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Author: Carrie Bock

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

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

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!

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

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:

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!

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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

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:

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

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:

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

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:

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

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

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.

106. Maximizing Your First Counseling Session with Carrie Bock, LPC-MHSP

On today’s episode, Carrie delves into the importance of maximizing your first counseling session. She offers insights and tips on how to navigate your initial counseling session effectively while emphasizing the importance of building a genuine therapeutic connection.

Episode Highlights:

  • The importance of managing expectations and not overwhelming your first counseling session with too much information.
  • How to build a good connection with your therapist right from the start.
  • The significance of assessing the counselor’s approach and the therapeutic environment to ensure a good fit.
  • Strategies for communicating your needs, goals, and boundaries effectively with your counselor.

Episode Summary:

Hi there, I’m Carrie Bock, a licensed counselor from Tennessee, and in this episode of Christian Faith and OCD, I want to help you get the most out of your first counseling session.

I often see clients who come in feeling the need to share everything at once—like dumping a jumbled play script on the floor. They try to fit their entire story into a single 50-minute session, which is just not realistic. Even with my own 40 years of life, I couldn’t cover every detail in that short time.

The first session is about starting to build a connection. It’s not about telling your whole life story but giving a broad overview of your life: your daily routine, work, family, or even how your pets provide comfort. You don’t need to share everything in one go. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, jot down the key points you want to cover. Intake paperwork can help frame your story too, so use it to your advantage.

Ultimately, therapy is a journey of building a supportive relationship where you can work towards your goals. Reflect on what you hope to achieve and what you’re willing to do to reach those goals. If your first counselor isn’t the right match, keep searching until you find someone who truly supports your healing journey.

Thank you for joining me on this episode. May you find comfort and guidance in your path to healing.

Explore further:

Christian Faith and OCD, episode 106. I wanted to do a show on maximizing your first counseling session, and I’ll tell you a little story about where the idea for this episode came from. Sometimes, I have people who come in, and they feel the need to tell me absolutely everything or for me to understand the totality of the story. There’s like this pressure or urgency. And I gave this analogy to Steve. I said it’s almost like somebody comes in with a play. The play has about ten characters, but all the pages are shuffled, so they’re out of order. Somebody dumps it on the floor, and I’m trying to make sense of what’s happening in this story.

If you’re going to your first counseling session, I want you to relieve yourself of some of that pressure to get all of the information out in one 50-minute session. It’s just impossible. I mean, think about it: I’m 40 years old. I could probably write a long book on my entire life story, and to believe that I could somehow share all the pertinent pieces with someone in a 50-minute session is unrealistic.

The first session is for your counselor to get to know you, for you to get to know your counselor. Having a general big picture of what’s going on in your life, how you spend your time, if you’re working, going to school, what your family life is like. Maybe you don’t have a family and come home to snuggle with the dogs.

That’s still relevant because maybe that’s a robust support system for you to have that comfort of your animals. So, trying to get a big picture, overarching view of where are the strengths in this person’s life? What do the support systems look like? What do the relationships look like?

Sometimes, people can get bogged down in a particular story. And they were jumping around to different timelines of that story. It may be helpful if you have a lot that you need to get out; maybe jot down what you feel are the most important things. Now, depending on how your counselor does their paperwork process, I often have opportunities where people can go into more depth in my intake paperwork. Some people use that to do that, and they feel more comfortable with it. Other times, people don’t want to put much information down, and they glance over that. But sometimes, that paperwork can at least provide the frame of reference. Who are the players in this play, and what’s the general overarching theme of the space versus having to figure it out by a bunch of different stories where somebody is all over the place just verbally vomiting? I wanted to make everyone aware that you don’t have to talk about things you don’t want to talk about in the first session.

That’s important to capitalize on because counselors are naturally nosy, and we want to know certain things, so we may ask questions that are more personal or vulnerable than you want to go in your first meeting with your therapist. It’s entirely okay for you to say, “I’m not quite ready to talk about that,” or, “I know I need to go there, but I don’t feel comfortable yet. Can we address that in a future session?” Often, people go into these counseling situations not knowing what to expect but not thinking through their needs and wants. For the session, I think this doesn’t just apply to the first session but can also apply to other sessions.

Sometimes, I’ll ask people, “What do you think is the best use of our time today?” Or, “What would you like to get into or process today?” Because you have a sense of that inside. Maybe you need to bounce some ideas off someone and get feedback like, “Okay, is what I’m thinking off base? Or is it a normal experience that I’m going through?”

Sometimes, you need to vent, for lack of a better word. You need to get all of your thoughts and feelings out and run them by somebody so the person can kind of help you can summarize and give it back to you in a way where you will gain new insight on it. And so there’s certainly, definitely value on that. There may be other times where you say, “What I need today, this kind of tuning in is I need to learn some skills to manage this situation in my life or be able to manage this relationship.” And then, by diving in and asking more questions, we can get more information.

I’m always hesitant to give people advice right off the bat. Let me caveat that because it depends on the situation, but we don’t always have enough information in the first session to give you certain levels of guidance on something, and maybe that’s a really good topic. Let’s ask these questions and explore that a bit more; ultimately, you are the decision-maker in your life.

I’m not the person who will be dealing with the consequences of whatever choice is made. So, I know that can be difficult for some people because they want the counselor to go in and tell them precisely what to do. And all that does is make you dependent on somebody to get answers. You can do this with pastors, parents, and other people.

If you say, “Okay, I have this problem. What do I do? Go to that person. They give me advice. I follow it. Next time I have a problem, I go back to that.” You want to come to a place where you can think critically and make decisions independently. And sometimes, when dealing with anxiety and OCD, you don’t have the confidence or comfort to make those decisions alone.

If there’s one thing I would want you to know, it’s that your first counseling session is about building a safe and healthy relationship with your counselor so that you feel you can do the work together that you need to do. I recently took my daughter to a new pediatrician because hers left the practice.

Steve and I were able to process because he also went to the appointment that we didn’t feel 100 percent comfortable after that first visit that this will be our child’s long-term pediatrician. However, we decided to give her another try. It’s like, did we have this interaction, and it was an off-interaction?

Maybe she had a bad day. Maybe I was extra sensitive today. Whatever the situation, or was this just somebody, I got a negative feeling. I didn’t feel safe or comfortable with them, and I don’t think I will be able to handle my daughter’s whatever health concerns she has come up with.

Maybe this is not the person I want to help us walk through any of those, and that’s a hard call, I think, sometimes to make after the first session. So, say you go to the first session, and there are some things you feel good about and maybe some things you don’t feel good about. You might want to refrain from judgment until perhaps the second session.

Think about this as any other relationship that you run into. So, for example, maybe you and a co-worker get off on the wrong foot, or you and a roommate get off on the wrong foot, but then perhaps the next time you meet up and talk, things are a little different, or you see where they were going with it, or their perspective is different.

Ultimately, you want to feel a sense of safety and comfort to open up and talk about hard things. I know people who have been in counseling for several sessions and still don’t feel that sense of safety and positive connection with their counselor after a month or two. At that point, it’s okay to say this may not be a good fit.

As a therapist, I must accept that I’m not what everybody wants. I try to be as compassionate as possible. Still, I can sometimes be very direct and aggressive because I want to help people move toward their goals and improve. I’m not the right therapist for someone who wants to come in every week and complain about the same things but not be willing to do anything to change those things.

That’s not a valuable use of my time or theirs. Questions to ask yourself after the first session. Is this counselor someone that I feel safe and comfortable opening up to? Can this counselor help me with the issue I’m bringing into counseling? Hopefully, you can answer this by looking at their website or having a short conversation with them via email or phone before your first session.

Ideally, you’d want to make sure that’s an area that your counselor works with. Sometimes, though, people will have experiences of a counselor saying, “Yes, I can work with you on OCD, or Yes, I can help you with anxiety reduction.” But you may not feel comfortable with the way they’re doing that.

I started using more parts of language and inner child work a few years ago. And had a client tell me, “You know, this just isn’t working for me.” And it was good. It was helpful feedback that let us discuss what she was looking for in therapy and who might be the best person to give that to her, even if it wasn’t me.

There are some times when we can change directions in therapy. Maybe I’m trained in something different, or I see how another therapeutic technique might be beneficial, and sometimes it’s me, and sometimes it’s not, and that’s okay. Another question you might want to ask is, did I feel comfortable with the environment that I saw my therapist in?

Thinking about my therapeutic experiences, I know some environments I felt much more comfortable in than others, based on where the building was located, how the waiting room was set up, and what the counselor’s office was like. Some of those things may seem minor. But if it’s someplace you will go to repeatedly, you want to ensure you feel comfortable with some of those elements.

Otherwise, that may be a barrier to getting what you need, and you don’t want that to happen. I would encourage you to think about the timing of your first session. Would it be better for you to do that on a day off or a day that you can leave work early, especially if you don’t know how you’re going to react or respond, you don’t know what emotions are going to be stirred up for you, and that is something that can be hard to deal with especially if therapy is new for you. I remember one time I was practicing with some other therapists on different techniques, and we were doing an awareness exercise that wasn’t supposed to be particularly troublesome or triggering, but in the process of that Awareness exercise and the feedback that I received from the other therapist. I got super triggered, which shook me up for a good chunk of the day afterward. It was completely unexpected, something that came out of nowhere. Think about your timing in terms of going to therapy. Because something may trigger you or upset you, or you may become aware. That you didn’t see coming.

You want to be able to work with your therapist on coming up with a goal for yourself. And even though it may not be fully clarified in the first session, it may take a little while to tune in and realize this. You want to ask yourself, “What do you want or hope to get out of that time?”

Often, people will make generic comments like, “I want to feel better,” “I just wish not to be anxious,” or “I want to be less depressed.” And in those situations, we’re focusing so much on reducing the symptom. We’re not focused on what’s behind that, what’s beyond the symptom for you, so when you feel less depressed, can you connect better with your spouse? Does that mean you can leave the house more and attend your kid’s sporting events? Does it mean that you’ll feel more confident to present at work? What does it mean? If you can dig a little bit deeper and answer some of those things for yourself, that might help you know what’s getting in the way of you feeling better.

Even if all you can see is the symptom right now in front of you because it’s so big or so bold, trying to imagine what life is like beyond this symptom can give you and instill in you a sense of hope that even though you may, for example, struggle with anxiety later in your life, it’s not something probably that’s going to be magically cured or gone away. What would it be like if you had a different relationship with it where it didn’t hinder you from being the person you want to be or doing the things you want to do? That may be hard to imagine at the beginning of therapy, but if you can, it will help push your brain toward that more hopeful track; I can have a better experience than I’m having right now.

Another consideration would be, what are you willing to do to get what you want? So, if you’re saying that you want less anxiety, are you ready to practice relaxation strategies outside of your counseling process? Are you willing to take the time to journal about some of your triggers?

Are you willing to expose yourself to challenging situations appropriately so that you can let your mind and body know that you can do these hard things that it doesn’t believe you can do? And if you are willing to do those hard things, what kind of support might you need from your therapist or others in your life to do the hard things that will help you get to a better place with your mental health?

There may be something that your therapist says or does that isn’t necessarily wrong or unethical in some way. It’s just off-putting. So, for example, I had a therapist, I think, that was a little bit more of a behavioral bent. I saw her only for one session. The reason was that she had this timer. That went off 15 minutes before the session ended and then again 5 minutes before the session ended. It felt superfluous and unnecessary to me, and I felt a little bit like I was being treated like a child. I’m pretty sure she sees other clients who don’t have a problem with it, or they may feel like, in their situation, it’s helpful to them to keep them on track. Maybe the therapist feels that way for herself.

It helps her keep track of her session ending and wrap-up time. I think more than a personal preference of just not liking it was that I didn’t feel like I had any say or choice in the whole-timer situation. It might have been slightly different if she said, “Is it okay if we try this,” kind of like inviting me into the process?

Is it okay if we try this timer and see if you find it helpful, or do I find the valuable timer for me? Would it be okay if we tried it out? It was just kind of something that was thrown in there.

In closing, the last thing I want to say is that if you don’t find a good therapeutic fit on the first try, that’s okay. Don’t give up; get up and try again. We do the same thing with doctors we might not feel comfortable with or dentists we might not feel satisfied with. We go out and find a different provider. At that point, the worst thing we could do is say, “Oh, well, maybe therapy’s just not for me.” That’s like saying, “Well, maybe I shouldn’t get my teeth cleaned because I didn’t feel comfortable with that dentist.”

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

105. Joy Comes in the Morning: 3rd Year of Marriage

In this special episode, Carrie and her husband, Steve, reflect on their three-year marriage journey and the joy of overcoming difficulties. They share insights on the importance of open communication and their experiences as parents to their daughter Faith. They also offer practical tips for maintaining a solid relationship while looking ahead with optimism and gratitude for each day.

Episode Highlights:

  • The significance of finding joy and hope in difficult situations as inspired by Psalm 30:5.
  • The importance of open communication in a marriage, even when addressing challenging topics.
  • How to navigate and adapt to life’s unexpected changes and challenges, such as health issues.
  • The value of adjusting and accepting new norms in life and relationships.
  • Their experiences in parenthood, including insights into their daughter, Faith, and the joys and challenges of raising her.

Episode Summary:

Welcome to Episode 105 of Christian Faith and OCD!

In this episode, we dive into our year of challenges and growth, centered around the theme “Joy in the Morning,” inspired by Psalm 30:5. We explore how we’ve navigated trials and found hope and joy through our faith and resilience.

Highlights of This Episode:

  1. Reflecting on Our Journey: Steve and I look back at our dating days, the trials of our first year of marriage, and our growth as a couple. We share how our experiences, including Steve’s diagnosis of spinocerebellar ataxia (SCA), have shaped our relationship.
  2. Adapting to New Normals: Steve discusses how he’s adjusted to life with SCA, including his memorable Crazy Hair Day at Vacation Bible School (VBS). Despite the challenges, Steve’s involvement in ministry and our lives has been a source of inspiration and joy.
  3. Mission Trip to Guatemala: Steve shares his incredible experience on a mission trip to Guatemala. Despite the obstacles, he found purpose and connection, highlighting how disabilities don’t have to limit our ability to serve others.
  4. Communication and Growth: We delve into how effective communication has been crucial in our relationship, especially when addressing and resolving issues that arise. Steve and I discuss the importance of understanding and patience in our journey together.
  5. Parenting and Faith: With our daughter, Faith, turning 18 months old, we reflect on the joys and challenges of parenting. We explore how our faith has guided us through these experiences and strengthened our bond.

Listen to this episode to gain insight into how faith, communication, and resilience have guided us through our journey. We hope our story inspires you to find joy in your own challenges and embrace the morning light after the night’s trials.

Keep listening with this related episode!

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD, episode 105. I am joined here once again by my lovely husband, Steve.

______________

Carrie: Hi Steve.

Steve: Hey. How are you?

Carrie: Welcome. We’ve been doing this as a tradition almost every year. It started before we got married. We did an episode about our dating experiences, and then, in the first year of marriage, I was pregnant. I remember crying a lot in that episode because we didn’t know what was happening to your eyes other than we knew you had lost vision. It was super scary. Thinking about all the uncertainties there, then you had just been diagnosed with neurological conditions, spinocerebellar ataxia.

We sat down and thought about what we wanted to discuss for our third year of marriage now that we’ve been married for almost three years. This scripture had come to mind: Psalm 30 verse 5 says, Weeping may stay overnight, but there is joy in the morning. And so, we thought about titling this episode Joy in the Morning. Do you want to tell our audience a little bit about why we chose that?

Steve: Yes, because I think going through trials, as everyone does, our trials that we have dealt with, there have been tears, and there have been difficult moments, but the joy that comes out of that, being able to look back and say, oh my goodness, I’ve made it through this. And it gives others hope that they may be going through the same thing. That’s the beauty of going through something difficult: when you make it to the other side, to a better place at least, you can share that with someone and help them. We have been through a lot; it has been difficult, but we’ve done it with a smile. As best as we can anyway, so, that’s kind of, it’s a good verse.

Carrie: Yes. Some of the highlights of this year of you adjusting to the SCA diagnosis and realizing that you can still be involved in ministry with which you’d like to be involved. And I wish we had a picture of your crazy hair day at VBS.

Steve: That was so much fun. They’d asked me to, at church, well, they didn’t ask me, but I signed up for VBS, which was a challenge at the time because I’d yet to serve in any way by myself amidst all the chaos of all those wonderful kids who were having fun. And here I am, with my walker, trying to hurry through and make it work but having a blast. They had different themes for each day, whether it be sports, and one of those days was crazy hair day, so I said, why not? So, each night, I participated, but that was probably the best one for me because, as a bald man, I could wear a wig with blue hair. I think it was. Was it blue?

Carrie: No, it was all white.

Steve: All right, there we go.

Carrie: But you had a blue headband.

Steve: That’s what it was. I knew something must have been blue, but A, there’s my memory for you, and B, there’s my eyesight for you. But yes, it was all white hair. I remember that now. And it was crazy. It was out there. And I got so many comments on that. And it was fun. It was a lot of fun.

Carrie: Right. Yes, and then this summer, you took a mission trip to Guatemala, which was the first time that you had been really since COVID and us getting married, having a baby, all these different things happened.

Steve: That was one of those experiences I did not know if I would get to continue with. But the team I went with was so gracious and so giving, so compassionate that they knew where my heart was. They knew they wanted me to go on that team with them and invited me, which was humbling. I never had to ask for help, whether I thought I needed it or not, and more times than not, I did need help.

They were right there, by my side, to grab a bag and help me up and down the stairs, which is funny because I took a walker with me. A smaller walker that would be easier to pack and carry and all that stuff takes up less space. I never got to use that thing, except in the airport once, because flat ground didn’t exist where we were.

There was no way of using that: there were so many stairs and different things. Anyway, the team was so good though to help me. I made sure I got from point A to point B and got to teach with people, and the people in Guatemala were so gracious with their time and compassionate, too, so it was a blessing.

Carrie: Great. And I think you got some positive feedback from people there that your story was just inspirational and that you had sacrificed to go to another country because you could have easily said, I’ve done mission trips for years; my time is over, and I have this disability. It’s time for me to kick back and rest.

Steve: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And I’ll never forget this. Pastor Mark, who led the group, commented when we discussed whether I should go or not that we have people with club feet and different things that come to see us. Why not have someone else come to see them with a problem, whatever, a disability? I hadn’t thought about it that way. I just thought, how will I be able to do this? That’s all I was focused on. That changed the way that I thought about it. When I got there, the people were just so, I don’t know, I think it was a different way of looking at things for them too. Someone who has a disability came to speak with them. It was a cool thing in the end. It was very humbling, though.

Carrie: This year has been about adjusting and accepting our new normal. I guess you could call it our new life situation, and it comes with many changes and challenges in relationships and daily life. What’s been your experience of that?

Steve: I had to adjust and change to, you can sit on a couch or sit in the bed and cry and give in, or you can tweak how you do things. You can change or adjust to the new normal. And that’s what I’ve done, and I still do what I like. I don’t get to go outside as often, and I don’t get to go hiking. However, there are ways that I can do things.

I’m very happy with the life that I’m living, getting to do those things. I still get to meet with my friends occasionally and can’t just get in the car and drive there. But I still get to go, so there are no complaints. It’s still a blessing to play with our child and do all the fun things that I think are important.

Carrie: Faith just turned 18 months old, and she’s a little firecracker sometimes. But it’s been a journey, lots of learning, lots of adjustment, lots of growing as parents. And I think all these things that we’re talking about related to your marriage are, like, these are things that can either bring you closer together or create conflict and drive you farther apart.

Steve: Definitely. I think that for us, you always have to look forward. You have to pick your battles. I constantly tell myself that, not so much with you, but with Faith. Just with our daughter, trying to figure out, okay, she’s upset. Why is she upset? Or, she is, like most children, she gets her mind set on something.

I want to carry that blanket around. And drag it while we walk outside. I want to drag it through the dirt and never want to let it go. She reminds me of Linus with those blankets, but sometimes, you must decide how important it is for me to take this blanket away from her. Or to take whatever this toy or whatever it is.

Is it a deal breaker if she hangs on to it? Am I training her incorrectly if I let her hang on to that? Or, there’s a lot of decision-making there, but sometimes I’ve learned it’s okay to let her hang on for just a minute longer. And then, whenever she forgets about it, take it away and hide it; she’ll never think of it, and you won’t have to deal with the fuss. I don’t know if that always works, but picking your battles is very important.

Carrie: I think that’s true in a relational sense. And what you were talking about before, essentially honoring your limitations, is helpful for all our listeners, just listening to your body. There are some days that you can do more than others and some days you’re very fatigued and have to take it easy, and all you may get done is one load of laundry, and that’s it.

That’s a hard thing to accept. And just in terms of the mental health realm, it’s like, okay, some days I may be prepared to socially interact in a certain way with others, and some days I just may not be able to do that and respecting and honoring, like, my body and where I’m at today.

Steve: You have to decide sometimes if you’re going through fatigue, are you not feeling well, and you need rest, or are you just depressed and pushing away people? Because that’s a big difference. There are days, I’ll be honest, I don’t feel like doing the people thing, but it’s just me being whatever, me being me, or wanting to avoid people. And then there are other days I want to be around people, but my body is too tired, and I need to rest. Those are decisions that you have to think about, I think, for me, in the sense of, is it me, or is my body just really needing the rest? And so more times than not, for me, it’s my body really needs the rest, and so I have to force myself to lay down. I’m not a very good stop-and-rest person. I’m getting better at it, but not by choice, because I have to.

Carrie: Usually, other people tell you to sit down rather than you decide to sit down.

Steve: And anyone who knows me knows I was always a person that just wanted to go. Not that I couldn’t stop, but I didn’t like to sit down. I like to fix things. If something is on my mind, I want to finish it. I’m not a procrastinator, but when you have something like I have, you have to sit down. It’s not procrastinating; it’s resting until you can.

Carrie: I wanted to bring something up, and we can always cut this out if you don’t want us to talk about this, but without going into a lot of details, we had an, like, a communication issue come up in our marriage this year where we were both unhappy with like one aspect of our life. Do you know what I’m talking about? And neither one of us said anything because we’re both conflict-avoiders. And then finally, I got up the courage, and I said, “Hey, I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of unhappy in this one area, and then it was surprising for you to say, yeah, me too.” We were able to, like, do something about it. And so, I just wanted to share with our listeners that sometimes it’s hard to bring up those difficult topics in your marriage and talk about hard things that make you feel uncomfortable or your concern that’s going to make your spouse feel uncomfortable or that they might be mad at you.

Steve: That was one of those things when you said it. When you said something to me, I thought, yes, I agree and it wasn’t a bad thing.

Carrie: Right.

Steve: It wasn’t like she was acting this way, and I’m annoyed. No, it wasn’t that. It was literally a communication issue. It’s like mentally sitting at that four-way stop, and neither one of us is going. But we’re both annoyed with the other because we think it’s their turn or we think it’s something not right here, go when you said something “Oh, good, good, yes” and we dealt with it, and everything went well.

Sometimes I think I tend to be the go-with-the-flow type of personality, and something will bother me. I’m like, it’s not that big of a deal. Just suck it up. And really, you don’t want to gripe every time something comes up. And I’ve been that guy, too. I’ll be honest, but you also don’t want to just, no big deal, and keep pushing it away, and pushing it away, and then one day, you’re going to blow up. It’s not pretty, so sometimes it’s better to talk, and the struggle is, how do you bring it up? How do you say it? That always comes up because when I say things, I tend to be a very sarcastic person. I’ve really had to work on that, and nowhere near success in that department. I’ve worked on my sarcasm because I like to be funny and sarcastic, but it doesn’t work when communicating in a profound moment. It’s always taken as a negative, even though I may not mean it that way. For instance, if you say, Steve, I really need to go to the store or the library, and my response is, oh, goody, I can’t wait. I may think nothing of that. I meant simply as humor but when you say that enough, it bleeds out as this jerk doesn’t even want to go, and he doesn’t have the guts to say, I don’t really want to go carry. Is that okay? Instead, it’s, Oh, goody. The sarcasm doesn’t help me and I’ve had to work on that honest moment.

Carrie: Well, I think coming to a place of when you say this, I hear this. In your marriage relationship, men and women communicate things differently, and there are times when you’ll say something, and I’m like, I heard this, and then you’ll say, no, that’s not at all what I said.

Steve: Yes, and I am so caught off guard in those moments but again, it may be how I’m saying it, orr the pattern of how I’ve said it before. I think that really you could set a tone.

Carrie: Yes, it also taps into what I’m learning, like your past relational baggage because it’s like, okay, I hear him talking like my dad or my ex or something like that, and then I’m absorbing it through that lens. I don’t even realize that I’m doing it at that point until maybe later, and I have moments of self-reflection. I think that piece comes up in marriage a lot.

Steve: I think that’s why I’ve always heard the first two years of marriage are the most difficult. I think it could go beyond that. I don’t know, but I think the reason is that you’re getting through communication and likes, dislikes, and all of that stuff. You’re learning about your other half. I hope we can be one of those cute older couples that everybody wants to go to. Oh my gosh, you’re going to make me throw up, or they say they’re so cute. The old couple that’s kissing and holding hands. Anyway, so you hope when you’re older, you don’t even have to say anything. You know what the other person would think.

Carrie: In this process of growing together, I always tell clients that you’re either growing with someone or growing apart from them because you might be growing at different levels. I’ve seen that happen in friendships; I’ve noticed that it occurs to various people in romantic relationships. So always, like, keeping those lines of communication open, being self-aware and knowing what you’re contributing to the relationship, what might be detrimental to your relationship, and how to work on those things. And I think if we can look at it as we were talking about our communication, It’s not always bad, like sometimes we need some enrichment in certain areas. There’s not a problem yet, or there’s not a crisis. If you can catch it before something becomes a problem, or becomes a crisis, or before we feel like we don’t talk about that at all, if you can address it on the front end, it’s a lot easier than waiting for things to, like you said, build up and build up, and then somebody blows up, or somebody withdraws or walks away.

Steve: Absolutely. I think, too, that sometimes we get angry in our head, and that builds up, and to the point where, and you say this about faith all the time, she doesn’t even know why she’s angry. Something triggered you, and then your state, not you, but in general, and I’ve had this to me, and I stop, and I think, why in the world am I even angry? I don’t even know why. And it may simply be I don’t feel well, and I have to stop and say, okay, I cannot take that out on anyone. That is not fair. I just need to shush, not say anything, let it go. Try to remember those techniques of how to calm down or how to relax. And then there were other times when I did have something that bothered me, but I didn’t want to say anything. And I held it in, and then, kaboom, it’s not pretty, all over something really silly.

Carrie: I think timing is vital in terms of bringing up topics. In your marriage, it’s hard to know. You can’t necessarily bring something up when there’s all that heat of the emotion on both sides. You have to take a break, like pause. Okay, let’s talk about this. Let’s go to our separate spaces, reflect on it, pray about it, and then come back together and talk about what in the world just happened with that last interaction. I don’t even know, but we went from a happy couple to all of a sudden. We’re at each other’s throats or something.

Steve: That would be those moments when I have to say, okay, Steve, calm down. Why are you upset or okay? Maybe your reasoning for being upset is justifiable, but there are two of us in this marriage, so what can I do? What can I say to try to calm this down? There’s no hero, no winner, no individual here. How do we do this together? How do we work? That’s hard because we always want to win; we always want to be right. As humans, you always want to be in the right, and we never stop and think; it seems most of us don’t; maybe I’m wrong here. Perhaps I need to change the approach. Maybe I’m not wrong, but my path is wrong, or how I’m saying it. And that’s where it’s difficult because the focus is on you to change. And that’s hard. We always want the other person to change.

Carrie: Right, and I think working with our daughter and trying to help her when she has these completely age-appropriate meltdowns because she’s been teething or refused her nap that day or her stomach hurts, and we don’t even know about it. You know, all these things come up, and at the moment, it seems like it’s, you know, I want the banana over the strawberries; really, it has nothing to do with that. It’s all these other factors and knowing that we can have the opportunity to bring the calm into the situation and like get down on her level and talk to her and like, okay, you know, I can see you’re really upset right now.

Steve: Well, and that isn’t easy in general. And it’s easy for a couple, I think, with children. They have problems because they have a child or children, in our case, a child, who may have been screaming for 20 minutes at the top of their lungs. You’re just at wit’s end to please make it go away, just stop, not the child, the screaming, and then the communication between the two of you can be rather snappy. It’s not personal, just give me the sippy cup, take the child here, do this, and it’s nothing personal, it’s just, oh my gosh, have you checked your diaper lately? There’s always something. And what are those moments you look at later and go, I’m sorry, I may have been a little snappy. It’s hard to focus on how to calm her down, and you’re going off on your spouse—just a tricky thing.

Carrie: I think, too, there’s that element where sometimes we’ll be trying to have a conversation in the car, and then all of a sudden in the backseat is because she can’t talk fully.

Steve: She wants to join in.

Carrie: Yes,

Steve: Those are the moments I kind of smile myself and then begin to insert her name every fourth word, maybe asking you when we go to the store, are we going to buy this, that, or the other, and then I insert her name, which makes no sense in real-time, but when talking with her, she hears her name and is happy to be a part of the conversation, I’m hoping.

Carrie: Despite all the difficult things that have happened this year, in terms of our themes of joy coming in the morning, we will talk about where you see things going.

Steve: Yes, I think there are so many opportunities that have come up already, be it with church or missions or whatever; there’s just so much to look forward to. And I know that there will be, as the song said, mama said, there’d be days like this. There are going to be those days. But I look forward to good things as well, and I think that some elegant stuff is coming up the pike, so I’m excited about that; I’m excited that some of my doctor visits, my annual checkups are already behind me, got my eyes taken care of, and no significant change there, and that’s a blessing. Some of my neurological visits and all that are coming up have already passed. They’ve already passed for a while. So those are good things. I look forward to those. Most people don’t like the doctor’s visits, but I like them because I get the news, and I’m done with it for a while. Get it behind me. I’m looking forward to what’s coming up the pike for sure.

Carrie: When you have this generative disease, stability is a blessing; staying the same and not deteriorating further is always a positive. So, we appreciate that whenever we hear that. Just in general, your health numbers are doing well.

Steve: Those are doing really well. On top of that, knowing that I am doing as well as I am is a blessing in the sense that we didn’t know when we first got this diagnosis, we didn’t know. It almost gave me the feeling like golly, I could die tomorrow. But now I’ve heard some individuals have the same thing. Maybe we don’t necessarily know which type, yes, thank you. Which type that I have? But we know that I have it. And the lifespan, again, I thought, golly, I could die tomorrow. Who couldn’t die tomorrow? I hear about people who have been living to be 80 years old. And I hear about, because of what they’ve discovered through studies for Parkinson’s disease, they’ve been able to say, hey, that’ll work for SCA as well. And now I’m not on this medication, but for certain types of SCA, they can take this medication, which slows it down a little bit, they think. I don’t have all the details on that, but I know that it’s exciting that they found something. Those types of things are exciting to me. That’s definitely something to consider a joy, and I can get up and spend time with my family, enjoy the days I have now, and make the very best of each day. That’s exciting.

Carrie: We got involved in an SCA support group and have just learned so much through the other individuals, things that have worked for them, been helpful, not helpful, and then been able even to take some of that information like to your eye appointment and say, hey, This was recommended to us, or we found out this doesn’t work as well with SCA. That’s been a blessing, I think, for me and just this whole podcast journey and our relationship. I want to impact more people positively for the kingdom, just continuing to spread messages of hope. That people can get the help that they need out there. I know that you have stepped in and been a big support in promoting the podcast, even sometimes talking to people or supporting me in going to the AACC conference when that happened.

There were some long days there, and you had more duties and responsibilities at home or with Faith. I appreciate everything that you’ve done to help support this podcast. It’s been a wild ride, and it’s hard to believe that it’s been about three years. Just all the things that God has done indoors that he’s opened and to be able to launch the course recently, and I hope this next year to work on a book I’m thinking it’s going to be for Christians with anxiety some focus on OCD. They want to do some writing about anxiety, So I’m not exactly sure what direction or bent I’m going to go with that. I want to provide some practical tools to help and support people experiencing that. Still, I’m just excited to see what the Lord is going to do, and we are hopeful to be able to move in 2024 possibly. Praise the Lord. So, we are looking for better accessible housing than we have right now. Not that our accommodation is terrible as far as you’re getting around. It’s just not going to serve us in the future. And we know that. And so, we are trying to get something that’s more one level or flatter yard or something. That’s going to be more,

Steve: Flat is the keyword there, at least as far as the yard goes and fewer steps. Also, I’d like to say that I’m proud of you for how much effort and time and all of that you’ve put into the podcast and your work and what you do, and knowing you as I do, of course, I’m going to brag on you, but you put a lot of heart into what you do. And I think it shows, I definitely think it shows.

It’s exciting that I remember when you hadn’t even started the podcast. And now you’re on number 105 or something crazy like that? That’s wonderful, and there are days, I’ll be honest, I listen and think I will need a dictionary. I don’t know what that means because I’m not in that world. And then I’ll listen and say, “Oh, well, that’s really interesting. I never knew that.” I tell people if I’m talking to someone at the doctor’s office or wherever, and they say I have a problem with anxiety. I have perfect help for you here. I always try to remind them that if they look through the episodes, one may stand out to them. It’s not focused on one little thing, and even when it’s not something you’re necessarily interested in, as you listen, you find, wow, that’s got a lot for me to take away. I had no clue that that also pertained to me or that I would get that much out of it. So, it’s not boring. I’ll give it that. It’s very informative, and I enjoy that—so good job.

Carrie: Well, thank you. I want all of our listeners to know that I made some great connections at the AACC conference. So that means more interesting guests to come next year. And kind of now that we’ve had over a hundred episodes, we’re able to just branch down different rabbit holes.

There are still more things to talk about. It’s kind of surprising that there are always new topics and ways that we can apply what we’re learning to help with anxiety and OCD. Everyone, definitely stay tuned. We have some free resources on our website. I’d love to tell you about it, too. You can go to Hopeforanxietyandocd.com. We have our download from our hundredth episode on A Hundred Ways to Help You Manage Anxiety. We have an OCD resource: five things every Christian with OCD needs to know. We’ve got a few different things going on there and would love to have you check those resources out. Thank you, everyone, 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.

104. Being Kinder to Ourselves and Others with Greg Atkinson

Carrie interviews Greg Atkinson, an entrepreneur, speaker and author, about the power of kindness.

Greg shares his personal journey and how forgiveness and kindness have played a pivotal role in his life. The conversation highlights the ripple effect of kindness and its power to make the world a better place.

Episode Highlights.

  • How Greg Atkinson’s life experiences, including anxiety, inspired his commitment to kindness.
  • The importance of forgiveness in fostering a kinder world.
  • The significance of vulnerability and openness in sharing personal stories and breaking down the stigma surrounding mental health.
  • Practical ways to incorporate kindness into your own life and make a positive impact on those around you.
  • Greg’s Book: The Secret Power of Kindness

Episode Summary:

Welcome to the Christian Faith and OCD podcast! I’m Carrie Bock, your host, and today’s episode features Greg Atkinson—an insightful speaker, author, and educator on mental health issues.

Greg recently authored The Secret Power of Kindness, a book that opens with a deeply personal account of his journey through trauma, mental health struggles, and ultimately, forgiveness. Greg shares how his experiences with sexual, verbal, and physical abuse shaped his life, leading to diagnoses of anxiety and bipolar disorder.

The central theme of Greg’s book is forgiveness—a process that has taken years of therapy and personal growth. He emphasizes that holding onto anger and bitterness can prevent us from living a kind and compassionate life.

Greg also discusses the impact of mental health in his life, from the physical symptoms of anxiety to the mental battles of catastrophic thinking. He highlights the importance of understanding mental illness, especially within faith communities, where there can be harmful misconceptions about anxiety and depression being purely spiritual issues.

Through his story, Greg aims to educate and encourage others to approach mental health with kindness, both towards themselves and others. His insights challenge the stigma surrounding mental illness and promote a more compassionate understanding within the church and beyond.

Join me in this episode as we explore Greg Atkinson’s journey of healing, forgiveness, and the power of kindness.

Related links and Resources:

www.gregatkinson.com

The Secret Power of Kindness: 10 Keys to Unlocking Your Capacity to Change the World

Tune in for another inspiring episode:

103. Bouncing Back with Resilience with Donna Cox Gibbs, LCMHCS

On today’s episode, Carrie sits down with Donna Cox Gibbs, a licensed clinical mental health counselor and author. They explore the true essence of resilience – not just bouncing back, but moving forward through life’s challenges.

Episode Highlights:

  • Misconceptions about resilience and its true nature.
  • The significance of self-awareness in recognizing physical, emotional, and relational responses.
  • How faith and spiritual well-being contribute to building resilience.
  • Balancing emotional, physical, and spiritual aspects for whole-person resilience.
  • Practical tools for navigating life’s challenges and developing resilience over time.
  • Donna’s Book: Bounce: A 60-Day Devotional to Jumpstart Your Resilience

Episode Summary:

Welcome to Episode 103 of Christian Faith and OCD. I’m Carrie Bock, your host. I had the privilege of speaking with Donna Gibbs, a licensed clinical mental health counselor and supervisor from North Carolina. We delved into the concept of resilience—a topic that resonates deeply with all of us.

Donna simplifies resilience as the ability to keep moving forward through life’s challenges without getting stuck. Rather than bouncing back to where we were before, resilience is about bouncing forward, adapting, and growing through the trials we face. She shares a powerful personal story about a three-month hospitalization that tested her resilience and how the support and wisdom of a trusted physician and friend helped her navigate that challenging season.

Throughout our conversation, Donna emphasizes that resilience isn’t just a trait some people are born with—it’s something that can be learned and developed over time. She discusses the importance of a whole-person approach to resilience, integrating mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health. This holistic perspective is central to her work and is the foundation of her devotional book, Bounce: A 60-Day Devotional to Jumpstart Your Resilience.

As we reflect on resilience, I’m reminded of how God uses our trials to build character and perseverance. Whether you’re facing a life-changing diagnosis, a significant loss, or any other form of adversity, remember that resilience is about moving forward with faith, trusting that God will bring good from our struggles.

Related links and resources:

www.summitwellnesscenters.com

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