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Author: Carrie Bock

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

69. Let’s Talk About Hoarding with Carrie Bock, LPC-MHSP

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Counseling, OCD, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 69. Let’s Talk About Hoarding with Carrie Bock, LPC-MHSP

Join me in a solo episode as I talk about hoarding!

  • Hoarding as an OCD spectrum disorder
  • What causes a person to hoard things?
  • Criteria for hoarding disorder
  • How is hoarding related to trauma and grief?
  • Christian perspective on hoarding
  • Helpful tips to overcome hoarding

Related links and resources:

Book: Buried in Treasure

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

Episode 49. Will Less Stuff Equal Less Anxiety? with Becca Ehrlich

More Podcast Episodes

Transcript

Hope for Anxiety and OCD, episode 69. If you are new to the show, my name is Carrie Bock. I’m a licensed professional counselor in the state of Tennessee, and our show is all about reducing shame, increasing hope, and developing healthier connections with God and other.

Today’s show is about learning to let go. And it’s for help for people who are struggling with hoarding. And I wanted to say a little bit upfront to give credit to where credit is. Some of this information is taken that I’m gonna share with you from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders also known for short as the DSM, as well as the Book buried in Treasures by David Tolin, Randy O. Frost, Gail Steketee. I hope I pronounce that last name specifically correctly. They have done a great job putting together research and provide practical advice in their book.

And then some of the material I’m going to share today is just based on my own personal experience of working with clients who have struggled with hoarding, I’ve made up various examples. They are not true clients examples, but they’re based on variations of things that I actually have.

Why in the world are we talking about hoarding on a show for Anxiety and OCD? Well, we are talking about hoarding because courting is an OCD spectrum disorder in the DSM five.
So there is a section on OCD followed by hoarding. Hair-pulling skin picking. So there’s a spectrum of some different things that are classified under OCD that the DSM is what counselors, psychologists, and psychiatrists use to diagnose people. So there’s various criteria in there for those of you who aren’t familiar with the DSM, I should not just assume that you know what that is and I apologize.

A lot of people don’t realize that hoarding is part of the OCD spectrum of disorders. So let’s look at what are the actual criteria for being diagnosed with hoarding. There’s a persistent difficulty discarding or parting with possessions, regardless of their actual value. We all know someone who collects various things.

And some of those click tools may be really worth something a person hoarding things that are really valuable in their possessions that they could sell for money, but they also may be holding on to things that actually don’t have any value. It could be junk mail, recycling things, maybe that once had value, but have worn down and are no longer good. Or they’ve been sitting in an attic somewhere where they’ve overheated and deteriorate.

The difficulty getting rid of items is due to a perceived need to save the items in distress associated with discarding them. So there’s a need to say the item and we’re trying to not be in distress because when we try to get rid of things, there’s a level of emotional or psychological distress that comes with it.

The difficulty discarding, possessions results and accumulation of possessions that congest and clutter active living areas and substantially compromised their intended use. That’s the third criteria in the DSM. So for example, if you have a guest bathroom, but it’s so full of extra toilet paper, paper towels, and laundry detergent that you extreme coupon found on sale that you can’t actually get in that shower.

That guest bathroom, or maybe there’s a kitchen that’s so cluttered that you can’t actually get in there and cook anything in that. The fourth criteria is that it inhibits functioning often, socially, for example, people who struggle with hoarding may not be able to invite anybody over. They may isolate themselves from other people due to their hoarding disorder.
And there is also a potential to add on what is called a modifier to the diagnosis, which is an excessive acquisition, meaning that they keep acquiring items, keep bringing them into the.

So let’s talk about how common is hoarding. Hoarding affects actually two to 6% of the population, according to the DSM, over 15 million people in the US. That’s a pretty high number and it’s actually a small percentage of people that struggle seek help. Usually, there are other people trying to seek help on their behalf. They see this behavior as a problem, and the people that do seek help may have some kind of external pressure on them to get better. So maybe their spouse is really upset is cause causing some intense conflict in the mirror.

Maybe they’re single and they want to have a relationship, but they feel like, okay, I can’t even invite anybody over. So I don’t feel like I can date successfully. Maybe they just want to be more socially connected in examples, such as retirement, maybe someone is trying to downsize and move from a full, you know, three bedroom house to a smaller town home, something of that nature, and they’re having trouble and they might kind of seek help for this issue. Or they may have. Some kind of government, external pressure, maybe the codes department has been called on them. Someone’s complained about, you know, rubbish in the yard. Maybe social services has gotten involved either our children and someone’s come in and said, Hey, you’ve really got to clean this area up.

Those people don’t necessarily want to seek help on their own, but they’re kind of backed into a corner and have to, or otherwise they’re not going to be able to get what they want. Hoarding typically runs in families. And about half of the people who struggle report also having a relative who hoards as well.
So whenever we’re looking at things that run in families, it’s kind of hard to tease out. Is that because there are some genetic components, is that because this is a learned behavior. If we’re seeing other people do something, obviously where you may have a tendency to pick up on. It’s quite possible that the individual grew up in a family where there were certain messages surrounding items that they internalize and then therefore are living out in their adult life.

Maybe some examples are that item was a gift. You can’t give that away. Somebody really thought of you and they gave you that item. You got a hold on. Or, you know, you need to hold onto this item because you might actually need that some day. Yeah. You’re not using it right now, but it may really come in handy later. We have to catch that sale. We’ve got to buy things, even if we don’t need them quite yet while they’re on sale. So how does. This hoarding develop will. It seems like there are some genetic and temperamental components and that’s where the authors of the buried in treasures did some research. They put people in MRI machines and they were having them make decisions while they were actively looking at the areas of their brain that were over-activated or under activated.

It’s actually really interesting. And I encourage you to go get the book and read on that. If you struggle with hoarding or if you know someone who struggles, there’s also a lot of advice in the book for family members and how to approach your loved one as well. So that may be beneficial if you’re listening on behalf of a loved one, who’s struggling.
What they found through this study was that there were different levels of activity and key parts of the brain between the person struggling with hoarding and the person in the typical population. They had a harder time categorizing their own stuff, but it didn’t interfere with them categorizing other people’s.

So seeing certain things as special kind of can be a common issue. And so then if it’s special, it kind of gets its own category. And we can’t put things together. In other categories, there are some common struggles and overlap that it’s seen in people who struggle with hoarding in terms of difficulty with attention, making decisions.

There you tend to be more creative because they look at items and think, oh, well, we could use it this way. Or I could use that to do this, that somebody else may not necessarily see the value in something. There may be a tendency to want to do everything perfectly like struggling with perfectionism and a tendency to procrastinate, to put things off, you know?
Okay. I really do want to organize this. I feel like it’s gotta be perfect. So then I put it off because I can’t do it. You know, it’s overwhelming. Maybe someone has, for example, a train collection and they want to sell this train collection, but first they have to organize the train collection maybe by type of year, the year that it came out.

And then I have to figure out how am I going to sell them. Am I going to put them in a yard sale? Well, no, that maybe seems a lot of work to label everything. And then who wants to do a yard? So with only trains, well, I could put them on Facebook marketplace, but then I have to take these pictures and figure out how do I list that? And if I listed on marketplace then I have to meet up with somebody and where am I going to meet up with them? And if I post it on another website to sell it online, you know, I’ve got to take these pictures and figure out how I’m going to get payment. The Venmo app, you know, what do I do?

I use PayPal and then there’s a sense of exhaustion and just feeling defeated like, oh, this feels like it’s going to be too much work to make this happen and ended up in decision overload.

We ended up in decision overload. What happens? We just have this tendency to shut down and not do it. Another issue is the sense of feeling sentimental attachment. Now we’ve all had some level of this, right? We have an item. It’s not necessarily worth anything to anyone else, but to us, it’s tied to a memory or a specific time in our life.

And we think, “Okay, I don’t want to let that go because the attachment to this object reminds me of positive things where it reminds me of an important person in my life.” Maybe it was something that they gave me or something that we did together. One thing I’ve noticed in my work with people who struggle with hoarding is that they have a tendency to view their better days as being in the past. So they have these items that allow them to reminisce about the past, where the better days were, for example, if an individual used to surf, let’s say they lived by the ocean. Now, maybe they don’t live by the ocean or they don’t go surfing anymore. Maybe they’ve had an injury where they can no longer.

But yet they have a collection of surfing supplies and you know, they’ve got the surfboard, they’ve got the wax that goes on the board. Other things that I don’t even know about surfing, but they have the wetsuits, everything that goes with surfing. They’ve got a whole collection of stuff yet. They’re not using it.

They’re not going to use it because they don’t surf. But when I look at that, I think, man, wasn’t that really great when I could get out in the water. Feeling the wind on my face and being catching a wave. It’s awesome. So that’s maybe just one example of how someone might hold on to items to really reminisce about good things that they experienced, even though they don’t need the items or they’re not using the.
We’ll talk about a little bit later in terms of healing from that people may hoard and hold onto things because it’s a part of their identity. They may view themselves as a collector like, oh, this is a collector’s item. I have all of these collector or board games from years and years ago that I want to hold on to probably are worth something.

I maybe a person holds on to craft supplies because they want to view themselves as an artist or painting supplies, even though they don’t paint, but they would like to be able to do some of those things. I know that for myself having been a foster parent, I had a lot of kid items around the house and it was hard to get rid of some of those things because being a foster parent obviously had been my identity for that time period.

And I didn’t know really what the future held for me. You know, maybe I would marry someone with kids and what if I needed some of these items? It was a process that I had to go through to realize, you know, I’m not living that life anymore. That’s not my identity. So I don’t need to hold on to things tied to that identity.

People may also struggle because they get a high from acquiring possessions. Oh. I saw a great sale at the thrift store. I got these pants for half off and I got this item and look, it was only a dollar. I went to this yard sale and isn’t this awesome. And they may buy stuff that they don’t need just because they feel like it’s a good price.
And then there’s this like elevation of self-worth and value that they feel of being able to find this good deal. Now I mentioned the book buried in treasure. This book is a CBT-based book. So it was based on cognitive behavioral therapy. And that’s the approach that they take to overcoming hoarding.

It’s very good material. And one thing that that approach hasn’t addressed really that I’ve seen is this tendency of something that I’ve noticed connected to hoarding and. The unresolved and at times traumatic grief and a loss that seems to come with it, this attachment to items that are tangible way of keeping a connection between the person and something or someone that they have lost.

It’s not always a loved one. When we talk about grief and loss. But it can be, it can be a situation where they’ve lost a loved one. A spouse has died and they feel like they just can’t get rid of their stuff. They’ve got to hold onto it because somehow that is connected to the memory of that person. And if they let it go.

They feel like I’m going to lose that person all over again. It also, the loss can be connected to things that they used to be doing, but aren’t doing anymore. So I gave the example of like being a foster parent in my own life. Other people, they may have been a Sunday school teacher when they were younger.

They may have coloring pages. They may have flannel graphs for anyone who remembers those things. Who are you? You stick the picture on the flannel. Nobody even uses that anymore, but someone might be holding onto it going, oh, that was such a good time. Like when I was a Sunday school teacher and pouring into the little kids and wasn’t that fun and awesome.

So really going through and grieving those losses. We’ll talk about this later is an important part of the healing process. Because if you don’t grieve those losses that are connected to these items, you’re not going to be able to get rid of the items. I remember another personal example for myself, of some things that I’ve struggled with getting rid of.

I had an entire room of play therapy tools. At my old office, this is now two offices ago. I had a specific room dedicated to seeing children and made a decision at that point in my practice that I didn’t want to work as many evenings. I wanted to kind of prepare for hopefully my own family life. At some point wanted to have more work-life balance.

I wasn’t seeing a whole lot of kids and it didn’t make sense to have this entire room full of. However, it was hard to let go of those things because I had acquired them over time. Over years of working with children, probably I don’t know, five to seven years. And that was hard for me to say, I’m no longer a play therapist.

I’m no longer doing this type of work. And what if I regret this decision? I, I get rid of all this stuff and then decide, I want to work with kids. Yeah, of course, that is a possibility, but that didn’t happen to me. I’m actually very happy and pleased with that decision. And I sold those toys to a friend who was going to do more types of play therapy, expressive therapy, and hopefully got some good use out of those.

Now that I’ve given you an overview, talk through some examples. I want to talk about the. Things that can be done to help. If you recognize that this is a problem within yourself, what are some things that can be done to learn, to let go of items, to not have to continue dealing with wording anymore?

Number one is recognize that this is a problem that you need help with. That is really hard for any issue that we’re facing to admit that we need help with something. As we talked about before, oftentimes. People who are struggling with hoarding either. Don’t recognize that they need the help, or they recognize that they have a bit of a problem, but they think they can manage it on their own.

Now you’re going to need different types of help and support. You’re going to need some professional support. Hopefully, you can find someone in your community or online, a therapist who has worked with hoarding in the past to give you that professional support and perspective, you’re going to need some personal support, not people who are going to come in and be overbearing or rushy to get rid of stuff but are going to come alongside with you and work with you at your own pace.
These are going to be people maybe that can help you bring some stuff to give away, to, to donate. Maybe they can help you move some furniture out of your house. Or they can just provide that encouragement in moral support of just saying, you know, I know this is really hard for you, but I’m so proud of you that you are tackling this issue in your life.
That goes a long way. Oftentimes we underestimate the power of personal support for someone who is struggling with a mental health issues. And we don’t need to underestimate that because it’s very valuable. Now you may need. Medical help. Um, you may need to look at medication as an option, especially if you have co-occurring disorders, something like ADHD, that’s getting in the way, anxiety, depression, then, you know, you may look at medication as an option to treat some of those things so that you can go through the behaviors and really tackle especially if you are working at this from a cognitive behavioral standpoint and you’re having trouble making progress, I always encourage people who don’t want to take medication to really, okay. We’ll try therapy, those tools, the self-help things for a little while. And then if you’re not making progress, maybe we’ll circle back around and evaluate whether medication might be an option at that point.

Step two, you’re going to have to commit time and I’m talking to them. Every day or at least five days a week to commit to the process of recovery, to commit to the process of cleaning up your space. Obviously, it didn’t get that way overnight and it’s not going to be cured overnight. You’re not just going to have an extreme home makeover most likely now.
The book. And then I talked about recommends really building up, I believe from maybe 15 minutes a day to eventually getting to a point where you’re working on this an hour a day to really make tangible progress, three, develop a positive view of the future. We talked about how people who struggle with hoarding can be very past-oriented.

The good times are behind me reminiscing. Wasn’t that awesome when we did this or that. So I really want to encourage you for a Christian standpoint to visualize yourself, blessing people with the items that you have and finding joy. In giving, because there really is a joy that comes from giving to others that would be beneficial for you to tap into and it’ll help ease the pain of getting rid of certain items.

I know that that’s been my experience in terms of getting things, when I was able to bless someone else with it, it was a lot easier to let those things go. Another way you can develop a positive view of the future is to really visualize what is it going to be like to have this life that you want, where you’re inviting friends and family into your living room.

Just really picture that in your mind there’s nothing on the couch, other than people actually sitting there and maybe a couple of throw pillows. Visualize that empty space, maybe where you have boxes right now, visualize your bank account, having more money because you’re not spending a bunch of money, accumulating things you don’t need at yard.

So thrift stores or on Amazon visualize your life without horses. Playing with your grandchildren more often finding a spouse, focusing on one hobby, instead of trying to focus on the things that you can’t do anymore, telling yourself that the better days are ahead of you and not all your good memories are going to be found in the past anymore because you’re going to be creating new, positive memories in the future.

And that’s going to be really awesome.

Step four. Figure out how to stop acquiring new items. There’s time dedicated in the buried in treasures book that helps with this as well. But if you don’t stop acquiring new items, then you’re fighting this losing battle, right? Because if you get rid of a bunch of stuff in your house, and then you go to the yard sale and you buy 20 more things, then you’re just going in circles.

You may have to stop going to the places that you acquire stuff temporarily. So let’s say that you are a shopaholic related to like Ross, TJ Maxx, some of those discount stores. Maybe you need to stay away from those places for a while, until you’re able to get some of the tools under your belt to be able to go in there and not acquire.

You may have to set up a rule for yourself if you’re an online shopper and you’re always having things mailed to you through Amazon or some of those other stores. You may set a rule for yourself where you say, okay, I am not going to buy anything until it sits in my cart for at least 24 hours.

And then I’ll reevaluate whether or not I actually really need that. If you put this into play in your life, I’ve actually had some clients that have tried this that just felt like they were shopaholics, not even necessarily hoarders. So they felt like they were spending too much money on Amazon on things that they didn’t need.

And I said, okay, well set a rule for yourself that it’s got to stay in your cart overnight, or it’s got to stay in your cart for 24 hours so that you’re not impulse purchase. Step five is to do the intellectual work. This is the cognitive part of the work, finding the belief systems that are holding you back.

What are the thoughts that are keeping you stuck? So it may be something like, I need this. We tell ourselves that we need things all the time when we actually don’t need them. They’re often a want the things that we tell ourselves that we need. The IMEI use this someday. If you haven’t used it in the last three years, you’re probably not going to use it in the next three years.

Some people have appliances for every kind of function in the kitchen when they don’t use them, they may use one or two appliances and have 10. I remember getting rid of some round cake pans awhile back because I realized, well, I used to do a lot of baking. I enjoyed it. It was a thing. And I thought, when was the last time I actually made a cake number one and there were two, if I do make a cake, I don’t tend to use the round pan because then you’ve got to stack to have the icing layer in the middle of like probably gonna use the rectangle pan and just make the cake that way. So I got rid of those and I don’t regret it in the slightest or miss them because I wasn’t using. Now the book has a lot of worksheets where you can ask yourself different questions to evaluate items of why you’re really holding on to them.

So if you want to dig in and do that work, you may have thoughts. Like, you know, this is a good deal, so I have to buy it or I can get some money out of it. So I have to sell it. This refers to things that you already own. Like, well, I can’t get rid of that yet. I’ve got to find a way to sell it. We talked about some of these things already, but to get rid of this item would disrespect the memory of my loved one or cause me to forget them in some way.
Or I can’t get rid of stuff until I can sort it out perfectly and put it into the right category. Realistically, you have to realize that whatever space you have, it can only hold so many items. Going back to the visualization. Let’s say you have 10 pictures, but you can only fit five in the room.

That means you have five to get rid of, because you can have a whole lot of especially decorations, decor type items that you don’t have the space to put up or show off. And it may be time to let those things go. Along with the intellectual work. Number six is you’ve got to be able to do the emotional work to either heal from the trauma or grieve the loss.

Some losses can be very traumatic to us, such as the loss of a loved one or pets. Now I have helped people process through things like watching their. Get hit by a car that is a very traumatic loss. It’s sudden it’s unexpected. There’s a tendency to blame yourself. And people may think, well, how in the world is that connected to hoarding or to holding onto things, but it can be when you are really sitting with a skilled counselor and you start to trace some of these things back, some of this tendency to hold on to things and the discomfort of letting it go.

Sometimes that’s where it goes back to. It could be a sense of a sudden move. Those can also be traumatic. Maybe you had to leave a place suddenly. Maybe you lost a bunch of items in a fire. I don’t know, but processing through that trauma can really be beneficial having a long-term illness or injury, a chronic health condition, an injury that has prevented you from doing other things.

There may be things that you’re not able to do that you used to be able to do. That’s a law. Then a lot of times we don’t acknowledge within ourselves and specifically within our society, that if you go through something like whether it’s cancer or whether it’s an auto-immune disorder and all of a sudden there are these limitations that you haven’t had before.
There is some grief and loss associated with that. You don’t have the energy that you used to have. You don’t have maybe the same supports that you used to have. There could be all different kinds of factors in there. Oftentimes when we’re talking about loss, there’s the big loss, right? Whether it’s the loss of the person and then there’s all the little loss that go along with it.

So for example, if I, worst case scenario lost my husband, Steve tomorrow, if he died in some way, then there would be all of these little things that Steve does and just kind of takes care of. It could be something as little as he feeds the cats in the morning and in the. Now every time I go to feed the cat, I’m thinking, oh, you know, Steve used to do that.
That’s a reminder, these bigger losses, there’s all these little things that can get wrapped up and connected into them. And if we don’t take time to really process that into cry and to journal and to grieve and to let go. Then we’re missing out on being able to work through that grief. Unfortunately, I don’t know how it is in a lot of other places, but in America, people rush through the grief process.

\They go from one thing and it’s like, tomorrow’s a new day and they just expect themselves to move on and not have any issues. Unfortunately, that’s not the way that we work, that our minds and emotions and body works. We need to be able to take time to process, to grieved, to elect. Number seven as with all forms of OCD.
Since this is an OCD spectrum disorder, a person with hoarding is going to have to learn to be able to sit with the discomfort that comes from letting go of items, because there is going to be some discomfort that. And the whole point of doing this work on the front end, the intellectual work, the emotional work, the spiritual work is to be able to get to a place where you can sit with discomfort, where it’s to a manageable level, that you can work through it so that it’s not a traumatic issue getting rid of. Because if someone just were to come in tomorrow and clean out your stuff and you struggle with hoarding, that would be traumatic for you. You wouldn’t want that to happen. However, you want to be able to pace yourself and go through this process so that you can get to a place we’re seeing.

You’re mindful in your space, how you’re feeling, what thoughts you’re having about getting rid of things. And then you can sit with the discomfort, work through it. So that it’s not as uncomfortable as it is initially looking at getting rid of an eye. Now, since this is a Christian podcast, I want to talk about this from a spiritual perspective.
For a moment, Jesus talks about storing up treasures in heaven, in not on the earth. There’s also a parable about a man who basically becomes rich, gathers a bunch of grain stores things, and then. Next thing, you know, he dies and none of it really matters that he had all these acquisition of items is because in the end, you know, he died and he had to give an

account for his soul at that.
We know that God doesn’t want us to have anything as an idol. That’s over him. You know, “you shall have no other gods before me or not have graven images.” And a lot of times we think that, oh, we don’t have idols like people have idols maybe in other places. But we all have idols in our lives that we have to confess and work through.
Whether that idol is stuff, money, relationship, it could be so many different things that people are putting above their relationship with God. And so understanding and confessing and recognizing that stuff can become an idol in your life. Even if you don’t want it to that, that’s something that can creep up on you.

And so addressing this from a spiritual perspective, really working through in prayer and confessing to God that just stuff has become out of control. And that you want to give that control back over to him, that you want to be able to release these items and allowing prayer to become a part of this process, I think would be helpful and important for you.

Prayer can be a process also in processing through the grief and losses. Like really telling God how you feel, what you think, why you feel like you have to hold onto this stuff. And as we’re praying, and as we’re processing through those things, God works on our heart, allows things to be a little bit easier and a little bit easier as you commit to that work, to letting it go really praying through what is a good time of the day.

Maybe for me to work on this, whether it’s in the morning, whether it’s in the evening, whether it’s right after you get off work, how are you going to do this?

Allowing this spiritual sense of godly accountability in your life can fastening to someone else that this is an issue. There’s so many ways that you could incorporate spirituality in terms of healing from hoarding disorder.
God does not want us to be ruled or owned by anything. And that includes our stuff. We did another episode a while back, if you have not heard it, I would encourage you to go back and listen to it. And that’s episode 49 on will. Less stuff, equal, less anxiety. That episode is a personal story about Christian minimalism. It’s a very good episode that has a lot of spiritual in it as well.

So I encourage you to listen to that one for more spiritual applications in terms of getting rid of. So if you’ve been listening to the show for a while, you know that at the end of every podcast, I like to share a story of hope, which is a time where someone received hope from God or another person.

And often I asked my guests that question, since this is a solo episode, I have to come up with stories of hope for you from my own life. And here’s one that came to me recently. I, if you’ve been following along with the podcast and myself and my own journey, My husband, Steve, you know, that we just had a beautiful little daughter named faith and she is fabulous.
We are so excited to have her in our lives and it’s been a really a long road to get to having faith. And so that’s how she got the name of faith, of course, because. There were so many things. I waited probably over 10 years to become a mother from the time that I started my foster care journey. So one day I’m holding my daughter and she’s asleep and looking absolutely adorable.

And it’s just really these beautiful times that we have for me to be able to pray over her and to thank God for her. And I was having this moment with my daughter that was just really beautiful and spiritual, and something happened where I started to really ponder God and being God, being all-knowing and God being sovereign.
In the world and I thought, okay. So God knew ahead of time that I was going to have this moment with my daughter. And I don’t mean like he knew ahead of time as in earlier in the day. I mean, God knew that I was gonna have this baby and be sitting here watching her sleeping feeling. Incredibly blessed.

God knew that 10 years ago when I lost my foster daughters and God knew that I was going to have this moment several years ago when my first husband wanted a divorce and walked out the door and wanted nothing else to do with me and all these painful moments of my life. I’m going to talk about my daughter’s birth story related to my pregnancy and in a future episode, but there were some complications that came up at the end, shall we say, where I had this higher chance of stillbirth. And of course, that’s very scary when a doctor tells you that. So here, I’m going through this crying and praying, like, don’t let me lose this baby. Now that I’ve gone through all of the. And in that moment, God knew I was going to have this beautiful moment where I’m thanking him because my daughter is here now.

So whatever you’re going through right now may be incredibly painful and you may not see anything good here. Or anything good coming out of it or anything? Beautiful arriving later because when I went through some of those painful experiences in my life, I didn’t see how they could be good on ever like on the other side and just really.
So angry or frustrated or sad with God and in how some of those situations turned out. But God had a plan. He knew what he was doing, and it’s so hard for us in the now to trust him. But that’s what I encourage you to do with whatever’s messy and uncomfortable and scary. In your life to really lean in and trust God to know that he wants to bless you with these beautiful moments. If you are serving him, if you are seeking to honor him, that he wants to make the beauty from the ashes and heal. You from this pain that you’re experiencing. And there is a beautiful and wonderful gift on the other side, at the end of our pain and suffering that we don’t see, we have no concept of at the time.

So that’s my story of hope for you today. I hope that that encourages you. I’m so glad that you decided to tune in today. If you are struggling with hoarding and you feel like you need additional professional support and you are in the state of Tennessee, I want to let you know that I plan to start a support group in the fall for people who are struggling with hoarding and really want to take action steps towards getting to a better place with this who want to do the intellectual, emotional work and want the accountability for putting the time and effort in.

So if that is something that you’re interested in, please contact me through my counseling website www.bythecounseling.com. I don’t have specific days and times for that group yet, but I will post information about it on my site and encourage you to contact me if you’re interested in being a part of that group, or if you’re interested in receiving individual therapy for hoarding.

I am back from maternity leave on June 1st and we’ll be taking on several more clients is since I’ve been off for a while. And if you’ve been looking to get into counseling summer is a great time because counselors often have more openings in the summer because people are on vacation and various things.

So if you need to go to counseling because you’re struggling with hoarding and OCD, spectrum issue, or any other mental health condition, don’t wait, go ahead and get that ball rolling.

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 our original music is by Brandon Maingrum.

Until next time be comforted by God’s great love f

68. Approaching Insomnia Differently with Martin Reed

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 68. Approaching Insomnia Differently with Martin Reed

Martin Reed is a certified health education specialist and a clinical sleep health specialist.

  • Martin’s personal insomnia journey and how it led him to learn helpful techniques
  • Regaining his sense of sleepiness
  • Misleading information about sleep
  • Do we really need a certain amount of sleep?
  • Helpful tips to calm a racing mind and sleep better
  • Can we still sleep even when we have difficult thoughts and feelings?
  • Martin Reed’s sleep coaching and online sleep education

Links and Resources:

Marin Reed

More Podcast Episodes

Surrendering Our Insomnia to God

Transcript

Carrie: Hope For Anxiety and OCD. Episode 68. Today on the show. I have an interview with Martin Reed. Who’s going to talk to us about approaching insomnia differently? Martin is an insomnia coach. And has this certification in Clinical Sleep Health. He’s going to provide some really practical advice on the show today. And I have to be honest to say that I really needed this and utilize some of it in pregnancy. I had horrible experiences with restless leg syndrome, and then later it changed. Lots of insomnia and it took me a little while to get into this rhythm, to work through and overcome it. So if you have trouble sleeping, like many people do, you’re really gonna want to tune into this episode. Martin, tell us a little bit about your own struggles with insomnia and how that led you to helping others with their sleep.

Martin: I was always one of these people that never had an issue with sleep. I loved to sleep. If it was advisable, I would have put it on my resume. You know, it was just the IXL that, and so it was something I never really thought about back in, it was, a long time ago, 2000. I think it was, I immigrated from the UK to the US and I was also getting married at the same time. So lots of big life changes. And at that time I experienced some sleep disruption. Never really thought much about it, you know, because everyone has some difficult nights from time to time. And I figured that it was just one of those things and it will get better, but it didn’t, and it was strange.

Because then I started to get a little bit more concerned about it. Not, not like crazy concerned, but this is an emergency, but just more concerned about it. And I started to do things to try and fix the problem, right? Because in life, when we have a problem, we try and fix it. But instead of sleep getting better, it seemed to get even worse. And then this led to more REM. Now, you know, I was starting to get really concerned about what was going on. So like what most of us do when we have issues or problems, we turn stopped to Google and see, see what the solutions are. And to be honest, that wasn’t a lot of very helpful information out there, I think has got a little bit better sense.

But back then, there was a lot of information that wasn’t helpful and it mainly centered ironically on sleep hygiene, which unfortunately is one of these things that people with chronic longer-term insomnia are often told about already know about. And we actually know that it’s not helpful for people with chronic insomnia because it’s more to do with prevention rather than treatment or cure.

You know, it’s a bit like if we get a cavity, we brush our teeth, then it’s not really going to help. But if we brush our teeth before the cavity, it’s helpful, then, you know, and, and I also thought it was a little bit condescending that someone would say, “well, if you have a hot bath or make sure there’s no light in your bedroom, or you set the right temperature in your bedroom, then everything’s going to be okay”. And so I was just really struggling, you know, because there was this problem that I’d never experienced before. 

There was all this information out there that just didn’t seem relevant or helpful. But, tubs, I kept on looking and I came across these techniques, which we now know, which I now know of as, grounded in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia CBTI techniques. And it’s just about changing our behaviors in a way that helps create better conditions for sleep. 

So I found these two specific techniques, that was, don’t spend as much time in bed. Which seemed completely illogical because I wanted to spend more time in bed to try and catch up on sleep and get more sleep. And upon reflection, you realize that more time in bed usually means more time awake and therefore you end up kind of perpetuating this sleep disruption. And another technique was to just get out of bed. If you’re struggling in bed, you’re just spending a lot of time away. So figure figured, you know, all right, thIs sounds different. 

These don’t sound logical at first glance and maybe there’s something to them, you know? So I tried them out and I found them really helpful. I started to regain that sense of sleepiness when I went to bed at night, by going to bed a lot later than I was. And it also just made the nights a little bit more pleasant because I had that option now, instead of just staying in the bedroom, being in bed didn’t feel good. I could just, like, get out of bed and maybe watch some TV or read or just do something to make being awake a bit more pleasant rather than just tossing and turning. So anyway, to cut a long story short, as I found these techniques helpful, I figured these techniques need to be out there more.

There’s not enough support out there for people with chronic insomnia. There’s a lot of misinformation. I ended up just starting off by creating, like a forum, just people, for instance, with insomnia, just to get support. As I found that these techniques were actually really helpful, not just kind of a flash in the pan that helped for a week. And then I was back to square one, but I actually found that they were helpful over the long term.

I figured maybe I can be someone who also shares these techniques. And so there were some people in the forum. I said, “Hey, let’s. I’ve learned about these techniques. If you’re interested, let’s see if they help you too”. And they were helping other people too. So I figured out there must be rid of that. It really is something to this. And so that just kind of led me to where I am today. Over the course of a number of years, I decided that I want to get the word out about these techniques. 

I want to help people coach them through this with evidence-based techniques, not this kind of sleep hygiene stuff. And so that was when I ended up going back to school, I obscured my master’s degree, becoming a health coach, getting certification in Clinical Sleep Health and sending up in Insomnia coach.com, which is my sleep coaching business for people with insomnia. So, it was basically a journey of my own experience. And that’s what led me to where I am today. 

Carrie: What you say, is there some kind of time limit for people? If you, for example, if you’re laying in the bed past. Is it 20 minutes, 30 minutes, then you should probably get up and do something different or try something else?

Martin: It’s a tricky one. Because, if we’re following, kind of the latter of the technique, we usually see people suggesting. If it’s like 20 minutes or 30 minutes of wakefulness then to get out of bed. But sometimes I find that’s not so helpful because it leads us to kind of lying in bed. Has it been 20 minutes? Has it been on my own, 15 minutes? Is it 10 minutes? Maybe I should check the time when we do all these things that ratchet up that brain activity. 

So usually I find it helpful to just be like, what does it feel like to be in bed? If it feels pretty good, you know, you’re calm and relaxed, then maybe we don’t need to get out of bed because that implies that conditions might be right for sleep. So there’s no need to jump out of bed. And that way, when we just use how we feel as a gauge, we might be less inclined to monitor for time or to check the time during the night, which usually isn’t very helpful. 

Carrie: Let’s talk about that. Some more, like, as far as behaviors that you see people with insomnia engaging in. That isn’t helpful. So for getting a good night’s sleep. So one of the things you would say is like clock checking, like what time is it? And then doing that calculation. Okay. Now I’m only going to get six hours of sleep. 

Martin: Exactly. I think, I don’t think we need to be like, really committed to avoidance. Sometimes we’re going to see the time. That’s fine. It’s when we kind of seek out the time. I think that’s when it can be a little bit problematic. I’m still waiting to hear from someone who told me who has chronic insomnia, who told me that checking the time during the night, like actively checking the time through the night, made them feel good and was helpful.

Usually the best outcome is neutral, but most of the time, like you just said, it leads us to think, okay, how much sleep if I go, how long have I been awake? How much time do I have left? Just get all those cogs tony again. And it seems like such a small thing. Just not to check the time during the night.

I have so many clients that tell me that was one of the most helpful things they did just making that change because it’s one less thing for the mind to be concerned with during the night, in terms of other behaviors, we commonly see people with chronic insomnia, completely understandably engaging in, but that kind of backfired on us is like a touched upon just spending too much time in bed or allotting too much time for sleep. And so we might be giving ourself a sleep schedule where we’re going to be in bed. 8 hours, for example, because we want to get eight hours of sleep or I, you know, I’ve had clients that have moved on to spending nine hours in bed, 10 hours in bed, 11 hours in bed, because they’re just so desperate to kind of get more sleep, to create conditions for sleep.

But unfortunately, this backfires on us because. What happens is we usually then go to bed before we’re sleeping enough a sleep. We can go to bed. It’s really easy to confuse fatigue with sleepiness. Fatigue is kind of feeling run down, worn out, exhausted difficulty, concentrating that brain fog, which I’m going to throw it out there. I’m going to guess that 99 to a hundred percent of people with chronic insomnia experience all of the time. And it’s really easy to confuse that with sleepiness and to think, that means it’s time for bed. That sleepiness is just finding it hard to stay awake. And that only occurs when we’ve been awake for long enough.

And when we have a lot of concern about sleep, sometimes we need to be awake for a little bit longer than we used to be in the past to build up enough sleepiness, to kind of overpower all that stuff that’s going on in our mind. So, spending too much time, allowing too much time for sleep, getting out of bed all different times.

You know, according to how we sleep from night to night time, the ironic thing that we see with people with chronic insomnia is often let’s say, you’ve set your alarm for six AM, you fall asleep? Finally at like 5:30 AM. So you get half an hour asleep, human nature. You’re going to want to turn that alarm off and get that sleep because it’s now happening. And it feels great at the time to do that, but unfortunately, it’s a little bit like kicking the can on the road. You know, we might get that bit of extra sleep when we do that, but we kind of setting ourself up for sleep disruption the very next night, because we’ve been sleeping for later in the day. We’re back to, then we’re not going to have as much time awake during the day to build up that sleepiness for the next night. 

Carrie: So naps good or bad, or is it hard to know? Just kind of depends on the person. 

Martin: Think for safety. Naps are always appropriate. You know, if we actually feel like we’re going to fall asleep without warning and we need to drive or operate machinery or something like that, you know, safety trumps everything. But ideally we want to avoid those daytime naps just because they’re going to reduce what we call sleep drive. One way we can imagine sleep drive is like, if we take a balloon and we’re blowing air into a balloon, every puff of air into that balloon is like an hour that we’re awake and we sleep when that balloon bursts.

So when we first wake up in the morning, you know, an hour, every hour of waiting, a furnace blowing air into that balloon blowing air into that balloon. And, and the idea is by the time we go to bed, that balloon is really close to bursting. We get into bed, pop the balloon burst and we sleep. So if we imagine that kind of analogy for naps, our balloon is about half full during the day. Then we nap. We’re kind of letting air out of that balloon. And then we got the rest of the day. We ended up going to bed but the balloon is still a little bit floppy, you know, not really close to bursting. So it’s one of these things that, and that might feel good at the time during the day, but then we’re kind of setting ourselves up for some potential for sleep disruption the following night.

Carrie: That makes a lot of sense, actually. It really does.

Martin: Another reason why it can be helpful to just avoid those daytime naps is it can also be just another area of concern because people with chronic insomnia. Often try to nap during the day because they’re chasing sleep. We’re so desperate for sleep to happen, whereas people without chronic insomnia they’ll nap during the day, because they’re sleepy, they’re finding it hard to stay awake.

So a lot of the time, especially my experience, I see clients. They try to nap during the day, but then they can’t nap. So that generates even more concern because then they’re like, oh my goodness, I’m really struggling to sleep at night. And I can’t even sleep during the day when I try to nap. So just by removing naps from the equation, we’re eliminating that potential source of more concern. And we’re also banking all that daytime sleep drive to help with sleep at night. 

Carrie: There’s so much of this, that’s connected to stress. So it’s like I’m stressed and then I can’t sleep. But now, because I can’t sleep, I’m stressed about not sleeping. And that really leads into the thought process that people get into with insomnia. So talk with us about that. Some of the common thinking errors that people have.

Martin: Absolutely. My thinking on thinking, my thinking on thoughts has definitely evolved over the last few years when I first learned more about these CBT I techniques. The traditional way of thinking that is the, we have, like dysfunctional thoughts, thoughts that are inaccurate or incorrect, and that we should perhaps evaluate them, criticize them, or try and change them into more accurate, or more positive thoughts.

My thinking now is that. We don’t need to really do any of that because thoughts are thoughts. Sometimes thoughts are true and they’re accurate, sometimes they’re not. So, but we don’t necessarily need to get into an argument with our mind because these are thoughts. Thoughts can make us feel good. Thoughts can feel unpleasant, but they’re still thoughts. And we can still control our actions and our behaviors, regardless of what the mind tells us. Even though sometimes that, that prompting from the mind. Can lead to us responding. Behaviourally almost instantaneously and make us believe that thoughts control our actions with some practice.

We can help to kind of decouple our actions from our thoughts. So I don’t know if they asked you a question, but generally now I take the approach that there’s no real dysfunctional thoughts, per say. There are just thoughts and that we can always work with our thoughts in a way that separates our actions from our thoughts so that we can still do things that create good conditions for sleep. And we can still do things that help us move toward the kind of life we want to live, even with all those thoughts going on in our minds. 

Carrie: I think really learning to become an observer of your thoughts and not having to get sucked into every single one that you’re having or believe that it’s somehow. Character reflection on you or that you have to act on it kind of what you were saying. It’s like, you can have a thought. And certainly, we have thoughts all the time that we don’t act on.

Sometimes we have thoughts that we should act on like, I should exercise. And we don’t. And then other times, you know, we have thoughts and we’re like, that was out of left field. That’s not really who I am or what I lined with. So do we have a misperception though, sometimes about sleep just from what we’re told with doctors and you know, I have to get my eight hours and you know, I’ve just heard conflicting things on that. I’ve heard some people say, you know, well, no, you don’t necessarily have to get eight hours. It just depends on your age and your own kind of individual makeup. Some people need more sleep than others. Any thoughts on that?

Martin: Definitely. You know there’s a lot of misleading information out there about sleep. A lot of it does focus on sleep duration. So many of us can have the belief that we need to get eight hours of sleep, or we need to get a certain amount of sleep. The thing about that is anytime we read information about, we should be getting a certain amount of sleep, it’s always just based on averages. It’s a bit like saying everyone should be five foot, 10 inches tall, just because that’s the average height. I don’t know if that is, but I’m just guessing here, but you know, all I’m just getting at is it’s just one of these things that’s based on averages.

So there are always going to be happy, healthy people that exist outside of these averages. Just like with our height, we can’t control sleep duration. We can help, we can use our behaviors in a way that creates good conditions for sleep, but in terms of how much sleep we’re going to get, we have no control over that. And often we get most caught up in the struggle when we do try and control that a lot of the clients I work with, they find the best, just such a relief to know that they don’t need to aim for eight hours or seven hours of sleep. 

You know, they just need to allot an appropriate amount of time for sleep. You know, give themselves the opportunity to get sleep. And the body is always going to generate at the very least the band and minimum amount of sleep we need. No matter what, as long as we’re giving it the opportunity to generate sleep, we never lose the ability to sleep. So it’s really about just trying to not control things that we cannot control and sleep duration is one of the things that we can’t control.

Unfortunately.

Carrie: That’s an interesting concept that I’ve never really thought about or pondered. It’s like, I don’t have control over what my body does, how long it stays asleep and whether or not, you know, I’m able to wake up rested. It’s like I have to provide the opportunity, but then my body has to kick in and, and sleep with it. Interesting. 

Martin: Exactly. One thing about, well, just to add onto that one thing that we often see when we read these articles about sleep duration. They’re really aimed primarily at people who aren’t getting enough sleep because they’re kind of burning the candle at both ends. They’ve got a busy home life. They’ve got a busy work life, so they’re just not giving themselves the opportunity to sleep. We’ve got, I think a lot of this advice or information about try and get seven to nine hours of sleep or whatever it is people are saying these days is, comes from a good place where it’s aimed at people who are only giving themselves four hours to sleep because they’re not prioritizing sleep. 

Because they’re too busy, doing everything else, people with chronic insomnia at the opposite, they are prioritizing sleep. They are giving themselves plenty of time for sleep. So I think the messaging comes from a good place, but it’s just aimed at a different audience. Unfortunately, the only people that are really paying attention to all this information are the people with chronic insomnia who it doesn’t apply to quite so much.

Carrie: So I would imagine there’s a lot of people listening to this podcast who deal with Anxiety and OCD, and they’re saying, okay, the problem I have, I feel maybe physically tired, like I’m ready to go to bed, but then it’s like, my mind is on overdrive and it wants to think about all the things I have to do tomorrow, or what happened today or things that are bothering me that I can’t control. Are there any helpful tips for people who just have a hard time shutting their mind off, who want to go to sleep? 

Martin: Definitely. Well, I think first and foremost is making sure we only go to bed when we’re truly sleepy enough for sleep. I’m talking about finding it hard to stay awake. Because, our sleep drive system will always overpower like that arousal system or the mental chatter once it’s strong enough, no matter what, without fail, it might take a night or two, but sleep will always happen, that sleep trifle always be strong enough at some point.

So we can always get ourselves one step ahead by making sure we only go to bed when there’s that strong sense of sleepiness. And then in terms of. All that mental chatter, all the mental gymnastics, really all that is, it’s our brain looking out for us. You know, it’s not a brain trying to cause us problems. It’s like our brain is being a really overly enthusiastic friend. Who’s trying so hard to help us out. It’s just kind of getting in the way. So I think just recognizing that, you know, this isn’t an adversarial relationship. It’s just our brain trying too hard to help us out. That can be helpful. And just recognizing that that’s what our brain does.

Our brain’s number one priority is to look out for us. Often we get most caught up in all this mental stuff. When we quiet, understandably, try to fight them or avoid these thoughts, these feelings, these emotions, because they’re unpleasant. So naturally we don’t want to experience them. But unfortunately that’s when we usually get most caught up in the struggle, trying to fight them, trying to suppress them.

It’s not usually helpful over the long-term short-term. Sometimes we can, like push feelings and thoughts away. They always come back and then when they come back, they tend to be stronger. It’s a bit like pushing a beach ball down under the water, you know, it’s just going to push back harder and harder. The more we put, try and push it away. Sometimes I think it’s just helpful to recognize, like, this is my mind looking out for me, I’m feeling, identifying and acknowledging everything it is feeling. I’m feeling this is my anxiety coming back. This is my frustration and my anger, whatever it is, you’re feeling. Just identifying it, labeling it, recognizing it, not trying to fight it or push it away can be really helpful. 

Just the fact that we’re thinking certain things or our mind is racing. Doesn’t mean we’re not going to be able to sleep. We can still sleep when we have difficult thoughts and difficult feelings and difficult emotions, but it becomes a lot more difficult for that to happen when we try and get engaged in controlling them and pushing them away or trying to avoid them, trying to fight them. And I think, you know, as a last resort, kind of what I touched upon. Aaliyah was if you’re just spending a lot of time in bed and it really just does not feel good to be in bed. It might be helpful to just get out of bed and just do something a bit more pleasant until conditions feel a bit better for sleep.

Carrie: Talk with us about what the CBT I program that you have looks like, is it over a course of a certain number of weeks or a certain number of lessons that are involved in it? What does that look like? 

Martin: My course is kind of grounded in many of these techniques that are taken from CBTI. It’s not CB type itself because technically that is a therapy. And I’m not a therapist. So I just coach people on these techniques. There’s kind of, I take what I personally found helpful from this collection of techniques and what other clients have found helpful along with just some other things that are more grounded, maybe more towards the act model, acceptance and commitment therapy. 

So, it kind of combines them, a little bit of cherry picking. And my online course runs for eight weeks and it’s conducted online. Clients can fill out sleep journal. And check in with me as they progress. And the way it’s currently structured is the first week is just about education, you know, sleep education, because like we touched upon, there’s a lot of confusing and maybe misleading information out there about sleep, how much sleep we need, what a normal night of sleep is like. And then as the weeks progress, we start to introduce these behavioral changes that aren’t intended to make sleep happen or to control sleep, but rather to help address any behaviors we might have implemented to try and improve our sleep that are kind of backfiring on us and to just change our behaviors in a way that creates good conditions for sleep.

So we kind of come up with a sleep schedule and earliest possible bedtime. Consistent with our bedtime in the morning, we talk about what to do during the night. If we’re awake, like you just touched upon all the mind games going on. What if we wake up in the middle of the night, we can’t fall back to sleep. What do we do? And we also just go through ways that we can explore our thinking, you know, not to control our thoughts, but just to maybe change our relationship with our thoughts where maybe we’re less influenced. By our thoughts and feelings, we’re less inclined to try and control them. And we kind of get independence back over our behaviors, but it’s the, our thoughts. Aren’t kind of dictatorial and control all of our actions. They’re the kind of core educational components, but really it’s kind of, it’s quite different for every client I work with because it’s very customized in terms of the specific challenges that each client is facing. We work together to focus on where the client feels the priority should be in terms of where they’re struggling and what their challenges.

But, so it’s, so it’s educational based and the changes, the components are introduced gradually over a course of eight weeks, which I also find is helpful. So it’s not. We should do this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this go, you know, there’s completely overwhelming. We just say, okay, first week, let’s just do focus on some more education the second week.

Let’s see if we can change the sleep schedule a little bit, the third and fourth week. Maybe let’s practice getting out of bed if being in bed doesn’t feel good. You know, so it’s all gradual so we can learn a new technique, become a little bit more comfortable, confident with it before we then add most stuff.

Carrie: So as we’re winding down at the end of every podcast, I like to ask our guests to share a story of hope, which is a time in which you received hope from God or another person.

Martin: You know, I think it would really go back to my own experience when I was first struggling with insomnia. And I learned about techniques that, once the hygienic pastes that were a little bit different and that in itself. Just gave me hope because when I was just finding the sleep hygiene stuff out there, that wasn’t helpful to finding these new techniques gave me hope and it gave me the motivation to give them a try. And I think that kind of inspired me to use those techniques, to offer hope to other people as well. You know, it’s this kind of knock on effect, first of all, through the forum and then through how that’s expanded. You know, through my own podcast as well. And just working with clients, seeing that transformation, sharing their transformation, just spreading that hope out there to others as well.

Carrie: That’s awesome. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your wisdom with us about using these techniques that are very practical for overcoming insomnia. 

Martin: Absolutely. It’s been a pleasure to me? 

Carrie: We would love for you to help us get the word out about the podcast. I know, you know, at least one person in your life right now, who is having difficulty sleeping, feel free to forward the link to this episode to them and let them check it out.

You can always rate and review us on iTunes, and that helps our show as well. Thank you so much for listening.

Hope for Anxiety 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. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum. Until next time. My you be comforted by God’s great love for you.

67. The Personal Story Behind the Mental Health Alliance with Joe Padilla

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Counseling, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 67. The Personal Story Behind the Mental Health Alliance with Joe Padilla

Joe Padilla, a licensed and ordained minister, and co-founder of Mental Health Grace Alliance.  Joe shares with us how his family was personally impacted by mental health and how he was able to work through it.

  • Stepping down the ministry to navigate his wife’s mental health issues
  • Barriers to seeking professional and pastoral help
  • Doing research and equipping himself to help his wife overcome her mental health condition
  • Learning how to integrate neuroscience, psychology, and biblical scriptures for mental health recovery
  • Reinventing support group models and curriculum that integrate faith and science. 
  • Joe’s work at Mental Health Grace Alliance

Links and Resources:

Mental Health Grace Alliance

More Podcast Episodes

Trancript

Carrie: Hope for anxiety and OCD, episode 67. Another really great personal story interviews for you guys today. Before we hop into that, though, there’s a couple of things that I wanna say on a more personal note. On the podcast here, it’s very hard to talk about current events due to the nature of having a counseling practice and trying to keep my own sanity as I’m recording this introduction. I know that this show won’t come out for another six weeks. Also, my interview actually was recorded several months ago. However, I feel like because we have such a worldwide audience that it’s really important for me to say. A couple of things about what’s happening in our world. At this point in time, Russia has invaded Ukraine and it’s a very heartbreaking situation.

We know from what Jesus told us that in the last days. There are going to be wars and rumors of wars. So this should not come as a surprise to us. I hope though, that these recent events have reminded you to pray for your brothers and sisters all over the world who are in war-torn countries, or who are experiencing persecution for their faith. If you have freedoms and the country that you are in to worship and praise God as you, please, if you are able to go to bed tonight and not have to worry about being bombed, we need to be very thankful because we may not always have those freedoms. We don’t know what the future holds for us, but we know that God loves us and that God is with us. And if by some chance you are in Ukraine and you’re listening to this, just know that we love you. And we are praying for you.

Today on the show. I am interviewing Joe Padilla, who is the CEO and co-founder of the Mental Health Grace Alliance. I didn’t know anything at all, really about the Mental Health Grace Alliance, until I was told by one of our previous guests that I needed to look into this organization. They’re doing some amazing things, just combining this passion of helping people who have mental health issues in the church. And Joe is gonna share his own personal experience of how they got started. Joe, tell us a little bit about yourself. 

Joe: I am a licensed and ordained minister. I’ve been in ministry for 20, some odd years now. And my background really kind of started with missions and then local ministry, and then really running the Grace Alliance as a mental health type of ministry, helping churches and individuals and families now based out of Texas. So, that’s where we are.

Carrie: Awesome. I know that your family was personally impacted by mental health, and that’s kind of how you got on this journey. Tell us a little bit about that.

Joe: When we started a ministry, basically in missions that we were on the field for probably a total of 10 years in regard to that. And during that time, we noticed a lot of challenges with my wife’s mental health, as far as depression, anxiety, and different things like that, which led us to come back, worked locally within the church and stuff.

But while we were here trying to get the mental health care system, you know, all of those pastoral care as well and all that kind of stuff, but really nothing ever really kind of progressed for her from both the professional and the pastoral, which got to the point where we actually had to step down from ministry because of those. 

We’re extremely challenging for her, for us and for our kids. And then really started to try to figure out, and how do we navigate this journey? And it was a time when we stepped down, that where we started to focus on how, do we really navigate this? And so I started to dive into really learning. What is neuroscience? What is, the psychology, all these types of things. Cause I wasn’t getting all of that information. And as you know. With the church leaders and things. That’s one of the areas where they just don’t get a lot of equipping and training and being a leader myself, I just didn’t have that. 

So it really took the time to kind of research and look at all those. And it was finding this way that you really could navigate this for kind of what’s called mental health recovery. And no one was talking about that. They were just talking about management and things like that. Long story short, I started to apply all these principles and then over about a year and a half period, I saw my web significantly improved. Through her journey where we’ve never seen any of that kind of progress in the last kind of eight to 10 years of suffering. And that led us to having to leave, ministry altogether. And then here we are now, building, rebuilding life, our marriage or family and everything. And just looking at all these concepts are using a real whole health approach or a holistic approach and doing all that we got better medical care, the mental health professionals.

I started to figure out what works, what doesn’t work and an even from ministry, figuring out what works. And what doesn’t work and why things were getting so bad. So, from both of those end, we just kind of learn how to navigate it and figure some things out and then rebuilding life towards a new promise for us. And in front of that journey, that’s where we start to figure out there really is a way to navigate this. Even within the church, and it’s way simpler than we think, but it’s a very useful, and then that’s kind of where the organization came from that experience.

Carrie: I like that. We talked about the holistic approach a lot on this podcast, you know, it’s not just your spiritual health, it’s your mental, emotional, physical, it’s all just interconnected. And that’s how God created us to be. So I like that. I wanna mention something too, that you talked about just in terms of one navigating the system of mental health care is hard. It’s hard to find a therapist. Sometimes, you call, you make phone calls. You may not get a phone call back. People say, “oh, no, I don’t take your insurance or no, I can’t work with your availability on the days you’re available. I’m not taking new clients”. 

So I’ve found a counselor recently for myself or some things that I’m processing through being pregnant, getting ready to have a child. And just different stressors in my life. And I know how hard it was for me. And I understand the system and I understand how the system works, but it took me probably a couple of weeks to find somebody that could meet with me. And that in itself, I think can be discouraging. Did you guys have a lot of roadblocks as you were trying to just kind of navigate the system and get the help? 

Joe: Well, I think from our position, we had excellent professionals. If it just was all scattered, do you have a family doctor who’s helping you, but then you have a psychiatrist who’s coming in, but then they don’t talk. And then you have a therapist. But then the therapist doesn’t talk to the psychiatrist. So it’s just all so scattered and you’re getting all kinds of, you know, it’s like they say, you talk to 10 people and you get a hundred opinions, but I think we’re really trying to figure out what’s helpful and what’s not helpful. And then because you have a psychiatrist, who’s prescribing medication, but then sometimes they’re not paying attention to what the side effects are, how they’re playing with other medication and what really the condition you’re dealing with as well as then you’re going to the therapy. They’re really, was kind of a way of, what kind of therapy do you need on the front end of this on to once you have a lot of stability, what’s helpful? 

But if you don’t understand that therapeutic process for an individual in high crisis, in high stress, it can actually make it worse. And I see that all the time and that’s what we were going through was, this has been a health care system, is so scattered.

No one’s communicating. No one’s really understanding. And then it took time for me to learn. Wow! These medications that they’re prescribing and they keep updating them. It’s actually making it worse. Why isn’t anybody paying attention to this or the therapy? And I remember meeting with therapists and they’re trying to sole approach. I’m like, “what are you talking about? You have no idea what you’re doing”.

You have to understand what condition is, where the brain condition is from a neuroscience standpoint of what can actually be processed rather than tools based to get to the point where you can process things. So kind of an understanding, because that’s a hard journey and I coach a lot of people through this. And we look at their kind of the therapeutic process and they’re making no progress whatsoever, because I was meeting with somebody recently and talking them through that. And it’s just, like they said, “well, I don’t feel like I’m getting anywhere”. I was like, “well, how long have you been in that therapy”?. It was like, “well, I’ve been in for quite a long time”.

It was like, “you know, you’re paying for that. You should go back to your professional and say”. “Here’s this, this and this, this, how can I move forward with this and this and this”,  but they belong for a journey. And then you ended up in this conversation.

Carrie: Absolutely. 

Joe: So, again, I think that’s part of when we say the mental health care system, there is one, the availability, when you do get in, it’s looking at the process of what type of care are we actually getting into?

Is it appropriate? And is it being followed up with very well? And then you look at the community. Where’s the community support? And there’s always a gap there, especially when you get into the price centered or Christian or body of Christ or church community, that’s very lacking. And we can talk about that a little bit more later too, because that’s kind of the essence of what we do as an organization. But I think when we talk about the confusion of the mental health care system, we’re talking about all these things that just from availability to who do you see, and then is it appropriate? Is this the right process? Are you in the right place? 

Carrie: If there are a lot of moving pieces really to navigate. And I think for you being so involved in your wife’s care, you were probably able to provide a certain level of feedback, maybe things that you were seeing, that she wasn’t able to see. Cause I know that sometimes people will go into see a psychiatrist for example, and they’re just reporting on their last week instead of really looking at the whole picture and reporting maybe on their last month or their last few months, because they’re in distress. And sometimes when you’re in distress, it’s just really hard to get it out and even communicate about what’s going on with you internally with  your experiences.

Joe: Exactly. Exactly. And I think that’s when we developed our coaching and then even within our groups, we try to give information that helps when they are working on professional helps them to be a little bit more strategic with understanding their care and their follow-up. Even when you get into medication, we do have a topic where we cover that. But giving them strategic ways of how to communicate better with their psychiatrists so that you can take the guesswork out and you really get into some information that’s helpful so that you can move forward rather than just kind of guess your way through a lot of these medications. 

Carrie: Absolutely. Unfortunately, it seems to be a lot of trial and error. More so in the psychiatric realm, then in other areas of medical treatment and different people respond differently to medications and it’s hard. I wanna ask you a little bit too about there’s this medical model of mental illness and the medical model of mental illness says, “Well, you know, you just have some chemicals, are often in your brain. You’re probably going to struggle with depression your whole life, or you’re gonna be struggling with anxiety. That’s just the way it is or some genetic components, this and that”. And for me as a believer, it’s always been very challenging. And there’s a part of me that greatly rejects that model, because like you said, at a lot of it is focused on management and just focus on. 

Well, you know, you’re just gonna have these symptoms and we just got to figure out how to manage them, instead of saying, how can I live an abundant life in Christ, even though I have these mental health struggles. And that’s one of the reasons, you know, that I have this podcast and wanting to give people hope that you don’t just have to suffer. You know, there are so many different treatment options. There’s different types of therapy that you can engage in. There is alternative medicines. There’s so much hope and so much help out there. And the more that we talk about it and the more people know about it, like we have Christ, we have the ultimate hope to get better.

Was that something that you found or you process like on your journey?

Joe: You know, and I think that that comment of, is she gonna be like this roast her life and then something inside you, is going. “I don’t know about that”. You know, I think that’s most everybody, even if you’re not a believer, I think there’s just, that’s just hard. But especially in the church where we have this aspect of, well, then where’s Christ in that, you know, whereas that?, and I think if we take it from the position of, when we look at mental health recovery, or we look at that concept from a medical process or even, and that whole journey, we don’t look at it as we’re gonna try to get rid of your diagnosis. We’re gonna try to get rid of all your symptoms. 

We look at it more of, you can still flourish in life. So it’s a really about understanding. How do you build a life that is more meaningful? And that you can flourish in your life and you have much more resilience to the condition that you’re walking through. And overtime as you build your own flourishing life and you become more resilient than you actually see a lot of symptom reduction, you may not see the whole thing go away, which is fine, but you can live very meaningful and purposeful. And I think that’s a lot of times in the medical model or sometimes in the community. And no offense, because I know that there are some conditions that are challenging. And, but I think that sometimes we just get this message of you’re gonnq be like this, the rest of your life, take your medications, manage and survive as best you came in. 

I think God’s designed us for more than that, even though we have a condition because I’ve coached people with severe mental illness, like schizophrenia and things like that. And I’m telling you, Carrie, I have seen them flourish from, and I have some incredible stories, even miraculous stories where they were living on their parents’ house. And this is on disability. This is what gonna  be the rest of their life, to having a full life, getting married, having business, you know, all these types of things. You see this dramatic turnaround they’re conditioned didn’t go away. But what happened was there symptoms declined as they flourished in life, they’ll need their medication, but they’re able to flourish with a meaningful, purposeful life. I think that’s the opportunity to show people cause when I’m coaching somebody and I’m working with them, I just share with them and tell them, “look, I know that I know, that I know, that I know. It can be different than this”. You get rid of this. We’re not gonna try to eliminate this.

But let me show you what you can’t have. And that’s when we get into psychology and you’d know this more than I do as a professional, where we were it’s called avoidant goals versus approach goals. And so that management of you just live this way, avoid all these things. And because you’re, you know, avoid life and all this stuff, because you have this condition and the research shows the more you live that way. Especially, God is in that narrative, we just don’t have very, we don’t have good wellbeing and mental health as opposed to approach goals of, here’s what you can have.

This is what your life is about. Here’s the opportunity that you can have a build and you start to see better wellbeing, mental health and stuff like that. I think that’s what we do with our curriculum since the week. As Jesus did, he came and he flipped the script. And I think in mental health, we need to flip the script so that you see much better hope in a tangible way, rather than just, let’s just keep praying about this and go to your closet and keep asking God, I think there’s more to it than that.

Carrie: I love that. That there’s always hope. And what you were talking about with goals. Is that a lot of times people do, they come into counseling, they come to see me and they say, I want these obsessive thoughts to go away. I’m dealing with OCD, or I want this anxiety to go away. I want God to heal me and just take all this away. And it’s like, okay. So that’s like, step one, maybe. But what would your life be like if you had less anxiety and sometimes that really just stops people in their tracks, almost like they’re not really sure. Oh no. I just feel better. What does feel better? Look like, you know, cause feel better to, you might look differently than feel better to me. And we start to unravel this. And then a lot of times they’ll get to, well, if I wasn’t so anxious, then I would be able to have more social relationships or I would be able to start dating somebody, or I would be able to have more confidence to do the things that they believe God’s calling them to do.

So that’s a whole different thing to work for because who wants to work for just less of something. I mean, I guess in the physical realm, it’s kind of similar to losing weight. Well, I just want to lose weight. But why? Oh, cause I want to run with my grandkids. Well, that’s totally, you know, wow! You just opened up the world for yourself there, by looking at that approach goal. I like that concept. Let’s talk about community because you brought up the community so crucial. I think now more than ever. At least, what I’m seeing in the North American context, is because we do have some worldwide listeners, but in our American context, we are more isolated. And we have ever been, and COVID of course made things worse and caused people to isolate even more. 

It’s so hard sometimes for people to find, a good, authentic Christian community.

And there’s so much shame around the stigma of having a mental illness. Sometimes I’ll talk with people and I’ll say, “okay, well, who in your church knows about this? Have you talked to your pastor about this? Is your small group praying for you”? And they’re just like, “oh, you know”, it’s just like, I can’t tell anybody that I’m dealing with these obsessive thoughts. And I’m like, “but you need these people, you know, you need this help in this community”. Do you find that as well? Just in working with people. That it’s, that is hard. 

Joe: I think it’s, well, this gets into the conversation about stigma and community. Obviously, community is the biggest agent for healing and for people, anybody, even if you’re just isolated and you’re healthy.

Carrie: Right.

Joe: It’s like, not that to have a flourishing life, you have to have community. And especially when you get into mental health challenges, because it is a little bit more of a private challenge or an issue or things like that it’s often associated with fate or you’re doing something wrong, your sin, or, you know, and then it gets associated with, well, maybe that’s demonic or something like that. I think that’s been an unfortunate default narrative, which really just unfair to begin there. So it’s still with the stigma. I think it’s research nerd. So I read all this stuff and I actually went and looked at the stigma and found that there’s about 50, 60, 70 years of research on stigma, mental illness stigma.

Carrie: Wow!

Joe: And what they basically have said over all these years is the more that you try to break stigma. The more stigma you create, because we’re not built for narratives that are psychoanalytical. Or just not an institutional project, we are people. And so when you use narratives that are biomedical and things like that, we create an otherness type of people and otherness type of people fall into a brokenness and default narrative. That’s why we just create more stigma by using that type of thing. And so when we use language that we already know that we understand, as far as mental health. I often like to just, say, “you know, this, these are about mental health difficulties and disorders, or just mental health challenge”. 

This is just me personally, but I don’t like using the mental illness language because, and I know that there’s others that will advocate for that. We can all have different positions. I think that, especially from the pandemic, we’re starting to realize I’m working with more church leaders. That realized this, now that is really more of a spectrum rather than a disease division. You know, it really is a place where we all are experiencing crisis and any crisis, especially within mental health, creates a longing for meaning and community. So I think we have to understand where we are on that spectrum and things like that. Yes, there are disorders and stuff and we can work. Then there’s also people on depression, anxiety scale that would never identify themselves. As mental illness or mental health. 

Perfect example is, I worked with a professional. We were just in a conversation and I was just trying to help a family member of this professional. And they explained to me, when I say professional, they’re a business professional, the very fluent they’re very influential. And they were just saying to me that like, you know, they’re on medication, they had the classic symptoms of depression and anxiety and how that was causing a lot of relational challenges. And then they said, “well, I would never come to your website because that’s where mental illness”. You know, I’m just going to go to church and I’m going to go, do some more inner healing work, you know? And so it’s like, okay, well, that’s fine. And I think that’s because of the narrative that we often tell around mental illness is so limiting because we make it such a sickness issue that we forget. It’s a person and it’s a story. And so when we talk about mental health and things like that, even like when we talk about suicide awareness and stuff like that, I’m kind of like, Hey, suicide awareness. It needs to be called, story awareness.

You have to understand people’s story because you will become more compassionate and understanding to a story than you will to a statistic. So we use statistics secondary, not first. We use stories first because at the end of the day, there’s more commonality. If we just sit down and talk to each other, then we realize. And then the diagnosis will become a secondary concern, but it will have so much compassion because the story’s there. So in order to break the stigma within the church, we have to tell the story, humanness and humanity and where God is in that journey because mental health is all over the Bible. I mean, it is everywhere. It is so described and described a very, very well. But we don’t tell that narrative because we only use scientific terminology and then nobody pays attention. And everybody’s thinking, I don’t know anybody with schizophrenia, and this is a longer, obviously a conversation and stuff, and we help churches and leaders. And I have this document that I could, I have, you know, some leaders and stuff to help them understand. How to use the right language so that you can appeal to the right people and get them the right support. 

Because the statistics, that show that it takes about seven to eight years before someone will actually reach out and get help. But that whole seven year journey, we talk about it as a team of how do we reach the seven-year journey person, because in that place. They’re not seeing mental health, they’re just saying I’m broken, God’s working on me and this is more sanctification in my life. And so then, and that just recreates or reinforces more of that avoidance or avoided detachment type theories and stuff like that. And so, but if we can really learn the language of the seven-year journey, I think we would see much more help and much more resources that would get to people much quicker.

Carrie: So, tell us about Mental Health Grace Alliance and what you guys do?

Joe: So, Mental Health Grace Alliance, we are integrating science and faith, scripture Christ into a material that is practical. It’s easy to use. Anywhere, anytime, anybody. So we’re really trying to get you that the insight and the tools to make life better. Okay. So from a family to an individual and even for churches. And so what we do is we provide a small group curriculums and that small group curriculum can be used even personally, because we know that, that’s hard to get groups going and stuff like that. And we just encourage people, if with the curriculum, even if you just found one person, that’s a group, this size doesn’t matter. Having one or two other people. So with that curriculum, and there are 16 week, so we have one curriculum for, again, for family members. That’s the parent or the spouse who is living with somebody that has a mental health condition of some sort.

Then we have it for the individual and that’s called our living grace. So we have family grace and then living grace. And then we have a version for students, high school and college that’s written in their world and that’s a 10-week version. So that can happen easily within a semester. We have another material called to thrive, which goes through much more of the intensive process. And that’s what we actually developed our coaching program from, but we just got overwhelmed and we turned it into a self, got to workbook. From the process of revising that. So hopefully in 2022, we’ll have a new version to be released because people have turned it into groups and we can’t keep up with them.

Carrie: So awesome.

Joe: So that’s the primary thing that we do is really provide them that a topical guidance through these, this material and everything is faith-based from a sense of, here’s a scripture. Here’s a way that you guys can discover how God is inside this journey. Not you trying to get to God, but where God is relating to you. And then some science facts and subscriptions facts. That they could discuss. And a lot of times they come with a tool that they can practice and professionals love it because it’s a place where they’re just getting reinforced because we do, like I said earlier, we have a topic on medication, you know, but then the rest of the workbooks really do reinforce a lot of principles. That are very tools based within a lot of therapy programs.

We’re not doing therapy, we’re just doing the support of it. And they’re getting the resources and the help and the groups that we have they’re easy. You do not have to be a professional. They are not, they don’t replace medicine or therapy or anything like that. It is just a way to get this conversation going. You learn and get encouraged and you grow through this. And we’ve done research on these groups. So we do have published results on these groups and we see that people reduce their symptoms and they are aided mental health recovery, and they renew their faith. And then the stories that just are amazing coming out of these groups too. 

Carrie: That’s a really interesting connection, I think between discipleship and mental health recovery because they are related in the sense that we’re always on that process of striving to become more like Christ. And that’s not always just a spiritual process. It’s a communal process. It’s a self-examination process. There’s so much that goes into that. So I love that. And just the aspect of people being able to be in a group with other people who they feel like, this person gets it. They have struggles too. And we’re able to be open about that. I haven’t led a group in a while since I’ve been doing online practice, but when I did groups in person, they were so incredibly powerful. And what I would see was my clients that were in group therapy. It almost like, It’s like it lit this spark under their individual therapy work. 

It’s very hard to explain other than it was just like, that was so powerful and good for them to be able to kind of see some of their symptoms in other people and be able to respond compassionately to others. When sometimes it’s hard to respond compassionately to yourself. There’s just so much. I think that people can get out of that. And I remember walking out of one of the groups and I just thought, this is what church is supposed to be like, I was like, this is what authentic community looks like. And it wasn’t a Christian based group because I had people in there that weren’t Christians.

It was just, you know, anxiety management group. But I walked out and I went, we learn a lot in the church from group therapy, you know what.

Joe: You know, from our focus is talking to some church leaders about this recently, but what we do is we have a solution for the frustration gap in the church. And what I mean by that is someone goes to the pastor and the pastor can tell this person needs way more professional help.

And I am equipped to offer, and we have nothing here at the church for them. So they get referred out to a professional. Then they go to the professional and the professional is I ready to help you? I wanna help you, but I have no spot for you for another three to four weeks. Okay. And, I wanna send you back to the church.

There’s no support for you there. Well, here’s this community support group, but they don’t do faith. And again, some of those models that those cathartic models that I’ve seen, the research on those groups, they are not effective. It’s just venting and venting and venting.

So, but its like, and so from our standpoint, I’ve been through that. Cause I went to a support group and I was like first and last meeting I’ll ever go to in the community support group because it was so horrible and it was so discouraging. And I thought there’s gotta be a better way of this cause I have seen life in the church. And so really that frustration gap, the pastor doesn’t know where to send them other than the professional, that he doesn’t know where to send them back because there’s no Christian support other than this community support. But then there’s not here from all the time. There’s no Christian stuff in these community groups. 

So that frustration gap basically means the support group model needs to be reinvented. And so what we did is we have reinvented the support model into a discipleship growth, the journey for those who are experiencing mental health challenges. From the family to the individual. And so really giving away that they can grow in their relationship with Christ. This isn’t about, Hey, we have this group for you in the back. It meets on Thursday nights. You come to the back door, there’s coffee over there, and then you just really be quiet and was like, no, let’s give you a full dignity of a discipleship experience tailored for your experience of where you are on this journey. Cause you’re not losing out. There’s actually an opportunity for you to see this as a growing experience. So here’s this group and these groups lead themselves; they’re just facilitated. 

Carrie: That’s awesome. I’m enjoying this conversation so much and I hate to wrap it up, but I’m curious for you, just kind of looking at your journey that you’ve been on. What would you tell your younger self who had a wife who is struggling with mental health issues? If you could go back somehow and give yourself advice.

Joe: If I were to go back and I would say, look at the science, don’t be afraid of the science. I think sometimes there’s this tension between science and scripture.

And the more that I see science, the more alive scripture gets and the more research I see that the bigger God gets and I fall in love with God more. There is a beauty between science and faith. I think we’re in a new age of the church that much more open to that now where we were 20 years ago. It was a little bit more tender, things like that, but I would say, yeah, I’d say, Hey, look at the science because there really is a way, and there’s a lot more hope 9when you integrate the science.

Carrie: Is there a way for people to go on the website and look and see what groups might be running near them? 

Joe: There is. So our website is a Mental Health Grace Alliance Dot.or. And then they can just click on the, for you page and they can see our material. And then also there’s a button there on the, for you page or for the family page, just to the shows them what groups are available. There are some groups that are online and then there are some in different areas, but it’s really easy for them to start a group. We make it really easy. This free training, free support, all that stuff. All they had to do is buy a workbook. So it’s very easy for anybody to find a group. 

We have hundreds of groups all over the world and things like that, so they can evaluate and see what’s there. And then if this is a shirts that’s interested and they’re listening to your podcasts, or maybe a leader, we provide free virtual meetings for church leaders because they’re curious and they want more help. And so we provide those meetings for free and I’ll meet with them and just talk them through. And most of the time when I meet these pastors and these leaders, they don’t go longer than 30, 40 minutes because they’re ready. They just need someone to help them kind of guide them. And then they run with it. 

Carrie: Awesome. We’ll put the links in there and I’d love to get a hold of your workbooks and see if it would be helpful for some of my clients, you know, as an addition to what they’re already doing.

So, man, keep doing what you’re doing and just encouraging churches and people who are struggling.

Joe: Thank you appreciated.

Carrie: I know that some of you may really benefit from the resources that the Mental Health Grace Alliance has to offer. We will be sure to put their website in our show notes for you to click on for easy access.

And we are always looking for great guest suggestions for the show. I probably won’t be recording until sometime in the summer, but if you have a guest suggestion, you’re always welcome to fill out our contact form on our website: www.thopeforanxietyandocd.com. Thank you so much for listening. 

66. Somatic Experiencing Therapy with Amanda Huffman, LCSW

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Counseling, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 66. Somatic Experiencing Therapy with Amanda Huffman, LCSW

Amanda Huffman, a clinical social work/therapist who uses holistic, integrative, evidence-based, & cutting edge approaches in her practice.

Amanda talks about Somatic Experiencing therapy and how it can help people with anxiety and OCD. 

  • How long does it take to become a somatic experiencing therapist?
  • The theory behind somatic experiencing 
  • How somatic experiencing can help process trauma 
  • How is somatic experiencing different from other therapies?
  • Amanda’s view on somatic experiencing and Christian faith

Links and Resources:

Amanda Huffman, LCSW 

More Podcast Episodes

Transcript

Carrie: Hope for anxiety and OCD, episode 66. Today on the show we are talking with Amanda Huffman. Who’s a licensed clinical social worker about somatic experiencing therapy. This one is a little bit near and dear to my heart because as I discussed way back in episode 10, I actually received some somatic experiencing therapy for myself before I started to date again, it was super helpful and allowed me to open myself up to another relationship after my divorce.

I loved talking through any body-based therapy because our body gets so activated when you’re dealing with anxiety or even with OCD. There are a lot of those similar symptoms internally that are very distressing. It allows us to tap into deeper places than simply doing talk therapy. And I hope you’re able to learn a lot from Amanda today. Amanda, I really believe that therapists choose modalities that align with them personally and professionally. How did you become interested in somatic experiencing? 

Amanda: That’s a fun question, actually, maybe a little different than others. I started my early career, was in the psychiatric hospital and they trained me in dialectical behavior therapy. And so I developed this kind of, like, heart for working with people with trauma. I started to see it as like, you know, trauma’s really at the root, what prompts the suffering, be it depression, anxiety, or personality-based stuff. If you follow it down to the core, we’re looking at early trauma experiences.

One of my dear friends was just like, Hey, there’s this SE training coming to Austin, like, we should do it. And I was like, let’s okay, sure. Let’s sign up for it. I didn’t really know what I was getting into, in the beginning. Once I signed up, I did read Peter’s book and thought, wow! this, this really sounds like amazing work. And that’s, you know, my interest began to get more and more peaked by this, you know, new modality that I didn’t know much about. 

Carrie: Is Peter Levine? When you read his book, is it waking the tiger? 

Amanda: He has several, but waking the tiger is one of the real foundational books that if people are interested. I would recommend they start with that one.

Carrie: So you were just really looking for an effective trauma treatment and kind of got dragged into the initial training. 

Amanda: Totally. And that’s a funny story too, actually. So here I am in this training, didn’t know what to expect and you know, I come from a very cognitive world. I love DBT, I still use it. There’s a place and time for everything. But, so I come from this cognitive, this world of DBT, and now I’m in the experiential world and I’m like, what it’s happening? And the training itself is different, right? Because it’s a lot of like, let’s get into this and let’s practice with each other. There was this moment I was in like really close to the front. And one of the students in front of me started to have, like a physiological reaction in the midst of the training. And so Maggie Klein, the SE trainer in Austin at the time, she said, “would it be okay if I moved over and I did a little SE work with you”, you know, here in the training let to let people see it, the student was game for it, but I’m sitting right behind them.

So as she’s doing the SE work, I notice my arms start twitching. And I’m like, what is happening to my body? I just went home and let. I laid on my couch and let it twitch. And I’m like, wow! There is really something to this. There was something shifting deeper in my own body just by being near the work that was being done.

And then I was hooked. I was like, I’m in it. I’m sold. I’m gonna follow this to the end. 

Carrie: There’s actually three parts to it. Right? I mean, it takes a while to get trained, you know, in somatic experiencing. 

Amanda: it’s a big commitment. That’s three years. It’s 36 days total, over three years. And it’s really worth it. If there’s a possibility of doing the training, I highly recommend it.

Carrie: And then you went on the third year is actually, touch. And it’s not necessarily always therapists that are in there. Sometimes there are massage therapists and other practitioners that get involved in this training. And after that, you went on to get trained in base. Can you tell us a little bit about that? 

Amanda: In your advanced year of SE you do learn about touch and I found it to be very powerful. Being a psychotherapist. I knew that I wanted something more, cause I did not have the background, like body workers come into the training with it. So, Dave Burger, his legacy faculty for SE Somatic Experiencing International.

He’s also a physical therapist as well as a counselor. And a massage therapist and he created a training called Base Bodywork and Somatic Education. The training really goes more in depth around anatomy. It’s like thinking about the body globally, regionally and locally. And so, we might work more specifically in base with a structure like a kidney, your liver, your kidney, and do hands-on work in those specific areas of the body.

Carrie: Tell us about the theory. Behind somatic experiencing and how it works. 

Amanda: That’s a big question. I’ll try to keep it brief. So it was founded by Peter Levine. He was studying trauma and started to look at animals in the wild, like how do they recover from trauma? If they survive a, an attack by a predator that led him to look at the nervous system. And to start to work with the nervous system in conjunction with, you know, what we would normally do in talk, you know, in therapy, which is utilize, talk, unlike cognitive based therapies, as he is gonna work more with the brain stem, we’re gonna incorporate more of body sensation. We’re gonna look at reflexes. We’re gonna look at impulses, board movement.

So as a practitioner, I’m tracking two things, I’m tracking the content of the information, the story. That the client is bringing in, but I’m also tracking the nervous system. So I’m watching, like, did that bit of information. Did someone start to have an, an increase in energy in their body?

Their color might shift or they could get really steel? Their eyes could get a little bit bigger. So you learn to watch for things that might inform me that this person is starting to kind of tiptoe back into a fight, flight or freeze response that happened in the moment of a trauma, but we’re working to integrate that energy. Right? 

So, trauma itself is a high energy state. That energy comes into the body and we need to be able to let the energy go. But a lot of times that gets inhibited. It might be that somebody’s unconscious, or they get strapped to a gurney or they get loaded down with medicines, but it inhibits that natural release of the nervous system.

And so, what we are doing is we’re allowing that process to start to emerge in a slow titrated way. So that energy that got bound up during the trauma can now be renegotiated within the body. So it becomes life energy again.

Carrie: And there’s some, a little bit of movement involved in that, right? 

Amanda: We incorporate movement. We can incorporate touch. Not all SEPs choose to do that. So you have an option around your comfort level. I had a young client who was in a car accident as we worked through the car accident and got closer to the moment of the trauma, where she was hit. We follow the impulse of the body and what her body wanted to do was really.

Her arms and body started to move to the right. It was like, almost as if she had wanted to turn her car away to avoid being hit. And so we let the body follow that instinct. Let’s see what happens if we follow this through and let the body do what it wanted to do. But what got inhibited in that moment?

Carrie: I know a lot of times people with anxiety will have things like leg shaking, you know, where their leg will just be bouncing up and down. All over the place and they’re just like, I just always do that. So that’s something that you would kind of pick up on and notice that’s how you utilize that energy.

Amanda: That’s right. So like that would tell me right away, I’m like, okay, I’m looking at their nervous system. Right? Their sympathetic nervous system sets high. Right? There’s a high level of energy in their body all the time. Right? That just kind of clues me into where we might start working with that person.

I might not go directly to the legs. I might not even bring that up at all, but as the person starts to give me the content of what they’re wanting to work on. As a practitioner, I might be more aware of helping them learn to settle. How do we bring a parasympathetic online, which is the part of our autonomic nervous system that helps bring us down. It’s like we need to practice the coming down so that you can live from a place of ease and flow. Your baseline can be relaxed.

Carrie: That’s good. It does take practice. If you are used to living at that high state, and it almost can become a comfortable discomfort. It’s uncomfortable, but I’m used to it.

Amanda: That’s right. It is also interesting. It gets maybe like a little bit more complex that sometimes when trauma happens, it can happen when we’re in a relaxed state though, if you’re sleeping, if you were at ease and, and you were shocked by trauma, that happened when you were relaxed. There might be a part of your body that says, “I don’t wanna go back there”. Right? I wanna be relaxed again because I’m not on guard. I’m not vigilant to everything that could be happening around me. Right? So it’s like your system gets stuck in a hypervigilant state watching, trying to prevent any trauma from rehappening.

Carrie: I have not been trained in SE,  but I actually received some from another therapist, I talked about this on episode 10 of the podcast. What happened was I went through a pretty traumatic divorce. And then as I was trying to go back out and date, it’s almost like my body would not let me. It was like, I couldn’t sleep. I was having high anxiety and it was only surrounding like the dating issue. And I was like, okay, my life is fine if I don’t date. And if I date it’s a, a bit of a wreck, my nervous system is a wreck, but I would like to date and I would like to get remarried.

So I’ve gotta try to figure this thing out. And I thought, you know, it’s one of those situations where, you know, talking about that is not going to be necessarily the most helpful because everything was so, such a body experience. And I had already done a lot of talk therapy surrounding my divorce. And what happened to me. I had done a little bit of EMDR around it actually, and, and different things. It was interesting. What kind of, what you were just brought up, that what it came down to was really feeling like there was this sense of not feeling like I was gonna be able to protect myself, the next time, like, or in the next relationship. And it was very interesting. I think some of the things that came up out of that, but I just found it to be very helpful. And I feel like I got a lot of relief probably in about, I don’t know, 10 sessions or less. It really just added an extra layer to the work that I had already done on those things in my life.

Amanda: A lot of people will stay with their therapist and they’ll come in to do SE work as a supplement to the therapy they’re already doing. So it doesn’t have to be your primary model of treatment. 

Carrie: Right.

Amanda: But because you are working with the nervous system, people can find relief very quickly.

Carrie: That’s incredible. How are some ways that you’ve also seen it be helpful for people who are experiencing anxiety and OCD. 

Amanda: I loved this question about OCD, cause even as you were talking about your divorce, I mean it’s the same concept. There’s something that happened that felt traumatizing to your nervous system or dis regulating in such a big way. Right? That we wanna sued to ourself. We wanna be able to bring it down and sometimes we find this thing that we do that provides relief and then suddenly that thing becomes a pattern. Right? So then we keep engaging in the thing, whatever.

Carrie: Checking behavior.

Amanda: Checking behaviors in an attempt to settle our nervous system. So,  from an SE perspective, OCD is in general, an anxiety management strategy. What we’re trying to do is just to help the person. Felt, sense of safety within their body and their environment so that they can feel bigger sensations. I can be with this sensation of anxiety as it comes in. And I don’t have to go check to sue them.

I have the capacity to be with the discomfort and to know that I’ll be okay if I don’t go check. One of the ways we do that is we start to really feel into the moments. Right before the checking behavior would come up. What is happening in that space right before the behavior. And can we then interrupt the pattern? Is there something we can do differently here to get that pattern to shift in a different direction? 

Carrie: It’s hard with OCD because a lot of times there may be a disconnection to the body they’re so used to living in that thought realm, what they would probably say to that is, well, I have this obsession and it’s harder to get them to tune into either that anxious the discomfort. That’s also accompanying that obsession or occurring right before the compulsion, like you were saying. 

Amanda: So then you have to work very slowly, right? It’s a titrated experience. You might work with them around experiencing body sensations, not related to the obsession or the compulsion. Something that feels safer for them. So, let’s in general, start to get you more in tune with your body, to live from a more embodied place. So then when we start to tiptoe into the anxiety and the compulsions, you’re already gonna have this kind of baseline to work with. You’re gonna know how to feel, into your body. You’re gonna trust that you can be in your body in a safe way. So, everything we do in SE is slow and titrated.

Carrie: That’s helpful because you’re always trying to monitor and make sure this person, your client is not getting overwhelmed. Which can happen in forms of trauma therapy, really any form of trauma therapy, people can become overwhelmed and you do have to have a good like, pacing and a process there.

Amanda: And it can happen in SE. There are times that people can slide into overwhelm very quickly. It’s not necessarily about perfection, but it’s about trusting that we can also come back to safety. If that happens. But in general, I think of it like swimming. I even explain it to my clients like this. If you, you didn’t know how to swim, or you had a traumatic experience swimming, I’m not gonna, like push you, you know, into the deep end of a pool. Right? We might even just talk about what it’s like to see the pool. And then we notice what happens in your body. And we help your body take in the image of a pool in a way that feels safe. And so then, you know, we titrate that more and more until the person has more safety, getting closer to the pool, putting their foot in the pool, experiencing the feel of the water.

Carrie: How do you feel like this is different? Obviously, it sounds very different from other forms of, of talk therapy, but I mean, maybe you can even talk about it a little bit as similarities and differences to other forms of trauma therapy. You know, you’ve got, like exposure and CBT and EMDR brain spotting. There’s just a lot of options out there in terms of trauma treatment. How do you feel like this approach is, is different? 

Amanda: I, I feel like it’s different. The things that I am familiar with, like a DBT, CBT, they’re gonna work with your cognition. It’s kind of like you have thought. And this thought is wrong and we need to change the thought. And if we change the thought, then you’re gonna feel better. And sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t, it’s like, I know the thoughts wrong and I still have the thought. And if it were that easy, I would’ve done this already. Right? So with SE what’s different about it is that bottom-up approach.

We are looking at all of it, not just the thoughts. So, you know, you have the story that’s unfolding, but as the story unfolds again, I am watching and tracking their body’s reaction to their own story and I’m helping them slow it down so they can feel the story in their body. Right? There’s something really important about being in an embodied place to be able to. Then get to healing. Right?

If I stay up in my cognition and I rush through it, then I might not actually feel it. And when I connect with my body and I can feel it opens up so many possibilities for being able to be with an uncomfortable emotion or find some type of completion to it. In a way where it doesn’t reoccur.

Carrie: I know I started out doing some CBT-based trauma therapy and there was just always felt like there was something missing from it, you know? And now looking back and understanding what I know about trauma being stored in the body. Something we’ve brought up on this show before is how much our bodies, really involved.

In that process of storing trauma and processing trauma. It makes sense. Why just kind of focusing on maybe lies that you believed about the trauma. It was my fault and people could, you could get them to a place where they could say, “okay, well I know it wasn’t my fault”, but it always felt like their fault, you know, internally there was something that resonated in their body that felt that that was very real.

Amanda: It’s like the development, the meaning or the story they create around the trauma. Very, very real. When we’re blaming ourselves for the trauma that happened to us. Now through SE as you work through the trauma and someone is experiencing the impulses, maybe to push away or to set a boundary or to leave a room like it, we’re restoring what they wanted to do in that moment. And there’s something really powerful about them recognizing that their nervous system took over and they really didn’t have a choice in that moment. They have a choice now, as we work through it again, it’s like we have one foot in the past in the story and we have one foot right now in the present. And so we’re restoring that choice to them. 

Carrie: That’s awesome. That’s really great. 

Amanda: And I wanna rephrase that, cause it’s not like we are restoring the choice we’re with them as they restore their choice, right? We’re just with them in it. I feel like that was an important maybe correction around language for me to make, cause it’s not, it’s not about me giving them something. It’s about me being with them as they create something new for themselves. 

Carrie: In terms of EMDR, we talk about like, kind of staying out of the way a lot and allowing the brain to do what it needs to do. Do you feel like it’s similar in SE like there’s an element of the body knows what it needs to do and you just kind of have to tap into that and find that out.

Amanda: Definitely. We are always saying that the body knows what to do and to trust it, the body wants to move toward healing. And there are times that it gets stuck, right? There’s a pattern that gets stuck in the body and we are there to help. I love Dave Burger’s word for it. He says “nudge all the time”. He’s like, we’re there to just help nudge it in the right direction. Even sometimes just being with someone is enough for them to start moving in the right direction. Just to know that they’re in the room with somebody who’s regulated and safe.

Carrie: I’m curious, about your thoughts on the Christian faith and SE.

Amanda: Well, I think about, you know, I come from a Christian background. I got my master’s in divinity and I think SE goes hand in hand with my Christian faith. If you think about it. The healing that Jesus did, which he was hands-on. He put hands on people. And I think about that often when I have people in my office and I’m doing work that’s hands on and remembering that it’s just an honor to be with this person, right? There’s this human in front of me that I get to be with in their healing journey. So for me, It goes hand in hand with my faith. 

Carrie: So, towards the end of the podcast, I like to ask our guests to share a story of hope, which is a time in which you received hope from God or another person.

Amanda: Most memorable clients, Phil to this day gives me hope. So a young man I worked with years ago and when he came into my office, he was self injuring daily. He had probably 10 to 12 psychiatric hospitalizations a year.

Carrie: Wow!

Amanda: And as we started to journey this path of trauma work and healing, he was very open. You know, he was like, let you know anything that will help. So we did a lot of SE work. Now after about a year of work well, right away, the self injury started to decrease. That was huge for me, cause I wanna know that someone’s safe and, it was just a relief to see that decrease after about a year of work hospitalizations was stopped. Phil’s injuring had stopped. He went back to school, he got his master, he got married. He had a family. I hear from him from time to time and. 

Carrie: Wow!

Amanda: He’s got a great job. Life is normal. So, this journey of trauma work of doing his SE work, like it changed his life significantly.

Carrie: And that would be somebody maybe that somebody else would look at and say, well, that person just has no hope. They’re just gonna continue. Repeat this mental health cycle and that they’re stuck in.

Amanda: Yes. That’s right. Or, you know, sometimes therapists feel overwhelmed by it. They’re like, the self-injuring piece or the amount of trauma can be scary for some therapists. If they haven’t had training and helping people who self injure.

I think sometimes clients come in with a feeling of hopelessness around finding someone who will be with them. In those scary moments, but I think trainings, like I see and base, like, they’re, they’re so helpful. I, I wish I could put better words on it, but you know that they are going to help someone in such a deep way that I could just fall back on that. And know like, believe he’s gonna get better, even if my level of skill wasn’t there. I know that this training, I know that this modality is going to be powerful enough to help him.

Carrie: That’s awesome. So I know that we will put your, a link to your website in the show notes. If people like to contact you and reach out to you. What area of the US are you in? 

Amanda: I was in Austin for 20 years, but I moved home to central Kentucky right before COVID hit, so, I am just South of Lexington. A small rural town South of Lexington, Kentucky. I’m all in private practice now. And I am working on building a somatic retreat center in an organic farm.

Carrie: That’s awesome. That’s pretty amazing. Well, you’re not as far from me as I thought you were. You’re just across the top of the state there.

Amanda: Where are you?

Carrie: I’m in Smyrna, Tennessee. 

Amanda: I thought you were in Texas. 

Carrie: We learned something about each other. 

Amanda: You did. We did.

Carrie: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being on the show. I really appreciate this has been very insightful. I think for people who are looking for a different type of therapy, maybe that they’ve been receiving currently, it’s always good to let people know that there are many different options. So if one doesn’t work for you by all means, try something different.

Amanda: And if I could add one thing, Carrie, it would be that therapies like SEM base, they are so helpful in communities where there’s a stigma around mental health because they really do understand that mental health isn’t this thing. That’s about strength or your willpower or you’re, you know, like go fix your brain.

They really get that trauma is about the way energy got found in your nervous system. And let’s help your physiology recover from it. Found that to be a very powerful way to discuss it. In my community.

Carrie: By the time this episode comes out, hopefully, I will be on maternity leave enjoying lots of baby snuggles. Pray for my sleepless nights. Thank you very much. I actually went to four sessions of somatic experiencing therapy during my pregnancy. Super healing again. I had these experiences of being hospitalized as a child that I had dealt with in therapy in the past, had done some talk therapy, some EMDR therapy, I think even came up during dating with the somatic experiencing therapy.

Everything was rolling along quite nicely until I started to think about having to go into the hospital again. And even though this time I wasn’t going in for an illness or an injury, there was a sense of vulnerability that was getting really triggered up. Going through those few sessions and unpacking my different hospitalizations helped me so much to feel more confident about going into a positive birthing space.

I want to invite you to join our Hope for Anxiety and OCD Facebook group. It’s a really great way for us to be able to get to know our listeners and for you to interact with others who are experiencing similar struggles. We strive really hard to make it a positive space for everyone to come be encouraged and hear what’s helping other people. We will put a direct link in the show notes for you to be able to get there. As always,  thank you so much for listening. 

Hope for Anxiety 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. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum until next time may be comforted by God’s great love for you.

65. ACT Therapy for Anxiety and OCD with Ingrid Ord, psychotherapist and author

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Counseling, OCD, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 65. ACT Therapy for Anxiety and OCD with Ingrid Ord, psychotherapist and author

My guest today is an experienced Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) practitioner and author, Ingrid Ord. Ingrid talks about the connection between ACT and Christianity.

How did Ingrid develop an interest in ACT?

What is ACT, and how does it work?

How does ACT help with anxiety and OCD?

Bible characters who went through hard times and learned to accept their situations.

Ingrid’s book, ACT with Faith

Related Links and Resources:

Ingrid Ord

More Podcast Episodes

Transcript

Carrie: Hope for anxiety and OCD, episode 65. If you’re new to the show, I’m your host, Carrie Bock. And we are all about using shame, increasing hope, and developing healthier connections with God and others. If you’ve been a fan of the show for a long time, you know that we love to discuss different types of therapy here. I could be helpful for people who are struggling with anxiety or OCD. I like to do that because you always hear people say, “Eh, I tried therapy. It didn’t work for me”. Did therapy not work because it wasn’t the right modality for you? Did therapy not work because you didn’t have a great relationship with your therapist? There are so many variables there that we could die suck. 

Today on this show, we are talking with Ingrid Ord, who is a therapist and author of ACT With Faith. ACT is a type of therapy that we’re going to be talking about today. And that stands for Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. If you want the long name, this wasn’t a therapy I knew much about. So, it was interesting to learn from Ingrid. And I know it’s a therapy that’s being incorporated more and more in OCD treatment. I hope you enjoy this interview.

Ingrid, I believe that therapists choose modalities like therapy that align with them personally and professionally. So I’m curious: how did you become so interested in acceptance and commitment therapy, also called ACT?

Ingrid: I’ve been working for a number of years, right? The modality I was in before I went to CBT and REBT was client-centered therapy, which fit me very well. REBT, Rational, Emotive, Behavior, Therapy. And it can be quite very proactive, and I found that quite hard. Then I found ACT, and suddenly, there was a therapy that did everything I’d been training up until that point. But allowed a much softer, gentler approach to actually being in the client’s space and not pulling them into your space. 

Carrie: REBT is pretty confrontational.

Ingrid: It’s very confrontational, and you have your disputations. It works really well. They were male lawyers.

Carrie: Certain populations might be necessary for us.

Ingrid: Certain populations. The thing with ACT is that it seems to work at the cold front. It’s one of the few therapies I’ve found that when the patient or the client actually needs it, it works for them. 

Carrie: Okay. So, tell us a little bit about what ACT therapy entails. 

Ingrid: Well, very much as the name says, within the acceptance part, it’s about willingly accepting that we have experiences that we don’t want and going into the experience. And being with it because these experiences invariably tell us something very important about our values. If I’m anxious about something, it’s probably because it’s something that there’s something in there that’s very important to me. So, if I’m anxious about meeting someone, it could be that it’s very important to me to make a good impression on this person. And why is it important to me? Maybe I’m envisaging a future relationship, a job, or something like that. It’s important to be within the experience itself. It’s tempting not to want to be there, to distract ourselves, and to all the denial stuff. And so the link between accepting what we’ve got in the moment and committing ourselves to taking action will take us in the direction of our values. Never mind what’s going on. What’s very attractive to me? 

Carrie: So there’s a sense of I’m accepting that I have anxiety about maybe going to a job interview because I want to look good or I really want a new job, but even though I’m anxious, I’m still going to work through that to the point where I’m committed to saying, I’m still going to put myself out there for this opportunity. I’m still going to the interview, show up, and do my best. 

Ingrid: Yes. So you take public speaking is a common problem with many people often, you know, seen this done in, in workshops and I do it myself is to acknowledge to the people there, how anxious I am, but I’m here because this is very important to me putting this across is a very important thing. And so I brought my anxiety was me, and I’m doing it anyway. 

Carrie: That’s good. I imagine that you’ve seen that it can help people with anxiety work through avoidance because avoidance feeds that cycle of anxiety and worsens everything. 

Ingrid: No, yes. I have a very dear friend in the app community, Robin Molson. She showed me in one of the first workshops. It’s a series of concentric circles. We’re right in the beginning of the circle, is what you are not wondering. And then the next circle will be what you do to avoid it. And then the next circle will be the results of what you’re doing to avoid it. And then there’s another biggest circle, the results of the results. So you end up with a little problem in the middle and the huge amount of consequences from actually avoiding taking action and sitting, you know, doing what you needed to do, whatever it is that you need to do that you’re anxious about.

Carrie: I’m curious about this in terms of OCD. Where people are taking action, but they’re doing things that they don’t want to be doing. They’re engaging in compulsions, trying to get out of repetitive thought patterns. What would ACT say about that? 

Ingrid: Well, one of the first things within there is the good old exposure exercises that you do and help the person to expose themselves to the situation so that they actually feel the anxiety. OCD is a specialized sort of area in that not that you have to be specialized, but you need to realize that the obsessions and the compulsions are there in order not to feel the anxiety. So you help the person go backward in the process to hopefully not do the compulsion or let the obsession go. And then, they will feel the anxiety and expose themselves to the feeling of the anxiety as being something totally normal. It’s going to happen. 

You have anxiety and are doing all these things to stop yourself from feeling anxiety. That is totally normal, but now it’s all become a big problem on its own.

So we need to unpick that take you backward so that you see that you actually can feel the anxiety. And live and get on with things, and it goes away. It always amazes me how people are so amazed that it goes away that you will stop thinking about this. You will, and it will go away if you stop listening to it and arguing with them.

Carrie: Right. And I think sometimes, in OCD treatment, that first step is really developing an awareness of how this plays out in a person’s life. And then being able to separate, like, I am not my OCD. I’m dealing with OCD.

Ingrid: Oh, yes.

Carrie: But it’s not my character. I may have these obsessions about hurting someone, but that’s not my value system. My value system is in loving people and caring for people. And that’s been shown through their behavior. 

Ingrid: Yes, absolutely. And it’s strange that you should mention that about, you know, not me and my values system. Very often that is a factor within OCD is that things are occurring, obsessions, compulsions that are totally in opposition to what their value systems are, which, of course, creates an immense amount of guilt and shame and so on, and actually help the person to understand that because it’s in your value system. That’s why you have these. The very fact that you’re so afraid of that means you’re going to have the obsession of the compulsion. 

Carrie: And we’ve talked about this before on the show, I think in your relationship to scrupulosity that people.

Ingrid: Yes.

Carrie: Those who are more spiritual and who have a connection to God are more likely to struggle with scrupulosity if they have OCD. I think that I can really see how this would be helpful for people with that sense of, there’s say, acceptance over the issue. And then you even said something earlier about taking it along with you. Can you talk with us a little bit more about that? Cause I know that that’s also a principle.

Ingrid: I often use the metaphor of a backpacker over the shoulder bag and say, look, you’ve got this thing, and it’s stuck to you, and it’s not going to go away. It’s like one of those magnetic games: as you move, it’s going to move with you. So instead of spinning off, trying to push it away, put it in your backpack, put it in your sling bag, and go and do what you want anyway because it won’t leave you.

So go ahead and do it. And it really helps to visualize it as well. So sometimes, I’ve had somebody visualize a little purple man who was giving her absolutely. I guess you should put them in the bag about herself, esteem, and all arresters and take him with you. And, of course, she must always be careful not to disrespect the mind. You’re not showing disrespect for the mind because the person needs to know your mind is doing its job. It’s just doing it in a bit of a weird way right now. 

Carrie: It’s trying to protect you.

Ingrid: We always need to be careful not to undermine the mind’s job and get the person to feel that their mind is somehow defective. That’s actually a very important part of actors. There is nothing wrong with you. You’ve got problems because there’s everything right with you. 

Carrie: Oh, wow. This is a very interesting reframe for people. 

Ingrid: Isn’t it wonderful?

Carrie: It takes off that shame layer, really.

Ingrid: Yes. And the fear of, you know, am I losing it? I always joke that the least funny joke ever is of all the things I’ve lost in life. I miss my mind the most. 

Carrie: I’m curious for you: how does ACT therapy align with faith in God and biblical teaching?

Ingrid: Actually, that’s a very close fit because the stitching with the thing I’m trying to avoid and actually sitting with it and willingly accepting it is much easier as a Christian because I have got the added strength of grace without being a Christian. I willingly accept that struggling against this thing will make me worse, but that’s just pure straight logic, and I learn it through experience, and that’s how it works. But now that I’m a Christian, I know that all things work together for the good of those who love the Lord. And so whatever I’m experiencing is somehow going to work towards my good. And if I am in it and with it and thinking about God’s promises, you know what He has promised me here, it increases my faith. 

Carrie: Everything is purposeful. I think one thing as Christians that we fight against sometimes. Is, you know, okay, God, why am I going through this? Can you please take it away so that I don’t have to deal with it anymore because it’s uncomfortable and it’s painful. And I know that you have the power to do that. And instead of, like you were saying, really leaning in and saying, okay, there must be some purpose that this experience is here.

Ingrid: Yes.

Carrie: And God has allowed it in my life for some reason or another, you know, maybe it’s to help somebody down the road. That’s going to be going through a similar experience; maybe it’s to grow my character internally, and I could see how this therapy could help you lean into that. 

Ingrid: Sometimes it’s to help me to learn something that I really need to learn. You’re like recently after I tell you at the end, but we’ve been living on a boat, and I tend to live in my head, but you can’t when you’re on a boat, and I’ve seen some many beautiful things and outside that I wouldn’t have been part of. Cause that would have been busy in my hand. 

Carrie: I know for me right now, I’m dealing with some chronic back pain related to my pregnancy. It’s taught me so much about many different things, but really relying on God, understanding my limitations, and having compassion for my clients with chronic pain. I think that it’s not over yet. So, I think there are probably still more things that I will learn or somehow will grow from this experience of going through it. 

But it is hard to accept when you’re in the middle of it. You know, it’s like, I can take my back pain with me to exercise and recognize that I don’t feel like exercising because I’m in pain. But when I start to do the stretching and the yoga and the things that I know will be good for me and the core exercises, I start to feel better. And I know that what I’m doing is not exacerbating anything. It’s trying to help the other muscles support my back and support. So I can see that in what we’re talking about today.

Ingrid: And would you say that it would then help you with empathy was chronic pain patients who sometimes seem to be quite childish, or it helps to have empathy with that to say, I know it feels really, really, really hard. 

Carrie: Sure. Have you seen in terms of biblical characters that you’ve studied how they may have accepted a situation and then acted based on it?

Ingrid: One of the things that mean a lot to me is the three Hebrew children, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, being thrown in the fire. And they said,” I think it was never that our God could save us from the fire, but even if he doesn’t, we still weren’t worshipping here.” That’s been a lot to me. There’ve been a few occasions in my life where, you know, you’re up against it, and it’s like, do this or else. And even if God doesn’t save me. So that’s one and the other one, really his job, even though he slays me when I trust him.

Carrie: Yes.

Ingrid: I struggle to get through this without getting emotional. But there’ve been very, very hard times in my life where that’s resonated in my head that God, I don’t know what you’re doing. And it feels like this is killing me, but I trust you. 

Carrie: Tell us a little about the book you wrote, “ACT With Faith.”

Ingrid: Well, I wrote it initially. The audience I chose was non-Christian therapists because I believe that there are many out there who are highly competent and would be very willing to work with Christians. With their own belief because, you know, ACT has a pragmatic Trist criteria which states that whatever the client believes is the truth in that room at that time. So even with a non-Christian therapist, Christian clients’ truths are what’s important. 

So, I thought I’d put out there what Christian truth is in terms of the six ACT processes or the six major processes lined in ACT. So, the therapists could relate process by process to various aspects of Christians’ beliefs. And I also wanted to give them eight for their Christian clients. So I put in a whole lot of appendices, which a client hands out, but if there’s something they don’t understand, like grace, they can hand it to their clients, and their clients can see how it relates to the whole ACT process.

Carrie: I like that a lot. Who has been resonating with the book, or have there been other people as well that have picked up on it, maybe clients that have read it and resonated with it or a Christian therapist?

Ingrid: I found it actually at a wide range of people because many clients have resonated with it. And people who are not Christians. People have come to me to say, “How can we adapt this for Muslim clients?” or I am trying to help and explain to them that the way I work is to say if I have a Muslim or Hindu or another religion, we have a religious book, and this is what it says. And I’m sure there are some things similar to this in your book. Can we see if we can find it? And there is something like if we’re dealing with marriage or relationship issues or whatever. People who are Christians who are not Christians

Carrie: That’s awesome.

Ingrid: In a very wide range of people. 

Carrie: Towards the end of every podcast. I like to ask our guests to share a story of hope, which is a time in which you received hope from God or another person.

Ingrid: Kind of alluded to this, but in 2018, my husband and I both felt that God was indicating to us to leave South Africa and return to the UK. The unfortunate part about it was that we would have nothing because of, you know, exchange rates, etcetera. Various factors meant that we would arrive here was nothing. We have about, so we’ve lived on the boat. It wasn’t supposed to be for three or four years, but that has been that, and it’s been very hard. The summers are beautiful, of course. And that’s what I was alluding to earlier with, you know, at being outside, seeing the nature it’s beautiful. But winters are tough, and we applied for housing, and it’s taken a very long time; we were approved in June, and it’s been hanging on hanging on. And today we got the large vacation, the house we love is ready, we can move it next week. 

Carrie: That’s awesome. That’s really beautiful. It’s hard to wait on those types of things, but praise God.

Ingrid: It’s very hard, it’s very hard to wait, and that’s been what I was, you know, about Joe, and I’ve been very ill on the boat at times, just saying to the Lord, “Okay, I know you have this in hand, I know you have it in half.” It takes you a bit longer than order a life.

Carrie: Yes.

Ingrid: I know we are both very excited about that. 

Carrie: It’s really being able to trust that he’s going to take care of things.

Ingrid: And, of course, deal. But you know, we’ve had to do quite a lot of, you know, applying and sorting and working and, so we do our bit.

Carrie: Sure.

Ingrid: But God is there, and he’s in control. And he knows exactly, and we couldn’t have chosen if I’d had to draw a little cottage that I would love to be in. I couldn’t have done anything more beautiful than what we’ve actually got.

Carrie: I’m so excited for you to be able to move into your place. And thank you so much for having this conversation about ACT with us. We’ll put links to your website and the book in case people want to learn more.

Ingrid: Great. Thanks, Carrie. Nice talking to you. And I hope the rest of your pregnancy goes well or you don’t have a bad backache. 

Carrie: Thank you. Thank you. 

Have you had any personal experience with acceptance and commitment therapy?

I think it would be interesting to have someone on the show from the client’s perspective. I wanted to share with you something that I’m very excited about, and that is what we now have: a Hope for Anxiety and OCD Facebook group. I know not all of you are on Facebook. It has its good things and bad things about it for sure. However, we wanted to create an opportunity for listeners to really interact with each other. And interact with myself. I’m hoping this will really help expand our audience reach because there are many people who still don’t know about the show. While at the same time, getting to know those of you who are listening on a regular basis. We will put a link for you to that group in the show notes and hope you will join us over there. Thank you so much for listening. 

Well 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. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum. Until next time, be comforted by God’s great love for you.

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

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Counseling, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 64. How We Unintentionally Increase Our Own Suffering with Carrie Bock, LPC-MHSP

In this episode, I talk about suffering and ways we have a tendency to increase our own suffering.

  • What I’ve learned from my recent suffering
  • Going through intense physical pain and how it led to emotional pain
  • How our thoughts increase our suffering
  • How acknowledging pain and emotions can make you feel better
  • What are primary and secondary suffering?
  • Seeking God for clarity and getting into a place of acceptance
  • How to decrease your suffering

Links and Resources:

 Is Mindfulness for Christians? with Dr. Irene Kraegel
Book: You Are Not Your Pain

Transcript

Hope for anxiety and OCD episode 64 today’s episode is a solo episode where I wanna talk with you about how we unintentionally increase our own suffering. This is something that I feel like God has taught me through a process of more recent suffering. And I wanted to share it with you because even though my suffering was physical and then it turned into emotional suffering was like secondary.

As a result of the physical suffering. What I realized through the process was that people do the same things with emotional pain. So they experience emotional pain due to anxiety, O C D depression, other mental health issues. And then there’s this increase in more emotional pain in response to that initial pain and suffering.

As I’m recording this right now, I’m about 32 weeks pregnant. But when I was going through some intense physical pain, it was a lot earlier in my pregnancy, probably around, you know, weeks, 15. 20. I started experiencing this back pain. That was unexplainable. I didn’t know where it was coming from. I didn’t think I had done anything specific to have the back pain.

It was in a weird spot, but I was trying all of the self-help things that I knew to do. To help it such as, you know, providing heat for the sore muscles, looking up exercises, you know, what are some good back exercises during pregnancy? It got to a point where it wasn’t getting better. It was just progressively getting worse and worse and worse to the point where it was a daily occurrence.

And then I was essentially living for. The time that I could lay down, I would sit up, meet with clients. And then if I had any kind of break lunch or after work, I’d just lay down and collapse and put the heating pad on me. And that was about what I could do for several weeks. I would try to stretch or do some light exercises.

Sometimes I ended up aggravating some other areas of my body. What I. As I was experiencing that physical pain was that then there came some emotional pain that got latched in and connected to it. I started having. All kinds of thoughts about my pregnancy. Maybe I shouldn’t have gotten pregnant. Maybe this wasn’t a good idea.

At my age, if I had known I was gonna have to go through all of this physical pain, I wouldn’t have done it. I was angry at my doctor, who I felt like had set me up for failure because she had told me going into this process that I was healthy. I was angry at myself for not knowing more or not knowing how to fix this issue.

I was angry at God. You know, why have you allowed so many people around me to have good and healthy and you know, relatively pain, free pregnancies. And I’m over here suffering with all of this discomfort. So early on, and I know I still have over half of my pregnancy to go, what’s going on with that?

These thoughts would just keep churning around in my head. I couldn’t seem to find some kind of resolution for them or some kind of landing point to get to. And the thoughts themselves increased my own suffering because. . I was starting to think things like, okay, I have this many weeks of pregnancy to go.

I’ve got 23 weeks of pregnancy to go. Am I going to be in physical pain this whole time? Because I’m at a certain size right now, but I’m only going to get bigger if my back can’t handle this point in time. Then what’s gonna happen when I am in the third trimester where everybody says you have back pain, like I already have back pain in the second trimester and I can’t handle it now.

How in the world am I going to be able to handle it later? I went through. A two week period where I cried every single day, I was completely depressed and hopeless. My doctor had told me, well, you know, maybe this will get better. Maybe it won’t. And that was not what I needed to hear at that point. I needed her to give me some hope of let’s try X, Y, and Z to help these things.

Get better for you so that you don’t have to continue in suffering. But I had really held onto that, that this pain might not go away for the rest of my pregnancy. I remember one day I was lying in bed and I just started crying before I even got out of bed. And Steve came by, I was like, you know, what’s going on?

I don’t even wanna get outta bed because I know I’m gonna be in pain today. And I know I’m gonna have to deal with that and I don’t wanna deal with it. I don’t wanna do. When I got to really my lowest point, which is very scary to talk about, but I wanna share it because, you know, we all have really, really low points in our life and we have dark thoughts that we don’t ever talk about.

And so I. Just wanted to share one of mine, I guess, for, to make somebody out there feel a little bit less strange or less crazy in some way. I remember just praying and, and asking God that, that I could not be pregnant anymore. And that he just needed to take my baby because I could not handle this pain for.

20 more weeks. I could not do it anymore. And just cried and cried and cried. And I felt so guilty. Like I must be this absolute, horrible person. Like I just prayed. And I asked God to take my baby. Like how awful is that? So in the midst of going through this whole process, I had these emotions surrounding knowing that I have other people in my life who have been unable to have children that I love very much and other people in my life who are in the process of trying to have children.

And I thought, you know, you’re really ungrateful. You’re awful for thinking these thoughts because these people would love to be pregnant and they would love to have children. Certainly compounded to the emotional distress. Then not only was I feeling certain feelings and having very distressing thoughts, then I was compounding it by telling myself how wrong I was to have these thoughts and how wrong I was to have these feelings.

None of that help. Whenever we tell ourselves you don’t get to feel that instead of actually acknowledging our own feeling, we’re increasing our own suffering. Similar to thought sometimes feelings just happen. They just come up and we don’t even know why they’re there, but instead of shoving them down, trying to ignore them, not acknowledge them.

It’s better for us to be able to say, okay, I’m experiencing anger. Where I’m experiencing sadness, I’m experiencing anxiety. It’s okay for me to acknowledge that feeling. And then it’s also okay for me to be able to say, what can I do to help myself express release this emotion? Let it go and allow myself to enter into a calmer space or a happier space.

Those two things are not incongruent with each other. I just want to help you understand that sometimes people think if they acknowledge their emotion, that they’re going to somehow be stuck in. That typically isn’t usually the case. It’s more typical that if you acknowledge it and are able to process it and kind of allow it to flow through you, like a wave goes up and then you express it in a healthy way, hopefully, and then it comes down.

You’re able to release it and get to a place of feeling better. The more that you try to fight the wave, the longer it tends to stick around in an unhealthy sense. During this process, I was seeing a counselor who I ended up firing kind of funny because I really didn’t like what she had to say, even though she was right.

She told me that I needed to work on mindfulness skills and I. I don’t understand this. Like I know how to be mindful. I teach people mindfulness practice. I have a podcast episode on mindfulness. Like what, why are you telling me about mindfulness? Like how is that actually going to help this chronic pain issue that I’m dealing with?

After I fired her, actually went on Amazon and started looking for a book on. Mindfulness and pain. I found this book called you are not your pain by Birch and Penman. That absolutely transformed my experience with my pain. Having the physical pain is one thing or the emotional pain, but what Birch and Penman talk about is that we have primary suffering and we have secondary suffer.

Primary suffering is a physical sensation of pain or for people with anxiety. There’s a physical sensation that comes along with that. So it might be like a rapid heartbeat or difficulty breathing. There might be just a lot of tension in your body when you’re anxious. And so that’s the primary suffering.

Your primary suffering could be mental as well. Like constant worry. You know, I just can’t seem to get away from my thought process. It’s just going all the time and worrying about the future. But secondary suffering is like that piece that comes next. It’s that piece that we add on. So for the person with the rapid heartbeat, the secondary suffering is they tell themselves I’m dying.

When really they’re having a panic attack and understandably so when people first start to learn that they have panic attack, sometimes they don’t know. Sometimes they really do think they’re dying, but after you learn, oh, okay, this is a panic attack. This is something different. Then it’s like, you can reframe it and say, you know, there’s a difference between telling yourself my heart’s beating really fast and telling yourself I’m dying.

So my primary suffering was. Physical pain, but my secondary suffering was, I’m never gonna get out of this. I’m gonna have it for 20 more weeks. I don’t know how I’m going to get through this. I can’t do it anymore. I can’t face another day. God, why won’t you take this away? All of those things, the regret thoughts about I shouldn’t have ever gotten.

You know, I, I did this to myself. Why did I do this? Why did this happen? God, why did you allow me to become pregnant? If you knew I was gonna end up in this pain, all of that churning stuff is the secondary suffering. What I talk about in this book, you are not your pain is that mindfulness will help decrease your secondary suffering.

And as you decrease your. Secondary suffering then sometimes your primary suffering decreases as well. Not always, but at least you will have a different perspective on your primary suffering than you did before. One thing I learned for myself is that secondary suffering involves a process of grief and loss.

In my experience, I could remember thinking, I went into this thinking, I’m gonna have a healthy pregnancy. I’m gonna be a fit pregnant person that continues to work out. I had these expectations right. Of what it was going to be like. And then my expectations were completely blown out of the water.

Because all of a sudden I couldn’t work out. I couldn’t even do day to day life stuff that I needed to do. That was really hard for me to sit with knowing that when I used to be a member of the Y for example, I would go to these Zumba classes and there would be pregnant women in there dancing around and doing just fine.

And. You know, I thought that that was gonna be me one day and it wasn’t. I had to grieve that and be, really allow myself to be sad about that. I had to allow myself to be sad and also angry about the fact that I was now having to do extra things, such as go to physical therapy that I didn’t plan on doing and didn’t want to do quite frankly.

I didn’t want to go to physical therapy and do these exercises and have somebody poke on my back. I didn’t want to do those things, but that was what I needed to do. It was okay for me to be sad about that. It was okay for me to be angry. I really missed my workout. Endorphins a lot. I miss them so much.

And I realized that through that process, that was something that I had to grieve. I was never one that said, yes, I like to work out. I absolutely wanna do it. I would always tell people, I love the effects of working out. I love the fact that I can sleep better. I love the fact that I feel better physically and emotionally, I had to grieve loss of social experiences.

Things that I was invited to or things that I wanted to do where I had to tell people, you know, I don’t know if I’m gonna be able to commit to that or not, because I don’t know how I’m going to be legitimately feeling on that day. And I had to admit to people that I had limitations. That I wasn’t sure if my back was gonna be able to handle sitting for that long or standing for that long or whatever the situation entailed.

That was hard for me. I had always been so healthy and one of the things that God showed me through this process was how much pride I had put in my own physical health as something like I have control over it. I think that’s a very. Probably American mindset of like, well, you know, if you just eat the right foods and you exercise and you’re gonna be in good health, the reality is we don’t have control over that.

Guys. You could be a super healthy person and wake up tomorrow with cancer. We’re not in control of our health. A hundred percent, like we think we are. And that was something that I realized that it was out of my control, that was distressing for me. And I had to come to a place of humility and surrender to say, okay, this is where I’m at in my life.

This is a part of my process. I will tell you though, that during that two weeks where I was so depressed and so angry, I knew that I was in this grief and loss process. I knew that I hadn’t come to a place of acceptance. It was like, I couldn’t quite get there. I didn’t know like what I needed to get to that place of acceptance.

Maybe you’re at a point in your life where you’re dealing with anxiety and you hate it so much. Or you’re dealing with O C D and it’s like, you’re constantly trying to fight it because you hate it so much. And maybe. You need to get to that point of acceptance that for whatever reason, this is my season right now of suffering.

It may feel like it’s been a very long season and I hear you on that, but we can’t make positive changes and move forward. If we aren’t willing to first, except where we’re at really think about that. You can’t move forward. If you aren’t accepting of where your starting point is. You can’t run a marathon overnight.

When you’ve been sitting on the couch, you can’t expect your emotional self to be able to do certain things. If you haven’t exercised those emotional muscles, when you’re dealing with secondary suffering, you also have to guard your heart and mind in terms of what other people tell you because other people’s experience.

Are not your experience. If there’s anything that will teach you about the dumbest things people can say to you, it’s when you’re pregnant. I mean, it’s just absolutely unreal. Some of the stuff that people come out with, but I had different people tell me, oh, when I was pregnant, that was just the best that I felt in my whole.

Girl, granted, some of those people didn’t know that I was dealing with chronic pain when they said that to me, but I thought that is exactly what I don’t need to hear right now, because that’s certainly not my experience. Then you start to think to yourself, what’s wrong with me? If they had that experience, why couldn’t I have that experience?

And I’m sure this has happened to you. If you’ve dealt with anxiety for any period of time, you’ve had someone come up to you and say, oh yeah, I used to deal with anxiety. And there was this revival service at church and they prayed over me and I’m no longer anxious and I’m just walking in the Lord’s victory.

And if that’s someone’s story, like, that’s awesome. That’s great for them, but that’s not a lot of people’s story. Um, not the people that I’ve worked with anyway, that. Typically been their story. We have to be careful not to compare ourselves to other people. We have to say, this is a journey that the Lord has me on.

And he’s the one that gets to speak into that journey. And other godly people get to speak into that journey. But no one else can tell me exactly how my specific journey, whether it’s with pain, whether it’s with anxiety, whether it’s with pregnancy, whatever it is, nobody can tell me exactly how that’s gonna go for me, except for God.

He knows what that path is like. After I went through my two week crying period. I started to seek God for some answers. Okay. What does it actually mean to depend on you on a daily basis? What does it actually mean that your power is made perfect in weakness? Of course, these are things that I’ve heard.

My whole life, but I didn’t know how they applied to my specific situation. I’m not gonna say that that God showed up and spoke to me audibly or anything of that through that time, other than God just gave me peace to do the next thing. My planning self who loves to plan and set goals and knows what she’s doing next week and next month really had to reign back in and be put on.

And say, I’m gonna do what I can do today. I was in a bit of a survival mode. I had to be okay with that. Going back to that acceptance piece, I had to be able to accept, you know what, right now I’m just in a survival mode and I’m just looking at things day by day. Sometimes not even day by day, sometimes just morning, afternoon, evening.

What is reasonable? For me to accomplish right now, a lot of things fell by the wayside. During that time, I wasn’t super happy that they were falling by the wayside, but I also knew that I was doing the absolute best that I could do. There were a lot of dinners that didn’t get cooked. There were a lot of grocery shopping trips that didn’t get done, maybe laundry progress notes for therapy.

There were a lot of things that had to be done later. I came to a place of acceptance that I’m doing the best that I can do in this moment. And that’s all I can do moving forward. It’s super important for us to understand what kind of season that we’re in, because oftentimes we are longing for a different season.

We’re longing for someone else’s season. We’re longing for a season that we used to have in the past, instead of really examining God, speaking to him in prayer and examining ourselves to say, Okay. What season is it that you have for me right now, at this point in time, that applies to so many different areas of our life.

I knew that a lot of my secondary suffering had to do with catastrophizing futuristic thinking where everything’s horrible, terrible, awful. I’m never gonna be able to get outta this pain. You know, how in the world am I going to give birth? If I can’t even get around. All kinds of thoughts that were happening to me after that two week period of crying, I don’t know what the shift was for me.

I know I was able to talk with my doctor who recommended that I get on an antidepressant genuinely. I was depressed. Maybe that was my wake up call that I wanted to shift and change things and look at them differently. I didn’t want to get on an antidepressant at that point. Not because I don’t believe in antidepressants, you know, we’ve, we’ve certainly talked about reducing shame surrounding medication on the show.

I’ve, I’ve been on an antidepressant in the path. That’s not a problem. But what I realized was that my depression was secondary. To my suffering with pain. And if I could work towards reducing some of my suffering surrounding pain, I wouldn’t be depressed and I would be able to move forward. I was able to talk with my doctor about why in the world did this happen, or how did I end up here?

Because I think I was taking responsibility for somehow being in this position. Like I talked about before, just kind of that feeling like I should be in control of my own health. What my doctor told me basically was that we don’t know how people are gonna react or how their bodies are gonna react when they get pregnant.

There’s lots of things that happen with hormones that I learned about that can affect your ligaments and your muscles, and really just throw things outta whack all over your body. Even though they’re trying to help certain areas of your body be prepared to give birth. That conversation I know was healing for me.

I know I also had some conversations with Steve and with our doula who I had recently hired at that point that were healing conversations for me to help me get back on track. All I can say is that God gave me some type of clarity of mind at some point, to be able to sit down, write down specifically some of these repetitive thoughts that had been coming up.

Some of the things that I had been thinking over and over and over, such as I regret getting pregnant was one of them that I wrote down. And God gave me these words to counteract these thoughts. Instead of saying I regret getting pregnant wish I had never gotten pregnant. And then I wouldn’t be dealing with this painful experience.

I wrote down that I’ve waited many years to have a family. I didn’t choose chronic pain or difficult pregnancy, but I choose my daughter and it’s not my fault that I’m in this pain and I don’t understand why it’s happening, but I know that it is happening. I had a thought about this pain will last the next 16 weeks until my daughter’s born.

It’s only going to get worse as I get bigger. And then I wrote down, but God knows how the next 16 weeks are going to go. It could get better. It could get worse. I can only deal with today’s pain today. If there’s pain tomorrow, I will not be able to deal with it until tomorrow. That for me was probably the biggest revelation and goes back to that place of mindfulness, right?

Like I can’t deal with tomorrow’s anxiety. I can only deal with today’s anxiety that I feel right now here in the moment. You cannot predict how O C D is going to go for you in one year. In two years, you can only say, okay, what can I do about these obsessive thoughts today? What can I do about the compulsions that I really wanna engage in today?

As you’re more mindful, you notice that some days are better than others. That was my experience. I did go through several weeks of physical therapy. My process, I thought was going to be much more linear than it actually was. I thought, okay. I’m gonna go to therapy, I’m gonna do these exercises. I’m gonna practice like I’m supposed to, and then it’s gonna be kind of this straight diagonal line upward.

Why I had this idea. I have no idea because I work with people all the time on emotional pain and I. Tell them constantly. That’s not how it works. You know, you have some ups, you have some downs, you start to feel a little bit better, and then you have a setback or you have a major trigger that happens.

And that doesn’t mean that you’re not making progress. It just means that it’s not that neat diagonal line. So kind of comically looking back on it. I’m like, why did I think that my pain was going to be any different, but I really did. And that was interesting because, you know, no one had really communicated with me what this process was going to be like in terms of physical therapy and, and working through this pain.

And this discomfort, I did have some pretty significant setbacks of experiencing pretty intense, pure forms, muscle pain, and spasms. If you don’t know what your pure form muscle does, it basically turns your leg from straight to out and it’s in your butt. Let me tell you when that muscle is in pain. You know it because I could not even roll over in the bed without that acting up and aggravating, that was very disheartening to me to have my back start to feel a little bit better.

And then this muscle completely go out of whack. I had one side that I was able to get better and then, you know, not too long after the other side majorly acted up and was got me down kind of in the bed for a little while. Even through that experience, I was able to learn if I sit too long, that’s not so good for me.

If I stand too long, that’s not so good for me. If I alternate heat. Nice. That feels a little bit better. I just had to try out a lot of different things. I really relate that over to anxiety as well as you start to kind of notice. What your experiences, what your triggers are, what kind of things have, have been helpful to you?

What kind of things haven’t been helpful to you? Then you can start to adjust how you approach the anxiety. One of the things that they have you do in the book, you’re not your pain is kind of go through some different activities and look at, you know, did your, did your pain increase with these activities?

Did it decrease? Did it stay about the same. And as you’re really kind of like just tuning into that whole process, then you’re able to have realistic expectations for yourself. A lot of times what we do is as we start to get better, then we put too much on our plate. And then we have a setback because we expected too much out of ourselves.

This can be a yoyo cycle, like for anxiety where maybe you engage and then you withdraw. And then you engage and you withdraw because you engaged a little bit too much, for example, or you tried to do too much. Besides mindfulness. Another thing that can be helpful for secondary suffering is gratitude. I had to get to a place where I was thankful for the things that I could do or be thankful for the days that I could do them because there were some days that I couldn’t do them.

And as I was able to develop more gratitude that allowed some of that pain to lessen, there is this interaction we have to understand between our mind and our bodies. There’s a two-way flow to it. Right? So our body is listening to what our mind is telling it. And then our body’s experience is kind of.

Traveling back up to the mind and informing it, you know? So there’s this two way street that’s happening all the time that we’re inter interacting with. And if we don’t take care of both of those components, then we’re going to be missing something. I’m really thankful that. I got to share this part of my story with you today, because it makes me feel like I didn’t go through all that in vain.

And maybe when somebody else has a thought that is, is really dark or out there, they’ll go back. And remember this episode, you know, maybe you feel less alone today in your experiences. I think if there is something that I could go back and encourage my earlier pregnant self with, it would be to go ahead and embrace physical therapy.

I had a really hard time with this for some reason, which is ironic because I’m always telling people that it’s okay to get help. But for some reason, in this experience, I was super ashamed of going to physical therapy. Somehow, I was supposed to be able to figure this out myself because I had been doing fitness and stretching and yoga and different things for years.

And I also didn’t fully understand the concept of physical therapy. Nobody took the time to. Break it down for me and explain these people are specifically skilled to be able to diagnose where exactly your pain is coming from. And in my case, it was being referred from a different area, which is why it didn’t make sense.

They can help you with specific exercises to target those specific areas. I think my concept of physical therapy prior to pregnancy was. Well, you know, if you have surgery, you get physical therapy, or if you had an injury, you get physical therapy. But I thought who gets physical therapy for being pregnant?

Apparently it’s a thing. And a lot of people do because there’s so many things that happen with your muscles and all of that and ligaments and different things, stretching out. If I could go back and tell my earlier self something, it would be it’s okay to get this help. And it doesn’t mean that you’re doing something wrong.

It just means that you need the knowledge, skills, and abilities that these people have in order to get yourself to a better place. I think in a similar way, some people don’t understand exactly what mental health therapy is all about. They have these pictures from TV, like, oh, you’re gonna lay down a couch and someone’s just gonna ask you about how you feel.

There’s a lot more to it than that. If you’ve been listening to our show, you know that, but we have these misperceptions right. About what getting help is like, and that keeps us from actually getting the help or we think is that really gonna help me? Or can I do this on my. I want to let you all know if you didn’t know that we have an email list where I’ve been really striving to send out emails every week.

This has also been a one step forward, two step back I’ll I’ll do it for a few weeks and then fall off the BWA and do it for a few more weeks, but I’m really striving to be consistent in putting things out there that are helpful and beneficial for you guys. If you want to join our email list, you can do that by going to hope for anxiety and ocd.com.

There’s a way on the homepage for you to be able to subscribe. And as a gift to you, you also get to listen to my color breathing, exercise that some of my clients have really enjoyed over the. I have some great interview episodes that I’ve been saving up for you guys on different types of therapy.

We’re gonna talk with someone about somatic experiencing therapy and about acceptance and commitment therapy. So I’m super excited to share those interviews with you guys pretty soon. So stay tuned. Hope for anxiety and OCD is a production of by the well counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bach, licensed professional counselor in Tennessee opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the use of myself or by the well counseling.

Our original music is by Brandon Mangram until next time may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.

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63. Trauma, Forgiveness, and Emotional Eating Recovery with Coach Jon McLernon

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 63. Trauma, Forgiveness, and Emotional Eating Recovery with Coach Jon McLernon

Joining the show today is Jon McLernon, a fitness coach and emotional eating expert. Jon shares with us his traumatic experience that changed his life and shaped him to be the person he is now. 

  •  What happened to Jon while he was on a humanitarian mission in South Africa 
  • Impact of the traumatic incident on Jon’s mental health
  • Using food as a coping mechanism
  • Making the decision to forgive
  • How did Jon forgive and move into a place of compassion? 
  • How Jon started to become a weight loss coach 
  • How Jon helps his clients create life-changing transformations. 


Links and Resources:

Jon McLernon

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Transcript

Carrie: Hope for anxiety and OCD episode 63. Today on the show, I have a special interview for you with coach Jon Mclernon. I’ve been holding onto this episode for a little while and honestly thought about not publishing it due to some background noise interference that comes up at different points. However, when I went back and listened to the interview recently, I felt like coach Jon’s story of how he got to a place of forgiveness was so powerful that I wanted you guys to hear it because he went through something that, no one should ever have to go through and it was traumatic and he talks about how he coped with that in a negative way. And then how he came to forgiveness, how he got back on track. It’s just a really great personal story. 

The reality is, is that if you’ve been living and breathing for any amount of time on this earth, there’s been someone that’s hurt you, that you’ve needed to forgive. And hopefully, this episode will help you with that process. Jon, you had a traumatic experience and that really changed the trajectory of your life. Told us about that. 

Jon: My wife and I sort of embarked on a global cold trotting adventure, I guess you could say. And we spent about three years of our life just traveling around the world. And one of the places that we landed in was, so with Africa, we, we’d met some South Africans in our travels and they invited us to come down to South Africa to help them work on a particular, it was a government program. It was an NGO or a government-funded but privately run. It was called Hospitality Youth Internship. And so what we were doing is we were working with underprivileged, young people, kind of teaching them life skills and helping them to be more employable and then placing them in internships before basically with potential employers to give them a chance to grow themselves.

At that time we were living on a nature reserve. Eastern Cape and South Africa, and one night I had went back to our cabin, kind of the layer of the reserve was the buildings were kind of lined up in a bit of an L shape. So you had, like a dining hall on one end and there was the dormitories for the students. And then there was, like the washroom facilities and tucked into the woods. A little bit was off to the side. Was the instructor’s cabin.  And so I’d been walking back there. Everyone else was in the dining hall, you know, enjoying dinner and whatnot. It should have clicked, but it didn’t, because when I was out there everything’s peaceful and quiet that something that was missed by the door was ajar the cabinet. And when I opened it, there was three men in there, that were actually sitting down and eating food or table and, and it didn’t really register with me that some of it was a mess. There was a fourth guy outside of the cabinet, and see who hit me over the head with a rock and it stunned me and so on.

So essentially their intention was to try to beat me to death, basically. That was quite a really traumatic thing to go through and kind of skipping over some of the details probably for the sake of brevity as well, but in an incident like that, like, I don’t think anything in life really properly prepares you to experience something like that. Some of the things that stick out in my mind were like they were smiling and laughing and that, you know, while they’re inflicting this on me.

Carrie: And these were people that you didn’t know and they didn’t know you and all of a sudden they’re trying to kill you basically. 

Jon: I sort of stumbled across some, I believe they were bid ransacked or cabin and whatnot, but it turns out the night before they’d they had to actually be in your death, a farmer that they’d robbed.

And so they were kind of on this spree of doing this. And so it was nothing personal, but me and the individual, it just so happened to be where they were. Then there’s also kind of a reason why they do things the way they do, in trustingly in a sense. And that is that they could’ve just said, “shop me or stab me or something like that”. But in a sense, being that I was white, I am a representation of something that they feel that historically oppressed them. And so in an interesting twist, it’s kind of like they’re trying to take back something they feel is taken from them. 

They want to inflict, a kind of punishment and demonstrate their power over you and really like, make you suffer in the experience. It kind of speaks to sort of the place that they might be at psychologically that made that, that worked to my advantage because I, I was able to sort of, I was stunned in concussed and widen, bruise and so on, but I was able to kind of fight my way to my feet. And at least escape to where the others were. The aftermath of that was nothing that I was really prepared for. You know, I come from Canada, we have our ups and downs and our issues, but we’re pretty open, friendly country. 

I had a lot of things, a lot of, kind of intrusive thoughts, like entering my mind, a lot of unprovoked or unexpected emotions that would come on very, very strongly thoughts of doing harm or violence, other people. And so on, that’s not who I am as a human being. That in itself was incredibly troubling and difficult for me to deal with. Because the part of the logical part of my brain says, “this is not who I am”. And yet here, these thoughts are coming into my head. I’m being triggered by things that would never have in the past triggered me. And so it really felt quite unequipped to deal with that. And one of my ways of coping was actually to use food to kind of, I would say, I call it, change the channel in my head. I shouldn’t say kind of, I became a binge-eating food addict essentially. And that was one of my coping mechanisms.

Carrie: Okay. So there was just a lot of intense anger after this trauma. And part of that was just your mind, like trying to make sense of everything that happened to you. It was like this double whammy of, here I am essentially sacrificing some time and energy to help people in this humanitarian organization. And then I’m seen as, like this, racial enemy that gets beating. And, you’re not a racist person. 

Jon: So it felt like a huge injustice. Everything about the situation felt unfair. It was four on one, it was a surprise attack. I was jumped at night, you know, I was by myself, that kind of thing. I was in flip-flops and sweatpants and a t-shirt just in a very good mood because we’d had wonderful interactions with our students. And to be clear, none of our students were involved in these. They were victims of this, but then none of them were involved in this. 

This was separate to what they were doing. And so just a lot of it felt incredibly unjust. And I think I have a strong sense of fairness and justice. And so having this happen to me, really angered me in the sense that, you know, it wasn’t fair. In a nutshell, it really went against my sense of fairness. And of course they knew nothing about me, but the fact that yes, we were essentially volunteers with a stipend working for this organization in a sense, the goodness of our heart, because we felt inspired by the mission that they were trying to do. Maybe it happened only two weeks after we’d arrived in South Africa as well. Just a lot, everything about it felt like, very frustrating.

Carrie: All right, that makes a lot of sense. Just not knowing how to deal with all those emotions that came up, all those thoughts that would come up, you know, as intrusions. And you were like, I don’t like this. I don’t know what to do with it. And so then this avoidance, which is really, really common and trauma took over and you filled that space with food? 

Jon: It’s, I’m ex-military as well, but I spent six years in the Canadian military and the navy. And as an engineer. But we’re also obviously trained as soldiers too. We’re soldiers, you know, first sailor, second or trade was third. I only share that because I am trained in terms of, of combat and things like that. And so there were definitely thoughts in my head about even things like setting traps. Because kind of what happens down there is also like, clearly we stand out because we are a visible minority, but like, you know, we were broken into many times as well and it just compounds it, it feels like you’re constantly under attack or under assault when you’re living down there for nothing that you’ve ever done. And so, you know, I had thoughts of, like setting traps and really trying to even, like encourage people to break into our hosts so that I could inflict harm on them and try and exact, maybe revenge or vengeance for what had happened to me. 

But there always be this voice in my head that goes, this isn’t who you are. This is not who you are. This is not what you would do. So I really felt this tension between like the sense of identity and who I am as a human being and these things, these thoughts and ideas that were coming into my head. But looking back, I believe they were an attempt to try and reconcile something that was taken from me. You know, they really took away my power. They took away, you know, they victimized me and so on. It was almost like my attempt to take back what was taken from me. 

Carrie: When did you recognize, okay, this way of coping with this trauma is not working for me anymore?

Jon: Truthfully, it was probably a couple of years after the fact. Because some of the other, what would I say, mitigating factors? I had a sense of an idea of what masculinity was and what it meant to be a man and so on. So that also came into play really in influencing how it felt about everything, including how I felt about myself, looking back. I realized like my whole life I’ve actually been an empath. I have a very big heart for people, a very big heart of caring and love, but for most of my life that actually kind of hidden and suppressed these things because I felt like, if people saw, these aspects of my nature, my identity, that they would see me as a weak man, not realizing that. Of course, that’s, that’s a completely flawed idea about it. 

So that came into it as well. So again, this idea, these huge emotions coming up, and I was seeing myself as an emotionally irrational person. When, you know, prior to this, I’d kind of been, my wife used to tease me and even call me the 10 men a little bit. And so to have all of this and have it outside of my control felt very, very disempowering as well. It was probably and why is in the backstories because it didn’t really have any idea of touch she even recognized that I was traumatized in a sense, like it’s, after the minutes, like I’m strong, I can move past this.

They’re not going to win. And so on, because of that, I didn’t necessarily seek out specific help for this. I just kind of used my own coping skills, but I would say it was probably six or seven months after the fact that I first realized that my weight had ballooned up to 328 lbs. So we go back to Australia where my wife is from and realized I can’t, like I can’t keep living like this. At that time, I was 30 years old. This is if I keep on this path. This is gonna be a short life for me, that’s not what I want. So I have to try to make some changes, but I didn’t know what to do to even make changes. And so I started with trying to lose the weight. And prior to that, I’d been an athlete.

I’ve been pretty good shape. Most of my life had never really struggled that much with my weight. And so now that was another compounding factor. Here I was, I had this sense of identity as an athlete who was in pretty good shape. We went to the gym regularly, that kind of thing to now being this obese person who struggled to move. So there was that as well. And along with that came like the self-loathing and the self hatred and, and feelings of unworthiness and being unlovable and so on, all of that sort of came into play as well. And so I started to turn my attention to trying to lose weight, feeling like that would correct some of this stuff that was going on.

Carrie: How did that go? How did the weight loss journey go for you? Did you try a lot of different diets?

Jon: I did. I would say name a diet and I probably tried it now. I imagine like, since that time, cause there’s a period of time where I’ve lost weight and kept it off now for a number of years, I would say that. I tried, like paleo keto. I was even raw vegan for a period of time, low carb, low fat, just a lot of different eating protocols. Flexitarian, Mediterranean and so on. And none really could stick and I couldn’t figure out why. I’m, I’m pretty, well-educated, pretty good handle on this. And it was a struggle to try and understand, why could I know all this stuff?, but I couldn’t seem to make it stick on my own life. 

I can even help other people. I was good at helping other people. I’m a natural coach, but I couldn’t help myself. I went on for a few years of, like yo-yo dieting, losing some weight, regaining it, losing it, regaining it. And even that sort of struggle itself. Again, compounding everything I felt about myself, of being a failure about really just again, being sort of this unlovable loser. Thankfully, my wife is just an amazing human being who was with me and by my side through all of this and never once like, lost hope or faith in me. Which is a real testament to her character. 

Carrie: I think so many people go through that shame cycle that you’re talking about there with, okay, I’m gonna do this diet gung ho and I’m gonna get the food and I’m gonna plan the meals. And then next thing you know, they, we’re working really hard at it. And either they don’t see the results that they were expecting to see or they’re not able to stick with it. And then it creates this, oh gosh, I’m a failure. I’m never gonna lose this weight. I’m just gonna be heavy forever. And they just end up in this spiral of negativity just makes you wanna eat more really.

Jon: Well see the brain had learned the pattern. That when I feel stressed or uncomfortable in anything that I don’t wanna feel. I can just eat food and change that. A lot of people, myself included when we embark on the journey of losing weight and we decide we’re gonna make this change. And transformation is very exciting in the beginning because we’re starting to picture how we’re gonna look, how we’re gonna feel, how life is going to be different.

But I think there’s this idea that somehow, because we’re a virtuous or a good person or something that the universe is gonna conspire to create the perfect conditions for us to lose the weight, because we’re a good person who wants to do a good thing. And the reality is a lot colder than that life doesn’t stop throwing you curveballs and punching your junk when you try to make a change like that.

So you actually have to, and I actually had to navigate this attempted transformation in real life while still sort of carrying around the emotional burdens of these beliefs, the trauma and so on. And then the yo-yo cycle just really perpetuates the cycle of shame, guilt, regret, a sense of failure and so on. I amassed a lot of that with the persona of the jolly fat guy, as well. You know, I was even at one point nicknamed the Garber eater, that’s quite, quite a handle to have.

Carrie: The garber eater?

Jon: Because I can eat a lot of food. I took a sense of pride in my appetite, but also, you know, if there was some good leftovers that somebody had, that they were just to scrape in the garbage, you know, say like a half eaten steak, I’d just cut off the parts where, you know, maybe their fork and knife and touched and be like, why are you throwing away this good food? If it’s gonna waste and miles to go to my waste, that was actually my thinking. And I think it would physically cause, like a pain at my core when I watched food being thrown away, that was like perfectly edible and good.  And maybe some of that was connected to the fact that for me, food really represented a poor solution to dealing with my emotional struggles.

Carrie: How did you find some more positive ways to handle your emotions? What was that process like?

Jon: I go back to a coach who asked me a really impactful question that I see it legitimately changed my life. And it’s interesting to think that one question, when you follow that back, one question can actually change your life. And it started with, he said, if you make a list of all the things you love and value, how far down the list we have to go before I see your name and that one stopped me dead in my tracks. 

Carrie: Wow!

Jon: Because it’s like, I’m not on the list. It wasn’t even that it was near the bottom. That was not on the list. I think I remember, like, I haven’t cried very often in my life pride, you know, when I send my wedding balance, that’s like, that’s the only time in my adult life that I really remember, like for most of my life ever, ever shedding tears, not because I’m ashamed to it just really hadn’t. And that moment, I just like when I was by myself, I just started crying because I couldn’t understand, like it had never entered my conscious that I was allowed to be in the list of things I love and value. Let alone near the top of that list. 

So it really spoke to how I felt about myself. If I look back, I had this historical pattern of like basically setting myself on fire to keep others warm, just giving and giving and giving and constantly giving them myself. And I think it really stemmed from a real core of my being the sense of identity that said, I’m not good enough. And I have to do this. Otherwise people will just in my life will just abandon me. That was yet again, another contributing factor that made like the weight loss such as troubles. That question was like a really, it at least started the wheels turning that I need to find my weight onto this list. And I didn’t even know how to do that because it wasn’t something that ever I had ever thought about before. And maybe even I would have felt, I would have felt like a sense of shame around like being given a compliment.

Carrie: Ok.

Jon: Or being told I was good at something I’d often just want to like brush that off. Even though, like I’m quite capable of quite intelligent, you know, if I could say, like, I’m a good man, a good husband, a good father, a loyal friend, all these things. But if anyone had told me that I would try to brush it off. I didn’t want to receive the compliment graciously because of how I felt about myself. I didn’t feel I was worthy or deserved that.

Carrie: Just make you really uncomfortable.

Jon: I then squirmed in my seat and just really wanted the light to be sort of turned away from me again. One of the things that I, and then my coach had me do was to try to pay myself a genuine compliment, like look at myself in the mirror as the president was and pay myself a genuine heartfelt compliment that was grounded in reality, because in the persona state of the jolly fat guy, for example, it would be something that everything was a little bit exaggerated. You know, it was a larger than life kind of character, both physically. And in my sort of presence, I was loud.

I was vocal that kind of thing. 

It couldn’t be this exaggerated compliment because a lot of that is just rooted in insecurity. It had to be a very genuine one. And that process of saying the compliment and then sitting with all the feelings that came up, not trying to push them away, not trying to shoot them away, but just sitting with them almost like observing them. And so maybe another piece of that puzzle would be when I started practicing meditation. I think it’s now shifted, but you go back like 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 years ago. 

The idea is around meditation, where it’s something for like monks, you know, maybe Buddhist monks in a monastery in the Himalayas or something like that or you have to burn or hippies or you have to burn incense and hum and things like that.

Really, it was just about trying to quiet my mind and have a singular focus. And for me, it was actually just the breathing rhythm box, reading four in four out four, hold, sorry, four and four hold for, out for hold. That was the first one, you know, just something really, really simple to calm the nervous system down, even learning that practice helped me to start to become more mindful of the thoughts that enter my head. And that was one of the ways that I started to deal with the intrusive thoughts actually.

Carrie: I like that so good.

Jon: Just as a side note, as a kid, I didn’t know what I was doing at that time. Let’s see I was laying in bed at night, maybe five, six years old and had sort of scary thoughts of monsters under my bed or whatever. I would actually visualize the hedgehog driving a bulldozer and he would push those thoughts outside of my head. It’s kind of like off the edge of a cliff. So it was funny that was sort of visual tool that I developed as a little child to deal with sort of uncomfortable thoughts in my head. 

Carrie: Okay. That’s interesting. So, how are you able to forgive the people that hurt you?

Jon: That was a process as well, that I made the decision to forgive because I wanted to be free from the experience. Ultimately, I realized that if I was to forgive them, that it was not about absolving them for what they had done. But I was really about setting myself free from what I had experienced. And I got tired of being angry. Rage is exhausting.

Carrie: Yes, yes.

Jon: And it’s not fun. It’s misery so it’s exhausting misery. And I was just so weary because again, it was not who I am as a person. I realized that, okay, I have to forgive them. It was in Istanbul, living with my brother at the time we were, we went back to Turkey for a period of time. My brothers lived over there for more than 12 years and I couldn’t sleep one night and I just got off and I said, “okay, I have to start the process of forgiveness, I didn’t know what it was gonna look like again, but I realized I wanted to forgive them because I want it to be free”.

I think what helped me is, I had to ask the question, “what must have happened in their life or their experience that led them to the place where not only did they think it was appropriate to do what they did”? It was actually there they’re almost like they were doing a good thing. I was the bad guy, because I don’t think first of all, I don’t think that human beings are born racist. And I don’t think that they’re necessarily born like with this idea that they wanna be a violent criminal.

Carrie: Right. 

Jon: And so what happened to them in their life, in their experience that led them to this point in time in their life? I don’t know, but it probably wasn’t good. 

Carrie: It makes sense.

Jon: So I started to develop a sense of compassion for them, which went against my sense of justice at the time. But I realized that again, I had to humanize them. If I was going to forgive them, they couldn’t just be like monsters. They had to be humans if I was gonna forgive them. And so I really started to reflect from their human experience and what would have brought them to this place. And the other thing I had to realize is I’m a Christian and I couldn’t say forgive them, but kind of secretly hold them at heart. And I wish that God would smack them. I have to be absolute forgiveness where I actually asked God to forgive them as well. 

Carrie: Yes.

Jon: And to let go of all thoughts and desires for vengeance. It was one I got to that place and it was probably an there’s a number of months, really getting to that place of one of the steps I would say in terms of healing and moving past it. And I can say we’re actually only a couple of days off the ten-year anniversary of this happening to me. And I’m deeply grateful that I had that experience because of how it has changed me. How I’ve become a more caring, compassionate, empathetic person. So it didn’t turn me into a bitter person. I went through many years of struggles, but because of those struggles, I now have a much deeper understanding of really a people’s humanity and in their experience. And again, it’s not to really, to absolve people of harmful or unhelpful behavior, but it’s to understand why that behavior occurs and understanding that to potentially be an agent for change. Could we see in other people’s lives as well?

Carrie: I’m glad that you talked about that being a process of forgiveness, because I think a lot of times people look at it as it should be some kind of like one and done thing, but really it’s a matter of when that anger comes up, you know, dealing with it in that way of saying, okay, let me get over to the space of compassion for others and for understanding that I’m not the one responsible for justice in the sense that’s God’s department. And it does, it takes time, especially when you have big things happen to you. Sometimes that forgiveness is a process.

Jon: And you’re right about like, I couldn’t just sort of make the decision to forgive and then be free. It’s every time my brain wanted to revisit what happened to me too. You highlighted exactly, really to move into that space of compassion to say, like, I don’t want this anger, you know, and really asking God to help me to let go of it. And also like not feeling necessarily a sense of guilt for the thoughts entered my head. Because I didn’t want them. I didn’t want them there, but there was this period of time where I felt really conflicted, even at least thoughts entering my head because I thought, well, these are, these are sinful thoughts. These are harmful thoughts. They’re not thoughts that a Christian should have entering their head thoughts of carrying out violence and harming other people, even letting go of the guilt that I felt for that realizing that this was kind of my brain’s response to trying to reconcile what had happened to me. And that like in this experience, God, God was taking me through this experience. 

There’s no shortcut. I think sometimes maybe there’s this desire that we try to be a Christian and try to serve God. But there’s this desire that somehow this will allow us to short circuit or shortcut the experience. But if we, if I was to take a shortcut around the experience, I would miss a lot of the value of that experience. And that’s not to say that I wanna go through something like that again, I don’t. But it was because I went through the painful experience. It’s like, almost like we have to get to like the lowest of lows to realize like how deep God’s love for us is. And we can’t really know it or feel it until we get to that place.

Carrie: Wow. That’s a good point. So tell us a little bit about what you do in terms of the nutrition coaching and your work with client.

Jon: So that originally started out about six or seven years ago, one ahead of nutrition and supplement store. So a physical bricks and mortar store. And so people would come in looking for a particular supplement to help them with a particular issue. I said that I started to become a bartender without local. And so people would come into the store and they would just start sharing their struggles. I would ask questions, “hey, you’re looking for this supplement help what’s going on”? Let’s try to understand this a little bit more. And very often that I’m saying, you know what, actually, you’re welcome to buy that if you want to. But like, I just want you to know that that’s probably not gonna help you with what it is you’re trying to get help it. And maybe I pointed direction or there’s something to help them, but ultimately I ended up coaching people. 

So I started, you know, maybe I started out giving people calorie recommendations and meal plans and things, because that is what I thought people need it. But as time went on, I realized that those were really just like band-aid approaches. But really now I do what I call like brain driven, weight loss. And I’d almost like to call it, say like the side effect might include weight loss. In other words, the process that we’re really working on is a one of transformation and it actually needs a permanent shift in identity.

The idea behind a diet is a temporary change to create permanent results. And that’s never gonna be the case. If we’re going to create lasting change, we have to be transformed really it’s about walking people through that process because it’s incredibly the human beings. We don’t really create change on our own. It’s really difficult because we feel lonely and isolated, but why don’t we feel connected to another safe human being? If I could put it that way. But then it’s safe for us because the process of change is vulnerable. It’s moving out of our comfort zone. It’s moving into the discomfort zone. It involves growing. Think about like when a snake goes to shadow skin as an animal kingdom example, it goes to a place where it will be safe and secure because in that time that it’s going through that process, it’s insane so to speak. 

So we can understand that a little bit like, when we go to transform, we’re moving into a vulnerable state and biologically our brain doesn’t like that because we have this hardwired sort of primal survival mechanisms. And so what needs to happen is we need to be in a safe space, so to speak where it feels like it’s safe to transform because we’re connecting to another secure human being. And so really there’s a relational aspect of the coaching that I’m doing is essentially holding space for somebody and then guiding them through that process. Yes, we’re essentially going to reverse engineer. 

So we understand that fundamental principles of a healthy lifestyle. It really hasn’t changed because our biology really hasn’t changed that part of it is relatively simple as the human part that makes it complex. And so we walk people through the process of building out the foundation steps or building out the foundation pieces. And then learning how to implement these skills into their lives. So they actually become a habit or a routine behavior. So in the process of doing so, one of the things we need to do is bring a lot of unconscious habits and behaviors into our conscious awareness, because it’s the place of awareness that we can create change. And I like to add to that and say, it’s, it’s really the place of compassionate awareness. It helps us to create change. 

We almost do two things. We take the unconscious habits that are unhelpful, bring them into our conscious awareness, refine them. And then we transfer them back into sort of our unconscious mind by basically by practicing these behaviors until ultimately we’ve done is we’ve crafted a lifestyle that suits the individual so that not only do they lose their weight. But because it’s become their way of living. And there’s also been a transformation in their identity. They can keep doing this because ultimately that’s what’s required to truly create change.

Carrie: I like that concept of changing from the inside out one and two to make major changes, having to change your identity, how you view yourself. And so many people are looking at themselves in the mirror saying, well, maybe like you like, okay, well I’m the jolly happy fat guy. And that really was your identity. And until you could see yourself differently, your subconscious essentially was like, we have to hold onto this weight. I mean, because we’re the jolly fat guy, like that’s who we are. And so until we, you start to see yourself differently, your body isn’t gonna fall in line with those changes that you’re trying to make that makes so much sense. 

Jon: Well, it’s really interesting because there’s like this, could we say a dynamic tension? So our primal nervous system is really hardwired to seek out comfort and familiarity because that’s where safety lies.

But our soul, the essence of who we are as a human yearns for growth and development and bettering ourselves. There’s just this urge or drive. And so there’s this tension between these kinds of these two forces that are kind of pulling back and forth. Probably heard the phrase that we don’t really change until the discomfort of remaining the same outweighs the discomfort of creating change.

Carrie: Right. Just kind of as a closing question. If you could go back in time, what encouragement or hope would you provide to your younger self? 

Jon: You can get through this. Human beings are immensely resilient. But we have to believe and have faith in the fact that we are, it is incredible what we can endure and move forward in. But the other thing is like, there is an end to this. There is light at the end of the tunnel. It’s going to be a difficult and painful experience, but there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Thing I would say is there is no shame in seeking help.

Carrie: Right. That’s a good one. 

Jon: It’s the most beneficial thing I ever did was to open up and ask others for help. And it’s incredible that kindness that human beings will show you when you open yourself up to receiving help.

Carrie: Coach Jon, thank you so much for being on the podcast and talking about your personal story. I think that the really powerful and something probably a lot of people can relate to. Maybe they didn’t go through the exact trauma that you went through, but they went through something difficult and used food to cope or are emotional eating even currently. And maybe they can kind of pick up some tips from things that you shared of how to start making heading in a new direction. So that’s awesome. 

Jon: Thank you so much for having me into, just to encourage anybody who might be struggling with things it’s okay. That your brain is doing what it’s kind of designed to do. We just need to, to, to work with your brain, the brain is wonderfully plastic. It’s called neuroplasticity. We can essentially rewire our brain. And so even if you feel stuck in these patterns, that can be changed. There is hope for you. 

Carrie: Yes for sure. I wanted to take a moment to give a couple of shout-outs. One is to Betty. Thank you for being our first patron on Patreon. If you like, Betty would like to support the show. You can click on the link in our show notes. I also wanna say a thank you to Emily for writing us an encouraging note and letting us know what the podcast has meant to her. She said that she found the podcast during a difficult time in her life. And now considers us to be one of her top three favorite podcasts. So that’s awesome. It’s so encouraging to hear from our listeners. So thank you for everybody out there who’s listening. 

Hope for anxiety 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 world counseling or original music is by Brandon Mangrum. Until next time be comforted by God’s great love for you.

56. Finding Joy in Her Husband’s Struggles with Carole Leathem

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 56. Finding Joy in Her Husband’s Struggles with Carole Leathem

I’m joined by Carole Leathem, mom, author and speaker. Carole has been caring for her spouse who has been battling anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts. She shares with us her journey of finding joy in her husband’s struggles. 

  • Carole’s experience with her husband who struggles with mental illness-the most chaotic and dark painful times she ever been through.
  • Factors that contribute to her husband’s mental health condition
  • How their church responded in terms of the mental health crisis faced by her husband
  • How did her husband’s mental health disorder affect her?
  • How to cope when a loved one has a mental health disorder
  • Turning to scriptures for comfort and hope
  • Choosing joy despite her circumstances 

Related Links and Resources:

Carole Leathem
Carole’s Book: Finding Joy In My Messy Life 

More Podcast Episodes

Transcript

Carrie: Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD, Episode 56. If you are new to our show,we are all about reducing shame, increasing hope, and developing healthier connections with God and others. Today’s show is on supporting and coping when your spouse is in crisis. I think this is going to be a great topic. We had another episode much earlier in the podcast where we talked about when your spouse has anxiety or OCD.

And here today, I have Carole Leathem, who is a speaker and author of the book, Finding Joy In My Messy Life. Carole, I have to say, I love that title because. I can relate. I feel like my life has certainly been messy at times and I’m sure other people can relate to that as well.

Carole: Yeah, Matt, I think right now everybody’s life is a mess in one way or another.

Carrie: Yes .

Carole: I’m happy to be here and talk about it.

Carrie. You had an experience ongoing experience with your husband who has struggled with mental health issues. Can you tell us a little bit about that story?

Carole: Well, my husband was a pastor and we’ve, we’re about to celebrate our 44th wedding anniversary in January. Five years ago, he started having some blood pressure issues and the doctor suggested that he retire.

So we did. He was going to do some sort of temporary interim work, and I was still working and about a few months into our retirement, he began to struggle with severe anxiety. By the end of that first year, 2016, the anxiety had moved into depression. By the end of 2016, he had to be hospitalized with suicidal thoughts and wanting to kill himself.

Our whole life just fell apart and I found myself a pastor’s wife, living on the other side of the pew, trying to figure out who I was,” What is this going to look like now? And then how am I going to support him? How am I going to support me? ” It was probably the most chaotic and dark painful times that I had ever been through.

Carrie: Wow! And I would imagine for men kind of going through retirement like sometimes men have such a focus on their career that it’s hard for them to shift gears and, and struggle handling that. Do you feel like that played a role in this as well?

Carole:I think looking back, I can see sort of the fingerprints or sort of the markers let’s say that maybe should have been alarming, but we just kind of lived through them.

So one was, he was very dedicated to his job and when we would go on vacation, he couldn’t check his. There were some control issues that started. I can look back and see now that that really weren’t severe, but they were sort of building, building, building. And then there was also a family dynamic like his family had this in their history and I was not aware of it

Carrie: Oh, wow.

Carole: until this happened to us. So stories started coming out. And so I do think that the job played a lot. The retirement did play a lot. “ How does that look, What does that look like?” You know, he retired earlier than he wanted to, so it hit us financially. We moved in with our daughter. So we lost some of our independence and I think there was just a whole lot of things that kind of gathered into the umbrella of the perfect storm.

Carrie: Okay. So I’m curious about how the church responded in terms of this mental health crisis, because it seems like a lot of times the church does really well with responding to physical health issues and maybe struggles with knowing how to respond to mental health.

I get one of two things. Whenever I talk about our story. And, and especially since my book has come out, one of two things happens when I began to talk. I get people kind of leaning in wanting to know more with, with sort of concern or sometimes a grateful smile. Like, “Hey, I want to hear, you know, you’re helping me here or I get total crickets.

And within the church, I think the church is still struggling to know how to deal with this from pastor to like church or parishioner. And when it happens to somebody within the leadership, it really sort of freaks everybody out, especially when they’re strong, they’re capable, they’re seen as a leader, that it comes out of nowhere and they people start getting, I think, afraid.

“ Well, if it could happen to him, it could happen to me. If it could happen to her husband, it could happen to my husband.” I think that there’s a denial that happens where we’d just prefer to sort of like walk away and not deal with it.And we did find that I found that a lot of people sort of pulled away. Some of them are starting to circle back around because they realize now that I need the love and support, I also think that it was good. For me to sort of have that pulling away in some ways, because some of the people who didn’t pull away said some really stupid things and said really hurtful, painful things, or, you know, trying to help, but not really thinking about what they were saying.

So, I think it’s the same in any type of crisis. We just don’t know how to deal with it. Especially with mental illness, they don’t know how to deal with it. And it’s oh!, running rampant through the church, right now?

Carrie: Absolutely. I was. And that’s why we need to talk about it. We need to have more of these conversations to say, “ Okay, you know, let’s educate the leaders and the pastors and let them know how you can help people in mental health crisis situations.”

Yeah. I think that’s huge. I love what you said there about denial because when you start to talk about mental health, there’s something where people have to kind of self-examine a little bit, and that can be super uncomfortable for folks because at one point or another, most of us have at least had some level of like mild depression or anxiety.

Those are their two most common mental health disorders. And obviously not, everybody’s at a diagnosable level. But everybody’s had a blue period. Everybody’s had a down period. Everybody’s had some anxiousness around a situation in their life. And so, to really be with somebody else who’s going through that, sometimes it can stir up your own stuff and people don’t always want to go there. It’s just much easier to pull back and avoid. And it’s a sad situation, I think.

Carole: When it first hit me. It took me a couple of years to verbally say out loud, “ My husband has mental illness”.

Carrie: Wow.

Carole: Because there’s just this sort of, “ I don’t want to be that person”.“I don’t want that to be my reality”. And then when I started researching, “ What did that mean?”, “I’m a digger, I’m an information person.” So I started like just going through and finding everything I can, which shockingly enough, there’s not as much information out there for the caregiver, for the person who’s not struggling, but loving somebody struggling. And so what I discovered is this, that mental illnesses is an umbrella.

Carole: and this umbrella has underneath it. Things like postpartum depression. We joke and tease about PMs, women having PMs, but that actually falls under the umbrella of mental illness because mental illness is anything that affects the brain when it attacks the brain, whether it’s depression, whether it’s anxiety, whether it’s fear that we can’t control, it controls how we relate to other people.

It controls how we relate to ourselves. It controls how we eat, how we sleep, and how we do everything in our life. And all of a sudden, we don’t want to realize that we can’t control this.

Carrie: Right

Carole: And it’s taken over everything, destroying our lives in a lot of ways.

Carrie: How did it affect you when your husband started showing these signs of anxiety and depression and suicidal thoughts?

Carole:I don’t think I really realized how far it had gone until a Wednesday night. He had been calling a crisis hotline, trying to find help. He was sitting in a chair with a hoodie over his head and, and not really engaging with the grandchildren. And we were in our son’s house. The only time I didn’t go into the room with him, when he went to call the crisis hotline, he came out and handed me the phone. And what happened was he had said the wrong thing to the person on the phone and started in motion what California calls the 51 50. California welfare code, which means he was now deemed a threat to himself, a threat to someone else.

And they’re wanting to send the police are wanting to send an ambulance and I’m standing there in the kitchen looking at my two-year-old grandson thinking, “ Oh my gosh, what has happened?” And I ended up having to finally convince her, the woman on the phone to let me drive him to a facility. And they told me where to take him. When I dropped him at the facility or I got to go in with him.

But when they finally realized that they could not talk him out of or find a way to feel safe, letting him leave, they literally kicked me out. Like I had an armed guard, walked me to the door, say, don’t come back. And when that happened, I remember it was one o’clock in the morning and I’m standing in the parking lot of the hospital, just sort of screaming, literally verbally out loud into the darkness.

“What the heck have happened to my life?”. It continued into the next morning and it wasn’t until the next morning when I sat down in the quiet of the house and I may, I have a strong faith and it wasn’t until that next morning, when I sat down with my coffee in the empty house. And just started crying out to God. like, “how am I going to deal with this?”

I am terrified myself. And really, I think we have to be honest with what we’re feeling at that moment. I was angry. I was afraid. I was confused. I mean, there’s all of these emotions, you know, that I’m trying to wrangle at the same time. I just think that it’s so easy for them, for us, to fall into the same trap because we’re now in the danger zone.

When we’re trying to deal with the understanding, we put ourselves into the danger zone, and there’s a critical point where we have to decide as a caretaker, as a loved one, as the person, who’s the partner of the husband or the wife, where we have to decide, how am I going to respond to this?

Carrie: Yes. That’s true.

Carole: So I think that’s that determines whether we’re going to stay healthy.

It really determines whether we are going to stay healthy ourselves.

Carrie: If someone who’s listening has a spouse who’s struggling, like from your experience, how do they make sure that they get support that they need? And it’s like this balancing act of trying to make sure that like your needs get met while at the same time, trying to support your spouse.

Carole: You have to be really proactive. The first thing I do, if we were on a video camera where I could turn the camera, I would show you that my window is covered in post-it notes. And the post-it notes are quotes. There are Bible verses. They’re statements that I make to myself. One of them says a scripture that I clung to that my book was actually written.

That’s the core bursts that my book was written on. You have to make a choice. Number one, to change your focus and what are you going to look at? It’s very, very, very, I can’t even say how many veries, easy for us to just want to crawl into the bed of life. Pull the covers up over our head and just ignore everything.

Carrie: Yes.

Carole: Thinking that that’s going to make me isolate. Don’t reach out, especially when people are starting to pull away, it makes it easier to isolate. So the very first thing I did was I called my.. well, I actually had connected with a friend right before this all happened and we had been friends for over 20 years.

And I’m telling her the story of not really understanding the behavior. And this was about maybe six weeks before he had to be hospitalized. So we were just going into the very critical sort of emergency part of his journey into the psychiatric hospital. And she told me it was so funny that day. She told me, she said, “ How many years have we been friends?”

And I said,” Oh!, over 20”. And she said, “ You know that I’m a retired”. And I said, “ Yeah, I know you’re a retired nurse.” And she said, “ What you don’t know is, I’m a retired psychiatric nurse.” And this is what I think is going on inside of bill. And so when we are willing to open ourselves up now like I blog about it, I wrote a book about it.

I talk about it everywhere. That’s not what the normal average person is required to do, but you do need to look around you because I found that there were perfectly placed people like my friend, Nancy, who was a psychiatric nurse, and she continues today to be one of my strongest advisers, supporters, encouragers.

And then I myself said, “ I need therapy. I need help because I need to deal with me. I have to take care of me.” And right on my window, I have it written: “ If I don’t take care of me, I can’t take care of anybody else.”

Carrie: Yes

Carole: If I want to stay married, if I want to stay healthy, if I want to keep from getting emotionally unstable, I have to take care of myself.

So I have all kinds of things that I do under the umbrella of self-care. And I say umbrella over and over, because I really do think that, that we are in a storm and I have this picture of this umbrella where God is kind of like the umbrella. And so when I refer to umbrella, it’s just kind of become this idea in my mind that everything you’re not in this alone, you have to have help.

I have all of these different umbrellas in my life. And so you have to get help, get counseling yourself, do physical things, make sure you eat well, make sure you sleep well. Make sure you do something fun. I have seven grandchildren and they give me so much joy. So, I’m always trying to find ways that I can go do something with one of them, because it’s going to take me away from the fear or the pressure or whatever.It helps me stop thinking for a moment.

Carrie: Yeah. That’s great. I, you know, so many of the things that you’re talking about are, are awesome. We have entire episodes on some of those. We have episodes on self-care. We have an episode that’s coming out before this one on sleep and nutrition, so many good things.

And I think a lot of people take that for granted. They don’t realize that there’s a foundation that you have to build healthy mental health on and things like sleep, nutrition, exercise, social support, self-care,. Those are all great, like foundational bricks and building blocks that are going to help you be able to work on the next level of your mental health sometimes, which is whether it’s dealing with past a few, you know, triggers and all of that.

Did you have some of that come up for you? Like when you went to therapy, like things started to kind of unravel that you learned about yourself. Like, “ Oh, this is here. I didn’t realize that.”

Carol: Yeah, well, my dad was an abusive alcoholic, so my younger life was chaotic. Moving into adulthood. I carried all kinds of baggage with me and I had already began to deal with this.

So if I had one hot button, uh, that we would call that, that one thing that would push me over the edge emotionally, every time it would be the word rejection. Because when you are rejected as a child, it’s really hard going into your adult life and not carrying that with you because you just, you always feel why did my father not love me?

Why did this happen to me? This happened right before our 40th wedding anniversary. And I had spent so much time learning to trust. There was an experience that happened in the hospital where the psychiatrist made my husband looked at me and he was yelling at him and he said, “ Look at her.” And he forced him.

Like, he forced my husband to roll over in the bed and look at me. And he said, “Do you want to do this to her? Do you know?” And he’s yelling into this room. Well, yelling is another hot topic for me. All of a sudden, my husband looked at the doctor said, “ Do you really want to do that to her?” And my husband looked at me in the eye, closed his eyes and rolled away , the ultimate rejection.

And I will tell you, Carrie, I still, to this day, I’m recovering from that. And it’s been five years, almost five years. Well, by the time this airs, it will have been five years that I’ve been dealing with this. And I think that our past really plays a part. The beautiful thing is, is that I was, I’ve been able to over the last five years, creates some really practical ways that when his anxiety and control turns into blame and anger towards me, I have found some incredible ways that I can deal with it without it destroying me while, I’m putting myself back together from that rejection, I’ve actually been getting stronger and stronger because I’m using those tools, that foundation that you talked about from years of therapy, getting over that. But I think there’s just some things that never go away. And it was sort of shocking to me to realize how much rejection played a part and still plays a part in how I have to choose every day to find that joy,
to find that commitment to stay on the course that I believe that I’m supposed to stay on, which is to love and care for my husband.

Carrie: Awesome. Do you feel like joy is a choice? Cause I mean, you, you know, your title starts out with finding joy. So, do you feel like that’s something that we have to be really intentional about?

I think a lot of people think about joy is like either have it or you don’t somehow.

Carole: Yeah. And I think that the word joy is, is a very misunderstood word. So the morning, the reason joy is in the title of my book is this, the morning after I left him in the psychiatric hospital, I was sitting on the couch.

I was drinking my coffee and I opened up my scripture because,as a pastor’s wife, as a Christian for all of these years, that’s the first place I would always turn when I’m looking for comfort, when I’m looking for hope, when I’m looking for something that’s going to help me sort of set aside all of these negative emotions and say,” Okay, God, you’re really there. You’re going to take care of me, whatever.” So I flipped up in my scripture to where I was reading at the time in the book of James and the first scripture I look at is James Chapter one, Verse two, where it says, “ Consider it all joy, My brothers, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith is going to produce endurance.”

And I remember reading the words, consider it all joy. My brothers, when you encounter various trials, Lambing the bookshelf and looking up. And I talked to God in a very real way. I get mad and I verbalize it out loud. There are times when I’m walking down the street and people are like, “ Who’s she talking to?”

But I snapped at him. I said, “ Really?” I said, “ Really God, my life is falling apart. And this is the scripture you give me to consider it joy?”. How in the world do you consider? So I looked at it in a different version and it said “ Considered a sheer gift.” Well, that’s even worse because I really don’t want this gift, but then my eyes focused in on one word. And I’m telling you that morning before, really? I didn’t even know where my husband was, but at that moment, two things changed for me, consider it all joy, when It didn’t say consider it all joy which means we need to understand as humans, that that was going to happen. And when it happens, we need to understand that God is not only there, but He’s already provided and is going to continue.

And I have story after story, after story, even down to last week where just crazy things happen, where God shows up. So joy is a choice because my joy is not founded in the circumstances. My joy is founded in that relationship and trust that I have believing that God is in control because right after I saw that word, I slid down into another verse, a couple of verses later, and it says your faith-life is going to be on display for everyone to see.

Now I was already a speaker. I was already a blogger. I was already very sort of traveling around and talking. I worked in Hollywood for many years, so I understood what it meant for your faith life to be on display. And I got this vision of God saying, “ Girl, I got a plan for you and you’re going to help all of these people that don’t know where to find help when they’re in your circumstance and carry that as what has been happening.”

A week doesn’t go by that somebody doesn’t reach out, who’s overwhelmed, who’s searching and I’m able to just lovingly say, “ Okay, here we are. I get it. I know exactly what you’re going through.” Sometimes I cry with them. You know, sometimes I can encourage them. Sometimes they just need to listen and know that there’s somebody out there.

Carrie: That gets it.

Carole: That’s making it work. That’s getting it. Joy is definitely a choice. It’s a daily choice. Sometimes it’s some three-second choice, you know, sometimes I have to say, “ Okay, joy, I’m going to choose joy. Okay. I’m going to choose joy.” And then there are days where I might be laying face down on the carpet, just crying and sobbing. And yet I’m still choosing joy.

Carrie: Yeah.

Carole: I’m still choosing joy.

Carrie: I think people misunderstand joy, you know, and they, they believe it’s like happiness or some kind of like warm, fuzzy feeling. But to me, joy and hope are very similar because in a sense, joy is saying, “ I know something good is gonna come out of this, even though it’s a really bad situation right now.”

And it’s, I don’t see anything good about it, but I’m choosing to delight in God and in what he’s done in my life and what I know he’s going to do. Like, I know that somehow this story has a good ending.

Carole: Yeah. And I think when we choose joy, it opens our eyes to the possibilities of things that are around us.

If I didn’t choose joy, then I would miss those moments with my like tonight, I’m going to go tonight with my 15-year-old grandson, I’m going to serve baked potatoes in the booth at the football game, while he marches in the band, I’m going to go and I’m going to do that. Um, and I’m choosing to do that.

Now, some people will go “ Where’s the joy, where’s the fun in that?” But what you’re doing is it’s a mindset of just living. You’re going to keep living. And so many times when we face crises, especially when we’re loving, like my relationship. I lost my identity as a wife, as a pastor’s wife, and even as a mother for a period of time, it was hard because I had to redefine, what does this look like inside of me?

And yet when we choose joy, then we open ourselves up to the possibilities of what is going to happen because of this. You know, I asked myself sometimes, “ I didn’t sign up for this.” You know, “ Why did this happen to me?” Somebody asked me one time,” Why did, why, why did God do this to me? What did I do to make him so mad?”

I was like, “I don’t even know. That’s not even in my wheel. That’s not even something that ever crosses my mind.” But when I do start saying, “I didn’t sign up for this, I didn’t deserve this. I didn’t ask for this.”, all of a sudden the focus has changed from what’s the possible, “ How am I going to survive this? How am I going to get healthy in spite of this?” is changed to the problem. It’s changed to focusing on the negativity. It’s changed to focusing on the things I can’t change. I can’t change what’s going on in my husband’s brain.

Carrie: Sure.

Carole: I can’t fix it. What I can do, is I can control how I respond to him. I can control how I’m going to deal with it. I can control how, and what my outlook is. And when you say, “ Yeah, something good is going to come out of it” . I really believe that. Well, I’ve already seen so much good come out of it.

Carrie: Yeah. Just that’s a huge mindset shift because I do believe that a lot of people get stuck there. And I don’t think it’s wrong to question God or to say, “ Why I don’t understand this.”

“I’m not getting it”. But we don’t want to get stuck in that place because then we’re missing out on this other piece that you’re talking about. Like, you know, let’s stop focusing on all the things that are negative. The things that I can’t control and okay. “What do you have for me, God, in this season of my life, as I’m going through this struggle, right now?”

Carole: Yeah. I tell a story in the book of, I was standing in my garage one day and I was just mad. I was done. I was mad. I was just standing in the middle of the empty garage. All the cars were gone. It’s the cement and its winter and it’s cold. And I stomp my foot and I just yelled out loud at God, “ What the heck did I ever do to you?”

And in that moment, I realized that I started to giggle because I thought, look at me, I’m like a three year old throwing a tantrum here. So I went over and I picked up a roll of blue painter’s tape and a measuring tape off the tool bench. And I created a three-foot by three-foot square and I measured it out and I taped it off.

And I said, “ I looked up at the ceiling of the garage and I said, “ Okay, God, do you see this square?” And I’m yelling at Him.” Do you see this square?” And I said,” I am stepping into this square and I’m going to let you take care of everything outside of this square.” And when I stepped inside of this square, I all of a sudden the pressure lifted. And I realized that what I was doing is I was trying to take it on all myself.

Carrie: Oh

Carole: And I think that we tend to do that. I’m responsible for making sure he takes his medicine. I’m responsible that he takes the doctor. I’m responsible for this, I’m responsible, I’m responsible. And what made it worse was that the medical professionals at the time were telling me. “ Keep him alive. Just keep him alive until we can find the medication.”

“Just keep him alive until we can figure this out.” “Just keep him alive. And every time they would say,” just keep him alive.” It put more weight into that basket of me being responsible that I’m carrying around. And the most freeing thing was for me that day, when I stepped into that square was I realized I could not keep him alive.

Carrie: Right. Right.

Carol: I could not control his choices. I could not watch him 24/7. I could not make the medication work. And when I realized that ,it was like a deep, like letting a deep breath out. And then I started to breathe normally again, I now can draw a three-foot square with my imagination when I start feeling the pressure and I will step into it.

I will draw it in a grocery store. I’ll drive, I’ve drawn one on an airplane. Whenever that pressure of, of when I’m not giving it up and realizing that I’m not in control, I’ll draw that and step into the square cause that’s me sort of giving up the control.

Carrie: That’s huge. That’s absolutely huge. I think that’s a great practical visual for people to have as well.

One of the things I like to ask guests who have had, you know, a personal story and talk about their own experiences is if you could go back in time, what encouragement or hope would you provide to your younger self?

Carole: That’s an interesting question. I would probably say that “ You don’t need to be so hard on yourself.”

And I would probably say, “You can’t protect them because I’m the oldest of four children.” And another thing I talk about in the book is how I took on the responsibility of those three children. When my parents would fight that I was the mother, I was the protector. I was, I look back now and I think I didn’t have to be that strong.

I think I didn’t have the childhood that I probably could have had because I just sort of poured myself into that. I tried to be the mother. I tried to be the protector and then my mom loved it. Because I took all the responsibility on, then it happened, it was even more required of me to do it. And so I think if I could look back at that younger self, I would say, “ You don’t have, you’re not responsible.

This is not your job. This is not your responsibility. You need to find ways to trust.” And at 16, when I did become a Christian, when I did become a believer of that all shifted because all of a sudden that new relationship that I had with God, all of a sudden, I really feel like I began to understand that, okay, there is something bigger out there in the universe that is controlling and I could never control my parents, or I never could control their choices.

And so that has really, I think if I had learned that earlier, it might have, I don’t know that it would have ever changed the dynamics of what happens now. But I think, I just wonder sometimes if I had known that in the early years of our marriage, how could that have changed it? Not regret, but you know, really looking back and going, okay.

So if I can learn that now, how is that going to change and moving forward? Because I think we can only be where we’re at. When you asked that question about going back and talking to my younger self, I think sometimes that can be a dangerous thing only because we might go, oh, well, you know, if I had learned that I wouldn’t be in this situation.

Carrie: Sure.

Carole: And I think there’s a danger for us as humans to go, oh, well, we’re at the point of no return. And I always liked to say, “ If I’m breathing, then that means my life isn’t over yet. And there’s still something for me to do. There’s still something important for me to be here. No matter how bleak it looks. There is a purpose for me to be here.”

Carrie: Right? Absolutely. Tell us where people can find you. If they’re looking for you or your book, or they want to book you as a speaker, where can they get a hold of you?

Carole: My website is Carol, uh, Carol with an E, C A R O L E caroles journey.com. And my email is carole@carolesjourney.com .And then my book is available through redemptionpress on their website or Amazon, wherever really, uh, books are sold online. All of my social media handles are at carolesjourney. I try to keep it all at caroles journey because I do believe life’s a journey.

Carrie: Yeah

Carole: And then we meet people. I love when we meet people like Carrie now, you and I, our lives are intertwined. And you know, now we’re a part of each other’s journey might be just for one short leg of the journey, but you don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. So carolesjourney is kind of my ministry.

That’s how I brand everything. They, I have a website, I have all my social media and if somebody has questions, I, I love if somebody knows somebody who is struggling, who has a spouse or a loved one, who’s struggling. I love to encourage pray for, just try to, you know, we need each other we’ve desperately need each other.

Carrie: Absolutely. I know that I have had spouses reach out who listened to the podcast and who are trying to support their husband or wife. It could be a boyfriend, girlfriend, daughter, son. Whoever’s in their world is very important to them. That’s really struggling with anxiety and OCD, depression, any of those things under the mental health umbrella that you’re talking about.

I think this episode in particular is going to be so encouraging and helpful for them. And I appreciate your willingness to come on and share your story.

Carole: Thank you. Thank you very much, Carrie, for having me. And as we go into the holiday season, that’s a really hard time, especially if you love someone because you need, I almost feel like we need the extra support and encouragement during the holiday season.

That’s just for me, I still have not decorated for Christmas. I know, it’s so bizarre just because I’m thinking this year might be the year I actually do it. I don’t know. We’ll see. But I think that there’s just, it happened for me right before the holiday season. And so we started going into this season and I start,

Carrie: The reminders.

Carole: I’ll wake up in a funk and I’ll go, “ What’s going on?”

And then I’ll go, “ Oh, I know exactly what’s going on.” I just really encourage everyone. Please just reach out, find somebody to reach out to. Don’t isolate.

Carrie: Yeah. It gets the support that you need for sure.

Carrie: Well, thank you so much.

Carole: Thank you, Carrie

Carrie: I hope that you were inspired by Carole’s story. We love to talk with people who have personal stories about anxiety or OCD.

So, if you or someone, you know, would make a great guest. Definitely fill out the contact form @hopeforanxietyandocd.com. Thank you so much for listening.

Hope for anxiety and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling in Smyrna, Tennessee. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum and audio editing is completed by Benjamin Bynam. Until next time. May you be comforted by God’s great love for you.

62. Connecting with God Through The Psalms with Courtney Reissig

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 62. Connecting with God Through The Psalms with Courtney Reissig

Courtney Reissig, a mom, author and speaker is joining me on the show today to share how God used the Psalms to prepare her for a traumatic and life-threatening pregnancy experience.

  • How Courtney started diving into the Psalms
  • Psalms as the language of the realities of life 
  • How Courtney processed her emotions 
  • How she worked through her trauma and what she learned from it
  • How to use the Psalms in prayer 
  • Courtney’s Book, Teach Me How to Feel 

Related links and resources

http://courtneyreissig.com/

More Podcast Episodes

Transcript

Carrie: Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD, episode 62. I am your host Carrie Bock. And today, I am joined on the show by Courtney Reissig, author of Teach Me How to Feel. She’s written other books as well.

We were talking about using the Psalms in our spiritual journey without using the Psalms to connect with God and in prayer and meditation. So I’m really looking forward to this conversation. 

Courtney, I know that you had a difficult experience that was traumatic for you and prompted you really to dive in, and study the Psalms, in more detail. Can you tell us about that?

Courtney: I had a traumatic delivery with my last son,  and it was actually like a medical crisis, but I actually started diving into the Psalms about six months before that, and was truly interested in them and how they fit together and how,  as I learned more about them, I realized the Psalms was giving us language for the realities of life.

It was so interesting at the time. But I didn’t know, that the Lord was using to preparing for what was to come. And so, I had spent that six months diving into the Psalms. And then when I was 33 weeks pregnant, I had a placenta abruption, which is the  Medical crisis full abruption is sudden death for the mom and the baby, but mine was partial.

And so I was admitted to the hospital for three weeks as we waited for either to stop or for him to be needed to be delivered. Really, what happened to me. And that time was kind  of hospital  bed rest  is really , really traumatic.  I felt like everyday with a life or death situation   with whether or not I was going to have to deliver him, whether we be okay. On those days, I couldn’t read anything. I couldn’t read the magazine people brought me, I couldn’t really watch TV, but I could read the Psalms.

And I spent so much time in the Psalms in those days, reading and processing and journaling about them. It’s not for I really start that I’m using the Psalmus. You’re not the first person who had walked through something that was life or death. And the Lord really met me there and showed me that He understood my frame and understood my struggle and was giving me language for what was going on.

Carrie: Yeah, So did you feel like, even though you could really describe like what you were feeling exactly. It was almost like when you opened up the Psalms, it, it really was like, oh yeah.

That’s, how I’m feeling right now. 

Courtney: Yes. Oh yes. I mean, there are so many songs where I opened them up and was like, yes, that’s how I feel. I feel as though God has forgotten me. I struggled a lot and actually after he was born kind of that. And I struggled with guilt over that because, I lived and I had the best-case scenario, but I still had all of that trauma that I had to work through. 

And even then I had a lot of darkness and postpartum depression. And even in that, the Psalms really helped me see that I was not the first person who had felt darkness or felt like God’s hand was against me or felt like I had sorrows in my heart all day or anxiety in my heart all day. So it really did give me words when I didn’t have other words for what we know.

Carrie: Um,  that’s good. How did you process those emotions as they came up? Just, you know, feeling like God had forgotten you or maybe other concerns that you had, you know, sadness, anger, fear?

Courtney: Yeah. It’s really understand talking to your friend about how kind I processed it at night. And I, it took me a long time to realize that I’m an internal processor. And so a lot of people didn’t know that I was struggling for a really long time until like six months after he was born. I had shared that I was really struggling. I think for me, I just had to really work through my own thoughts in my own head.

And through writing, primarily for me is just a big way for me to internally process what’s going on, that was a big thing for me. I find that when I’m deeply, deeply struggling, that I’ve got to write to get it all out before I can never talk about somebody else, which I’m a natural born talker, which so people don’t think that that’s how I process.

They usually think that I brought those through talking about it. Cause everything, but when I’m really, really struggling, I work it through with writing and then reading. I didn’t have a lot of quiet moments. It was my fourth son by the time this happened. I had four children, four and under,  there were no quiet moments.

My husband was really gracious and gives me time to process. And I will say too, I eventually did go to therapy and that was really helpful. I needed someone else  outside of myself and outside of my circumstances to really kind of help me work through what we had walked through. And I still remember I canceled number of times that I had a really good friend who finally was like, I’m going to come watch your kids and you’re going to make that appointment.

Carrie: You thought, I don’t have time for this, or you were avoiding it because you knew it’d be uncomfortable to talk about?

Courtney:  I think I knew I needed it. Like, I think I knew like deep down that I really needed just to like an hour, a week to sit and process. And I was gonna have that unless someone had given me that time.

Yeah. I think I was just like, I didn’t have the time. I just didn’t have the time or the energy. It seemed impossible to me. Yeah. 

Carrie: Yeah. That was just really loving what your friend did to just kind of step in and say, They all l take care of your kids so that you can go take care of you.

Courtney: Right, and I think sometimes we’re afraid, I  think as moms, maybe it’s women in general to kind of say I’m willing to do that, it feels too self-focused and we are kind of conditioned to be like, we’re always dying to self and I think we’re supposed to die to self. Because  Christ, I just like drive to himself.

Carrie: Right.

Courtney: But we are also not God, you need help sometimes. And so, sometimes the most self-sacrificing that you can do is to help and you can help  others. And I think, that’s what my friend saw in me is that I needed that so that I could serve and the way I was called to serve.

Carrie:  I know some people, when they go through trauma and then they get to the end of experience, they’re like, okay, it’s over. I lived, I should be fine. Like, I shouldn’t be having those residual effects. Like, did you understand that it was. The trauma that was impacting maybe emotional experiences that you were having, or was it kind of like you learned some of that later? Like after the fact? 

Courtney: Yeah, that’s a really good question. Cause I don’t think I understood that fully in the moment. And it’s been helpful since I’ve come to realize that I have that  It’s helped me love my kids well through it, I had a few people in my life who understood enough of what we had walked through and had lived long enough to say,

Carrie: You’re going to have to be working through this for a while.

Courtney: It took me a while, like a few years to realize that there were these things that would happen. And I wouldn’t understand why I would all be dealing with it again, even it was in my mind seemed to be kind of unrelated. It’s only been as I’ve learned that I’ve learned part of the process of working through trauma is that eventually, I think hindsight now allows me to say, oh, I was not in a good place then, because that  I’m in a better place now. 

Carrie: Sure.

Courtney: Yeah, I don’t think I fully understood in that moment, but I’ve walked through the trauma scene. Then, so I was diagnosed with cervical cancer during  COVID.

Carrie: Wow!

Courtney: Yeah,  and I was really, really unexpected. All the markers to catch it, just kind of fell through the cracks for me. And, um, so I had radical hysterectomy really quickly because I had walked through the trauma with Ben. It didn’t make it easier and didn’t make it less traumatic, but it did make me more aware of what I was going to need to process what had happened. And the healing emotionally from that was better the second time around versus I just felt like I was blindsided by what happened with him.

Carrie: Right, right. Yeah. It’s interesting. Because so many times when we’re in survival mode, we are not aware that we’re in survival mode. We’re just kind of making the next day happen. Like, I’ve, you know, in your situation, it’s like, I got four kids and somebody is going to feed them. 

Courtney: Right. And you don’t realize that you’re like deeply not okay. Like, you’re like a hair trigger away from like blowing up. And I’m thankful that the Lord brought me through it and then allowed me to give me some clarity to see so that I’m aware. I mean, trauma happens all throughout our lives. 

Carrie: Sure

Courtney: And so I’m not naive enough to think it won’t happen again, but.

Carrie: What guidance, like you can give us on using the Psalms in our day-to-day prayer and devotional life? 

Courtney: I’ve used them all different ways. Right now, my life, I’ve been really convicted over the last year that my prayer life is really lacking, it’s always been, like more of a struggle in my own life to just find, to be purposeful in prayer. But so many of the Psalms are prayers and written as prayers

Carrie: Yeah.

Courtney: And so one of the things I’ve done over the last year has been to pray the Psalms and just pray them based on whatever’s going on in the lives of the people. I’m praying for at the time or my own life.

I think that’s one way to use them is to use them as prayers. Many of them are prayers.  I think another way to use them, is to read them when life is hard and read them to find familiar friends who also understand that life is hard. You know, I read them a lot when I was writing the book, I write them a lot.

When I was walking through this trauma, I read them a lot when COVID first started, because everything felt so uncertain and crazy. And I have found in every one of those seasons that the Psalms get the human experience. I think I’ve heard a Tim Keller, wouldn’t say. That part of his devotional reading is he reads, a Psalms everyday  because we’re always walking through something that the Psalms understand because God is the author of the Psalms and he understands us. And so I think for anyone, it’s a really helpful tool. And seeing that we have a God who sees no matter what we’re walking through.

Carrie:  Yeah, Just sense of relate-ability that we have to. I mean, it’s the human experience. It’s anger, it’s sadness. It’s uncertainty. It’s fear. And for me, I think it opens up and gives us permission to have a messy prayer life.

Courtney:  Yes,  absolutely. 

Carrie:  So just say, this is how I feel and it’s messy right now and I don’t care what’s going on in my life. Like it’s crazy. 

Courtney: .Right,  and I think sometimes we’re afraid just to be like that because we, depending on, like our theological tradition, we are so prone to wanting to have it all put together and to sound like we’re trusting the Lord and that everything’s going okay. And I think that’s the reality of the Psalms is that they’re not afraid of the struggles. And they kind of reorient us to acknowledge that.

Carrie: Hmm.

Courtney: Stop pretending that everything’s perfect and that we’re able to respond rightly to everything at all. Any given time.

Carrie: Yeah, the, we don’t have to have polished prayers all the time.

Carrie: Right? Yeah. I love that. Tell us about your book. Uh, “Teach me how to feel?”

Courtney: Yes, that book was born out of our experience with Ben and it kind of takes us through 24 different Psalms and walks through how the Psalmus experiences, the feeling, and then how this almost experiences God. There’s also a study guide that goes along with it to kind of help you add more depth to it.

If you’re trying to really kind of work through the Psalms, but the heart behind it was that a person who is walking through something could take any, could open up and look at any emotion that they’re feeling at any given time and find language for their struggle. There are short chapters. They’re designed for, like, if you’re walking through struggle, you need something 

short and accessible.

There are a variety of feelings. There are happy ones like joy and forgiving and different ones like that. And so it’s not all sad songs, but it’s really intended to show you the breadth of the songs and the breadth of how God gives us language and the different struggles and joys and sorrows of life.

Carrie: Hmm. Good. How can people get in touch with you if they want to kind of find out more information?

Courtney:  About the book? 

Carrie: Yeah. Or just if they want to get in touch with you, um, do you do speaking engagements sometimes or? 

Courtney: Yeah, I do. Um, I don’t do them as much as I used to, so COVID really slowed down what ended up speaking that I did. And then, um, it kind of gave us, like a little bit of a reset. Is this what we want for our season of life right now? 

And so, I don’t accept a lot of speaking engagements throughout the year. I accept maybe like one or two outside of Arkansas where I live, and I’m also on staff at my church recently. So that takes up a fair amount of my time.

And I have a website that I. Should I update more than I do Courtneyreissig.com, but I feel an urge to write something. I primarily put it on Instagram, so it’s just my name. Courtney Reissig.

Carrie: Okay. Awesome. So when you were struggling, if you could go back in time, like what encouragement or hope would you provide to your younger self?

Courtney: Hmm. That’s a really good question. So I would provide, to my younger self, I would say trust the long game. That’s kind of the thing that I would tell younger Courtney, is that what seems like an impossible thing right now, it seems like God’s not going to work that out for you right now. God plays the long game in life.

And so it’s kind of the message of someone, where the one who meditates on God’s word day and night is like a tree planted by streams of water. And what we know about trees is that they don’t grow overnight and transformation doesn’t happen overnight. 

And so the life spent in the world. And what life spent trusting in the word made flesh Christ is one that grows over lifetime. And so that means that there are seasons like summer where everything is going really well and the trees in full bloom, and then their seasons, like winter, where it seems like nothing’s happening. 

And I think I spent a lot of time in my younger, in my twenties and towards the end of my thirties now. So most of my thirties, not trusting the long game, not trusting that God was working, that God had a long-term purpose in view when He was working in my life or not doing anyone else.

I think it’s probably the greatest struggle of these younger people, in general, is we’re so instantaneous and that’s not how God works. 

Carrie: Yeah, I think that’s so good. Just to have a little bit more for ourselves of an eternal perspective. What God’s doing right now, you know, we may not see the fruits of it for many years. Something that we’re investing in, you know, you could be investing in kids or teenagers and you may not see the fruit of the day to day what’s you’re doing until many years down the road, you know, or the difficulty that God’s bringing you through right now is the difficulty that you’re going to be helping somebody else walk through and 10 years. Right?

Courtney: Right, right. I mean, there’s in our own life. We’ve seen in just the last few months, an answer to prayer that we’ve prayed for 10 years. 

Carrie: Wow!

Courtney: And I mean, that’s just a long time. And to be honest, like there’s, there was like whole years where I stopped praying for it, you know, because I just don’t think it was going to happen.

So I think that it’s the benefit of getting older is you get to see God work over the long haul that you don’t see when you’re younger. 

Carrie: Yeah. Yeah. That’s great. That’s good. Hopefully that encourages some, some younger people out there that are wondering why something isn’t happening right now.

Courtney: Right. Yeah.

Carrie:  Well, Courtney, thank you so much for taking some time out of your day to talk with us about these things. And I hope it expands and encourages people’s prayer and devotional life, or if they’re going through a hard time to really just dig into the Psalms and see what God is going to show them and teach them through that.

Courtney: Well. Thanks for having me.

Carrie: I really hope you enjoy this episode on the Psalms. In a couple of weeks we have a really powerful interview about forgiveness that I wanted to share with you. So, if you’re struggling with forgiving someone in your life. You may wanna  tune in, in a couple of weeks to that episode. 

Just a friendly reminder that we have a couple different products on our website for sale. We do have some t-shirts. If you want to share the news and share your excitement about Hope for Anxiety and OCD. We also have an e-book on finding the counselor who is right for you. If either of those things are an interest to you upon over to Hope for Anxiety and OCD.com.

My assistant and I are also working on putting together a  facebook group which will be an encouraging, supportive, positive place for hopefully to be able to connect with us and other listeners. But definitely be on the lookout for that.

61. Overcoming Financial Anxiety and Shame with Carrie Bock, LPC-MHSP

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 61. Overcoming Financial Anxiety and Shame with Carrie Bock, LPC-MHSP

Join Carrie in a solo episode as she speaks about anxiety and shame around money and how to cope with it. 

  • Common financial traps
  • Evaluating your finances and making good financial decisions
  • Thought processes and limiting beliefs about money and how to reframe them.
  • Honoring God with your finances  
  • More helpful tips and advice on dealing with financial anxiety. 

More Podcast Episodes

Transcript

Hope for anxiety and OCD episode 61. On today’s episode. I am choosing to fly solo to speak with you about anxiety regarding finances and overcoming that as well as shame. That people carry around related to their finances. One thing I want to say in regards to this episode is that I am not a financial planner or advisor by any means.

So take that into consideration as you listen to this episode and make decisions about whether you want to follow any of this advice or not. I had a guest that I interviewed that I was going to air. Um, to talk about this issue and it just, I didn’t really feel like it jived with our audience or was going to be relatable to all of you, especially since we have a worldwide audience.

And I felt that that position was a little bit more Americanized. I also want to point out though that it doesn’t really matter how much money you have. You still may have anxiety about your financial situation. There are people with a lot of money in the bank, maybe who have obsessions about having a certain amount in their savings because they’re afraid of something catastrophic happening to them. Maybe they’re afraid of losing their house or losing their job. Maybe not having family members that they can fall back on to help them. So understand that it’s not just people who. Are struggling financially or who are dealing with poverty that have anxiety about finances.

But I really do believe that it affects people across the demographic range, whether you’re in poverty in the middle class, or whether you’re even rich, you can get anxious about your finances. This topic is really relevant for everyone. I wanted to talk about shame in this episode as well. People who are very well-meaning are trying to help others with their finances, even within the church context, unfortunately, can at times perpetuate shame.

It’s a little bit like people who are trying to lose weight and someone comes to them and says, well, it’s easy. I mean, all you have to do is eat less and exercise and that’s really, and that position may really be minimizing the struggles that that person is having emotionally. Maybe they’re dealing with emotional eating, or have some type of eating disorder.

They may be obsessing over eating or not eating certain things. There may have been some traumatic experiences in their life contributing to their weight gain. So it’s not as easy as, okay. Here. Let me give you the two to three-step process and it’s gonna change your life and you just have to implement it.

Anytime we approach someone with that type of quick fix scenario, or someone comes at you with that, I think you have to be very careful because typically our problems are not that simple. Many of our financial decisions unfortunately are made emotionally or impulsively. If we don’t take this time to really stop and think about what is it that we want for our family’s future, then we can just kind of get blown in the wind in bad financial decisions. And unfortunately, the thing about finances that I’ve realized is that it’s very easy to get in a difficult spot financially, but it’s a lot harder to get out once you’ve kind of fallen in that financial.

And there are so many different things that people face that can get them in a difficult spot. Financially. One is the reality that the rent mortgages, the cost of living increases overall has gone up drastically. I think about the first apartment that my first husband and I rented was probably, maybe $600 a month, maybe a little bit more than that. And in the process, we were looking at staying there for another year and our rent was going to go up a whole hundred dollars a month. And at that point in time, that was like, whoa, like, I don’t think we can do another a hundred dollars a month and ended up looking elsewhere for a place, cuz we weren’t super happy there.

But I promise you that if you go to rent, that is probably same apartment right now. And this is granted, we’re probably 15 years down the road, but the price has probably doubled. It probably would cost you about 1200 and it was a one-bedroom apartment with a loft. It wasn’t anything huge or special. If you are in a place where your rent or just cost of living has gone up drastically.

And oftentimes our salaries don’t follow that. You may really have to take a hard evaluative look at what do I need to do in order to save money. Do I need to move farther out? But then with that consideration, you have to consider gas expenses and. Do I need to look for potential opportunities to work from home where maybe I can live a little bit farther out from the city easier.

I think since COVID, a lot more people have those opportunities and have been able to live in an area, maybe that’s a little bit more rural or more outside of town where they’re not having to be so close to a city center, having to drive into work every day. And that may not be a possibility for you.

That’s not a possibility with everyone’s career. Some people have to go into work in order to do their job. I had to take a hard evaluation when I went through my divorce, looking at my mortgage, do I sell my house and go rent somewhere? That would’ve possibly been maybe the easiest case scenario. When I started looking at how much rent was at the time, it made more sense for me to keep paying my mortgage.

And even though I knew I wasn’t going to be able to pay my mortgage on my salary alone, I knew that I could get a roommate. Was it the most ideal situation or my favorite thing ever to have roommates? Not necessarily. There were bumps and challenges in the road at different points as happens whenever you live with people.

If you’re in a position right now where you have to live with family because that’s what you can afford and maybe it’s not the greatest, but you know that that’s the best financial decision for you. Sometimes we have to buckle down and do what we have to do, and it’s not easy. Another way sometimes that people can get into a difficult spot financially is they may have made a poor investment.

They may have whether that was in a house or a car, and now you’re upside down. You owe more than what it’s actually worth. You’re stuck with this extra debt, whatever the situation. The biggest thing I would say from the emotional side of things is to not beat yourself up, if that’s you, because I think it would be so easy to go back and live in that guilt shame of saying, “Oh gosh, I wish I had never bought this car or I shouldn’t have made this investment over here. I should have gotten a house in a different neighborhood.”  

Whatever the situation is, you can’t go back and change. Beating yourself up is not going to help. The problem is really just adding insult to injury. It may be a situation where you get some good financial help, coaching, talk to a financial planner, get some advice on what’s my best step oving forward here. Maybe you’ve had a situation where you’ve had a lot of medical bills, maybe you’ve been sick and had to miss some work. This is something that Steve and I definitely can relate to right now because we have a lot of medical bills coming in for what was happening with his eye issues.

And now pregnancy issues. There’s always some kind of medical bill coming into our house at any given time. Those are things that you can’t fully plan for. You can plan to have savings, but oftentimes that can get quickly depleted if you have a high deductible plan, which a lot of people in and speaking from an American context, lot of people have a high deductible plan now that maybe several thousand dollars.

And it might be hard for you to save up that money or to have that in the bank ready and available at any time. I know for me, it’s a situation where I’ve had definite thoughts recently about, whether are we going to be able to take a vacation next year. Like what’s going to happen. But, you know, you just have to take those things one step at a time. I’ve found in the process that some places are more willing to work with you than others. That’s just a situation that you’re in. So if you can talk with someone from the billing office about what the expectations are, having them let you know ahead of time, you know, is my amount that’s going towards my deductible.

Do I have to pay that? When I come in. Is that something you’re going to bill me for later? Can I set up a payment plan? Unfortunately, what I’ve seen with a lot of people who maybe have big bills or have medical bills coming in is that overwhelm can lead to an eventual shutdown. For example, I’m overwhelmed about this medical bill.

It’s large. It’s more than I can pay. So then I just shut down, avoid it. I put it in the back of the drawer and I don’t pay anything. That’s definitely not what you want to do. You want to take a moment, breathe, evaluate, say, what can I afford to pay on this medical bill right now? One thing that’s helpful with medical bills is that typically you can’t be sent to collections.

And look this up on your own, because I did a little bit of research a while ago. As long as you are paying on that bill and making a good faithful effort to pay on it regularly, you’re not going to be sent to collections. Some of that may vary by company to company because some companies will send you to collections after say 90 days. So make sure that you’re aware. And if you have to call and talk with somebody, it’s better to do that than to avoid the situation entirely, because what happens when we avoid things entirely, they tend to get worse and you don’t want this situation to get worse for you. It’s already difficult enough that you’re having to deal with it.

You may be in a difficult financial situation because you’ve lost a job or had to make a sudden move. You’ve had a sudden life change. That’s happened to you, whatever the situation is if you would say, okay, I’m in a financial hole right now. And it’s absolutely stressing me out because I don’t know how to get out of it.

We always talk about hope on a show. And I think that’s so important that we talk about how. There is hope for your financial situation. You may have to make some difficult changes or hard choices, but you can get to a point where you get out of that hole and get to a different place. You may need some professional financial help for someone to look at all the numbers for you and map that way out for you.

I’d like to talk about two common, but completely different themes that we hear in regards to teaching in the church surrounding finances. And one, I talked about a little bit earlier, which is that it’s just easy. You should be able to do it, create a budget, spend less than you bring in, et cetera. And that creates shame, obviously, because we have all kinds of things that get wrapped up in terms of spending.

You know, some of us grew up in a family where finances were never talked about. Some people grew up in a family where every time their parents got money, they just blew it. So they never learned how to have restraint, self-control, how to budget, how to manage money. And obviously that puts you at a disadvantage when you’re trying to learn how to manage it on your.

Some people grew up in families where love was bought. So gifts were a big thing or a lot of money was spent giving to people. And maybe you wanted to continue that, but haven’t been able to, because of your financial situation. So you spend above your means to provide gifts and what you believe is love to other people in the family.

There are so many different thought processes that people can have surrounding money. And oftentimes these thought processes go back to childhood. For example, you may have a belief about yourself that I am no good with money. Now, if you tell yourself that you’re going to live by that principle. And so it may be better for you to say to yourself, I’m learning how to manage my money.

I’m growing in new financial knowledge. I’m talking to others who know more than me to try to learn about this issue. I’m reading books. If you are doing those things and you’re really seeking out the help that you need, I promise you will not continue to be bad with money anymore. Another belief that people may carry is that they never have enough money.

And this goes back to maybe growing up in a little bit more of an impoverished environment. Maybe now they’re doing okay though. Maybe now they’re in the middle or middle to upper class, and they’re still holding on to this belief of I’m never going to have enough. This can drive people to be anxious, workaholics, working multiple jobs, believing they have to have a certain number in the bank account or certain amount of income that can really create a lot of stress.

If you’re holding onto that financial belief, you may need to look at reframing that to, I am content with everything that I have everything that I need getting into a space of gratitude will really help you get out of a scarcity mindset. One thing we have to remember is that when we are in that fight-flight or freeze response, and we’re trying to make a financial decision, it’s not going to go well for.

The reason is when you’re in that panicked fight fight free state, your higher levels of thinking are turned off at that point because you’re in survival mode, short-term, thinking, what do I need to do just to get through this? versus a more balanced, long-term mindset. If you have ever bought a car, you know how this goes and how people really try to play on this, like car sales are very good.

They know exactly what they’re doing. They will convince you that you have to make that decision right now about whether or not you’re going to buy that. Because it is going to disappear into thin air and the $500 off they promised you is going away right now. And they tried to get you really into this state of worked up of making this decision.

And next thing you know, they’re showing you stuff that’s out of your price range. This happens. Anytime you go to buy something that you will tell someone, this is my price range, and they will show you something completely outside of it, case in point, Steve and I bought a mattress recently and I was choking with people about it later because I said, you know, she gave us several different mattresses to lay on after we told her our price range and the last mattress That we laid on was $2,000. I did not come in there with any intentions of spending $2000 on a mattress. It was a very nice mattress granted, but it was almost just comical to me that she felt the need to have us lay on that one, you know, see how wonderful it is, isn’t that great. And, you know, we have these financing offers and so forth and so on.

You have to be very careful and understand the psychology behind sales scarcity time limitations really educate yourself on some of those things before you go shopping, make sure you’re in as calm a state as possible when you’re making especially large financial decisions such as on a car house, furniture. Those things are gonna be more money for you. Another message that you may have heard in the church is similar to kind of a, you know, name it and claim it type of thing. God wants to bless you financially. He owns the cattle on a thousand Hills. He wants to open up the windows of heaven for you.

So this seed and give to our ministry and God will multiply it. Whatever the message is, that’s out there. I’m sure that you have heard some version of each of those. Here’s the reality based on going back to scripture, Philippians four 19, and my God will meet all your needs. According to the riches of his glory in Christ Jesus. Interestingly enough, this verse is found in a passage on contentment. It says, God will meet all of our needs according to his riches. It doesn’t say that we’re going to have everything that we. It doesn’t say, if you accept Christ, you’re going to be a millionaire. Steve will tell you that some of the most blessed people that he’s met were not blessed financially, but they were blessed spiritually.

They were blessed relationally. They were blessed in many other ways. God does want to bless us, but it’s, doesn’t always come in the financial realm. We have to understand that there are many different ways that God can and does bless us. I do believe that there’s also the parable of the talents, that if we are responsible with what God gives us, we will naturally be entrusted with more to take care of.

The opposite is also true. If we don’t take care of what God gives us. We may not have it anymore. We are not always ready to receive what God has for us. I’m not just speaking financially. Although I do believe it applies financially, but sometimes we aren’t ready to receive a different job opportunity.

We may not be ready to receive a relationship. God may be working in our lives to prepare us for that next thing. But our character may not be where it needs to be in order to receive that. I want to say something here about giving. Oftentimes we hear about tithing and giving in the church. These are certainly biblical concepts and there’s plenty of scriptures to back tithing giving to the local church, as well as even above that giving to other organizations that are helping other people or other Christian causes. Why does God ask us to give certainly he can do anything and doesn’t rely on us to give money to the church or to give to other organizartion. He can meet needs in any way that he desires.

I believe that God asks us to give because it keeps us out of a space of greed. If we put God first in our finances and say, okay, I’m gonna dedicate this first 10% over to you. And I’m going to give how you’ve led me to, to other cause. That keeps us from making money a God. And a lot of times, if we’re obsessing, ruminating have a lot of anxiety about finances, you know, we have to be careful because maybe we’re making that an idol in our life.

That’s something maybe that you might need to just genuinely self-evaluate for yourself, have I put this money and this effort in paying my bills and getting certain things or accomplishing certain things in life above God, when we give it puts us in a state of gratefulness for all that we do have, and all that God has provided for us.

It’s really amazing sometimes when you stop and you go back and look at difficult, maybe financial situations that you’ve gone through, I was on someone else’s podcast and it was, it was kind of comical because I was trying to make this analogy right about coming to counseling and how. You know, if you’re having a problem with your car, you know, you don’t just lay hands on it, you take it to the mechanic.

And I was kind of saying, if you have these emotional problems, praying is good, but you don’t just do that. And you go to somebody that can help you with those emotional problems. So as I’m making this analogy, I say, no, no, wait, there was this time where I could not afford to get my car fixed. I had to get an emissions test that was coming up.

I knew there wasn’t anything majorly wrong with the car, but I was gonna fail because my check engine light was on. And sometimes those things can be temperamental. If you know anything about cars, sometimes the systems. Just kind of go a little wonky and one thing is off and your check engine light’s on and it’s not really anything to do functionally with the car.

So I said, “no.” I remember I prayed for my check engine light to go off and it did. It didn’t go off right away when I prayed about it, but it did go off several days later. And I really believe that God heard that prayer and came through for me so that I didn’t have to take my car in anywhere. And I certainly wasn’t in a space to get a different car at that point.

I say all that to say, you never quite know. Like how God is going to come through for you and never underestimate the power of prayer and the power of knowing that if you are a child of God, that he loves you very much, and he wants to make sure that you are taken care of that includes financially in terms of being able to make sure that your bills are met and taken care of what I would encourage you to do.

If you are anxious about your finances today, take a moment and stop, look around, start to become really, really thankful for all the things that you do have, whether it’s running water, electricity, a yard, a car, whatever it is that you can be thankful for today. One of the things that changed my life when I was going through my divorce was I read this verse in James 1:17  says “Every good and perfect gift is from above coming down from the father of heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.”  What I realized when I read that verse was going through a difficult season financially, as well as emotionally was to say, okay, if there’s something good in me regardless of what it is, whether it’s tangible or intangible. That means that God put that good thing. There it’s a gift from him. It’s something that I can be thankful for. Gratitude helps us with so many areas of our life, but specifically when we’re talking about financially, It helps us get to a place of contentment where we can step back and say, you know what?

I don’t really have a need of anything. Maybe you’re in a space where you’re anxious about finances because you genuinely cannot pay your bills or you genuinely do not have enough food. And what I would say to you is that it’s okay to get help. There’s no shame in that. If you go through a season. Where you have to go to the food pantry because you lost your job.

Don’t feel bad about that. If you are a single mom with no child support and your husband has left you and things are really rough for you and someone’s offering to help you don’t turn that help away. It’s okay. To receive that you need that in this point in your life, you may not always need it. And you know what, you’ll probably one day be able to give back to somebody else, even if it’s just a listening ear or to be able to say, yeah, I’ve been there.

I know how hard that is. If you’re consistently unable to make your bills, you may need to look at a major life change in circumstances, whether that’s moving, sharing space with somebody, getting a different job that pays you more money. These are all big changes. Sometimes that have to happen as hard as they are to do and to implement.

We touched on this earlier. But my other advice, if you’re feeling stressed financially is to really look at some of your beliefs surrounding yourself and your relationship with money. Are you the type of person that always has to have new things? Are you trying to keep up with some type of status? Do you believe that you’re just always going to be broke?

Do you believe you have to have a certain amount of savings and if it drops below that point, then you just panic. Do you think it’s bad to have money? If you do, you will not hold onto it. You’ll seek to get rid of it. Just so some people believe that Christians should be wealthy. Some people believe that Christian should live in poverty.

And somehow that gets you closer to God. Neither of that beliefs are accurate. You can have a lot of money and honor God with that money. You can have a little bit of money and honor God with that money that you have. Third thing I would say, if you are anxious about money is to pray and really seek God as a provider of all your.

The scriptures tell us that God knows our needs before we ask, but obviously, he wants us to have a relationship with him. He wants us to depend on him. He wants us to ask for those things that we need, start to keep track. Of those answered prayers of those ways that God comes through in the difficult times financially, you will be able to go back and look at those and see how God has worked in your life.

The fourth thing that we’ve already touched on is get help if you need it whether that’s reading a book about finances, going to a class, talking to a financial advisor, getting some type of financial or debt counseling. Allowing others to help you when needed, if you are dealing with financial shame because of maybe negative choices that you’ve made in the past or negative beliefs that you have about yourself related to money, know that God is gracious.

And loves you, wants you to learn from this experience that you’ve had so that you don’t make the same decisions in the future. Sit with the guilt, ask for forgiveness, and then move forward into new behaviors and actions. Don’t keep beating yourself up over and over again for the same. Recognize shameful messages that may be coming from the church or other well, meaning people and choose not to receive those for yourself.

There are many stories of hope that I could give you about finances. And I already talked about one a little bit earlier in the show. This story of hope is actually about giving and financial surrender around the end of the year in 2019. I talked with Steve about our church’s end-of-the-year offering.

That goes towards local and global missions. I had thought that it was going to be easy to give money to this end-of-the-year offering. Unfortunately, what happened was that there were several catastrophes that occurred right around that time period. I can’t remember exactly, but we may have had a home repair car repair and unexpected medical.

Come up. It was several things at one time that had depleted the money that I was planning on giving. I had a specific fund within my business account that I had set aside for a specific purpose. I felt like God was showing me that I needed to give that money to the end-of-the-year offer. I cried so much during this process because I knew that God wanted me to give this money, but I had no idea how that money was going to be replaced.

I was anticipating at some point in 2020, needing those funds for different things. Of course, at this time we had no way of knowing the pandemic was going to happen. That stimulus funds were going to be going. That money ended up getting replaced relatively quickly. My business was pretty busy in the beginning of 2020 because everyone was at home and ready to go to counseling.

So something that I was worried about and didn’t know how God was going to provide for. God already knew and saw into the future. That wouldn’t really be an issue for me. My business was going to be fine, to be honest with you, I can look back and say, I don’t miss that money that I gave to the church.

And honestly, I don’t miss any money that I’ve ever given for the Lord. And for things that I believe he’s called me to give to you, I believe at this point in my. It was about surrendering and trusting God with everything that I had and not holding anything back from him, really trusting that he was gonna be able to meet and provide all the needs for my business.

And for me personally, I hope that this episode has been an encouragement to you or provided some helpful guidance or tips. If you’re dealing with anxiety about finances, I know that it’s a real deal. I’ve experienced it personally in my own life at various points. And I am here to tell you that God is good and he is a great provider.

So last time we talked about making fitness changes. This time we talked about financial changes. What other changes are you seeking to make in this year? Let us know anytime @hopeforanxietyandocd.com. Thank you so much for listening. 

Hope for anxiety and OCD is a production of By The Well Counseling in Smyrna, Tennessee 

Opinions given by our guests are their own and not necessarily a reflection of the views of By the Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. Our original music is by Brandon Maingrum.

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