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Author: Carrie Bock

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

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.

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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

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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.

115. Choosing Supplements for Anxiety with Dan Chapman of Redd Remedies

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

In this episode, Carrie explores the link between emotional health and gut health with Dan Chapman, founder of Red Remedies, emphasizing the role of high quality supplements in promoting overall well-being.

Episode Highlights:

  • The connection between emotional health and gut health, and how stress can impact digestion and overall well-being.
  • Christian perspective on stewardship over our bodies and emotional well-being
  • Understanding the role of herbs and natural remedies as part of God’s provision for health.
  • The benefits of using supplements, such as those offered by Redd Remedies, to support emotional health and overall well-being.
  • What to look for in a natural health brand and why transparency in sourcing and
    testing is crucial.

Take advantage of a 20% discount on any Redd Remedies product using code HOPE20 at checkout.

Episode Summary:

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD, episode 115! I’m Carrie Bock, your host and a licensed professional counselor based in Tennessee.

Today, I’m thrilled to welcome Dan Chapman, founder of Redd Remedies. We met after the AACC conference to discuss the benefits of supplements for managing anxiety.

In this episode, we cover:

  • Gut Health and Anxiety: We revisit the link between gut health and anxiety, a topic we explored in episode 44. Dan explains how stress can impact gut health and neurotransmitter production, creating a cycle that affects both physical and emotional health.
  • The Stress Response: Dan discusses how chronic stress impacts digestion and overall health. He emphasizes the importance of rest and recuperation, as God designed us to need both work and rest.
  • Natural Remedies: We explore the benefits of herbal supplements and how they can support stress management. Dan shares how Redd Remedies creates formulas to nourish the body rather than just stimulating it.
  • Supplement Quality: Dan highlights what sets Redd Remedies apart, including their commitment to quality and purity. He compares it to finding a top-notch restaurant versus a mediocre one, underscoring the importance of ingredient quality and effective formulation.
  • Consumer Choices: Dan addresses common questions about choosing supplements, such as the difference between high-quality and inferior products and the effectiveness of various forms of supplements.

I hope this episode brings you valuable insights and practical advice as you work towards better health. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a review to help others find this resource.

Check out the latest episode:

44. How Can Improving Gut Health Help Your Mood? with Maggie Roney, MS, NCC, LPC

Transcript

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD episode 115. I am your host, Carrie Bock, licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. We talk about a variety of different topics on this show with a goal of reducing shame, increasing hope, and developing healthier connections with God and others. We’re constantly talking about the overlap between our physical health, our mental health, emotional, and spiritual health, since this is a Christian podcast.

Today on the show, I have with me Dan Chapman, who is the founder of Redd Remedies. That’s two D’s in Redd for those who are listening and not looking at our show notes yet, but we’ll put that in there for you. I’m happy to have Dan here. We connected a little bit after the AACC conference to have a chat about supplements and their benefits for anxiety.

__________

Carrie: Welcome to the show.

Dan: I’m grateful to be here with you, Carrie. Thanks for having me today.

Carrie: We’ve talked in the past on our show about gut health and the connection to anxiety. I interviewed, I think it was a functional medicine doctor. It’s episode 44, if anybody wants to go back and look at it: How Can Improving Gut Health Help Your Mood? We talked about neurotransmitters like serotonin and things being affected. A lot of that is my understanding is formed in your gut. Maybe for people who haven’t heard that episode, kind of give us a review of that connection between anxiety and gut health.

Dan: Absolutely. Oftentimes, we look at the health of our gut being a determining factor on what the health of your body is going to be, and that would include emotional health and all kinds of other health issues as well.

One of the things that I think is important to look at, though, it is not just the gut, but what is it, especially with emotional health issues that might cause you to have an unhealthy gut, which is therefore going to cause you to have some issues with maybe neurotransmitter production and digestive issues and other things like that.

It ends up being a little bit of a spiral and what I mean by that, is stress is going to cause your digestive system to change. What comes first, the digestive issue or the stress issue? When we have both of them, it can be a little bit of a spiral. I do want to give a little bit of hope that we’re not just going to share the bad news here today, but hopefully, some things that your listeners can do helpfully and positively to make positive changes. I do think it’s really important to understand what happens in the body. I really like to help people understand what happens when we have a stress response because we also need to recognize that God gave us a stress response. It’s not all negative, but there are changes that happen in your body physically under stress.

If we allow ourselves the time and the space to rest and to heal and to recuperate after that stress response. We’re okay. Our bodies are designed to go through that process, and we do it really throughout our lifetime. The problem happens is when we have this internal stress response that fires off over and over and over again. That’s where we need to make some changes.

One of the things that we know about stress is that during that stress response, your body literally shuts down the digestive system. You stop producing enzymes to digest food. You don’t process carbohydrates the same way. Part of that process is because during stress, your body needs to reprioritize the use of its energy.

You only have so much energy to go around, so your body is going to say, “You know what? I don’t need the digestive system to work at this moment. I’m going to put that energy into my muscles and my brain so I could respond the way I need to for survival.” If we live in that stress response, we live in a constant state of digestive enzymes not being produced the way that we need to, to digest food well, which is going to cause a host of other issues.

I like to back up not just talking about digestion, but I want to back up at some point and talk about what can we do to protect your body from the negative impact of stress.

Carrie: A lot of people are familiar with the fight, flight, or freeze. Some people have added now fawn to that, but then the opposite of that is rest and digest.

A lot of times we don’t talk about the rest and digest piece. As you’ve said, if people are in chronic states of stress, maybe due to caring for a loved one, Maybe due to past trauma, so they’re constantly getting triggered back to that time where they had to be in that fight, flight, or freeze mode, or the stresses of day to day life that people have that, whether it’s job, work, family, we live with a lot of stress, probably more than we need to.

We can lower that stress. That’s great. But sometimes we’re in situations where for a season, at least even we don’t have an option. We have to keep doing the things that we’re doing. And so this is great to talk about. Our digestive system doesn’t get that balance. It’s constantly in the fight, flight or freeze and doesn’t get that balance of the rest and digest energy.

Dan: I got my start in the natural food world because of my mother. My mom struggled with anxiety, fatigue, depression in the 1950s, a long time ago. And it was a long process for her to change her health. By changing diet and integrating herbs and nutrition, and part of the thing that I recognize growing up with my mother is that she had the mindset of always wanting to care for and serve other people, and sometimes she did not take care of herself well and when she needed to take care of herself, she almost had a sense of guilt because she wanted to be outward focused and help all of those around her. One of the things I think is just really important to recognize is we look at the fact that we are whole people. We can’t just look at stress or just look at digestion or just look at our diet or whatever the thing is.

God created us as whole people. One of the things that I love about the way that the Lord cares for us is in creation, He created night and then day. It’s been such a really remarkable thing for me to appreciate. That, you know, my view of the day typically is that, oh, it’s going to start at 6 or 7 or 8 o’clock in the morning, and that’s not true. Our day starts at night. We need to sleep and we need to rest and it’s out of that rest that we can go about having a good day.

The other reflection on that, that I think is important, at least it was impactful for me is to understand that in the creation process, Our first day as human beings, our first full day was Sabbath. So my week doesn’t start on Monday through Friday, and when I’m tired at the end of the week, I’m going to take the weekend and I’m going to rest and then recuperate from that long week. No, my week starts on Sunday where I’m going to rest. And out of that strength of rest, I can actually go about having a week.

I realized even the knowledge of that, like some of us and myself included can feel like, well, I just can’t do that. My schedule doesn’t allow for that. I don’t know how I would possibly do that. But it starts with the knowing that we have to rest first and out of that rest, we can go about living our life the way God created us to live.

Carrie: That’s such a great concept. All of these things that you’re talking about play on each other. I’m so anxious. I can’t sleep and then I’m not sleeping well and maybe I’m just grabbing something quick and not really thinking about what I’m eating or I’m eating too many carbs to try to get the energy flowing or drinking too much caffeine because I’m exhausted.

It just people get end up in this really negative cycle of their physical and emotional health. It’s like I feel terrible. But then I continue to do things that cause me to feel worse instead of helping my physical and mental health. So how do we get off of this treadmill, I guess, or negative cycle.

Dan: That’s a great question.I think this is definitely the place where We have some amazing herbs and vitamins and minerals, amino acids and things. I believe the Lord gave us because he knew, he knew from the beginning of time where we would be. I believe he gave us these tools to help our body deal with the place that we’re at.

We can start to make these little steps forward each day. We just need a little bit of improvement over the day before. We don’t need transformation by Friday. We just need a little bit of improvement and progress every day. That’s part of the reason that I started Red Remedies is I wanted to create formulas so an individual in a situation did not have to figure out, okay, what herb do I use? How much do I use? Do I put that together with that vitamin that I heard about or that mineral that I heard about? There’s so much clutter to work through. We put these formulas together in a way that allows us to get the results that we want for that individual, but also working with the body. Our formulation philosophy is we’re going to nourish your body.

We’re not going to push or stimulate it. We’re going to nourish and feed it because I believe a well fed body is going to do what the Lord created the body to do in the first place. So we are simply feeding and nourishing the body. We are using some herbs known as adaptogens. These herbs are going to protect your brain and your body from the negative impact of stress, and I will tell you these herbs are wonderful because it goes through all of the things that we just talked about earlier on this episode of the impact of stress when we live in that stress response that fires off constantly throughout the day, there is a significant negative impact physically on your body and in your brain. These herbs, they’re safe. They’ve been used for thousands of years. There’s so many studies around them. And literally the way I summarize is they protect you from that negative impact of stress.

Carrie: That’s awesome. We’ve all heard people say, okay, we’ll be talking with friends or family and they’ll say, well, have you tried this? Have you tried adding B vitamins? Or have you tried adding a probiotic? Or have you tried adding this? And next thing you know, you’ve got this table full of supplements and you’re like, I don’t know who’s doing what and if any of this is working and how is it going? So What you’re talking about, your products are blends of all of these different vitamins and herbs to help people with specific issues like sleep or digestion or brain function and anxiety so that you have a supplement that I actually started taking called at ease, which has been really great to just managing overall stress level.

I feel like for me, it’s been helpful. I got one for my husband too. I got him on nerve shield because he has a neurological condition and he has a lot of nerve pain specifically at night, more often in neuropathy issues. I said, do you think that’s helping you? And he said, yeah, definitely. And I was like, okay, well let’s keep taking it then.

I’ve noticed just two at night, less complaints from him or less issues of him being in so much pain that he was before. So that’s really a game changer for us to be able to use something natural and also not have to rely on prescriptions. If people are on medications for anxiety and OCD that are working for them, we’re all for that.

I talk with a lot of clients too who struggle because they’ve tried medication, they’ve gotten a lot of side effects, or they haven’t gotten the effectiveness that they’ve wanted. I find a lot of clients are looking for more natural remedies. So I’m glad that we’re having this conversation and talking about these things.

Dan: Definitely. That is exactly why I started Redd Remedies and put these products together. It’s because I had been working with so many people for many, many years. And it was so challenging to give them a B complex and then take these couple of herbs over here and you end up with four or five or six bottles of product to use for a single problem, and it’s difficult to take that many pills. It’s difficult to follow the instructions for what you need to do with each one of those products, whereas we put it together in a formula and it just makes it so much easier for the individual to use. And we find that a well designed formula will actually have a many times better impact, and the result that we’re looking for, then using a whole bunch of single ingredients that fill up your cabinet.

Carrie: Yes. Honestly, when I first heard about Redd Remedies and we started communicating via email and I thought, okay, like it’s a supplement company. That’s nice. There’s about a thousand plus supplement companies out there.

I wanted you to talk with us a little bit, because I’m sure, like I’ve said, people who are listening have heard, “Hey, take this vitamin or that vitamin,” and then you go to the store, there’s this whole rows of vitamins. And you’re looking at what makes this brand A different from this brand B over here.

How do I know that I’m actually getting what I’m getting? That’s one piece. How do I know that I’m getting what the bottle even says I’m getting? Second piece is like, how do I even know that my body’s really absorbing that and using that? Can you talk with us about those things as we’re trying to make consumer decisions?

Dan: Yes, that’s a great question, and we could talk for a few more days about that specifically. Let me try to give you just a little bit of an image, and then I’ll tell you just some more details about who we are. Yes, there are thousands of supplement companies out there, and it may be it’s similar to the fact that there’s also thousands and thousands of restaurants. All of us can go through our town and we know different restaurants. We know some are really, really good quality. They have got the five star and they have got the chef that went to school for how many years and he’s a master chef. And the food at that restaurant is incredible. And then there’s other restaurants that maybe not the same quality.

We know that, but it’s all food and you might even be able to get chicken at both of those restaurants or steak at both of those restaurants or a salad at all of those restaurants, but the quality is absolutely different. That is very much also true in the dietary supplement world. And so at Redd Remedies, we were a small, I consider us a boutique company.

We make only about 40 different products. Where we make a product, we’re very specialized in that area, so we have a handful of products for emotional health issues, if you will, and because we know that we need slightly different formula for the issues that different people might be experiencing. I also have on our team, a master herbalist, and that’s 1 of the things that sets us apart. While I personally have a very long history, I grew up using herbs and eating healthy foods, mostly because of my mother.

I have a long experience with that. It’s like second nature to me on my team. I have a lady who has an undergrad degree in biology and a master’s degree in herbal medicine. I will tell you that in particular is really part of what’s significantly sets us apart, and it’s no different than that 5 star restaurant with that master chef who can make chicken noodle soup, if you will, no different than maybe I’ll make chicken noodle soup with all the same ingredients, but that soup by that master chef is very different. They might use the same spices, but they know where to get them. They know when they should be harvested. They know exactly how that spice should be used and prepared in the right amount, along with the other spices they use. And that’s what happens when we put a formula together, uh, using our master herbalist.

We have lots of resources beyond that, so it’s one of the things that really separates us is the choice of the herbs that we’re using, the part of that plant that we want used, the type of the extract that we want used, and the way we want that herb prepared. You might see an herb or even a mineral on the label of 20 different herbal supplements, but that same quote unquote ingredient can be wildly different.

On each 1 of those products, just because of the source, the way it’s prepared, the type of extract. That’s 1 piece is we’re very particular about the ingredients that we put in. The other thing that we do is while I believe very much in building relationships with the places that we buy and get our herbs and our vitamins and minerals.

We definitely believe in accountability. We have a purity promise that we have designed ourselves. It’s a testing protocol. The reason we’ve designed it ourselves is I have not seen a testing standard. I’ll say in the world, that is a standard that we believe is going to do the job that’s necessary to ensure purity.

With the variety of herbs and things that you see out there, our master herbalist has put that program together, and we have a 3rd party lab that then manages that purity promise for us. If any of your listeners want more detail on purity, I don’t want to spend too much time there, but then go to our website at reddremedies.com/purity. We have a nice summary there, but also for those that really want the detail, they can download a white paper. That’s about 23 pages long. That will tell you what we do for testing and purity. I can just tell you that it’s what we do is different. No different probably than that 5 star restaurant where that chef is just really engaged in what he or she is making and cooking and preparing for their clients.

Carrie: Yes, I think that’s awesome and I appreciate the transparency there because not all brands are willing to peel back and let you know the details of some of those things. If you really want to get down into the dirt and the weeds and everything like that.

I also think it’s cool that you can become a master herbalist. Put that on your list of career goals for anybody that’s looking and interested in this area. That’s pretty awesome. Studying herbs and acquiring and how to use them and I like what you said about there’s a difference probably in terms of how you’re using the extract or dried forms of things and all of that stuff. I’m sure that makes a huge difference. It’s kike when we put fresh parsley and something versus if we use dried parsley and something, it’s going to make a difference in the end result.

When we met via Zoom a little earlier and had chatted, we got on the subject of gummy vitamins, which is super funny because when you go into the store now, it’s like, we’re all adults, but somehow there are just like tons of gummy vitamins. I was looking for, I think, maybe like a multivitamin or something at one point, and I was really struggling to find one that wasn’t a gummy vitamin. Why are these things so popular? And are we just kidding ourselves here? Are we really just eating candy and pretending we’re getting vitamins? What’s going on with these gummy vitamins.

Dan: Oh my goodness. Yes. As human beings, do we not love to just satisfy ourselves? Yes. That’s probably the best definition of a gummy. I want to do something good for myself, but yet I want to be satisfied. So, yeah, gummies have kind of taken the supplement world by storm. I hate to generalize because no doubt there are some gummy products out there that I would say absolutely have value, but I would say that is the minority.

It would be the very select few. The majority of the gummies out there, in my opinion, are probably not going to be worth the money that you spend on them. I would encourage you, if you can’t swallow a capsule or tablet, like in the multivitamin example, I encourage you to go find a good tablet chewable, not a sugar filled gummy chewable.

The reason for that is vitamins, minerals, and herbs can and do degrade. We want them to be pure and potent. And one of the things that will degrade a vitamin especially is moisture. If you think about a gummy, gummies are soft. We don’t think about gummy as having moisture in there. Most of us probably don’t squeeze a gummy and water doesn’t come out. But there is a moisture content in a gummy significantly higher than a capsule or tablet. You’re going to have some issues with stability for sure and so you want to make sure that it is a brand that knows how to do appropriate testing to ensure that what’s on that label is on the label.

I will just tell you that most brands are not testing properly. The other issue that you have with a gummy is just a physical issue of space. You can only put a very small amount of active ingredients in a gummy. Part of the issue is if you have a gummy and you’re going to chew like two of those or even three of those a day of some multivitamin, you’re really not getting much of anything.

I would encourage you to go to the produce stand and eat some lettuce and an apple or something or some blueberries, and you probably get more benefit from that. Hopefully that’s helpful. Most of what we use at Redd Remedies is a capsule. We do some tablets. We’re going to get really good stability in that and really good efficacy in that. You know, for the most part, stay away from your gummies.

Carrie: Yes, that definitely makes sense. I appreciate you sharing all of the different wisdom that you had, just talking about how we can make decisions and investigate companies. Let’s talk about a couple products specifically that you have at Redd Remedies for emotional health.

Dan: Certainly. You mentioned that you were using at ease and that certainly is one of the flagships in the emotional health area for us. AtEase is a product that people would use when the stress that they experience is more like anxious, nervous, tension type stress. I also look at AtEase as my caregiver product.

If you’re one of those listeners and you’re caring for everybody around you, AtEase will actually help kind of balance the emotions of that out because when you care for others, You’re giving a part of yourselves away in that process. So AtEase is definitely one of the products I find that most people probably listening here would definitely benefit from.

There’s another product called InJoy. And InJoy is for people whose stress really shows up as kind of depressive, low, melancholy type stress, where we just need that lift of the spirit. We also have and most of us could probably benefit from that will help us get a good restful night’s sleep. And so that’s an important one to look at.

And I don’t want to ignore brain awakening here is because all of us, especially with. Any emotional health issue, if we can feed and nourish and help the brain to function healthy and the way that it’s designed to, brain awakening would probably be a great choice for us as

Carrie: What does brain awakening do for your brain?

Dan: Yes, great question. So brain awakening is going to do three primary things. It is going to restore density to the synapse. Right? So the synapse, of course, as we know, connect our brain cells and we need healthy, dense synapse for the messages to go back and forth between our brain cells appropriately.

There’s a form of magnesium that we use because it’s those minerals or electrolytes that are going to help with electrical connectivity. And some amazing research on this specific form of magnesium to restore density to synapse. And then I also use a mushroom known as lion’s mane, which will nourish the health and the strength of that brain cell itself.

We use another herb called amla, which is an antioxidant that will protect the brain against damage, stress, plaque buildup, and so forth. We’re focused on the brain cell, the synapse, and protecting that structure to keep it healthy and strong.

Carrie: Wow. Several different angles there that you’re hitting it at. I like that.

At Hope for Anxiety and OCD, I’ve really made a decision not to just kind of, I don’t have random ads on my show, advertising luggage and random things. We’ve made a decision here to be an affiliate partner with Red Remedies. They have been so gracious to give us a coupon code, so if you put in HOPE20, you can try any of their products, not just the ones that we’ve talked about today, and get 20 percent off, and you’ll also be Helping support the podcast.

I really believe in what you’re doing there. I think that adding supplements to just an overall picture of your health, like you said, you can’t just ignore diet, exercise and sleep and then take a supplement and expect your life to be great. But in the process of working on our overall health, if these are products that could benefit you, I would encourage people to definitely try them. Thank you for being on the show and sharing with us today.

Dan: It’s been my pleasure.

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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 views of myself or By the Well Counseling.

114. Vagal Nerve Stimulation for Anxiety with Dr. Hool

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

In this episode, Carrie interviews Dr. Nicholas Hool about his personal struggle with anxiety and how it led to the development of VeRelief™.

Episode Highlights:

  • How vagal nerve stimulation works and its effectiveness in relieving stress and anxiety.
  • Why VeRelief is a good option for managing anxiety
  • The evolution of the VeRelief product line, from its initial design to the upcoming third generation.
  • The differences between VeRelief and other anxiety relief devices on the market.

Explore VeRelief through our affiliate link.

Episode Summary:

Welcome to episode 114 of Christian Faith and OCD. I’m Carrie Bock, your host. Today’s episode features a unique guest, Dr. Nicholas Hool. With a PhD in biomedical engineering, Dr. Hool is here to share his personal journey with anxiety and the innovative product he developed to help others manage their anxiety.

In our conversation, Dr. Hool reveals how his experience with anxiety began in high school while pursuing a career in competitive golf. As he faced intense pressure and performance anxiety, he explored various methods to manage his stress, from sports psychology to medication. Despite some initial success with visualization techniques, he found long-term solutions challenging to maintain.

Dr. Hool’s quest for a more effective solution led him to study biomedical engineering. His research focused on the vagus nerve, a key player in regulating our stress response. He explains how vagus nerve stimulation can quickly balance the nervous system, offering a non-drug approach to anxiety relief.

Dr. Hool’s breakthrough came with the development of a handheld device that stimulates the auricular vagus nerve using gentle electrical impulses. This device aims to enhance heart rate variability, a measure of nervous system balance, helping users recover from stress and anxiety more effectively.

Tune in to discover how Dr. Hool’s innovative approach could provide relief for those struggling with anxiety and how his personal journey led to this groundbreaking solution.

Summary

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD episode 114. I am your host, Carrie Bock, and on the show, we’re all about reducing shame, increasing hope, and developing healthier connections with God and others. We have a unique interview today. Here I have with me Dr. Nicholas Hool who has a PhD in biomedical engineering, and he can explain a little bit more about that later. He’s going to talk about his own personal experience with anxiety that led him on a journey to develop a product that will help others with their anxiety as well. 

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Carrie: Welcome to the show.

Dr. Hool: Yes. Thanks for having me.

Carrie: What is your experience with anxiety being on a personal level?

Dr. Hool: I have some experience that’s going to be different than a lot of other people, but my kind of first taste of it was in high school.

I was a competitive golfer growing up, played golf since I could walk basically, but decided I wanted to really pursue golf as a career. Probably when I was, or maybe around 14 years old, I thought I want to do this. I want this to be my sport. It would be awesome to go pro someday like a lot of kids think when they play sports, they want to go pro.

And I was good. I won some tournaments, traveled the country in high school. And then for whatever reason, probably when I was 16, 17, maybe it was just suddenly like the thought of this is real. I got a couple of years left and then it’s like, it’s the real deal. Suddenly I started thinking about it more. I started contemplating the future.

I started contemplating my own performance and everyone’s watching you. Like now is the time you have to perform well. I never thought about the future before.  It was just exciting, right? When you’re a kid, you’re just having a good time, but then suddenly, I mean, I think that’s what anxiety is, right?

You’re thinking about the future in a negative way. You’re afraid, you’re worrying about things that you don’t either typically worry about, or I guess what they say is a typical person doesn’t really worry about it that much to the degree that you’re worrying about it. I just started worrying about the future all the time.

And I’m just like, “why am I worried so much about this?” It wasn’t so much the worry that affected me. I think everybody to some degree worries about their future, right? What if I fail? What if it doesn’t work out? It started manifesting as these. I want to call them panic attacks. They were just severe stress responses.

When I was on the golf course, I would be on the first tee and just heart beating out of my chest. I think it’s normal to be nervous, right? Like everyone gets nervous, but I’d been nervous before I dealt with that in every tournament. This was a lot more severe. Suddenly college coaches are watching, maybe they’re not even watching it.I’m just playing by myself. Suddenly I’m in my head. I’m going into that stress response again. I’m just like, what the heck is going on?

Carrie: It’s a lot of pressure in those sports arenas, the better you get, the more competition you encounter. All of sudden you’re playing around people that are as good as you are better. And there’s a lot going on there.

Dr. Hool: There is a lot going on, but when you think about it, you’re still just doing what you do. It’s me playing golf. That’s it. I’m not playing another person’s golf round. I’m playing my golf round. I’m the one that put all that pressure on myself by thinking about it, by worrying about it.

I think that’s what a lot of people do with just life in general. People are so worried about what if I fail or what is this person going to think of me if I say this or do that. And that causes the stress response that causes an anxiety.

Carrie: Almost like your body is responding as though there’s a bear or a lion in front of you instead of a gold tee.

Dr. Hool: Yes, exactly. And a lot of it, it’s just in your own head. I mean, it’s so hard to just get that out. It’s not like you can just say, “Oh, well, don’t think about it.” Obviously that’s not how it works. If left undealt with, it will have a major negative impact on the trajectory of your life. So for me, I kind of burned out and I didn’t pursue golf after I graduated high school.

I could have gone to play at a lot of different schools.  I was still good, but it was just knowing how good I was. At the time when I graduated, how much I was struggling, it was just like, “man, I don’t feel like this is going to work out. The guys that were going pro at the time were so good.”

And looking at that, I’m like, “man, I’m so far from that.” Even though I’m good,I  just kind of struggle with anxiety and the fear and all that just took a toll. It’s like, “yes, it’s probably best to do something different.”

Carrie: What did you try to manage it or get rid of it or deal with it?

Dr. Hool: When I was 16, I went to a sports psychologist and did the whole thing like lay on the couch, let’s go through progressive muscle relaxation. It lets get you a nice state of calm. And he would lead me through these visualizations of just being on the golf course and playing perfect golf. If I hit a bad shot, what does that look like to recover from that? And then even if I’m in a high pressure situation, trying to visualize my body responding in an ideal way compared to how I typically respond.

And just doing that over and over in the mind was sort of reprogramming my thought process. It worked incredibly well when I was practicing it. The key is that I did it for about a month, probably a few times a week, and it would take me about an hour to do this. I would lay on the couch. I go through my progressive muscle relaxation, get in that optimal state of visualization, and then I would actually do the visualization, which took time. And because it had an almost like a pretty immediate effect, I would do a visualization and I go and play golf. I’m really calm and focused. I thought like, Oh, I cured myself. I’m good. I don’t need to do this anymore. So I stopped doing it. And of course, once you stop doing it, the tendencies come back, especially if you’ve only done it a few times.

I kind of just lost discipline, I guess. I didn’t commit to it. It takes a lot of time and mental effort to do that visualization, to do that relaxation. You have to go find a quiet environment. I got to lay down. If I have racing thoughts, I have to first calm those down before I can even focus on the positive.

That’s hard to do. I was actually prescribed clonazepam for a month, which is a benzodiazepine anti-anxiety drug. Which is really powerful, and I have no idea why the guy prescribed it to me. I did not need that like it wasn’t so bad, but the protocol is you would take it about an hour or so before you go do something that is supposed to freak you out and cause a lot of anxiety, because it takes about an hour to kick in.

It worked really well to get off the first tee when I would take it an hour before taking off. But then it stayed in my system for four hours and I was sluggish. I wasn’t cognitively focused and I wasn’t performing my best mentally. And I was like, that’s not a good option. Like, I don’t want that in my system when I’m trying to play golf.

The available solutions that I tried just weren’t effective, really. They weren’t what I needed. The most effective was the visualization, but, it’s just so hard to commit to that long term because it takes so much time. And like in today’s modern world of just always on the go, who has an hour to just sit down in a quiet space and meditate and focus, even if you had the time to do it. You have to have the ability to do it.

Carrie: It’s a Yes. It’s a skill that you have to learn and train

Dr. Hool: It’s really hard. You can’t just download a meditation app and be like, “Alright, I’m going to do meditation now.” That’s not going to work. It’s a skill. It’s something you get to practice all the time. If you’re not disciplined, it’s just not really going to work out long term.

Carrie: How did this lead you into studying biomedical engineering and learning about the vagus nerve and vagus nerve stimulation?

Dr. Hool: I just had this thought of if I’m on the golf course and I’m fine, and then I fight or flight response can kick in in a matter of seconds. It just hits you out of note. I was thinking, I’m like, if it can just turn on like the flip of a switch, why can’t I turn it off like the flip of a switch doing these meditations and these progressive muscle relaxations and this breathwork stuff that wasn’t the off switch. It just wasn’t having that deep immediate effect that I needed. Neither were drugs, right? Drugs still take an hour to kick in. Those don’t even have very solid effects, but in those moments, it’s not gonna have any effect on me. I thought, let’s go study that response.

There’s going to be something out there that can shut it off fast. I always liked math and engineering, so I chose biomedical engineering because I literally just wanted to study that what is happening in your body physically when that fight or flight response flips on and ultimately to understand it. So I could turn it off.  I just turn it off on command. It was 8 straight years of biomedical engineering went into undergrad. So for four years, I learned all the basics, and then in my PhD program, that’s where I got really specific and started doing actual research with different technologies and ultimately arrived at the one we have today.

Carrie: Tell me about the vagus nerve and its role in that fight, flight, or freeze response. I was doing a little bit of mild Googling on the vagus nerve, and it turns out that the term vagus is Latin for wandering, which I found interesting. So this is a nerve that wanders in our body.

Dr. Hool: The vagus nerve, it’s one of the 12 cranial nerves in the body. It’s called the wandering nerve because it wanders throughout your entire upper body. It’s the largest and the longest of your cranial nerves. It plays a role in essentially maintaining what’s called homeostasis, keeping your body and your nervous system in a state of balance. There’s a lot of things that it covers, right?

It helps digestion. It helps with heart-related issues, cardiovascular things. It helps with mental health. It just keeps your overall nervous system in a state of balance. And the nervous system is made up of two separate components. You have the sympathetic nervous system, and the parasympathetic. The sympathetic is your fight or flight response.

When your sympathetic is active, it sends a signal to your body saying it’s time to speed up and to tense up. That’s where you get that racing heart rate. Your hands are jittery. Blood pressure might go up. Breathing rate goes up. You’re familiar with it, right? It’s that fight or flight response. Not comfortable to be in unless you’re actually running for your life.

Carrie: And then it’s helpful and purposeful and useful at that point.

Dr. Hool: Parasympathetic is the opposite. It’s the rest and digest. It’s what helps you stay calm after you eat a nice big meal. Usually, you’re really sluggish, and you don’t want to move around because you’ve eaten a meal.

That’s the rest and digest state. Your body’s going into a state of just chill so that you can digest your food. You can recover from stress. You can rest. Those states are always fluctuating all the time, no matter what. And so what? The vagus nerve’s main job, it basically shifts you out of fight or flight.

So when your fight or flight is really active, the vagus nerve’s job is to help bring that down to rebalance the nervous system. In my research, I learned that it’s not so much that the vagus nerve increases parasympathetic, but instead, it decreases the sympathetic, and so that’s how it balances. That’s why it’s also really good if you’re in a fight or flight state where you’re having an anxiety attack or panic or just stress stimulating your vagus nerve is an almost instant way to bring that stress response down because that’s its main job. And I learned that in research, just reading all these research papers, learning about the vagus nerve. And to me, it was like, that’s what I needed right there. If I had something that could just stimulate my vagus nerve on the golf course, It would pull me out of that response, and I could focus again.

I could be calm and perform. I can fall asleep finally, or I’ll be less irritable around my loved ones after I’m stressed out or something that kind of became what I committed to was. Let’s dive into vagal nerve stimulation and see if we could develop this out for the high performing individuals like the athletes, but really the everyday person that just wants something safe, nondrug, and effective to calm them down quickly.

Carrie: Can you tell us a little bit more about how the product that you have is used for vagal nerve stimulation?

Dr. Hool: We developed a little handheld device. This is kind of what it looks like if people are watching the video, but what it is is it uses electricity, so gentle electrical impulses to directly activate a small branch of the nerve found just under your ear.

There’s two areas you can target the vagus nerve noninvasively.  That’s what’s called the auricular vagus nerve, which is around the ear, and then you have the cervical vagus nerve, which is on the front side of the neck. The cervical region of the vagus nerve is a little deeper in the neck, and it’s close to baroreceptors, which control blood pressure, and it also has direct projections to your heart.

It’s a higher risk location to stimulate because it can cause a sudden drop in heart rate and the pressure applied can also cause a sudden drop in blood pressure, which, if you deal with any type of heart condition or have a blood pressure condition, it can be dangerous to do that, whereas auricular is farther away from those regions. So there’s no risk in dropping blood pressure, and there’s no direct projections to the heart with the auricular. There’s no heart-related side effect. That was my first kind of focus was safety first. We know the vagus nerve can have this effect, but we need it to be safe. So, auricular was the obvious choice.

Now, the other benefit that we learned later in research was when you stimulate the auricular vagus nerve with electricity, You see an increase in, it’s called heart rate variability. Heart rate variability is just a way to measure your heart rate in such a way that it reveals the state of your nervous system.Heart rate is just measuring how many beats per minute your heart rate is beating at. Heart rate variability is a measure of the fluctuation of your heart rate over time. So, when you have a large fluctuation in your heart rate, that’s a good thing because it means your body is in a state where it can adapt to changes very easily, but if your heart rate is not changing over time, it’s like kind of stuck in the same heart rate over some period of time. That means your body’s not capable of adapting to change. If you go into that fight or flight state, you typically stay there for a long time. That’s why you can’t recover. If you have a low heart rate variability, what a regular vagal nerve stim does is literally in 60 seconds, we can see, we could double your heart rate variability, depending on what it is when you first start. That’s just an indicator that we’re shifting you out of that fight or flight state, literally within seconds versus cervical. We don’t see the same effects of heart rate variability.

Carrie: If you have a low heart rate variability, does that mean that you usually have a more elevated heart rate? You’re more anxious and it stays at that higher heart rate?

Dr. Hool: Not necessarily. If you think about a true fight or flight response, you’re walking in the woods and suddenly you see a bear start chasing you. Your heart rate is going to go up, but it’s going to stay up. It’s not going to come down and then go back up. It’s going to stay there. So the variability is tiny when your heart rate is beating really fast.

When you’re just chilling at home on the couch watching TV, if you monitor your heart rate, you’ll see that it might be 60, and then it might go up to 70, maybe 80, and then it might come back down to 60, and it’s going to do that over time. That’s just how it is, but if you’re chilling on the couch and your heart rate is just stuck at like 70, that’s not good. That means your nervous system is kind of in that fight or flight state, even though your heart rate may not be high. The variability is really low, which suggests your nervous system is not balanced. You’re not in a healthy state. Beyond just being stressed and anxious, an imbalanced nervous system affects your ability to heal from other conditions, from sickness.

You don’t digest things properly. You can’t recover if you have an injury. And so heart rate variability is just a great way to quickly take a snapshot of, “Is my body in a rest and digest state or am I in a state where it’s being resistant to healing and I’m more prone to getting stressed and anxious?”

Well, we’ve been able to demonstrate on almost all of our step patients and research was when you stimulate the auricular vagus nerve, you see an instant increase in the H.R V., which is why we always get people saying the device helps them fall asleep faster. They recover from a stressful experience faster.

We have a lot of patients with PTSD and panic disorder that use our product, pull them out of that panic attack. And then when used as part of a daily routine, it definitely helps decrease the effects of anxiety. And I say the effects of anxiety because it’s not going to eliminate your worries. If you’re someone who’s a lot and you’re always afraid of the future, you’re contemplating negative thoughts, it’s not going to drive those away.

However, it will lessen the impact on your body that those negative thoughts have, which is still a good thing for things like general anxiety. I highly recommend people learn meditation like the right way, but you can use verily to accelerate your meditation sessions because the problem that I was having was it takes me 30 minutes just to calm my mind, calm my body before I can actually do a real meditation. With the very late device, it does it. It does all the work for you. It’s literally pulling my body out of fight or flight and putting it into that ideal meditative state in a matter of minutes. And now I can meditate again. We have a lot of psychologists and counselors who will sit with their patients in a session. “Here use this for the first five minutes of our session, and then I’ll walk you through our counseling, and we’ll get to the core issue of your anxiety.” It’s a great supplement or something like that.

Carrie: I liked what you talk about in terms of chronic health conditions and our body having difficulty healing.

If our nervous system is out of balance, there are a lot of people out there that they’ve been to several doctors and the doctors are saying, “I don’t know how to help you anymore,” or “we’re not really sure where this is coming from.” Yes, we can say that you’re having these symptoms. I think there’s a lot that goes on in a day-to-day in our nervous system that we aren’t necessarily always cued into or aware of.

When people are having heightened levels of anxiety, sometimes they’re recognizing that because it’s coming in the form of an anxiety attack or a panic attack. Sometimes they’re not aware of that because they’re just living at a state of chronic stress and it’s now taking a toll and they’re having things like headaches or digestive issues or other chronic pain or health conditions.

I think that’s important for people to recognize that mental health piece in there. I like what you said about utilizing this to help wind down for sleep. You and I got connected some time ago, and you guys actually sent me a Verilief device, and when I started using it was before I went to bed, kind of to help, like, wind down my mind, like wind down my body.

Sometimes it can be hard depending on what you’re doing before you try to go to sleep to get yourself to a more wound down state. But I’ve also used it if I have a really difficult session with a client or we’ve just processed some really hard trauma and maybe that’s something that I still feel like I’m carrying around with me.

It’s nice for me to be able to release that stress and take those few minutes to just be able to breathe and let go. And so I have found it helpful and have recommended it to some of my clients. Now, I know that you guys are doing pre-orders for the third generation V Relief. So can you tell us about some of the changes that you’ve made over time to kind of tweak and make perfections to the product?

Dr. Hool: We’re a team of engineers and designers, core, which just means we are obsessed with building the best product. It hurts us to launch something that we’re like, “Oh, we can build something better.” Although we still have to ship a product. We can’t just sit in our lab all day and just keep making stuff. But the first product we launched was just a handheld device.

I want to say maybe late 2021, early 2022. That was just through word of mouth and connections we had with local doctors, but the usability of it was not great. It was a little bit big and bulky before we were ready to really launch this thing. Let’s redesign it. Let’s make it smaller.

We’re taking pre-orders for that. We weren’t expecting to take pre-orders this early, just because our gen twos sold out way faster than we thought they would over Christmas. We thought we’d have an easy transition into the next gen. But people are rushing to buy this because they’re starting to realize like, “Oh, man, this thing is legit.”

There’s not a lot of great options out there to take care of your nervous system, right? There are these really expensive machines that are good, but not affordable. And then the low-cost ones are ineffective. You’re just kind of getting these knockoff products that don’t have any major impact on your nervous system. It’s definitely a powerful, effective product. And for the price point, it’s kind of unbeatable.

Carrie: Yes. That’s awesome. You guys have it discounted right now for the presale and you’re expecting to ship around April. Is that right?

Dr. Hool: Yes, so right now we’re offering a $100 discount for those who pre-order. That discount will start to be reduced as we get closer to shipping.

We want to reward customers who wait the longest with the best deal, but yes, for now, you can just get it and save $100 to get it for $299 as opposed to $399. They’re being made right now, about 50 percent of the batch is complete. We just have to wait on some other manufacturing things to come through, but yes, they’re coming.

Carrie: This is one of the things I think that impressed me the most about your company and caused me to become an affiliate was your 60-day money-back guarantee. Tell us about that.

Dr. Hool: Basically, every product that we looked into for calming people down, helping the nervous system, they’re giving these 21 to 30-day warranties or money-back guarantees. I’m like, “That’s so small”. If you don’t have time to use it in every situation, right? People are traveling or doing stuff, so  we give people 60 days just because we know 30 days is not enough. Use it for two whole months. If you don’t get the improvements at some point within two months, probably not going to have an impact.

It’s like you’ve got plenty of time to try it. We talk to everybody that reaches out to us. If they have any challenges, any help at all with understanding how to apply this to their own lives. We’ll literally chat with you. We’ll say, tell us about your routine. What do you do currently? What’s your day-to-day look like? We’ll create protocols for you. We recommend using it. Combine it with this modality or that supplement and you’re going to see great results. We’re here to really make sure that this works for people and it does, right? As long as you just don’t give up trying, like we’ll make it work for you.

Everybody has a vagus nerve. Every vagus nerve responds to stimulation. You just have to work with it a little and get a feel for how to optimize it for each individual. And we work with people to do that.

Carrie: Also I wanted to mention to you when you’re talking about the electrical stimulation, it’s not like you’re getting zapped. For me, it feels like a little vibrating, like tingly feeling near your ear, so it’s not painful or anything of that nature if you’re using it properly. 

Dr. Hool: That was our big engineering feature that we came up with. At the time we were designing them, all these electrical stimulators were very sharp. For the auricular, there were all these ear clip electrodes and tiny little surface area electrodes that just shock your ears. It’s so uncomfortable. And we’re like, “We have to make it feel good.” We tested a bunch of different materials. I mean, we shot ourselves all day long, trying to find something that was comfortable, and we found a really good mixture of materials. We use a certain ingredient that kind of hydrates your skin, so when you’re using it, it’s actually got a skin hydration component to it, which is what makes it a lot more comfortable than a standard electrode that doesn’t have those properties.

Carrie: The high cost of being an entrepreneur, lots of electrical shocks to ear.

Dr. Hool: Yes, all kinds of stuff. I’m not as bold as my electrical engineers. He has done things. Hey, you have some scars that are going to last forever. That’s like, “Dude, you’re crazy, man.” Those people, they love doing stuff. 

Carrie: Gotcha. Are you familiar with the Apollo device?

Dr. Hool: Yes, very familiar. I see advertisements for it on Facebook. 

Carrie: I really know about zero about it, and I didn’t know if you wanted to say anything about that or just leave that out of it, but I’m curious, what does it do compared to what VeriLief does?

Dr. Hool: It’s a different value that they’re delivering. What Apollo does, at least what their technology does, skin vibration, it’s more of a mild calming effect for a long time. Think of it like an SSRI. An SSRI is something you take every day, has a long, mild effect, keeping you calm, but it’s not like a rescue drug. 

If you’re in the middle of a stress response, you don’t take an SSRI, you take a Benzodiazepine. The Benzos are strong. We’re going to get to it, calm you down fast, even though those still take time to kick in. That’s really the difference. 

Apollo is something you wear kind of all day, and if you’re not someone who has a lot of anxiety attacks, probably a fine thing, but if you’re someone who gets those moments where your body goes into that fight or flight state, VeRelief is that’s what it was designed for, but you can use both. That is the benefit of technology is there’s no side effects. You can stack as many as you can and just enhance the effect. I tell people that all the time. Wear your Apollo and do this at the same time.

Carrie: Well, thank you so much for sharing this information with us. I hope it’s valuable to some of our listeners. I know that I talk to all kinds of people all the time who are just looking for different options to help them manage their anxiety. Maybe they’ve tried medication or they’ve tried certain meditations, they’ve tried a variety of stuff, and they just feel like they’re not getting the relief that they’re wanting or they’re needing something, like you said, in the moment right before they go perform or speak in front of people, or even if it’s just a presentation to a few people at work.

If that really makes you nervous and this is something that’s going to help you before those types of situations.  If going into your job makes you anxious, I mean, there’s just so many different applications for this product. We’re going to put our affiliate link in the show notes for everybody and make sure that you can check out the product and take advantage of trying it out and get in the full 60 days. Hopefully you’ll love it. For some reason you don’t, you can contact the staff and they’ll help you troubleshoot with that.

Dr. Hool: And we’ll troubleshoot too. And. If it really, really doesn’t work, we do refunds as well. One thing to note is this is kind of a newer space. There’s not a lot of products like this on the market. There’s definitely a temptation for people to want to go to Amazon or buy some Chinese knockoff that is like an ear clip for 30 bucks. But those things will do nothing. They have no impact on your nervous system, unless you’re someone who’s extremely chronically imbalanced. It might have some effect, but our product is the real deal.

We spent years developing this. We tested everything out there. This thing is by far the most effective out of any other auricular vagal nerve stem you can try. So it’s worth the wait. Definitely worth it. And with that 60-day money-back guarantee, it’s as low risk as possible.

Carrie: Well, thank you so much and we’ll be in touch.

Dr. Hool: Thank you, Carrie. I appreciate the time.

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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 views of myself or By the Well Counseling. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.

113. From Suicidal to Thriving, a Personal Story with Sara Nicole Tynan

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

In this week’s episode, Carrie interviews Sara Tynan, author and wellness educator, about her journey from mental health struggles to wellness, and how her experiences inspired her to help others.

Episode Highlights:

  • Sara’s transformation from battling mental health issues to finding wellness with God’s help.
  • How spiritual, physical, and mental health contributed to Sara’s recovery.
  • The role of scripture affirmations in Sara’s life and how she teaches others to use them for mental wellness and overcoming insecurities.
  • The inspiration behind Sara’s book “So That” and her role as a wellness educator.

Episode Summary:

Welcome to episode 113 of Christian Faith and OCD! I’m thrilled to feature Sara Tynan, the author of So That and a dedicated wellness educator. Sara’s inspiring journey from struggling with mental health and substance abuse to finding fulfillment and healing is a testament to the power of faith and perseverance.

Sara’s path to wellness wasn’t immediate; it involved overcoming significant challenges, including mental health issues and substance abuse. Her turning point came during a college crisis, where she hit rock bottom, prompting a decision to make drastic life changes. With the support of loved ones and a commitment to healthier habits, Sara moved away from medications and substance use, eventually finding peace and stability.

Her latest project, the podcast “Fulfilled,” is a continuation of her mission to share tools and insights for a fulfilling life, grounded in spiritual growth and God’s promises. Sara emphasizes the importance of scriptural affirmations, like Philippians 4:13, in transforming negative thought patterns and aligning one’s mindset with Biblical truth.

Sara’s story is a powerful reminder of the strength that faith and practical changes can bring in overcoming life’s challenges.

Related Links and Resources:

Sara’s Book, So That: A Story of God’s Glory

Sara’s website: saranicoletynan.com

Her Podcast: Fulfilled

Click for another inspiring story:

79. Personal Story of Anxiety with Dr. Sherri Yoder

Summary

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD episode 113. Today on the show I have with me Sara Tynan. She is the author of the book “So That” and a wellness educator. Her passion for teaching comes from her own personal experience with her mental health struggles. We’re going to talk today about her story, some things that she has picked up along the way, as well as things that she teaches to individuals that she works with now.

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Carrie: Sara, welcome to the show.

Sara: Hi, thanks for having me.

Carrie: What kind of led you on this journey to become a wellness educator and author and just tell your story?

Sara: My own journey to where I am today, which is, I’d like to think I’m pretty well mentally, physically, and spiritually, but that didn’t happen overnight. It happened over a course of years and I went through a lot of twists and turns.

I got to a point where I feel like I’m doing really good, and  I don’t think that I’m on the other side of this for no reason. I think everything God does has a purpose. I felt like God was saying, “Okay, well, if you feel like you’re well, then use what happened to you to help other people.”  I just wrote it all out. I wrote down everything that happened to me and through me, and that turned into a book. After a couple of years of that book just kind of being there, I was like, there’s still more, so then I created a mental health conference. And even after that, I just kept feeling that phrase.

There’s still more. There’s still more. I redid my book and added a devotional to the back of it because a devotional was one of the big tools that helped me in my journey. That’s where I am today. I just launched my podcast in January, which is just another resource for people to go to find free tools. Some of the tools that I’ve learned along my journey. 

Carrie: What is your podcast called?

Sara:  It’s called “Fulfilled” and it’s all about living this fulfilled life and clinging to the promises that God has yet to fulfill.

Carrie: Yes. That’s so good. So many of us are in the waiting on the journey where we desire to be where God desires us to be, and really that’s a lifelong process of sanctification, which is really just a big word for becoming more like Christ. We’re all on the journey somewhere. I really do believe that the Bible has direction for us that if we are even slightly farther along than a brother or sister in the journey, it’s our responsibility to help lift them up to where they need to be.

What do you feel like was a rock bottom moment for you as you were going through this?

Sara: The chapter in my life and the chapter in my book that’s literally titled “Rock Bottom.” I won’t give away too many details because obviously you’ve got to read the book, but I’m literally an open book. I mean, I love sharing my story, so I’ll share what I can.

The rock bottom happened when I was at college. I had been drinking a lot. I had been dabbling in a bunch of different marijuanas and marijuana types, even some of the synthetic stuff. I was also heavily medicated. I was on medications for bipolar and insomnia. I was on another one that kind of helped with the anxiety that came with bipolar.

All these medications should not be mixed with anything, especially alcohol, especially synthetic marijuana. All of those things led me to get to this place where I was suicidal. I was cutting my wrists. I was ready to end it. I tried to take a bottle of pills, and  somebody walked in. That somebody was a friend and she said, “All right, I see what you’re doing. If you don’t get your mom on the phone, I’m going to call her.”

My mom came and got me. I checked into a mental institution that’s no longer around. I don’t even remember the name of it, but I know that they shut down a couple of years ago. They had both inpatient and outpatient. I think we live close enough that I was able to do the outpatient.

I would go into this facility and I forget how long the program was supposed to be, but a couple of days in, I was like, “This is not for me. This is not the life God wants me to live.”  I was sitting in a circle. We had group therapy, something that happens frequently in the mental institutions. We’re sitting in this group therapy session and it was women older than me and they were all talking about their problems.

I remember just sitting there thinking, I don’t fit in with these people. I don’t have a hard life. Nothing bad happened to me. I think I just need to get my act together. It was just this moment where I was like, “This is it. I can’t ever do this again. I do not want to feel this way. I don’t want to live this way.”

I went home and I kind of looked at all the things that I had been doing in my life and not doing. Even my dad was like, “Sara, you’re not really active like you used to be in dance and you’re not moving your body at all. All the alcohol you were drinking, you’re consuming a lot of junk food.”

We looked at my physical situation. I was very unhealthy. I wasn’t eating nourishing foods. I wasn’t moving my body, and then I looked at my spiritual situation. I wasn’t reading my Bible. I would go to church every now and then because my parents made me when I came home from college. I just kind of reevaluated where I was mentally, physically, and spiritually.

I implemented tools. Those tools took me to this place where my doctor said, “Sara, you no longer need to be medicated for your mental illnesses.”

That was 12 years ago, and I haven’t had medication for mental health since.

Carrie: That’s huge. I think that was a wake up call for you in terms of I’m sitting in this circle with these women who are older than I am, and if I don’t change something about what I’m doing, if I don’t live my life, that’s where I’m going to be in 10 years, 20 years. 

Talk to us about the marijuana, the synthetic marijuana. There’s a lot of that stuff going around now and people just see it as [fine], there are some Christians that will even tell you, “It’s a plant. God gave it to us. We should use it in the ways that we see fit.”

I’ve known a lot of clients who have struggled with things like sleep. Like you had said, insomnia was a big deal for you at one time, and they’ve just said, “Hey, this is the only way I can wind down at night. This is the only way that I can go to sleep.” What was your awareness or thought process on going from using to not using?

Sara: Actually, I’m glad you said that because all of those thoughts that you said, that’s the thought that I had.

I’ve been a believer my whole life. When I was really at my rock bottom where I was drinking and smoking, it was all like party usage. It was all just like, “Let’s get blackout. Just forget all our problems, so let’s have fun.”

That was my use in college. But then even after I was, this was actually a couple of years ago.

I got back into using marijuana, but I was using it for wellness purposes as is talked about. I did think, it’s natural. I bet Jesus would have smoked pot when he was here on earth. Those are the things I said and believed for two years until I was baptized by the Holy Spirit and had true conviction.

You talked about sanctification. That’s I believe when I finally had this conviction where God was like, “I want more for you and I want you to live the way that Jesus lived, so let’s change some things.”  What took me from using marijuana to not using marijuana was what God said to me was, “You trusted me to heal your mind before. Can you do that again with this?” 

When God originally healed me, when I got off of my medication, my struggles were bipolar and insomnia, but a couple of years ago, I started developing really, really bad anxiety. My son got really sick and I was planning this mental health conference, and it took a toll on my mental health.

My anxiety was through the roof. My heart was racing. If my phone buzzed, I would literally jump because I was so anxious about everything, so I started using marijuana. I would take tinctures. I would smoke. I would get edibles. I would go to the Delta eight, Delta nine, whatever it took to take me from this very hyper anxious person.

Where it took me was sunken into my couch, not being present with my family. Eventually, after that conviction came into my life, I felt like God said, “You don’t need this to heal. You need to rely on me and the things that you’ve done in your past to heal.” 

Even though I felt that conviction, I want to be totally honest. I continued using marijuana up until last December. It took me realizing that I was completely disappearing from my family because I thought that was right. It took me going, “Oh my gosh, I didn’t realize how far I had gone with this stuff.”

I went and got some of the legal stuff. It’s called Delta 8 or Delta 9. I justified it in my head by saying, “This is legal. It’s not wrong. I’m not breaking the law. This is natural. It’s what God would have wanted me to do. I believe those lies.

It’s legal. I took it. I became so paranoid, which is very common. I was worse off with my anxiety than I was before, and the purpose I was taking it was to help with my anxiety. That was a wake-up call for me. I was like, “What am I doing?” I’m so desperate to get well, to not have anxiety that I’m doing something that’s taking me in the opposite direction.

That was one of my bigger wake-up calls when I was like,” Oh God, you really are trying to get my attention here.” 

In January of last year, our church did this series called “A Year From Now.” It was really, really cool. My pastor brought out our baptismal, the trough that we baptize people in. It was empty and he had everyone write down on a piece of paper some things that they wanted to surrender to the Lord: Habits, addictions, whatever. I wrote down marijuana and we put it in the baptismal and then he threw dirt on it. It was a symbol of you have to die to yourself if you want to follow Christ. Right?  I decided to give up marijuana and trust that God would continue healing my anxiety. It’s so cool because he absolutely did.

We wrote letters to ourselves and sealed it, addressed it, and our church sent it out. You guys, I got the letter last week and it was like the things that you wanted to be where you wanted to be a year from now and it was just amazing to see [that] I went a whole year without relying on marijuana for my anxiety, and I haven’t had anxiety.

Carrie: That’s awesome. I feel like the things that you were doing like sleeping well and eating well and moving your body, exercise can be really great for us in terms of making us be ready to wind down at the end of the day and to de-stress definitely helps a lot. It’s truly like a God thing that we’re having this conversation because I made a decision at the end of last year to make some health changes this year.

I just had let my health go by the wayside physically and was just eating whatever was convenient and in front of me instead of really taking the time to plan and be intentional about what I was eating. I had kind of fallen away from exercise routines. I’ve just noticed how much better I feel making those changes when I eat well and when I exercise and how that has had truly a ripple effect in other areas of my life.

It’s had ripple effects that I can see in my business in terms of planning and intentionality. It’s had ripple effects in my spiritual life and other places. I think a lot of times we know what we need to do. Taking that first step really is the hardest or sticking with it once we’ve taken that first step is amazing, but you have to kind of set that intentionality and to say, I’m going to take away all of the excuses that I have in my life. I need this.” 

One of the things I processed was when I’m really stressed, it seems like I’m running to sugar or caffeine. In the process of shifting my diet and having a lot less sugar in there now and less instead of just being so carb-laden, like the average American diet is, it really has helped me realize, “Oh, I don’t need to depend on it.”

Whether we like it or not, sugar or caffeine can become our substance that we rely on instead of saying like, “Okay, God, I’m stressed. I’m overwhelmed. I don’t know what to do about the situation. How do I move forward?” Instead of engaging in some of those healthy habits, we turn towards what’s comfortable and familiar with us.

Sara: Whether that’s sugar or weed or alcohol.

Carrie: Yes. It’s also common for a lot of people to just say, “Well, I just have a glass of wine at night to wind down,” but then they don’t realize the accumulation of that over time. 

When we had talked before, you told me about using scriptural affirmation with clients. Would you share with us, how you utilize some of those? I think a lot of times people use affirmations that aren’t Christian and they’re just like, “I am strong and I am powerful and I can do anything I set my mind to.” Some of them are just completely bogus and not true and kind of like we’re trying to inflate ourselves in some way or even could give into pride.

How do you utilize the scriptural affirmation with the people you work with?

Sara: I love affirmations. I used to teach a class. It was a yoga class. We would get into a stretch and then while we were in the stretch, we would say, “I am”, and then you fill in the blank, whatever the theme of the day was. I created this. It’s like a curriculum because we met every single Tuesday for like a year and a half.

Every Tuesday, I would have to come up with my plan for what I was going to teach, what the affirmations were going to be.  I got to this place where I ran out of affirmations. I was just pulling them from Pinterest, and then I was like, “What about grabbing the Bible?” I literally just grabbed my Bible.

I opened it up, and I just hold a random scripture, and I was like, “What does this say about me about who I am in Christ?” An example I like to use is most Christians know: Philippians 4:13: I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. 

You can break that up into multiple affirmations, and one of the affirmations was, “I am strong.” That’s a true affirmation. My question is, where do you get the strength? The Bible, Philippians 4:13 tells us we get it from Christ, so when you say your affirmation, you’re thinking I am strong. You can keep it going by saying Christ strengthens me or I am strong because Christ strengthens me. And so you take what’s in the Bible and you say it as if it’s your words because you’re believing that what the Bible is, is truth. That’s part of being a Christian. You believe that that word is breathed out by God and it’s true. What the Bible says about you is true. And a lot of the struggles I had when I was harming myself was what I call stinking thinking. It’s where I start to tell myself I’m not good enough. I’m not pretty enough.

I’m not strong enough. I can’t handle this. Those are lies. And I don’t serve the father of lies. I’ve served the Lord. And the Lord says that I am strong. That’s what the Bible says. That’s one of my biggest tools is scripture-based positive affirmations. I’ll write them on my mirror. It changes from season to season. For example, there are seasons where I struggle with feeling pretty enough, or there are seasons where I struggle with feeling smart enough. That’s when I lean into what the Bible is saying about me. Another one I like to use is Proverbs 31, all about being the wife that God’s called me to be, being the mother God’s called me to be.

Carrie: I was going to ask you about kind of insecurities about physical appearance, like, are there certain ones that you use when you don’t feel pretty enough? Do you focus on just being beautiful internally?

Sara: Yes. Is that another part of Proverbs 31 where it talks about like the words of your mouth? What makes you pretty is your heart. I know there’s a verse, I can’t think of it off the top of my head, but it does speak to that. It does say that your appearance is worthless if what’s in your heart is hate. The words of your mouth make up what you look like. I cannot think of the scripture, but I know that that’s there and that’s one that I will lean into.

It’s like, I may have a breakout today, but that does not define who I am in Christ because my heart is still beautiful.

Carrie: Usually, towards the end of our episode and our time together, I like to ask people a couple of different questions. One is, what would you tell your younger self that was just kind of like living the typical college life, if you want to call it that, just living for the moment, partying, junk food, staying up late, not getting enough sleep, all of those things. What would you want her to know?

Sara: The thing that I was told when I was struggling a couple years ago, which is there’s still more. There’s still more goodness for you. God has a plan for you, which was spoken over my life when I was really young, Jeremiah 29:11, that he has plans for good and there’s a future for hope for me.

I heard that growing up, and I ignored it when I was in college, I thought this is all God has for me. This is my life. I am bipolar. I can’t sleep. I can’t do anything right. I’m not good enough. I believed all those lies. So if I could just speak that into myself, there is still more for you, Sarah, God has so much in store for you.

You just have to get through this short season. You will be strengthened by it. When you’re on the other side of it, God is going to use this storm and he’s going to turn it into the most beautiful rainbow you can ever imagine. I was actually just thinking about this because we didn’t talk much about my struggles a couple of years ago, but my son was really sick. I didn’t think I was going to get through it. I was starting to feel very anxious. That’s why I turned to the marijuana, but there was a phrase that someone said to me that I just want anybody out there who’s struggling to kind of hold onto this. It’s just two words. It’s for now. This trial that you are facing right now, this storm, it’s only for now. It will strengthen you and God will use this pain for your purpose.

Carrie: I think one of the hardest questions and struggles that people have is, “Am I always going to feel this way? We can get really stuck in that. It feels so terrible, horrible, awful. I can’t stand one more moment. Am I always going to feel this way?”

I think one of the things that we want to promote on the show is hope. That now you feel this way and you know what? Tomorrow you may feel this way or two weeks. You might, but over time, that doesn’t mean you’re going to feel this way forever. There is hope. There is help for our physical bodies.

There’s help for our emotional health and there’s healing from past trauma. There’s so many things that I would absolutely agree with you and stand on and say there’s more for people out there now than what they’re facing. That God wants believers to be empowered and to be his light in the world. If we’re kind of just covering in a corner saying, “I can’t do this” then it’s hard for us to be able to shine that light. That’s part of my passion is helping people, you know, see that confidence in Christ. I think it’s so important.

Sara: I love that. I’m really glad I found your podcast because that’s everything I stand for.

Carrie: Yes. I want to check out yours too since it’s new and kind of see how it’s flowing and listening to your story.

We’re going to put Sarah’s website in the show notes and we’ll find your podcast too. That way people can connect with you.

Thank you so much for sharing your story, really from a place of being at rock bottom and suicidal to now just thriving by the Holy Spirit. Thank you for sharing that.

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Thank you everyone else for listening. 

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 views of myself or By the Well Counseling.

Find out how you can practice mindfulness as a Christian.

5 Ways Therapy Can Make OCD Worse

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

Usually, when people talk about mental health therapy, they refer to therapy making things better. This is what all therapists and clients hope for. However, can therapy make OCD worse? The short answer is yes. Let’s look at the five different ways OCD can be made worse by therapy.

1. The therapist misdiagnoses OCD as Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) or something else.

Unfortunately, it often takes years for a person struggling with OCD to receive a proper diagnosis. Oftentimes, it’s difficult for individuals struggling with OCD to open up about the thoughts they are having that they may label as “bad” or “crazy.” They may have obsessions or fears about going into a mental hospital. They often present with a complaint of being anxious. Unless further assessment is done such as a YBOC II, OCD may go undiagnosed. A proper diagnosis is crucial for proper treatment.

2. The therapist uses logic with OCD thoughts.

 If a therapist is not trained in OCD, they may challenge the thought or provide logic to a client’s concern. For example, telling a client with contamination OCD to remind themselves that they cannot get AIDS from using a public toilet or telling a client with relationship OCD to remind themselves that offending someone is not the end of the world. Individuals with OCD know how irrational their thought processes are when they are in a moment of clarity. However, intrusive thoughts don’t respond well to logic. When someone is dealing with OCD, using a public toilet or offending someone can feel intensely distressful. This type of approach will typically leave the client with more shame, frustration, and disconnection from the therapist.   

3. The therapist provides excessive reassurance.

Therapists naturally want to be a voice of calm and reason for clients. Even good therapists can fall into the trap of reassuring their clients too much. If a client tells a story about something hurtful they did towards their spouse and says, “Does that mean I don’t love my spouse?” A therapist without training in OCD might reassure the client that based on conversations they’ve had with client, it seems like they love and care for their spouse. Instead, therapists who specialize in OCD will help clients recognize thoughts as OCD and learn to sit with the discomfort of uncertainty. 

4. The therapist fails to be trauma informed.

Trauma amplifies OCD symptoms. Therefore, treating past trauma or childhood wounding experiences (attachment issues, lack of nurture received, etc) can lead to a reduction in OCD symptoms. I have seen this time and time again in my own practice and heard the same from other trauma informed therapists as well. I’ve treated clients whose PTSD from childhood was triggered by exposures completed in Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) therapy. Once the PTSD became the focus of treatment, the clients deal with less intrusive thoughts and are able to dismiss them more easily.

Therapists who are strict behaviorists or strict ERP therapists may be so focused on changing present behavior that they fail to make a connection between global elements like the need for control, over dependency on others, or lack of confidence in decision making as being connected to past trauma and attachment experiences. When these global issues are taken into consideration and targeted, individuals will respond differently to intrusive thoughts. One of the issues with OCD is that the obsessional themes can morph and individuals can be playing exposure wac-a-mole if they don’t get to deeper level core issues. 

5. The therapist is insensitive to a client’s religious or spiritual beliefs.

As a therapist with Christian faith who sees many Christian clients, I have unfortunately heard stories about therapists banning clients from praying, asking them to state things they know are not in line with their belief system (for religious OCD), asking them to look at pornography (exposure for sexual obsessions), or dismissing/invalidating concerns about sin or hell. Clients who feel like their beliefs are not respected or understood are less likely to follow through with treatment recommendations. The International OCD Foundation contains guidelines for religiously sensitive exposures.

While therapy can make OCD worse, there is hope! OCD is treatable often by combining therapy and medications. When choosing a therapist, ask about their training in OCD, specific treatment approaches, and how often they see clients with OCD.

Carrie Bock, LPC-MHSP of By The Well Counseling is a Licensed Professional Counselor who specializes in helping clients with trauma, anxiety and OCD get to a deeper level of healing through EMDR via in person and online counseling across Tennessee and EMDR intensive therapy sessions. Carrie is the host of the Hope for Anxiety and OCD podcast, which is a welcome place for struggling Christians to reduce shame, increase hope, and develop healthier connections with God and others.