Skip to main content

Author: Carrie Bock

I am a Christ follower, wife, and mother. I seek to bring a calm, compassionate, and hopeful approach to my practice. I am direct and transparent, ensuring no guessing games or hidden analyses. I believe in taking my own advice before sharing it with clients as we strive towards physical and emotional health together. I’ve been a licensed professional counselor since 2009, but I’m still learning every day. I’ve been practicing EMDR since 2013 and became an EMDR consultant in 2019, which is the highest level of training in EMDR. I also host the podcast “Christian Faith and OCD.” This started with a hesitant “yes” to God in 2020, and has grown into a world wide ministry.

125. Help For When You Can’t Stop Googling Everything! with Carrie Bock, LPC-MHSP

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Counseling, OCD, Podcast Episode.

In this episode, Carrie talks about the downsides of Googling too much, especially for those with OCD and anxiety. She shares how seeking reassurance online can actually make things worse and offers tips for resisting the urge to Google.

Episode Highlights:

  • The risks of excessive Googling, particularly for those with OCD and anxiety.
  • How seeking reassurance online can escalate anxiety and spiritual confusion.
  • The importance of accepting uncertainty as a part of finding peace.
  • Recognizing the urge to Google and making intentional choices to step back.
  • Practical strategies for resisting the urge to Google and maintaining mental well-being.

Episode Summary:

Welcome to Episode 125 of Hope for Anxiety and OCD! I’m Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor based in Tennessee, and I’m thrilled to have you with me today. If you find yourself caught in the habit of excessive Googling, you’re not alone. Many people with OCD struggle with this same issue, and in today’s episode, we’re diving deep into why this habit can be harmful and how you can start to break free from it.

Are you constantly Googling for reassurance? Perhaps you spend hours reading articles, watching videos, or searching for answers online. While it’s okay to research things in moderation, excessive Googling often exacerbates anxiety and leads to confusion rather than clarity.

We’ll address the cycle of reassurance-seeking that many people experience. Just like asking others for validation in relationships or at work, Googling is a way of self-reassuring. But instead of finding peace, you might end up trapped in a maze of conflicting opinions, especially in spiritual matters.

It’s crucial to recognize the urge to Google as a potential sign of OCD. When you feel a strong, anxious need to find an answer immediately, it’s often a sign that OCD is driving your behavior.

Remember, not everything needs an immediate solution. It’s rare that Googling will provide you with the certainty you’re seeking. Often, the answers to your questions are not readily available online, and learning to sit with uncertainty can be an important step in your healing journey.

Tune in to discover how to manage your Googling habits, set healthy boundaries, and find peace without relying on endless searches.

Explore related episode:

131. Relationship Obsessions Combined with Scrupulosity: Pierre’s Story

Transcript

Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD, episode 125. I am your host, Carrie Bock, a  licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. 

I’m glad that you’re here. I just want to remind everybody, we have some exciting news, we have some revamping of the podcast that is going to be happening this summer and hopefully, we will have some new artwork, a new website, and a new name. For more information about that, make sure to hop on our email list so that you can be an insider and be the first to know. It is hopeforanxietyandocd.com/free. We’ll get you any of those free resources and to be able to be put on our email list.

This episode is for some of you that really struggle with your relationship with Googling. Maybe you are Googling what you feel like is everything or you’re spending hours and hours reading articles, hours and hours researching things on YouTube. If you haven’t figured this out, this is not incredibly healthy for you or your mental health. It’s okay to research things in moderation, it’s okay to look into things. But there is a point where it becomes unhealthy and creates more and more anxiety. Googling is a common OCD obsession that I see in clients that I work with, and when I first started working with OCD, It was one of the red flags of maybe this person needs some more assessment if they are Googling all of the time.

Maybe we need to start assessing them for OCD. Googling is a way that people seek reassurance. You may have seen, or heard of reassurance seeking in OCD, where you’re asking someone in a relationship, “Hey, are we okay right now? You’re asking your boss, am I doing everything the way you want me to? You’re asking doctors like, am I going to be okay? Are you sure that I’m going to be all right? Googling is a way we have done to self-reassure, to find out from some article, or expert video that everything is going to be all right, or we’re finding for or against what we think is okay. 

Now we want to talk about how this can send you down a bunch of different rabbit holes where you see a bunch of different people’s opinions. It can cause you, especially in the spiritual realm from what I see with clients is it can cause you to become more and more spiritually confused, like, “Okay, well, this person about this scripture says this, and this person over here says that. You can get stuck on who is right, and who’s wrong.

If this person is saying this, does that mean I need to be doing that? If that person is saying I should stay away from seeing movies that are rated PG-13, does that mean that I’m a bad Christian if I go see this movie over here, the latest film? If this person over here says I should only listen to Christian music, does that mean I’m a bad Christian if I listen to secular music? What it does, the reality is, especially spiritually. It leaves you confused and causes you more disconnect from your actual relationship with God. Your relationship with God needs to, there’s a balance here. I’m not going to say it’s based a hundred percent. on just you and God because I do believe based on the scriptures that Christian community is an important part of our walk, that we can lovingly correct each other when we’re outside of bounds.

We need to just be very guarded and cautious about the people that we allow to speak into our lives. We need to make sure that they are aligned with the Word of God and our beliefs and understandings about the character of God. We don’t want to go too far off the rails and be following someone that is using obscure scriptures to make a major life change point.

Certain people may be convicted about some things. that you are not convicted about, and that is okay. Back to Googling and spending lots of time on YouTube, you need to be careful about that urge, so it starts with probably some type of obsession, and then there’s an urge to get on Google. There’s an urge that like, I need to know, I need to have this answer, I need to have this settled. What OCD is telling you is that you need to know and have that answer settled right now. That’s what you need to be cautious about. It’s not bad to know information or to try to research, but when there’s a strong, anxious, emotional urge that says you have to know it right now, go on and Google this. That’s probably OCD telling you or urging you to do those things. Then you can sit back and you have a crossroads, a choice at that point. Do I pick up my phone? Because now it’s so easy for us, we don’t even have to go to a computer anymore. We just pick up our phone. We can voice search in there.

We just say, “Hey, look up this for me.” We can ask it all kinds of questions. We don’t even have to touch our phones. I mean, people have Alexa in their home or they can say, “Hey, Alexa, look this up for me.” It’s so so easy for us. 

Be intentional. Maybe you need to leave your phone when you feel that urge, leave your phone in another part of the house and literally walk away from it or walk away from your computer. Make intentional decisions not to get on those things when you’re trying to go to sleep because that is going to activate your brain in a way where you’re trying to problem solve and figure everything out right now Here’s the truth that we can sit with it is very very rare that we need to have a solution Right now that we would need to Google Maybe there is a solution right now like in an emergency situation where We might need to call 911.

We might need to tell someone to stop doing something. We might need to walk away from a situation. None of those involve googling. A lot of times the things that you’re searching for are things that are hard to know right now. In this present moment, or you’re trying to find certainty about a specific situation that you’re dealing with, instead of sitting with, maybe the answers to your specific situation are not on the internet.

You’re trying to find other people who have been through similar experiences. I have done my fair share of Googling, especially when it comes to medical experiences. I did a lot of Googling when I was pregnant with my daughter. I had some various complications. I wanted to know, was she going to be okay? Was I going to be okay? Ultimately, that Googling gave me some information, but it really didn’t give me certainty. 

That’s what you’re wanting to know is, can Googling actually give you certainty? No, it can’t. It can give you more information, but can it tell you what’s gonna happen 100 percent of the time? No. As you’re learning through this process of dealing with OCD, part of that is learning to know, Hey, I don’t have 100 percent certainty. What’s going to happen in my experience? I didn’t know what it was going to be like to give birth to my daughter. Even though that was my first and only child, other people have had vastly different birth experiences, even who have had multiple children.

Just because you’ve had a child before, that doesn’t mean it’s going to go exactly the same as it did the last time. Googling about it can give you some broad strokes, some general ideas, but it’s not going to tell you the specifics of your situation. Keeping that in mind, you’re wanting to know, what is it that I actually need, and can Google actually provide that? Most of the time, the answer is a no. 

You may, if you do need some legitimate information, but you are struggling because you know that you’re going to spend two hours on it, It may be something where you ask someone else to get you, like, one or two articles to read that are informative, that is from a healthy, good source, not just something that someone obscurely wrote that’s about two pages down the search engine. A reputable source where you can gain that information without feeling overwhelmed by all of the information that is out there. Typically, we do not have to consume as much information as we believe that we need to consume. You do not have to look at all different sides or angles or videos. You can glean some information from one or two things and then allow that to be the information gathering and moving on.

If you were going to Google, you would want to examine for yourself, “What is it that I am needing to know?” That’s one thing. “What am I actually needing to know? What am I hoping to gain from this? If I’m really Googling just to reassure myself, Or just to get some sense of, like, obscure certainty that’s out there.” Then you need to put the phone down, put the mouse down, walk away from the computer or phone, and say, okay, I’m going be okay even if I don’t get the certainty right now. I have to sit with some of the unknowns that are in my present experience about the future. Typically, it’s almost like we’re trying to get Google to help us figure out the future and be able to have some false sense of control. I think that’s what OCD is trying to tell you that you can have. You can have some false sense of control if you just get a little bit more information about this. Maybe you’ll understand it. Maybe you’ll be more confident in your decision making. Maybe you’ll know what to do.

There may be times where you gather all the information and you don’t know what the right decision is exactly. I had to make a hard decision about whether or not to be induced with my daughter and that was tough for me because I didn’t want to. Looking at all the information and then being able to say, okay, well, at some level, I have to make a decision and so many times I see people with OCD being concerned in a perfectionistic way about making quote the wrong decision or feeling like there’s only one right decision to be made in the situation.

Sometimes life is about praying and waiting for the peace of God to steer us in the right direction. And sometimes we have two okay options that are not in violation of our spiritual nature or things that, they’re not moral decisions to be made. And sometimes we just need to go with one of those, and that may be really hard for you or feel scary.

You may not feel like you have the confidence to make those decisions. That means there’s a little bit more inner work that needs to be done within yourself to be able to say, “Yes, I can make decisions. It’s okay.” That’s a thing that all adults do. Sometimes we are not sure of ourselves and sometimes there’s just a decision to be made and we have to stick our neck out and make it. Sometimes it’s okay, it works out well, sometimes it doesn’t. That’s a part of our life. 

OCD wants you to believe that somehow you can have this absolute certainty if you have an abundance of information. More information typically does not give us more certainty. It can actually lead us to more confusion, especially if we find conflicting information.

Look at your past experiences with Google and see how they have turned out. Sometimes people will tell me, “Well, I looked this thing up and it actually relieved my fear or my concern.” I found out that it’s very unlikely that this scenario would happen. If it was just something like that and then you stopped and you were able to let it go. If it’s something where there’s a lot of gray area and you’re Googling about it more than once or you’re almost looking for new information on it, Is that contributing to your mental health and saying no to OCD? It Doesn’t sound like it. I would encourage you to take some steps to be able to prevent yourself from going down that rabbit hole so often. As you do, it may feel uncomfortable at first, but you’ll notice that it gets easier and easier and easier the more that you resist that urge to Google. It truly is an urge, there is a feeling, you know. associated with it, but also you can say no to OCD and not give in to that urge to Google.

Hopefully, this helps some of you who are struggling with this area and the Googling. 

124. What to do When Compulsions Become Habits and Routines

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Counseling, OCD, Podcast Episode.

In this episode, Carrie explores how compulsions can evolve into habits and routines, especially within the context of OCD. She shares insights on how these patterns can impact daily life and offers practical advice on breaking free from their grip.

Episode Highlights:

  • The progression of compulsions into habits and routines.
  • The impact of compulsive behaviors on various aspects of life.
  • Strategies for identifying compulsive behaviors and understanding the motivation behind the desire for change.
  • Techniques for developing awareness of compulsive actions and acknowledging engagement in rituals.

Episode Summary:

I’m Carrie Bock, your host and licensed professional counselor based in Tennessee. Today, we’re diving into how compulsions can evolve into habits and routines. If you’ve been managing OCD, you might have noticed that compulsions start small but can gradually develop into extensive rituals.

For instance, you might begin with a few simple actions before bedtime, but before you know it, these actions can stretch into a 15-30 minute routine involving checking locks, windows, and appliances. This isn’t about typical bedtime routines but rather compulsions that grow more demanding over time.

Similarly, rituals before leaving the house can become time-consuming and interfere with your daily life. You might find yourself repeatedly checking things, which can delay work or social engagements.

Here’s the deal: If you recognize these patterns in yourself, the first step is to avoid self-blame. OCD can be sneaky, and what starts as a small request can balloon into an all-consuming ritual. The key is to acknowledge the issue and decide why you want to change it. Whether it’s reclaiming time for loved ones or personal care, understanding your “why” is crucial.

I encourage you to listen to the full episode to gain insights on managing these rituals effectively and to learn practical strategies that can make a real difference in your life.

Check out related episode:

https://carriebock.com/podcast-breakdown//118-how-do-i-know-if-this-thought-is-an-ocd-obsession-with-carrie-bock-lpc-mhsp

Transcript

Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD episode 124. I am your host, Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. Today, we’re talking about when compulsions become habits and routines. 

If you’ve been dealing with OCD at all, you may notice that compulsions start out a certain way, but then they just develop once you do them so often, or you do them in certain situations or scenarios so often then, they eventually become routines, rituals, habits, however you want to say it. For example, people may have certain things that they feel like they have to do before they can lay down and go to sleep at night. Here’s the problem with OCD, it’ll start out with like,” Ah, just do this one or two things before you go to bed, and you’re like, “Okay, that’s not that big of an ask,” and next thing you know, you’re doing this.It’s like 15 to 30-minute routine and ritual stuff, and it’s all OCD functionally related. I’m not talking about normal things that people do to get ready for bed. It’s like checking the locks a certain number of times or making sure all the windows are closed and the doors and that the oven’s off and all of a sudden it becomes this whole thing.

There may be some similar rituals that people have about leaving the house. I have to do these specific things before I can leave the house. The problem is that it may interfere with getting you to work. It may interfere with getting to social functions or other things that you need to be at because you keep going back and keep checking and looking at things.

Your rituals may involve things like cooking, cleaning, or the trash, and maybe washing your hands a lot during those types of rituals. First, I would say, if you notice, “Okay, Carrie, yes, what you’re talking about, I’m dealing with some of those things.” The first thing I would say to you is don’t beat yourself up. You didn’t get here overnight. OCD probably was like a little demanding, and then a little more demanding, and then a little more demanding, and next thing you know you have this whole giant ritual. You Just to take out the trash. It happens. It’s sneaky like that. We don’t want to beat yourself up or be in a place of shame.

If you’re identifying like, “Oh, I have these things that I need to change because now it’s gotten to a level that feels out of control for me.” What I would say is to identify the compulsive habit, routine, ritual, whatever you want to call it that you want to change and why you want to change it. It’s important to know why you want to change it. Maybe there’s something that you want to use that time for instead. You realize I’m being robbed of time that I could be connecting with other loved ones in my life.

I’m being robbed of time that I could be using to for self-care exercise. Maybe your why is that you realize OCD is taking way more control in the reigns over your life than you want to give. And you say, “You know what? I don’t want to fulfill OCD’s demands anymore. I can’t stand this no more.”

Now, if you recognize yourself in the middle of this routine. You develop awareness even over that you’re doing it. Some of you may just kind of check out and you’re just going through the motions and that’s what you don’t want. You don’t want to check out and go through the motions.

You want to recognize like, “Okay, I am thoughtfully choosing to engage in this compulsive ritual right now.”  Instead of just it being like muscle memory for you, we all have that if we do things over and over and over again. Eventually, we don’t have to think about that we’re doing it. There are many tasks involved in driving that you don’t think about just because you’ve driven so much and it’s become a routine.

You know when to check your mirrors, when to push the gas, when to push the brake. When you’re going through this compulsive ritual, you’re going tell yourself, “Okay, I’m choosing to engage in this right now.” Maybe you can’t stop it right away and that’s okay so that you step by step know what you’re doing.

The first step is to really even recognize and slowing down. “This is what I’m doing and I’m identifying to myself, even if to no one else, I’m identifying to myself that this is a compulsive ritual. 

Now, like I said, number one was, you’re not going to beat yourself up for it, but then when you get to the next kind of phase, You can plan to somehow mess it up. If you are telling yourself you have to do something a certain number of times, maybe you start by doing it. The ideal is that you wouldn’t engage at all, but that feels really hard or too big. You say, “Okay, well, I’m going to do this maybe one less time. If I normally do it three times, I’m going to intentionally mess it up and do it twice.”

Also know that OCD is going to be really irritated about that. It’s probably going to be disruptive and tell you it’s not going to feel right, and it’s not going to feel okay, and you have to be able to tell yourself that that’s all right, that this is part of the process of saying no to OCD, is that it’s going to get upset, just like boundaries with anyone.

You set your boundary with OCD, it’s going be mad, it’s going to push you back, and it’s going make you feel uncomfortable. Let’s say, it’s okay, this is how I’m getting out of this brain obsessive compulsive loop. That somewhere in that process, I have to intervene and mess that, that loop up. Every time I go around the loop, it gets stronger. And because that’s ingrained in your brain, You can’t just say no once or twice and expect it to be gone. You have to consistently be able to work through that in a way. If you usually say your part of your ritual is pulling on the doorknob, maybe you leave that part out. Maybe you make sure the door is locked, but you don’t pull on the doorknob.

If you have mental compulsions, make an intention to not do them perfectly like you would normally do, or not doing them until they feel right. Subtract something until you get to a point where you say, “Okay, I’m going to completely disengage from this activity. I’m not going to do this anymore.” 

Make that an experiment, maybe see, so if I don’t do my entire ritual before I leave the house, are things still going to be okay? I may not feel like they’re okay, but are they still going to be okay? You’ll probably find that nothing bad happens that day if you don’t do it. It’s okay, but the idea is that if you can’t stop the compulsion right away, try to see if you can somehow mess it up or delaying the compulsion. Maybe you tell yourself this is not really as workable for bedtime or something like that, but if there’s something that you’re doing immediately, like A lot of times I’ll have clients who are confessing many, many times throughout the day.

They’re confessing stuff. They’re not even like taking a pause to know if it’s a sin or not. It’s just like, “Oh, I had a thought. I must confess that. Oh, I had an experience that maybe might have been a sin and I’ve got to confess that.”

One of the things I’ll tell people to do in terms of delaying is say, okay, why don’t you take some time either in the morning or at night and be intentional instead of just repeatedly confessing everything, be intentional about what do I need to confess today? Stick it to that time period. If you don’t even remember it, or the Holy Spirit doesn’t bring it to your mind, it probably wasn’t important enough for you to confess. That’s okay, you can let those things go and not have to be stuck up on them. You’ll probably find that you’re confessing a whole lot less. Does that mean that you’re less spiritual? No, it means that you’re being present and intentional with God with your spirituality to be able to say, okay, like I want to have a relationship with you. I don’t know if you could imagine having a relationship with anybody else where you were constantly saying that you’re sorry. That does happen sometimes with people and usually they’re saying sorry unnecessarily after a while. Pretty soon people aren’t really hearing the apology anymore. All I’m hearing is I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It’s like wait a minute do you even know what it is you’re sorry for anymore? 

Think about that relating that over to your relationship with God you want those times where you are confessing To be meaningful for you, I hope that this clarified some things of if you’re going to get out of something like an obsessive compulsive loop, you have to be so aware of it and so aware of the trickiness that OCD gets you wrapped into.

If you’re not aware of those things, it’s really hard to intervene and make changes. So many of the times we’re going through life, we’re just going through the motions, we’re just doing things, we’re not thinking about it. Mindfulness is something that I teach my clients that really helps you to be able to slow down, be intentional, be in the moment, be present, to be aware of what’s going on.

For those of you who are trying to make some intentional changes to your routines. I hope that this information was helpful for you. You can always find us on hopeforanxietyandocd.com. You can click on courses to find out more about the mindfulness course there. We are winding down on time to sign up for the OCD summer sessions that you can find at my counseling practice, bythewellcounseling.com. That’s an opportunity for you to learn this summer. You don’t have to be in Tennessee to participate. We’re going to have some webinar series to cover a variety of issues. I hope to see you there. 

123. Three Reasons You Don’t Prioritize Self-Care with Carrie Bock, LPC-MHSP

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Podcast Episode. No Comments on 123. Three Reasons You Don’t Prioritize Self-Care with Carrie Bock, LPC-MHSP

 In this episode, Carrie delves into the importance of self-care amidst life’s challenges. She explores three common obstacles that often hinder us from prioritizing self-care.

Episode Highlights:

  • The importance of prioritizing self-care, especially in managing mental health conditions like OCD.
  • Why we often neglect self-care as Christians.
  • Distinguishing between genuine self-care activities that rejuvenate you and “numbing out” behaviors,
  • How self-care can actually enhance productivity,

Carrie also shares a sneak peek into the podcast’s upcoming rebranding, unveiling a fresh look and renewed clarity on the podcast’s mission!

Episode Summary:

I’m Carrie Bock, your host and a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. Today, let’s explore why you might not be prioritizing self-care.

Self-care is such a buzzword, but it’s crucial, especially when stress levels rise and symptoms spike. I’ve noticed that many people don’t fully grasp what self-care means or how to implement it effectively.

Productivity Concerns: We fear self-care will reduce productivity, but it actually boosts efficiency by lowering stress and enhancing focus.

Difficulty Asking for Help: Seeking support can be hard, but it’s a key part of self-care. Lean on loved ones and professionals; it’s a sign of strength.

Lack of Planning: Without planning, self-care can be overlooked. Schedule time for activities that rejuvenate you and explore new interests to recharge.

At its core, self-care includes basic needs like sleep, nutrition, and attending medical appointments. For us as Christians, it also means nurturing our souls through prayer, reflection, and reading the Word of God. Beyond these basics, self-care involves engaging in activities that rejuvenate and refresh you, whether that’s exercising, pursuing hobbies, or simply spending quality time with loved ones.

If you found this episode valuable, please share it with others who might benefit. And don’t forget to subscribe and leave a review—it helps us reach more people and continue providing valuable content. Until next time, take care and prioritize yourself!

Explore related episode:

38. What is Self-Care all About? With Monica McLaurine

Transcript

Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD, episode 123. I am your host, Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. Today, we’re talking about three reasons you don’t prioritize self care, but before we get into that, I wanted to share an update on episode 122, our last episode where I was talking about dealing with uncertainty, the process of “Are we going to find a house in time by the time we move out of ours?”

I’m very happy to update you and let you know that the box are moving this month. We are super excited to be moving relatively close to where we actually are moving to Smyrna in a great area where we will have a one-storey for Steve with a little bit of bonus space upstairs where I will be getting to record podcast episodes and working from home some.

Super excited about that. God blessed us and caused several different things to come together to make that happen. There were different little spiritual pieces that he showed us along the way and gave us peace that this was the direction we were supposed to be moving in. We are so incredibly blessed and thankful to God for his provision in that area for us so I’m excited. 

As some of you know, there have been some changes happening on the podcast if you’ve been following along for a little while. Back in April, we decided to go back to weekly episodes. It seemed like maybe we had been losing some folks because we were only producing an episode every other week.

We’re back to weekly episodes, and I’m also excited to share a sneak peek that there are going to be some rebranding changes coming up. There is going to be some new podcast art, a new name. Some other things coming down the pike. We’re not totally ready to release all of that yet, but I’m excited to be able to share it with you.

It’s the new and improved version of this podcast. It has been going on for three years now, and it’s just time. It’s time for a change. It’s time for a fresh look and rebrand and really to develop more clarity on my calling towards this podcast and clarity on what we’re about. Some people have gotten a little confused at different points, so we’re wanting to work on this rebrand in order to provide just greater clarity about what the podcast is here for and who it is here to serve. Now, if you want to be an insider, the people who find out about this type of information first are on our email list. And to get on our email list, all you have to do is go to hopeforanxietyandocd.com/free. There are some free downloads there. Make sure that when you get the download in your email, that you click the link. Otherwise, you will not be subscribed to our email list.  I consider those our insiders, our first to know about new things that are going on with the podcast. They were the first to know about our OCD Summer Learning Sessions that are coming up this summer in 2024.

Let’s dive into three reasons that you don’t prioritize self care. I know self care is a hot topic for people and when your stress goes up, your symptoms go up. This is true for any mental health condition, but I’ve seen it very strongly in terms of working with OCD that when clients first come in for treatment for OCD, a lot of times they’re in stressful life experiences.

They may be experiencing some major life changes, whether that’s change of a job, whether that’s having a child, or moving. Even if there are things that we want that are positive things, they can still be stressful for us. I’m always looking when people start therapy, what can we do to help lower their stress level or help them manage it better?

What I see is that even though we’re talking about self care is kind of a buzzword. People are not prioritizing it or don’t know what that even means. What does self-care even mean or what does that look like for us now? I know we did a previous episode on the show on self-care. We will link in the show notes for you, but at a very basic level self-care is doing things like sleeping, eating, showering, making sure you go to your health appointments, getting to the doctor at least once a year, getting your blood work done and checked out.

As Christians, we need time to care for our soul, to pray, to sit in the presence of God, to open ourselves up to hear from Him what He might have to say, to open up and read the Word of God because that is God’s Word spoken to us. Regardless of whether we’re hearing or sensing something in our spirit or not, we can go back to the Word of God and see what God has to say.

Another level of self-care would, if you got some of those other basics down, would be to make sure that you’re doing things that you enjoy or things that rejuvenate you. They might look different for different people. In order to be able to engage in self-care and have it work for you, you have to look at what kind of things help you decompress from stress, help your body feel calmer, and what types of things rejuvenate and refresh you.

Hopefully, we experience this at some level when we take some time off from work or we go on vacation. I took a day off during my daughter’s spring break and we all went to the botanical gardens. It was a great opportunity – beautiful weather, just be outside and have a family day where we could engage intentionally as a family and not worry about anything else. Not worry about work, not worry about house stuff, just be together and enjoy each other’s company. My daughter since she got to run around outside, she really loved it. 

Self-care, maybe going to the gym or doing workouts at home, maybe engaging in a craft project. I love paint by numbers. I don’t do it as much as I wish I’d prioritized it, but I enjoy those types of things because it helps me calm down.

If I feel really revved up, it’s slow, it’s methodical and there’s a result at the end. There’s some kind of finished result where I feel like, “Oh, I did something good it looks beautiful. The beautiful thing about it is I’m not having to freehand paint because my talent level is not there. 

Self-care may be spending intentional time with friends, family, just sitting outside, getting some sunshine, some vitamin D, but breathing deeply, really enjoying a hot beverage or a cold beverage, depending on your weather at the time. 

What is not self-care that I would say is numbing out activities, numbing out on social media. That doesn’t count as self-care.

Social media is very stimulating to our brains. Things are constantly changing, constantly moving on there. We’re trying to keep up with all of the information, what’s going on, social media can trigger all types of emotional experiences. Maybe we see something like, “Oh, well, look at my friend who is on vacation. I wish I was on the beach right now.”

Maybe you’re seeing somebody else. They just graduated and they are doing so well and successful in their life. “What am I doing with myself?” Social media just triggers up all kinds of stuff and there’s nothing wrong with being on it. I’m not picking on social media.

Some of you may have found out about this podcast through social media. I have no idea. What I will say is that if we are getting in a state of just blah. We are not refreshing. We are not decompressing. We’re just chilling. Just status quo. If you’re watching too much TV or engaging in other activities to just numb out and not experience, not be present.

Essentially, a lot of times that’s what we’re doing when we engage in these activities. It’s not horrible, but I’m not going to call that self-care because self-care is intentional and self-care is to care for our mind, body, and spirit in a very present and intentional way. Not just like, “Let me just do this and feel blah” 

When we don’t get our self-care time. What happens? We get irritable. We get more frustrated. We maybe get resentful of others because we feel like they are not helping enough for us to be able to get that time. It could be that you are irritated at a spouse or co workers. You don’t feel like are pulling their load. The number one reason people don’t engage in these types of activities that we talked about is because they say, “I don’t have time for that. You don’t understand. I mean, I work a full time job and then I have the kids and then I have this responsibility and my mom wants me to run over here and do this for her.” We just say, “Well, I’m not important. I don’t have time for that. Well, we have to prioritize what’s most important to us and what is in line with our values.”

We always say, if you want to know like what’s most important to somebody, we look at their time and their money. If you are not spending time, just having that time for yourself or for rejuvenating time with those you love. If you’re not spending any kind of money on those types of things. I’m not talking about major dollars like you have to go on the thousands of dollars vacation or being a luxury resort, that’s not what I’m talking about, but if you don’t take time to even just get a coffee with your spouse,or just do something small and simple, drive to the park and walk outside. There are things where you don’t have to spend a lot of money to take care of yourself. You don’t have to get a gym membership. You can get a 15 yoga mat, roll it out, and find some free videos on YouTube where you can do yoga Pilates, strength training, whatever you want to do. I’m sure you can pick up something heavy around your house if you don’t have weights. You don’t always have to spend money for self-care, but if you find yourself feeling guilty about spending any money on yourself, then I would encourage you to question that and see. Where does that come from? What is that about? 

Three reasons you don’t prioritize self-care. 

One, you think that you have too much to do and self-care will take away from your productivity. We place a lot of value and emphasis, especially in American culture, on being productive, on getting things done. We got our list. We’re checking it twice. We’re crossing things off, and that’s a lot of times where we get our value and our worth from. That’s a problem because your worth is based on who you are, not on what you do. You are a beautiful creation in Christ. He has a plan and purpose for your life, and regardless of how much you get done today, He still values you. 

We have to be careful about this connection between our productivity and our worth. It’s very interesting, this concept of productivity. I was listening to a podcast recently that talked about how she added exercise back into her routine. This was something that this podcaster had been wanting to do, and she had this concern. “How do I have time to exercise? I know it’s important for me. I know I will feel better physically and emotionally if I do it. How do I get back to this thing that’s important to me?” What she found was that when she added exercise back in, she felt like that she was more productive. She noticed that she was more intentional about how she spent her work time, making sure that she wasn’t getting distracted from the things that she needed to get done.

She was sleeping better, she was feeling better, and felt like, “Okay, even though I added exercise into my routine, this is going to take away from some time of other things. She felt like it didn’t, that she really felt better as a result of it. One thing I will say, too, is that there’s a cost in our brain for switching tasks on a regular basis. Unless you’re in a business world, a lot of times people are in entrepreneurial space. People don’t usually talk about this, but what I will tell you is that every time you switch gears in your brain, going from doing one thing to doing another thing, There’s a cost to that, and a lot of times we’re distracted all the time because we have all these pinging notifications, this person is texting you about this, hey I need to know like can we get together Saturday, somebody else is texting you about something else, and then some random email pops up from your boss, oh hey did you get this task done.

If we’re not careful, our brains are constantly switching whether we want them to or not. Then we’re opening up social media, scrolling, and all of a sudden there’s all this other extra information that we’re taking in. And if your mind is clear, because you have spent some intentional time to unpack things, to clear it, you will be more productive.

A lot of times I see this with people’s emotional experiences when they’re coming into counseling. There’s a huge like bag of emotions of past experiences or present stressors that they have not unpacked. As a result, they will sit being trying to do their day-to-day task and they are unable to because these emotions keep popping up. Past memories keep popping up. Obviously, it could be an obsession that keeps popping back up, popping back up, popping back up, and can really distract you from what you’re trying to do. 

When you take time to clear some of that stuff out to where you’re not having to focus on it, or you take the self-care time to work on some skills in managing your OCD, that is self-care. Therapy is self-care. We have some great programs and courses through the website on mindfulness that really can help you be in the present moment with a level of awareness and acceptance, something that I teach my clients quite a bit that helps with the emotional regulation piece. It helps us be able to process what’s actually happening in the here and now usually is not as distressing as what we’re adding to it by the meaning that we’re making of it.

Past experiences are worries about the future. Usually if we able to isolate down to the here and now, that’s usually a much more manageable process. 

Second reason that you’re not prioritizing self care is you feel uncomfortable in asking for what you need in order to take care of yourself. “Man, I am so preaching to the choir because I have been very guilty of this in my own life.”

I think that, okay, here I am, I’m the strong, independent woman that society has told me that I need to be, or I’m supposed to be. I’m running my own business. I have a family. I’m doing the things then the lie that I believe I’ve told myself is I should be able to handle this. I mean, I could ask for help, but I don’t really need to ask for help. I can handle this. It’s okay. What I’ve realized is that if I’m going to have self-care time, that means a lot of times I have to ask somebody else to help me. It may mean I have to ask somebody if they can pick up my daughter from her program. It may mean that I have to ask my spouse, Hey, can I just have some time to myself right now?

It may mean that I have to ask my spouse like, Hey, can you watch our daughter so that I can go do this thing? Is that all right with you? And if I don’t ask, I know that that need is not going to be met. It may be asking or hiring services, it may be, okay, like you look at all the things that you have to do saying, is this really manageable?

I think that would be your first step and I’ve done this in my own life. Okay, what are all the things that I’m doing? Do I need to actually be doing all of those things? or do I need to hire somebody else to do it? Can I mow my own lawn? Yes, I can. I don’t think that I’m the greatest at lawn mowing, but I can do it.

Let’s be theoretical. It’s actually not the lawn, it’s the weed eating that I always get a little tripped up on. But the point is, can I do it? Sure. But I have a lot of other things on my plate as well. Does it make sense for me to pay someone to do it? In my scenario, it does. You may not have that opportunity.

I pay for a grocery subscription service to deliver groceries. I am not ashamed of that. I’ve been doing it for about a year. I am the only one that drives in my family. My husband is not able to drive because of his disability. So there are ways that we have to move, maybe that are a little bit different than other people.

Are you telling yourself that you have to be, whatever that is, the strong one of the family? The one that doesn’t need time for themselves, the one that has to focus on everyone else’s problems and your suffering. I can definitely look back on times in my life where I should have involved other people, or I should have asked for help more than I did, and as a result of not asking for help, my mental health majorly suffered during those periods because even though other people theoretically knew what I had going on I don’t think they realized how challenging it was for me. I think I was waiting for everyone else to kind of figure it out. Don’t do that because there’s a chance they may not ever figure it out and you will still be there It takes a lot of humility for us to ask for help, but we are told in the scripture to bear one another’s burdens.

It is okay for you to ask somebody else for help. It’s also okay for that person to say no, but you can ask someone else for help. Keep asking until you are able to get the help and the support that you need. 

All right, number three reason that you are not prioritizing self care, telling yourself you have no time for it, is that you’re not planning it.

This kind of similarly goes with number two. You are not being intentional about putting it on your schedule. You’re not saying like, hey, When’s our date night going to be this month? Okay, what does that look like? What would you like to go do together so that we can connect as a couple? What kind of things do I enjoy?

There are some people that maybe listening to this, maybe you don’t even know what you would do for self-care. Maybe you don’t even know what you like because you’ve always been so focused on taking care of everyone else. Hey, here’s a clue, it might be time to try to explore some different things.

That’s a beautiful thing. Go out and try something new. Maybe you are not sure if you’ll like it or not, or you’re not sure if you’ll be good at it. Honestly, who cares if you’re good at it? If you enjoy it, if it helps you decompress. If it helps you rejuvenate internally, then good, go for it. You don’t have to be good at something in order for it to be a hobby.

I think that’s a misnomer that a lot of people believe, like, “Oh, well, I’m not really good at anything so therefore I’m not going to do any type of sports or crafts or hobbies. I’m not going to whittle with some wood or try to build something because I don’t think I’ll be very good at that.” It doesn’t matter. Do what you enjoy and allow God to use those things in your life to be able to just rejuvenate you. I hope that this episode was helpful for you as you’re thinking about self-care and what are some reasons maybe that you don’t prioritize it or that you feel like you have no time for it. Remember, we have time for what we make time for.

We just have to be intentional about it. Ask for help. When we need to and recognize that self-care is not going to make us a less productive person. In fact, it may make us a more productive person. If you enjoyed this episode today, I hope that you will share it with someone else that you know. Please feel free to hop on over to iTunes and leave us a review, or if you’re on YouTube, like and subscribe.

Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of myself or By the Well Counseling.

122. How Do I Deal With Uncertainty? with Carrie Bock, LPC-MHSP

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Podcast Episode.

In this episode, Carrie delves into the challenges of facing uncertainty amidst significant life transitions. Drawing from her own experiences, she offers helpful tips for coping with uncertainty and finding peace amid the unknown.

Episode Highlights:

  • The importance of trusting in God’s plan and finding peace amidst unknown circumstances.
  • Insights into dealing with uncertainty from a faith-based perspective.
  • Ways to find comfort and strength in your personal journey through uncertain times.
  • Tips for maintaining confidence and hopefulness despite facing unknowns in life.

Episode Summary:

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD, episode 122. I’m Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee, specializing in trauma, anxiety, and OCD. Today, I’m diving into a topic that’s deeply personal for me right now—dealing with uncertainty. My husband and I are in a challenging transition, moving from our split-level home due to his neurological condition, spinal cerebellar ataxia (SCA). The condition impacts his balance and mobility, and we’re facing an uncertain future.

The process of selling our house and finding a new, accessible home has been overwhelming. With the real estate market in high demand, it’s been a struggle to find a suitable property that meets our needs. As we navigate this uncertainty, I’m reminded of the same principles I teach to those grappling with OCD: embracing uncertainty and trusting in God’s plan are crucial.

I lean on the comforting words of Lamentations 3:22-23, which remind me of God’s steadfast love and faithfulness. Reflecting on past instances where God’s provision has been evident strengthens my faith and helps me trust that He will guide us through this challenging time. Even though the outcome and timing are unclear, I find peace in knowing that God has a good plan for us.

I invite you to listen to the full episode for a deeper exploration of how I’m managing this period of uncertainty and the spiritual insights that have guided me.

Explore related episode:

118. How Do I know if this Thought is an OCD Obsession? with Carrie Bock, LPC-MHSP

Transcript

Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD, episode 122. I am your host, Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. I specialize in working with people dealing with trauma, anxiety, or OCD, often a combination of those things. 

Today on the show, we’re talking about “How do I Deal with Uncertainty?”

My husband and I are going through a period of intense uncertainty in our lives right now. As I share this story, it may not be a big deal to you, but it is a big deal to us in our lives right now. We are in the process of transitioning houses from one house to another house. For those of you who’ve followed my story, my husband has a neurological condition called spinal cerebellar ataxia or SCA for short. This is a degenerative condition. He has issues with balance, walks with a cane or a walker right now, and there’s a lot of uncertainty with that diagnosis. We don’t know what the future holds for him, but we have been told that There’s a great chance that at some day or another, he will end up in a wheelchair due to this condition, which is hard to sit with that reality.

In preparation for that right now, we have been living in a house that’s a split level. It has a lot of stairs.  There are stairs to get into the house from the front porch. Once you enter the house, there are  more stairs that either go up or down. It’s not great for somebody with balance challenges. Not wheelchair friendly at all. 

We’ve been praying and processing about timing, when should we move, what do we do, the housing market, the interest rates, it’s all crazy. We’re in a high-demand area. Lots of people are moving into our area in middle Tennessee. So what do we do, God? How do we time this correctly?

We’ve been working with a realtor that we trust. He said, “Hey, you’re going to have to sell your house before you can buy another one because nobody wants to go for a home contingency right now. If your offer has a home contingency and it’s up against another offer that’s cash or doesn’t have one, then you are going to be bid out.”

We put our house on the market and it sold in record time. We got everything ready and looking nice. That was super stressful. I didn’t know I had a lot of uncertainty about showing the house. I’ve never done this before. I’ve never sold a house before. I had so many questions for all my friends. “Tell me about selling your house. Tell me about what it was like getting it ready to show in the morning. How much notice did you have?” 

I went through all these things and ended up selling your house very quickly. The only problem has been that there just has not really been a whole lot on the market in our price range that also would fit with what we are needing for my husband’s unique challenges. 

There are lots of two stories in our area. Lots of houses where the bedrooms are all upstairs and that just isn’t going to work for us. Lots of new builds that are coming that are unfortunately outside of our price range or the lots are not flat. Maybe the home is one storey, but the lot has a steep drop-off in the back because we live in Tennessee.

There are hills, there are mountains, not mountains in our areas, but lots of hills and elevation changes for sure. We’ve been going through this process, knowing we have a month and a half to two months to really find a place and get everything set up so that we can get out of our house and hopefully into what we hope to be our forever home.

It’s been a huge waiting game with a lot of questions. “How long do we wait to be in a particular area? What if nothing comes open in the market in this city that we want to live in? Maybe God wants us to live a little bit further out. We’re also a part of a church plant. What does that look like? There’s a lot of uncertainty there.

We don’t know where the church is going to end up being located, feeling the call of God to be a part of this church plant and not wanting to be too far from wherever they’re going to land and end up at the same time trying to find a place that’s not too far from our daughter’s Mother’s Day Out programs that she goes to.

A lot of questions. What if we put a bid on a house and we don’t get it? What if someone overbids? What if we don’t find a place to live by the time we have to be out of here and we end up in an apartment? I haven’t lived in an apartment in a long, long time. I don’t even know much about apartment living today, other than it seems expensive, and I have two pets, so I know that would be even more expensive to have cats in the apartment.

There’s so much uncertainty right now. I teach people, especially who are dealing with rapid thought processes, a lot of what-if questions, and overthinking. I work with a lot of people who are struggling with OCD, and one of the things that we do is we help them sit with uncertainty, so I thought I would talk with you as I’m going through this period of uncertainty in my life, and it doesn’t have a happy bow or a happy ending yet.

I’m in the middle of it, speaking to you about it, and unsure and have some lack of clarity, even spiritually, from the Lord. “Okay, God, what are you doing here?” I thought that as I’m going through this process of life uncertainty, that we’re all going to face uncertainties at some point or another, I would walk you through how I am dealing with this uncertainty.

One thing is that I have to rest and trust in the character of God and who I have experienced Him to be in my life. Number one, I know that I can rest in God’s character. Lamentations 3, 22-23 tells us that God’s mercy is new every morning. Great is his faithfulness to us. God has just shown me that time and time again, God is good, God has good plans for us, God is kind (Ephesians) and God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus in order that in the coming ages He might show the incomparable riches of his grace expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus So God expressed his kindness to us in Christ. That’s awesome That’s something that we can really rest in. 

I think it’s hard for us because we know that sometimes God calls us to hard things. Sometimes God calls us to things that might be uncomfortable for us. After living in a home for over 10 years, it would be uncomfortable for me to go live in an apartment. But if that’s where the Lord has me, if there’s some ministry that I’m supposed to be doing in that apartment, if there’s a person I’m supposed to meet needs to know the Lord, if there is some reason that God wants to plant me there until he plants me in a forever home, then I am all for it.

My life is surrender to Christ and to what he wants for me. It’s not about me anymore. I am called to take up my cross daily to follow him, and as we connect with Christ, a lot of people are afraid that God is going to ask them to do something that they completely don’t want to do. 

Here’s what happens when we abide in the Lord and our desires become God’s desires. As we pray, and as we say, this is what I would like, I know for me, I know where I would like to live, I know that I would like to have a shorter commute, I know that I would like to be close enough to get my daughter, and for that to not be a burden after she’s done with school. I would like to not feel like I’m too far from my church family right now.

These are things that I desire, but I desire the will of God more. And wherever God wants us to be, we’ve been praying for ministry opportunities. In our new community that God would plant us where he wants us to be. I just believe that the Lord is going to do that in faith and trusting him. The uncertainty is the timing.

I don’t know what timeline that’s going to be. God could have a house for us in two weeks. God could have a house for us in two months. God could have a house for us in six months. I have no idea. That’s the uncertainty, but I rest in God’s goodness. I know that I can trust him. 

Point number two of the way that I’m dealing with this uncertainty.  I can point to times in my life, I can go back and say, “I didn’t think this situation was going to work out, but it did” because of God and His intervention.

There’s a story behind a lot of places where I’ve lived. There’s a story to getting this house that I’m in that the only reason I knew about this house was because we got lost trying to get out of the neighborhood. This house that I’m living in now was not on the radar until I got lost, and God put it there and said, “Huh, maybe this house. What about this?” It ended up being my home for over 10 years and that is incredible. 

I have stories behind offices that I’ve rented my very first office. I remember calling the guy on the phone and this was just after being beaten down, just feeling like, “Lord, I’m never going to get a space because I call and either they want too much money or they’ve already rented it out, or they want me to pay for the build-out that I didn’t have money for. They are all these different roadblocks, and the Lord graciously provided this cute little office. It was not very big at all, but it was exactly where I needed to be for the two years that I rented it.

The guy we’re walking through the office, looking at it and I’m saying, “Okay, I think this is going to fit the needs that I have at this time. He kept telling me I wasn’t supposed to work today. He managed the place. He didn’t live in that area and he happened to be in the area for a completely different reason.

God brought all these things together to make that happen. When we were praying for my husband’s disability process to come through, God just wholly provided. God granted us favor. He ended up getting disability faster than some other people. We don’t tend to talk about that too much because we’re not prideful about it. We didn’t do anything. That was all God because God knew our needs. God saw that we were in a difficult place. I had a very young child at the time that we were trying to provide for and my husband had been out of work for many months at that point and he was partially taking care of her. I was trying to work and make sure that everyone had what they needed.

It was a tough time in our life and I sent in a bunch of paperwork, literally just prayed over it and said, “God, please give us favor with these people. Please let them know that my husband is truly disabled and that we do need this disability to come through to pay for our bills at this time.” 

God was so faithful. We were just incredibly blessed by that experience. There’s just been time after time after time where God’s provided something that I’ve needed. God’s not going to let me be homeless in this situation. I know that there’s going to be some kind of roof over my head. I don’t know if I’m going to be in a temporary situation for a little while or if we’re going to have a smooth transition.

We have no idea right now, but I just know that God’s in it. Whatever uncertainty you’re facing today, just know that God is right there with you. God will never leave you and never forsake you, and that it’s okay if you don’t know something right now. God’s word is a lamp to our feet. And a light to our path is what we’re told. God doesn’t give us the whole picture. Oftentimes, he only gives us the next step. And sometimes we have to wrestle with him in that process of decision making to know where do we go from here? God, what do we do? I’m trusting and resting in the character of God. I’m believing in what he’s done in the past for my family.

This is why, oftentimes, we forget, as human beings, what God has done in the past. You will see in the Old Testament, they had festivals to remember, things like Passover. Passover was to help them remember that God led them out of Egypt. God led them out of slavery and when angel of death came through and the firstborn sons died, yours didn’t because you had the blood of the lamb on your door.

It was a complete picture of Jesus. We are covered by the lamb of God. If you are a believer, the Israelites had festivals and times of celebration to remember those things that God did. I feel like in common American society, we don’t celebrate or sit and think and remember what God has really done for us.

Maybe you haven’t been a Christian in a long time, or you don’t have as many stories that maybe you can point to in your own personal life, but you can always point to God showing his kindness in Christ Jesus that we were saved while we were still sinners. We were hopeless, we were far from God, we were lost, and God came and sent Jesus to us to be the substitutionary sacrifice.

That in itself is enough If God never did anything else for us, God gave us Jesus, God gave us his presence, God has gifted us heaven when we die, and man, that ought to just be celebrated, make you excited and just full of joy. Whatever is weighing you down today, whatever you’re uncertain about, just know that you can sit with that in the Lord, that you don’t have to run from the uncertainty.

It’s a part of all of our lives at different points. There’s going to be times where you may question who God is. I know I’ve had those times in my own life and that we have to cling to faith and believe what we know to be true when we’re in a good place. I hope this information has been helpful to you.

You can follow along on my journey. I send out little emails every week about things that are happening with our podcast, things that are happening with me, what God’s teaching me. You can get on our email list by going to hopeforanxietyandocd.com/free. We’ve got some amazing resources on there: 100 tips for managing anxiety, Things that Christians with OCD Should Know. If any of those appeal to you, you can get those downloads in your email box, and then you will be on our email list. Subscribe and follow us. 

Thanks so much. Hope for Anxiety and OCD is a production of By The Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee.

​

121. Suicide Prevention: One Life Box at a Time with Heather Palacios of Wondherful

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode.

In this episode, Carrie delves into the challenges of facing uncertainty amidst significant life transitions. Drawing from her own experiences, she offers helpful tips for coping with uncertainty and finding peace amid the unknown.

Episode Highlights:

  • The importance of trusting in God’s plan and finding peace amidst unknown circumstances.
  • Insights into dealing with uncertainty from a faith-based perspective.
  • Ways to find comfort and strength in your personal journey through uncertain times.
  • Tips for maintaining confidence and hopefulness despite facing unknowns in life.

Episode Summary:

I’m excited to share a deeply moving conversation with Heather Palacios, the founder of Wondherful. Heather discusses the intense shame and isolation she felt, particularly as a pastor’s wife, battling suicidal thoughts and actions while feeling trapped by societal and religious expectations.

Through years of therapy, medication, and unwavering faith, Heather has not only survived but has thrived, turning her pain into purpose. She founded Wondherful, a nonprofit that has sent nearly 15,000 life boxes to people struggling with mental health issues across the country and around the world. These boxes, filled with items that have helped Heather stay alive, are a lifeline for so many.

Her testimony is a powerful reminder of the importance of mental health support within the church and the healing that can come from sharing our struggles openly.

Tune in and explore how God’s love and the power of community can transform our deepest pain into a powerful testimony of hope.

Check out related episode:

104. Being Kinder to Ourselves and Others with Greg Atkinson

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD. My name is Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee and the host of this podcast. Today, I have an interview with Heather Palacios, who is the founder of Wondherful. We’re going to hear about her story of her own mental health struggles and what led her to start and continue. It’s just grown and grown and grown. 

Carrie: We’re glad that you’re here today.

Heather: Thank you for having me, Carrie. You’re amazing.

Carrie: Thank you. I wanted to hear a little bit about your own journey with mental health. When did that start for you? How did that show up? What did it look like?

Heather: Great question. It started when I was eight. That was a minute ago because I’m 50. It started in 1981, and at eight years old, I started having thoughts of suicide, but then I actually penned it in a letter and mailed it to my grandparents. You’re the first to know this. My mom and dad found that letter recently and mailed it to me.

I’ll be using that as a prop, especially when I speak to students, but yes, it started when I was eight and has been a struggle for me up till today.

Carrie: What caused you to get to that point where they’re challenging social relationships you were dealing with in elementary school or things going on at home?

Heather: I’ve struggled with suicide for the entire timeline of my life from eight to the current, but I haven’t been in the same season, obviously, this entire time. As an eight, nine, ten-year-old, it was moving schools all the time and brutal bullying. I have a wild imagination that remembers very traumatic details. That’s always corroborated by all the journals that I’ve kept all these years. The bullying was intense and would drive anybody to want to take their life.

Carrie: Kids can be so mean and cruel and they don’t realize how that affects other kids and students. Were you bullied in elementary school and did that continue in middle school?

Heather: It started when I was eight and went through high school, but I think it was only being bullied that made me want to take my life as a child. I think as I moved into my teen years, it was being bullied, but it was also compounded by just didn’t love myself and didn’t see other options. My brain has never been able to compute other options. Other than just take your life when there’s any kind of crisis or trauma, but it was pretty purely bullying as a kid.

Carrie: As you got older, how did this constant suicidal thoughts affect you as a young adult? And, uh, did you have suicide attempts during those periods?

Heather: Yes, great question. I have attempted suicide three times and had the plan countless times.

I have been Baker acted, which in Florida’s mandatory 72 hour confinement in a psychiatric ward and was hospitalized.

Carrie: I was just wondering how things affected you as a young adult. What were some things that were going on there?

Heather: As I said, I’ve battled with suicide over every season of a person’s life, barring elderly senior citizens, because I’m not there yet.

As a child, as an adolescent, as a high school student, as a college student, as a young career, as a wife, as a mom in a pandemic and with unexpected grief, those are pretty much the mile markers in my life where I have attempted suicide or wanted to. The young adult season was a lot around relationships. Dating and being with a guy for five years and him saying, after five years, “I’ll never marry you. You’re not the kind that I would want to marry.” And that just set me off.  I took a bottle of pills and tried to take my life. I saw that as the only way out of that.

Carrie: There would be these big stressful events and whenever we have stress in our life, that tends to increase our symptoms so that makes a lot of sense. What would you say was your lowest point rock bottom? You know, the only place to go is up from here.

Heather: The lowest point would have been July 30th, 2000. That was when I had been married for one year to a pastor, which made me a pastor’s wife. I just couldn’t, after a year into the marriage, reconcile kind of being the crazy lady, but being married to a pastor. A new divorce wasn’t an option for a pastor. Again, my brain only saw suicide as my way out, and that would be a gruesome attempt where my husband showed up to the scene and was unable to stop me. The 911 first responders surrounded my car and were unable to stop me. I had become manic to the point of supernatural strength, almost like a rabid animal, unstoppable.

They were forced to tranquilize me and knock me out so that they could strap me down on a gurney and rush me to the hospital where they treated my injuries, and then they shipped me off to a psychiatric ward. It was mandatory. I didn’t have a say in the matter. I was put in isolation in the psych ward on July 30th, 2000.

When you’re in isolation in a psych ward, I had vomit on me. I had blood on me. They didn’t feed me. They didn’t clean me up. It was deplorable conditions. This was 24 years ago. It was the lowest point because not only was I locked in isolation as a pastor’s wife, but as a failed suicide attempting pastor’s wife.

That was such a low, low that I didn’t even think there would be an up and had actually pretty much determined that once they released me from the psych ward, I would do it again. And I would succeed this time because in my mind, there was nowhere else to go with the coming together of being a pastor’s wife and failing at killing yourself.

Carrie: This sounds like an immense amount of shame that you were carrying for having mental health issues in the church as a Christian. Also, lso interestingly, like shame that you weren’t successful at what you set out to do.

Heather: Yes and you don’t have this Facebook group or women’s golf club society of people like me.

There was nobody, not only just in my circle, but in, to my knowledge, the country that understood what it was like to perpetually want to die, but not be able to because you’re married to a pastor. So it was a lonely existence and shameful.

Carrie: How did you go from that to starting Wondherful?

Heather: Obviously, God keeps me alive despite my efforts. Finally, once I was able to get medication, get into a regular psychologist, and maintain that to today. I identify that I have a chronic weakness in my brain, which I don’t distinguish from any other chronic weakness in any other organ in the body, so I embrace that and I take care of it. I would, if I had been in an accident, rendered to a wheelchair.

That has opened up a lot of doors—just my candidness about that, willing to talk about it—and that launched a lot of opportunities to go and speak, share the story. But it was during COVID, during 2020; I was cut off from being able to go to people. You know, our country was in a shutdown.

Carrie: Right.

Heather: By this time, I’m 20 years into using my weakness to help others, but I couldn’t go to people and they were reaching out to me. They were dying by the dozens by suicide and overdose.

Carrie: Yes. COVID was huge. 

Heather: Yes. Huge and I’m not hearing about people are reaching out to me because of COVID and them dying of it. They’re reaching out to me because of the pandemic and they didn’t want to live anymore.

In my dining room here, where I am right now, some friends and I started just shipping what I would normally take in person when I get asked to go visit people in psychiatric wards, detoxes, sober living homes, hospitals, ICU units, funerals. I would always take what I call a “life box,” which is all the things I’ve needed to still be here. Instead of taking them, we just started shipping them. It became a nonprofit and we’re three years in now. We’ve had to move offices twice. I think in three years since its inception, we’ve done almost 15, 000 life boxes to every state and 15 countries.

Carrie: Talk to us about that process of moving from being so ashamed because I work with a lot of people who really struggle over having mental health issues.

As a Christian in the church community, going from that to being able to be open and allowing God to use your story, was that like a process that God really worked with you on? Or as you started sharing it, you saw the benefits of sharing it?

Heather: It was so instantaneous that the leadership was like, Whoa, whoa, whoa, let’s have you heal a little bit.

I remember getting out of the psych ward and I had kind of made a deal with God in the psych ward. That’s all I had to talk to. I mean, I was in isolation. I was a threat to other people so they wouldn’t put me in a room with other people. I just lied there and it was like, talk to my demons or talk to God.

I was like, “God, if you could just get me out of here because it was deplorable.” It was everything you’d think of in a horror movie for a psych ward. But I was like, “If you could get me out of here, I’ll dedicate the rest of my life to help people not end up here. “ 

I was able to be discharged a little bit earlier than I was slated to be. I took that as a sign from God and I wanted to own up to my end of the commitment. I just wrote out my story from that experience, got on medicine, got under the supervision of a psychologist, and then went to the church leadership and said, I want to share my story. They were like,”Okay, not yet. Let’s have you get a little bit better.”

I waited a year and proved myself worthy of being able to share my story because I really wanted to. They put me up on stage and I shared my story about a year after getting out of the cyborg.

Carrie: What are some things that you do on a day-to-day basis that just really help and supports your mental health moving forward?

You said, this is a chronic issue. It’s not something that has just gone away. It’s something that you’ve struggled with for a long time. What are some of your strategies or things that you do to stay healthy?

Heather: I love it that you asked that because my formula is unique, but it’s working because I’m still alive and I’m so glad you asked it.

It has seven parts. It’s medication, which “certain Baptist circles love it when I say that.” it’s medication, it’s Christian counseling, it’s journaling. I even have my journal here to show you.

Carrie: Awesome.

Heather: Reading my Bible, regular church attendance. Church regularly is a free full fill up on an empty tank for me, outdoor activity, knowing my worth and having boundaries.

Carrie: Wow. So good. I’m sure you could write a book on all of those principles because I think that they’re each important. I like what you said about valuing church attendance. You feel like there is something that that does for your spirit and the sense of being in Christian community. 

Have you found some strong community through the church that’s been supportive for you?

Heather: Yes. I mean, we underestimate what the church can do for our minds and God teed it up pretty well. He said, Love me with all of your body, heart, mind, and strength.” Where do we love him tangibly? Where do we love him audibly and visually in church? 

I feel like it’s never returned void for me. If I show up and love God in his house for an hour on Sunday, he fills my cup to the overflow, which gives me the fuel to go the next week.

Carrie: I love that you have boundaries in there too because that’s something that a lot of Christians struggle with. We think that we have to be all things to all people, to bend over backwards, to constantly be volunteering for every single thing that has a need, and we can get burnout and not be in a healthy place mentally and emotionally from not setting good boundaries.

We’re allowing other people to speak into your life that really have no business and no need to be speaking into your life. It’s like, I don’t really need to take that from you.

Heather: Right? I mean, I take my cues from Jesus for a lot of these parts of my formula that I follow. There were thousands of people that needed him critically. They were mentally psychotic. They were spiritually lost. They were medically incurable. I mean, these are thousands of people who he loves that needed him. Yes, he did walk away from them after a certain point to go alone and be with the Father. I take him at his word literally and I understand that the harvest is plenty of people that might need you or me or the church or the pastor or the therapist, but the workers are few.

The Bible says Jesus doesn’t say pray for the harvest. He says, pray for the workers. He modeled that by showing that boundary that there are still thousands more that need me today, but I’ve reached my limit. I’ve done what I can for today. Now I need to go refresh.

Carrie: You talked about sending out life boxes.

What different kinds of life boxes do you send out to individuals?

Heather: Good question. Okay. I actually have one here. Now this is a mini life box and we use the mini life boxes for traveling and events and bulk orders because it costs less. We’ve shrank everything that we would normally send to an individual down into a mini size, but we do life boxes for anything, for anybody, anywhere.

We curate it to their plight. Plus, I’ve discovered suicide is not in a vacuum, it is not in a book. Anybody, anywhere can give up over anything. I know that personally. I didn’t try to take my life because of bullying as a married woman. There’s always different reasons. At Wondherful, we receive these requests through our website.

We not only all the options that people can have a curated life box for, but we have a big comment section because if we don’t have it listed, they can put in the comment what their plight is, what their pain is, what their despair is, and we’ll curate it for them. Specifically, the ones that are listed in the most popular are anxiety way up there. Trauma, loneliness, addiction, suicide attempt, grief ans depression would be the ones that are the most requested.

Carrie: That’s incredible that you’re able to personally tailor those to each individual and what you feel like their needs are. What’s in the box that you have there?

Heather: In a life box, the presentation is very important to me. Our team is awesome because they know my heart that I see the value of every single person, even if they don’t just now driving home. I saw the guy begging for money at the intersection and I prayed for him. I saw him because I saw him as someone that God created. This guy begging for money. He wasn’t aborted.

He wasn’t a miscarriage. God wanted him here. And so he has value in and of itself with that. So the box’s presentation has to show value to that person. We take it seriously. Like we don’t just throw crap in a box. The girls know like this, this would drive the team nuts that this tissue is wrinkled here.  Take out the tissue, put a different piece in because the person opening this Carrie, this might be the only time someone somewhere has expressed their value. They open it up. This specific one is for loneliness. 

After the surgeon general came out with a report saying loneliness in our country is an epidemic. We decided to add loneliness to the drop down options for a life box. The first thing that they see when they open it up is, What the heck is this that I just got? Because a lot of these are requested by other people. 

Carrie: Right. They’re like, “Oh, I got a box.”

Heather: “What the heck? Who’s stalking me?

It’s got a QR code and it goes right to a video of me and I share my story and explain why they received this and then if they don’t want to, they can’t do QR codes. It says it in text right here. That’s the first thing they see, but the second thing they see is a handwritten card. 

Somebody on our team wrote them a card. We’ve had people actually frame this and send us a picture that they framed it. We always include the 988 because I am assuming that whatever this person’s going through, I need to hook them up with resources that I am not qualified to give them.

This came inspired by a male executive, he said, I had your list of some life versus that I could keep in my wallet. I would. So I was like, that’s it. So we have wonderful with life versus that guys can keep then a notepad, a devotion on loneliness and Rick Warren. What on earth am I here for? This really is covers every reason for suicide. This goes in every box. A refrigerator magnet with 988. These are the staples because I spoke into this, I said, these are the things I’ve needed when I’m struggling with wanting to give up. I need a stress ball.

Carrie: Yes.

Heather: I need practical things. I cry a lot, so I need tissue. My lips get dry because I cry a lot, so I need chapstick so these go in. I have mints because I am crying. I do have probably bad breath. I also just need to suck on something that’s savory or sweet to get the starkness in my mind at least freshened up with some mint, right? They’re also called life savers. So let’s play on words. There you go. A Bible and a journal and a pen.

Those are essential. Those are non negotiable. They go in every box. This devotion says, “I just want to die.” It’s a faith based devotion and then I put like an herbal mask because this is a female box. Okay. We want her to feel comfort and then a staple that every single one gets is a never-give up wristband, inspired by my youngest brother who died last year and struggled with suicide like I did and finally got him.

I remember one conversation I had with Chris, he was so ashamed of his scars on his wrists from years of attempting suicide. Then we get a lot of, Sober Living Homes. I speak to a lot of addicts. They have so many track scars on their wrists. There’s a lot of shame with that, Carrie. Whether it’s a suicide attempt or a track scar, your wrist can be a point of shame.

I was like, “Not anymore.” They have a wristband that says never give up, that is going to be able to go over their wrists. Hopefully they’ll see that and not be shamed of their scars.

Carrie: Yes, it’s a positive reminder to keep going. Man, that must have hit you really hard your brother dying from suicide.

Heather: Yes. Very painful. It’s been my most recent biggest test for not wanting to give up myself, which is a whole nother podcast, but grief is a beast.

Carrie: Well, what do you do when you have suicidal thoughts come up now?  Beause a lot of people that are listening to this podcast, whether it’s suicidal thoughts or they have obsessions that pop it in their mind that they don’t want to have there.

How do you handle those? I think there’s a lot of different directions we can take our mind and in our body and our spirit when those happen.

Heather: Well, I have to make sure that I’m doing my seven things- the formula. I have to make sure I’m doing those, but in a moment I can shift gears and a moment I can go from wanting to live to wanting to die.

The first thing that I do and the first thing that I tell everybody to do, whether they’re children, adults, Jamaican, Puerto Rican, or anything is you get to call someone. I mean, that’s backed up with research, but that’s also backed up with Jesus. Again, I take my cues from him in his darkest mental hour, where he was in such hopelessness and despair that his body was reacting by bleeding sweat.

He called somebody. Now he had followers in the thousands. He had a tribe of 12, but in his darkest hour, he called someone and the text says in the gospels that he called three, Peter, James, and John. I take my cues from him and I call someone and I actually have three in case one doesn’t answer.  That’s good. That’s helpful. My first thing is I need to call somebody.

Carrie: That’s good. It’s Definitely a good advice for everyone. 

I wanted to ask you one more question before we got into some stories about how life boxes have impacted people. I know a lot of people struggle with journaling. What types of things do you journal about?

Do you journal about thoughts and feelings or do you journal prayers? What kind of things do you journal about?

Heather: I don’t follow a guide. I follow my head. I have journals from when I was eight up until today. I’ve kept them all. Yeah. So I got a lot of journals. There’s never a pattern, but my brain doesn’t operate in a pattern.

Like I said, I could be wearing a smiley sweatshirt, doing this podcast, beautiful South Florida weather. And by tonight something can happen and I can want to die because I don’t have routine in my head. I don’t have routine in my journaling. What is important is that I journal simply because I can wake up or I can go to bed with all this stuff in my head, or I can put it on paper and just get it out. That’s why I’m always advocating journaling.

Carrie: Yeah, that’s good. Tell us about some stories of hope because this is hope for anxiety and OCD. What are some stories of hope of how life boxes have impacted different people that you’ve heard of?

Heather: Oh man, anxiety. We get so many for anxiety and I’ve had that. My pendulum swings between depression and anxiety. That’s a real thing and it really is a struggle beause it manifests in your mind and your body in such an intense way. There’s 15, 000 light boxes we’ve done. There’s so many stories, but one in particular is during COVID a friend of mine, she’s a homosexual Jewish addict, just had so much anxiety during COVID that she became suicidal.

Now she’s got so many issues, but reached out for a life box. We sent her an anxiety, suicide prevention, life box. She asked her coworker to record her opening up the life box. I can’t put it into words what it was like to see this homosexual Jewish addict open up this life box with anxiety resources and a Bible and a journal and all these things, and she was weeping, but more importantly, she was living and still to this day.

Not only did she continue to live and I don’t take the credit for that. That’s God and her and things that I’ll never know on earth, but she still lives to this day and is a catalyst between us and our life boxes and all the addicts. that she does life with. She’s continued to live and she’s continued to use these life boxes as ways of helping people that are struggling just like her.

Carrie: That’s awesome. If somebody’s listening to this and they want to request a life box for somebody or if they feel like, hey, I need that myself. Like I’m on the edge here. I’m really, really struggling. How do they do that?

Heather: Well, it’s easy. You just go to wondherful.com.

Carrie: Yeah. We’ll put that link in there too. We’ll put the link in our show notes if anybody’s just listening on the audio here.

Heather: You click on Lifebox and you can request it for yourself or you can request it for someone you’re concerned about and we will curate it and priority ship it. If you’re a really rich person, feel free to make a donation for your Lifebox request. We do send them out for free to everybody.

Carrie: That’s awesome. That’s really incredible. Well, thank you so much for being vulnerable, sharing your story and talking to us about this organization. I think it’s so important that we talk about the hard subjects that we talk about. things like suicide that people are struggling with and letting them know there is hope and there is help and there are people that care about you and want to let you know that you are valuable and you are important and we want you here.

Heather: Yes, we do. No matter who you are, no matter how hard it is, No matter how many people don’t understand, if you wake up breathing, that’s your proof to keep going. There’s a reason you’re still breathing. That should be enough encouragement for all of us. 

120. Are You Overly Responsible for Others’ Choices? 3 Ways to Know. with Carrie Bock, LPC-MHSP

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Counseling, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 120. Are You Overly Responsible for Others’ Choices? 3 Ways to Know. with Carrie Bock, LPC-MHSP

In this episode, Carrie explores feeling overly responsible for others’ feelings and actions. She explains how this can cause stress and shares some helpful ways to ease that burden for greater peace and acceptance.

Episode Highlights:

  • The signs of being overly responsible for others’ behavior and emotions.
  • How trying to control others can lead to internal stress and anxiety.
  • Why taking responsibility for others’ emotional experiences can be detrimental to your well-being.
  • Strategies for developing distress tolerance and finding peace amidst challenging relationships.

Episode Summary:

Welcome to episode 120 of Christian Faith and OCD! I’m Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor based in Tennessee. If you’re outside Tennessee and need help connecting with anxiety or OCD resources in your area, I’m here to assist.

Today, we’re exploring the anxiety that comes from feeling overly responsible for other people’s emotions and behaviors. You might be overstepping if you’re trying to control or prevent someone’s actions, especially in relationships marked by codependency or addiction. Remember, the ultimate responsibility for their behavior lies with them.

Another sign is taking on others’ emotional experiences. If you avoid speaking your truth or setting boundaries out of fear of upsetting someone, you’re likely taking on too much. It’s important to communicate with kindness while allowing others to handle their own reactions.

Lastly, if you constantly try to change someone’s behavior or convince them to do something differently, it’s a sign of excessive responsibility. Accepting what you cannot control and focusing on your own well-being can help alleviate this stress. For support, check out my mindfulness course to develop distress tolerance.

Feel free to share your thoughts through our contact form at carriebock.com. Thank you for joining me, and may you find comfort in God’s great love for you.

Explore related episode:

64. How We Unintentionally Increase Our Own Suffering with Carrie Bock, LPC-MHSP

Transcript

Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD episode 120. I am your host, Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. I also provide consultations to those outside of the state of Tennessee who are looking for finding and getting connected with specific resources for anxiety or OCD in their area, or what might be the next step that would be helpful for them.

Today on the show, we’re talking about being responsible or feeling this sense of responsibility for other people’s feelings and behaviors. Even though you’re not responsible for others in that way, that may be new news to you. It creates a lot of anxiety when we strive to try to control other people or try to manage their behavior that can cause us a lot of internal stress. I want you to have peace, enjoy, and be relieved for some of that. 

We’re going to talk about three ways that you know that you’re overly responsible for someone else. 

Number one, you find yourself trying to prevent certain behaviors in that other person. This happens a lot in terms of codependency with people who have addiction.

Let’s say, for example, you’re trying to reduce the addict’s stress so that they won’t use. You go around, you clean up the house. Maybe even do things like throw away the alcohol, put out the pamphlets or the information on the local AA meetings. There are all these little things that you’re doing to try to influence or control that person’s behavior, trying to make sure that there isn’t conflict so that they don’t get upset.

This also happens frequently if you’re connected with someone that’s angry, and you may know certain things that trigger that anger, certain things that are a tipping point, and so you hold back. On saying things that may need to be said, you hold back on setting boundaries because you don’t want to upset that other person and you don’t want to have that anger unleashed on you.

Here’s the problem: People are unpredictable human beings. So, even though we may tiptoe around the attic in hopes that they won’t use or try to create the perfect scenario for their sobriety, ultimately, like, they have to be the ones to take that responsibility on to be able to surrender to God, surrender to, I’m powerless over this addiction.

They have to take that responsibility in order to move forward. You can’t make them or take that responsibility on for them. People who have difficulty with anger or fly off the handle, as you know, you can tiptoe around them, but there’s still going to be something that sets them off. It’s unexpected, something that’s completely outside of your control, like people who are just stressed about work, they’re mad, and they come home and unleash on other people.

You cannot prevent that. That person has to recognize their own issues, the other things that are leading to their anger. They are responsible for managing their stress. You’re not responsible for managing their stress. We take that step back and say, “I cannot change this other person.” That is a hard acknowledgement.

It’s an important acknowledgment for you to have. It may bring up a lot of sadness that you’re avoiding dealing with. It may bring up other emotions that are hard to sit with, feelings of powerlessness, inadequacy, and it’s much easier to get into doing mode, tiptoeing around, and trying to prevent those people from falling into behavior patterns. We cannot change other people. Only God can do that. 

Number two, similar to number one, you may be overly responsible for others if you take responsibility for others emotional experiences. What this looks like? We are called in scripture to have the fruit of the Spirit. When we are connected with God, we experience love, joy, peace, and patience. We are told to speak the truth in love. We also have to balance this with times where God calls people to be bold and to be brave, to prophesy at times and say hard truths. All that means is speaking the truth of the gospel or of Scripture. We’re called to do that in love. But a lot of times what happens is we tell ourselves, I can’t say what I need to say to this other person, or I cannot speak the truth to them because they’re going to be upset or they’re going to be angry at me and this can even happen in our closest, most intimate relationships with our spouse. Sometimes we need our spouse to call us out. And it’s a beautiful thing because that lets us know, hey, you have a blind spot here. 

My husband called me out not too long ago and said, “You have unforgiveness towards these people in your life.” I was like, “Oh! Ouch!” It did. It hurt my feelings, but I’m so thankful that he said that because that was a blind spot for me. I wasn’t in awareness that I was still holding on to so much anger and bitterness that in my perception I thought I had let go of, but what he was able to see from the outside view was “No, you haven’t let go of that.”

By allowing me to have that hard emotional experience, it drove me back to God. It drove me to prayer to say, “Okay, God, am I in unforgiveness?” Yes, I do believe, that I’ve been convicted and I’m in unforgiveness and allow me to pray through that and say, I don’t want to hold on to this anger towards these individuals any longer.

I don’t want to live in bitterness. Yes, I believe what they did was wrong, and I’ve had my time to be angry about it, and now it’s time to not continue to hold it against them and to let it go so that I can be at peace. These are also people that I want to continue in relationship with, and I want to continue walking side by side.

As a result of that, I need to have a positive, forgiving, and loving, gracious attitude towards these individuals. That was incredibly eye-opening and incredibly loving. But oftentimes what happens, even in Christian circles, is we say, “Oh, I can’t set a boundary because that’s going to hurt that person’s feelings,” or “I can’t speak the truth and let them know that they’re off course because they’re going to get mad at me and they might not want to be my friend anymore.” This is unhealthy in our lives when we take responsibility for other people’s feelings and try to prevent them from having hard feelings, because sometimes we need to have hard feelings. That’s a part of growth. 

If you say something, and even if it’s a kind word, and you know that person is going to be upset, they have to deal with their own feelings. You are only responsible for saying the kind words, for speaking the truth in love, for showing patience with other people and grace. We also don’t just run around calling people out just because we want to have a positive relationship with that person and be careful with our words. But there are times where you’re going to say kind things and people are going to get mad at you. There are going to be times where you say, Hey, I’d encourage you to look at this in your life or to look at that situation and they’re not going to receive that. You have to know that you have done your part of what you’re supposed to do. 

Number three, you may be overly responsible for other people if you believe that you can control or convince that person to change their behavior in some way. If only I say this, then maybe they’ll change.

If only I say that, then maybe they’ll get it finally. If I only tell them for the 50th time that they need to go to therapy, It’s the nagging wife syndrome, right, where you just continue to bring something up, continue to bring something up, continue to bring it up. What happens in these situations, you just get more and more frustrated, more angry. It’s like hitting a brick wall. What happens with the other person is they become more defensive often. “Okay, you’re telling me I need to change and so I’m going to dig in my heels and tell you that everything’s fine and we’re good.: The more that you push people with that type of energy of, “I need you to change so that I can be okay inside.” That’s the energy sometimes that we can bring to these relationships that we don’t even realize we’re bringing that energy. 

So whenever you are trying to change someone and they push back, that’s why, because it doesn’t feel good. And automatically, the knee-jerk reaction is to go into a defensive mode. We need to learn to be okay, even when other people in our life are not okay because you’re going to have them. You’re going to have those people. It doesn’t matter if it’s a family member. It doesn’t matter if it’s a co-worker that you really wish that they would change. It doesn’t matter if it’s a boss. There are going to be people in your life, regardless of what you do and what circles you’re in that you have a hard time relating to people that are just maybe difficult to deal with. 

I heard someone say they’re extra grace required people. I don’t remember who said that, so I apologize. Whenever you have an extra grace-required person in your life, that’s an opportunity for you to connect with the Lord to say, “Okay, God, I want to love this person well.”

What does loving them well look like? Sometimes loving them well means accepting their mess right now. It means saying, “Look, “I see you and I love you and I accept you right where you’re at. I don’t need you to change. I’d love it if you would change because it would help you be a better person. It would help you grow closer to the Lord, but as far as me, I can be okay, even if you’re not okay.” 

Sometimes it means setting healthy boundaries to say, in order for me to remain mentally healthy and love you the absolute best that I can, I’m going to need you to know that this is what I can give to the relationship and then I’m going to have to take a step back in some other areas. I’m going to have to kind of let you fall at times. I’m going to have to. let you make choices and make mistakes. That is really, really hard sometimes for us to do. It’s hard for us to sit with these difficult emotions and knowing that someone is making very poor choices over their life, but if you have already spoken those truths to them and encouraged them towards the right path, then you have done your part.

You have done what you can and it’s time to take a step back and trust God with the rest. As you can see, kind of through this process, there are some reasons that we take responsibility for other people’s stuff. It’s because we have a hard time sitting with the emotions that come up. When they make choices that are either unhealthy or that we disagree with, let me tell you what really helps with dealing with those difficult emotions. It’s developing what we call distress tolerance, which is a big way of handling the hard things that come our way. 

A great way that you can do that is mindfulness. I have a course on mindfulness that’ll walk you through the process. What does it look like to be in the present moment, to be aware of what’s going on and in acceptance?

A lot of what we’re talking about today is accepting other people’s choices that may not be great. That’s a hard thing to do. We don’t want to do that. We don’t want to accept that someone’s inactive addiction right now. We want them to be free and whole, and we don’t want to accept that we have a person in our life that might fly off the handle unexpectedly.

We don’t want to accept that. We want that to change because that would help us feel better internally and not have to sit on the edge of ourseatst with all that energy of what’s going to happen with this person. But once we accept our situation, it leads to a sense of greater peace. We know what our role is.

We know what God’s role is. We know what that other person’s role is. And we’re able to tease some of those things out and a little bit cleaner way. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this episode. You can reach us any time via our contact form, hopeforanxietyandocd.com. 

Thank you so much. Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By The Well Counseling.Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, a licensed therapist.

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

119. ICBT as an Alternative to ERP from the Client’s Perspective with Crystal Propes

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in OCD, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode.

In this week’s episode, Carrie interviews Crystal Propes about her journey with ERP therapy and her transition to Inference-Based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (ICBT), highlighting its effectiveness from the client’s perspective.

Episode Highlights:

  • Insights into Crystal Propes’ personal journey with OCD, including her experiences with various treatment approaches.
  • The principles and techniques of ICBT.
  • How ICBT differs from ERP therapy in addressing mental compulsions and providing functional certainty without distress.
  • Personal examples of applying ICBT techniques in real-life situations

Episode Summary:

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD episode 119! I’m Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor from Tennessee, and today I’m thrilled to have Crystal Propes with us. Crystal and I connected on Instagram, and I’m excited to share her story with you.

In this episode, Crystal dives deep into her personal journey with OCD and her experience with inference-based cognitive behavioral therapy (ICBT). We often feature professionals discussing therapy techniques, but it’s equally valuable to hear personal stories. Crystal’s experiences underscore that if one treatment doesn’t work for you, it’s okay—there are other options out there.

Crystal’s journey with OCD began in childhood, with symptoms manifesting as early as age three. From emetophobia to severe anxiety during her school years, her story is a powerful reminder that OCD can evolve and change over time. Despite her struggles, Crystal persevered and eventually sought therapy. She initially tried exposure and response prevention (ERP) therapy but found it overwhelming and not suited to her needs. Thankfully, Crystal later discovered ICBT, which resonated more with her and helped her focus on managing mental compulsions and staying present.

Tune in to hear Crystal’s full story and insights. Remember, if one treatment doesn’t work, it’s not the end of the road. There’s always hope and help available. Don’t give up!

Related Links and Resources:

www.instagram.com/functionallyocd/

What is I-CBT?

Explore Related episode:

18. ERP is Not the Only Option for OCD

Transcript

Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD episode 119. I’m here today with another personal story of anxiety. I am your host, Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee, and here I have Crystal Propes. We actually met on Instagram, which was really fun, and I just had reached out to her and she agreed to be on the show.

Crystal has been posting a lot of information about ICBT, which is inference-based cognitive behavioral therapy, and just her perspective of it from the client that I feel is very helpful. Sometimes we have different types of shows. Sometimes we have shows with different professionals who tell us about the nitty gritty details of specific therapy, but we always find it’s helpful to share personal stories on the podcast of people who have actually been through the struggles and the trials that so many of you have gone through with OCD, and it encourages other people to continue to seek help because we want people to know that there’s hope and there’s help and with our story today, if one treatment in particular doesn’t work for you, that it’s okay to know that there are other treatment options out there for you.

You don’t have to be stuck in a rut. I think a lot of times people feel like I’m the exception to the rule and I’m the one that this therapy is not going to work for and I can’t get help. And then they stop and we just don’t want anybody to stop today. If you hear nothing else from this episode, that’s what I would want you to know from the therapist’s point of view.

_______________________

Carrie: Welcome, Crystal. Tell us a little bit about your story with OCD. How did that start? And when did you notice it showing up? And then when did you realize like, Oh, that’s what this is?

Crystal: My story is a long one. Now that I think back about it, I mean, I didn’t think this hard about it until recently, but now that I think back about it, I knew, like, that it had showed up in childhood, but I wasn’t sure how young.

I think I was three, so, which is very young, right? I’ve lived with this my entire life, but yes, I think I was three. I started my first manifestation of OCD with emetophobia. But I had a lot of other issues with it. I was overwhelmed with big situations. I remember having so much DPDR, like, going, “What’s next?”

The kids are supposed to be excited, but I’m sitting there in silence. My mom’s like, “Are you okay? What’s wrong with you?” And it’s like, “I don’t really know. I just feel overwhelmed.”

I would get really particular about the order of my toys and, like, my toys being played with a certain way and it would give me, like, extreme anxiety to, like, let people borrow books, just all kinds of little things that shouldn’t have caused anxiety that it did now that I look back on it.

I think what really, I would say, like, when my brain broke, even though I definitely had OCD before then, I was 12. I was in 7th grade and I was a teacher’s assistant. for my teacher and so I spent a lot of time alone in her room as one of my electives and I was like grading papers and stuff.

Obviously, being quiet alone gives you so much room for your imagination to run wild and I just remember having this thought, what if you’re terminally ill? What if you have cancer? And then that just latched right on. It’s like, why did I think that? Is God trying to tell me that I have cancer? Is there something wrong with me?

I spent like a long time after that, like terrified and I couldn’t figure out why. I thought I was going crazy and I didn’t want to say anything about it. My mom because I really didn’t know what was going on and I just remember like kind of dealing with that on and off all throughout high school.

I remember seeking reassurance from my mom, like, I’m not going crazy. I’m not crazy. Am I? There’s nothing wrong with me. Just like Googling stuff to make sure I was okay. Lots of rumination, lots of body checking. That’s kind of my experience with like my early OCD and how it started.

Carrie: Those thoughts, you’re just sitting there and then all of a sudden the thought pops in and OCD gets going and you get really latched into that thought and into the meaning of “What does this mean that I’m even having this thought?

What is this saying about me?” Emetophobia, for those who don’t know that are listening, maybe they don’t experience that, is fear of throwing up.

Crystal: It has existed largely in the background for the most of my life. Like, as long as I wasn’t directly exposed to it, I was okay. It didn’t live my life around it.

My OCD has worn many hats over my 30 years with it, and most of them were not aminophobia. Even though I’ve always been aminophobic, again, like, unless directly faced with it, it really didn’t bother me until I had kids, and they’re in school, and they’ve brought home germs, and I’ve been traumatized by it.

But yes before that, it really was mostly other themes that popped up, but now it’s the opposite. Now, all my other themes extremely well, and the am phobia has dug its calls in,

Carrie: It’s interesting how symptoms like this wax and wane over a lifetime. Like you said, sometimes things are really upfront and then, “Okay, I am not as worried about those things,” and then those fall into the background, and because of other life stressors raising young children and bringing home all of the germs, obviously that’s stressful.  There’s more fears about getting sick or people in the household throwing up and then you getting sick and throwing up.

Can you walk us through that process a little more? Becaus those were the pieces that caused you to seek out ERP therapy initially.

Crystal: Right. Before I get into that, I wanted to say like, I didn’t realize it was OCD and not generalized anxiety until I was about 18. There’s a gap there though from the time I realized it was OCD at 18, but I didn’t get an official diagnosis until last year at 32, even though I knew what it was.

I didn’t seek out therapy until then because I dealt with it on my own fairly well, even though it was so hard. severe when I was in college, extremely severe, but I ended up seeking out therapy because about two years ago, my kids started bringing home stomach bugs. I was blessed with the fact that my daughter, my oldest never had one until she was five and in public school in kindergarten.

That was the first one we ever had to deal with. Nobody caught it that time. So like, it was traumatizing for like about two weeks until I was sure like, okay, everything’s probably dead. And then I was okay, but then we got another one five months later, and then we got another one five months later. We had like four, and I had two or three of them, back to back to back.

By the time I would get over one, we would get another one, and it was just back to, and the one that took our whole family down, it was extremely traumatic for me. And I think people who don’t have a phobia, It’s hard to explain the level of fear you experience in relation to a true phobia.

Some people never feel that type of fear ever in their life, but if you’ve ever been terrified of something, you have to think of the most scared you’ve ever been in your entire life. Like the scariest possible thing you can think of and being faced with that and having to take care of your kid through that and then having to deal with it yourself.

I’m literally shaking while taking care of my kid. And then I get sick. It’s like the worst I’ve ever felt in my life. All my fears are realized. It’s just as bad as I thought it would be. I am traumatized, truly traumatized from this. I haven’t been officially diagnosed with PTSD, but only because I haven’t been evaluated for it.

We decided to treat the PTSD first, but I’ll get into that a little later on. I was super traumatized. I found that my kids, we started school and my kids, I was just watching them, their every move, hyper-villagently watching them, afraid they were going to fall ill at any second, just anticipating the next bug that I was going to have to deal with.

I was spending every second home with them. It stuck in my own head, ruminating, hypervigilance, my hands crack and bleed, I wash them so much, just like so miserable, even though I was technically functional.  I was still taking care of my family, I was still taking care of my kids, I was still sending them to school, they had everything they need, they were fed, they’re happy, but then I’m sitting there playing with them and I’m not present, my brain is miles away.

Carrie: Sure. Did you have a lot of cleaning rituals related to that that got ramped up?

Crystal: I have some. My therapist is big on not telling me what’s a compulsion. He wants me to decide what I think is compulsive. We’ll get into that talking about ICBT therapy a little bit because I distinction between it and ERP that I like.

I’m a compulsive hand washer. I will admit that right away. I feel like if I’m going to touch something that’s going to go into somebody’s mouth, I can’t have touched anything in between. If I wash my hands and then go touch something that’s not food, I have to wash my hands again before I touch food. That’s probably excessive. My hands bleed. I also do some things that may or may not be compulsive. My kids shower when they get home from school, but to be fair, they roll all over the floor at school and floors are gross. And I can’t change their hair. I can change their clothes, but I can’t change their hair.

I also have a tendency to llysol” all their shoes and “lysol” all my car after they get out from school. I have a three year old that like licks everything and puts everything in his mouth. If I didn’t have a three year old that was a germ collector, I wouldn’t be this intense about it. I do have some cleaning things that may or may not be compulsions. The mental compulsions that I have, the hypervigilance, the mental review, the ruminating, they far outweigh the physical ones in, like, time and, like, distress level that they cause.

Carrie: That’s the hard thing that I see a lot of my clients dealing with is okay, you can put the Lysol down and walk away. That may be really hard for some people.

I don’t want to minimize that, or you can tell somebody, “Okay, touch this and then don’t wash your hands,” but you’re always going to have your brain with you and so you have opportunities to ruminate all the time throughout the day. Those are, I think the hardest compulsions to deal with are the mental ones, like you were saying, that makes a lot of sense to me just from talking with my clients, and it makes sense that after seeing your kids be sick so many times, that it became stuck in your brain that am I ever going to get out of this? Is this going to happen again? And then this was terrible, horrible, awful and I’m trying to prevent these types of experiences from happening.  It rose to this level of where you decided I need to go to therapy and you had done some research.

I’m assuming like other people have on what type of therapy should you get? If you have OCD. And you found exposure and response prevention. This is the therapy that’s recommended.

Crystal: I knew about ERP for a long time. I have never wanted to try ERP. I have never thought that it would work for my phobia, but I was desperate. I knew about both ICBT and ERP going in. I was struggling to find an ICVT therapist and I was desperate. So I was like, okay, let me try. this therapist that says that they do ERP and CBT and is trauma-informed and see if they can work with me, but I don’t want to do exposure therapy directly related to my phobia.

I went in thinking maybe he can work with me, and he really seemed like he might. He was really nice, good Christian guy from my state. I thought this was going to be a good experience. He had a lot of experience with trauma and stuff and honestly, if he hadn’t been where he was working, I think that he may have been a really good therapist for me, but I felt like being treated as just like a number on a assembly line. “You have OCD, you have ERP. This is exactly how we treat this.” There was no room for my personal experience. We started with it and I just felt like any time he brought up, “okay, this is what we’re going to do.” Make this an exposure or okay, now we’re going to work on a hierarchy. It gave me so much anxiety.

I never felt better after therapy. I always felt immeasurably worse thought of like having therapy was giving me anxiety and it just felt like a bunch of extra work on top of what I was already dealing with. I was like, okay, look, I’m already so exposed to this. I don’t need extra exposure. I’m already so traumatized by this.

I don’t need extra trauma. I don’t want to create a hierarchy of my fears and then you make me work through them because I already faced my worst fear all the time. Like I deal with this all the time. I have three young children in public. It really wasn’t a good fit. So I talked to my friend and was like, Hey, can you find me an ICBT therapist? And she came through for me big time. 

Carrie: That’s awesome. How long did you stay with the ERP therapist?

Crystal: There was one or two weeks where I did two sessions in a week and then others where I just did one. Of course, we get a stomach bug right in the middle of the day. It’s been like one or two weeks that I decided to start therapy and my kids have a stomach bug.

It was awful. Not only am I like trying to start therapy, I’m also dealing with my worst nightmare at the same time. Of course only like five months after we had the last one we had. It’s again, I had just gotten started to feel better and then this happens again. So I think I did four or five weeks of ERP in total.

Carrie: Okay. So there were enough sessions to really determine, like, “This doesn’t seem to be jiving with what I’m intuitively wanting to do, and I don’t feel maybe fully heard or understood how traumatizing this is for me.”

Crystal: Right. I felt like I was having to spend so much time explaining what I meant and what was really bothering me and what I really hoped to get out of it.

None of that was coming through. I don’t know, like maybe he didn’t have a lot of experience with aminophobia in general. It just seemed like he could only do exposures and plan exposures. That’s not what I wanted. I already have exposures. What I primarily wanted to get out of therapy was to learn how to stop the mental compulsions, to stay in the present moment, to redirect my attention to reality and be able to be present with my kids. I don’t think I’m ever not going to be immunophobic. I can’t imagine a day where if there is a stomach bug in my house it’s not going to terrify me. I absolutely can imagine a day where I am not worried about it unless it is directly in my house. You know what I mean?I didn’t think ERP did a good job of making me more present. It’s like, “Okay, well, you’re not present, but you just got to function anyways.” But I’m already extremely functional. I don’t need help functioning. I need help being present, and that’s where I CBT spoke to me. 

Carrie:  I will tell people too, it matters where you put the I on CBT. If you put it at the end and you say CBT I, it’s CBT for insomnia. If you put it at the beginning and say I CBT, I know we’re therapists. are confusing than it’s inference-based cognitive behavioral therapy. 

Tell us a little bit about what you’ve learned about ICBT. I know you’ve done a variety of reading on it in addition to going to therapy with someone who’s trained in ICBT.

Crystal:  Let me preface this by saying this is not an ERP hate. Like I know it helps so many people. I don’t want people to think that I’m hating on the therapy that got them functional. I do realize the value in it. I just want to say that. Now let me dive into the therapy that I love. I knew a little bit about it from a friend who had gone through it and now is a fledgling therapist herself providing ICBT therapy in her clinical rotation.

I didn’t dig too, too much. I understood the concept. I understood how it worked. I didn’t dig too much because I wanted my therapist to guide me through it. And he’s done an incredible job of that. This is a good time to get me because I’m almost done. I just finished module 11. There’s only one module left.

Inference-based cognitive behavioral therapy is based off the concept of something called inferential confusion, which basically means that you have a trigger and then your brain has an obsessional doubt about it. What if there’s a germ on this doorknob? But you have no evidence that there’s physical evidence that there’s a germ on that doorknob. It looks clean. You didn’t see anybody sneeze on it. No one’s sick in your house. You have no reason to think that doorknob is dirty, but then OCD comes in and says “Well, what if somebody touched it and if you had a microscope, you could see it? What if the person who delivered your mail yesterday had a cold and he accidentally touched your doorknob while he was delivering it?”

Your brain thinks of all these faulty reasoning methods as to why your doorknob could be contaminated, but none of that is real, right? You don’t have evidence of any of that. All you have is your imagination thinking of all the ways it could be. That’s like really where ICBT lives. It teaches you that you’ve created a story based on faulty inferences that you have gained from all these reasoning methods that seem logical in your OCD brain, but they’re just a little off.

Past experience matters, but does this matter to this situation? No, you’re probably applying it and the situation’s different, or yes, germs technically do exist, but do you have any evidence that are dangerous germs that could actually hurt you on the door? It’s just all about teaching your brain how to recognize the obsessional doubt and the faulty reasoning behind it that goes into weaving this story and then redirect yourself to actual reality, the here and now. You Dismiss your doubts because you realize that they’re based on your imagination, so they’re not relevant to your present life.

Carrie: That’s awesome. I started reading the ICBT manual. I found it very interesting going back to what we were talking about, about mental compulsions versus physical compulsions. What ERP does is it focuses a lot more on the compulsions. ICBT focuses more on stopping because there’s a loop of sessions and compulsions.  ICBT is focusing more on stopping the loop at the obsessional part rather than stopping it at the compulsive part. I think that makes a difference when you’re talking about mental compulsions, being able to say, “Okay, right now, it has kind of taken over my imagination and now I’m imagining the worst case scenario where everyone in the family is sick in the hospital, dying because of the stomach bug that I caught off the doorknob”

Crystal: I think with ICBT, it’s a metacognitive therapy. It resolves the obsession. The thing I love about ICBT is that when it works when you finally get it. I’m not perfect at it yet/ Don’t get me wrong, but the more you practice the better you get and it’s like a slow burn First, you just start recognizing,” Crap! that is so outlandish.” Yes, that’s a faulty reasoning method, but you can’t stop. You’re still compelled to do it, but it could be possible, but as you recognize more and more of your obsessional doubts and what is actually drawing you into the OCD bubble, you get better and better and better at not getting into that rumination cycle, right?

It’s like, wait, no, this is an obsessional doubt. I don’t need to take it further, but he greatest thing about it is when it works, you don’t have to sit with uncertainty.  We get to have functional certainty in ICBT and I love that because you can be certain according to your senses, right? You can be certain enough.

The greatest part about it is that you never get to the distress part because you get to sit in that functional certainty and say, okay, this is enough for right now for the present moment. Possibility doesn’t matter because it’s not relevant right now. I went through an experience recently that like could have been really triggering for me, and I used my ICBP techniques.

I went to a funeral and I’ve had some death religious OCD in the past and obviously, I was around a bunch of people. I went in a public bathroom, lots of triggering things and I feel like with the ERP would say, all right, do it anyway and just sit with the discomfort, but with ICBT, I did it anyway, but I was never distressed because we resolved the obsession. We never got to the anxiety part of the sequence. We never got to the compulsion part of the sequence because we never got to the anxiety part. It’s like, yes, I did all of this. Yes, it would have been triggering in the past, but because I was able to stay rooted in reality, and I didn’t even get into the OCD bubble at all, like, No, I didn’t have to tolerate discomfort. No, I didn’t have to tolerate uncertainty because I had functional certainty, and I just operated it as I would as any normal person in a normal, non-obsessive circumstance would have. It was really cool to like be able to explain that to people. Yes I face triggers, but I didn’t even have to face discomfort.

Carrie: Did you prep yourself ahead of time or work with your therapist ahead of time on that experience in order to be able to do that?

Crystal: Not specifically. The death was a family friend and was not unexpected, but obviously, we didn’t know exactly when it was going to happen, but if I had done this back when I was like, not as far into the modules, I would not have had as good of an experience with this.

ICBT does a lot of background buildup before you get into the real skill building because you have to learn the metacognitive part. You have to learn exactly. where your obsessions come from, why the reasoning methods are faulty, and you have to learn so much of the beginning of ICBT is learning to recognize your obsessional sequence without changing it, because at that point you don’t have the skills to change your, like, your obsessional sequence.

You just realize, “Okay, this is where my obsessional doubt is, this is what my feared consequence is, this is giving me anxiety and dread and that is why I’m going to do a compulsion. But it’s hard to just stop the compulsion with like no guidance, right? Once you realize that you can notice all of that, then you get to the later modules that teach you about reality sensing and the OCD bubble and the alternative story.

It teaches you how to stay grounded in reality and create a story that is based in reality. And then it’s not compulsive because you don’t. argue with your OCD, right? ICBT is not arguing logic with OCD. It’s saying, okay, reality says this, and I’m going to believe it. And that’s where you leave it. So it teaches you those skills.

So I had just gone through module eight and module nine and module 10, which talk about all the tricks OCD uses to pull you in and why they’re tricks. Module eight is a reality fencing and it tells you about how to stay grounded in reality and not like give in to the OCD bubble. Module nine, the alternative story, which I absolutely love because it’s like you’re choosing to create a story, but you can create any story, so why not make a reality-based story and then stick with it? That helped me so much because I had just done all of that work. I was able to use that.  I walked into the public bathroom. I was like, no one’s sick in here. The bathroom’s really clean. I’m not going to dig into it anymore. No what if, no hunting for reasons that it could be dirty or contaminated. 

I hugged a bunch of random people and there was no like, what if they’ve been sick? It’s like, well, they look healthy. They seem healthy. Nobody looks like they feel ill or anything. So, I mean, I’m just going to believe the reality based story.

Everybody here is healthy and I’m not, it’s not dangerous to hug them. And you learn those techniques and you don’t have to dig into it. It’s so helpful. I will say like, it took me months, it took me probably four months of just noticing before I was able to employ and it helps a little bit. Noticing does help. I noticed that I was able to get out of my OCD cycle so much faster, even early on, even when after module two, it didn’t really start getting to the point where I wasn’t like even creating an obsessional story to begin with until I had gotten into the later modules. So it just builds on it, but once you get it, it all happens fast.

Carrie: This is something that feels very congruent with the types of things that I teach- mindfulness, which is learning to be in the present moment. The level of awareness and acceptance, what you’re talking about, even noticing your own thought process. A lot of people in the early stages of treatment, they have a hard time even noticing that what they’re thinking is an obsessional thought.

You may have worked on that some prior to this and probably elaborated on that in ICBT, but that’s really the first step is for people to notice. Even when they’re having an obsession before it just seems like, but this just people will say, well, it feels like my thought process and it feels really true when somebody walks into that bathroom, they may feel like it’s contaminated, but what you’re saying is look for the logical evidence that says that it’s not contaminated or that it is maybe it is really dirty.  Anybody without OCD would find it disgusting.

Crystal:  ICBT spins, I’m not kidding, six modules teaching you exactly how to do that. The first six modules teach you how to slow down your thought process. That’s like the biggest thing with ICBT. You have to slow down. It’s so not intuitive for people with OCD because our thoughts race. It gets your OCD bubble too to slow down your thinking. Instead of ruminating and being like, “Oh my gosh, this is so scary. This is so scary,” It redirects you. It almost pulls you a little bit outside of it to say, “Okay, wait, how did I get here? You spend the first six modules learning how to recognize your obsessional sequence, how you weaved this obsessional story, why it feels so real and the ways OCD pulls you in.” 

Literally six modules before it even ever tells you here’s how you get out, and as you learn to slow down the process and work on the whole, do I have direct evidence of this doubt? And that was like one of the earliest things. I think we were in module two when my therapist taught me this. He said, “Just ask yourself, what direct evidence would I have to have right now for my doubt to be true?” By direct evidence, he said he means it will hold up in a court of law. We live by this principle now.  I need direct evidence that would hold up in a court of law that my doubt is reasonable. And that was one of the earliest things before I even got to the skill building part of ICBT that started to pull me out of that bubble, that started to help me with my OCD.

What is the direct evidence I would have to have that one of my kids has a stomach bug? And in a court of law, evidence, it would have to be that they are physically sick. I would have to have seen one of them have gotten sick. Because I can’t tell you how many times I was like, my stomach hurts, and there’s nothing wrong with them. That’s not direct evidence, et cetera, et cetera. A lot of times the bar for direct evidence is way higher than we realize that it would have to be. Our OCD has tricks warp us into thinking we have direct evidence, but really, we don’t have direct evidence of that. That was the earliest thing that I learned to do to help pull me out of the OCD bubble was say, “Okay, wait, slow down.” You’re creating a story. What direct evidence would you have to have for the story to be true? That was like an early, early skill technique that my therapist taught me that really helped me when my OCD was really bad before I even got into the skill-building part.

Carrie: You said there are 12 modules that you have to go through and learn. As you go through those modules, is there homework involved? 

Crystal: ICBT is like a course, literally, I would say like a college course. The way my therapist approaches it, he goes over a module with me, and he doesn’t like read to me, and I do not have the module, he doesn’t send me any of the stuff until after.

He always has some sort of analogy or thought experiment or exercise to do with me in session, and they’re always excellent. I was relating my OCD to parallel, but not exact, situations. So like, I have a lot of anticipatory OCD issues. I’m afraid of the next time we’re going to have a stomach bug.

He would parallel that with the client that was worried about, he worried about noticing shapes, and he would notice a shape, and then he would see it everywhere and get really distracted by it, and it would make him miserable. He would always be worried about the next time he might notice a shape and it would stick in his brain. He would parallel my story to that, and he would parallel, maybe my worry about stomach bugs to someone who was equally as afraid of COVID. These parallel examples, but that took me a little bit to think rationally when it’s specifically about your theme. He would go over that with me and then it would always relate to the module we were on for that week and then he would send me the homework and the homework is always a lot of it is like some writing and then there’s some exercise like thought experiments that we do throughout the week.

We would meet back the next session and go over what I wrote. First go over the quiz and then we would go over the work I did and then any questions I had about it, one to two weeks per module, typically.

Carrie: I think this is really important, Crystal, for people to know what they’re getting into when they’re looking at doing different therapies because it doesn’t really matter which therapy you choose. If you’re not willing to show up and do the work, it’s not going to help you get better in different modules, different types of therapy work for different people. That’s why we’re talking about this to let people know, maybe you have tried ERP and you’re looking for a different option. Maybe you haven’t tried ERP because the idea of it just totally terrifies you and you don’t feel like you can do that. Or maybe people say, I don’t know how to expose myself to certain things that are in my imagination, like being afraid of going to hell, there are different things that they do and exposure and response prevention to expose people to that, but it doesn’t necessarily sit well.

Sometimes Christians struggle with doing some of those exposures and having to find somebody that we will do religiously sensitive exposure sometimes can be a challenge from what I’ve heard from various people that have contacted me through the podcast. So I’m glad that we’re talking about this, but it does, whatever you’re going to do, it does take practice.

It does take intentionality and it does take work be called it the OCD bubble. You’ve spent so much time going through that over and over and over again, like it’s really patterned in your brain. So whenever we’re trying to make these new brain connections, it takes our brain a while to pick up on something new like that, that you’re feeding it. You have to do it over and over and over, just like any other habit we create in our life. We can’t go out and exercise one day and say, Hey, like I’m in fit and in shape.

Crystal: You have to exercise that brain. I will say that was the biggest thing. I would get so frustrated at the beginning of ICBT therapy because I’ll be like, “Yes, you taught me to notice all this and I can notice it. I don’t know how to stop.: That was my biggest thing and then I realized the more I practice, all of a sudden I was just doing it. I can do this now. I cannot put too much emphasis on it, even if it feels you’re just noticing and it’s frustrating that you’re noticing and there’s nothing you can do.

The more you practice, the faster you get and the earlier you notice your obsessional story, the less anxious that you will make yourself. You’re torturing yourself by weaving this terrifying story. You’re scaring yourself. Once I realized that, it’s like, “Wait, why am I doing this? I’m literally just sitting here terrifying myself. Why am I doing this?”  

I was already so far in before I realized I was doing it. It was hard to stop, but when you catch it, then you’re not quite as anxious. You haven’t woven as good of a story at that point. It’s way easier to stop. Noticing is, I would say 85 percent of the work. Once you’ve noticed it, once you figure out how to notice it and slow yourself down, that’s like 85 percent of the work. The skill-building part is only 15%. 

I spent weeks doing it, he had me doing thought chains. At first, it was retrospective and then eventually I got so good at it, I can do it in real-time.

But it’s like, “Okay, I noticed I was in the bubble. Where did I go wrong? What initial thought took me into my imagination and away from reality? That was so helpful. I think I did them for three weeks. Now I do not have to write them down. I do not have to go back and go through it at all.

I can do them in real-time. Like I said, I’m not perfect. Sometimes they’re harder than ever. For instance, if there was a stomach bug going around at my kid’s school and I knew it, it would be much harder for me to deal with that, right? Or if one of my friend’s kids had a bug, when I get faced with an online, like the other day, the weather channel decided, well, not the other day, this was like a month ago, but norovirus is going around.

I was like, no, I don’t want to know that. I spent the whole day freaked out because of that. Again, I’m not perfect at it, but I will say the beauty of ICBT is that a lot of times you hear you can’t get better without exposures, but I think we need to think about that differently. You don’t have to do exposures to do ICBT if exposures terrify you and you are not going to do therapy for your OCD because you don’t want to do exposures, you do not have to do exposures with ICBT.

You will be triggered because you’re going to have to talk about your fears to be able to do the therapy, but you do not have to do exposures. And the thing about ICBT is that you obviously eventually you’re going to stop doing compulsions and live your life. But it’s not about doing exposures for the sake of exposures.

It’s about I can do this triggery thing because I have no direct evidence that it requires a compulsion. I have no direct evidence that my obsessional doubt requires me to do anything but live to do what I want to do according to my values. That’s the greatest part about it. My therapist, he does ERP with other clients.

Sometimes he’ll be like, “Well, that’s a great exposure” But it isn’t an exposure, right? It’s just something I wanted to do to live my life. We’re just like kind of joking about it being like that. But it’s great, right? Because I didn’t have to plan an exposure, plan response prevention. I just, for instance, we’re going to go to an Easter egg hunt at church on Saturday.

That gives me anxiety, having to take my three-year-old and let him hang out with other kids. Do I need to avoid that situation? No, because no one’s ill. I have no evidence that anything bad is going around at the church. It’s outdoors in the sunlight, and we’ve gone to many things at the church before, and my kids have been fine.

My daughter goes there. All the time with her friends, and she comes back fine. Reality tells me that we can go and it’ll be great. And it’s something I want to do. It’s something that’s values-based. And so it’s not an exposure, right? It’s just me living according to my values and not having to do an avoidant compulsion because reality says that it’s unnecessary.

Carrie: Unless you’re doing massive amounts of avoiding, which there are people that do that, that avoid all types of different situations. In order to live your life, you’re going to face triggering situations, I think is what you’re saying. So you’re going to expose yourself. It’s just not a, Oh, this is a planned exposure to work through my OCD.

It’s just like you said, living your life, which feels really freeing and beautiful that you’re able to go out and do those things.

Crystal: I like to think of it as not an extra exposure, you know what I mean? With ERP, it’s all about extra exposure on top of your triggers to teach your brain how to not respond to it and don’t do a compulsion when you do this trigger,

but with ICBT, you’re remaining in reality, and your obsessional doubt is irrelevant in the here and now. That’s like the biggest thing in ICBT, like, Your OCD is irrelevant. OCD is imaginary. It is a story you have created solely in your imagination, and it doesn’t matter if it’s technically possible.

It doesn’t matter if it’s happened before because it’s not happening right now. And because it’s not happening right now, the only way that OCD could have conceivably come up with this doubt is for you to have imagined it, I love that. OCD is in your imagination, but you need to be in the present. That’s the biggest thing it has taught me is that even though I feel like my fear is a very difficult one, my fear is more probable than not, right? There are lots of people who are scared of things with OCD that will never happen. I am going to be exposed again. I am going to be terrified, and I might even be traumatized by it, but it’s not happening right now, so it doesn’t require my attention right now. That has been the biggest thing for me is learning to let go of the what if and that it’s possible and this could happen in a week because it’s not serving me any purpose.

Carrie: Through that process, you’ve found that you’ve been able to be more present with your children than instead of just in these thought processes.

What if my child gets sick or what if they brought something home or what if this or what if that?

Crystal: Constantly, hypervigilantly monitoring their every move for evidence that they might be ill, you know, I used to spend so much time doing that and I still do it occasionally, but it’s much quicker.

I’ll look at them. I’m like, “Oh, it looks fine and I’ll just move on.” Whereas before I would have stared and I would have asked how they felt and I would have dug, but digging is bad.

Carrie: Well, thank you so much for sharing your story. Tell us where people can find you on Instagram and we’ll put some links where they can learn more about ICBT from a professional perspective, but tell us where they can find you on Instagram.

Crystal: Functionally OCD. They can find me there. You can message me there. Awesome.

Carrie: Awesome. Thank you again for being on the show. 

Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie  Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of myself or By the Well Counseling.

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

118. How Do I know if this Thought is an OCD Obsession? with Carrie Bock, LPC-MHSP

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Counseling, OCD, Podcast Episode.

Join Carrie as she helps you distinguish personal thoughts from OCD obsessions. She breaks down common OCD themes and the urgency they create and offers practical tips for navigating the complexities of OCD.

Episode Highlights:

  • How to recognize common themes of OCD thoughts.
  • The urgency often associated with OCD obsessions and the behaviors they provoke.
  • The tendency of OCD to make insignificant issues feel overwhelmingly important.
  • The importance of mindfulness in discerning the true significance of intrusive thoughts.
  • Strategies for embracing uncertainty and resisting the urge to seek reassurance.

Episode Summary:

Welcome to episode 118 of Hope for Anxiety and OCD. I’m your host, Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor here in Tennessee. Today, we’re diving into a question many of you have asked: “How do I know if this is an OCD obsession?”

Let’s break it down into four key points to help you identify whether what you’re experiencing is an OCD obsession.

1. Align with Your Typical OCD Themes: Think about whether your current obsession matches the usual themes of your OCD. For example, if you struggle with scrupulosity, your obsessions might revolve around fears of offending God or committing sins. If your thoughts fit these recurring themes, it’s likely an OCD obsession.

2. Sense of Urgency: OCD often creates a sense of urgency, making you feel like you need to resolve or answer something immediately. This urgency can manifest as excessive rumination or seeking reassurance, like re-reading scripture or asking for advice repeatedly. If it feels urgent, it could be OCD at play.

3. Perceived Importance: OCD tends to magnify the importance of certain thoughts, making them seem like the most crucial issue at the moment. For instance, you might obsess over a past interaction or perceived mistake, even when it’s not relevant to your current life. Practice mindfulness to gauge whether these obsessions are overshadowing more immediate concerns.

4. Embrace Uncertainty: If you’re still unsure whether a thought is an OCD obsession, embracing uncertainty can be key. OCD loves to create a false sense of certainty, pushing you to seek answers immediately. By learning to sit with uncertainty, you can reduce the power of these obsessions. Remember, it’s okay not to have all the answers right now.

I hope these insights help you navigate your journey with OCD. If you need more support, head to carriebock.com/services/

Explore related episode:

87. OCD FAQ with Carrie and Dr. Kelley Kleppinger

Transcript

Hi, welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD episode 118. I’m your host, Carrie Bock, and I’m a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. I wanted to talk with you today about “How Do I Know If this is an OCD Obsession?” This is something that comes up for a lot of people, right? Is it God? Is it the devil? Is it OCD?

Is it an OCD obsession or is it really just me? I want to break it down for you a little bit, maybe give you four ways that you can know whether or not this is an OCD obsession. Number one, does it fall in line with your typical OCD themes? You know your themes that OCD typically runs through. For someone with scrupulosity, for example, “Have I offended God in this way?” “Did I actually sin?”

A lot of times, OCD starts with, “What if?” What if I hurt that person’s feelings? What if I ran over someone with my car? What if this is not arranged properly, then something bad might happen, that superstitious type of thinking that can come along with OCD? Is the obsession or the thought process that you’re having, is it in line with what your themes typically are?That’s number one. 

Number two, does this feel urgent? OCD will tell you, you have to do something about this right now and it may not be an external action. So it may not be like a typical checking the doorknob or checking to make sure that the stove is off one more time. It may be a rumination of. I have to figure this out right now, and I have to have an answer right now.

It feels very urgent, so that may lead you to say, “Okay, if I need to know right now, that means I’m going to go Google about it. I’m going to go call my best friend and ask her the same question that I’ve already asked her and I’ve already received an answer to.” That’s reassurance seeking. “I have to sit here and think about it, or I have to find three scripture verses that tell me yes or no. I have to look at what this pastor that I listen to, let me try to see if he’s done a sermon about this situation.” If it feels like, yes, I’ve got to engage, I’ve got to do something, I’ve got to figure it out and it’s so urgent. It’s like, I’ve got to do it right now. That’s a good indicator that you are dealing with an OCD obsession.

Number three, does it feel like it is the most important thing, even if it is not? OCD has a tendency to just cloud and zoom in and tell you this is the thing that you need to be focused on. Right now, you need to be focused on, did you hurt that person’s feelings three years ago when you told them the truth about their boyfriend, that he wasn’t the right person for them.

OCD may have you stuck on that for a long time. And if you’re able to zoom out a little bit and look at kind of your life in total, Is the most important thing to be focusing on right now, or is it just that’s what OCD is telling me? It’s the most important thing to focus on right now. Because what happened between you and your friend three years ago when you made a comment about her boyfriend wasn’t the person she should be with.

I imagine that you have many other things going on in your life right now, whether that’s work, school, family responsibilities, current friendships, maybe you’re still in a relationship with that friend and things are fine right now. What’s actually happening in the present. This is why I teach people mindfulness skills.

This is why I stress those and have a course on mindfulness because learning to be able to be in the present helps us know what’s the most important thing right now. And a lot of times it’s not what OCD is telling you. Sometimes, we can be running from the stress of the present moment into an obsession and you don’t even realize that you’re doing it.

It’s much easier for me to like, it’s a familiar pathway in my brain, maybe easier is not the right word, but it’s a familiar pathway in my brain ruminate about this scripture verse and trying to figure it out. Versus sitting with the uncertainty maybe of my present situation of a family member who’s sick or of not being certain if I’m doing a good job on this work project.

Thinking about what is OCD possibly trying to distract you from that’s uncomfortable in the present. And as you’re able to sit more with some of those present uncertainties, that’s going to help you be able to manage the OCD and to recognize. That it’s not the most important thing right now.

Acceptance and commitment therapy or act teaches you to move towards your values, to move towards what’s important to you. And so if you’re sitting in your room obsessing about something or seeking a lot of reassurance, a lot of times that’s taking time away. From what’s most important to you at that moment.

Even though OCD is telling you, Hey, you’ve got to figure this out right now, you’ve got to sit and ruminate on it. Thinking about what are my values? What’s actually most important to me? How can I move towards that value system instead of being stuck in this OCD loop over and over again, where I like to tell people that OCD is trying to get you to scratch an itch that you can’t scratch.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had an itch on your back that you couldn’t reach. It’s a little bit like that. It’s like, well, maybe I can, maybe if I just move this way, or, oh, maybe if I just put my arm that way, maybe I’ll be able to get to it. That’s what OCD obsessions are like. It wants you to believe that you can scratch that itch, but really you can’t.

Really, you have to learn to be able to sit With the discomfort to sit with the uncertainty. And as long as you keep chasing, being able to scratch that itch, the more and more uncomfortable you’re going to be. And it’s just going to continue back that loop of obsession and compulsion. We’ve covered three different points so far on the four points of how do I know if this is an OCD obsession or not.

Let’s say point number four is that you’re still unsure. You’re still not sure if this is an OCD obsession or not. And I would say, encourage you to embrace that uncertainty in any way that you can. I know that may seem big or impossible for some of you who are listening to this. With anxiety or OCD, but embracing uncertainty is what allows you to be able to say, Hey, I can move forward towards my values.

I can keep living and functioning in my day-to-day life. I don’t have to figure this out right now. There are some things that take us a long time to figure out. Is this the person that I’m supposed to marry? Probably shouldn’t make that decision in a day or in an hour. We don’t necessarily need to know that absolutely right now, but that is what OCD is telling you, to say, let me sit with this uncertainty.

Let me gather more data over time, not gather more data by Googling a bunch of stuff. But let me take my time on deciding, is this the person that I should marry? If it’s a spiritual obsession, a lot of times people can get stuck on sins and making sure, “Okay, I have to eradicate every sin from my life, sins in the present, sins in the past.” Can I sit with the fact that maybe there are some things that I’ve done in the past? Maybe sometimes I can reconcile those things. But there are some things that we just can’t that it might be damaging to go back and rehash something with somebody that they’ve already healed from, but you might still be stuck in shame about that’s something that you might have to sit with.

Embracing that uncertainty and that discomfort in the present is going to help. Slow you down, slow all the racing obsessions down because the less that you give into them, the less that they’re going to reoccur. Everyone has uncertainty in their life. Everyone has things that they don’t know, and it’s okay to not know, and it’s okay to have a mindful moment and acknowledge there are some things that I’m questioning right now.

There are some things that I am uncertain about. I can sit with those things. I can recognize that discomfort, but I don’t have to become a slave to it. I can continue living my life. I hope that these tips have been helpful for you and you can reach out to me anytime at hopeforanxietyandocd.com. I encourage you to click on the courses tab and check out the options there.

I have a great course on mindfulness that can really help you learn to sit with some of that uncertainty, learn to sit with those uncomfortable feelings and recognizing you don’t have to act on them. 

Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By The Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the use of myself or By The Well Counseling.

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

117. Demonic Oppression or OCD? A Personal Story with Jessica Ray

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, OCD, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode.

Carrie interviews Jessica Ray about her experiences with OCD and faith. They discuss how OCD developed alongside Jessica’s newfound faith after childhood trauma.

Episode Highlights:

  • The challenges of navigating OCD within Christian community.
  • The importance of recognizing the difference between demonic oppression and mental illness.
  • Jessica’s journey of finding relief through diagnosis and treatment.
  • The supportive role of Christian community even at times they didn’t understand mental health struggles.
  • Specific things that helped her along her journey of healing. 

Related Links and Resources:

Jessica Ray’s YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/@JessicaJoy34

Instagram: www.instagram.com/joynicole_34/

Episode Summary:

Welcome to Episode 117 of Christian Faith and OCD. For the past three years, I’ve seen firsthand how sharing personal journeys can deeply resonate with our community. Many of us facing anxiety and OCD may feel isolated, but connecting through shared experiences and faith can be incredibly uplifting.

In this episode, I’m honored to speak with Jessica Rae, who opens up about her personal battle with OCD. Jessica’s story is remarkable as her symptoms began in her late teens, right after a profound conversion to Christianity. She describes how her OCD manifested through relentless obsessive thoughts and paralyzing panic attacks, particularly around her role in evangelism and her personal relationships.

Jessica’s path to healing has been both challenging and inspiring. Initially, she encountered some misconceptions about mental health within her church community, which complicated her journey. However, Jessica’s perseverance led her to seek professional help and receive an accurate OCD diagnosis. This pivotal step marked the beginning of her significant progress in managing her symptoms.

Jessica’s experience highlights the critical role of recognizing mental health issues and finding the right support. It also emphasizes the power of faith and community in the healing process.

Explore Related episode:

108. OCD personal story with Michael Kheir

Transcript

One thing that I’ve learned over the course of three years doing these podcast episodes is that you guys love personal stories. You find them very relatable because so many people dealing with anxiety and OCD feel isolated They feel like I’m the only one that’s going through these things.

So it really helps you to hear from other Christians who are also struggling and how they’ve seen God in their redemptive story. They’re still in process of working through some things. You know, we’re all on a journey to become more like Christ and in pursuit of healing from him. Today on the show, I have with me Jessica Rae and Jessica had emailed me when I was looking for guests and just offered to share her story. If you would like to be a part of our email list, definitely go on www.hopeforanxietyandocd/free. Hit up any of our downloads and then you can kind of be in the know and get random questions thrown at you sometimes.

Carrie: Jessica, I appreciate you responding to that and welcome to the show. 

Jessica: Thank you for having me. Excited to be on. 

Carrie: Tell me a little bit about how OCD showed up for you when you were younger.

Jessica: Whenever I was very tiny, under the age of two years old, I was a victim of sexual abuse. And I can remember having anxiety attacks, probably starting around four or five years old.

I also had an issue with food at a super young age. As a whole, I wouldn’t say that anyone ever recognized that I was an anxious child, but I definitely remember having things pop up like anxiety attacks if I was away from my parents or in a place that I wasn’t comfortable in. Anxiety really didn’t pop up for me until I was around 19 years old.

So my story’s probably a little bit different from other people. I didn’t really have any OCD type symptoms manifest until a little bit later on, until around 19, 20 years old.

Carrie: Okay. Do you feel like the people in your life just kind of saw some of these maybe as Age appropriate behaviors, like it’s somewhat normal for children to go through separation anxiety, and maybe they didn’t realize internally how much that was affecting you or how troubling that was for you?

Jessica: I would say so. I can remember having a very black and white bend in my thinking. And a shame oriented type thinking, especially if it had to do with getting in trouble or rules, or if I’d done something wrong, I could only hold it for so long and I had to go and confess it. I can remember going to church off and on as a kid and somehow I only heard hell.

I didn’t hear the gospel. My brain focused in on the idea of hell and I just thought I was going there. I can recognize internally that I had some issues. Very black and white thinking and some shame based thinking, but outwardly, I would say I appear pretty, if you want to call it, normal. Right. So it would make sense that my parents didn’t think to take me to a professional or anything like that.

Carrie: Yeah. What showed up when you were 19? What happened there?

Jessica: 19 is when I was born again. 19 is whenever I began my relationship with Jesus. I had a very, very radical conversion for lack of a better way to put it. Things changed for me overnight. God really just changed my heart and I was truly born again.

I was all in 100 percent and that is when the obsessive thinking, the panic, the anxiety started to manifest. I would say the first, after two or three months in going to church regularly. Being in the scriptures, starting to be discipled, I started to have some behaviors and some ways of thinking, looking back on it, that I’m like, there’s OCD.

Some examples that I could share would be, a few months in, I had a thought that I needed to end a relationship that, a friendship that I’d had from childhood. And this person wasn’t a believer, but she wasn’t bringing any sort of that influence into my life. And I just had this thought that I needed to end this friendship.

Even after talking to my youth pastor and them encouraging me not to do that, the anxiety, the obsessive thinking that what if that was God’s voice and I’m being disobedient, that sort of thing. Just was so intense that I ended the friendship. That was kind of the beginning of it. After that OCD latched on to evangelism.

I was a baby, baby Christian. I’m introverted by nature. I’m not somebody that just walks up to strangers and let me tell you about Jesus. It usually happens in a relational form for me, but it seemed that anytime I would hear a teaching. And it seemed that I was deficient and are not doing things that I should be doing, quote unquote, not doing things the right way my brain would latch on to it.

So very early on, I had an evangelism obsession. The anxiety of walking up to a stranger probably outweighed the anxiety of OCD in most points, but I remember going and knocking on doors at my grandma’s apartment complex in absolute torment. Praying for people having a pure heart wanting to honor God, but just not knowing what was going on And having thoughts and every thought that I have, I think it might be God.

I was in quite a bit of torment the first year of my walk with God because of undiagnosed OCD.

Carrie: Wow. The people that were discipling you, did they pick up like something just doesn’t seem quite right here? Like, were you asking for a lot of reassurance or, but maybe they couldn’t put their finger on it of what was going on?

Jessica:  Yes. About three or four months in, the evangelism compulsions hit. I was living in Northeast Texas, which is not where I’m from. I’m from Houston area. And I started going to this church. I went to church by myself. My dad would drop me off and I would just go because nobody in my family was really following the Lord.

On my journey, God’s really put people in my life really to protect me. People that were very kind, but were also very patient and would kind of deal with the reassurance that I needed. I had a pastor that I would call at seven o’clock in the morning. He was so kind and patient, but yes, I had the wife of my associate pastor and then the pastor of the church that I was going to, my best friend, I would call her at three o’clock in the morning because I couldn’t sleep, I was just absolutely tormented and they would try to direct me and give me reassurance.

You have to be led by the Holy Spirit. All these things, I was so new in the faith and I’m dealing with this anxiety disorder and. It was like dropping a quarter into a bottomless pit. It just, it would come back. I don’t think anyone around me knew what OCD was. I don’t think anyone around me even thought, Oh, this is a mental illness, which kind of tells you the lack of awareness that we have in the church.

Definitely, I think maybe what was going on with me at first was branded as like legalism. I come from more of a charismatic background and so maybe more of like thinking it was demonic oppression or things like that. No one really even thought, Oh, this could be something that maybe she needs a doctor. That conversation never happened.

Carrie: I really wish that we could put out more educational materials to the church to let them know some of these warning signs of scrupulosity. So that if they have someone who seems quite distressed and is coming and asking a lot of questions, instead of saying like, okay, this person is really trying to figure everything out, or they’re dedicated to their faith, or, and like, it could look a lot of different ways.

That they really have some information to point that person in the right direction to say, Hey, this is potentially what it’s called. Go to a mental health professional and see if you can get assessed and get some help so that you’re not living in such a high state of distress. I wonder if when you got saved and then there was all this psychological torment, was there a part of you that sensed there’s some kind of peace in here?

I know God’s with me. Like even in the midst of all of that that was going on because you kept following Christ, like you didn’t give up on your faith.

Jessica: I think that I had such, for lack of a better way of putting it, I had such a supernatural experience. My conversion experience was very much, I knew nothing about Jesus and I just came to God in absolute surrender and I was changed.

Literally overnight, I fell in love with Jesus. But in a sense, I fell in love with the God that I didn’t really know yet. I know I was absolutely convinced that Jesus was it for me. I didn’t want anything else. But honestly, the first couple years, I didn’t have that peace. It was several years down the line of the Lord really intervening in these places where I was super tormented.

There are some pretty wonderful stories that I have in ways that God just supernaturally would just drop things in my life to be like, hey, this isn’t who I am. This isn’t me. But it was rough. It was rough for quite a while. That’s that piece, that anchor didn’t come until a little while down the road.

Carrie: It seemed like you held on to your salvation experience though. I find that even in the midst of like all of the OCD distress, usually, people can name a time or two out of their life where they really saw, whether it was their conversion experience or whether it was experiences after that as well, like, okay, I know that God is real and I have encountered him in this experience in a positive way.

It’s almost like the Israelites when they picked up stones from the river, it’s like kind of remember that you crossed the Jordan and you each get a stone so that you can remember that God did this miracle for you. And I feel like we need those markers in our own lives as Christians. To say, hey, things are really rough right now, and I don’t have stable footing, but I know God did this back here, and so I know that he’s going to be able to do, lead me through the next part of life that feels scary or uncertain or troubling.

Jessica: Yes. I would say at the beginning stages of my walk with God, he really showed up for me through people. I had wonderful people around me who loved me really well, and who were very patient. It’s kind of mind-boggling the way that looking back, I can see how God protected me. It was almost like I was in this little bubble, but he did it through people.

That was one way that I definitely look back and go, “wow.” There are a few other just short moments that I could share. One, I was in Northeast Texas and my best friend was around Houston area where we lived and she knew what was going on with me, what I was experiencing because I was calling her at three o’clock in the morning, which she was really in it with me, which I’m so grateful for her.

We’re still best friends. She was driving home from work, and she said the only way she could describe it is she felt internally like God yelled at her. Hell, Jessica, this. And what she felt was, stop trying to answer all of your questions. Give me all of your questions. Look at what this does to you. Look at the fruit of this.

If it tears you up, it’s not for me. When she told me that that was like, okay, I held on to that for about like 10 years. I held on to those concepts. And so anytime I would have these looping thoughts or I would have this. Anxiety that I felt like I couldn’t manage. I would literally just be like, God, I have no idea.

I don’t have the answer to this. I would just say, you have it. He just carried me that way. I live pretty normally for about 10 years. Okay. Using those few things, and of course, if you look at scripture, scripture backs that those concepts up. And the way that you traditionally treat OCD, in a sense, kind of lines up with, you know, surrendering things to God, the Ian Osborne, Catholic Christianity Cure OCD, I think he calls it something along the lines of, I can’t think of the word, but the whole concept is just surrendering these.

Formenting thoughts and doubts up to God and letting him be big enough to carry them. So I was really applying these principles before I knew I had OCD, which is a testament to the faithfulness of God. That’s one thing. One other story that’s really close to my heart is I was cleaning a room one day in my mom’s house.

This was about five or six years into my walk with God. I’m still wrestling with these tormenting doubts about certain theological issues and there’s a Bible on the floor and the room was a wreck and I was cleaning it and I opened up the Bible and it opened up to a scripture that God had highlighted to me and Isaiah about a year before.

He’s speaking to the Israelites. And he says, “Oppression will be far from you for you shall not fear.” And it’s all these promises of God establishing them in righteousness and them being free from fear. And he had used that scripture before to show me like, your life is not going to be what you’re experiencing right now.

This is not going to be your life. And that day when I was just in the muck and the mire of anxiety and obsessive thoughts. And we all have those moments when we’re dealing with that kind of anxiety, where we think we’re not going to make it. And when I opened up the Bible and it was right there to that passage, I was like, okay, I mean, how could that not be God?

I’ve had a lot of those stories on my journey, but that’s one that I can really highlight is that was just maybe a small but a supernatural act of God to keep me going really.

Carrie: You talked about having a period where OCD didn’t bother you. It bothered you really intensely and then you were able to surrender some of those doubts and having to figure it out to God and you kind of had a more peaceful period there and then things came back and that happens with OCD sometimes.

The symptoms kind of wax and wane. It depends on life change and stress and other issues. Tell us about when that came back. What happened? Was that closer to you getting a diagnosis?

Jessica: Yes. I had had some pockets off and on in my twenties where I would have those looping thoughts and that anxiety. But every time that that would happen, I would eventually just say, you know what?

The way that I was taught was it was just demonic oppression. And so I’d be like, Oh, this is the spirit of fear. And I’m going to choose not to listen to this. And then I would come back up for air and kind of go on about my way. When I was 30, I got into my first serious relationship as a Christian adult.

That’s when OCD was triggered, and really, that’s when everything came to a head. So one of the major themes that I wrestled with is relationship OCD. Relationship OCD and scrupulosity have been the two, a little bit of body image issues, body dysmorphic disorder type issues, but those are the two main themes that I’ve struggled with so I got into this relationship.

It was not a bad relationship. It was not abusive We were both believers. It was good. It wasn’t we were young and whatever but I began to obsess over Every little thing everything he did everything. He said I was terrified that I had to break up with him I was terrified that he was crazy, that there was just something horribly wrong with him, with his character.

At that time, I was living in a house with some ladies from the church I went to. The woman who owned the house, she was like a mom to me. There was a good two month period where I was in just an absolute panic and torment constantly, almost every single day, and it got to the point where I was sleeping in bed with her because I didn’t want to be alone.

I wasn’t eating very much. I wasn’t sleeping very much. I probably lost 20 pounds. Kind of one of the parts, I think, that kept me from getting help a little bit sooner was that the church culture that I was involved in at the time really believed that any sort of mental illness was demonic. Not that the person was doing anything wrong, but that this was demonic oppression or however you want to say that.

There was no awareness of, hey, mental illnesses are actually demonic. Medical and biological. This could actually be something that needs medication or a doctor. There was no grid for that. I started having panic attacks multiple times a day at work because I’m single, never been married. I didn’t have a lot to fall back on financially.

I had to get up every day and go to work. There’s no option there. So I’m having panic attacks. I started having really horrifying, intrusive thoughts. The worst thoughts that you could imagine. Blasphemous, violent, those kinds of things. That was really the breaking point where I thought that my life was over.

I literally thought that my life was over. I don’t know how, I didn’t know what I thought was going to happen to me, but I just thought one night after getting one hour of sleep, I called my pastor. Everybody loved me really well through this, even though they weren’t, but they still love me very well. I called my pastor.

I had gotten one hour of sleep and he just said, sweetie, I think it’s time for you to go to the doctor. I had been involved in a ministry that referred me to this psychiatry practice in my area that was Christian, that they kind of worked in tandem with. I called, I set up an appointment. On my way to work, I dragged myself out of bed and went to work, and on my way to work, a friend sent me an article on harm OCD.

She had been kind of Googling, praise the Lord for Google sometimes, unless you’re using it for a compulsion. Yeah. She googled my symptoms and she found an article on Harm OCD. And I got to work and I read it and I was like, Oh my gosh, not just the thoughts, but the OCD cycle, the obsessions, the looping thoughts, the reassurance and the anxiety coming back.

I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is what’s happening to me.” I have this article in hand, and I show up to the psychiatry practice that I still go to, and met my psychiatrist for the first time, such a wonderful man, I’m just so thankful for him, and he confirmed this is textbook OCD, and so I got the diagnosis.

Carrie: Where you more shocked or relieved, or how did you feel at that point?

Jessica: I was relieved to know what was happening to me.

Carrie: To have an answer finally. 

Jessica: Yes. I’m very much a solution-focused person, and so I’m like, okay, this is what’s happening. All right, give me the tools. What do I do? I texted my pastor and said, “Okay, this is what’s going on.”

He was really supportive, and I just started devouring anything and everything I could surrounding OCD and how to treat it. I remember that night coming home after being diagnosed and finally sleeping, finally having a good night’s sleep. That’s where my recovery journey started was right then.

Carrie: It’s hard to have mental health issues, but I find it more terrifying to think Evil is constantly oppressing me on a daily basis.

Jessica: Yes, and having an anxiety disorder, and having this thought in your head that this is a demon, well, I mean that, in and of itself, that just runs them up internally. I remember being afraid that my sanity was going to be stolen from me because panic attacks, a genuine panic attack is from what I understand is your fight or flight response, just going crazy.

You feel like you’re going to die. You feel like you’re going to go crazy. I was experiencing derealization. I felt like I was coming out of my skin, like it was horrifying. And so to not know my body’s doing this. I’m not being taken over by some demonic entity and having a panic attack to not know that in that moment. That’s even more terrifying, I would say.

Carrie: How did your theology, I guess, shift after that point? Or did you end up like switching churches or changing things at some point? Like, what was that process like? Because I think that we have different experiences and not that your experience is the litmus test of God. That’s the scriptures, but God works in our lives through experience, sometimes to teach us about him. I do believe that’s biblical. So what was that process like? 

Jessica: All of the above. I do go to a different church now. The house that I was living in, the woman who owned it, wonderful, godly woman, loved me so well, was so patient with me.

I guess my church community didn’t have, like I said, a grid for mental illness. I guess. I’m a truth person, I’m a justice person, and if I know something to be true, then I’m not going to say that something else is going on. I’m a very open book. I jumped into recovery headfirst and embraced that I have obsessive-compulsive disorder.

This is a thing. I started to learn, well, naturally, if somebody asked me how I’m doing, or if I’m having a conversation, I’m going to share. I just got this diagnosis, or whatever. I stayed at my church for a couple years, but these things that I had learned just started not to line up anymore, and the more I understood mental illness, not just OCD, but schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia is a brain disease. I just started to realize these things that I’ve been taught, they don’t work, they’re not helpful, they’re not necessarily 100 percent scriptural, and I felt such a peace on the inside of me from God. I just started. That hey, this is what’s going on. This is your avenue of healing.

This is where I’m leading you Is to understand these things I slowly but surely just really started to feel like I couldn’t fully be myself anymore in this beautiful church family that I had been in because there was this part of me that was seen as, well, I experienced it to be seen as she’s oppressed demonically.

Carrie: The primary problem is spiritual, not the problem is medical, mental health, emotional And so many of those things overlap, right?

So it’s hard for us to sit here and tease out and determine sometimes, what’s medical? What’s mental health? What’s spiritual? What’s going on? I personally do not believe that we need to be afraid of demons because we have the Holy Spirit inside of us. Greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world.

There may be times where we are tempted and thrown off track or discouragement comes our way. And we know certain things are clearly not from God. So those pieces are hard to tease out, but I think it removes kind of like what we were talking about before. It removes some of the fear if you’re able to say, “Hey, I know at least that I do have this medical mental health diagnosis, and  I don’t need to be afraid of that,  I can actually, like you said, embrace it as, okay, this is what I’m dealing with now that I know, now that I can do something different about it. What is that recovery process been for you like, and just kind of share with us where you are now.

Jessica: Like I said, I began to really just devour any and all resources that I could get my hands on.

I found a book by a local pastor named Jeff Wells. It’s called breaking free of OCD and it’s about his 30-year-long battle with OCD and how knowing God as a father and applying scriptural principles and he had a lot of recovery. I read that book and I found Jamie Eckert. She has scrupulosity.com. She has a coaching group. I joined that. I really started to get some tools in my tool belt and really apply the standard OCD tools, like how we treat it with acceptance and commitment therapy, some ERP exposure-response and prevention tools, Jamie Eckert, her materials helped me probably more than any of them.

Things like, I’m going to put this on ice for two days or for a week. I’m having this obsessive thought, you know what? Put it on ice. It’s going to be okay. You know, that kind of thing. So I would just say workbooks, online resources. I do have therapists, but I never sought classical OCD treatment. There are so many resources that are free. 

I’m an advocate for therapy, 100%. If you have that, and if you can afford it, and if it’s accessible, 100 percent go for it, but there’s just a lot of online resources. I refuse to be debilitated, and there’s so much hope in the OCD recovery community. No OCD doesn’t get to run your life.

I just really started applying tools. I got to a good place. I was diagnosed in June of 2020. It took me probably about nine months to a year to get it back to like, I would say more normal everyday living. In 2022, I had this reemergence of evangelism, compulsions, and scrupulosity that took me out for a couple of months. During that time, I had been feeling the Lord. He just orchestrated some circumstances that kind of booted me out of my church. I started going to a local church, and Jeff Wells is the pastor of that local church, that book that I referenced before.

So he understood OCD. It’s called Woods Edge Community Church. They offer a recovery group called Regeneration, or for short, Regen. In that place of crisis, I started attending that church, and that first week after I had left my church, I went to a Regen meeting, I signed up, I was like, I need something, I need help.

I don’t even know fully what I’m doing, but I need help. It’s a 12-step program. It’s very biblically based and the basis of it is we are powerless to overcome these things in our own strength with the power of the Holy Spirit. God can transform anything that we might be going through. And so the recovery group was different from other 12 step programs.

It wasn’t just about addiction. It could be codependency, mental illness. I went through the program, and God really confronted unbelief in my life. I had this lie that I lived in for all of these years that I’ve been walking with Jesus that He expected me to fix. My own issues that he expected me to solve my own problems.

I finally got to probably the end of myself realizing I cannot fix this. There are parts of me that just feel utterly broken. There are parts of me that feel disabled, the way that my brain works. When you have OCD, your brain tends to be so black and white that you genuinely at times, at least for me, still can’t discern certain things.

This foundation, the first three steps are admit, believe, and trust. Admit that you’re powerless. Believe that God is all powerful and can change and transform anything that you’re going through and trust that he actually wants to and that he will and that the believe and trust. I was like, “Oh, man, I don’t trust God at all.”

It pushed me into the scripture in a way that nothing else ever had. And if you really look at scripture, there is this ongoing theme of as humans, one, we can’t fix ourselves apart from me. You can do nothing. We don’t have the power to overcome these things. God doesn’t expect us to, and his willingness to help come alongside and heal those that simply look to him and trust.

I mean, it’s everywhere in the scripture. I just came to this point of, are you going to believe what this book says about me? Are you going to believe your circumstances? Your circumstances look really dire to you. They look really big and really hopeless, but is that what my book says? He really started to heal this view that I had of him.

Slowly but surely, I’ve come to a place of, John 15, 4 through 5 is one of my favorite scriptures and it says, “Abide in me and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.” And it goes on to say, for apart from me you can do nothing.

God has really just brought me to this place of rest. Where the situation comes in my life. I don’t have an answer for I go to him and I invite him into the situation and I’ve seen him just do amazing and just mind blowing things with these situations that I just give over to him and I simply make space. I make space for the Holy Spirit to do his work.

Carrie: That trust piece is, it’s so hard and it’s so huge. I know it’s something that God has really worked with me on in my own life. In our culture, there’s so much striving and so much working and so much self-improvement. Even, you know, we’re kind of self improvement junkies.

Sometimes, like you said, what God wants us to do is like, be still and know that he’s God, and take the step back and say, okay, I surrender, I give up trying to do it on my own, and I need you to enter in. But sometimes God has to get us to the end of ourselves. He’s like, okay, you’re ready now. You’re ready now for me to step in and to do that work because you came to the end of you.

Our pastor shared this quote recently by Jackie Hill Perry about trust. And it said this is because God is holy. He cannot sin, and if he cannot sin, that means he must be the most trustworthy being on the planet. It’s hard for us to wrap our minds around that because we’ve been so hurt and wounded by other people in our life, just from living life.

It doesn’t matter who you are or how old you are, you’ve been hurt and wounded by somebody or something that’s happened to you. Just recognizing that character of God is so different that we can trust him, we can rest, we can let go. But sometimes it means that we have to do the hard work of surrendering and letting go and trusting and embracing that God is here and is with us in the midst of this.

Jessica: Yes, I realized along this journey that I couldn’t actually surrender. I couldn’t even surrender in my own strength because you have these faulty beliefs. It could be because of trauma, like with me experiencing sexual abuse, especially being so young. I was under two. I mean, that shaped your worldview like nothing else does.

And I realized I genuinely don’t know how to trust you. I don’t know how to let this go. And he’s so beautiful and so kind. He gave me the power and the strength that I needed to even do that. That’s why I love to encourage and try and share this hope that you can do any of it on your own. And that’s actually wonderful.

We don’t have to, he doesn’t expect this to you. The other day I was reading, I can’t remember what book in the scripture it is. You hear about the Holy Spirit being our advocate. Well, the scripture also references Jesus as being an advocate as well. And I looked up the definition of an advocate, and one of the definitions was one who comes alongside.

That’s good. That just, it just gave me so much more hope, and it was so much more confirmation that I don’t have to do this life by myself. Paul said that I will boast all the more in my weaknesses, my sufferings, when I’m weak, He’s strong. His power has made perfect in weakness. I don’t wish mental illness on anybody or physical illness or any suffering.

I do believe, though, that when we come face to face with our weakness as humans, it’s beautiful because that’s when we really experience God in a sweeter, in a deeper way. I believe at least. That’s been my experience.

Carrie:  Awesome. Thank you, Jessica, for being so willing and open to sharing your story, and I’m glad that you have gotten a variety of different support along the way, whether it was people just loving you, even when they didn’t understand everything, to getting more specific help medically and discipleship help through the church.

It sounds like God has really used a variety of different things in your life to bring you. to where God wants you to be. So thank you for being here and sharing all of that. 

Jessica: Yes, thank you for having me.

Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee.

Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of myself or By the Well Counseling.

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

116. Why Am I depressed and Tired All the Time? Could it be Sleep Apnea? with Carrie Bock, LPC-MHSP

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Podcast Episode.

Join Carrie today as she shares her personal journey with unexplained fatigue and depression, leading to a surprising discovery of obstructive sleep apnea.

Episode Highlights:

  • The surprising connection between unexplained fatigue and obstructive sleep apnea.
  • Key symptoms of sleep apnea to watch out for, beyond just snoring.
  • How home sleep studies have made diagnosis more accessible and convenient.
  • The crucial link between physical health and mental well-being.
  • Simple steps you can take to improve your health and quality of life

Episode Summary:

Welcome to episode 116 of Christian Faith and OCD! I’m Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. Today, I’m sharing my personal journey with unexplained fatigue and how it led to the discovery of obstructive sleep apnea. If you’ve ever felt persistently tired despite normal medical tests, you’re not alone. I experienced this firsthand, feeling sluggish before pregnancy and then struggling with restless leg syndrome. My exhaustion was so overwhelming that I felt like a “walking zombie,” even though my baby was sleeping through the night.

Last fall, despite a full night’s sleep, I needed excessive naps, which I initially attributed to grief from losing my parents. However, my symptoms were eventually linked to obstructive sleep apnea, a condition where the airway collapses during sleep, causing frequent breathing interruptions. This condition results in severe daytime fatigue, snoring, headaches, and can worsen mental health conditions like depression and anxiety.

Obstructive sleep apnea often goes undiagnosed but can be identified with a sleep study. The primary treatment is CPAP therapy, which helps keep your airway open. Modern CPAP machines are now more comfortable than ever, and using one significantly improved my life. I felt more refreshed, had more energy, and could fully engage in daily activities. If you’re dealing with unexplained fatigue or related symptoms, consider getting tested for sleep apnea, especially if other tests are normal.

For those seeking support, my counseling practice in Tennessee offers both in-person and online sessions. I also provide consultations for individuals outside of Tennessee.

Tune in for more:

51. Surrendering Our Insomnia to God with Dr. Charles Page

​

Transcript

  Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD episode 116. I am your host, Keri Bach, licensed professional counselor in Tennessee, and I’m happy to be with you here today. I wanted to tell you another personal story of mine. And I know some people probably that have heard some of my past stories are wondering, how in the world can this person go through so many things?

The answer is, I don’t know. I was hesitant even to record this episode because I thought some people are gonna find this a little bit unbelievable. However, I’m here. I’m still standing. Everything’s good. Have you ever been tired and no doctor can give you any kind of medical explanation for it? Some of you know what I’m talking about.

Maybe you’ve had all the blood work tested, they’ve checked for anemia, thyroid malfunction, vitamin deficits, nothing. Nothing comes up. Everything’s fine. Your doctor says it’s fine, but inside you’re like, something doesn’t feel fine. I’m tired all the time. This was a part of my story before I became pregnant.

I was a little sluggish, but, you know, nothing major. I talked to my OB GYN and said, Hey, could you just run the blood work again? Because I feel tired. She did. It was fine. Of course, when you get pregnant, then you have a reason to be tired, right? And pregnancy came along with absolutely horrible restless leg syndrome.

If you’ve never had restless It’s hard to describe, but your legs are not calm and they just feel this need to move. It can keep you up because it’s so uncomfortable. And Restless Leg Syndrome, hey, it’s something that can happen during pregnancy. And of course, as with pregnancy, there’s Very few options that you have in terms of what medication you can take, and so the restless leg syndrome medication they determined would have risk that I didn’t want, and I ended up taking that.

So I can’t sleep, still tired, and then I had a baby. Of course I was tired. I had every excuse to be tired. Who wouldn’t be? Now looking back on it, being outside of the situation, I was more than just tired. I was a walking, working, zombie mom. I was functional, I was doing the things I needed to do, yet I would crash on the couch after dinner, just, I was unable to engage with my daughter.

I remember just, like, laying there and feeling like I could go to sleep right now if there wasn’t so much happening around me. Last fall, I knew that there was something more wrong. My daughter was sleeping through the night, but I never woke up rested. I laid down and on a Sunday afternoon, I thought, well, I’m just going to get this quick cat nap after church and fell asleep for two hours.

And this was after I had already gotten a full night’s sleep the night before. I shouldn’t have needed a two hour nap. And I knew that that, that wasn’t normal. I was continuing to have daytime fatigue. I woke up with headaches. I felt depressed. I honestly chalked some of that up to losing both of my parents in a six month time span.

Some of you may remember on a previous episode where I was talking about my grief and loss journey, just telling you how exhausting it was. Well, I didn’t know that more than depression and grief were going on there. What was the secret cause to my exhaustion? Obstructive sleep apnea. Maybe you’ve heard of sleep apnea, but don’t really know that much about it.

And I wanted to share my story to help someone else who may be struggling with depression, anxiety, unexplainable fatigue. Sleep apnea is when the muscles in the neck relax at night, causing the airway to collapse, causing someone to stop breathing for a short period of time. And this can actually happen many times in a single hour of sleep.

So imagine multiplying that by the number of hours that you sleep at night, meaning that you could potentially stop sleeping. 30, 50 times in a night, easily. The symptoms of sleep apnea are daytime sleepiness, fatigue, snoring. I didn’t realize that snoring meant that somehow your airway was constricted. I thought it was just a thing that some people did.

Both of my parents snored. I had been told that I snored, but I never thought it was a big deal because no one had ever said, hey, I think you stop breathing when you’re sleeping. It was just like, hey, you snore. Observed episodes of stopped breathing. Sometimes that may happen if you have somebody that you’re sleeping with at night, like a spouse, waking up during the night, gasping, choking with a rapid heartbeat or in a panic.

This is an important symptom for some of you who are struggling with anxiety. You may not know that just waking up in a panic might be a symptom of sleep apnea. Morning headaches. When you lose oxygen to the brain, your head hurts. Trouble focusing, even on tasks that should be routine or pretty simple.

Depression, high blood pressure. I never had high blood pressure until I was pregnant with my daughter. It ended up with preeclampsia. I had some after my daughter that, you know, it didn’t go away right away. Blood pressure fluctuations. can happen with sleep apnea. Sometimes it can come up low, and that actually happened to me shortly before my diagnosis.

My blood pressure was actually a little bit low. So that’s something to watch out for. Oftentimes, we don’t know that we have high blood pressure unless we’re getting it checked. Restless leg syndrome or jerking movements during sleep. If your legs or arms just seem to be jerking a lot, that’s your body trying to wake you up.

Prior to my diagnosis, I didn’t know that being over 40 is a risk factor. I just turned 40 this past year. And the treatment for sleep apnea is CPAP therapy, which is where a machine blows air into your airway to keep it open, keep it from collapsing. It’s amazing. Unfortunately, sleep apnea often goes undiagnosed.

Shortly before I had my sleep study done, a client I hadn’t seen in a while came back to see me and she mentioned something about waking up in a panic attack. I had told her that was a symptom of sleep apnea. Previously, similar story, she tried to tell medical professionals, doctors, how tired she was and said, this isn’t normal that I’m this tired.

No one recommended a sleep study, but after talking with me, she pursued one and got on CPAP therapy and had come back and let me know that she was feeling so much better after engaging in that therapy. Many years ago, in order to get a sleep study, you would have had to go into a lab. Sometimes that still happens on rare occasions if for some reason a home sleep study doesn’t show anything.

But now there’s all these technology that they have to be able for you to take a device home and have your sleep study done at home in the comfort of your own home. That’s where most of us sleep comfortably and more naturally. I wore a ring device, um, on my finger that measured heart rate fluctuations and it was comfortable.

It was really easy to use. My results were given to me, which I wasn’t surprised at all by this point that I was diagnosed with a moderate obstructive sleep apnea. And they said that usually the home test is a little bit lower threshold. then in person. So it probably could have been in the severe category.

I was set up with a CPAP machine. Now, you may have heard all kinds of horrors about CPAP therapy, but I really didn’t have too much trouble adjusting. Once again, technology has advanced. They’ve created all different kinds of CPAP machines, masks, Slowly making them more and more comfortable, getting you fitted the right way, so that it’s easier to get adjusted to.

I immediately noticed that even with four hours on the CPAP, because in the beginning it felt like, okay, I could wear it about half the night and then I just needed to take it off. Four hours being on the CPAP was better than eight hours without it, in terms of feeling more refreshed in the morning and feeling more rested.

That kept me using it night after night. That kept me keep coming back because I just felt so good. One thing I want you to know that I realized now through this process, God created our bodies so incredibly resilient to adapt to situations. That realistically, we should not be able to adapt to. I learned that my body adapted to running on fumes.

Being tired had become so normal that I didn’t even realize how good I could feel until after the fact. Some of you are sitting here wondering, can I feel better? The answer is yes. Yes, you can feel better, but your body has gotten so used to living and being stuck in anxiety and depression that you don’t even know what’s on the other side because you’re just stuck and you’ve adapted to it.

I absolutely love my CPAP machine. If I travel, it goes with me. I do not leave home without it if I’m going to be sleeping somewhere else. I thank God for it. Every boarding, I feel so rested. I have so much more energy to play with my daughter. I have energy now to exercise. My brain is not foggy. I can focus on work.

I’m not a zombie mom anymore. Shortly after I started CPAP therapy, I was able to get off antidepressants because I had energy again to do the things that I wanted to do. I wasn’t feeling that huge weight anymore of just sluggishness. So often, we assume that mental health problems are always based in our mind alone, and you have to understand that our physical health and our mental health are so intertwined.

Sometimes there is a genuine medical root that is either causing your mental health symptoms or it could be exacerbating those symptoms. Maybe you have a propensity already towards anxiety and depression, but lack of oxygen to your brain due to sleep apnea is just exacerbating that problem so much more.

If you have any of these things symptoms that I listed before, and they just seem chronic, they’re not going away, they’re not getting better. All your blood work looks fabulous, but you know something’s wrong. Please, get tested. Don’t let the CPAP horror stories deter you. Untreated sleep apnea puts you at greater risk of having a heart attack or stroke.

So please get tested, at least rule it in or out. If you suspect that you may have sleep apnea at all. One of the reasons I’m doing this episode is because it’s not on a lot of people’s radar. And I’ve even had more clients come to see me with similar symptoms that I’ve really recommended. Like, Hey, you really may want to get a sleep study if for nothing else, at least rule it out.

And then you’ll know. You know, you’ll know one way or the other. For those of you who don’t know, I have a counseling practice in Tennessee. So if you are looking for counseling for trauma, anxiety, OCD, I am open for business, uh, in person in Smyrna, Tennessee, and online across the state of Tennessee. I also provide consultations for individuals who are out of state, helping them.

Get connected with resources that they might need, whether that’s therapist resources, self help materials. I have an online course for helping Christians develop mindfulness skills. What mindfulness does is it’s amazing for anxiety and OCD. It allows us to be able to. Be in the present moment with intentionality, developing self awareness, developing acceptance over our situation, allowing us to let go of control, give that control over to God.

He has it already anyway. Thank you so much for listening to the show today, and you can always reach us anytime online at hopeforanxietyandocd. com. Hope for Anxiety and OCD is a production of By The Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bach, Licensed Professional Counselor in Tennessee.

Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of myself or By the Will Counseling. Our original music is by Brandon Mangroom. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.