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Author: Carrie Bock

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

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.

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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.

________________

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.

——–

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.

112. Finding Motivation to Finish with Carrie Bock, LPC-MHSP

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

In this week’s episode, Carrie shares a six-step guide for finding motivation and achieving your goals in 2024. From understanding your why to making small changes, tune in for practical tips to overcome challenges and finish strong.

Episode Highlights:

  • Why knowing your “why” is crucial.
  • How to learn from past experiences to avoid mistakes.
  • The importance of researching the “how” for effective planning.
  • Strategies for handling challenging days in your journey.
  • Why seeking accountability can boost your progress.
  • Tips for choosing a good start date and successfully executing your plan.

Episode Summary:

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD Episode 112! As we wrap up January, many of us are either pressing forward with our New Year’s goals or feeling like we’ve fallen short. If you’re finding it tough to stay motivated and need a boost to finish strong, this episode is for you. I’ll be sharing practical insights and personal experiences to help reignite your passion and keep you on track with your goals.

In this episode, I dive deep into finding the motivation to complete the goals you’ve set. We all start with great intentions, but maintaining momentum can be challenging. I’ll discuss how understanding your “why” and learning from past experiences can set a solid foundation for achieving your goals. This includes identifying what’s been holding you back and planning effectively to tackle those hurdles.

I also cover the importance of researching and planning your approach, especially when embarking on new habits or changes. From setting a realistic start date to preparing for inevitable challenges, having a clear plan is crucial. I share examples from my own life and how they’ve guided me through my health and fitness journey this year.

For the full breakdown of steps and additional tips on maintaining motivation, be sure to listen to the complete episode. I hope these insights inspire you to persevere and reach the goals that matter most to you this year.

More to listen to!

60. The Benefits of Fitness and Spirituality Combined with Jen Roland

Transcript

Hi, welcome to Christian Faith and OCD episode 112. I know it’s the end of January right now, and some of you may have the gung-ho in the middle of working on goals that you started at the beginning of the year, and some of you may have given up on them completely. And some of you may be somewhere in between.

I want to do this. I want to finish strong, but I’m struggling right now. So I wanted to talk with you today about finding motivation to finish. We can have good plans, good intentions, but if we don’t know how to execute and get our plan from start to finish, then we’re going to have a challenge. I think many times we get excited. Yes, it’s a new year, fresh start. I want to make changes to my physical health. I want to eat better. I want to actually stick to my budget this month instead of just spending erratically. I want to develop relationships. Maybe I want to put more effort and energy into developing friendships, mom, friends, dating relationships, whatever your story is, maybe you have a career goal you’re trying to hit.

I want to reach a certain number of sales or I’m looking to get promoted. Whatever it is, I hope that this episode will help you to find the motivation to do the things that God has laid on your heart for this year. I’m going to give you a step process, and I’m going to give you examples from my own life of something that I’m working through in 2024.

I’ve gone through that process, it’s really helped me solidify how to share it with you who are looking for motivation. You may have hard things that you need to do in therapy, and that may be another thing that you’re trying to motivate yourself towards.

Number one is find and clarify your why.

This is so huge. Why do you want to make this change? I saw a picture of myself in December. It was a picture of my family in front of a Christmas tree at church, and I looked at how I looked physically and realized I am carrying more weight than I want to be carrying at this point. I’ve gone through various weight fluctuations over the years.

I’ve lost it. I’ve probably lost the same 15 pounds and found it several times at this point. Another thing happened in December where something popped up on my Facebook memories four years ago. I had been working out regularly at the Y and it was a picture of me with that class and the teacher had, it was her last day.

So we had all gotten together and taken a picture to kind of wish her well in her new adventure. I contrasted those two pictures in my mind and I was like, “Okay, here’s me now. I’m not happy with not just the way that I look, but I’m not happy with the way that I feel.”

I have this other picture of me where I was feeling amazing. I was moving my body on a regular basis. My mental health was great because of that movement of my body. I was getting all of those endorphin benefit. Everything that was going on. I was sleeping. There’s so many positive benefits to exercise and eating right, so I decided I’ve got to do something different and actually got sucked into a Facebook ad because apparently the little algorithm knows me too well and bought a fitness program and diet and exercise program that involves carb cycling.

One thing I decided at the beginning of this experience was that I was not going to go hungry. That was a huge thing that I had decided like, “Hey, I’m going to figure out a way to not to be hungry.” So that was supposed to be one of the benefits of this program. I had done a lot of calorie tracking and different things before and just something felt lacking. This is a macro tracking program. It’s a little bit different.

All of that is inconsequential right now because we’re still talking about your why. Why do you want to make this change? For me, I wanted to feel better. I wanted to be happier about how I look. I wanted to be more toned. I wanted to have more energy to spend time with my daughter.

I found a cave tour at Mammoth Cave. It was kind of a more rugged cave tour, not just the ones that you do the typical walkthrough of, but I thought, “Man, I would really love to go on that rugged cave tour for some self care and feeling a sense of accomplishment for myself.” I’ve loved caves for a long time. Something I probably haven’t shared on the podcast before, but caves have been always just something that have been really interesting to me. I’ve done several different cave tours, even done several of the ones at Mammoth Cave. I decided I’d really like to go on this, but if I try to go in my current physical fitness level. I am not going to feel good about it. I am going to be absolutely hurting and my back is probably going to be wishing that I really didn’t do that. I knew that I had to strengthen up my abs more. That’s one of my goals that I’m working towards is being able to do that CAVE program. There’s a bit of a multifaceted “why” that I have.

Now, your why may be completely different. A lot of times our whys, though, have to do with our relationship to self and others. If you say, I want to have a better relationship with God, That’s a good piece, but why? Try to dig down a little bit deeper. “Okay, because I know that when I’m more spiritually connected, I am more present in my family life. My priorities are in the right place because I’m putting God first and then these other things are following, just like scripture tells us.” Wen you can really dig down and find your why, and find the things that have gotten in the way in the past, I can put that as number two. I just created an extra step because we’re ad libbing this right now, which is welcome to podcasting.

Find out what has failed in the past and your learning from your past mistakes. One thing that I’ve learned from past health journeys is that the number on the scale really screws me up. I can’t be focused on that. If I’m focused on that and it doesn’t fluctuate the way that I want it to, I end up getting discouraged. If it fluctuates to a certain level, then I’m like, “Hey, I can eat more.” Sometimes I get derailed on the diet aspect of things. I knew that that’s an issue for me. I also have gotten squirrely about numbers in terms of counting calories in the past. I don’t know if that’s a little bit of an anxiety thing where I think it has different manifestations, but it can be things like, “Oh, I only have like 300 calories left today. What if I eat these 300 calories and then I’m still hungry? Do I want that 300 calories? It just can really mess with me. Did I track all of the calories correctly? That can be really derailing for you if you’re dealing with anxiety and trying to make positive health changes. So I knew that that was kind of a problem that I had run into in the past.

What I talked about a little bit earlier was I had a lot of excuses for not doing this earlier. A lot of times for me, it was easy to default and my daughter was the excuse. Well, I don’t have time because I’m a working mom and I’m busy and I’m either working or I’m taking care of my daughter. I’m taking care of my household, so therefore I don’t have the time and the energy that I need to work out. I also know for me that there are certain things I’m just not going to do. I am not going to get up at 5 am. and work out, so not set yourself up for failure if you’re not a morning person. You’ve tried in the past to get up at 5 a.m and work out and it has not gone well for you.

Why are you going to continue to try to do that which you know completely crashed and burned in the past? I see people who do that all the time. You have to find what’s going to be most successful for you. For me, sometimes that meant I have to work out after my daughter goes to bed. It may look like I have to work out at work before I pick her up from daycare or on a lunch break. You have to find what’s going to work for you. Sometimes finding what works for you is learning from the past experience and past mistakes that you’ve made. Learning from the past experiences that you’ve had.

Point number three, research the how. With this new program that I’ve gotten involved in, it’s tracking macros very different from tracking calories, and that has been a huge learning curve for me. I spent a chunk of time towards the end of December, instead of saying, “Hey, I’m gonna start this diet tomorrow, and I’m gonna be like, completely on it.”

I really looked at and researched what types of foods have less carbs. What has more protein? How am I going to get the amount of protein that I need in a day? What are some recipes that I can feed my family? Because I’m not trying to cook three different meals for three different people. I know that that’s not going to work very well. Really researching different recipe websites. What can I prep ahead of time to be able to make my life easier beecause I am a busy mom, I do have responsibilities at home and with my own business. Thinking through my meal planning process and figuring out the different types of food that I can eat to get enough protein or the right amount of carbs depending on the day because it’s cycling between low, medium, and high.

Researching of the how is important. There’s a saying that says “if we don’t have a plan, we are essentially planning to fail.” Having a plan is super important, so before you take any steps or take any changes, Let’s look at this from the mental health standpoint, when I’m encouraging clients to practice skills outside of session, whether that’s deep breathing for anxiety, whether that’s mindfulness for OCD, just learning to notice those thoughts, learning to notice their just thoughts, learning to notice that you can let them go. You don’t have to hold on to them. When they have therapy, they have set appointments to do therapy, but when they’re at home, they don’t necessarily have a specific time of the day where they do that. We talk through that. Would it be best for you to practice this in the morning when you first get up or after you get ready? Would it be best for you to practice this for five, 10 minutes after you eat lunch?

When we want to start a new habit or have a new behavior, it helps us to connect it with something that we’re already doing. You can learn that from the book by James Clear called Atomic Habits. It’s an excellent book. It talks about developing positive habits in your life and removing negative habits, which we all struggle with. I want to go back and read that book some more and really work on implementing some of the things in my life to review some of our points here.

We talked about finding and clarifying your why we talked about learning from past experience of what didn’t work, researching the how and now we’re going to talk about number four, which is plan for challenging days.

Look, I don’t care what you’re trying to do or what new thing you’re trying to implement or what you’re trying to finish. You’re going to have hard days. Make a decision upfront what those days are going to look like. How am I going to handle the sugar craving? How am I going to handle that day that I’m exhausted and don’t want to work out? How am I going to handle the week that I get sick and I’m not able to follow through with the diet exercise plan? This may look like a lot of different things for you. It may look like you writing down your why and saying, “Hey, here’s why I’m making these changes for me.” It’s going back to when I want to eat something that maybe wouldn’t be the healthiest for me. Going back to that picture of this is where you are and you have a picture of where you are and you have a picture of where you want to be. Let’s move towards the picture of where you want to be. Instead of continuing to stay in the picture of where you are, it may be certain affirmations that you write down to yourself, like God is bigger than any challenge that I’m going to face today. That’s something that I tell myself when I feel stuck, when I feel like I can’t do something.

All the strength and the power that you need, you can access through the Holy Spirit, through prayer, and that spiritual connection to God is super important. If this is something that God has called you to do, then he is going to equip you and enable you to be able to do it. I have to speak that to myself on a regular basis. Keep that in mind. Plan for your challenging days. Maybe that means, if you’re trying to change your diet, that you have some quick, healthy foods in the refrigerator. Maybe it means that you have a list written down of “If you don’t have this food, I can eat this food.” If you eat out a lot, what are some healthy options as you eating out.

When you’re talking about motivation for mental health changes, knowing that you can make positive changes and it’s not always going to look like a straight diagonal line. That’s true of any positive change. I tell my clients all the time, you’re going to have your ups and downs as you’re making progress, so don’t be discouraged when you take a step back. Just know you have made this much progress so far because you take one step back. That doesn’t negate the progress that you have already made. I’ve got to keep going and go to the next thing. Go to the next piece and pick up. Today you totally blew it. That doesn’t mean that has to become a habit. That doesn’t mean you have to go back to square one. You can say, “You know what? I can start again later today. I can start again tomorrow. “

Number five, seek accountability.

I have told everybody, including you, the podcast audience of health changes that I’m trying to make in my life. Actually, I broke it to the podcast audience on our email list where I wrote an email about some changes that I was making and asking some of you about changes and goals that you’re doing in the new year. I’ve told my in laws, I’ve told my friends, I’ve told loved ones because I want that accountability. I want people to ask me, how is this going in your life? I know you’re trying to eat more protein and less carbs. What does that look like? How are you doing with that? I have another friend who’s also making some health changes, and she’s telling me about movement that she’s doing. I can share the movement that I’m getting in. I wanted people to know because it really helps me stay on track. If I don’t let other people in my life know the changes that I’m trying to make, then I can just kind of get away a little bit more with not making them and not feeling bad about not making those changes.

Accountability can be really huge and really beneficial to us. That may look like different things for different people. You may want to get in a support group and it could be something mental health related, could be something physical health related where you’re saying, “Hey, I want to make these positive changes in my life.” It could be a Bible study or a church group where you say, Hey, I want to become the person who God has called me to be. I know that I want to be reading my Bible. Our church is going through one of those read the Bible in a year plans. That’s another thing we’re doing in 2024 and it’s really great. Having that accountability where you can say like, “Hey, how was your reading going? What did you pick up on today? or how did you connect with God as you read his word today?” That accountability is very important for us being able to reach our goals. We can’t get there alone. A lot of times we try and we think we can, but you weren’t made to do this alone, regardless of what it is that you’re dealing with.

Number six, pick a good start date. There just are some times that are not a good time to make the change that you’re trying to make. I had situations where I was going through back pain and that’s part of the reason I got off track. I’m not going to say that that’s 100 percent the reason, but there definitely have been some physical limitations and some rehab that I’ve had to do at various points over the last few years. For me to say, I’m going to go on a complete physical journey transformation and walk five miles that just wasn’t realistic and it wouldn’t have been helpful for me because I had to start where I was at. Starting small is good and we’ll talk about that in the last step, but when they talk with people about quitting smoking, they always say, have a quit date, put it on your calendar, make that determination, have it as a visual so that you know after today you are not doing cigarettes anymore. That does something to our brain, really trains us. You had all this preparation beforehand.,Finding your why, figuring the how, planning for the challenging days, getting your accountability on board so that when you pick your start date, it’s a good time to start. You probably don’t want to start your diet plan on December the 24th.

If you know you’re going to be having Christmas celebrations with family over the next couple of days and eat way too many Christmas cookies like I did. That was what happened to me. Picking a good start date is important because a lot of times we do these things that We’re not trying to set ourselves up for failure, but then when you take a step back and look at it, it’s like we really planned in a way that didn’t set ourselves up for success, and then we turned around and beat ourself up for it.

We’re like, “okay, I have all these major life changes happening in my life, but I need to make this change.” It’s a huge change. We don’t make the huge change that’s unrealistic, and we say, “Well, see. I told you I couldn’t do it” It gets into all this negative thinking and all this beating ourselves up.

Going back to planning for the challenging days, we’ve got to learn to be kind to ourselves. We’ve got to learn that we’re not always going to hit the mark. That’s what grace is for. That’s what the love of God is here for us and knowing that it’s okay. That doesn’t mean we’re a horrible person. It doesn’t mean that we’re not ever going to reach our goals because we can get into all of this negative thought process. “Oh, see, I told you I couldn’t do this and I couldn’t do that” Wust end up getting stuck and wallowing in a place of shame.

The last step that I want to talk you through is execute. When you are executing your plan and your goals and the step by step process, sometimes you need to ease your way into it. What I’ll find in talking with clients, they’ll say, “I’m going to create a goal where I am walking 30 minutes every day this week.” I’m kind of like, “but you’re not walking at all. That might be a good goal.” Say if you were walking four or five times a week and you want to do every day, or if you said, “Hey, I’m walking every day for 15 and I’d like to walk for 20 every day.” It sounds a little bit more doable, but to go from zero to 100 percent is probably not going to happen and that’s that whole setting yourself up for failure. Maybe if you’re trying to make positive health changes, you just focus on one thing. I’m going to drink X amount of ounces of water a day, whatever is deemed healthily, because that depends on your body weight. I’m going to drink this much water per day, or I’m going to trade one soda for sparkling water, or instead of drinking this soda, I’m going to drink flavored water instead, and making that one small change. When you can stick with that one small change, going to the next small change. Maybe you decide, you know what, instead of pulling through the drive thru and getting a breakfast sandwich, I am going to get the oatmeal or I am going to get a smoothie or make something at home. Whatever you deem is reasonable that you’re going to be able to do, and then you can always change that. Maybe you decide that the oatmeal is healthier than this, but it still has too much sugar or whatever the case is, you can always shift and adjust and change your plan as needed. That’s an important thing to remember.

Let’s talk through small changes that you can make to improve your mental health. Can you reduce alcohol consumption? Can you go to bed at the same time every night? Can you develop a relaxing bedtime routine or a joyful morning routine? What does that look like to wake up and embrace the joy of the Lord? Some of us have a really hard time with that in the morning, but you can do it. Put on a worship song or get up and stretch, move your body, go outside and take a deep breath. Maybe not if it’s super cold, whatever it is that is going to help you like engage in that process. Maybe you decide that your mental health goal is going to be journaling. I’m going to take five minutes before I go to sleep and just write down some of the things that I’ve been thinking about. Maybe going to reach out and ask someone for help this week. That’s huge. That’s something that we have a hard time doing. I’m going to work on saying no more. When what’s being asked of me doesn’t suit me or isn’t healthy, I’m going to set a boundary with a co worker or friend. We have entire episodes on setting boundaries on the podcast that you can go back and look at. Whatever you feel like God has laid on your heart to do in 2024. I just want you to know that you can find the motivation and that you can finish strong. Pray about it. Clarify your why. Sit with the Lord. What failed in the past? What didn’t go well? How can I learn from that? How can I grow? How can I set myself up for positive change? How can I plan for challenging days? Who’s going to be my support, my accountability on this journey? What’s a good day to start and Lord help me execute. I think all of this integrates with our spiritual life so well because self control is a spiritual discipline and we receive that through the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit does his part at work within us and we do our part in doing what we have been called and asked to do in obedience.

Thank you guys for listening to this episode. I hope that you are going to finish strong as we get to the end of January today. As you continue to make changes throughout the year, if there’s anything that we can do to help and support you in that process, please let us know.

I’m always up for episode suggestions. We do have a personal story interview coming your way in a couple weeks of a lady who went from being in a mental health hospital to really thriving and is now a health educator and advocate. She’s going to share some of her story and I know that’s going to be inspiring to you as well.

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.

 

111. Using Humor with ERP with Judy Lair, LPCC

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

This week, Carrie is joined by Judy Lair, a licensed professional clinical counselor specializing in OCD therapy, to explore how to use humor in ERP therapy and how laughter and creativity can be powerful tools in overcoming challenges on the journey to healing from OCD.

Episode Highlights:

The use of humor and creativity as powerful tools in overcoming anxiety and intrusive thoughts.

Customizing ERP techniques based on individual interests and strengths.

Strategies for incorporating creativity to confront OCD challenges.

Insights into the sanctification process and the choice between living in faith or seeking constant certainty in managing OCD.

Episode Summary:

Welcome to episode 111 of Christian Faith and OCD! Today, I’m thrilled to have Judy Lair, a licensed professional clinical counselor, with us to delve into the use of humor in ERP (Exposure and Response Prevention) therapy.

Judy’s journey into specializing in OCD began from her own experiences with anxiety and a background as a litigation paralegal. After a transformative period working with a psychiatrist and discovering her passion for counseling, she transitioned to working in OCD therapy. Judy’s approach incorporates humor as a tool to help clients navigate the challenges of ERP therapy.

In this episode, Judy shares how she uses analogies, like the haunted house, to help clients understand and manage their OCD. By embracing humor and creativity, she empowers clients to face their fears in a more light-hearted and less intimidating way.

Judy also discusses the importance of recognizing OCD’s inaccurate threat levels, likening it to a malware virus that skews our perception of danger. Her innovative methods, including using personal interests and humorous visualizations, make ERP more accessible and less daunting for those struggling with OCD.

Tune in to gain valuable insights into integrating humor into ERP and how it can make a significant difference in the therapy process. Don’t forget to subscribe and leave a review!

Related Links and Resources

www.treatmyocd.com/therapists/76492/judy.lair
Jusy Lair’s Books on Amazon

Explore related episodes:

74. Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) and NOCD with Stacy Quick, LPC

Transcript

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD, episode 111. Today on the show, I have with me Judy Lair, who is a licensed professional clinical counselor, here to talk with us about using humor in ERP therapy. We had a previous episode on ERP that you can go back and listen to; we’ll link that episode in the show notes for you, where we did just a brief overview of what it was. It was also a personal story from Stacy Quick, sharing some of her experiences with OCD and how she became an ERP therapist. Stacy was a therapist we met through NoCD, and we talked about that on that episode. Judy also works with NoCD. 

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Carrie: I’m  happy to have you here today on the show.

Judy: Hi, Carrie. I’m glad to be here. Even with this not being my real voice, I think I can still talk.

Carrie: Yes, she is recovering from a cold here, so thank you for bearing with us on that one. I heard you speak at the AACC conference. That was how we met, and it was exciting to see how many Christian therapists were there interested in a presentation on OCD. That’s not something often covered or has been covered, I guess, at that conference.

How did you specialize in OCD? How did you get that to be a specialty?

Judy: I’ve had a lot of different types of jobs in my life, but one of the things was when I was on the other side of the couch, working through my anxiety and such for about a year, talking to me like, “You can do this, you can be on the other side of the couch.” I’m like, “No, here’s a whole bunch of reasons why, no, it’s not going to be me.” I was never one of those people that everybody came to for advice and stuff; that’s not me. Much more cognitive, I’m much more thinking about thinking, planning, strategic types of things. It’s my forte and stuff. So I’ve worked in a number of areas in different things, especially I was a litigation paralegal in a law firm for a bunch of years.

That was really my background. Then I started working in a doc psychiatrist’s office, and that’s when I kind of got that message from God about, “You really could do this.” So I went back to grad school quite late in life to do that. I found that was my niche, that was the thing I was doing all along; I just didn’t know it. Being a paralegal, educating, and helping people through, I did when people got injured and hurt and helped them through that. That was the start of me counseling. I just didn’t know it at the time.

Carrie: Yes, there’s so many overlaps, I think, between counseling and education and problem-solving. I’m sure that there were things that problem-solving that you had encountered, so I could see how all of the skills would be beneficial.

Judy: Right. I had finished grad school, and I was disappointed because I wanted to work in a Christian counseling agency. Once you spend the time and the money to get your degree, you have to spend extra hours to be able to get your independent licensure. That’s where, at least where I was living, they all wanted independent licensure, and I’m like, “How do I get that if I can’t get that?” It was a quandary. I still worked at the law firm that I was looking at for a bunch of years, and I opened this out of my house. I did evening counseling out of my house. Shortly after I started, there was this woman who came to me and said, “Well, I know I have OCD. I was diagnosed with it years ago. I’ve had treatment at some of the well-known facilities. I now live in my area. So do you think you can help me?” She explained her obsessions and compulsions, and I’m like, “Fascinating. Okay, so when you do this and you do this, then it ends up like this. If you do this instead of this, does it go like this?” She’s like, “Oh my gosh, I have never heard anybody get it who did not have OCD themselves.” I could just get it. It was definitely a gifting from God too. I understand the logic of OCD, which has a lot of logic in and of itself if you understand the root part of it. Once she recommended that, and I started working with her, then I read Jonathan Grayson’s Freedom from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. I’m doing everything in the book; I already organically knew what to do and how to walk people through that, which was really exciting. I found my path away. So I eventually took the International OCD Foundation’s Behavioral B2BI training. I spoke at one of their Annual conventions, gave continuing education conferences in Columbus where I was at the time. It just really happened from my niche in my area. Now, 22 years in January, that has been my specialty.

Carrie: That’s awesome. I always used to tell counselors that I was supervising, your specialty kind of finds you; you don’t really find it. I didn’t necessarily think that I was going to be working in the areas that I’m working in now, but I’m happy that God has brought me along this path. Mine kind of branched out of working with anxiety, and once you see enough people with anxiety, you’re going to eventually run into some people with OCD, and it looks a little different.  You have to kind of readjust the toolbox and reexamine some of the things that you’re doing. We talked on that previous episode about creating hierarchies in ERP, the idea behind it that you’re exposing yourself to some things that are uncomfortable, starting with some smaller things and then gradually building up to the scarier stuff. You use a helpful analogy with your clients about a haunted house. Will you go through that with us? Just kind of like you would tell a client.

Judy: ERP, exposure response prevention, seems like anybody who’s heard about it has horror stories that it’s going to be so hard, so scary. But using the framework, thinking about a haunted house, if you’ve ever been to an actual haunted house, there are two things that you know to begin with. 

Number one, you know that nothing in the haunted house is designed to physically harm you. You walk in with that kind of knowledge. Second, the reason why people go to haunted houses is they like the uncertainty. They like the thrill that you get when somebody bumps out, and you don’t know or a noise, and you don’t know when it’s going to happen. You get this feeling, this anxiety. I call it anxiety because it would make me have anxiety, but other people are like, “That’s a thrill.” They get this thrill going on. The first time you walk through a haunted house, it’s full of uncertainty. You don’t know what’s going to happen, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t continue to walk all the way through and get out the back door. 

The good news for us is that God created a program in our brains called the habituation program. I like to call it Pac-Man. I just like the visual. So you’ve got OCD going, “Scary!” and then we’ve got a big old Pac-Man coming up, and we want to close scary down organically by inside, not us internally doing compulsions or something, but letting Pac-Man do that. The way that happens is if you walk through a haunted house the first time, it’s the scariest because you don’t know what to expect. You walk out the back door, come around the front, you walk through the same haunted house three times; you’re not going to be as scared by the 10th time. Pac-Man’s closing it down, closing down the anxiety to the accurate threat level, which generally is zero. But it closes it down so by the 10th time; it’ll be pretty funny. You walk through it; “Oh, the guy with the fair is going to show up. Yeah, then they’re going to dangle these things and go, ‘Boo!'” You can make fun of it, even if there’s still some level of nervousness in there. If we use humor in that way, like, “Oh, this is going to be silly, funny, scary,” it allows your brain to have that Pac-Man to start readjusting what is true about the threat level and close down the feeling, that adrenaline surge that you get, that feeling of anxiety.

Carrie: Talk about that a little bit more, just the inaccurate threat level related to OCD. Like OCD is telling you that something is going to be super scary, horrible, awful, but like your brain is malfunctioning there.

Judy: Yes, and that is key to OCD versus generalized anxiety disorder. With GAD and other anxieties, there’s still a thought where, “Oh, what if?” kind of thing to it, but your brain is able to quickly, if you use some logic, use some cognitive behavioral stuff, kind of, “Is it really true? Is that really that scary? Has that happened before in the past?” If you use some of those CBT kinds of things, generalized anxiety, your brain is like, “Oh yeah, that’s not really true. Calm down,” but when it’s OCD, it’s like, “No, maybe not that one, but another one and another one and another, and they pop up all over the place like that.” So the key, in terms of understanding if you have OCD, is the inaccurate thread. I call it a malware virus program in your brain. 

If you think of your brain like a supercomputer that God made that always has this underlying operating system running, just like your technology, you’ve always got an operating system running underneath in our brain; that operating system is currently using our senses. What we see, taste, touch, hear, smell. It’s looking for data. Internally, the data it’s looking for are thoughts, feelings, body sensations, and observations. The way it was designed is that if we get one of those pieces of data that pops up, it’s a neutral piece of data initially that brings it to the first program in your brain in the frontal cortex. That program’s design is to say, “Is this piece of data a threat or not a threat?” Definition of threat is jumping out of a plane without a parachute. That is the only definition. There is no other definition that goes with threat. Anything less than that is on a continuum scale of something that don’t really like, gross, that’s really terrible, but none of those are threats. That’s where the malware virus program of OCD gets in there and cherry-picks and hijacks the things that matter to us and skyrockets the threat and says, “Oh, there’s definitely going to be a threat here.” Then it starts pushing those buttons with adrenaline and neurotransmitters, makes you feel like there’s something going on. 

The urgency of now, we have to do it now, we have to figure it out now, know it now. All of that works together to combine to keep the threat being imminent, urgent, right now. That’s the part that with OCD there is no factual evidence that is what is actually true right now. You just think it and feel it, and therefore you feel like you must. Do something to fix it right now, going over and over because you do, you respond to it as if it actually is a threat. Then you create those neural pathways saying this is always a threat.

Carrie: That’s a really great explanation. Originally when I went to a two-day training in ERP with some people from Rogers and I got. Nothing against Rogers, by the way, it was just the training specifically really turned me off to ERP because there were a lot of extremes just we’re going to ban this behavior. You’re not going to be allowed to wash your hands at all, or you’re not going to be allowed to pray because you’re confessing too much to God.  I walked away just feeling not only was this very rigid, but I felt like I was being asked to torture people. And I’m curious, what you’ve done is kind of taken some of these principles and used the scientific evidence of what you’ve learned and yet added humor and made it more fun or let’s laugh at OCD or make fun of it. Tell me about some of those things that you incorporate with your clients.

Judy: I feel like that ERP, if you understand from a faith-based perspective, you know, how God made us and the interaction, learning how to do ERP is very much the same sanctification journey that we want to do in life anyway. We’re always those concepts, the broader concepts of struggling with our fleshly nature. Paul was talking about doing the things he doesn’t want to do and can’t do the things that he wants to do. That sounds very much like doing ERP to me, always has. That’s why I view it in that way. I’m looking at what is the root issue here. And the root issue is that the malware virus is scaring me. That’s something that matters to me is really big and scary. It tells me I should take care of it. I should do it on my own, which is the opposite of what we want to do in a faith-based journey. Yes. In a faith-based journey, we always want to bring God into things. We want to wait on God. We want to hear the truth that God gives us rather than us going ahead and trying to fix things or do it all on our own. So to me, that always made sense in terms of how I do ERP. 

I honestly don’t ever care if somebody who’s afraid of germs is able to reach out, grab a doorknob, and open the door. I really don’t care if they do it with their hand or paper towel. What I do care about is actually finding the courage to get through the door to find out. That really was their brain just scaring them about something and then they’re like, Well, I’m gonna let you do that to my life. I don’t need a paper towel. I’m just gonna keep on moving through. So attitude, that’s the attitude is one of the things that I feel like helps move us through things when we’re nervous and anxious and scared, kind of thing. That way of, let’s go, Jesus, the Rodney staff is with me, let’s go, let’s move it on, get to the banqueting table on the other side. That’s what I’m looking for, is the ability to have somebody be empowered to walk it out. 

Humor and creativity is one of the things I see in the Bible so much. Think about, there’s some amazing, interesting things that, how God does things in the Bible. The biggest one to me is Jericho. Seeing how they won Jericho. That worship band is out front, and all the people are behind singing and worshiping God, and then the walls fall down, like, oh my gosh. 

There’s other things, and I see other stories about how God used different people or situations. We’re very creative that we’re not the norm of how you do that. And that’s what works because God is showing that there’s all of these interesting creative ways of doing things. What I found is humor is really helpful if we can look at OCD. I have people come up with separating OCD as a separate entity and making a Fred Flintstone or one of the funny cartoon characters so that you can like, Fred, I don’t know anything about this thing, germs, or my relationship thing here, Fred Flintstone, what now? Um, and even though inside they’re going to feel like all of this, if you can make fun of OCD in that way and get your family member to say, you leave my wife alone, and then they’re both laughing and the laughter brings that level of urgency and oh no, and oh, it brings it down because you’re like laughing at it. Like you are ridiculous. You just think and think, or “Honey, I think you do,” Yes, you’re the worst thing in the world, being dramatic or silly or whatever. Doing it in these creative, silly ways really helps us as people to move towards something scary long enough for our brain to figure out, like, close it down. It’s not really actually that scary.

Carrie: Yes, I think of the two guys in the Muppets that are up in the balcony, and they’re just yapping around or somebody that’s heckling a comedian, you have that internal heckler, and sometimes it’s helpful to, like you said, create that separation, because it all feels like reality when you’re in what they call the OCD spiral, it just feels like everything’s so real now, but if you’re able to step back and even say, OCD is telling me that I’m going to get sick and die if I don’t do this, or if I go out in public and do these things, Then that helps you kind of create some of that mental separation. I think mindfulness and other activities that we teach clients thought diffusion helps with those things as well.

Judy: It’s really important how God made us and that’s one of the things that I always look for is something that’s sort of organic to how God made us rather than something so rigid and like you said extreme that they’re not, we actually have OCD or not we’re like, that sounds way too far. I would never do that kind of thing. I just feel like that people lost. That’s a little bit too much of the traditional ERP and that makes me sad in terms of understanding that if you work with somebody and with the way we were designed, that it actually helps us to go with the flow. One of the things that when I customize ERP for each client, I always want to find out about their background, things they’re interested in, who they are, if somebody is competitive, say in sports or something. 

I had a teenage client that was like a volleyball player. I’m having her visualize and practice spiking the ball into OCD’s face when it’s trying to give her a hard time because that’s a natural thing that she does and she can use it quickly to say I still feel all of this but I’m going to picture OCD standing there and I’m going to slam this ball in his face. If you’re a sports fan like me and you have your rival teams and you’re like, Oh, that rival team is not going to beat me. No, come on, buddy. You can’t beat me at all. I become animated and silly on purpose so that I can show my client that they can be animated and silly in terms of that. 

We use whatever types of things in that person’s life that they can use as a strength and empowerment strength to stand firm and be able to give some sass and give some, like, you are not the boss of me, give that one to kids a lot. You’re not the boss of me, which they love because they can’t tell that to their parents. They can tell that to OCD.

Carrie: Yes, I love it. I could see my daughter getting in on that if she had all those words right now. She would probably say that. “You’re not the boss of me.”

As far as like traditional ERP versus using humor and creativity, a lot of times I’ll have people just kind of sit and wait it out, right? Like, let’s wait for this anxiety where you’re trying to make the anxiety board, I guess, traditionally kind of wait it out. So you’re using some visualizations with people or. Some other, like, creative techniques where they can visualize and imagine themselves overcoming OCD in that process.

Judy: When you’re just waiting in the midst of it, you’re white knuckling. I hope it goes away soon. I hope it goes away. How long is it going to be? Is it done yet? Is it still here? When is it going to go away? That does not facilitate habituation, that doesn’t give the room for Pac-Man to go and close things down. We have to approach it, even kind of fake it till you make it, in a more empowered kind of stance. So that’s where, come up with a bunch of different ways that somebody can be active, but active exposing themselves and going towards OCD, and active while you’re waiting for that Pac-Man to do its job, rather than just sitting there and white knuckling. and stuff. 

One of the ways that you can do it is that you can say, “Oh OCD, I’m so glad you showed up. You’re such a good guy. I’m glad you’re showing up today. Let’s watch some TV. Do you want some popcorn? I’m not going to talk about what you want to talk about. Talk about TV. Let’s just look here. Oh yeah. You want to talk about this? Eh, don’t really want to talk about that. You can hang around all day you want, but not going to talk about that. Let’s talk about making sandwiches. What kind of meat do you like on your sandwich? What kind of pizza toppings do you like? No, I’m not going to talk about what you want me to talk about. Let’s talk about ice cream flavors or something.”  That is a more just calm, peaceful way for folks that like to be just kind of chill, calm, peaceful. 

You’re accepting that OCD is there. You’re just refusing to talk about what it wants to talk about. You can move it on to being something like I said before, kind of dramatic, real dramatic. This is such an important thing. “Oh my gosh, you are so helpful, OCD. Tell me every little thing. I don’t quite understand how you know. Do you have a question? It’s a hotline to find. Are you on the psychic hotline? Maybe you’re on the psychic hotline. Maybe I didn’t know that you knew all of those things.”

 Some of this like making fun of it, talking about what you’re not gonna take me on, you’re the opposite team. Any of these kinds of ways where you’re active, you’re active in doing ERP, which means you’re keeping your focus on OCD is there, um, looking at your OCD, I’m talking to you, but I am not talking about the topic that you want me to talk about because that thick is your inaccurate threat level on something, I’m not going to go there, you don’t have a driver’s license. You don’t have legs, and you don’t have arms, and you don’t have a face, and you don’t know how to drive. And kind of make it sort of funny that way. You’re being active while you’re waiting for the habituation to happen.

Carrie: You had talked about in your training singing silly songs like Old MacDonald or just other goofy songs.

Judy: I always have to make sure the clients understand there is, any school can be used as a compulsion, so anything you say or do can be a compulsion. Of course, the definition of a compulsion is doing something to make you feel better to avoid and get away from the anxiety, but anything can be an ERP tool as well. 

There are some people that are very behavioral that say you can never sing a silly song or you can never talk about pizza to things. Because it’s always a compulsion, and I disagree, you can use anything to say, “I’m going to look you in the eye, and I’m going to talk about that instead, because I get to talk about what I’m going to talk about.  This is my brain, this is my body, I’m going to talk about what I want to talk about”, and such. You’re using it to expose yourself, where OCD is trying to pull you to its topic, and you’re like, no, not going there. I feel it, not going there. That’s the key, the habituation. It’s not to have your hand on the doorknob for 24 hours without washing your hands. I guess maybe that eventually gets there. But it’s this struggle, this fleshly nature struggle, that where we choose to live by faith in that way, I’m not giving in to our feelings and our thoughts and our worries. As we do that, and we’re an intentional participant, that’s what makes that work better.

Carrie: Yes, I love that verse that talks about working out your salvation with fear and trembling because it’s God that works within you because we have a part and God has a part. One of the things that you and I run into in working with Christian clients is we’ll have people ask us or say things like, I’m praying, I’m waiting for God to take this away, and we’ve talked a lot about healing on the show. We’ve talked about various theologies and prayer and different aspects, but I love what you talk about with this being part of the sanctification process, because whether you have OCD or not, we’re in a struggle with our own minds on a day to day basis regarding are we going to be focused on the things of God and what God wants us to do? Are we going to be focused on sin and self and what other things that are negative? It really kind of fits in line with that sanctification process. What would you say to someone who says, “I just don’t understand. I’ve prayed and why hasn’t God just healed me from this yet? Or Why isn’t he helping me more through this process?”

Judy: What I’d say is that has to go back to our understanding of our role in God’s role and who he is. We have to broaden that picture too.  The Bible is very clear. Our thoughts are not God’s thoughts. We do not have the understanding, whether it’s about something in our personal life, or why God allows terrible things in the world, and such. It has to go back to, we always make the choice of, are we going to be the ones trying to figure it out and try to get God to answer to us about things that we don’t understand and figure out or if we understand the parental way of doing things. 

If you’re a parent, you understand that there are things that you say you can do with your child that they won’t get. They don’t understand because their age, their developmental age, or they haven’t walked through something yet. We know why we’re asking them to do or not do something, and they just think we’re being mean and they don’t get it and they don’t understand. To me, that’s parallel. “I don’t understand why you don’t take this away from me. I don’t understand why you allow things in the world. That causes me in my immaturity, that’s where I think that comes into our immaturity, back to sort of childishness of like, “I want to understand, I’m going to demand that I have to understand. I demand that you explain it to me”, whatever that might be, which includes that, “why haven’t you healed me” kind of thing, then our immaturity comes out and that’s what I think some of that’s a design to show that coming to the surface again, our fleshly nature is coming to the surface rather than saying, I choose to believe God is my heavenly father, who’s created me and loves me unconditionally therefore, everything he does is for my good. Even though it doesn’t feel like that and they don’t see it that way, I choose in faith to trust that and just walk out. I need to walk out day by day because that’s how I get to a healthier place that God wants me to be. That’s now how we get maturity is choosing to walk it out in faith even when we don’t see that may or may not change at any point in time.

Carrie: How do you work with clients dealing with scrupulosity, who are having some of these difficulties with trusting God, with the uncertainties of our faith and life?

Judy: I have a lot of folks who are like, what if, what I’m thinking or feeling, or even the thoughts that I have are sinful and if I’m not pushing them away, talking about not pushing away the scary thoughts or I’m not reacting to them, then that means, in their mind, that means I’m not faithful, I’m sinning because I’m not trying to push things away.

I go back to the broader concept. We talk about what is their view of God. How do they see God as in a punitive way, as their Heavenly Father? If they’re parents, well, if your child thought this about you, would that be accurate? That kind of thing. Have them understand that this one area that they are worried about doesn’t overshadow all the other things that they actually believe about who God is and how God loves and cares for them.

It’s just out of their fear and anxiety that they want to go out that they want to get certainty and know for sure but nobody has that nobody has that we’re humans and so we don’t have 100 percent certainty of anything honestly about God this side of heaven we really don’t we would like to say we do and folks with especially scrupulosity but let’s see they feel like but my friends or my family say they know what’s Certainty that God loves them or they’re going to have it or whatever they are so certain, well, yes, but no. Nobody has actual sexual certainty and our feelings about anything. If you ask that family member and you track their feeling of certainty from our, to our day to day, year to year, that would change too. It’s just a, a way of speaking at any given time about where we are. feelings but feelings do not equal truth. I broaden it back to how do they want to live out their faith? Do they want to live it out as a faith based journey where they’re walking you know and taking risks in faith or do they want to be the one that trusts in chariots and their own manpower and their own knowledge and their own understanding?

I always bring people back to which one of those two do you want to live out? Well, right now you’re trying to live out your own understanding and getting answer knowing for certain and such and nobody has that, so you can keep doing that if you want your life to keep feeling like this versus choosing to take this risk.

Carrie: I think that normalization of doubts and normalization of uncertainty is huge because in certain faith circles, there are things said like, do you know that you know that you know that you know that you’re a Christian and do you know, you know, you know you’re saved and that’s probably like the worst thing that you could say to someone with OCD because we all have to live with a certain level of uncertainty and unanswered prayers and not knowing. We’re not going to know everything, like you said, and we have to accept that, that we’re in the child space in our relationship with God, and we may not know all the ins and outs and the whys and so forth.

I think this episode is going to be really great and helpful for people who are dealing with all different kinds of OCD and maybe some people that are even in ERP therapy that can utilize some of these strategies that you’ve talked about to help them create a little bit more lightheartedness about it and not have to engage with it in such a serious, like you said, scared manner.

People are scared to engage with this type of therapy sometime. I think your presentation and dealing with other mentors that I’ve had have kind of helped me soften a little bit towards my ERP initial standoff ed ness that I had at the beginning of learning about it, I thought, this maybe, I don’t know that I can really do this, but it just kind of opens a doorway for me to be able to integrate some of these things with the clients that I’m working with.

Judy: Yes, at the beginning, the first couple of years, I had somebody, again, not to nullify Rogers, but who was in the Rogers program, and they contacted me for follow up care, and what they wanted me to do was come to their house, time them taking a shower, make sure they got out of the shower on time, and then time them when they were washing their hands to make sure that they got out of it because that’s what they did at Rogers. I did that for a couple weeks and I’m like, this, I can’t, no, I don’t believe in this. I don’t think this is going to help you long term. Have a babysitter stand there and watch you do these things. That’s not how you’re going to learn. You need to learn how to underline. I don’t want this for my life.  I’m not going to let you OCD do this for my life. So I’m going to find some way to give you some sassiness. And some silliness because I don’t want to live this way. That’s what I can provide to people and that has made such a difference. I am so blessed. I feel so blessed and thankful to God that every day I help people get out of these terrible places, these prisons, these torment place because I can help show them the pathway is that God designed this already that there is a way to get there and that you can do it. There is hope. That’s what we bring to folks is the hope that life can change, things can change and God already has it in your head. Let’s go use what God gave you to be able to get you out of this terrible place.

Carrie: Awesome. Well, we’ll put a link to your NoCD profile in the show notes. And I know you’re licensed in several states so people can. Look you up and see you as a option if they’re in one of those states, so that would be awesome too.

Judy: Not bragging, but I have written some books, so if you want to go on Amazon and my name is Judy Lair. I have a series called “Freedom from Fear.” There’s a specific book on OCD. There’s also one in Generalized Anxiety Disorder and one on stress and worry because men do not have anxiety, they might have stress and worry and then have a big one that talks about my journey with anxiety. It also talks about OCD and, and how I’ve come through all of that in the background I came through, how I got here. That talks about my faith and looking at faith in terms of that. You can go on Amazon and find those things if those are helpful resources.

Carrie: Yes, that’s awesome too. I forgot you were an author, so it’s good to put that in at the end. All right, thanks for your time today. 

Judy: All right, Carrie.Thanks!

__________________

Carrie: I wanted to let you all know that we have a new freebie on our website called How to Handle Difficult Thoughts. You can find this at www.hopeforanxietyandocd/free. We have several different free downloads that you can benefit from there, but this download specifically is to help give you a little bit of a taste of our mindfulness course coming up.

This is to give you a little taste of “Reclaiming the Mind: Learning to be Present.” One issue that a lot of clients talk to me about is having racing thoughts, not being able to know how to slow their mind down. Mindfulness is a great way to do that, so this course will be launching soon, and if you get our emails, you’ll be finding out all about it. I Can’t wait to share it with you. 

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.

110. Healthy Conflict with Janeen Davis, PsyD, MFT

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

In this week’s episode, Carrie is joined by Dr. Janine Davis, an expert in conflict psychology and biblical conflict resolution to discuss how to handle conflicts in a healthy way, emphasizing the importance of self-reflection and grace in resolving relationship challenges.

Episode Highlights:

  • How to navigate relationship challenges with grace and understanding.
  • The practical wisdom of the Peace Pursuit model for resolving conflicts.
  • The role of self-reflection in achieving genuine peace in relationships.
  • Strategies for fostering open communication in difficult conversations.
  • Practical steps to promote forgiveness and reconciliation in conflicts.

Episode Summary:

In this episode of Christian Faith and OCD, I’m excited to welcome Dr. Janeen Davis from Purpose and Peace Solutions. Dr. Davis brings extensive experience in member care counseling, especially for those in overseas missions. Her work in supporting individuals facing challenges like anxiety, depression, and conflict resolution within ministry contexts has been transformative, and I’m eager for you to hear her insights.

Dr. Davis introduces the concept of member care, a holistic approach she’s practiced for over a decade while living in Asia. She supports missionaries who often face unique stressors, such as cultural adjustments and relational conflicts. Her commitment to finding practical solutions led her to adopt the Peace Pursuit model, a systematic approach to conflict resolution that has proven highly effective in ministry settings.

A key takeaway from our conversation is the importance of self-reflection in resolving conflicts. Dr. Davis emphasizes that true peace begins with examining our own hearts and motives, shifting the focus from trying to change others to understanding our role and inviting God to work within us.

We also discuss how past wounds can influence present conflicts, making it crucial to recognize and address these triggers with grace. Dr. Davis shares practical advice on discerning when to confront conflicts and when to extend grace, reminding us that through prayer and self-examination, we can approach conflicts in a way that fosters healing and reconciliation.

Related links and Resources:

Purpose and Peace Solutions

Explore other episodes:

73. What are Boundaries and Why are they Important? with Erica Kesse, LPC-MHSP

Transcript

Christian Faith and OCD episode 110. A lot of what we talk about on our show is healthy relationships, as well as reducing shame and increasing hope for people who are dealing with anxiety and OCD, we wanna say Happy New Year to everyone as this is coming out on January 3rd. 

Here on the show with me today, I have Dr. Janeen Davis, who is of Purpose and Peace Solutions. She does a variety of different things, so I’ll let her tell a little bit more about herself and what she does.

Janeen: Thank you, Carrie, for the intro and yes, Purpose and Peace Solutions is hopefully aptly named because in all the different ways that I work with people these days, I think that does reflect the heart of what we’re after.

I do a lot of what I call member care counseling these days, and that’s because that’s the term that we often use overseas on the mission field. When we’re working with people overseas, we call it member care.  I’m not sure why we call it that other than that. A lot of times we’re dealing with everything that life throws at us.

There are no parameters, there are no insurance companies. We’re not dealing with things in that way. We’re dealing with people living cross-culturally, who might be struggling with how to secure a visa to continue living in their country, or wrestling with their call to ongoing overseas ministry, or wrestling with anxiety, depression, OCD or acute traumatic events that they go through. And so because it just runs the gamut of situations and ages and family, individual ministry teams, all that stuff, we just call that member care. That is a lot of what I’ve been doing. Well, that’s primarily what I’ve been doing for the past more than a decade.

I’ve been doing overseas ministry myself and living in Asia since 2007, but shifting into a member care-focused role, and then supervising a team of member care providers throughout all of Asia, that’s been my life for so long, that when I got stuck in America, because I had to evacuate during COVID, It didn’t occur to me to change that framework of just really like holistic care and looking at people’s what does life look like on the ground for you, what is your local situation like, what’s your family situation like, as well as the maybe specific thing that they’re expressing the need for and asking for help for. I do a lot of that. That’s just one answer. That’s just one part of it, but kind of introducing that term, I feel like it may be necessary because it’s oftentimes just associated with overseas work and I brought that to where I am now based out of Nashville, but still providing care full time for overseas cross-cultural people working in ministry around the world.

My work schedule is crazy. I usually start at 5:30 or 6:00 am with sessions because of time zone stuff.

Carrie: How did you become interested in helping Christians on the mission field resolve conflict? Was this something that you had encountered a lot or you had seen this was a common occurrence, something that people were bringing into their time with you?

Janeen: I like the way you phrased that because you’re including so many components that were so relevant. I didn’t even say the thing about conflict resolution, but that did arise out of my work in a cross-cultural ministry context because, well, I’ll say it like this, we can see a correlation between interdependence and conflict potential. What I mean by that is the more that we depend on other people for our basic needs or basic core aspects of our life, the more there is potential for conflict and that is particularly true on the mission field, where sometimes there’s only one other family in your village who speaks English.

Our need for one another to kind of be our whole social support in the way that we want it is really high when options are limited. The more that we need another person who didn’t necessarily sign up to be our best friend or to like to play board games at night to decompress or whatever. They didn’t necessarily sign up for that and yet if we come to them with those expectations, then it just increases the opportunity for conflict. That’s just the lighthearted things. 

In my experience working overseas. Of course, we see the full gamut of the human experience. People are going to struggle with things regardless of where they’re living and working. We also see conflict arise in a way that’s problematic and distracting and destructive for this kind of work because if people can’t be in the right relationship with one another, then how can they even really claim to be disciples of Christ? I mean, Jesus said, don’t know, they’ll know you’re my disciples if you have a love for one another in John 13:35. So that’s really a big deal and something that we have to work through. We can’t do ministry together if we’re not speaking, you know, there’s tension. Everybody feels that. So in my experience, conflict has been the most difficult or even untreatable issue, across the board and that’s partly because of its commonality and I just say that like as a general rule. My member care team and I would understand that when conflicts got severe to the point that leadership or management. However, you want to think about it.

We’re reaching out for help with mediation or something. They would want us to show up and help these people fix their problems like help them resolve their conflict It’s the one thing that I didn’t want anything to do with, because we don’t have a gold standard of treatment for conflict. We don’t have a specific standard approach that consistently produces positive outcomes for relational conflict.

Ultimately, seeing that pattern and seeing that problem, but also seeing how persistent this is, like in the human experience, influenced the direction of my doctoral research in looking at like where conflict comes from. We need to have a better standard understanding of the nature of conflict so we can more effectively treat the right thing.

I think part of the reason conflict is so difficult to resolve is we’re often trying to fix the wrong thing. So all of that to say that it was a huge problem because conflicts constantly arise, and it’s extremely destructive in a ministry context where we are relying heavily on one another for work, personal needs, social needs, for kids, for adults.

We have to find a way to work this out. We can’t just part ways. We can’t just be like, I’ll just go to a church down the street. I don’t have to deal with you anymore. We have to deal with each other. We had to come up with something that worked, and we weren’t able to find it until I came across some materials called Peace Pursuit that had been circulating in the global ministry world for a long time.

When I got my hands on those materials, I could see that it was a systematic, really action-oriented, measurable process of working through conflict in a way that addresses conflict in different terms than I’d ever seen. Iit would produce new positive outcomes and I started using it in my organization consistently as in 100 percent of the time for the first year I was being called in to deal with really significant conflicts that had been going on a long time and using this model 100 percent of the time we would measure the success thrilling.

My passion for this ongoing work of helping people get this tool in their hands, know how to use it effectively and just know how to find peace in their own hearts, in their own lives from relational hurt and from wounds from the past in this way has come out of seeing it as a really huge need previously without a good solution on what we would call on the mission field or in an overseas context. Now I’m working in the States and have the privilege of getting to do a lot of training for ministries and for overseas organizations or local ministries in the States that want to help their staff or church staff or just local, any kind of office setting in a Christian context, equip their personnel or their staff with a really specific process of how to resolve conflicts well and reach peace no matter what.

Carrie: What I like about it is that it starts the conflict resolution process with you and God really praying, examining what is my part in this, is as you said, a lot of times we’re trying to solve the wrong thing, like we want to come to the conflict table and try to get that other person to change. But we don’t have control over that other person and what they’re doing. Ultimately, God is the one who can speak to their heart soften them and open them up towards resolution as well. I mean, that’s the spiritual component is very important there, I think, for people to recognize and understand. There’s also this element of you have different, I’ll call it a pathway. I don’t know if that’s what you would call it, but there’s a different pathway depending on if you feel like you’re the person who’s offended. if you feel like you’ve possibly offended someone else, or say you’re a third-party mediator and you’re not actually involved in the conflict. There are different systematic steps for each, depending on who you are in the conflict, to go through. I like that a lot because it’s very practical and step-by-step oriented.

Janeen: I think it’s great because you’ve clearly looked at these peace pursuit materials. That’s what you’re describing is this Peace Pursuit model of conflict resolution, we would say, It does start you out with a couple of things that are very, very unique that I’ve not seen in other models addressing this one is first asking people, do you want to resolve a relational problem? And the reason that that question is so important is because as we start to unpack it initially people will just say, “Yes, of course. That’s why I’m here. Yes, of course I do.” But then you already pointed it out. We want to do that by having the other person change or something like that. We want to do that by receiving the apology that we know that we are due, possibly, and that is the kind of mentality that keeps us stuck in conflicts when everyone else involved isn’t cooperating with our definition of peace. We have to really start checking our hearts right from the beginning with that question and realize it’s really challenging us to reflect, “Do I want peace or do I want to win?”

Carrie: That is a very good question.

Janeen: It’s a gut-wrenching question. We haven’t even started. That’s the first question of the process because we’re not going to start down this pathway until we’ve really made peace in our own hearts with even what the goal is if I’m trying to win, if I’m trying to build a case or develop some kind of amazing communication technique that will then open this person’s eyes to the wrong that they did and I will finally get my apology and that’s how I define peace then we’re going to be spending our time in a very different way, the common way. We’re going to do conflict resolution training on all these communication techniques because that’s based on a philosophy that conflict comes from just poor communication. That kind of, but no, not really because that would mean that every time someone doesn’t use “I statement” instead of “you statements”, it would consistently result in conflict, which of course it doesn’t because it comes down to our own heart, our expectations about the relationship.

Yes, so we start with that and then we choose our role. Am I the offended? Am I the offender? Am I a potential initiator where I just saw this go down and I want to help but I don’t want to make it worse and I want to stick my nose where I shouldn’t? Should I? Should I not? What should I say? And then, of course, the coach, which is for those of us in the counseling field, we’re often in a position to be a coach or at least potentially be a coach where we’re just utilizing these resources to help another individual, or maybe multiple people if we’re working with different people in the conflict, to help them reach peace.

All of that is such a fresh way of entering into the conversation. It really just starts to prime us to shift our thinking toward a more rational perspective because we’re going to be asked to describe the situation objectively, not emotionally, not using judgment labels on the other person or moral labels on the other person, like rudely or harshly or carelessly or whatever we might say as we’re describing the situation, but really starting to process back what happened and why exactly it was offensive to us or hurtful to us in the first place, not to justify our hurt, but to really start to understand the nature of the wound so that we can better understand how to reach peace, like, what does forgiveness need to look like in this situation, possibly.

Carrie: Sometimes the wound is that they did the exact same thing that your mother used to do, or your father used to do, or your ex used to do, and really taking that time to self-examine, recognize like, “Oh, okay, I’m getting triggered by past relationship stuff.” It’s not even have to do anything with this particular person, for this particular relationship.

Janeen: Yes.

Carrie: How do we know? I’ve kind of picked some questions for people who deal with anxiety surrounding conflict, and I would include myself in this somewhat. My husband and I do an anniversary episode every year, and we just talked about how I brought something up like, “Hey, I’m unhappy about this. And he said, “Yes, me too.” So then we had the opportunity to make changes in that aspect of our relationship, which was really beautiful. 

How do we know whether something is worth bringing up and addressing? Like, we all are, in the Bible, we want to extend grace to other people. And I know that I have bad days, and I know that other people have bad days.

How do I know if it’s like, okay, I just need to extend grace and just let that one roll off and move on, forgive them, or do I need to address this with this person? Do I really need to bring it up and say, “Hey, that hurt me?”

Janeen: Yes, I love the question, and I think there are a couple of different ways that we can look at this. First of all, it would be helpful if we realized that the Bible actually gives us three different options for how to respond to hurt. It’s not just “go” because sometimes we feel like the right thing to do is go directly to the person and talk to them directly about it. We also have a whole slew of passages that tell us it’s to my benefit to overlook an offense. Overlooking and just releasing those moments of offense is also an equally valid option. 

A third option is to just wait, watch, and see if a momentary offense was possibly a misunderstanding, a bad day, or discern if this is a pattern. Is this something where, for the sake of the other person or the relationship, the most loving and gracious thing to do is bring it up and bring it into the light and address it? Sometimes we need time to discern that we’re not going to know that from one incident. So that’s one thing to think about. The other is this significant shift or separation between my peace in my own heart and making wise decisions about how to best care for the other person and the relationship.

I think what we see in research, as well as practical, just realistic outcomes is I will get the best outcomes in my conversations with the other person in a relationship or speaking into issues in their life if I deal with them first in my own heart, rather than trying to find my peace through that conversation because then I’m bringing my needs into it. In addition to the topic that we’re talking about,  I’m putting extra pressure on that conversation if I’m trying to find my peace from that person, taking it well, not getting defensive, and understanding what I meant.  If I can come into that conversation already at peace in my heart from the Lord, then I’m going to be so much better positioned to speak in a way that the other person is more likely to hear and receive partly because I don’t have an agenda anymore other than just to love them well.

I think we’re trying to decide what’s the gracious thing to do. When should I go and speak with them about this? When should I kind of be merciful and just release them of this? I think one thing we’re looking at that we would want to look at is evaluating the seriousness of the offense. This would be like the Peace Pursuit model contains all this, so it’s really easy for me to answer this because all of these are steps in what we call stage one, this time that we spend with the Lord before we even decide whether or not to have that stage two conversation with the other person, is what we would call it. So we want to evaluate, what’s the nature of the offense? What are the potential consequences if I don’t say anything?

Carrie: That’s good.

Janeen: Really considering just a Philippians definition of love, where I’m considering the needs of the other person as more important than my own, as more significant, like I’m really taking into account what’s best for them, what’s best for the relationship and me.

 In making that decision, when do I bring it up? What should I bring up? What should I just let go? one thing we want to do is try to understand the nature of the offense. Could this rightly be called a sin? Is this not just about something that I didn’t like because it didn’t suit my preferences, but this is actually really impacting their relationship with the Lord? This is a moral issue. I think that’s important for us to understand because I think that should influence maybe how we think about what to address and what not to address and how to address it. Because if I’m really particular about how I want the dishes done, they know it. They already know it. We’ve already had a conversation about it and then they’re still not doing it. Well, at that point, do I think that they’re sinning against God or am I going to think of this like they’re not loving me? Well, because they’re choosing not to do what I ask, but then in my orienting definition of love is the whole world needs to do what I ask to love me well and like if people don’t do what I want, then they’re sinning because they’re not loving me well.

Even just like checking my own heart about that really is a humbling process because it often helps us to realize conflicts may be best understood as not a moral violation per se, but really as unmet or unequal expectations, and when I can reframe my offense or the thing that I want to address in terms of expectations, like what exactly did I expect them to do or not do, to say or not say, and then really work through a process of questioning my own expectations. Did we talk about it before? Have we ever talked about it? Or am I indignant because they should just know. I shouldn’t have to say it then that’s my issue really because I’m expecting them to read my mind. That’s not how communication works. That’s not how people know things. So then even right away in this process, if I’m thinking about it in expectations, like they should know that they’re not supposed to do that, they should know that whatever, if we’re thinking about dishes or something much more significant and impactful, we can also look at, okay, are my expectations legitimate?

We did talk about it, but is there any basis for my expectation that they do it my way? Reasonable is another one where it’s like, would another person in their context in their circumstance, is it reasonable for them to be on time? Even if they get a flat tire, like they should have just left early enough, even if they get a flat tire, they won’t be late.

Well, that’s not reasonable for people to live like that. 

Loving is the last criteria that we use to really question our expectations. Is this about my needs alone or am I even taking into consideration their needs and what’s best for them as I have expectations about this situation? Some of these kinds of questions, these self-reflective questions, as well as evaluating like what’s the nature of it? Is it miscommunication? Is it a cultural difference? Is it different in perspective? Is sin involved? These are really just reframing, we could call it reframing techniques, that help us to think about it in a way that is automatically going to just start cooling down the flame, that’s fueling that hurt, that’s just continuously fueling that offense.

As we think about the nature of the hurt or the offense differently, we can better understand what we want to say to them and why we want to say it, and that can really help us make the decision. If I want to say it so that they will know how bad they hurt my feelings, so that they’ll feel bad, that’s actually not great to elicit shame, essentially. That’s not a great reason to go, but if we’re able to forgive before the Lord, and just be humble before Him, and to receive our peace from the Prince of Peace, and really receive healing for these hurts, the real hurts, from Him and realize that I do have expectations and preferences. I’m not really able to make demands on that. So if I’m going to go for that reason, or if I’m going to go for a real moral violation issue that I want to speak into their life about, like an anger issue or something like that, I’m going now out of love for them, out of care for them. My motives are now different because I’m not going because I don’t like it.

You need to agree to never do this again. When we go like that, it’s like our needs are in their hands.  I think that is part of why conflict resolution is often so unsuccessful because we have seen something that we want that’s important to us, and we’ve put our well-being into the hands of the other person. So now we need them to agree and they might not agree. That’s just the reality is they may not agree. They might not do it the way we want. They may not apologize. Even if they were so wrong, they may never come to that point of repentance. If we’re stuck saying that, I can only find my peace if they give me what I need then that’s actually no way to live, Just the big picture. That’s such an external locus of control. And a lot of times that’s how we approach conflict resolution, as though if we do not reach this external satisfying outcome, then we’re not at peace, rather than I’m going to spend time with the Lord and just remember where my peace comes from and it is unshakable. From that point of view, now I can go to this person in love, and care for them, and the relationship, and the situation, and we can work it out, but I’m going to be okay either way because my well-being, my life, is in the hands of a loving, loving father, and not in this person’s hands. It’s like a whole worldview shift if we really keep going down this path.

Carrie: That’s awesome because when you talk about things like anger issues or someone maybe comes across a certain way and they may not even realize that that’s hindering, like you’re talking about on the mission field, that that’s hindering their ministry or how people are viewing Christ, then going to that person, they’re most likely If they’re utilizing that type of language or tone of voice with you. They’re most likely utilizing it with other people as well, so it’s not just going to help your relationship with them to hear that truth spoken in love. It’s going to help their relationship with other people and they’ll start seeing that like, “Oh yeah, I saw, I did that thing again in relationships.” and they can kind of catch themselves before as it’s happening in the moment.

Janeen: It’s so true. It’s so freeing and you were talking about anxiety relating to deal with conflict, which is so, so prominent because so many of us are afraid to address it at all because we don’t know what exactly to say to get the outcome we think we need. So we’re afraid if we say anything, it might just make it worse.

We don’t want to deal with it. A lot of times when I’m doing trainings, I’ll ask everyone, all right, who here is a conflict avoider? And almost everybody in the room would identify as a conflict avoider. And why is that? It’s because we don’t know. The conversation about conflict feels very, very risky. We don’t know if we’re going to be able to communicate in such a way as to elicit the response that we think we need. That’s why this approach I have found to be so incredibly effective and successful is because if I realize that the hurt and the conflict that I’m experiencing, I’m going to take that to the Lord, and I’m going to find peace there, and even only after that, will I even decide whether or not I should talk to the person. When I do go have that conversation. It’s just that it’s a conversation. It’s no longer a confrontation. I’m not going to them to meet my needs anymore. My needs are met. I’m at peace. I remembered who and who I am. So now I’m coming to them out of love, which means I know it can be successful. It decreases the perceived risk. Which is what we think of when we’re thinking about anxiety, right?  I’m afraid of an unwanted outcome. There’s something about this that feels risky, and I’m afraid of what might happen.

If I know that my so-called conflict conversation with this person is really just going to be a conversation given in love to them, and I’m already good, Then the risk, the threat, goes down. I don’t have to be afraid because I’m not going in hot, and I’m not going to try to work, I’m going to try to express the right kind of emotion strongly enough that finally they see, or finally they agree, or whatever.

I can just go in gently, and I’m going to have a different measure for success that’s guaranteed. Or that can be guaranteed, because now it all depends on me. Because I can go into that and say, this conversation will be a success if I say what God really put on my heart to say, no more, no less and throughout the conversation, I embody the fruit of the Spirit.

I just stay right before the Lord from start to finish. If I’m being obedient and expressing to them what I feel convicted to do, to say, and if I’m saying it in the way God commands me to say it, with kindness and gentleness and self-control.

Carrie: Yes.

Janeen: Not demanding, not aggressive. That’s all, those are things that depend on me. Those are choices that I can just choose or not choose. If I make the choice of what to say, and I make the choice of how to say it, and stay in that place, then really that’s the determinant of a successful conversation with them because it’s not going to base success on their response and that’s where the anxiety just starts to go down and down and down because now success is based on choices that I can make. So I can feel more confident of the outcome from the beginning.

Carrie: Yes,, I know I’m going to be okay regardless of how they respond because I’ve already gotten peace and I’ve already prayed through this process.

Janeen: Exactly.

Carrie: The Peace Pursuit has an app that people can download and go through that process together?

Janeen: Yes, it’s been something that we’ve been really excited about in this last year as it’s been in development. Yes, it’s at the Apple Store, the Google Play Store, a mobile app for phones or tablets that allows people to work through this process without any prior knowledge. Even that first question, “do you want to resolve a relational problem?” It really walks you through that and unpacks that right from the very beginning. You choose your role that I am the offended or an offender? Usually everyone is going to choose offended and that’s okay, but the app has all of the content that we would use in trainings and all of that, that allows an individual person to just start with the first part of the app and just start working their way through and making choices. It’s interactive and it just really leads you through this time to spend time with the Lord and then even prepare for that conversation and know how to evaluate it and know Kind of how to organize it even in very practical ways like, “Okay, what should I say first, second and third? How should I structure this conversation If that’s where I get to?” It has so much content in there, broken down into very small steps so that you don’t need any prior knowledge, and we’ve been really, really excited about how people are responding to it in just the first maybe month and a half now that it’s been available. So yes, absolutely. That’s been a huge step forward for peace pursuit.

Carrie: That’s awesome. Towards the end of the podcast. I like every guest to share a story of hope, since this is hope for anxiety and OCD. What’s the time where you received hope from God or another person?

Janeen: I’ve been thinking about something this week that’s just continued to be on my mind and come up in a couple different counseling conversations, actually. That’s what came to my mind first was this passage that I heard spoken about on Sunday, which is Colossians 1:16 and it just says, “For everything was created by him. In heaven, on earth, visible, invisible, whether thrones or dominions, rules or authorities, all things have been created through Him and for Him.” The reason that I find so much hope in that is because it’s this maybe paradoxical or ironic somehow thought, but I find it so comforting, which is that it’s not about me. I don’t have to define my life, or my value, or my worth, or my purpose in life, or my accomplishments, as though it was all about me.

 I am, in a way, so encouraged, and find so much hope in my life, knowing that I’m almost like a background character in someone else’s wonderful story. I get to be a worshiper, I get to be a part of this story, but it’s not about me. So I can enjoy the peace and the victory that comes from someone else’s accomplishments and the hope that someone else has provided for me, which is in the Lord and a future that’s already secure. I think those words have just been really powerful for me. I’ve been thinking about it this week. That all things were created by Him, through Him, for Him. I think maybe, I guess it just takes the pressure off. And seeing people that I’ve been working with in these areas, specifically in anxiety or discouragement in their lives, whether it’s overseas or here in the States. I find so much, maybe surprising, hope and relief in remembering that this is all for him. That kind of, in a way, all we have to do is just like, know who he is and what he’s done and cheer for that and just cheer. That’s it, that’s enough. And it just kind of takes, yeah, it just takes the pressure off. So I think that’s something that I really found hope in this week.

Carrie: Yes, it’s so very different from how our society functions where it’s all about me and it’s all about promoting myself and what am I doing and those types of things. I think that that’s great. I appreciate you sharing that with us and I hope people will check this out. You and I had met at the AACC conference and I talked with someone else that was at your booth who had said they use this in their lay counseling ministry at their church and have been able to work with like mothers and daughters or different family members that weren’t able to talk to each other before and now they’re actually able to utilize this and communicate with each other. So I think that’s great. That’s awesome.

Janeen: Yes, it’s wonderful to be able to give people hope in things like really deep or long-lasting relational conflict because I think sometimes that’s one of those topics where people feel like it’s lost, and it’s lost forever, and there is no hope, like specifically broken relationships. I really do think is one of those areas where people truly believe there is no hope. Some things are broken beyond repair, and so to find hope that, at the very least, we can reach peace in our hearts about this loss, rather than let it always be a hurt, an unresolved hurt, I think, oh, it’s so encouraging. And then to bring people together in that and see restoration happen, it’s really been a wonderful thing to be a part of, for sure.

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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 use of myself or By The Well Counseling.

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

109. What Christmas Teaches us about Managing Anxiety and OCD with Carrie Bock, LPC-MHSP

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

In our Christmas special, Carrie talks about the Christmas story and how it can help with anxiety and OCD. By connecting Jesus’ experiences with our own struggles, Carrie offers insights and understanding for a more hopeful holiday season. 

Episode Highlights:

  • Timeless lessons from Christmas to help you deal with anxiety and OCD.
  • How you can relate Jesus’ challenging times to your own struggles, especially those related to anxiety.
  • The role of Jesus as a counselor and the guidance of the Holy Spirit, especially during uncertain times.
  • The value of connection over absolute certainty in managing anxiety and OCD.
  • Tips on managing anxiety during the holidays (excerpt from Episode 55)

Episode Summary:

Hello and welcome to Episode 109 of Christian Faith and OCD! Today, we’re diving into a unique perspective: what can Christmas teach us about managing anxiety and OCD?

One of my favorite modern Christmas songs by Chris Risen says, “This is such a strange way to save the world,” and it truly was. Jesus, who could have saved us from afar, chose to enter our world—full of hurt, pain, and anxiety—to be with us, as Emmanuel, “God with us.”

Jesus, fully God and fully man, experienced everything from hunger to betrayal and even intense anxiety, like when He sweat drops of blood before the cross. This tells us that God understands our struggles intimately. When we feel isolated by our OCD or anxiety, we can remember that Jesus chose to live in this world and experience its difficulties, so He truly gets what we’re going through.

Jesus also showed us the ultimate example of humility. He could have come as a mighty king but chose to be born in a manger, living among common people. In a world that’s so focused on appearances and perfection, Jesus’s humility reminds us that it’s okay to be open about our struggles, whether it’s anxiety, OCD, or anything else. We don’t need to hide our flaws but instead can share our testimonies even in the midst of our trials, trusting that God is working through it all.

That’s what Christmas teaches us about anxiety and OCD: Jesus came to be with us, to model humility, and to guide us as our eternal counselor. Merry Christmas, and I look forward to journeying with you in the new year!

Check out related episode:

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD, Episode 109. What does Christmas teach us about managing anxiety and OCD? Before I hop into our topic today, I want to share with you some really exciting things that are coming up on the podcast—things that we’re working on for January, covering a variety of topics, including mental health topics and our physical health. We have several people lined up to interview in January that will carry us through a good chunk of the year, and I’m excited to share these interviews with you.

I’m also excited because next year, I’m going to be launching a smaller course on mindfulness. This is going to be an excellent course for anyone who’s struggling with any type of mental health issue, whether that’s anxiety, depression, OCD, difficulty focusing, or difficulty sleeping. These are the types of things that people are telling me they’re having problems with all the time. They want to know, how can I get better? How do I deal with these anxious thoughts? Well, the long and the short answer is mindfulness. It is going to help you with all of these different areas. Mindfulness is really about training your mind to focus on what’s actually happening right now, what’s going on in this present moment.

Mindfulness lets me become aware of what’s going on and also embrace a level of acceptance—acceptance over the things that I can’t change, acceptance over my feelings, whether I like them or not, acceptance over this thought process that keeps running through my head. I don’t have to continue to feed it, I just have to say, “Yes, I’m aware that that’s there, and it’s unhealthy, and it’s anxiety-driven, or it’s OCD-driven, and I’m gonna let it pass by and not continue to give in to that rumination cycle.” So that’s what our mindfulness course is going to be about. 

I have some things that I’ve worked on over the years—different recordings, different things that I’ve written out. I’m excited to be able to share those with you. It’s going to be a lower-cost offering for folks, just as kind of a good entryway.

It’s going to help people who are just starting out their therapy journey to help them increase awareness. Lots of good things coming up in the new year. Every year for December, we kind of take a step back, only produce maybe one episode, sometimes two, really just so that myself and those that work behind the scenes on the podcast can get a break towards the end of the year, regroup, and gather up.

This will be a little bit of a shorter episode. We’ve done some things in the past as far as how to handle anxiety and OCD around the holidays. So really, I asked my assistant to compile some of that advice, and that comes from Episode 55. And so we’re going to include some snippets from Episode 55 at the end of this episode, if some of those things would help you in terms of going to holiday parties and all of that.

What does Christmas teach us about managing anxiety and OCD? Well, one of my favorite modern Christmas songs is a song by Chris Risen. It says, “This is such a strange way to save the world.” And truly, it absolutely was. If you’ve been a Christian a while, you know, we have a tendency to just gloss over the Christmas story.

We’ve heard it so many times. And I wanted to talk today about how can we apply the Christmas story really to managing anxiety and OCD. And I know this may seem like strange or weird. Like, what is Carrie even talking about right now? One, Jesus chose to come and enter our world in Matthew 1:22-23. “Now all this took place to fulfill what was spoken by the Lord through the prophets. See, the virgin will become pregnant and give birth to a son, and they will name him Emmanuel,” which is translated as “God with us.” God could have saved us from afar. He didn’t have to come out of heaven to save us. God can do anything he wants to, but he chose to enter our world full of hurt, pain, misunderstandings, and betrayal.

He experienced all of these things so that you could be in a relationship with him. And Jesus needed to eat, and sleep. He had a full range of emotional experiences. He cried, including anxiety. Luke tells us that prior to going to the cross, Jesus’ sweat was like drops of blood, which only happens when you are in a very intense state of distress.

Jesus was rejected, he was betrayed by a close friend. Can you imagine Judas was hanging with the rest of the twelve for these years of Jesus ministry, and then this guy sells him out at the end? I mean, that’s awful. Sometimes we feel like we have this idea God doesn’t get it, he doesn’t really understand.

What I’m going through but through Christ he does on the earth Jesus was fully God and fully man our ultimate example of how to live how to be in relationship with others and I would say be in a relationship with God and ourselves as well just trying to figure out what it looks like to take care of our Human body and the needs that it has.

Jesus is still Emmanuel. He’s still God with us today, even in the worst of times, even in the midst of your most anxious moment when you feel like you are on the verge of a panic attack through negative thought spirals. Jesus is still with you. He never, ever leaves and because we have a savior who is familiar with suffering, Scripture even calls him a man of sorrows in Isaiah.  We have someone who understands and the devil is going to try to tell you lies that Jesus doesn’t understand your struggle. He doesn’t really know what it’s like to have OCD. That simply isn’t true. God created our minds. Jesus understood what it was like to experience those lies from the devil, even if just trying to elevate himself or break his fast.

If you go back to the temptation of Jesus, Jesus knows what it’s like to struggle mentally.

Point number two, Jesus was the ultimate example of humility for us. Jesus came into the world as a baby. He could have come down as a fully adult man, riding on a white horse, or even born into a king’s palace. Instead, He was born in a manger as a commoner. People looked down on him because he was from Nazareth, so he wasn’t even from the right part of town, so to speak. We live in this very self-centered, social media-driven world where people elevate themselves however they can. We’re constantly trying to look better than we actually are.

We elevate the positive and hide the negative, but Jesus didn’t try to hide where he came from or whose parents were. During his years of ministry, he traveled around, he stayed with various people. He didn’t have a home to go back to. He wasn’t seeking to be in the most coveted neighborhood or around the most important people.

He ate with tax collectors and sinners. One thing that’s really changed for me in the past year is that I care about inviting people into my home more than making sure my house is spotless. I grew up in a home where we weren’t super neat, except for when someone was coming over and then we just pretended like we lived that way all the time, I guess.

It seemed very incongruent to me because I would ask my parents, why are we cleaning up so much before people are coming over? And they would always try to hide it and say, no, no, we’re not doing it because people are coming over. We’re doing it because the house needs to be clean. And just having a toddler at home and everything that you try to do, they undo.

I’ve realized that inviting people into my home, having that community and that connection is more important to me as a value than making sure my house is spotless. I don’t even apologize for it anymore because this is my value, and I don’t need to apologize for my value. That’s a sidebar, but maybe it helps somebody this year, but the point was Jesus was about connecting with all different kinds of people, about inviting them to places and sitting down and having that community and that connection.

In a world where everyone’s trying to elevate themselves and hide their flaws, sometimes it’s okay in a safe space to say, “Hey, I struggle with anxiety or I struggle with OCD.” And you may not even understand what that means or what that looks like, but I want you to know that I’m working through it day by day with God’s help.

I’m seeking out these self-help resources, or I’m going to therapy, and it hasn’t completely gone away. It’s still here. It’s something I’m wrestling with, and God is still loving, and God is still good towards me. That’s an incredibly powerful testimony. We don’t want to share our testimony a lot of times until our trial’s completely over.

We’re like, “Yes, I’ll talk about that after Jesus delivers me from it. No, no, no, no. We need to be able to tell our testimony in the middle with faith and say, “Hey, I don’t know how all of this is going to work out right now, but I am staying connected to God and I love him. I’m reading the word. I’m seeking him out in the waiting and I’m trusting him with the plan.”

That’s what we need to be able to share with others. 

Three, Jesus was sent as a counselor. I love this. It’s my favorite thing. He left the Holy Spirit as our counselor inside of us. If you are in Christ, you have the ultimate counselor in Jesus. Isaiah 9:6, “For a child will be born for us, a son will be given, the government will be on his shoulders. He will be named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.” That doesn’t mean that you never need a human counselor. Obviously, I am a human counselor and we’re very pro-counseling on this show, but even after like years and years of training, all different kinds of clients, different scenarios, there are times in the moment where I’m like, “Okay, I’m just not really sure where to go here right now.”

It’s in those times where I’ve seen the Holy Spirit either guide me or guide the person that I’m working with, like, “Hey, maybe we need to go down this path. What do you think about that?” Or they’ll say, “Hey, I feel like this situation in my past is connected to what’s going on right now.”

I’m like, “Okay, great. God’s showing you that. Let’s go down that path.” The Holy Spirit has just guided the trauma processing many times when I’ve been working with people and talked to people and told them things in the midst of that. It’s incredible. Oftentimes we don’t know what we need. We don’t know how to meet the needs of others, such as even our spouse or our children.

I know for me, having a child has definitely increased my prayer life because I read the books and I listen to the podcasts, and I pray, and I read the Bible, but I’m like, “Okay, God, I do not know what to do with this child right now. Like, she is just outside the box, and I don’t know how to handle this.”

We don’t have all the answers, but the Holy Spirit does in anxiety and OCD. They want you to have an answer. They want you to have certainty right now, and sometimes that’s not actually what we need. It’s what we want. We want that certainty, but what we actually need is connection over direction. So if my daughter is hurting because she fell, or she’s hurting because she’s got new teeth coming in, it happens a lot. I’m not going into some kind of educational spiel about, “Let me tell you about teething and how your teeth are coming in right now. Let me explain the whole process to you,” because that’s not gonna benefit her. She needs a hug and she needs me to tell her, “Hey, I’m sorry that you’re hurting and it’s gonna be okay.”

We’re promised peace through prayer that surpasses all understanding and not certainty. God doesn’t say, “Pray to me and you’ll receive absolute certainty and never have any doubts.” That’s not what we’re promised in scripture. But our faith requires a certain level of faith. It requires a belief into the unknown.

You don’t have to understand everything about how the world was created to believe that God created it. You don’t have to fully understand grace to receive it. Thank God, because I don’t get it. It doesn’t make sense to me on a human level. God wants to have a personal relationship with you. And if you’re just happening upon this podcast, maybe you would say, “Yes. There’s a God, or I pray, or I’m a spiritual person”, but maybe you don’t have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ as written in the Bible, just please contact us and send us a message through the website; we’d love to talk with you more about that. That’s what Christmas teaches us about, anxiety and OCD.

Jesus came to enter our world; Jesus was the ultimate example of humility for us, and Jesus was sent as a counselor and left the Holy Spirit as our counselor and our guide.

 I’m going to pause from this piece, and you’re going to hear some information from our episode 55 if any of you are struggling on how to manage the holidays with anxiety or OCD.

Before we get into celebrating these important holidays towards the end of the year, I wanted to talk with you about surviving the holidays when you have anxiety because there are specific challenges that people with anxiety face in regards to parties, gatherings, gift giving, and that it can really increase your stress this time of year.

First thing I wanted to talk with you about is when you have anxiety, sometimes these large gatherings, even if they are family gatherings, there may be extended family that you don’t see very often, or you may be gathering with say like your husband’s coworkers and you don’t know them because you don’t work with them every day.

Sometimes those types of environments can be a little bit more anxiety-provoking. Knowing your limits and knowing when it’s time to go is important. If you’re with a friend, or spouse, or you rode with somebody, definitely knowing how to communicate to that other person that you would like to leave is important.

Sometimes you may have a code word or phrase that you want to use with your spouse, like, “Hey, don’t we need to get by such and such store before it closes? Oh, we really got to get home and let the dog out.” I’m sure that you can come up with something where you and your spouse will be on the same page and kind of be in line with each other, like, “Yeah, we’re ready to go.”

I find when I go to large gatherings, sometimes just taking a moment to sit down, maybe away from where the big crowd of people is, that really seems to help me in particular. So that may be something that helps you. Just standing requires a little bit more energy. I know that that sounds silly in itself, but you may just need to kind of take a miniature time out from all the activity.

You could go to the bathroom. You could step outside if there’s an indoor-outdoor element to this gathering. My overall point is that it’s good to have a plan going into some of these social interactions to help make them less overwhelming for you. You may not want to plan too much before the gathering so that you have time to rest and relax a little bit versus rushing from this thing to that thing to that thing if you’re traveling for the holidays.

It’s helpful to have a half a day to a day before your trip and then definitely a day when you get back before you have to jump into your work or school routine. Try to give yourself a buffer on the edges of your trips to be able to get things in order. You know, there’s always these last-minute things that we end up having to do before a trip or after a trip. We have laundry and different things that we have to do. Give yourself a little bit of a buffer of time if you can. If you’re going to reduce your stress around Christmas, you want to prioritize the gatherings and parties that are most important for you to attend.

Let’s talk for a moment about challenging family relationships. I’m not going to assume that you get along well with everyone in your family. And so some of those relationships may cause you stress. It’s important to know just internally within yourself how much of certain people you can handle. What I mean by that is that if you know you can only handle a day or two at a time around a certain person, don’t plan to spend five days with them. That’s just a recipe for disaster. Understanding that you’re an adult and you have a choice. You do not have to go and do all the things that you normally go and do.

Letting go of the have-tos is important. So many times we convince ourselves that we just have to do things that we don’t have to do. Don’t be afraid to say no if you know that what someone is asking you to do is going to be too much for you. We all have different limitations at different times in our lives.

Sometimes we’re going through things and we can only do so much and it’s okay. It’s really okay to acknowledge that to ourselves. It’s okay to communicate that to other people as well. No is a complete sentence. You don’t have to give a lengthy explanation. You can just say no or no thank you. So when you’re prioritizing your gatherings and parties, it’s very easy to get overloaded on these.

You just need to put everything on the calendar evaluate it and say, “Okay. Are we really able to give our time and energy to these things? Maybe we really want to invest more time and energy into our kid’s function, and maybe just make an appearance at the work party.” You know how that is, just kind of, “Yes, we’re going to show up a little bit later, say hi to a few people, be a part of maybe a gift exchange, and then head out.” That’s okay. It’s okay that you don’t have to be 110 percent for all of these events. Decide what is most important to you that you’re putting on your calendar. Let go of expectations that it’s going to be a perfect Christmas. The last thing I want to encourage you with, which is also very important, is to have a budget and stick to it.

Oftentimes, people overextend themselves at Christmas and go into all kinds of debt. It’s just not healthy. It causes us a lot of financial stress and, in turn, emotional stress. We have to be diligent about setting aside some for savings every single month so that when we get towards the end of the year, we have some money to spend on Christmas presents for the family and so forth.

If you sit down and budget, how much you’re going to pay for Christmas gifts, who it’s actually important to buy a Christmas gift for. I think sometimes we have this perception that we have to go overboard and buy a gift for every single person that we interact with, and obviously that’s not the case.

That’s the important thing to remember. It shouldn’t be out of obligation, you know, some families to help with finances will maybe draw names and each person gets a different person in the immediate family or the extended family. And then. That way we’re reducing the amount of money that we’re spending around Christmas and we’re also able to get good gifts for each other.

I think sometimes when it comes to holiday spending, we way overthink things or we make them more complicated than they actually have to be. So have a budget, and stick to it, that’s going to reduce a lot of your stress. I know it’s a little late to be saying save money, you know, throughout the year.

Now you know, going into next year, save a little bit of money every month for Christmas. It will help you out tremendously. You can put that towards presents, towards travel, if you’re having to travel with family. It’ll be great. And finally, let’s take the opportunity this Christmas, to not forget what it’s all about, we can get so caught up in making the food, attending the gathering, and spending time with people that we miss the point that Christmas is an opportunity for us to celebrate Christ’s birth is an opportunity for us to reflect on the fact that he chose to come into the world in the humblest way possible as a baby.

Don’t get lost in the commercialization that you forget the simple and that you forget what’s most important. If you have children, talk with them regularly about why you’re celebrating these holidays. Read the Christmas story, focus on those things more than opening presents. Find opportunities to give to others who have less than you.

I think this is such an important part of the Christmas season. You may be in a really difficult situation this Christmas, and may not feel like you have a whole lot to give. But I’m sure that even in those situations, there’s something small that you can do for someone else just to let them know that you care and that you love them.

Christmas is about love, joy, and giving to others. Let’s not lose celebrating our Savior’s birth. Let’s not lose our focus in the midst of all the activity. 

Thank you everyone so much for listening today and just standing firm with this podcast. Some of you have been around for a long time. Some of you are new.

I just wanted to let you know that recently we hit our three-year mark of doing the podcast in November. It’s been an incredible journey. So much has happened in my personal life, as many of you know, through this process, butI’ve been just totally blown away by how God has used us to impact people positively, to give them a sense of hope and encouragement.

We just received news that we have had 50,000 downloads. In that three-year span overall, which is really exciting, and we just love that some of you have shared the podcast with others as well. If you want to find out more information about what’s going on. With the show, and what’s going on with the mindfulness course coming up in 2024, please definitely get on our email list. We’ve got some great free stuff on the website for you to download. It’s www.hopeforanxietyandocd.com/free. Thank you so much for listening today.

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.

108. OCD Personal Story with Michael Kheir

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

On today’s episode, Carrie sits down with Michael Kheir, the author of “Waging War Against OCD: A Christian Approach.” Michael shares his personal experience with OCD, shedding light on the challenges he faced. He delves into how faith and a deep understanding of God’s grace were pivotal in his journey towards healing and recovery.

Episode Summary:

  • The importance of reducing stigma around mental health, particularly OCD and anxiety.
  • How OCD can lead to obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors, even over seemingly insignificant matters.
  • The impact of strict religious upbringing on OCD and the concept of legalism.
  • The power of understanding and embracing God’s grace in dealing with mental health challenges.

Episode Summary:

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD, Episode 108! I’m Carrie Bock, and today I have the pleasure of speaking with Michael, the author of Waging War Against OCD: A Christian Approach. Michael was kind enough to send me a copy of his book, which has been incredibly insightful for our discussion.

In this episode, we dive deep into Michael’s personal battle with OCD. He shares how his journey began in childhood and has evolved through adulthood. Michael has extensively researched OCD from both Christian and secular perspectives, and his book reflects this thorough exploration. He recounts a poignant story from his college days, where a seemingly small incident triggered a flood of obsessive thoughts and compulsions.

Michael also opens up about the stories he revealed for the first time in his book—stories he hadn’t shared with his family before. His openness underscores a crucial point: mental health struggles do not define our worth or intelligence. Instead, they are a part of our journey, and understanding this can help reduce stigma.

Michael’s reflections on his experiences highlight the importance of embracing God’s grace rather than being trapped by rituals and compulsions. This conversation is a powerful reminder that faith and understanding can guide us through the complexities of OCD.

Join us as we explore these themes and more. If you find this episode helpful, please subscribe and leave a review to support our mission of breaking the stigma surrounding mental health.

Related links and resources:

www.wagingwaragainstocd.com

More to listen to:

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

Transcript

107. Impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES) with Diana Rice, LMHC, CIMHP, CTP, QS

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

On today’s episode, Carrie sits down with Diana Rice, a licensed mental health counselor and certified integrative mental health professional. They delve into the impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and their relevance to anxiety and OCD.

Episode Highlights:

  • The impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) on mental health, with a focus on anxiety and OCD.
  • Diana Rice’s personal journey and her path to becoming a counselor.
  • The significance of the ACE study and its ten-question questionnaire for assessing childhood experiences.
  • The distinction between externalizers and internalizers in response to trauma.
  • Strategies for healing, including neuroplasticity and holistic well-being approaches.

Episode Summary:

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD, episode 107. I’m Carrie, and today we’re diving into the impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) on anxiety and OCD with Diana Rice, a licensed mental health counselor from Through the Valley Therapy in South Florida. Diana, whose journey from a peer counselor in middle school to a seasoned mental health professional is inspiring, shares her deep insights into how early childhood experiences shape mental health.

In this episode, Diana explores how her upbringing as an immigrant child and her ACE score of six have profoundly influenced her therapeutic approach. She reflects on how these formative experiences led her to seek an integrative approach to therapy, highlighting the importance of understanding one’s past for effective mental health treatment.

We also discuss the ACE study’s significant findings, revealing the correlation between high ACE scores and increased risks for chronic health issues and mental health disorders. Diana explains how ACEs can contribute to conditions like high blood pressure, diabetes, and addiction, emphasizing the need to address these early experiences for effective therapy. Diana’s insights into addressing underlying trauma, rather than just symptoms, provide crucial perspectives for managing anxiety and OCD effectively.

Related links and Resources

Transcript

Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD, episode 107. For anyone new to our show, we are all about reducing shame, increasing hope, and developing healthier connections with God and others. I have with me today on the show a licensed mental health counselor and certified integrative mental health professional, Diana Rice of Through the Valley Therapy in Florida. 

Carrie: Are you in the Miami area? Is that right?

Diana: I’m in South Florida. 

Carrie: Okay. Today, we’re going to talk about adverse childhood experiences. People may have heard them referred to as ACEs. I’m talking about how these things impact us, which is really relevant for conversations surrounding anxiety and OCD.

Diana: I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about your personal story in terms of just what led you to be the counselor that you are today.

Diana: Wow, I could say I could blame my middle school, my Broward County middle school that I went to. Honestly, my father’s family kind of kept me here. My mom is an immigrant from another country and my dad is as well.

I’m originally from New York, and when I came to visit one summer, they kept me, so I was in middle school and then I started middle school here. My mom ended up coming back, but at that time, she didn’t know her rights. It turned out for God’s glory, of course, because here I am now. But in seventh grade, I became a peer counselor.

I think that’s where my love of helping others plus, my mother’s only child and I have older siblings, but they’re from my dad’s side. I just wanted to help people. I could see now back in the past like I had to disentangle what was I trying to heal because of my background and what is actually my calling, how my personality is and what the Lord has given me to do in this place we call earth.

That’s where it all started, and in high school, I was a peer counselor. I remember they interviewed me in the yearbook and asked,, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” I’m like, “I want to be a psychologist.” That time, I was already doing the wrong thing. I wasn’t a Christian then. I was raised Catholic with Santeria, which is a religion. You guys could look it up, but be aware. It wasn’t as bad as you’ll see if you do look it up, but my grandma was a medium.

Carrie: Oh, okay. Wow, so that’s like two different worlds intermingled there.

Diana: Yes, so I had that kind of spiritual trauma along with other things. I know that we’re talking about ACE, adverse childhood experiences, and my score is a six. I did not know these things when they were happening because most of us when we’re growing up, we think that’s just the norm of what’s happening.  Everybody must be going through that plus our brains aren’t fully developed at that time.

Carrie: Right. I think a lot of people are just like, “Well, that’s just kind of how it was. That was the water we swim in. That’s what maybe all the neighbors were going through as well. Until we get outside of our box or bubble of how we grew up, we don’t really know that things can be different or are different for other children and teenagers out there.

Tell us a little bit about how you got interested in the ACE study because I think when you and I had chatted before, you said you felt like it was kind of a life’s work for you, just really understanding this and applying it in your counseling.

Diana: When I was in college, we have to do our practicum and our internship. I spent a year in a Broward County school that was cognitive-behavioral therapy-based. It is sort of an alternative school, but the students that were there, they were from other schools sort of got kicked out or they needed help and they had to be seeing a psychiatrist. At this school, that was my internship and I was basically for that year, the only intern, but there were like eight other therapists, a psychiatrist, and a couple of psychiatrists.

It was probably one of the best educational times of my life for that year. I learned a lot of what not to do as a therapist, the red tape and the understanding of insurance, sorta there. So basically I was just learning from a lot of different modalities of how people practice back then and that was in 2004. It was almost 20 years ago before social media and it was at school. I was mostly teens. I mean, we had middle school and I think there might have been an area of elementary, but most of my clientele that came to me were teenagers. I realized I was there and I’m not the psychiatrist and I was getting frustrated because it was basically they came to me and a fat file of the student or whatever it is that follows them along the whole system. I’m like, “I don’t want to read it. My supervisor would be like,”Yyou have to read it. That’s your job.  I’m your supervisor.”  I’m like, “I know, but then you’re giving me this.” I’m going in already kind of with a judgment on the student.  I’m from Broward County, so I was a product of the Broward County school system.

 I have that little bit of that sass. Basically though, I was seeing like, why aren’t we listening to these students? I’m seeing these things that are happening and they’re angry and they’re frustrated or they’re not being heard.  I ended up taking what Carl Rogers talks about unconditional positive regard and I was new. I was just new to the game. I just basically started listening and questioning and then I would go home and go to my library and research or go back to my college and ask my professors.  I was just always asking why, why, why would we do this back then? I think the DSM might’ve been three or TR or something like that. I’m like, “Why do you keep telling me this book my Bible?”  That’s what we’re taught in a public secular college when it comes to licensing and everything. And then I would open it up and see all the names and I’m like, no offense. Why are all these white people the ones that are telling me what to do?

Why are we not taking into consideration the cultures? Or the understanding of other people’s backgrounds. I was questioning and questioning. Some of my professors loved, that I was questioning things.

Carrie: And some hated it.

Diana: Oh, some of them were, but I was used to that already because that’s how I’ve learned most of my life, even in high school and stuff. Just like questioning why. That’s just how I still do that to this day.

Carrie: Right, and very valid questions. I think psychology was based off of a bunch of white men at the end of the day. It started, that’s not where it is now, you know, things have progressed, but there’s still a lot of that bias in a lot of the research materials and things of that nature in DSM.

Back in the 90s, just for anybody who’s not familiar with the ACE study, adverse childhood experiences. Kaiser Permanente, which is an insurance company that’s more on the west coast of the U. S., if you’re not familiar with them, they decided they’re going to do this study and try to figure out, we have these people that have chronic health issues that are obviously taking a lot of money to take care of.

People with addiction issues, people with high blood pressure, diabetes, all of those chronic conditions that we think about. They wanted to figure out what makes some connection points between their physical health and their mental health and what they found through questions. They had, I think, 10 questions on there. 

Diana: I have the questions in front of me and it’s basically simple and people don’t understand what it does. It makes you understand things that you never do. That’s the way I like it in a holistic practice because we really touch on some stuff and it does get utilized in my practice anyway. In a way that’s like, whoa, but they don’t ever see the correlation.

The 10 questions are like this, “Did a parent or another adult in the household often swear at you, insult you, put you down, humiliate you, act in a way that made you afraid that you might be physically hurt? And then it keeps going. “Did a parent, or other adult in the household often push, grab, slap, or throw something at you ever hit you so hard that you have marks or were injured?”

I don’t know, I know these could be trigger questions right now for your audience. I want to be careful because now I’ve realized like, okay, because I utilize it so much, every client has to fill this out when they come to me. I’m realizing now that I got to be careful because your listener might never have heard these and they’re going to be like, because if we end up saying all 10 questions and they say, “Oh, yeah.I have seven” then what do we do here as therapists?

Carrie: Yes, people can go look them up online and I’ll link them. Even something like the divorce of your parents is on there and that’s pretty common in today’s day and age.

Diana: Or drinking or alcohol. Anybody had a mental illness or was depressed in your household. “Did anybody go to prison?”  It is questions that are basic, but when you put all 10 of them together and you start seeing the scoring, anything higher than a four, I think is cause for a little bit of concern. The higher the score, of course, the more you going to have to be aware. It’s an awareness. It’s not like you’re doomed.

Carrie: Right. It’s just a look at how that connection is, and they found that people who had scores of four or more ACEs were more likely to have these chronic health issues, the high blood pressure, the diabetes, addiction issues, and it was very significant. It was kind of like the graph was small at 1, 2, 3, and then jumped when it got to 4 and above. It’s a very eye-opening, and it’s not a new study, but I think a lot of doctors don’t take these types of things into account. A lot of individuals who have chronic health issues or chronic anxiety or chronic insomnia don’t take these types of issues into consideration because, like we were talking about before, It was just kind of how they grew up.

It was the water they swim in and they don’t always identify with the word trauma or abuse. I think that’s why some of those questions get very specific. Because if you say, did you experience physical abuse in your household? Someone might just think, well, that was discipline, but yet they ended up with marks, or they ended up getting hit in ways that are clearly not disciplinary.

Diana: What I see in my practice for the last 20 years is that It is a cultural thing at times. I also understand because I use a lot of Myers Briggs too. I try to come up with free assessments so we can have a holistic picture. Say you have this young person who is an introvert and is nervous by nature, like, and that’s okay. All of a sudden the father comes home drunk and is yelling. It doesn’t even have to put hands on, but, your nervous system just gets turned on. All these layers of emotional wounds, that’s how I explain it to the teen or the young adult or the adult that’s come to me is that we have emotional wounds.

We all experience these emotional wounds. The intergenerational trauma. A lot of people want to call it intergenerational sin, generational sin or whatever it is that’s happened. But if we don’t deal with them, then this is why symptoms happen.

Carrie: Absolutely. Those types of things that affect our nervous system and get us into that fight, flight, or freeze energy on the regular basis, that’s almost like teaching our brain for that fire alarm to constantly go off when it’s really only meant to go off in high danger, high-stress situations so that we have that energy to fight, flight, or freeze.

When you’re in a chronic situation like that, and like you said before, your brain is still developing. Now we’re affecting kind of how the brain is developing in these processes with children and teens. Similar to you, I started out working with children and teens, not in a school setting, but in a home setting, trying to prevent them from out-of-home placement.

When I first went into it, I thought, what’s going on with these kids? What is the deal here? Why are they acting up so much? Was it something about how they were raised? I didn’t know. Do they just have no structure in their home or no discipline? But then you start to peel back the layers and you start to look at, we had a, oh, I’m trying to think of what the assessment was.

It wasn’t an ACE assessment, but it was a trauma inventory, and it’s got a really long acronym, but we would go through that with every client and ask about, have you ever experienced this, homelessness, times where you didn’t have enough food, all kinds of different experiences. Has anyone ever hit you? And then you find out all kinds of things that have happened – bullying, abuse that they’ve experienced, and then you go,  “Oh, these kids aren’t bad kids. They’re not behavior problems. They have been through an enormous amount, and their nervous system, like, does not know how to process or handle even day-to-day situations.”

Diana: On fire, that’s what I say. That’s inflammation and when we understand the science of the mind and the body all together, it’s places of yourself that are inflamed. If your gut is inflamed, you start feeling it in other places. The same with the brain. If your central nervous system is always protecting, I mean, think about back in the day, a long time ago, thousands of years ago, when you have a sabertooth tiger running after the caveman, that’s the alert.

Your adrenal glands are going squirt, squirt, squirt with chemical and it’s fight or flight or freeze or fawn. If you’re on, but the thing is with the chronic, like you’re saying, if it’s happening every day, your system just learns to stay on. And then people that have a safe environment or healthy foods, or they don’t have to worry about resources or gang life or abusive home settings.

They don’t have that understanding and then they’re judging it now. For us therapists, if you’re a therapist listening to this, this is something that can revolutionize your whole practice, understanding the holistic approach to mental health and especially with the ACE, understanding the neuroplasticity and the science behind that, I mean, the brain and the gut connection, things like that.

“If I did not learn these things, I think I would have been, I was a wreck. I mean, I was smoking pot. I was drinking alcohol all through my teen.”  And that’s why they’re like, they’re just teenagers, but if we get to understand the why, why are they taking it so personal? Why are they popping off? I think we’re going to talk about internalizers and externalizers.

Carrie: Yes, let’s go into that. Your externalizers are the poppin’ off kids.

Diana: Yes, the Poppin off kids. The ones that are  people see and they think that they have a chip on their shoulder, like, “What you lookin at”, or whatever it is. If you take those personal, if you’re working with adolescents, or you have one, and you’re taking it personal constantly and saying, well, they’re just teenagers, they suck, or whatever it is or instead of taking a step back and going, “Why are they poppin off? Why are they punching the teacher in the face?” And those are the students that I worked with. I worked from there, and then I worked in a non profit organization that went into the houses, too, into the inner city homes, so I was seeing things we are the richest country and we’re allowing people to live this way.

I don’t get it. I get it, but I don’t. It’s such a system. I’m not even gonna go there. But you have those that externalize, which they’re fighting. They’re angry. They’re the little kid who might be diagnosed with ADHD. They might be diagnosed with a thousand different things and on five different medications. We don’t realize at home they’re eating Captain Crunch and Mountain Dew for breakfast. We don’t see this whole picture because we have to, I get why in the system, if you’re responsible for thousands of kids in one school, you can’t do what we’re trying to do, individualizing therapy for each, so you have to come up with answers quickly so you could keep the fire down.

Carrie: Yes. Absolutely. 

Diana: Those are the externalizers, the ones that you see that are angry or cussing or upset or wanting to fight and you feel it. The internalizers, they’re usually the cutters. They’ll stay in their room all day long playing video games, or they’re doing other things that they shouldn’t be doing. They’re the shy ones, they’re the suicidal ones.

Carrie: Right, they just keep everything inside and bury it as much as possible and even occasionally they may blow up at some point, but it’s usually against themselves, like you were saying.

Diana: Some of them will do both, depending on what’s going on in their own system, like in their own body, their vessel. It depends on how much a human being can take. Each one of us only has a threshold. We only have a certain amount of bandwidth.

Carrie: I’m sure it drove you crazy like it drove me crazy that the trauma wasn’t taken into consideration, so then we were just looking at symptoms. We were trying to match people up with the DSM and trying to match people with medication.

Therefore, there was a turning of students who got diagnosed with ADHD and then bipolar disorder. That’s what we saw all the time. 

Diana: ADHD and bipolar borderline. I’m trying to think there was one more. I mean, when I had anxiety and depression that year. I came and I think I am quite fine, I’m in private practice now. After that, when I was working at the nonprofit, I took a little break because of a certain situation that happened personally in my family, and then I went into a different career. After the Parkland shooting, and the Stoneman Douglas shooting in 2018, I had a couple of parents ask, “Hey, are you still a therapist?”, and I’m like, “no, I’m not.” And then little by little, the Lord kept saying, “You’re going back.  I’m like, “no”, but I see now since 2018, everything. I’m like, Okay, I’m just going to be obedient. This is of service for you. It’s a calling. I’m grateful that I do get paid for it and I get to help others learn about it. When I went back, I ended up in a school being the crisis intervention counselor serving about 200 students and I was the only licensed therapist there.

Carrie: Wow, that’s a lot of students to take care of. What hope is there? Because this is hope for anxiety and OCD, what hope is there for individuals who’ve had these types of experiences?

Diana: There’s so much hope. Listen, I am one that had these types of experiences. Like I said before, I have an A score of 6. It’s reframing what has happened and understanding, but getting the help and doing the work. Because some people do the healing process, they get stuck in the victim. And they don’t know how to get out of it because it’s been their life for so long and they might be surrounded by other humans in their family or in their community.

That’s all they know as well, so it’s understanding there is hope and it starts with you understanding you being that curious observer of yourself watching YouTube videos on CPTSD. Reading books like Dr. Gabor Maté’s book, The Myth of Normal, or The Body Keeps the Score by Dr. Vessel Van de Kock, or CPTSD, From Surviving to Thriving by Pete Walker.

There’s so much information out there. Or listening to podcasts like this, saying, Hey, no, there’s hope and understanding the science of your brain. Neuroplasticity is a real thing. They’re finding it out there in more and more information on the brain and how rewiring your system you can do it. I have done it.

It took a lot of hard work to grieve my childhood to learn to forgive those that hurt me and it’s not only my home. It’s understanding. We’re all raised in a village.

Carrie: Yes.

Diana: We’re all in a village now. If you’re hearing my voice, you’re part of a system. You’re part of a village, but we were also raised by one.

Some people might hurt you which can cause anxiety and depression, which are symptoms of numerous things. Finding out that you are not anxiety and you are not depression. These are just things you’re wrestling with or struggling with. I like wrestling better because wrestling means that you could get up on top of it.

When I use the word suffer, I don’t like that too much because it’s like, “Oh, I’m suffering. Oh, what was me?” To me,  I had to go through that part. I was grateful for EMDR. There are modalities that can help internal family systems, EMDR. I do cold plunges now. I do sauna work, infrared sauna, acupuncture, and things that have been around for thousands and thousands of years that are Westernized medicine. It doesn’t utilize because it’s either free or they can’t make money off of it.

Carrie: The cold plunge. How does that work?

Diana: I just started honestly last month and you go into like 40-degree water and I’m up in 90 seconds. I started off at 30 and I thought it, but it was the weirdest, craziest, most amazing feeling I ever had.

I do Wim Hof breathing. Wim Hof, you should look up his story. I started with the breathing techniques because these things are not taught in churches. They’re not taught our profession either much, and a lot of people see them as woo woo or new age, but I’m like, “No, the Lord made breath.”

Carrie: There are certain breaths that I know, like from yoga. There are certain ways to breathe where you can warm up your body or cool off your body. So are you trying to warm up your body like in those situations or no, you’re trying to take your temperature down?

Diana: Are you talking about breath work or with a cold plunge?

Carrie: With the cold plunge, are you trying to breathe a certain way while you’re in there?

Diana: It is actually trying to wake up my mitochondria to healing. It’s also understanding your mindset. We have a fixed mindset, many of us, especially if we wrestle with anxiety because I do, I wrestle with anxiety, honestly, like I can’t drink coffee. I have to do the work and I have to be okay. Kind of like an alcoholic shouldn’t be drinking alcohol. 

Carrie: Right, yes.

Diana: Someone like me that has anxiety and wrestles with it. I have to do the work and understand like, “No, I can’t touch that substance because that substance is going to make my anxiety worse or depression or whatever symptoms being exasperated by whatever’s around you. With the cold plunge, I am trying to, first of all, wake up myself and at the same time realize that I have the power in my mind to do this. Tthat is the rewiring of the brain that is creating new neurons to be able to connect.” Whatever fires together wires together.” That’s what Jim Quick says.

Carrie: Right. Yes.

Diana: I love to listen to and it’s true. If I would have stayed like, “Oh my gosh, I’m going to be a pothead of all my life, or I’m going to be depressed, or I’m never going to be able to be around my family because they trigger me too much. I had to rewire my brain. I have also been diagnosed with SERS, Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome, but I also know it’s because of how high my ACE score.”

It’s an autoimmune, so I have to do the things to keep that fire down because it’s inflammation. And I do the work and it was trying to shrink the inner critic because you grow up in that kind of environment with a high A score. It’s constantly like, I’m not worth it. It’s attachment issues,

Carrie: Putting yourself down a lot from things that you’ve heard from other people and just kind of repeating those things to yourself.

Diana: Because it’s been chronically done constantly, you start believing and that is something I had to realize with my walk with the Lord. To me, guilt and shame, because that’s what most of us who have anxiety, a lot of these diagnoses come and they’re really in guilt and shame. Guilt and shame is from the world. Conviction comes from the Lord.

Carrie: Right. That’s good.

Diana: It’s different. If you’re going against God’s word, then of course you’re going to get convicted.

Carrie: That’s a good thing.

Diana: Yes. If you’re feeling guilt and shame constantly and you’re blaming God and you’re not understanding, like, where is that voice coming from?

Who said those things? And you start recognizing those voices, the inner critic, and then you just sit with it because a lot of people that have anxiety, that I’ve come to find out in this 20 years I’ve been doing this, is they’re storing these emotions in their bodies, so they’re either so depressed and sad about it, and they’re just giving up with no hope, or it is stored so deeply that it’s like when a deer gets hit by a truck, or any animal. 

Carrie: They’re sort of shaking.

Diana: That’s our nervous system, which causes the anxiety, or the OCD. I still struggle with that too, and I have to realize, I got bad news. This is an example that happened lately. My sister was put in hospice.  My husband, because he has done his work with me and understands he or she is starting to clean everything and make everything perfect. She took everything out of the gap because that’s what I did. Then he took me and was just like, “Honey, you’re going to have to go see your therapist. Please calm down. I could tell because it happens.”

Carrie: Fall back into those patterns. I really like what you’re saying on a spiritual sense of that there’s a verse that talks about work out your salvation with fear and trembling for it’s God that works within you and you’re talking about really partnering up with God and the Holy Spirit to do the work, not just kind of sitting back and being a passive observer and say, God, just come over me and just fix all the brain cells, just make them all like wired together the way they’re supposed to and heal up this yuck stuff that happened to me.

You’re like, “No, I’ve actually sought the Lord, but I’ve also gone to counseling and I’ve also done these other healing modalities and read a lot or watched a lot of videos and really absorb the Information because knowledge is really helpful in these types of things and it does help reduce some of the shame so that you’re not thinking why in the world am I responding in this way?

Why in the world am I acting like this? When you understand, you can peel that back and say, “Oh, okay, now I get it. Now that I get it, I can start to take a step towards change.”  If a lot of times we don’t understand what’s going on in the first place, it’s really hard to make changes into it. If we don’t sit with it and go, “Oh yeah, this is what happened to me. This is how it affected me. This is how my relationships have gotten so hijacked for the last 10 years.”

Diana: We have to remember as believers that Satan’s only reason is to steal, kill, and destroy every relationship that you have, including and especially the one with yourself.

When you notice that and you realize, like, this is why I really am a mind, body, spirit connecting therapist here. When people come to me, they understand my position in Christ. I do not force. I’m not a biblical counselo. People argue with me all the time and we all have our journey. To me, what has worked thus far with people. I have quite a few people with a lot of spiritual abuse from church where I have to disentangle because some people don’t understand they grew up and was forced into some kind of say religion or whatever it is. And then they come to me with this hatred towards God and they want to deconstruct. I’m there going, okay, I think you want to disentangle and understand your situation that happened in ACEs is not only in inner cities, I mean, there’s higher scores there because they have fewer resources. It’s just how our system in this society has been for so long. And this is. In the last three or four years, that’s the uprising that we’re feeling and people misunderstanding.

That’s why I encourage those to educate themselves, but it starts within ourselves. Psalm 139 verses 23 and 24, search me, Oh God, and know my anxious thoughts starts with us being responsible for us. Despite anything that has happened to us. That’s the power we have.

Carrie: Towards the end of the podcast, I like to ask every guest to share a story of hope, like a time where you received hope from God or another person.

Diana: Wow. I could actually talk about this morning. I had a client, mostly my clients gave me hope due to them doing the work and seeing the progress. I’m very grateful for that. Just like this morning, I had a client that came to me two months ago and she was in a very, very bad place. When I say very bad place, it was just, I don’t know if I could. It takes energy.   I think the listener needs to understand we’re humans with our struggles and we care about our clients, or we would not be in this. And we care about them, not just for the hour or 90 minutes we have them.

Carrie: True. Very true. 

Diana: We’re trying to find other ways to help them. I’m in a lot of prayer. If you come to see me, I’m praying for you before you come in. We pray together and then when they leave, I pray, “All right, Lord, what do I have to do for the next session? Or what do I do next?” This person came in and I’m just like, I don’t know if I can help them. I can’t after crying out to God for a while.

I’m like by this time, if I can’t help and she came in today and I was just blown away with how much progress it was amazing. It’s like every time I want to quit, I honestly want to retire or go back to the other career I was at because this is heavy work for us.

Carrie: It’s not easy.

Diana: It’s not easy. It is a calling because I’m sure that if you are a therapist listening, you did not get in this for the money. If you got in it for the money, then your heart is not in the right place to be a therapist. If you’re coming in thinking you’re going to make a lot of money, then you’re not seeing your client as the human that we should be seeing them as.

To me, I’m talking to my husband, “Shiver. I’m older now. I’ve done some time already.” The second I think that, a client comes in and boom, something out. I’m like, “All right, Lord. Okay. I hear you. All right.” He reminds me, it’s not about me. It’s not even about the client. All of that price and utilizing our gifts and talents, which each one of us have, and it’s just getting in tune with that. The only way to get in tune with who you are to heal is to sit alone and be still with the Lord.

Carrie: I love your office too. For those that are just listening, she has lots of plants all over her office and natural lighting is a very warm and inviting therapy space. I really like that. I’m still working on my office, I moved into it a few months ago, and it’s just not quite where I want it to be. There are still some tweaks that need to happen, but I’m going to get it settled, and it’s going to be great when it gets done.

Diana: You have to send me a picture of it.

Carrie: Okay, we’ll do. Thanks for being on the show today and sharing your wisdom with us.

Diana: Carrie, thank you for having me.

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Carrie: I loved interviewing Diana because it’s always great to find another therapist with a similar heartbeat about treating trauma and letting people know that is possible for them to have a better life moving forward, even if their background has been kind of rough.

As some of you know, I do EMDR intensives with clients who are looking to process trauma in a short, condensed amount of time, instead of having to spread that over weeks and weeks and open up issues and close them up. If you want more information on that, feel free to check out my counseling website at bythewellcounseling.com. I am also working on longer intensive packages specifically for clients who are dealing with the intersection of trauma, childhood wounding, and OCD. If any of that is of interest to you, definitely contact me and I would love to share more about it with you.

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.