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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.

Christian, Feelings Aren’t a Battle to be Fought

When I was a child, I remember feeling things very deeply, but not knowing how to express or manage those feelings. Experiencing emotion was like being knocked down by a tall wave. I was introspective, picked up on the subtleties of others’ emotions, and took everything personally. Even into college, one negative comment by someone could affect my entire day. I now have a greater understanding of my emotions, what it means to be highly sensitive, and how to handle things in a healthier way. However, for many years, having strong emotions felt like a curse. Feelings were uncomfortable, painful, and needed to be avoided at all costs.      

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Should I Take Medication for my Anxiety or OCD?

Maybe this is a question you’ve asked yourself. Perhaps you have concerns about side effects, becoming dependent on medication, or wonder if this option is for you. My response to this question is always the same: It’s a personal decision. Each person has to decide what is best for their body depending on their own symptoms. Some of my clients are able to tolerate medication with little side effects while others try several different medications and react negatively to all of them. Some want to try counseling first before starting medication. I respect and honor each individual’s decision.  

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6 Factors to Consider Before Searching for a Counselor

Note of clarification: In this article, I am using the terms counselor and therapist interchangeably to refer to a provider who is trained and licensed by the state to practice. I am not referring to someone who may engage in counseling or counseling techniques who has not been formally trained to practice professionally. 

If you want to find a doctor, there are several ways you could approach this. You could ask a friend, check the insurance website, the doctor’s website, or read reviews. Finding a therapist comes with unique challenges. I have listed the important factors to consider when finding a therapist below. Understanding this information helps you know what information to cover in the initial phone call or email when reaching out to a therapist.      

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9. Not Sure About Therapy? Try it on! with Erica Kesse, LPC-MHSP

  • Different therapist personalities and styles 
  • Demystifying therapy
  • Finding the therapist who is the right fit 
  • Different kinds of therapies that therapist utilize such as CBT, DBT, IFS, Psychodynamic or Play Therapy 
  • Erica’s experience with mental health in the African American church 
  • Seeing a counselor of a different race 

Resources and links:
Erica Kesse, Your Goal Concierge
Try on Therapy
Mental Health Marketing Conference 

More Podcast Episodes

Transcript of Episode 9

Hope for Anxiety and OCD. Episode 9

Today, we are talking to Erica Kessee who is a good friend of mine and fellow entrepreneur. She is going to share with us something that she created called Thrive on Therapy. I’ll let her tell you more about that.

One thing that I want you to pick up, hopefully from this conversation is an understanding that there are many different types of counselors and many different personalities of counselors. 

There are many different counseling approaches that those counselors utilize and this can really help you if you’re processing, searching for a counselor, or what you might need from a counselor. And of course, I couldn’t have Erica on the show and not ask her about her experience with racial issues and mental health in the black church, but I was not prepared for what she was going to say.

So let’s go ahead and dive into this episode with Erica. 

Carrie: Miss Erica, you and I used to share an office space together, right? 

Erica: It was a blessing because another colleague told me about you and that you had an office. I was so excited because I was able to be in a space and start my practice in my own office and it was ready for me to hang my shingle. 

Carrie: Yeah and we have to let people understand that this office space was very small and you somehow found a way to make it super cute and homey and you had someone help you decorate. It was adorable, very adorable.

Erica: I was very proud of my space, loved my little space, my little couch. When you will listen to a decorator, they work wonders. So it’s just like, “you paid me.” So cozy and sweet.

Carrie: One of my favorite Erica stories that I have to tell is that we have a lot of things in common. We have really a passion for people getting really good help and treatment and reducing stigma. We have no problem talking about difficult issues, but our temperaments are a little bit different in terms that I’m kind of quiet and somber and calm and Erica is exciting, exuberant, and full of energy and life. That was very interesting. There would be times where I just go down to your end of the hall and just kind of gently turn up the sound machine. Do you remember that? 

Erica: Yes. When I was working in community mental health and in other places when there’s other people around, it’s always been noted that I am having a great time in my session and I am laughing, enjoying the time that I spent with the people who are in the room with me and it is outside of the room and so it made the sound machine to be brought up a little higher.

Carrie: I think that’s an interesting thing cause we’re going to get into this a little bit later about different therapists having different personalities and different fits. There’s just kind of a little intro of one example of that, but tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got to where you are today professionally. 

Erica: I am Erica Kessee, a CEO and founder of Your Goal Concierge. I also have a service within Your Goal Concierge called Thrive on Therapy. Your Goal Concierge Mission is to provide services, support, enhancement, and encouragement to those who are in helping professions. Counselors, coaches, nurses, frontline people who had to go out of the house even in the middle of quarantine. Those are people that I serve and people who are trying to create businesses, try on therapy as a service specifically because I have a master’s in clinical mental health counseling and civic leadership. 

I wanted to make sure that individuals, both the public had the right fit for their therapy and that therapists had opportunities for networking opportunities to show their craft and opportunities to offer services to others and show what they’re good at and to make sure that individuals are with them. Every counselor coach knows this person is like the perfect client for me because they have a lot of the same story that you have.

You understand how to work with them and get them to the next level. It is an immersive learning experience for individuals. So individuals who have the temporary license, which that’s what I have, or a master’s in clinical mental health counseling can provide this immersive learning experience to people so they can at least get a taste of therapy because there’s a lot of stigma associated with getting mental health services. 

Carrie: Right. I remember you came by my office one day and you were so excited and you were like, “Carrie, you try on clothes?” And I was like, “at the store” and I was like, “yeah”. She was like, “what if you could try on therapy?” And I was like, “What in the world are you talking about? This is a little out there, Erica. I don’t know about all this.”

Tell us about how that originated because you did actually create this for the mental health marketing conference originally, right?

Erika: Yes. Exactly. So for the mental health marketing conference, I started going to the conference while I was at Lipscomb. I went to get my master’s in clinical, both masters from Lipscomb University. There was an opportunity as a student to go to the mental health marketing hub. I got there and I looked around and I saw all the marketers and I thought, where are the clinicians? They don’t have a seat at this table when they’re supposed to be marketing for mental health services. Only the clinicians know how to market to the people they’re trying to bring in the doors. And so I spoke to the founder, which was an Austin parent about incorporating more clinicians. I did speak the next year and it was that third year that we spoke about having clinicians at the table. Then the third year was, hey, we’re going to actually pilot trial therapy and let these marketers experience therapy because they had never experienced therapy. They have no idea how they are going to be marketing something they’ve never experienced. 

Everybody else gets something free. If somebody is in the market, they get a product for free. So they can say, I buy into this product. Like a sample, that’s what trial data is. It’s a sample of therapy and the sample is actually not watered down or anything, but we call it an immersive learning experience because we don’t want to say it’s therapy. It’s just a crucial relationship. So you don’t want to say that you’re entering into that relationship until you’re truly entering into a relationship with a person that’s going to be taking you to the level you need to go to according to your treatment plan. So we offered it and at that time we asked Carrie, even though I went over there to her office, I was actually trying to get her to come to be a trial therapist.

I’m always a connector. I’m always thinking about opportunities to reel people in and Carrie was one of the child therapists that year. I can’t remember the numbers. I do have an annual report. If anybody is interested in it, you can reach out to me for it. I have the numbers in there. With every person that we did have, every person that I met was there also exhibiting. I did have a conversion of a person that stayed with me from that conference that very first time. 

Every single year we’ve done trial therapy there and they asked us to come back every year, try on therapy in there because there are marketers, people who’ve never experienced it. There it’s just valuable and this makes sense to me. 

Carrie: Now you’ve expanded to other places and it’s not just for the conference and it’s not just for marketers, what other locations have you been to where you’ve utilized this? 

Erica: Because of the specificity of the middle half marketing conference so we went to the Sexual Assault Center here in Nashville, Tennessee. They were talking about a particular thing that could trigger individuals. There was a therapist there who could be available for anyone that was triggered but then we also provided sessions at the end of the conference.

I closed two people from that. When I say closed, they converted into clients. I went to the sexual assault center twice. After the second time doing the mental health marketing conference, I met a lady with HCA health corporations in America, and they had a hiring event at top golf, which is a place where people can do golf and shoot there.

Carrie: They’re trying to hit a target right, the golf ball into a target. I’ve never done it before, but it doesn’t look like much.

Erica: It’s a cool place. So we went there and we provided group therapy. We had therapists there, they wanted a group, they wanted to hit as many people as possible and so we did three 30 minute group sessions on self-care. The topic of self-care was amazing. I had a wonderful time. They’re going to invite us back next year. As soon as someone tries it, even like it’s so fun in trial therapy, usually, you convert them to a client. When a corporation tries this trial therapy then they usually want me to come back every year to continue to do it for the individuals that they’re serving.

Carrie: it’s been a great success for you. I think it’s opened a lot of people’s minds to what therapy is. Maybe people have ideas that it’s something mystical or they’re really uncomfortable about it like it’s this big mystery like, “what in the world do you do in there?”

Erica: That’s part of our marketing. What happens behind those closed doors. A part of the marketing is also learning the product of therapy. The product of therapy is sitting with that therapist. The therapist is the product. You need to have a relationship with that person and get the right fit with that person. So I recommend you not just meet someone and say, “Okay, I’m going to go through therapy with that person.”

I feel like you should shop around, there’s a sample here and a sample there of how they flow, how it feels in the session, what things they say, and the methods that they will like to show you. Mainly, I would have to say how it feels, because if you’re doing some transference or anything else, which is when you feel some feelings about this person and you’ve never met them, but they bring up things in you that are not so good, then you don’t need it. Then you don’t need that therapist. You need to get somebody else.

Carrie: You mean if they remind you of your mother who you got a strained relationship with it may not be the best fit.

Erica: Not a good fit. 

Carrie: Talk about that a little bit, because I think a lot of times people approach finding a therapist like they would a doctor like, “Okay, well maybe who’s in my insurance network or who’s the person that’s within the 10-mile radius of me and looking for a therapist really needs to be a very different process than that.

Erica: Oh my goodness Carrie I just had a bright idea and maybe we should collaborate on that. Oh, I’m sorry. This is how I am, but yes it shouldn’t be a different process and you’re right. 

Let’s talk through that process now. It can’t be that way. That’s why when your insurance gives you a list, they give you a list. The list is pretty big.

You need to go through and call through. First of all, if they don’t call, if they don’t call you back or they call you back, like three months later, then you know, it’s not a good fit. There’s some issue that’s there that you don’t mean to keep pursuing but also the whole insurance rate also, the radius is maybe a problem as well. It’s like you have to decide that this is life or death. 

A lot of times people don’t see our mental health, our brains, and our emotional health as a life and death situation, but it is because most of the time when people come to us, it’s a conflict that’s happened. That’s just during a crisis. So sometimes holding onto this crisis for years and then finally it just boils over and they’re finally reaching out. You can’t decide that it’s going to have to be with the person within a radius or the first person that you get to answer the phone. 

Carrie: I think the process of finding a therapist is really important and I can only share from my own personal experience of finding a therapist. There was one period of my life where I really wanted to see a female therapist. I thought that person is going to be someone who I would feel more comfortable with. I don’t feel comfortable with talking with a male right now, but then after I went through some other things. I was really looking to get back into the dating world after my divorce and I just said, “I want to talk to a male about this because I feel like I need that perspective.”

I need that opposite sex perspective of some things that I’m dealing with or some questions that I have and that was just so helpful. So even sometimes that male or female distinction, sometimes people feel more comfortable with a younger therapist. Sometimes people feel more comfortable with an older therapist and don’t feel bad because maybe it sounds kind of superficial like, “Oh, I’m ruling that person out because they’re too old or they’re too young, but it’s who you’re going to be able to connect with personally. Other people are going to be able to connect with that other therapist personally. So it’s okay. 

Erica: It is. I’m so happy you’re affirming and confirming that it is okay to have your preferences. Just like right now because I’ll have to say black awareness and racial awareness that’s happening, I’ve gotten more people contact me who are black or people of color because they need counseling, but also because they are reaching out to someone that looks like them. And so it’s important to decide to pick who you want. Even somebody that looks like you may not be a good fit either. You need the right temperament.

I know I need an action-oriented counselor. I don’t want one to just sit there with me because I will take over the session just like right now. Carrie knows what she’s up to. So like, I need someone that’s going to say, “This is your homework. This is what you need to do.” Give me some parameters. I need some CBT DBT. Well, let me explain those things, cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy. So I need these things for myself. I know that.

Carrie: Sure. Those types of interventions are helpful for you. 

Erica: So that’s something to think about too when you’re trying on therapy is the structure. What is the structure that works best for you? Especially in a trial therapy session, you can always ask a therapist about internal family systems or psychoanalytic therapy or EMDR or like I specialize in plant expressive arts therapy. So talk through what that looks like. 

So it’s, it’s good to kind of build your many, a listing of things that maybe sounds like something you want to try. You can talk through that. For example, when you’re talking about male and female thing. One of the people who came and did the mental health marketing conference was an exhibitor there, so she wasn’t a marketer. She worked in one of the nonprofits. She wanted to test out or try out a male. So she was able to check out one of the males there. I try to have it at the conference, like blubber city, diversity, and males. They’re scarce.

They really are. I had actually a black male. She was able to meet with him and she was the one that converted to see me because she got a taste of him. It didn’t fit and be with me and we did great work. So she did get that out of her system. She understands a male, isn’t a good fit for her.

So then she decided to try something else, which was great. 

Carrie: I think it’s important to you that once you talk with a therapist, whether that’s over the phone or once you meet with them in person, they may be diving into certain topics because of their training and their worldview and how they were trained as a therapist.

Specific different types of therapy, just like Erica was talking about earlier that that person may be kind of guiding you down a path that you might not want to go to. So they may be an insight-based therapist. And you may say, I need an action step or vice versa. Maybe you’re not ready for an action step and you’re just going to therapy because you’re trying to learn about yourself. Maybe I’m very upfront that I’m very interested in people’s past and trauma and difficult experiences that they’ve had because that’s the lens that I work from, but not everybody is like that. Some people will say, I don’t want to hear about your childhood.

I just want to know what’s going on right now. And so it’s important to know those distinctions in terms of finding a fit. If you find someone that’s going in one direction, it’s okay for you to say, you know, I think I’d really like to go a different direction, or I thought we were going to talk about this instead, or this is important to me right now.

You have that power as the client. 

Erica: Yes, Carrie. I’m very expressive. So yes, it is definitely about the relationship that you have with the person that you’re working with. You have to take ownership of your session. I’ll have to say this in a medical field too a lot of people are not taking ownership of all of their doctor’s appointments as well.

But with counselors, you’d say, “Hey, I want to work on this because they’re supposed to be building your treatment plan according to what you need and what you think your goal is. That’s one reason why my organization is called Your Coal Concierge. I’m your goal concierge. I’m going to help you with your goal.

It’s just important to have that relationship and speak up for yourself. There’s no power differential between you and your therapist. They are an expert in what they’re expert in. So they do understand that because they got the master’s degree, but you’re the expert on you and they’re there to help you work through and deal with and support you and where you’re going.

Carrie: I love this conversation but I also want to move on because I know there’s some other things I want to ask you about. 

What is your spiritual background and how would you describe your spiritual identity today? 

Erica: Okay. I have to talk about the past a little bit in order to get to today and I won’t be long-winded.

I grew up in Missionary Baptist Church then went to Full Gospel. That’s where I learned about my relationship with God. I didn’t learn much about it before, but once asked about the relationship with God it’s like my eyes were open to the possibilities of this beautiful connection.

That’s father. That’s just for me and for other people too. The relationship that I have is just for me and God. I could ask for whatever I want and it just blows my mind. I also believe that God lives inside of me and I’m still grateful too because I’m also I’m Christian too. So I believe in Jesus.

I need a savior as well, but you can tell that it’s like, people go through things and they may have got a family that taught them to do things a certain way and they just go along with it, I decided to do my way. According to me, thinking through and deciding that this best works best for me to, to be Christian and believe in Jesus.

And then I am also very spiritual because I really take a whole to that part of God living inside of me. So if God lives inside of me, then I got a source to everything. 

Carrie: I’m curious what your experience has been in black Christian community surrounding mental health treatment. 

Erica: I had a group that I was trying to promote that never really happened because people are not ready to have this conversation.

People are not. It’s not just black churches too. I went to some Church of Christ to do some things and try to do some things. I’ve noticed that it really doesn’t want to deal with things. It’s like an ostrich with his head in the sink. It does not want to deal with the real things that’s happening.

Carrie: Let’s pretend this is not going on. Let’s pretend people are not struggling with these big issues like anxiety and OCD. 

Erica: They don’t want to talk about them. I would think that you could find evidence in the Bible where there was somebody who was displaying the symptoms of anxiety and how they persevered or OCD and how they persevered.

One of my things that I always talk about is single motherhood. They don’t want to deal with that either. 

Carrie: It’s very prevalent. 

Erica: Yes, I did my master’s thesis on that. They didn’t want to deal with it. I never got support within the church to help do a group for single mothers.

Anyway, black church entered the price, white churches. The reason why I’m saying this is because those are the ones that I know of. I don’t know. Churches, and that’s my experience with them and it’s my personal experience. I just know that that’s one reason why I have another endeavor called trials spirituality, which if you go to Your Goal Concierge. That is my website, yourgoalconcierge.com. There’s a link that says trial spirituality. In there, it talks about small groups that people have at their homes. Actually, churches used to do this, but they have small groups at their homes about specific issues, scriptures that go along with for example, anxiety, that’s fine. So in the Bible to study who has anxiety and how they persevered through it and that group talks about it. So that’s definitely something that I am very passionate about. Let’s talk about the real things.

Carrie: We’ll put all of the information on the websites, in the show notes too, so people can click on the links.

Why do you think this is? Why do you think that people have their heads buried in the sand? Because we look at the lifetime prevalence of things like anxiety and depression and it’s high. This is not just affecting unbelievers. This is affecting believers as well. So what do you think is going on with church leadership that it’s having the ostrich mentality?

Erica: I think it’s too hard. It’s too hard of a topic and they don’t want their own stuff to come out like there’s needs to be some kind of transparency that happened in their own life. They probably have had it. Everybody has some anxiety. Everybody has a little bit of it. So that means you have to address your own stuff, This is like with counseling. That’s one reason why I decided to do my master’s in clinical mental health counseling because I needed to evaluate myself before I can even sit in the room with somebody else and I’m not sure they’re willing to evaluate themselves, but then they don’t address. There’s a lock.

Carrie: Right. Talk with me a little bit about your experience regarding racism, black issues related to counseling because I know you and I have had some conversations surrounding this. There may be some white therapists that don’t want to look at their own experiences or their own potential biases that may have a hard time seeing someone of another race or cultural group and vice versa too.

Erica: So being a black woman, it really is a conversation going on right now and I was just telling a friend of mine who is a white woman about it. It’s an everyday thing. They were talking about the protest that was happening and I said, “there’s no reason for me to get out in the streets and protest.” It’s a protest that I get up every day and not to come to the weight of the world that I feel as a black woman. Knowing that the people around me who are close to me could easily be killed at any point, just because of my skin. People don’t even think this way. Zora Neale Hurston kind of summed it up. She’s one of my role models is that my race, my race is only a part of who I am like brown coloring on top. Like it’s so much of me that doesn’t have anything to do with my race, but it’s just one of the parts, just like I am, you know, I love to giggle.

This is same day. It’s just one of the big. So everybody puts so much merit on it and seeing the differences in us when there’s so many similarities that my experience with racism is every day. Like I hear it. I feel it. I see it all the time and I can tell you many stories.  

Because of who I am. I love to have, I love creating, I have an idea and launching things, but I’ve had many circumstances where people did not want to see the merit in what I was saying and what I was doing until somebody white was interested in it. I was capitalized on in some type of way by someone who was white on a regular basis.

That’s a normal thing. There’s always circumstances where someone wants to capitalize on what I have, which I mean, as a black person, I’m never going to have as much as they know. I’m working on trying to create my own dynasty, but like, there is just historical wealth that people who are white have that I will never be able to match.

Right. Because I’m working towards that, I started from the bottom, everything that there’s always someone who tries to align with me to try to capitalize on me, even my supervisor that I had. 

Carrie: So like for example, people wanting you to do work for free or expecting that from you and so forth.

Erica: Yes work for free. That’s normal. I’m the kind of person where I get in and I jump full speed ahead into organizations and to opportunities and so I just give away so much information and I’m not paid the way that I see my counterpart being paid or the information is taken. I’m not appreciated for what I was, what I gave.

At all. Yeah. So that occurs. That’s the part that hurts me sometimes. I’ve spent some time with God on that and what God has for me, it’s for me, and whatever I gave away was what needed to be given away. 

Carrie: And do you think that people could benefit sometimes from going to a therapist of a different race?

Erica: Of course. I know I’ve been to several people who were not my race and I got something out of each one of them like beautiful stories. Whenever I was in a room with someone, I had a white male one time through my EAP program when I worked at Vanderbilt and I only met with him one time because he was like to the point-blank. He affirmed me and I was on my way. I didn’t need to go back. I was good. I just needed someone to affirm me and affirm things that I did know, because when he talked about the exhaustion that you have in between two programs, getting my bachelor’s and getting my master’s and that loll in between there, I was not trying to give myself a rest.

I was ready to go to the next thing. And he was telling me, no, this is the time to rest. It’s all right. Your life is not going to crumble. Those kinds of things. So it was great. They were a white male, but also, you know, I’ve had, I had, uh, I had a black, older woman who I needed because she was helpful and there was transference that I felt with her that I wanted and I needed because I needed a mother in my life.

I needed it and I got it from her. It was a beautiful relationship. It was very psychoanalytic. So that was the part that I was missing like she didn’t give me much of that, but I found that somewhere else. So I think that every relationship that we have in our lives and not just counselors is something that you need in your life.

You call into your life to happen for you. So just look around and you’ll find the right people for you. 

Carrie: I think we have so much to learn from each other. People that are similar to us and people that are different than us, people that look different than us. People that think different than us and people that have different backgrounds. And if we just keep our mind open to what we have to receive from that person like you were saying I think it’s a great thing. 

Unfortunately, a lot of times we get so close-fisted to our position or stance on something that we are not willing to look at what’s the other side and why does this person feel so strongly about this? Why does this person who’s out in the street protesting? Why do they feel so strongly about that? Why is this person at home who feels very passionate about these issues, but they’re not protesting and so forth? Kind of like you talked a little bit. How about, is there anything, I guess that you would want to say just as an encouragement to Christian Black women?

I know that it’s, you’re a double minority in a sense, because, you know, there’s somewhat male privilege in our society, whether we want to admit that or not men are often paid more for the same positions than women. You’re also a racial minority and a lot of times what I’ve seen in my practice is that African-American women just kind of put up with a lot of things that they don’t necessarily need to put up with.

And sometimes they need somebody to speak into that space and say, “Hey, you can set a boundary there or you don’t have to do that, or you’re doing too much, you know, let go get some help.” I don’t know, maybe I’m stealing your thunder. 

Erica: I remember, I love it that you had a board in the lobby of the suite that I worked at.

I worked out of the suite and it was, she took care of the lobby and everything, and there was a chalkboard and coffee table.

One thing I put on there was I have done enough. That’s something that I was speaking to myself, but black women and all the people that seem to be my clients, individuals that are type A people who are running and running and running to get things accomplished that they feel that they need to get accomplished in life, but they don’t give themselves rest and stuff.

Well, and so they have to decide something. They have to decide that they’ve done enough. I’ve done enough. You know, the thing is, people are going around saying, you know, I am enough, but for these people and those are my clients, the ones that made that message. I have done enough. I want to give them rest. Let’s be strategic about the next step you take.

Let’s not just go right into something else. Let’s decide that this is the next thing for me. And so I find that with black women It’s a crushing feeling of all the things that I have to do. I have to lecture with my male friend or my partner, my children. Oh, we’re doing virtual school right now with my boss.

My mind, I also feel the burden of the whole black community. Recently, we just had another blackmail murder. It just weighs down on us and it makes us want to run to do something to fix it, but I’ve done enough. I’ve done enough.

And one thing, another affirmation I would love to give is that I just recently started and it felt so good was I am at peace with the progress in my life. That made me just do a deep breath because I am. If I could just be at peace at the progress. Because you have done, I mean, just take like you get suspect amnesia and you think that you didn’t do a lot, but if you sit and think about all of these you haven’t.

You can sit and think about what you’re grateful for it makes you sit down and be strategic about the next thing that you’re going to do.

Carrie: Because progress is more important than perfection. Love that. 

All right. So at the end of every podcast, because this is called hope for anxiety and OCD, I like to ask all the guests to share a story of hope, which is a time that you received hope from God or another person in your life.

Erica: Okay. I received hope when I had a very traumatic scenario happened. I had a fear of losing a child or my child dying. That was my fear and then it happened and it broke me down and it helped me see all the people around me who were capitalizing on me taking on the responsibility of so much.

I went through a depression and I reached out to a therapist and my hope came from my daughter, looking at me. She was the one that walked me to the car in the middle of my ectopic pregnancy and put me in the car, put the seatbelt around me and said, my daughter who is seven, she put me in the car put the seat belt around me and said, “Mama it’s going to be okay.”

And I knew that came from an inner part of her like that wasn’t a seven-year-old clock. That was God telling me that this is for a reason. All of this is for a reason. You’re going to be okay and in the middle of it, I’ve received that hope. Even though I was in pain there was a piece that I had because ultimately the version of who I am now is so much greater than I ever been. I would never be at a point that I can say, I’m at peace.” I’m not with my progress or even give myself the self-care and the self-love if I had not shared all those people around me and taking all of my energy and taking all of my love and not putting in anything. So that’s my story of hope.

Carrie: Thank you for sharing that. It is really those hard times that we go through that are transformative for us the most. And we can look back and go, “Oh, wow. That was a really hard situation but if I hadn’t gone through that, I wouldn’t have reaped to this benefit over here and I can be thankful for that.”

And you never know who you’re going to meet, who may be walking through similar circumstances that you can encourage as well. And side note, Erica’s daughter is really cool too. She’s fun. She’s a fun human being. 

Thank you so much for being on the show and for talking about trying therapy and how we can find a good therapeutic fit.

Thank you for talking to me about hard sayings, about racial issues, and letting me ask you those questions as well. I think that’s awesome. 

Erica: Thank you so much. It was such an honor. Thank you so much for reaching out to me to be on here. We’ll love to come back and you want me to talk about something else or whatever.

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Everyone. I had no idea that Erica was going to speak so strongly about her experience related to mental health in the black church and remember this is just one person’s experience that we’re interviewing. It’s on my wishlist bulletin board for guests, I would love to talk with a black pastor who feels like that they really get and support mental health.

So if that’s you and you are listening or you know of a pastor, or this is your pastor and you say, “Carrie, you absolutely need to talk with them.” Please, please get them in touch with me. You can always reach us on hopeforanxietyandocd.com. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you feel like our content is valuable, I really hope that you will tell a friend and say, “Hey, I found this podcast and I think you might be interested. Why don’t you give it a listen?” I’m sure you know somebody that needs a little hope. 

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.

Bring Your Own Tissues: My Experience with Online (Telehealth) Counseling

I wrote this about a year before COVID-19 hit. Telehealth (online) counseling was still in the shadows and people were skeptical of it. In 2020, telehealth is more the norm than in person sessions. I felt this was worth sharing as the words are still as true today as they were in 2019.   

My therapist lives about three hours away, but I don’t get in a car to see him. I turn on my computer. I’ve been seeing him via telehealth, and it’s been one of the biggest  blessings of this year.

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7. How PCIT Can Help Your Anxious Child with Anika Mullen, LPC-MHSP

  • What is Parent Child Interaction Therapy?
  • How PCIT is helpful for children with behavioral problems
  • How receiving PCIT virtually through online counseling benefits families
  • Are the tantrums my young child is having a normal part of development?
  • PCIT Calm adaptation for anxious children
  • Reinforcing brave behaviors over accommodating anxiety

Resources and links:
Anika Mullen, LPC-MHSP
Parent Child Interaction Therapy

By The Well Counseling

More Podcast Episodes

Transcript of Episode 7

Hello, Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD Episode 7. 

For today’s episode, I got to interview one of my friends in the counseling profession. Anika Mullen. It’s kind of like Monica but without the M. It’s what she told me when I first met her. Anika was so sweet because when we went to record this show. We had been talking and got through almost the entire interview. We were towards the end and I realized nothing got recorded. I was absolutely mortified.

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What is it Like to See a Counselor for the First Time?

I think this counselor is a little too close to her client. Respecting client’s personal space is important!

Coming to counseling for the first time can be a bit unnerving. You may feel discomfort at the thought of talking to someone new about things that are personal to you. That’s normal. Most clients who are coming to counseling for the first time will tell me they don’t know what to expect. So, if you’re nervous about coming to counseling for a first session and don’t have a clue what it will be like, you’re not alone. Allow me to attempt to debunk some mystery about the first session or as we refer to it in the counseling realm, the intake. 

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6. The Science Behind Engaging with Music for Anxiety Relief with Tim Ringgold

In episode 6 of Hope for Anxiety and OCD, I interviewed author and speaker Tim Ringold. Tim provides insight into how the brain and nervous system function when a person is stressed. Then, he explains how people can use music to calm down when they feel anxious.

  • Spiritual pain
  • Neuroscience behind how music calms the nervous system
  • Practical ways to utilize music when stressed
  • Difference between listening to music passively and engaging with it

Resources and links:

By The Well Counseling
Tim Ringold
Music Therapy
Adverse Childhood Experiences Survey (ACES)
Book: The Hard Questions

More Podcast Episodes

Transcript of Episode 6

Hope for Anxiety and OCD episode 6      

In today’s episode, I am talking to music therapist and public speaker, Tim Ringgol. Tim has a vast knowledge of how music affects the brain and how we can engage with music and utilize it in a very specific way to help us calm down. I learned so much from interviewing Tim. I’m really excited to share this episode with you. 

Carrie: Hi, welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD. 

Tim: Thanks so much for having me, Carrie. It’s great to be here.

What Does A Music Therapist Do?

Carrie: I know a little bit about you but I actually don’t know a whole lot. Can you tell us a little bit about what you do? 

Tim: Sure. I’m a Board-Certified Music Therapist, which is someone like a physical therapist who uses exercise to help people in a clinical setting. I was trained in school how to use music in a clinical setting to help people. People help themselves with music all day long. Sometimes, it’s like tales of the obvious to people like, “Oh yeah, I do that all the time.” There are situations where the targeted use in the hands of a clinician where music really can help people in certain circumstances throughout the lifespan. So that’s what my training is. We all know it’s good for our mood and it’s good for our spirit. 

My training is really how music affects the brain and the body and particularly the nervous system. That’s kind of what I get excited about to kind of empower people to understand their nervous system and how to regulate it with music.

Carrie: That’s really awesome. I’ve been a therapist for over 10 years and I can’t remember ever actually meeting a music therapist. 

Tim: I know we’re a rare breed. There’s only about 8,000 of us nationwide. Contrast that with like there’s 900,000 members of the APA. I am usually the first music therapist someone meets. 

From Rock Musician To Music Therapist

Carrie: So how did you become a music therapist? 

Tim: I started out as a musician first. I started out on stage when I was four and started singing right out of the gate. I was pursuing a career as a rock musician because that seemed like a very healthy, stable financially, no, none of those things apply when it comes to rock music. If you want to get a degree in music performance, it’s either opera or musical theater and I wasn’t interested in either of those. 

So I went rock and roll cause I’m totally a rebel, but I grew up like Catholic, Connecticut, prep school. All the boxes of conformity and then I was just like, “I’m not any of this”  and I kind of exploded when I was 22 and I joke that I came out as a musician and my family was devastated. They were just like, ”Oh my God. It must’ve been the drugs.” No joke. They said that. So I was like, “I’m so sorry to disappoint you” and then there was an intervention with my family because “rock music is crazy and it’s unhealthy.” These things aren’t true. That was my lifestyle. 

When I wanted to settle down, I was engaged and I just couldn’t imagine the future being on the road and being in a committed relationship, having kids, trying to stay sober, trying to stay faithful on the road. 

One day, someone sent us this cute little book for an engagement gift called “The Hard Questions.” A hundred questions every couple should ask before tying the knot. It talks about career and family and yadda yadda.  

My wife, she had her MBA at that time. She could see her future like corporate clear- pie charts, graphs and I just looked into the black hole of the music industry and I was like, “Oh my God. What am I going to do with my life?” and she just encouraged me, “If you want to go back to school, we can afford it.”

I don’t want to marry like a grumpy never-was so I scrolled from A to Z in the index of majors at my local university. I just scrolled like, “Is there anything interesting here?” And sure enough, I bumped into the two words, “music therapy” on this scrolled list. I was like, “Oh, stop it.” I had been a musician and I was an athlete. I used to work in physical therapy, but I found it to be just tissue. It was like, I didn’t touch the emotions. I didn’t touch the spirit. It didn’t go deep enough for me. 

I wrote a paper in college called music versus medicine because I thought I had to choose one or the other. Then I found a field where I could combine the two, and my life literally changed direction in a single moment. I have not looked back since. 

Tim Scaling His Impact By Traveling And Speaking About Music And Mental Health

Carrie: Wow, that’s awesome. So now you actually travel and speak to people about how to reach for music.

Tim: Yeah, that’s it. I noticed early on in my internship that I enjoyed speaking about music. I like doing music therapy, but I also really just love talking about it. One of my colleagues said to me, “You know, you’re a good music therapist, but the American Music Therapy Association should literally just hire you to go around and talk about music therapy because you’re just really good at talking about it” and I was like, “Thank you. I like that idea too.” 

So I got booked in. One day, I got an email and it was the National Hemophilia Foundation who had found my blog that I’d written about my special needs daughter, and then here’s a dad, a special needs dad who knows how to use a non-opioid based approach for pain management. So they said, “We’d like you to come speak at this summit that we’re doing and you’ll be faculty and we pay faculty.” It was like 15 times how much I made an hour as a music therapist. I am a speaker but this is a whole different world. 

That began this kind of quest that I’ve been on for the last seven years to just speak more and more because then I also realized that I could plant the seeds about how to use music yourself to really big groups of people really fast. For me, it’s always been kind of like this journey of wanting to help the most people. [00:07:29] It’s almost like a numbers game. I want to go wide. I like going deep with one person but after a while I was in the treatment room, working with one patient at a time. There are so many patients a week because there’s only so much of me that can go around. I don’t know what the right word is but just I couldn’t scale my impact. I couldn’t clone myself.

When I got up on a stage, I could have 800 professionals in a ballroom all getting the same message at the same time and I was like, “Oh yes, please.” That developed into what I do full-time now. Now I have a clinical staff that does the music therapy and I do all the speaking.

Carrie: Awesome. You’re also the second person that I’ve interviewed who said somebody else told them, “Hey, you should be doing this. You have the talent, skills, and abilities to be doing it” and they weren’t doing it at the time. It’s just always interesting how other people can see things that we can’t see in ourselves. That happens in therapy.

Tim: Totally. There’s a phrase that I use which is, “you cannot see the frame when you’re in the picture.” You have blind spots all around you. Your peripheral vision only sees so far but everybody else sees all that way around. They see a dimension of you, you just can’t see. That’s why being willing to hear what others have to say is a really useful ability because the listener can’t see this right now. We’re on zoom, I can wave my hand to you, but right now I can’t see my hand but you can. In my perception, there’s no hand except there’s a hand, right?

So how many times in life are we walking around and there’s something right there, everybody else can see it, but you’re like the last one to get it. That in and of itself is so much of my work in mental health. It’s because there’s such a stigma around mental health. Unwilling to turn and look and see that there is something amiss right next to him. 

The Importance of Recognizing Mental Health As Essential To Physical Health

I had one teen who told me once, he goes, “Yeah, that’s like addiction man. Everyone else sees it before you.” Oftentimes, we will feel discomfort, “dis-ease” symptoms in our body. We’re the first to know when it comes to our physical health, when it comes to our mental health because there’s such a different attitude about mental health in the culture. When we feel dis-ease or discomfort mentally, we don’t have the same freedom to just go, “You know what, I keep thinking about killing myself.” This is not normal because I’m designed to survive like my DNA is programmed for survival. So why do I keep thinking about killing? That doesn’t make any sense. Being able to have the freedom to just say that out loud and not be institutionally locked up for 72 hours. Your doctor, your physical doctor is not a mandated reporter if you’re having physical symptoms. They don’t physically lock you in a physical hospital for 72 hours for anything. You can get up and walk out at any time. You’re free to be called AMA against medical advice but physically you’re free to do what you want, mentally, it’s another story. 

We have a completely different relationship to mental health in this country than physical health. I think that’s a real challenge for people because the human experience, everybody’s having physical symptoms and everybody’s having mental symptoms.

If you’re not free to talk about the mental symptoms, the way you do with the physical symptoms, what people do is they wait until their body turns it into physical symptoms. Then they go try to treat the physical symptom which is the symptom, but not the source.

Carrie: That happens with anxiety all the time. People will show up at the ER, “I think I’m having a heart attack,” “I think I’m dying” and they will get fully checked out and the result will be, “We think you had a panic attack.” 

Tim: Yes. Anxiety attacks and “I can’t breathe. I physically can’t breathe” and it’s a somatic sensation.

Carrie: Absolutely.

Tim: Just like depression can be a somatic sensation of heaviness. Anxiety can be this somatic experience as well of being like, “I can’t catch my breath” and they physically can’t. You can see their shallow breathing and they’re starting to hyperventilate. 

My daughter has anxiety and I watch it and she’s 14. It’s kind of a fascinating journey of adolescence, puberty, hormones, and mental health, and like trying to navigate, when is this hormones of adolescence and puberty? When is this an anxiety attack?

As a clinician, I can tell you, there are times when I can see when we are crossing into the red zone where there were having a panic attack and she cannot recover her breath and I have to work with her and it’s really scary. If we took her to a hospital, they’d check her out and they’d be like, “there’s nothing wrong with you” and then they’d say something like, “it’s a panic attack. We don’t treat that here.” So it’s a real challenge in our culture. 

Tim’s Sex Addiction Experience And Its Connection With His Religious Orientation

Carrie: Absolutely. You talked a little bit about growing up Catholic and I’m curious what your experience of that interaction between mental health and the churches because that’s super interesting to me. 

Tim: I’m happy to tell this story because I think it’s instructive for a lot of other people’s experiences of growing up in a religious family. For me, I believe in a kind of a bio-psycho-social-spiritual model of the self. You’re having this experience of being you in four dimensions and you can experience pain in all four dimensions but that presents in your brain the same way. It doesn’t matter if you’re suffering grief or you’re suffering from a bruise. Your brain doesn’t know the difference in terms of where it shows up as pain. The signal is pain. It could be emotional pain. It could be physical pain. If you’re getting bullied, it’s social pain. You can have spiritual pain. 

I didn’t really understand this until maybe my mid-forties. I’m in long-term recovery for sex addiction. My ACEs score is zero. So I have zero adverse childhood experiences which is a massive predictor of addiction and mental health in adulthood. If those who are listening have not been exposed to ACEs, it’s a really valuable tool to look at. It scientifically validated the adverse childhood experience survey (ACEs).

I would be in 12 step rooms and I’d hear guys talking about physical abuse, sexual abuse, and I felt like, “What’s the matter with me? I don’t have anything wrong with me” and then finally as I started to look in this four-part dimension of spiritual pain, I realized in my house, I was crying myself to sleep when I was eight years old, convinced that I was going to hell because I didn’t say my “Our Father” the night before when I was going to bed.

I had this imagery of me falling asleep. I equated it to falling to hell because I couldn’t stay awake. It was so hard to stay awake to say my prayers but it was so easy to just fall asleep. So I started to see images and arch of hell like they’re the most horrible, glorified, horrifying, traumatic visual things that I’ve ever seen in my life were pictures of people describing this religious thing called hell. So I grew up totally traumatized by the idea that I was going to hell because I was told there were these rules you had to follow. You get one chance and there’s this whole idea of sin. When you grow up in the Catholic and in the Christian world, you cannot walk five feet without having that word thrown at you. As a kid, it was like a math equation. At a certain point, I was doomed. I was doomed by the things that every human being does. I was like, “This is an equation where there’s no way I don’t end up in hell, and wait a minute, I’m not a murderer. I’m not a rapist.” I’m like, “If I’m ending up in hell, everybody’s ending up in hell.”

Now I have an eight-year-old and the image of my son crying himself to sleep because he’s afraid he’s going to hell, breaks my heart. Except that was my childhood and no one knew. I never told anybody because I was scared to death to talk about that kind of stuff.

I think a lot of people leave the church when they get old enough to physically leave the church for a really good reason because well-intentioned people put the fear of hell into them. I mean, we talked about put the fear of God into somebody. I can’t square myself with anybody who thinks that the idea of an all-loving God and the fear of God at the same time can hold the same space like, “Cool. That’s for you.” Great but I’m not signing on to anything where I am afraid of my creator, that I am afraid for my eternal soul like that has no place in inspiring me to be a good person. It didn’t work. All it did is it inspired me to find pornography because as soon as I found it in pornography, I found relief. I found something that captivated my imagination. It took my mind completely out of the terror for a period of time while I was in the very same place that I was crying myself to sleep, alone in my room at night. 

So when people have to understand that addiction is not a problem, addiction is a solution to a problem. People who don’t have a problem, don’t have an addiction. Most adults recreationally use drugs and illegal substances and alcohol and then they spontaneously stop using it after a 10 year period. The data on it is overwhelming. 

Carrie: And food. 

How Does Childhood Trauma Impact The Nervous System?

Tim. And Food. They come to a decision, “Oh, this isn’t working for me” and they just stop whatever it is. They just stopped doing it. For a small percentage of people who have adverse childhood experiences who have trauma, who are chronically stressed, their nervous system has been hijacked by past events and current events, and they’re now reaching for something in an attempt to self-soothe their nervous system. It becomes a feedback loop where they reach for something to self-soothe. It works in the moment. It causes problems afterward. They feel shame, guilt, pain of some sort, disconnection. So then once again, they’re in a stress response their brain craves to be self-soothing. So then they reach forward again and it becomes this vicious circle that they can’t get themselves out of.

When I work with people to help them understand this cycle, it’s like the stressed brain craves relief by design. So when you have depression, when you have anxiety, you have this in your brain and in your body, you feel discomfort. The brain’s job is to comfort itself. A craving is a design, it’s well-built.  The reason we can’t withstand cravings is because they’re supposed to work. We want to self-soothe. We want to self-regulate. 

Our nervous system has three gears. It wants to be in what we would call a safe-default-relaxed-aware” state which would be identified as the ventral vagal state. That’s where our nervous system is running. The parasympathetic aspect of our autonomic nervous system is running the show. Our prefrontal cortex is online. We’re able to be creative. We’re able to connect emotionally. We’re able to consider the past, consider the future, all the best parts about being a human being. Why we’ve dominated the world in terms of the natural landscape. They’re all available to us when we’re in that state. Most of that goes offline though when we are called upon to either outrun a tiger or fight off a tribe. 

We have this second gear, this sympathetic nervous system response, the fight or flight gear where the amygdala suddenly activates and takes over and kicks the prefrontal cortex to shotgun and says, “I’m going to get us out of here.” Now we are in reactive mode. We’re not in creative mode and it changes our body physiologically like blood sugar changes, blood pressure changes. Hormones are released in that moment. That’s really great in the moment and then the moment is designed to pass, but in our chronically over-scheduled, overstimulated 21st-century world, we’re now getting that stress response chronically daily, multiple times a day. 

The brain and the body are not designed to work that way so it’s overwhelmed. It gets stuck. It gets in this feedback loop, and now it’s like, “Oh, I’m stressed out. Why am I stressed out?” Because I’m so used to being stressed out.  

That is a real challenge. It presents huge physical problems like type two diabetes, massive connection to chronic stress because what it does to your blood sugar like the same diet if you’re stressed, versus if you’re not stressed. Your body metabolizes the same diet differently. So it has real health implications, heart implications, stroke implications, addiction, low libido, anxiety, depression get exacerbated. All of these when we get stressed are at risk and we live in a culture where there is no break. There’s no slow down. 

The Science Of Music And Its Impact On Mental Health

For me, my job is to teach people where are these moments happening in their day and then how do we insert music into these moments. The funny thing about music in nature and with our nervous system is that when we make music in some way with our body, or we listen to music that we enjoy, our nervous system regulates. So it turns the stress response off fast. 

Carrie: It’s incredible. 

Tim: It is incredible. We know this intuitively like you’ve been in a funk. A song comes on and there’s transformation like the science behind it. You know how we are in the Western world, we have to study it and then tell you it happened and we’re like, “thanks, I already knew that” 

My whole degree, Carrie is tales of the obvious, chapters one, two, three, four. “Let me tell you about music,“ “I already knew that,” “but here’s how it works,” “Oh, okay. Now it’s real.”

A lot of times I’m telling people what they’ve already experienced and what they already do, but now they understand like it’s legit. That this isn’t wishful thinking. This is a real stimulus-response experience in the body happening at a preconscious level.

I used to work in the hospital where I would go into the ICU. I was referred for patients who had elevated blood pressure, heart rate, and respiratory rhythm. Even though they were in a coma I would slow their heart rate, their blood pressure, and their respiratory rhythms down just with my guitar. 

Carrie: Wow. That’s great. 

Tim: That’s really, you know, really? They’re in a coma but their ears are still receiving these auditory signals from the environment and our bodies is a rhythm machine. You can slow down your body’s rhythms by introducing a slow tempo in the environment around it.

I would just look at their heart rate on the monitor like it was a click track or a metronome, and I’d start playing along with it. After about five minutes, I start to slow down my guitar and their body would slow down in response and that was when I really was like, “Okay, this is legit.”

How To Use Music To Relieve Anxiety

Carrie: Do you encourage people to listen to certain types of music when they’re anxious or when they’re depressed?

Tim: It’s a really great question. People will want to know what’s the right and wrong stuff to listen to. So there’s a couple of things one is with anxiety, a lot of times your focus is no longer in the present. You’re kind of wrapped up. It’s a kind of a disembodied experience as a trigger to an embodied extense of panic. The disembodied part is you’re up in your head, perseverating over a future that you’re convinced is going to happen.

Carrie: A bad future.

Tim: Yeah, not an exciting future because the brain is designed not to thrive, it’s designed to survive. So the brain defaults to a negative scenario out of survival because a false positive keeps you alive, a false negative, “You’re a lunch for the tiger.”

The way that our nervous system and our brain designed itself for survival was to default to a negative potential. This could be bad. We have a very old operating system. It’s designed to do that. So people naturally default to the negative. There’s nothing wrong with you. That’s your survival instinct. The problem is they get caught in a feedback loop about it and they believe the thought. It’s just a thought and it’s designed in a certain way, but we believe it as the future and then we get stuck in it. Then now we’re no longer present. We’re out of our head. We’re out of our body. We’re up in our head. 

The first thing we want to try to do is when we reach for music the style of music isn’t so important as that it’s something that is enjoyable to me. It’s very personal. It’s like flavor. It’s very personal, but I don’t want to stop with just reaching for it to listen to it.

I want to make music with it. So if I’ve got my phone and I’ve got my earbuds in and I put on a playlist of music that inspires me, that I’ve already put in there for just such an occasion. What I want to do is I want to either tap along on my body with the beat, with the music. I want to hum along with the melody. I want to actually audiate, which is like when you sing in your head but not out loud. So you can sing along with a song in your head and you’re not actually using your mouth but your brain is doing all of the calisthenics to produce the pitch and the tempo and the words in your head. Then what happens is you just activate your vocal cord. If you want to release that out into the environment, you can just sing along in your head. You can sing along out loud, even better, but in any way that you can activate your body to match the music, then your body is involved. That’s a huge component for people with anxiety is because getting back into your body brings you back into the present moment because the only place your body is, is in the present moment. 

So the challenge with remembering that is you got to remember it, but if you just turn on music and you try to play along with the beat or tap along with the beat, you’re just trying to keep the beat and by virtue of trying to keep the beat now you’re back in your body and you’re back in the present moment because music is time-based. When we play music in order to keep the beat, we have to be present. The challenge with listening to music is listening to music can become a very disembodied experience.

Carrie: Passive versus active. 

Tim: Yes. It engages your imagination and your memory. So you can be listening to a song and you can float away. The song can take you to where the song is. It’s a disembodied experience when you just listened to the song. You’ve had this experience where you listened to a song that you have heard before and you have a memory associated with that song. So suddenly you’re no longer in the present moment. You are a back wherever that was, and it could be good, could be bad. 

The same thing can happen in the future. You can hear a song and it can trigger your thoughts and your feelings and your emotions about the future because there’s nothing holding you. The song itself isn’t holding you in the present moment unless you try to engage with it with your body.

When You Have Anxiety, Choose Music That Lifts You Up

So that’s why for people with anxiety, it is really, really critical that you have music you enjoy that you know that lifts you up.  When you put it on, you go move your body to it. What I tell people to do is to have a power playlist. It’s three songs that fire you up. When you feel the anxiety strike, you put the playlist on, put in your earbuds, get up and go for a walk and you walk to the beat because everybody walks in rhythm.

If you can’t go walk to the beat and you have to be stationary then tap along with it or hum along with it, but be in the present moment, making music with the music. You don’t have to be a musician to do this because when you clap to the beat, you don’t consider yourself a musician. If you tap your leg to the beat, you don’t consider yourself a musician, but you’re doing the very same thing. [00:30:55] You’re activating your body in the present moment. I think that’s more important than the actual material that’s in the music.

When it comes to the material, that’s in the music, here’s what we know from research. Typically, if you are struggling with depression or anger particularly, what’s going to happen is the music you reach for might do one of three things. Typically, people will reach for music that matches their mood. That’s normal. We want to validate where we are intuitively. So angry people, if they listen to angry music, it may do one of three things. It may reduce the anger because they now have this resonance with something they feel validated. It’s cathartic, so it actually reduces the anger. Sometimes it doesn’t do anything to the anger. It has no effect at all. They just engage in the music and they feel as angry as they did beforehand. Sometimes it actually exacerbates the feelings of anger. I would submit that anger and anxiety are more related than anxiety and depression, because I feel like anger and anxiety are hyper regulated, hyperactive states. Whereas depression is kind of a hypoactive state. There’s this correlation, but not identical but correlated. So if you’re in a hyper-regulated hyperactive state, there’s the chance that you could exacerbate that. 

We’ve read from research with teens were the same with depression they listen to sad music when they’re depressed. The music doesn’t make them sad. They were sad and they reached for the music that matched their sadness.

The music either makes them feel better, it doesn’t change the sadness, or actually exacerbates it makes it worse. It’s really important for people to notice what’s happening in their body. As they’re listening to the music they reach for because there’s no stamp of this than that when it comes to music. 

We’ve even had anecdotal evidence. Anecdotal evidence is like an oxymoron but case studies where kids will say, “I used this music at one time to actually make myself feel worse” and then the song changed. The meaning of it changed. I felt better. Then the song became like a badge of survivorship that I made it through and the song took on a new meaning. And now when I hear the song, I actually feel more inspired and it’s like, “Wow, that’s really complex.” People don’t want complex. They want simple solutions. 

Difference Between Music-Listening And Music-Making

So when it comes to music listening, music listening is very nuanced. It’s very complex and that’s why I try to encourage people music-making because music-making is a motor cortex embodied physical experience happening in the present moment. It is not really subject to these nuances of context. It’s just, “Here’s the beat.” “The beats happening now.” “Oh, the beats getting faster.” “Okay. I got to keep up with the beat right now.” There’s no emotional discussion about the beat. There’s the beat. I’m going to tap along with the beat.

If you’re feeling elevated and you want to slow your heart rate, blood pressure, and respiratory rhythm down, the principle we use is called the ISO principle and the law of rhythmic and treatment.

So you start with music, that’s uptempo to match how you’re feeling, and then you pick music that gradually slows down. Your playlist would be like the first song is the fastest of the three. The second song is a little bit slower in tempo and the third song is a little bit slower than that but not shocking.

Carrie: Sure. Just gradually going down. 

Tim: Yeah. If you’ve ever been to any kind of cardio class or DJ, if you really pay attention, the music they pick usually starts slow during the warmup and then it picks up but gradually it peaks. Then at the end, during the cool-down, the tempo, the speed of the music slows down. The intensity of the music slows a little bit because we’re warming down or we’re bringing down at the end. That kind of tempo arc or speed arc, if you will, that’s really what your body responds to more than anything. It’s going to respond to that. 

Integrating Music With Spirituality

Carrie: I’m curious about if you could integrate spirituality in that because as someone who’s gone to church her whole life, typically you start out with the fast praise and worship song, everybody’s clapping. Typically nobody starts a worship set with a slow song unless they’re really trying to stir you up.

Tim. No, but I will submit that the band or whoever’s running the soundboard oftentimes has prelude music before the opening song. That prelude is usually lower, slower tempo intensity than the opening song. There is usually some sort of entrance, if you will into this experience and it doesn’t start here. At least that’s been my experience.

Carrie: Yeah. I would agree with that.

Tim: It’s so funny how different aspects of the world of music don’t necessarily talk to each other. In music education, they teach a certain way, but if they knew the research that is in neurologic music therapy, they would teach music completely differently. The two worlds don’t talk to each other. Music ministry doesn’t talk to music therapy. There are two completely different silos. They take completely different classes or we don’t exchange notes. We don’t exchange research like, “Hey, here’s how to use tempo.”

They probably do it intuitively but if you knew, then you would really do this, I would submit that intuitively if I think about the music director at our church. I’ve subbed as the music director and I’ve played in the praise band on and off for several years like there is an ebb and flow of tempo and intensity of the songs based on where we are in worship that tend to match where the worship is.

When we’re doing the anthem either right before or after the message It’s not the fastest tempo song we do. The fastest tempo songs are usually the opening and closing. We’ve kind of more in like a contemplative. It’s like where the ballad is. The anthem is the ballad. It’s the feels where all the feels come in. It’s like back in growing up in music, your first record, the first single from the pop star, it’s upbeat, it’s fun. Maybe the second one’s like that and then they introduce their ballad. It’s like the second, third or fourth, but no artist ever releases their ballad as the first track on their record.

Carrie Absolutely. It’s been absolutely incredible having you on the show. I appreciate so much you taking the time to do this and talk to us about a variety of different things. It was neat to see the interaction between all of them. 

Tim: Cool. Thanks for having me. 

___________________________________________________________________

I really appreciated Tim’s vulnerability and being willing to talk about spiritual woundedness and spiritual pain.

I think that there are going to be other people who listen to this episode and really relate and resonate with that. If you’re in that situation, I just encourage you in Jeremiah 29:13, it says, “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.” That’s a promise. 

If you are looking for God with your whole heart, I believe that you will find Him.

How Music Helped Carrie In The Midst Of Divorce

I made a critical blunder on this podcast, just kidding. It’s not a critical blunder but I did forget something. I forgot to ask him,

“What was the time that you received hope from God or another person?” So I thought I would share a little bit with you just personally if you needed a hope story for this week because quite frankly, we’re living in a world where we need more stories of hope.

I wanted to tell you about how music has given me hope. There were a couple of songs in particular when I was going through my divorce that were popular at the time. One was The Kari Jobe song, “I Am Not Alone.” That meant so much to me because at that point in my life, that’s exactly how I felt. I felt completely alone and the song just reminded me that God was always with me. 

The other song that was popular that really resonated with me was a Jeremy Camp song called “He Knows.” It was this sense of Jesus knows like every pain and every suffering and every hurt that you’re going through and He can relate to that. He can relate to you in that human nature of suffering. 

Every time those songs would come on the radio and I was driving around for work. I would just sing at the top of my lungs and it was like those words provided such a level of hope and encouragement to me like, “I’m going to get through this.”

So I just want to encourage you. What songs are meaningful for you in this season of your life right now? God can really use music to speak truth over our lives if we will just engage with it. 

You can find helpful resources at hopeforanxietyandocd.com. Feel free to hop on over to the contact form. I would love to hear from you. I want to hear your story of hope and let me know if we can share it on the show sometime. I would love to compile some of those together. What’s a time for you that you experience hope from God or another person? Hit us up on the contact page and let us know. 

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.

1. Carrie’s Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD

In episode one of Hope for Anxiety and OCD, Carrie Bock discusses the reason she started a podcast for Christians struggling with anxiety and OCD. She shares her own personal story of loss and how her faith in God got her through it, learning more about His character along the way.

  • Learn the inspiration for Hope for Anxiety and OCD
  • My story of going from a religious person to a spiritual one
  • When life turns out not as you planned it, but somehow better

Resources and links:

By The Well Counseling

For more information on foster care and adoption in the US:

Adopt US Kids

Court Appointed Special Advocates

Wendy’s Wonderful Kids

Listen to more podcast episodes


Transcript of episode 1

Hi, my name is Carrie Bock and I’m the host of Hope for Anxiety and OCD podcast. Two of my most defining characteristics are that I’m a Christian and I’m a Licensed Professional Counselor.

All Truth Belongs To God

It’s been an interesting journey being caught between two worlds, so to speak. If I use anything in addition to the Bible, I’m too secular for some Christians. Don’t get me wrong. I love the Bible. It’s my guide for life. You know, the big stuff like how to be saved, love God and others, find spiritual peace. However, there are many things the Bible never taught me that I had to figure out that was important in life like how to change a tire or pick which college I was going to go to, or how to cook salmon in the oven just right. I’m not going to find these things directly in the Word of God. I have to go elsewhere for that information. That’s okay because all truth belongs to God. Put lemon slices on top of the salmon. Trust me. It’s delicious.

If all truth belongs to God, that includes every psychological study that’s ever been done on how we learn, what motivates people towards positive behavior, how the brain and the body are affected by trauma, [and] the methods of therapy that are effective for different disorders. The list goes on and on. I could totally geek out about all of this, but in certain therapists circles, if you start to mention Christianity, some therapists look at you a little sideways and start talking to you about how many people they have in their caseload who’ve been traumatized by religion. I get it. So now you know, I’m a misfit who doesn’t fit in. I don’t fit in with the Christian counseling community because I’m too secular for them. I don’t fit in with the secular counseling community because I’m too Christian for them. It’s okay. My conscience is clear that I can have all of Jesus and all of the really good therapy techniques too. Enter my clients. Of course, I can’t tell you all about them. That would be a major HIPAA violation.

You Can Have Jesus and Therapy

Let’s just say that I specialize in treating trauma, anxiety, and OCD. My clients aren’t all Christian, but among the ones who are, some have repeated similar statements people have told them about Jesus and therapy. Some are secretly in therapy because it doesn’t feel safe to talk about it in the church. Some are ashamed to be struggling with anxiety or OCD as a Christian wondering if it makes them less spiritual for having these struggles in the first place. They have verses memorized about anxiety. They’ve been told all kinds of things from church leaders about not seeking secular counseling and medication is wrong, and to just pray and read their Bible more. Others are told they’re struggling because they don’t trust God enough.

I’m so sick and tired of these negative, shameful, and non-biblical messages being sent to Christians that I can’t stand it. I can’t stay silent any longer. I want to scream from the rooftops, “You can have Jesus and therapy!”

Anxiety affects people physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Each of these domains must be addressed in order to find healing. How can I love God with all my heart if I am stuck in anger due to past trauma? How can I love God with all my soul if it is dry and thirsty, lacking connection? How can I love God with all my mind if it’s plagued with worry? How can I love God with all my strength if I don’t take care of my physical body?

Hope For Anxiety and OCD Podcast Is For People From All Walks Of Life

It takes time for my clients to unpack these negative messages and evaluate them based on scripture. I guess you could say this podcast is for my clients, but it’s not really. No offense meant to any current or former clients listening here. This podcast is for all the people I may never meet but who need to hear that it’s okay to struggle, and it’s okay to take steps towards greater health and freedom.

Hope for Anxiety and OCD exists to reduce shame, increase hope and develop healthier connections with God and others. I invite you on this journey as I interview pastors, Christian leaders, therapists, and everyday people who found hope in the midst of their mental health struggles. I want you (yes you) to help me out along the way.

What burning questions do you have about the intersection between faith and mental health? Who do you want me to interview? What topics are important to you?

Feel free to reach out anytime via our website: www.hopeforanxietyandocd.com. I’ve already recorded some shows that I am super excited to share with you. We’re going to be talking about unanswered prayer, how to rule out potential physical causes of anxiety, help for parents who have anxious children, [and] different types of therapy techniques that can be helpful for anxiety and OCD.

Hope For Anxiety and OCD Has Something For Everyone.

There’s something for everyone. Every show is unique and special and I pray it’s a blessing for the person that needs to hear it that day.

There is also something I want you to know about the guests on this show. It would be easy to assume that every guest on a Christian podcast is automatically a Christian. This show is a little bit unique and different because as I talked about in the beginning, we’re combining two different worlds. Some of the guests are Christian and they are combining the worlds of counseling, psychology, the Bible, Christianity, the church, and it’s so valuable for us to hear that information.

There are other people who have valuable, helpful counseling information that I also wanted to include on the show, or who are friends of mine and don’t follow Christ, the Bible, or Christianity.

The really cool part of that I think that has opened up is an opportunity for us to learn how to talk to people who believe differently than we do and how to ask important spiritual questions. I’m fully prepared for this podcast to probably upset somebody, but that’s okay. Jesus ended up upsetting a lot of people. So as long as I’m doing all that God has called me to do, we’re good.

More About Me

Now that I’ve introduced the podcast, I’d like to tell you some background information about myself, so you can get to know me, the host a little bit better.

I grew up as a shy kid seeking to fade into the background. My dad likes to tell the story about how we went to a new church and everyone knew who my brother was and that my parents had a son, but they had to tell people that they also had a younger daughter. Let’s face it, the kid that got seen also got in trouble more.

Growing up in a conservative family, I was pretty conscientious about things like right and wrong. There were lots of fears about doing the wrong thing and getting in trouble.

I made the decision to follow Jesus and make Him Lord of my life at eight years old, but I put on Jesus, my experience with other adults. If I do wrong, I’m going to get in big trouble and God will be really mad at me. He seemed harsh and mean in some of the Bible stories, and I was scared of Him. What did God want from me? Whatever it was, I knew I was probably going to mess it up.

Being the quiet shy kid also made me the observer. I was keenly aware and had a heightened sensitivity to other people’s emotions, and I didn’t know how to handle them at all. My sensitivity caused me to take everything personally.

It’s a little rough in the making friends’ department when you’re quiet, and you tend to get bullied more. I used to replay social interactions over and over in my head and always felt a little awkward.

How Did I Become A Therapist?

Did I become a therapist because I was the person everyone naturally gravitated towards with their problems? No way. But if I had studied the DSM at the time, I probably could have diagnosed my high school class. All joking aside, it was the opportunity to take psychology in high school that steered me away from the path of becoming a sign language interpreter towards well, I don’t really know, other than I thought psychology was the most interesting thing I’ve ever studied, and I wanted to help people. Mom said helping people is not a career. So you have to narrow that one down a little bit more.

I was a religious person into adulthood, running around, doing the good things, hoping that my works were going to keep me in right standing with God. I believe I was saved by grace but after that, it felt like I was under the law all the time, and God was just waiting for me to mess up. That’s a non-biblical, messed-up theology by the way.

As a religious person, checking boxes of all the things I was supposed to be doing, was exhausting. I completely missed the heart and intimacy of having a relationship with Jesus.

My Experience As A Foster Parent

In 2013, my husband and I had gotten the phone call we’d been waiting for. Department of Children Services or DCS asked us if we would like to take two girls: a five-year-old and an eight-year-old into our home. We were ecstatic. I had a dream previously that I believe to be from God about having two daughters. We were led to believe by DCS that these children would most likely not have an appropriate family placement to go back to.

We gave the girls several different options of things they could call us, and they decided they wanted to call us mom and dad right away. I was not expecting that. We all seem to be enjoying the new normal of our instant family life. I even got asked where babies come from on my first week of parenting.

The girls came during the summer and we helped them get ready to start a new school year, at a new school. There’s something really profound about having two children call you mom, eat at your dinner table and play in your front yard. But at the end of the day, they aren’t your children. My heart didn’t know the difference, and my heart would be completely broken six weeks later when DCS lost in court, and the girls immediately went back to their family. We weren’t even informed there was a court date, so we were in complete shock to find out that we had a few hours to pack up all their stuff and get them to the DCS office.

My husband and I came home to two empty rooms, one decorated with Monster High and the other with decals of a boyband. I can’t even remember which one now. A behavior chart was stuck on the door. Whatever we were trying to correct at the time, suddenly didn’t matter anymore. I wasn’t prepared at all for how to handle this and the physical pain of loss was so deep that it sent me to the doctor’s office. I had never felt anything like that before. I now jokingly say that was the day I spent $200 on bloodwork to find out that I was going through grief.

Other foster children came in one over the next year. Meanwhile, several foster parents we were connected with were in the process of adopting their first placements. I was very discouraged. Why wasn’t God allowing me to have the gift of family? I felt like God called us into this foster care and adoption journey but really questioned His plans.

Questioning God

In the fall of 2014, we received another sibling placement; this time, a boy and a girl. It was looking like they might become a part of our forever family, but what happens when you check all the religious boxes, believing you’re doing the right thing, and then something goes terribly wrong? It happened to me on what should have been a normal Sunday in January of 2015.

I threw my cell phone against the wall and swore before bursting into tears. I’d gone in my bathroom in hopes that my foster children wouldn’t hear the phone conversation. My husband of nine years was telling me that he was done and wanted to divorce.

I knew that our marriage wasn’t perfect, but I didn’t see divorce in our future anywhere. That hadn’t even been discussed at all. Wait a minute God. I married a believer. We’re in church every Sunday. We’re in a small group. We pray at every meal. We read Bible stories with our foster children. How in the world did this happen?

My head was spinning. I had so many questions for God and most went unanswered. Why didn’t he answer my prayer to restore my marriage? Then divorce devastated me. Not only did I lose my husband, but my dreams of having a family were gone in an instant.

Overcoming A Divorce

I went from being a household of four to all alone, looking for roommates to pay a mortgage, in survival mode. My thoughts kept me up at night. Where did I go wrong? What should I have done differently? I couldn’t sleep or concentrate at work. I had no energy and felt hopelessly sad, all symptoms of depression.

I made the decision to take an antidepressant for six months and I can confidently say it was one of the most healthy decisions I’ve ever made for myself.

I carried around a lot of shame regarding being a divorced woman in the church. I remember thinking “my life is over now.” I didn’t mean that in the suicidal sense, but I didn’t see any kind of positive future for myself. What godly man is going to be with someone who’s been divorced?

Unpacking Emotional Baggage and Experiencing God In New Ways.

I had a lot of emotional baggage to unpack from childhood and beyond. Sometimes, that meant talking through my thought process, and sometimes that meant reprocessing trauma with EMDR therapy. It was this process of unpacking the baggage that caused me to experience God in new ways. It was as if there were clouds blocking my view of the sun and when they moved, I could see the sun clearly. God hadn’t changed, but my view of Him is less cloudy now. My faith doesn’t just have knowledge and rules. It has heart and understanding of the depth of the love of God, and the promise that He would never leave me.

I found God as a good father who had blessed me in many ways, and some I just couldn’t see yet. I also had a greater understanding of grace that God showed me as I walked through dealing with my own sin and how that impacted my relationship. I could connect with Jesus knowing that He understood suffering and pain that’s both physical and emotional.

I’m thankful for my pastors, divorce care recovery group, therapist, primary care, physician, and close friends. They all played an important role in my recovery process.

Jesus Transformed My Tears into Triumphs

Today, I am thankful for my divorce, not that it happened but how God used that experience to shape my character and view of him. I’m a more thankful, positive, and compassionate person due to what I’ve been through. I want to help Christians recognize that they can have the abundant life Jesus talks about in John 10:10.

I invite you to think through what is holding you back from that abundant life. I’m happy to tell you that five years after my divorce, I met the most amazing man, and we were married in October of 2020. You’ll get to meet him soon on the podcast as he’s graciously agreed to appear with me on an episode about anxiety and dating, more my anxiety than his.

Thank you so much for listening. I pray that this podcast is a blessing to you today, and whatever you’re facing, know that you are loved by God and never alone.

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.


How to Receive Counseling for Free

Did you know you probably have a benefit through work that would provide you with free counseling? Seriously. Who doesn’t like free? An Employee Assistance Program (EAP) is a benefit separate from health insurance that pays for 3-8 counseling sessions at no cost to the employee.  

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