.” But it’s a combo of the situation. I think for me recognizing that he wants me to want him, like he likes that pursuit as well.

And massaging is good like touch. Just being able to be okay with not just jumping into bed. And maybe I was just super, super rigid in my beliefs, and it was like, you give him what he needs and get out and go rinse off. We’ve been able to talk through some stuff and then being maybe more, let’s say, more experimental, whatever, but being more open with trying different things.

Carrie: I always tell clients, and I’m curious if you agree with this from the medical side of your work. I really believe that great sex requires great communication. I mean, you have to be able to have those conversations, even if they’re hard, or even if they’re uncomfortable to be able to say, “Hey, when you do this, that feels good.” Even just language that we use in the bedroom. I like this type of wording and not that type of wording or these are some things that would be helpful for me to hear from you.” And if you’re not able to have those conversations with your partner. I just don’t think that you’re going to be able to have this expectation that it’s going to be great if you’re not able to communicate and talk about what you enjoy because different people obviously enjoy different things.

Kelly: Yeah, and that was one of my big takeaways from that book too, is everybody is normal within their own realm. We all have similar anatomy. We all have similar kinds of patterns. Anatomically we go through this typical pattern of arousal on through, but we have different things that turn us on and turn us off.

And you can’t expect your spouse or partner to know that If you don’t tell them, “Hey, when you do that, that was good. Do that again,” They have to be told that like a little kid, like they go by your vibes in your words and so the words aren’t present, then you’re not validating them or yourself.

Carrie: Where do people start If they are noticing they’re having sex maybe less and less often? And that might be a warning sign for them or what would be kind of like a good first step if they feel like their sexual relationships declining? 

Kelly: I guess it would be kind of like you were saying as self-assess it. It’s situational because something else has taken that place in terms of time or the stress. There are specific sex therapists out there. I have one friend that I will refer folks to, but I don’t have anybody specific, so that may be better. I’m in kind of stepping back to say, well, I noticed this and figure out. I always like finding the why with everything within the therapy world. It’s I can work your neck out, but if it’s going to come back because you’re pastorally not correcting it, then kind of the same with this it’s I think backtracking to is it because I just had a baby and everything hurts? Is it because your kids just stressed you out and you had to go pull them out of jail and you’re in that fight-flight or freeze? Is it just because you’re tired? Isn’t it hormonal? What’s driving the bus and then from there it will be either probably finding the right practitioner to guide you in that direction.

Sometimes it’s talk therapy. Sometimes it’s an OB-GYN or somebody that can give you a hormone replacement. 

Carrie: I think it’s really important in these types of situations where this can happen for a lot of different areas, but specific sexually, there may be some medical components involved and then there may be some psychological components involved. And when we’re looking at the situation, it’s hard to assess what’s medical and what’s psychological. I think it’s important for the medical community and the counseling community to really work together for us to be able to say, Hey, maybe you need to follow up with a women’s clinic or with your OB-GYN about that.

And for the medical community to say, Hey, has there been any trauma in your past, is there anything that’s been unaddressed that you feel like could be contributing to this issue?” Or do you just need some skills to learn how to calm your body down to like learn how to wind down at the end of the day?

We’re running 90 to nothing too often and so really learning those skills is a good process. 

Kelly: I agree with that. I have a lot of patients that I’ll suggest things to, but nothing is going to change unless you actually try some things and the consistency, a little goes a long way. So being consistent with whatever you’re trying, give it enough time. Going back to your medical model, there’s some skin issues that can cause pelvic floor dysfunction, but that can, the skin issues can turn into cancer. So for me, being able to recognize, “Hey, this is not something that’s within my scope.

You need to go see some, you know, somebody beyond a therapist or a PT. You need to go get some medical treatments.” I think I would say most of us hopefully are able to determine some of that. We got to get a gut feeling in terms of when things are not going right. 

Carrie: But what is a usual treatment length for someone that receives, um, pelvic floor physical therapy?

How long does it take somebody to go through therapy? It’s probably similar. It depends a lot on the situation. 

Kelly: I would say most. So if it’s more of an incontinent. Let’s say the pelvic floor is influenced by your GI system, your endocrine system, your skin, musculoskeletal your integument. It has so many systems that cross up in, and then through that, I find that part of our body to be slower to learn than like a shoulder or neck or something that you can physically see because there are so many other little factors that go in. I usually say two to three months for kind of some of the women’s health issues.

If it’s postpartum, I’ll encourage them, a year and a half to two years for you to get back to normal, to feel normal. Not that they’re with me the whole time, but just giving them that timeline of kind of biological tissue healing, that kind of stuff. But it also does depend on do you need some psychological help. Can I physically help you here and I show you how to mechanically help your body move better but every time you’re stressed it feeds back in how do we take that stressor away or help you recognize when you feed in and in that talk therapy, I’m the catalyst and I see you a month or two, and then you go see somebody else and come back and we revisit or see a doctor. There’s a clinic in downtown Nashville called the WISH Clinic (Women’s Institute for Sexual Health) and they do quite a bit. They do pelvic floor botox, injections, trigger point injections. I’ve actually trigger point dry needled the pelvic floor. They do vaginal suppositories with valium for kind of decreasing. There’s a lot of options. 

Carrie: That’s really good for people to know. I mean, even if people have had problems in the past that they find reoccurring that the growth in treatment options in this area, like you were saying has probably grown exponentially in the last five or so years. I didn’t know that they were using things like botox for that.

Kelly:  Yeah, I’ve got a client right now who had endometriosis then a hysterectomy and everything just got locked up in response to I think the surgery and then all the pain prior. I’ve needled her and we’ve done some really cool stuff in terms of getting her pelvis moving. But she’s done the botox. She’s like 90, 95% better. Now it’s taken us a couple of months because it’s been a couple of year’s worth of issues we’re having to kind of delve through, but they’re phenomenal. And that just knowing the options that are on the table besides just don’t do not let somebody cut something out because it hurts that does not answer all the questions. If you have abdominal pain, do not let them do a hysterectomy without ruling out endometriosis and some of those other triggers or even pelvic floor tone can increase abdominal pain because it irritates blot like there’s so many overlapping things.

If nothing else, do not let them cut on you because scar tissue creates more pain and more attention and more adhesions like, “Can we just go down that cycle?” 

Carrie: That’s really good because I think doctors are just kind of like doing their best and it’s like, well, here’s an option and there’s an option and maybe we should do this. And you go down this rabbit hole sometimes of things that like you were saying potentially may cause more problems than what you had to begin with. But I guess the message that I would want people to take away from the totality of this conversation is if you’re having issues with pain during intercourse, Hey know that you’re not alone, that other women are facing these types of issues. People aren’t talking about it. So you may feel really alone, but these are relatively common things that you see in your practice that I saw in my practice and that there is hope, and there is help and keep knocking on the doors until you get the help that you need.

Go to therapy. See how that does or go to your doctor, talk with them. Talk with them about all the different treatment options that are there for you and ask questions and keep going until you find somebody that can help you. You may not find that person on the first or second try, but you may find them, the third person that you talked to.

So keep it hopeful. I guess from a spiritual, Christian perspective, I’m curious maybe some of your thoughts about that as far as what would you tell a Christian woman who’s struggling with these types of issues?

Kelly: I have a nine-year-old and I’ve been trying to figure out how do I give her the message of your body is beautiful. God created it just for you.

You need to keep it holy like keep it to yourself, but at the same time how do I get her to understand that? She needs to know what it is like. It’s okay to look at yourself. It’s okay. That is your body. You only get one. Kind of what I said earlier is if you don’t know it, you can expect somebody else to either that getting comfortable with your anatomy. Just knowing the difference between a vulva, vagina the canal, the vulva, that whole region and knowing where your pee comes out, where your poop comes out. Knowing you have three holes down there. Knowing just what things are. And I don’t think there should be shame around touching. Guys play, I mean, my son’s do that. He pulls off on that thing all night. Well, what I’m saying that it’s acceptable. Kind of going back to the societal, men are supposed to get off and we’re just supposed to help them. I think we need to have pleasure too and we need to, I don’t know the best answer like I don’t think that masturbation is bad.

I think that’s a message that I have to personally figure out how to communicate with my daughter. That’s something my husband and I have talked about in terms of what I like and what he likes and are we okay doing separate things? Do we want that to be like, that just needs to be a conversation piece within the relationship.

If you’re single, I think it’s fine to explore. You’re not denying. The Bible talks about not denying your partner and not saying being consensual, but not denying your partner there that pleasure. I can’t think of the verse, but something to that extent. And so that’s still a grey area and I don’t have a good answer for you. 

Carrie: Yeah, I think this sense of we were created uniquely by God with a purpose and God created us as physical beings as emotional beings, as sexual beings, as spiritual beings and somehow that’s all wrapped up in the same body and we have to figure out how those pieces in our work with each other. I do believe that sex is a spiritual connection when you’re married between you and your spouse and that’s a picture of our connection and our union with Christ and the church, and something really sacred and valuable and holy about sex. And yet at the same time, It doesn’t always work the way. it’s supposed to because we’re humans and our bodies are flawed and sometimes we go through surgery or childbirth and sometimes things don’t work the way they’re supposed to.

And knowing that, that doesn’t make you like, “Oh gosh, I’ve got this horrible thing wrong with me and I need to have a bunch of shame about it.” 

Kelly: You’re not letting this dysfunction define you. Acknowledging it and knowing you were meant for more.

Carrie: Yeah, and kind of like keep pursuing that journey until that your sex is restored in your marriage and relationship. I think that there’s hope there. 

Kelly: When you look through in Song of Solomon, I mean, he talks about her breasts. God let that be and God allowed that to be in that special and I think part of that is skewed I think, with how we grew up in terms of that, that gets twisted and it shouldn’t be that way, but my husband’s words are God made it and it’s not dirty if God made it that way. 

Carrie: Thank you for sharing some really valuable information. Today I feel like there’s so much that we could go into and really just like we’re able to scratch the surface on things, but I hope that it will be kind of a springboard for people to maybe go get more education or look into some different avenues. 

So since this podcast is called hope for anxiety and OCD at the end of every episode, I like to ask our guests to share a story of hope, a time that you received hope from God or another person. 

Kelly: Sure, I guess kind of what got me into this field, in general, was issues after my daughter and so in terms of that riff between me and my spouse since we’re on this topic, I couldn’t enjoy him. I remember laying in the bed crying and then going like being able to go through courses to help my clients actually helped. It did more, I guess. You kind of grow as your professional relationships with your clients grow. I think that’s why I am like, sex is better because that communication had to occur.

And I was able to mechanically in my brain, went through the coursework, was like, well, that’s why that hurts because this is scarred down and for my brain, I needed the biomechanical. I need somebody to explain it to me on my level that I could. It didn’t hurt just because I had a baby, it hurt because I had scar tissue because of muscle tore and every time he went through that spot, it made it tear more. That made sense to me and I think just being able to break things down on my level gave me that ability to be like, okay, I can do something about this. This is my body. I know how to help myself and that led me down the path of all right now I have a second kid, I want to do this for other moms. I don’t want them to lay in the bed being miserable, dreading, “Oh my gosh, he’s coming. Is he going to want it tonight? Am I going to just cry again?” I want to enjoy sex. I want my partner to enjoy me. I want it to be consensual.

I want to go on a date and come home and be ravenous like the movie. Like I want it to be that way and I want my clients and my patients to be able to understand that it can. It can be that way like there’s my hope.

Carrie: That’s how empowering just to have that knowledge about your own body and why it was responding, the way that it was, and then realizing it, doesn’t always have to be this way and I can get some help and help myself and move forward.

Kelly: That’s far back in your lap and understanding. I just think like you said, keep searching. Be your own advocate. If you don’t think something’s right, we have that good gut-fixed sense as women. I think we just have something, some intuitive, something innately in us that helps us help each other, but also help ourselves. Our body wants to thrive too.

We want that homeostasis, I guess. Keep searching. If you’re getting the runaround and help, there’s a ton of us out there on social media now, that you see something you can go down that path and search a little harder.

Carrie: We’ll put links on your information in the show notes and as well as for the book that you talked about too. Thank you so much for sharing today. 

Kelly: Thank you. I appreciate your time. 

_________________________________

There were so many good nuggets in that interview and I hope it sparks some further thought in conversation in your mind, if you’re a woman about how can I make my sex life better for myself and for my spouse.

Do you have lingering questions from either this episode or other episodes that we’ve done on the show? If you are leaving with unanswered questions or feel like you want to know more about a specific issue I would love to hear your feedback on the show because I want to make it something that you want to continue to come listen to. So you can drop me a line anytime through our website hopeforanxietyandocd.com and I promise to read those and respond to you. 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.

19. Thriving as an Introvert in an Extrovert World with Holley Gerth

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Counseling, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 19. Thriving as an Introvert in an Extrovert World with Holley Gerth

On this episode, I had the privilege of interviewing Holley Gerth, author of The Powerful Purpose of Introverts to discuss her own experience of burnout from trying to be an extrovert after becoming a published author.

  • How the introvert brain processes information differently than the extrovert brain
  • Why introverts are more susceptible to anxiety and depression
  • How to communicate to an extrovert who is asking for your opinion on the spot
  • Why you should actually show up early to a party if you are an introvert 
  • Examining the connection between fear and excitement
  • What you might need as an introvert on vacation, during the holidays, or at a conference

Resources and Links:
Book: Quiet
Book: The Introvert Advantage 

Support the show 

See more:

10 Ways to Have a Calmer Mind and Body in 5 Minutes or Less

More Podcast Episodes

Transcript

Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD, episode 19. Today’s show is all about introversion. And if you’re wondering what in the world does that have to do with anxiety, we’re going to explain that in the show that there’s a connection between introverts being more likely to struggle with anxiety or depression.

Sometime back, I had picked up a book, The Powerful Purpose of Introverts and found this book to be so validating of my own experience and also provided some practical tips on how to thrive as an introvert. So I knew that I wanted to ask Holley to be on the show and she so graciously agreed. So here is my interview with author Holley Gerth.

Carrie: So Holley, I wanted to start by telling you a story that I think will help us dive into this conversation about introverts. I was sitting in my friend’s living room and I’ve known this couple for probably about 10 years now. And we were talking about theme parks and they said, “Oh, Hey, you know, what do you think about going to this theme park?”  And I said, well, I said, do you know, that’s a lot of people to be around and it’s outdoors and it’s hot. And I said, if I have kids it might be a different story because I would suffer through it for the kids, but I said it as an introvert with all that activity going on around me, going to a theme park does not sound very fun. And my friend looks at me, the husband’s super serious and says, “You’re an introvert? “Yes, I’m an introvert” but it was just so funny to me because we have all these misconceptions about what it means to be an introvert. And here’s somebody that knew me for 10 years and wouldn’t have pegged me as an introvert.

Holley: Yeah, I think that’s a great story that happens so often. And the example you gave of a theme park is such a good illustration of the brain differences between introverts and extroverts. So they feel best when there’s a lot coming at them because it releases more dopamine in their system, which is their preferred neurotransmitter. And for us, it’s just a little too much sometimes. 

Carrie: Right. The external stimulation of having to process everything that goes on around you and picking up even on little minute experiences, even conversations, sometimes really good conversations with friends that are maybe more rich and deep, I’ll go home and I’ll be thinking about that for a half an hour to an hour, whereas I think other people just kind of they’re like go home and go to sleep. And Carrie has to have like processing time, which is just different. 

Holley: Yes, we do. Our nervous systems are more sensitive. And so we take in more. They’re like nuts with small holes and that’s why introverts reach, they’re done points pasture. And then we need to do that processing, like you described where we empty our net a little by thinking through things, and then we’re ready for more. 

Carrie: Yeah. I know that in your book, you talk about how introverts are more prone towards anxiety and depression. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Holley: Yeah, it’s actually related. It seems they’re still studying it, but it seems related again to that more sensitive nervous system. So we’re just more impacted by the things that we experience and some of our brain wiring. It’s just a vulnerability and that’s part of my story. And for a long time, I wanted to get rid of that part of me completely. I was like, “God must have messed up” and I want to get rid of it completely. But over time I realized it’s actually tied to my strengths. So if you picture the core characteristics of who you are is like being on a continuum and in the middle would be that nervous system that introverts have. And on the left side of the continuum would be anxiety and that could be labeled struggle.  But on the right side of the continuum, there would be a label that says strength. And that’s where things like you described that perceptiveness and empathy and ability to notice things is. So I think for introverts, when it comes to overcoming anxiety, depression, really saying this is tied to some of my strengths, and it’s not about changing who I am, but moving toward the strength sides of those core parts of who we are that can go in either direction.

Carrie: Yeah. Those strength parts a lot of times are often overlooked in a society maybe that caters a little bit more towards extroverts. 

Holley: Yeah. I think so but it’s surprising that actually about half the population is made up of introverts. We’ve just learned to act like extroverts when we’re in public, because like you said, our culture is more extrovert centric, but I think that introverts and extroverts are actually an intentional, complimentary pairing on God’s part that he made both and we’re better together. So I think that when introverts dare to be who they are and extroverts do the same, then we’re all a lot better off. 

Carrie: I love that because I have had similar experiences I think to what you just shared of I feel awkward in social settings, or maybe I don’t know what to say. I struggled at one period in my young adulthood, really of making conversations with people, not knowing how to do kind of the small talk thing. [00:06:03] I’d love the one-on-one deep conversations but I didn’t know how really to interact in a group of people. I actually went through a period where I made myself talk to strangers which sounds really funny, but it was my way of practicing small talk. And I knew that I wasn’t going to necessarily run into or see these people ever again. [00:06:28] So that made it a little bit easier to kind of like practice some of that stuff. 

One of the things I liked that you said in the book was that you try to bring an extrovert with you to a party but they also appreciate having an introvert, which I thought was really cool too. 

Holley: Yeah. I usually bring, I call them my designated extroverts.

[00:06:52] So if I’m at a conference or somewhere like that, then I look for an extrovert and it does work out well because they want to kind of flip from conversation to conversation and talk to as many people as possible a lot of this times. And then if there’s one person that wants to go really in depth and tell me a long story and talk, maybe and cry for an hour, then they’re like, “you got this one.”

[00:07:16] We both have our strong points. And again, those are stereotypes. Of course, introverts can learn to network, like you said, and extroverts are of course caring people too. I do think that when we come team up and help each other out that that can be really useful. And the reason why we prefer those conversation types for extroverts, they use a brain pathway for processing that shorter, faster, more focused on the present [00:07:46] So they really easily do that quick, small talk. It’s also why they like talking on the phone more than introverts and introverts use a pathway that’s longer, more complex. It takes into account the past, present and future. So we need a bit of time to respond, but often when we do, it adds depth and insight context to what we’re saying in that conversation [00:08:10] So again, it’s something that can be frustrating at times, but it’s also strength. It’s what makes you a great counselor that you have the ability to use that longer pathway and go to those deeper places with your clients. 

Carrie: I absolutely believe that because there will be times where I’m outside of session and I’m thinking about a client and their situation in a little bit more depth, and I’m able to have some mental clarity. [00:08:37] And the nice part about my job is I don’t always have to think on the fly. I can come back and say, “Hey, I was thinking about this thing, and I think it might fall in this area, or I think it might be helpful if we shifted direction over here a little bit.” It’s super frustrating when you’re in a corporate environment or even sometimes in church, you’re in meetings and people are spitting out ideas and sometimes that processing speed is a lot faster.

[00:09:06] And so for the introverts to know, it’s okay I think to come back and say, “I thought about this a little bit more” and to not feel guilty for not being able to think on the fly, like maybe we see other people doing. 

Holley: Yeah, that’s a great tip. One thing that I’ve learned through the process of writing this book is that extroverts just want a response. [00:09:30] They don’t necessarily need the response. And as an introvert, I tend to think I have to have my fully formed as close to perfect as possible response before I say anything at all. But actually extroverts just want to know that we’re engaged in listening. And so I’ve found It’s okay to say I need some time to think about it because it really matters to me [00:09:53] or I want you to know I’m listening to you and I hear you. I just need a little bit of time to work through that. And then let’s set up a time to get back together. And so that was freeing for me. I have a daughter who’s an extrovert. And so I’ve learned to say to her, things like that, “I hear you. I am listening.

[00:10:12] Let me have this a little bit, and then I will get back to you. I promise.” So that is one strategy. Also preparing ahead of time can help us. As little in the moment processing that we have to do that can be helpful. I’m sure you prepare for your sessions with clients. And then, like you said, you think about them afterwards. [00:10:33] That idea of saying especially in a meeting, “Hey, I’m going to get back to you by 8:00 AM tomorrow. I want to dig into this a little more.” So preparation, and then knowing you can just use a response. You don’t have to have the response and then asking for time for followup. Those are three good strategies to help with that.

Carrie: [00:10:51] That’s so good. I like having the practical things to say with other people, and that can help in a variety of different relationships that we’re talking about whether it’s your boss or your spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend, best friend, your child like you named.  This is just applicable in so many different areas.

[00:11:13] I’m curious for you what that process was of really embracing your introversion in a different way other than looking at it as a deficit, going from that to looking at it as a strength or as a God-given blessing. 

Holley: Yeah. Well, I did it by pushing myself into burnout. [00:11:39] So, especially when I first started publishing books, I started getting a lot of speaking invitations and I literally told myself I just have to be more of an extrovert now like that’s the job. And I said yes to everything to everyone without being very strategic about it. And at the end of one year where I traveled like 20 times, I was a keynote at a conference and the next morning in the worship service, I just couldn’t stop crying. [00:12:05] And I felt like God saying, “Go home.” And I knew he meant like go home and taking a nap because you are tired, but also go home to who I created you to be. And I realized that each of us are perfectly designed for God’s purpose for our lives not for anyone else’s, but for ours, we have what we need. And so I went home and I went to counseling. [00:12:29] That was part of my healing journey. I told my close people, “Hey, I’m not okay. I need to make some changes. I spent time with God” and just asking, what have I taken on that you never asked me to. And started saying “no” more strategically and started saying “yes” more strategically and realized that I didn’t have to do all those things in order to fulfill God’s purpose for me that I could be an introvert and still make an impact. [00:12:59] It was more than okay to just say this is who I am and I’m going to build my life around that. So it was a long journey and I wouldn’t recommend anyone do it that way but that’s how it worked for me. 

Carrie: I love that. I love that sense of, yes, I can fulfill God’s call on my life. Whoever’s hearing this, no matter what your personality is, no matter whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert, you can still fulfill God’s calling and it’s going to look like

what he intends it to look like for your life instead of trying to follow the pattern of other people. It’s so tempting in the days of social media to look on a profile or a public figure and say that person has it together, or I want to be like them but really we should be striving to be who God created us to be unique and individual. And there’s just everyone, I believe has a gift that they give to the world, that God has given us things to be able to give out to others. And that was just really beautiful how you shared that. 

Holley: Yeah, I agree. And even when we look at those around us, a lot of times we assume they’re extroverts and often they’re not. Some well-known introverts include Oprah, Jerry Seinfeld, Joanna Gaines, Abraham Lincoln, Max Lucado, Michael Jordan, Michael Phelps. The list goes on and on. And because we live in a more extrovert centric culture, we do assume, “Oh, they’re in public. They must be an extrovert,” but there are actually a whole lot of introverts doing really remarkable things. And so I think that is something I’ve learned too, that when I see someone that I think, “Oh, they’re an extrovert” to pause and be like, “maybe not”. [00:14:59] Maybe they’re in their zone of what I call brilliance and belonging, where there’s this thing that they do that brings them into a different place but maybe they’re an introvert just like me. 

Carrie: Do you feel at times, like God’s calling on, on you to do specific things has been totally scary?

Holley: Yeah.

Carrie: [00:15:27] I feel like that too. I wanted to ask you that because even like putting out this podcast, it’s terrifying. The only reason I continued doing it is because, well, one, I believe it’s got what God wants me to do. And two, I’m having enormous amounts of fun with it, talking to people and interviewing them, but it is scary to do new things or to put ourselves out there. [00:15:53] And I think sometimes as Christians, we may be have been fed this lie that if I’m doing something for the Lord or if I’m following God’s calling on my life somehow I’m supposed to have a hundred percent confidence in that, and I’m not going to experience anxiety and I’m not going to experience fear. [00:16:14] I just wanted to just dispel that myth because it’s a myth. 

Holley: Yeah. It is. I once looked at all the verses that say, “do not fear” in scripture and there are almost always to someone who’s already afraid. So it’s not like a command don’t ever feel fear, it’s God saying to us in a reassuring way, you don’t have to stay in that fear because I’m with you. [00:16:40] I realized that we are afraid when something matters to us. We don’t get scared about things we don’t care about, you know? I don’t get scared that I’m never going to get to be an accountant or an engineer. And probably folks who love their jobs are like, they’re not scared.

[00:16:58] They’re never going to get to be a writer or a podcaster. It’s the things that matter most to us that scare us most. So in that sense, the fear is never going away or in a way we don’t want it to, because that probably means that the passion is also going away. And so just recognizing that fear as. As proof that we’re doing work that matters. [00:17:23] And then I would say the day I stopped being afraid is the day I should probably walk away because it’s the day I think I can do it on my own without God’s help like fear keeps us dependent and saying, “okay, God, this is bigger than me. I don’t think I can do it, but I’m going to trust you.” He and through me.

[00:17:41] And then we take the next step forward. But I think fear is just with us when we do things that are worth doing. 

Carrie: Right. That connection between fear and passion is so huge because the passion is the thing that God gives you I believe to help you push through the fear. There’s something in your heart that you feel like you have to speak up about, or you have to share, or you have to do. Sometimes that anxiety is something that’s almost a confirmation for me of like, okay, like you said, this is something that God’s put on my heart and put in my life for a reason and a purpose, but I can also, with his help, move through that and move beyond that to the other side and do things that I couldn’t do on my own.

Holley: [00:18:42] Yeah. And it’s really interesting that from a brain perspective, fear and excitement use the same circuitry. It’s just about how we frame it to ourselves. Whether we tell ourselves like if we’re getting ready to speak. If we’re telling ourselves I’m scared out of my mind, or I’m excited. There’ve been studies that show, if you tell yourself I’m excited that it helps, even if you feel like you’re faking it, you may.  You know what am I saying?

[00:19:11] I’m not excited, I’m terrified but if we just learn even to change some of that language and link it more to that passion and excitement, because it is the same kind of circuitry in our minds that can help also. 

Carrie: I think some people should try that next time before going to a party, “I am so excited to be with my friends,” because that is true. [00:19:32] You’re excited to be with people, hopefully that you love and enjoy. Let’s talk about maybe some practical things that if people are struggling with anxiety in social settings or when they meet new people, those types of things. Are there any tips that you’ve found helpful for you or through your research?

Holley:  [00:19:57] Susan Cain wrote a book called “Quiet” about introverts and also one for kids. And she uses the metaphor of extroverts are like helicopters. Introverts are like airplanes. And so extroverts in social settings kind of immediately lift off. They’re just jumped right in and introverts need a runway.

[00:20:17] So to ease into it a bit more and so if you’re an introvert, it can actually help to get to places a little bit early so that you have time to get familiar with your surroundings, to feel comfortable there. See people come in one at a time instead of walking into a crowded room because it’s tempting right as an introvert to come late because we think that will help. But that any kind of preparation you can do ahead of time even if it’s just researching online the restaurant or the venue, or looking at the people’s Facebook profiles not in a stalkery way. I’m getting familiar with these people then that is helping yourself have a runway. [00:21:03] And so I think that’s one thing or even doing research ahead of time, like saying,” okay, what are some questions I want to ask people tonight,” having some things. So when you’re put on the spot, there’s something in your toolkit for using, and then just honoring your done point.  Knowing that because we process deeply and we take in a whole lot that it’s okay if we’re just done before other people that it’s okay If we’re just like “I’ve had enough, I’m ready to go home.” For socializing to be more about quality than quantity, I think is a helpful shift. And then finding ways to make bigger groups feel smaller.

[00:21:47] So in a group saying, how can I talk to one person at a time or taking on a role or responsibility, like at the holidays saying “I’m gonna wash dishes” because that means I get to stand by at the sink and catch my breath for a few minutes. Or I’m going to take the dog for a walk or I’ll be the one to run to the store often when introverts have a role or responsibility, social settings become more comfortable.

[00:22:15] It’s that unstructured time where it’s just about like the back and forth conversations that aren’t always our favorite, that can be challenging. So give yourself a runway or look for a role or responsibility when you’re in the setting.

Carrie:  One of the things that you mentioned that I’ve found super helpful for me.

[00:22:37] And it seems really silly, but I will become overwhelmed if I don’t look at the menu beforehand. If I’m going to a new restaurant, it’s like there are too many choices and too many options. And I feel like I have to read this whole thing and investigate it. And maybe other people don’t look at menus that way, but when you’re highly sensitive and that’s how you process the information, it’s just easier for me to.

[00:23:05] almost decide before I go to the restaurant, what I’m going to eat, or at least narrow it down to a few choices versus just having to do that all at once. And then usually people are trying to communicate with you as well like “Oh, Hey, how are you doing?” It’s like, okay, I can’t talk and read and think and everything all at the same time.

[00:23:25] I’ve found it helpful at parties. I think I read this in a book a long time ago. I had read a book as part of my process called the Introvert Advantage. I don’t even know if that’s still out but that book really helped me understand myself. And I think one of the things they said was don’t be afraid to sit down and let people come talk to you.

[00:23:48] I had an interesting experience at a networking event one time where everyone was mixing and mingling, and I just needed a break from meeting new people. So I sat down on the sofa and this extrovert woman came over and she started talking to me and I was thinking, Oh gosh, I came over here. So I could like just sit down.

[00:24:08] And she interpreted that as like,” Oh, you’re not having a good time. You’re not mixing and mingling.” And somehow like, “It’s my role in this networking event to come over and rope you back in.” So that was just a little, kind of funny misunderstanding, but I think it’s okay too kind of take a break or observe for a little while. [00:24:30] And sometimes people don’t understand that that that’s what you’re doing. They just think that you’re disengaged or not having a good time. 

Holley: Yeah, and I think that’s a common misconception. I think one reason why is that brain and nervous system wiring differences means that introverts and extroverts experience happiness differently. [00:24:52] And so for extroverts, happiness looks like enthusiasm and excitement and for introverts calm and contentment. And so that extrovert assumed because you were over there being calm and content that you must not be happy at the party. And so our loved ones can do the same.  If you’re in an introvert expert, marriage or friendship, or kids and parents. And so understanding that difference can be helpful. And also as introverts communicating, saying, I’m really enjoying, just watching everyone or just making it overt that we’re in our happy place. It just looks different than it does for extroverts. But a lot of times that’s what’s going on and I love your strategy of menus. [00:25:38] I do the same thing, and I’d never thought about it as an introvert HSP thing, but that makes so much sense. And I think I’m going to do that in broader ways too. Like if I’m going to a conference, I’m going to say this conference is a menu. I don’t have to eat everything on it. What do I most want to consume while I’m here and what will be the right amount for me that I get what I need, but I don’t over indulge in a way that makes me not feel good by the time I’m going home.

[00:26:11] And I think you could do the same with a vacation, with a lot of different things. So I love that strategy. 

Carrie: That’s so true of conferences because they will literally have like, okay, and here’s the breakfast for the new people. And then here’s all of your conference schedule and the special lunch. And then the dinner evening thing. [00:26:32] And I look at that and I’m like, “No, I don’t want to go all all to all of that.” It’s like when you’re having your evening 8:00 PM thing, I want to be in my PJ’s reading and decompressing because I’ve been around people all day long. What are you thinking?” So that’s really funny too, that you mentioned conferences because that’s been my experience of looking at them. [00:26:54] We have way too much stuff on this menu. I’m not going to go to all of that. 

Holley: And so to saying, I’m going to pick and choose. What’s going to add the most value and not worry about the risks. Again, it’s that quality over quantity, such an important strategy, especially for introverts. 

Carrie: I know that things like. [00:27:13] Trips or being around family for long periods, even people that you love and value my spouse. And we have introvert time.  There’s times where we just kind of want to go to a separate space in the house and just read or relax. And we just kind of check in with each other about that. Like, “Hey, are you cool if I go here and read” :Oh yeah.  That’s fine.”

[00:27:37] I just kind of need to decompress. And we don’t always have to be around each other all the time. And there’s a peace and a communication about that. I’ve had vacations with friends where like, I can think my best friend and  we kind of had an understanding of just like, we need time alone at the end of the day, we’re going to be around each other all day, doing fun things, going places and seeing people.

[00:28:05] And then there needs to be some kind of decompression time at the end where we’re not having to be fully engaged or talking to each other or doing an activity every second of the day. I think that’s it. That’s important in terms of when introverts are planning things like vacations, to really take that time and be gentle with themselves. You don’t have to absorb every single moment. You can have some happiness in your peace and contentment and relaxation at the end of the day. 

Holley: Yeah. And I think it can be helpful to ask each other, what will help you enjoy this vacation, the holidays? whatever it is that you’re going into with another person. [00:28:52] And so that gives introverts opportunity to say, “I’m going to need a nap, or I’m going to need an hour to read every day.” And the extroverts will say, “I’m going to need to have a little adventure every day,” whatever it is. And so a lot of times we just assume that other people are wired like us. And so we are afraid to ask for what we need or are we missing what someone else needs. [00:29:16] And so I think just having those conversations can be helpful. 

Carrie: There’s so much about this, as you start to develop an awareness of yourself, your own body even how you feel physically and emotionally, when you’re around other people, how you feel physically and emotionally doing certain tasks. Some may feel more draining to you than others. How you rejuvenate that mental and emotional energy. And if you can develop some awareness over those things, then it allows you to know what you need. And if you know what you need, then you can advocate for what you need. And there’s so many pieces I think that go together with that.

[00:30:06] I hope that some of this conversation helps spark like self reflection in our listeners just of how do I really feel in these situations. With anxiety, there’s a tendency to just avoid and just say, “It makes me feel uncomfortable. I’m not doing it” Party with 20 people and I only know one person, “I’m not going.” And I would just encourage people really to say instead of tapping out and avoiding to say, how can I Set myself up for success in this situation instead like some of the tips that we talked about a little bit earlier. How can I engage socially in a way that’s going to be most comfortable for me understanding that it’s not, it may not necessarily be a hundred percent comfortable.

Holley: [00:31:00] Yeah, that was a big aha for me was my anxiety is realizing that avoidance actually reinforces anxiety because we never learned that will we actually can do it, that we can make it through the party or the speech or whatever it is that’s making us anxious. And so the more we go through things that trigger anxiety and come out, okay [00:31:23] On the other side, that’s what actually decreases it. And so that has been a big aha for me personally, it’s just saying, like he said, okay, this is making me anxious. But I’m going to get some strategies and call for backup if I need it and I’m going to live through it. Usually on the other side, I say “that wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.” What I come up with in my head is usually so much worse than what actually happens. I think that’s great insight for your listeners that you’re sharing that. Lean into it when it’s tempting to pull away.

Carrie:  Are there things that you tell yourself or to get through some of those situations. What kind of like what the tipping point is? [00:32:12] How do I know that this is too going to be too much for my system or it’s something that I can manage and kind of get through with a little self encouragement?

Holley: Yeah, I think asking, “Am I making this decision out of fear? or out of intentionally taking care of who I am as an introvert?” because those are two different things. [00:32:38] If there’s an event that would probably be beneficial and I know that, but I’m just like, I’m scared. So I’m not going, then I try not to let myself off the hook, but if I’m saying, “I’m exhausted.” And I know the close people in my life need some things for me, and I’ve got to prioritize my energy and this event is just not making the cut because it’s a “want to” not a “need to” then that’s a different thing.

[00:33:09] And just saying it’s okay to prioritize what I spend my emotion and energy on especially as an introvert. And so just asking, where is this coming from? Is it from a fearful place or is it from a proactive place? I think can be helpful. 

Carrie: That’s really, really good. So before we end here at the end of every podcast, I like to ask the guests to share a story of hope, which is a time in which you received hope from God or another person.

Holley: [00:33:41] Okay. So my story of hope is my family story. I went through about a decade of infertility, my husband and I couldn’t have her own kiddos. And so we ended up adopting a 20 year old who basically aged out of the foster system. And so she’s now 27. And so she got married and we are Nana and Papi to Ula and Clement. [00:34:10] And so I literally wore a ring on my finger that said hope for all those years. And the ending to our story is not at all what I would have imagined, but it is now one that I would not trade for anything. So I think about that still when I’m in a situation where I’m waiting or I’m uncertain of the outcome, just knowing that God’s working out something probably better than I could have imagined on my own.

Carrie: [00:34:38] That’s awesome. Thank you so much for sharing that. So Holley, tell us a little bit about your book. 

Holley: It’s called the “Powerful Purpose of Introverts. Why The World Needs You to Be You.” I spent years doing the research behind it. It has tons of information, but I also did a survey of my blog subscribers about their biggest challenges as introverts.

[00:35:02] And I used that. I got thousands of responses. And so digging into that, I noticed patterns, patterns of struggles, but also patterns of strengths. And so the book really unpacks, what are the gifts and strengths the world has to receive from introverts and how can you individually recognize those strengths in yourself and maximize them and overcome the struggles that might get in your way. [00:35:30] And so I hope that it’s both encouraging but also very practical. There’s a lot of interactive tools in it. There’s questions for reflection. There’s all kinds of things like that. And if you’re an extrovert, I’ve heard from several extroverts now that reading it has helped their relationships with an introvert in their life. So if you’re married to an introvert or you’re parenting one, or if you just have a lot of friends that you love who are introverts, I think it can be beneficial for extroverts too. It has been a best seller and resonated more than I even imagined. So I hope everyone can get this message because I think it is something I wish I’d had 20 years ago. [00:36:14] It would have changed the trajectory of my life. It would have protected me from going to that place of burnout. And so I want everybody else to have it so that they do not have to go through what I did. You can let me be your warning. 

Carrie: Absolutely. I’ve really enjoyed it. It felt so validating for me to read.

[00:36:38] And I knew some about introverts from reading that I had done in the past and kind of my own journey of self discovery, but reading the book this time with all of the interweaves that you talked about of the research that you did, and the brain science has been like, “Oh, yeah. That makes so much sense.” And there are little checklists and different things and it’s just been, it’s been a good read. So thank you for writing it and sharing that with us and thank you for being on the show today and just sharing your wisdom there. 

Holley: Thanks for having me. 

_____________________________________________________________

I hope you enjoy listening to this interview with Holly. If there’s nothing else that you take away, I hope that you know that you were created uniquely by God with a purpose and intention in mind. He did not make a mistake by making you an introvert. If you are an introvert and he did not make a mistake by making you an extrovert, if you’re an extrovert, so go and embrace and be all that God has called you to be.

[00:37:47] At hope for anxiety and OCD, we talk about how we are here to reduce shame, increase hope, and develop healthier connections with God and others. If you know somebody that needs this message, I would encourage you to share the show with them. You can also share your support for the show by writing us a review on iTunes.

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 grace.