Carrie Bock, LPC-MHSP has appeared on several different podcasts to cover a variety of topics and to promote the Hope for Anxiety and OCD podcast.
Ayan Robin Dixon of Circle 31 International Women’s Ministry interviews Carrie about her experience as a former foster mom.
Joe Sanok interviews Carrie about how to start a private practice and transition off insurance.
Adam Kol asks Carrie’s advice on how to use insurance coverage for counseling, how to obtain low-cost or free opportunities for counseling and how to find a therapist that’s right for you.
Tracy Lowery asks all kinds of questions about everything from finding a counselor to understanding suffering as a Christian.
Brian and Carrie discuss prayer and anxiety by using the movie War Room as a jumping off point.
Carrie breaks anxiety down in an easy to understand way in Jeff Allen’s first episode.
Carrie discusses the process she has created for attracting and onboarding the clients she enjoys working with most.
I had the privilege of interviewing Brooke Randolph, a licensed mental health counselor and a Brainspotting trainer. Brooke shares with us her insights and knowledge on Brainspotting. She also gives some advice for those who are considering adoption based on her experience as a single adoptive mom and as a Brainspotting consultant specializing in adoption.
What is Brainspotting? How does it work?
How was Brainspotting developed? Who discovered it?
How can Brainspotting help with anxiety and OCD?
What happens during and after a Brainspotting session
Can Brainspotting be used with all ages?
Brainspotting training
Comparison between Branspotting and other forms of therapy.
Hope for anxiety and OCD, episode 36. On today’s episode, I have an interview with Brooke Randolph who is a brainspotting trainer and therapist. Brainspotting has some similarities to EMDR in that they’re both seeking to work at a brain level to help people heal from internal disturbance. So it was neat to have that conversation and look at some of the similarities and differences.
If you caught our episode with Peyton Garland, which was a personal story where she talks about her experience with OCD and her experience with brainspotting. I know you’re going to want to check out this episode as a follow-up.
Carrie: Brooke, welcome to the show.
Brooke: Thank you.
Carrie: And tell us a little bit about yourself.
Brooke: Well, I am a licensed mental health counselor. So I’m a therapist who lives in Indiana, but I also in licensed in Massachusetts and I run a group practice here in Indianapolis. So we are currently up to 10 clinicians. I am also a single adoptive mom to a 14-year-old boy. So that makes me rugby mom those days of the week.
Carrie: Wow. Okay. I know very well about rugby.
Brooke: I very much enjoy rugby. I like showing it to people. So maybe you can come to a game and I can keep you past that.
Carrie: That would be interesting. How old was your son when you adopted him?
Brooke: He was six.
Carrie: Oh, okay. Awesome. Let me tell you about how this show actually came about. So we had a guest on our show Peyton Garland, and she came out with a book called Not So By Myself about her experience with OCD. And she was sharing about the book and how she went through brainspotting with her therapist, or was still in the process of going through those sessions. And I said, oh wow. I haven’t had anybody on about brainspotting. That would be really fun. So then I found you on Facebook and we got connected. And so we’re here to learn all about brainspotting today, how it can be helpful for anxiety and OCD. I’m super excited about that. So maybe we can just start by, just tell us a little bit about brainspotting even like how you would explain it to a client maybe that was coming in for the first time.
Brooke: Yeah, brainspotting is really exciting. It would be what I call a power therapy that helps us get deeper into the neural networks of the brain. And really what it does is it’s going to allow the brain to heal itself. And as we tune into what’s going on in the brain and what’s going on in the body, the brain is able to lead the processing in a way that’s so much more efficient than when we try to talk through something. Because when we’re talking, we’re really only going towards that neocortex, that front part of the brain. And the neocortex is not involved in regulation, which means it can’t make you feel better. And so when we’re feeling anxious or upset about something, it’s going to be much more effective If we can utilize the parts of the brain that are involved with regulation to help us process those things so that we’re not only doing the processing but also calming the brain and the body at the same time.
Carrie: That’s really good. I like that a lot. We can really get in there. I don’t know if you want to call it defenses in our thinking part of our brain, right? There’s all these layers that protect us maybe from our emotions and keep us from really going there, but when you’re able to find therapies that tap into that like the limbic system response, then that’s a whole different ball game.
Brooke: When I also explained to people, I worked from everything from children who were adopted internationally at young ages to really five functioning achievers. And if these high functioning achievers could have thought their way out of the problem, thought their way out of how they’re feeling, they would have done that. Many of them are much more educated than I am. If they could have thought their way out of it, they would have done it, but they can’t. So we need to go in deeper into the brain.
And then for these other, these kids who may have memories that are not stored in the English language, because they were in another language at that time, or maybe they’re implicit memories that are pre-verbal and you can’t process those things from the neocortex. That requires language. So we need to be able to get more into the body and deeper in the brain.
Carrie: Right. I’m curious for you because I think therapists find different therapies to be trained in. I have a theory on this. I’ve never done any research, but my theory is that we find things either that have helped us. We’ve seen these things, help our clients, or it’s just kind of aligns with our personality.
How did you get involved in training and brainspotting like becoming trained on that?
Brooke: Well, I’ll tell you the story, but it’s probably goes to that part where it aligns with my personality and the deeper I get into brainspotting, the more I recognized that the principal tenants are just right along with my theory of counseling. But for me, I work primarily in adoption and I have these very early trauma, early parental separation kinds of cases. And I knew that there were like our therapies like EMDR that were really effective like we have plenty of research to show that, but also knowing the potential for overwhelm. And I’m very protective of my adoptee clients, especially my young adoptee clients. And so knowing that potential for overwhelm, I was just kind of dragging my feet really on that.
And then someone came and told me about brainspotting and I heard about it from somebody I trusted. And then I went and did a bunch of reading and I immediately started referring my clients to “okay. I think you also need to go do this.” And so here’s somebody locally. We had a few people locally who were already trained. And so why don’t you go do that? And then meet with me every other week and meet with them. And a couple of my clients did try it and one of them just put his foot down and he said, “I’m going to go see anybody else. You need to get trained now.” You know what I said? “I’m going to get trained in this.” I’m definitely like I really believe in it. And he was like “you need to get trained now.”
And what are the DVDs and started from there and did the training at home. And then very quickly helped to bring a trainer to Indianapolis so that we could have a training here and did that. And then just continued from there until the point that now I’m a brain spotting specialist trainer.
Carrie: Wow. So you’re actually training other therapists to do this as well and supervising people that are in that process. That’s pretty awesome. Yeah. It just seemed to fit and it was really helping your clients and then you decided to get trained in that. How exactly does it work? I know that’s a hard question.
Brooke: Yeah. So, I mean, Most people want to compare it to EMDR. Brainspotting was kind of discovered and developed by David Grant who was a master EMDR trainer. So he was very influenced by EMDR, but he was also very influenced by somatic experiencing and insight-oriented relational therapy and some other kinds of things.
And so they all kind of play a role. We get from somatic experiencing is really being aware of the activation in the body. We’re talking about OCD here. And so if we have someone who has some compulsion to pull a hair or to touch something or to turn right, but asking them to really locate where in the body is that starting and turning them into making that brain-body connection.
When you make the comparison with EMDR where they’re using rapid eye movement, brainspotting is actually a fixed eye position. And so one of the ways that I explain to people about this is that a fixed eye position is going to be less activating. And you really just think about it. If you were staring down like this tiger who’s just staring at you, that’s really intense. But if you start to imagine that tiger pacing back and forth in front of you and your eyes have to fall, like suddenly the anxiety starts going up a little bit and people can feel that when I’m presenting at a conference or something then I just demonstrate like walking across the stage like they can feel it like a fixed eye position is less activating than eye movements. And so that’s just part of how we are able to make it. More flexible, less activating. If necessary for people, we can really make adjustments in the moment, which is what I like about it. That we can be very attuned to the specific client and what they need and help them have the processing that they need, whether that’s helping them turn up the activation. For people like me with chronic pain, who’s learned to ignore my body or turning down the activation for people who have just had too much trauma and can’t go all the way into.
Carrie: Yeah. I’m glad that you went into that because when you started explaining it, it sounds like it’s really good for people who have these app reactions with EMDR, where they’re just sobbing uncontrollably and they’re feeling just really intense sensations in their body and have a tendency maybe to want to get out of that. But you’re saying it also works for people that have difficulty accessing maybe body sensations or emotions. It can help them develop that process.
So there are some similar components in terms of it’s a mind, you say it’s a mind, body emotion therapy like you’re making those connections.
Brooke: Yeah. They say it’s a brain-body, mindfulness-based therapy. I’ll check the website to make sure I got all the words that are in.
Carrie: Do you usually start with some mindfulness activities? Is that part of the preparation before you go in and do the more traumatic work?
Brooke: It completely depends on the client. So one of the principles of brainspotting that I really love is there is no protocol. Because we’re very focused on the client, then a relational attunement and being attuned to the client. Therapy can’t be attunement based if there’s a protocol, if there’s steps that are involved.
And if we’ve decided that these steps are these steps for everyone, then it’s going to miss some people who that might not be because some people are going to need in-between steps and some people are going to need to skip the steps like I was that high achiever or in school and was always frustrated that they were teaching to kind of the lowest common denominator, which is what they have to do.
But for me, It missed things for me. My education wasn’t attuned to me, but I want therapy to always be attuned to my class. So we don’t necessarily have a protocol. And so for some clients, we may be doing mindfulness activities ahead of time. We may be introducing other things. Some people may come in and just start telling us about the presenting problem.
And we already noticed that they’re on a fixed eye position. And so we may just invite them to stay on that spot, whatever it is that they’re looking at it way. And let it go from there. And so that may not be the full set-up necessarily, but they’re getting into it. And so we can kind of work. It’s very flexible. We follow our clients and what they need.
Carrie: It’s very interesting because I think my personality goes to like a “that’s too unstructured for me” like having a little internal moment. I think I really like structured therapies.
Brooke: Do you like it as the therapist or r do you like it as the client?
Carrie: I think I like it both because I think if I’m the client, I want to know where we’re going and what we’re doing. And I want it to kind of have a logical sequence to it and feel like there’s a good beginning, middle and end. And I think even with therapies like EMDR that have protocols, your therapist really has to know how to tailor that to you as the client. Kind of what you’re saying in terms of attunement. I think that you can have attunement with some of those structured therapies, but you just have to be very careful if you find like your therapist that you’re working with is like too rigid. And they’re like, we have to do this now like you said, we have to do this next step. And that next step, you may not be ready for.
Just for the people listening out there, I think you have to communicate and advocate for yourself as well to say “I don’t know something about this. This just doesn’t feel right.” Or maybe I’m just not quite ready for that deeper level of processing things yet. I’ve in my own work over the last probably couple years now, I’ve been incorporating ego state therapy, which has made the EMDR process more tolerable and a lot less in terms of reactions, more attachment, needs getting met.
That’s a whole another story, but this is interesting to me because different people are going to respond to different types of therapies in different ways. And one of the reasons I like to talk about so many different types of therapy on the show is not so we can have a discussion about, oh, this one’s better.
That one’s better, but more like to give people options like here’s your menu because I think a lot of people go into therapy and they’re like, yeah, I tried therapy. I’m like, Yeah but what did you do, like tell me more about that because there are a zillion different therapy techniques out there.
There’s a zillion different therapists personality styles. And it’s very hard to say like, oh, I’ve tried therapy. Like I’ve tried green peas and I don’t like him, you know, there’s just so many options out there. So this is, this was really interesting. I think you’ve kind of, you’ve talked about how.
This is a little bit different form of trauma therapy in a sense you’re kind of combining, like after they find the fixed eye movement, are you combining a little bit of talk therapy like if they want to tell that story or if they’re wanting to talk about the experience or what they’re noticing in their body?
Brooke: Oh, absolutely. I always say to clients, you can talk as much or as little as you want to. And what it looks like is different for each individual based on what they mean. I think as a client myself, I initially was much quieter and would have to say things out loud when I felt like I was like a broken record like you kept coming back to the same thought, but I found that I continue, I’m much more verbal that it kind of keeps pushing me forward. So I think it’s going to be different for people even in different stages.
Carrie: Right. For part of your training or certification process, did you have to have this done to you basically? Did you have a practicum where you practiced on each other?
Brooke: Yeah that’s built into all the trainings. All the phase training and all the speciality trainings all have kind of demos and practicums and debrief from there s we have that opportunity to experience it. And we really do encourage therapists to do their own work and to continue to do their own work. And so finding whether that’s a practice partner or a peer support group, or just finding your own brainspotting therapist and sticking with that.
Carrie: Yeah. That’s definitely so valuable and something that really helps us grow as therapists is to be the client for a period, for a season and come back around to it when we need to, as things come up in our personal lives or our professional life. Probably one of the biggest variables that’s made me a better clinician. I’d say getting my own therapy.
So, can you talk with us a little bit more specifically about how you’ve seen maybe this be helpful, brainspotting for anxiety and OCD?
Brooke: Yeah, I mean, in general, it’s just going to help lower that activation and we can see that pretty immediately. OCD, there are setups and discussions around that particularly. And what we’re doing allowing the brain to process, but also giving the brain something new. The brain is holding on to that obsession or that compulsion because it feels good in some way.
And so until we get something that’s better, it’s going to have a hard time letting go of that. You can think of that similarly to like any kind of addiction. If I really like eating Stroop waffles, my son really likes eating Stroop waffles. And to just say, I’m never going to do this again is hard, but when you say like, I have this thing, that’s better but I’m going to have this really sweet mango and not only does it taste good, but then I feel better and I have more energy. And once your brain can recognize that, it’s a lot easier to let go of what might be overly sugary or something that may be beneficial for you. I mean, that’s a fluff example.
Carrie: Sure. Well, I think it’s important for people to understand that our brains do change, can change and do change over time. And that we may be kind of stuck in this well-worn neural pathway that’s not working for us, a maladaptive neural network. And we can make changes to that and forge a new path in our brain. It’s not easy. It takes some time and practice just kind of like walking through a new path in the woods takes time and practice and intentionality, but it can happen. So that’s part of this process.
Brooke: We know neuroplasticity. And this just seems to be a faster way to get to it, but even then when we can’t always explain it to see the changes that come about and how it seems so much easier to do something different suddenly after doing brain spotting.
Carrie: Do you find that people pursue this after having received some talk therapy at times and feeling like, yeah, I’ve kind of talked maybe through some of my traumas, but I don’t really feel like they’re fully processed or I’m still having the effects of some of them.
Brooke: Yeah. I think if the people who are looking for brainspotting, it’s either because they’ve tried something and it’s not answering everything for them or someone else’s recommending it to them. Generally, although I do have people who are just doing an internet search and come up and they’re like, oh, so I read this thing on your website.
Yeah. And that sounds really interesting. Let’s can we do that? Yes, of course. You know, so I think there’s probably lots of ways, but it’s not as well known at this point. Most people are going to come at it after they’ve tried other things.
Carrie: Great. Do you know, like when brainspotting was developed?
Brooke: in 2003.
Carrie: Okay. So it’s a newer form of therapy maybe that hasn’t had as much research as other things.
Brooke: Right. I mean, research takes a lot of time and a lot of money, the library of researches is smaller. This, you know, it’s much more experiential colloquially, all kinds of spreading kind of that way. Grassroots at this point.
Carrie: Okay. And you said the brainspotting can be used with all ages.
Brooke: In fact, Monica Bauman from Austria recently wrote a book. She wrote it in English, Brainspotting with Children and Adolescents. And in that book, she tells this amazing story about working with an infant.
Carrie: Wow.
Brooke: And it’s an amazing, beautiful story.
Carrie: So 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.
Brooke: That’s a great question. I think I have moments of hope most days. I think, you know, looking at the possibility. Some recent ones would just be conversations.
I’m having with people who are for me, the National Association of Adoptees and Parents. And they’re wanting to get me as part of their committee. And like, these are all the different ways that you can make a difference like that to me has a lot of hope in that. We’re looking at that, looking at the vaccine, coming out for adolescents next. For my family, that’s really helpful. My son is really looking forward to that. It will probably be the first time he’s gotten a shot that I won’t have to have held him down because he believes in that. So that’s hope. And for us, that’s hope that we may be able to travel again. And just all the things that we are looking forward to.
Carrie: Do you have any advice for people that might be looking into adoption as an option?
Brooke: Yeah, start your therapy. Now my recommendation, and really explore that and explore what is bringing you to adoption and get lots of different perspectives, because I think there are some messages out there. And if we are in a silo, you may not realize how very different other perspectives can be.
Carrie: That’s good. That’s good to have just kind of a well-rounded perspective on adoption. Do you say that and, sorry, this is an interest of mine only because I’ve been a former foster parent. So would you say start your therapy now because these kids are dealing with so much emotional baggage or they’re bringing that with them and that’s really going to trigger up your own emotional baggage.
Brooke: Yes, absolutely. So you, as a parent, whether that’s an adoptive parent or a foster parent. I’d probably say any parents, but you need to be working through things so that you can best show up for your kids. You can’t lead them to any kind of healing that you haven’t been able to find for yourself, that if you are struggling with being impatient. I mean how you’re what were you going to teach your kids patience. Finding those things and also absolutely. You said it wonderfully like they’re going to stir up anything that’s unprocessed in you. And I would say anything in everything. Kids and partners are really great at helping us reveal our areas in need of growth.
But just also, you know, adaptive parenting and foster parenting is really advance, It’s therapeutic parenting. It is hard and you need support and they have additional layers and additional issues that continue throughout their development and for you to be able to show up and help them with those things. You’ve gotta be able to take yourself out of that equation. You can’t be taking it personally. In one of my presentations, I talk about how, whenever my son in early ages would say like, you’re not my real mom, but I never took that personally because it wasn’t about me. I was literally about how he was feeling in that moment.
But now when he tells me you’re the best mommy ever. I don’t take that personally either because I also need to look and see that, where is this coming from. And is this actually a sentiment, or maybe he’s saying it because he has a need to connect and can I meet him where he needs to connect and again hearing the needs behind everything.
Carrie: Or he’s trying to butter you up really well for something.
Brooke: For Sure. That may also be it. He is amazing at like getting that voice to change when he needs something. And in some ways that’s really effective. And so just kind of rewarding that, wow, I see that you can use such a kind respectful voice when you want this and helping them see that, Hey, you can do this.
Carrie: Awesome. Well, we will put links in the show notes to your practice and where people can contact you and find out a little bit more about you. So since you’re licensed in two states, I assume you’re doing some online therapy as well.
Brooke: Yes right now, I am completely virtual, so I’m doing all of my work on telehealth.
Okay. For now. And for the foreseeable future, we’ll just kind of take it step by step and see what the future brings.
Carrie: Gotcha. As so many therapists are doing right now. So it makes sense. Well, thank you for sharing your wisdom and insight with us on brainspotting. And it was a good learning experience for me as well, to just see how things compare to what I’m doing and who knows, you never know, I may end up getting trained in that too one day.
Brooke: Yeah, of course. I think having an awareness of lots of different tools and theories is always beneficial. And then also finding those things that you really connect with that you guys have into and know really, really well is really important.
I feel like in this short amount of time that I’ve had this podcast, we’ve been able to cover several different forms of therapy, which has been really neat because I love letting people know that there are treatment options. That’s part of increasing.
I am working on making our website a great resource, not just for our podcast to host the show notes, but also to have blogs and other articles that are helpful for individuals on there.
If there is a topic that we haven’t covered on the podcast, or you don’t see on the blog anywhere, feel free to reach out. I would love to hear your show suggestions or article suggestions. You can do that through the contact page of our website www.hopeforanxietyandocd.com anytime. While you’re there, feel free to subscribe to our email lists to keep up with what’s going on with the podcast. 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 was completed by Benjamin Bynam.
Until next time it may be comforted by God’s great love for you.
Hope for anxiety and OCD episode 35. Today on the show, I am interviewing a counselor as well as a special needs Mom. Diana Robbins shares some really great wisdom, on the show today, she asked specifically if we could not share the diagnoses of her children. And so out of respect, we didn’t do that, but I’m sure that regardless of your child’s diagnosis If you are a special needs parent, I know that you will get something out of this episode. We talk about everything from how it impacted her marriage, to how it impacted her faith and relationship with God. So let’s dive right in.
Carrie: Hi, Diana, will you tell us a little bit about yourself and why you wanted to be on the podcast today to share your story.
Diana: Yes, Hi Carrie. Thanks for having me on. I am a wife of 26 years to my husband, Chris and a mom to two teenagers, two teenage sons, and we are also blessed to have our 13-year-old niece living with us. So we’re a family of five. We have been living in Singapore for the past three years, but before that, I was a stay-at-home mom and a homeschooling parent in Houston, Texas.
And in Singapore, I’ve resumed my practice as a grief and trauma therapist and have a practice and do a lot of volunteer work with those who are recovering from trauma and loss in their lives. I wanted to share my story because I have to encourage people who are battling anxiety or OCD and that especially the people that love them to the moms, the dads, other family members that are supporting those who struggle with anxiety. I really like to encourage them as well.
Carrie: Right. And I know that we have people who are struggling that listened to the show, and we also have loved ones that tune in people that have a spouse or boyfriend, girlfriend or child with anxiety or OCD and they’re really trying to understand that individual better because maybe they don’t have the anxiety themselves and can’t necessarily relate personally, but they’re trying to kind of get some more information. So that’s part of a little bit about what we’re doing with the show today. And I think you have the personal, professional and practical information. So it’s a little bit of you’re coming at it from both angles.
Diana: Well, I’ve certainly been gifted with experience in all of those things. And we’re great.
Carrie: What was it like for you as a parent to find out that your child had a developmental disability? Can you take us a little bit through that process?
Diana: Absolutely. So when my children were born, my first son was born. We recognized pretty quickly that he was struggling. And no one really knew why. So it took a process of about three years to get accurate diagnosis. And in that time there was a lot of stress, a lot of worry about what was happening and my husband and I were just doing the best that we could to manage, helping him grow and develop. So when the diagnosis finally came and there were several, it was a mix of relief. It was just really helpful to have at least partial answers to what we were dealing with everyday, but there was also this overwhelming grief that set into that, what we were dealing with would be lifelong and not something that we can just fix quickly and the struggles, and there’s some grief for him as well.
Carrie: I think that makes a lot of sense. You know, there’s kind of multiple emotions as you’re going through that as a parent like, okay, we’re going to be in this for the long haul.
And at the same time, it’s nice to have some kind of idea of what we’re dealing with so that we know how to treat it, or what avenues to pursue professionally.
Diana: Yeah, absolutely. There were a lot of other emotions mixed in with those two main ones and we have fear. I became just this really fierce advocate.
Immediately I went from being just the mom to being an advocate and a student I had a whole new realm of life and learning that I had to adjust to the diagnoses, how to best support my child and I had a lot to learn. So I became an avid student as well. And, that was really challenging for us.
On a spiritual level as well for both me and my husband to receive the diagnosis. And so I think that I look at that time in our life as one of the key spiritual moments that we are crises that we had to overcome really.
Carrie: What kind of challenging behaviors and situations did you experience with your children?
Diana: Well, I would say we faced struggles really across, you know, social, emotional and behavioral levels. All of them. The behaviors that were most challenging were the perseveration type behaviors. My son was really fixated on certain things and you would need a lot of order, a lot of routine, and he would also find really odd passions at a very young age. One of the cutest ones, but also most frustrating was in became very interested in vending machines. It makes it not pass a vending machine in town without having to put a quarter in it and watch, you know, something from out. So if there is a vending machine at the grocery store, have a new machine when we were driving on the road that he saw through the window, we had to stop and we had to see the vending machine and purchase something and go through that whole ritual, or he would become very distressed and have a lot of meltdowns or temper tantrums and things. It was just very overwhelming to him to not be able to engage in these behaviors. That was really challenging. It really interrupted our daily life. As you can imagine, trying to get anywhere and do anything that those kinds of behaviors were maybe the hardest for me as a mother.
Carrie: How did you manage those things and find the balance of giving your son what he needed while also maintaining your own sanity as a parent?
Diana: That’s a great question. To be honest, I didn’t do that so well, a lot of the time. I tried, I tried to find that balance, but it was a daily struggle and some days I lost that struggle, but overall I learned some really important lessons that I think helped me grow in that over time. My husband and I really believed that it was important to help our children become as involved in a typical developmental trajectory as possible.
We wanted to accept them as they are and help them to integrate into life as best we could. Normal what people consider normal life as best we could. And, and that was always something that we had to balance carefully because we didn’t want to push them too hard or to make too many concessions to the things that they were struggling with.
And I don’t know that you ever feel that you’ve got that balance perfectly at any given time, but we did see that it was helping them grow and become more and more able to engage in the world. So we tried to challenge them only as much as they are supported. I was a principle that we have. I actually learned that in graduate school from one of my mentors and he said that we need to challenge people so that they grow, but we can only do that as far as we have supported them to be able to do that.
So that principle was really important in our home. We really manage their home environment. Home became our secure base. So I can’t control things outside in the world that they’re going to encounter and make it orderly and make it routine. Home became our place to really be able to give them that safe place to engage.
When my second son came along and had some of the same challenges, that became especially important because it was the one place that they could really be themselves and it was safe to do so. And they had all the things that they most needed right at hand. We might home be everything that we could for them. But then when we went out, we would limit our time outside. We would take short outings and eventually grow those into longer, more demanding situations. And then we just taught a lot of coping skills. I did a lot of preparing them at home so that when we went out, we had objects that they could take with them to help them be able to stay focused, to help them be able to manage anxiety and feel safe and secure when they went to church or they went to school. Those kinds of things.
Carrie: That’s so huge. I think kids knowing what to expect, This is where we’re going, this is what we’re going to be doing. This is kind of a little bit of what it’s going to look like. And here are some tools that you have, like when you do get anxious or when you do get bored, I think so many times we just kind of don’t break it down enough for children.
I don’t know if that’s the right way to say it, but I think that especially any children that are dealing with anxiety or OCD, they need the explanation in simple language, because we may assume that they understand what’s going to happen, but that doesn’t mean that they do.
Diana: Absolutely. That’s so critical. Giving very explicit and simple instructions was a key part to their success. I had to learn to give maybe one instruction before I gave another. And allow them to process very simply at first to really help manage that anxiety and keep it at a level that I wasn’t adding to the overwhelm.
Carrie: Right. I know that this is probably something that has come up on the show before or may come up in the future like kids and spouses are really good at stirring up our own stuff internally. And so can you talk a little bit about how some of these behaviors or thought processes triggered you and how you dealt with that?
Diana: Yes. I think that was probably the hardest challenge for me was recognizing. And my kids struggle how much I was struggling myself. Even before I had children, I hadn’t recognized how much anxiety I had myself until I was trying to help my children who had anxiety. And I could see it so much more plainly and as they struggled, then it would trigger us for a deeper struggle in me, all of those fears, all those worries. My own sense of overwhelm, just trying to get us all through the day was when sometimes just become more than I could handle effectively.
So I think that I learned a lot and learning how to help support my children and how to manage my own anxiety and how to be compassionate with myself just as I was trying to be compassionate with my children and to set them up for success, I needed to do the same thing for me in order to support them well.
Carrie: So in a sense, as you are learning how to manage your own anxiety then you were able to teach them certain things that would help them and kind of, as you’re calmer, they’re probably calmer as well.
Diana: Yes, that was really important. I learned very quickly that our children respond so much to the way that we show up for them. If I’m calm that helps communicate calm and steadiness to them that they respond to. When I’m anxious, or I allowed their anxiety to trigger my own, then we have a real problem because then we’re all upset and all overwhelmed and it makes it much more difficult to just to complete anything that we’re trying to accomplish.
So I found that it was so important that I was really grounded and really calm when I approached any tasks with my children and that I could manage my own anxiety privately as best as I could before I really engaged with them was very important.
Carrie: What was the process of finding support like whether that was professional supports or just other parents who could understand what you were going through, spiritual support, all of that.
Diana: Well, it was difficult at first because we live away from our family. My husband and I have never been able to live close to family. So we built it. And God was so gracious in that he put us in an area where there are wonderful therapists all around us. And we had many. We had developmental therapists, occupational therapists, physical therapists, speech therapists.
Carrie: Wow.
Diana: Yeah. And for both of my sons, they had a very intense schedule therapy, which is part of why we began from schooling just to be able to manage the schedules that we all had. I needed to really be able to educate them from home. And so the homeschooling community also really became a support for our family.
I just made a real effort to get out there and meet other moms and to learn all I could. I looked for support groups in the community and there were some, but they were mostly for older children with the same challenges and adults with anxiety. Those kinds of things. I actually ended up starting a support group so that I could have that support.
It was a wonderful experience. Brought other from spilling parents around that had children with different special needs and tried to talk about the unique challenges of raising kids in home all day with their needs and trying to educate them because that’s a big job. Having that support was really critical to our success.
But I also want to say that I found a neighbor who became a very dear friend to me. She had children the same age, roughly as mine who did not have any developmental challenges, but she was gracious and loving. Actually, I had two neighbors at the time that were that way and loved us well. They brought my children for play dates. They took the time to learn about their behaviors and how to manage them so that I could have a break sometimes while the children played with their children. I don’t know that anything else was more important to me in that period of our life, just to have their support, to be able to connect with moms around things that didn’t have to do with disabilities or the challenges that my kids were facing.
That was just really essential to me.
Carrie: I hope that provides some encouragement maybe for people who are in a situation where they might be able to support and help another family through the process of helping raise their children because you never know, like what kind of impact you could potentially have in people’s lives. And we all need each other, parents I think in general, just need each other, but especially, so when you’re raising a child that has specific needs.
Diana: Yes, I feel that it will encourage people. I know my friends if they were speaking with you today would tell you that they felt that the relationship with our family taught them a lot too, but it was beneficial on both sides.
Although it wasn’t a tremendous ministry to my family. And I feel like it certainly probably benefited us more than anyone. They will tell you that it benefited them as well, that they learned a lot from having our children be part of their children’s lives and watching them play together.
And we of course tried to really reciprocate to those families as well, not just to receive from them, but to post them in our home and to show love to them as well. And I think it was just some really beautiful relationships that developed as our children grew up together.
Carrie: That’s a really beautiful story. Let’s talk a little bit about how this is impacted your marriage because I’ve heard that statistically, people who are raising children with any kind of special needs have a higher divorce rate than average. How did this affect your marriage and how did you and your husband work through some of those bumps in the road?
Diana: Well, that’s a great question. I could probably talk about that the entire time we had today. But I was thinking in general that raising children with special needs and the anxiety and things that came with that for them really challenged our marriage more than anything else that we’ve faced, but it’s also been the way that God has strengthened our marriage probably more than anything else. So it’s been both a really difficult and wonderful thing at the same time. We’ve learned several survival skills that I’ll share in case they’re helpful to others. But one is how important it is that we actually communicate in a healthy way.
I think when you have typical challenges and marriage and parenting it’s difficult anyway, good communication is important, but when you have children with special needs and the constant demands of that, it becomes even more important because you have so little time together and you need that time together.
Where you’re alone to really have this really clear communication that’s very healthy. We had to accept each other’s limits. That was really important. And to recognize when my anxiety or his anxiety with dealing with the challenges was too high. And to step in not with any judgements, but to just try to step in for one another and say, Hey, you know, I’ve got this situation. I can take it from here for a little bit, you know, go grab a cup of coffee or, you know, go work in the yard a bit. I’ve got this. And to really just understand that there’s only so much we can take. We’re human too. And to make room for us to have our own limits was really important. We make amazing at dividing and conquering tasks. We developed that pretty early in the marriage to survive. And some, we just took on the task that we each were best at and did that really well and work together as a team. And that was really helpful to me because we weren’t constantly reinventing the wheel to get through every day.
We just knew what we needed to do. And that helped a lot. That reduced my anxiety a lot to know that he had certain areas covered and I didn’t have to think about them and, and then I would handle the others. So, yeah, I think those were some of the main things that we learned as far as tips, but encouraging self-care. My partner was really important too.
Sometimes we have recognized ourselves when we’re really overwhelmed and anxious. We see it for our children that we couldn’t always see it for ourselves. And so my husband and I learned to help one another recognize when we were at that place. And to encourage self-care not just a temporary break, but how has your spiritual life going.
You had to do a hobby that you enjoy or to connect with a friend to call your family does most of the really important things that we did for one another.
Carrie: Right. Good. I think some of that’s good for, for any marriage, some of the principles that you just outlined, just a sense of knowing your strengths, knowing your limitations, learning how to communicate with each other. That’s an ongoing process, I think for married couples. Very good insights there.
How would you say that this journey with your children has impacted your faith?
Diana: Well, you hit on probably the first thing I always say about it already, Carrie, you said that recognizing limitations is important. And that was the first thing I think that I had to learn spiritually was that there are limits, I think before having children and these challenges in our home, there really, hadn’t been very much that my husband and I hadn’t been able to tackle together very well the challenges that we hadn’t been able to overcome. And just through hard work and effort, and you can’t fix anxiety, you can’t fix developmental challenges with hard work and effort. You can’t power your way through that.
And so we had to learn that we have limits and our children have limits. And that it was okay. It really humbled us, I think and deepened our need for the Lord in ways that I don’t think we would’ve grown and recognized until the children came into our family. We became very aware that we need a God for everything. And I wish that I had had a deeper sense of that before, but really the Lord used our children and their needs to drive that point home.
And I’m thankful that he did.
Carrie: It just ended up leading you to like a greater place of dependence on God.
Diana: Absolutely. And it really caused me to really shrink life down to its basic elements for many years.
Our story is much different now, but in the early years of dealing with all of this, I was really happy to get a shower. If I could everybody say all the toddlers, you know, or we’re doing well. We had gotten through the day, their basic needs are met and my basic needs were met, I was really, really happy.
That was a successful day. That was a triumph. But in doing that and having this very small circle in life, I realized that I can focus more on the Lord too like I have so many fewer distractions and the quiet because life was so basic and it really helped my husband and are both, I think, focused on eternal things more, to become more in touch with the fact that things may not be what we desire or sometimes even feel that we need them to be here, but that we have an eternal hope that we can cling to that even if things don’t get better. Here that we will be okay. That this is not a forever situation. And that hope became very real to me in those years. For sure.
Carrie: How are your sons doing now?
Diana: I’m really happy to report that the prognoses and things that we received when they were young has really been blown out of the water.
I guess if to say we’ve gone from home homeschooling lifestyle so that we can just manage behaviors and allow them to learn in a safe environment for them to maybe in our costs the world and going to competitive international schools and you know, all of these things that are anxiety-producing for anyone.
And my son’s been able to manage that extremely well. My oldest is going to university in the fall of this year and. He’s graduated without really much support anymore academically or socially at school or emotionally at school. He’s really impressed. All of us, I think with the sheer amount of effort and work and perseverance that he’s demonstrated over the years.
And my younger son is right behind him and he’s in 10th grade this year. He’s finishing that up and plans to get a university as well, which are things that we just never dreamed of, you know, really being potentials for them when they were young. And we were getting all of this news. So we have a lot of joy in this season, seeing all that God has done the ways that he has not just helped us overcome that a lot, many of the challenges, although that’s wonderful and we’re thankful for that, but really the people that he shaped us into through these struggles and seeing that character formed in my children as well. And that love for the Lord that they carry with them because they’ve had to depend on him so much is a great encouragement to me, probably the best thing.
Carrie: Right. I think that’s something that we’ve seen with really all of the personal stories that we’ve of people we’ve had on the show that I’ve struggled with anxiety or OCD is that they’ll say it caused me to know more about God. It caused me to grow closer to him. It was part of my sanctification process of becoming more like Christ. And I think that your story really fits in, with all of that. And when we’re in the middle of it, it’s so easy to get bogged down with the day-to-day trials that we’re facing. And a lot of times we don’t see the bigger picture until maybe sometimes years later. And then we take a step back and we’re like, wow, God really used that situation in my life for good, but when I was in the midst of it, I just couldn’t see anything good about it. And I was just there just going through the motions, just trying to survive like you said.
Diana: Yes, absolutely. And I think that that perspective is so critical. It’s easier to have when you’re looking backwards like I am now. It’s so overwhelming, sometimes that all you can do is just kind of ask the Lord to come to you in that place because you don’t have anything to reach out to him with. That’s such a wonderful thing that he does, that he does come into our mess. He does come into the chaos. He does come into all of the things that we can’t manage on our own. And, and brings his peace when we don’t have it. And when we experienced that, it helps us understand that there is something more than what we’re struggling with.
Carrie: Right. So I feel like your, your whole story has been hopeful, but because I always ask this question to every guest, I’m going to ask it to you. What is the time in your life where you have received hope from God or another person?
Diana: There have been so many times that the Lord himself has done that and he used other people to do that for us. But I think I’ll share the one where it was one of my darkest moments. I was much older. We were both really young and really struggling, kind of at the crisis point, I guess, for their challenges. I had one of those days where I really couldn’t even have my own thoughts. I was just trying to keep them happy and getting through their day.
And we had a lot of outbursts, a lot of meltdowns and a lot of anxiety that day. All the way around with both of my sons and with me, myself. And I finally put them in their rooms for quiet time, which was my saving grace that they had by at time every day. And I just kind of collapsed in a heap on the floor.
And I told the Lord really clearly that I needed him to change that situation, or I needed him to change me because I didn’t know how to go forward even one more step. And that feeling, even as I talk about it, it’s still just really present. It was such a moment I had really come to the end of myself and as I was crying and telling him these things, I just felt his presence really powerfully.
And he reminded me that he was with me and that he was, he was going to be enough and he didn’t tell me how he was going to do that. He didn’t impress on my heart, the plan for the next five or 10 years or anything like that. But he just met me in that place. And I just felt his presence.
I was encouraged by scripture and things that I needed so desperately in that moment that reminded me that there was more than that one moment that I was stuck in. And at that point, things really changed in our family. We became a family that wasn’t driven by the challenges and just constantly reacting to them, but a family that was looking beyond them to something more. And that shift made all the difference in being able to cope with the anxiety that we were all feeling and changed us I think. It’s certainly changed me forever to find him there.
Carrie: Yeah, that’s awesome. I loved what you said earlier about just God really entering into those places with us. You know, the, whether it’s the mess or the loneliness or the heartache or the, I just can’t do this anymore. One more day. I just can’t seem to do this.
That he’ll be right there and that he pursues us in that process. I love that.
Thank you so much for being on the show and telling your story. I know that it’s going to encourage and inspire some other people.
Diana: Thank you for having beyond theory. It’s a privilege to get to meet you and to hopefully share our story in a way that will maybe help somebody else keep going too.
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There are so many amazing special needs parents out there. So shout out to you if you are in that category. And I hope this episode was encouraging to you. If that’s the case, stay tuned for future episodes where we’re going to be talking about everything from brainspotting to self-care to dealing with doubt.
You can find us online anytime at www.thopeforanxietyandocd.com.
Thanks 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.
“I deal with anxiety almost every day at some level. And sometimes it’s worse than, or sometimes it’s better than other times, but anything to help people understand that they’re not alone.”
Jeff Allen, a mental health advocate and host of Simple Mental Health Podcast shares his journey through anxiety, how he overcame shame and stigma around seeking help, and taking medication.
How Jeff discovered he had an anxiety disorder.
Backlash he received from churchgoers for opening up about his mental health condition.
Spiritual doubt process that he went through
Prayer, medication and therapy
His journey of spiritual deconstruction and reconstruction
More about his podcast called Simple Health Podcast
Carrie: One thing I have learned about my listeners since we started the podcast, is that you all love personal stories of individuals who are struggling with anxiety and OCD. Those are often our most popularly downloaded episodes. So today I have another personal story for you. And that’s Jeff Allen.
He’s a podcaster. I had the opportunity to be on his podcast, which was how we met and then decided to have him come on and share his story on this podcast. He talks about some backlash that he received in the church when he started to talk publicly about his experience with anxiety and taking medication, as well as some spiritual doubt processes that he worked through. So I hope that you will enjoy this story.
Okay, Jeff, so thank you for taking the time to come on today and tell us a little bit about yourself.
Jeff: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. You said my name, it’s Jeff. I live near St. Louis, Missouri, actually across the Mississippi River in Illinois.
And I’m married for this June will be 11 years and we just had our first son and man life is crazy right now and crazy awesome right now I work at a church and I do a video production among other tech things here in St. Louis.
Carrie: So you’re the behind the scenes guy making stuff happen.
Jeff: That’s right, yep. I used to be a worship leader. I kind of needed to step away from that for awhile. So now I’m a behind the scenes guy.
Carrie: Awesome. You are very important just as the scene people. Okay. Why did you want to come and share your personal story about anxiety on the podcast?
Jeff: Yeah, I love to share it any chance I get, because I feel like it’s an opportunity to smash some stigmas.
I want to take down the stigmas that have been in place by culture, that everyone seems to think that it’s such a bad thing to talk about mental health issues. And I want to get away from that. I want people to find freedom. I want people to know they’re not alone. So for me, it’s important to have any opportunity I have to…
I deal with anxiety almost every day at some level. And sometimes it’s worse than, or sometimes it’s better than other times, but anything to help people understand that they’re not alone and to just smash stigmas. That’s the main reason for me.
Carrie: I’ll say, I think that’s one of the reasons that the personal stories episodes have been so popular on my podcast is because when people hear someone else talk about.
The story, they go, oh yeah, me too. Like, I deal with that. And it helps me realize, I just thought I was alone and going through all this stuff in my own head and nobody else was dealing with it, but then they hear somebody else talk about it on a podcast. Then they just feel the sense of relief, you know. So when did you first start experiencing symptoms of anxiety, even if you didn’t necessarily know that that’s what it was?
Jeff: Yeah, well I can pinpoint back to as early, as like five years old, I found a picture on Facebook, not too long ago that someone had tagged me in. And it was me as a little kid. They were family friends, this person who posted it. And we were out this like touristy place locally here in St. Louis called Grant’s farm.
And I could see myself standing kind of away from the other group of three kids, they were all hamming it up for the camera. And I was like off to the side, just like always just kind of like staring like out of like in concern, you know? And I’m thinking, man, I remember that feeling that that little boy has right there.
I’m like, I know it, I still know it. And I can remember every time we would do something, I’m an only child, so I don’t have siblings. So we would always go and hang out with other families. And when we did that, I would be around those kids. And I could always remember telling my mom and I really would rather stay home.
I don’t want to go, can I please stay home? And she’d say things like, you’re going to have a good time. You know, you’ll have a lot of fun and she was right, but always ended up being fun. But the journey to that place was just full of anxiety. I didn’t know. That’s what it was, you know, as a kid.
My mom understood probably that she had an anxious kid, but didn’t know that, it might actually be something that was diagnosable because that would have been like 1990 and I just don’t know that very many people were talking about child mental health.
Yeah. I mean, I’m sure. I once saw that the word, the term generalized anxiety disorder, GAD, I once saw that they didn’t even start, like, they didn’t have a name for that until 1980.
And, you know, don’t quote me on that, but I’ve read that on the internet, so it’s gotta be true. And if that’s the case, then 10 years later, like why would my mother in the Midwest here know that maybe there’s a diagnosable anxiety disorder with her kid. So it’s been that long. So since 1990, at least, but I can remember up until like the sixth grade or, you know, just before I started having the choice of who I wanted to go hang out with.
It would have been from that point on that I knew that I had anxiety.
Carrie: Well, what was that process like of coming to a realization of, okay this is a problem that I may need help for and getting a diagnosis.
Jeff: Sure, it wasn’t until, 2010 was the year I got married that my wife helped me see that, this was more than just a character flaw or something. Thank God, actually. Because I had a few relationships that I think ultimately ended because of my anxiety. Like I made decisions or treated people a certain way or, maybe felt too much. Like I was going to lose someone or didn’t trust the relationship over anxiety.
And my wife is just very tough, you know, so I think she was able to deal with that and see past some of that better than other people. So it was in 2010, I was leading worship at a megachurch in Illinois. I remember being on stage for a rehearsal one week. I thought I was having a heart attack. I’m 25 years old at the time.
I’m like, man, this is crazy, heart palpitations. I go to the doctor or go to the ER and they’re like, no, you’re fine. You know, you’re forced to send me home. So went home not long after that. I’m on stage. And I get off stage for the sermon, our pastors preaching. And I go up to my colleague and I said, I got to go home, I’m sick. I’m going to throw up. He was able to back me up so that I could leave. And my wife at the time, my wife worked at the same church at that time that she was in kids ministry and I texted her. I said I’m going home. And then when she met me at home, I said, I feel fine now. And she said, you know, I’ve been thinking about this because you’ve struggled with this for when we go out to eat with couples, you know, you struggled with feeling sick because what if you have an anxiety disorder?
And so I was kind of embarrassed because of the stigmas that exist. Like damn, that’s tough. So I decided to ask my general practitioner about it. She said, man, that sure does sound like social anxiety and maybe some general generalized general anxiety disorder started on Lexapro right there.
Carrie: What was that like for you when you first heard that? Because you talked about experiencing some stigma but was it this sense of here I am in a church leading worship? Did you feel like, well, I shouldn’t be struggling with anxiety like I’m supposed to be more spiritual than that or something.
Jeff: You know, I did kind of feel that way, but I think it was more like in the back of my mind, really.
I didn’t really want to tell anybody about it at first because I just thought that that was like a private thing. You know, if you’re dealing with some anxiety or depression, I also went to see a counselor at that point. When you go see a counselor, that those are things that you just don’t talk about.
Like that’s private stuff. Those are the dirty laundry, or that’s the stuff you keep in the closet. So, I don’t know that I thought I should’ve been more spiritual necessarily, but I definitely thought it would be looked down upon to come out with it
Carrie: It’s more like this is embarrassing and I feel ashamed.
Jeff: Yeah, that’s right.
Carrie: And what happened after that? Like how did that progress?
Jeff: So, there’s a blogger, now he’s a podcaster. He was a worship leader. His name is Carlos Whittaker. I don’t know if you know that name or not. Carlos is a great dude and he was. This was like in the prime of blogs, nobody, you know, everybody used to have a blog and now everybody has a podcast.
Carrie: We’re trendy.
Jeff: Like when blogs were a big and one day he just, I was looking at his blog and there was just this picture of a prescription bottle of Paxil. And he’s like, this is the church’s dirty little secret. He said a lot of us, he was a worship leader at the time. He told the story of his almost exact same story as mine.
He was on, on Sunday, although he had actually like gotten dizzy and passed out and had to have a doctor come up and he had had a full-blown anxiety attack on stage. And then he just talked about it, like, man, a lot of us in ministry or a lot of people in general have struggles with this.
And so I rely on, God prayer and Paxil, and I’m like, man, that’s good. And so I decided I’m going to speak out about this a little bit. So I remember taking a Facebook and saying, man, this blog really hit home with me and you know, here’s why, and, and then I got a few nasty emails from churchgoers. So that left a bad taste in my mouth for church, even though I was serving, I still am serving at church just saying, you know, Hey, you’re leading people astray. If you’re saying that you need medicine, it’s bad. And my man people, I think you, for your listeners, you, uh, were on my podcast.
And I think you said it on there. You know, if you have high blood pressure, nobody ever says you shouldn’t take medication for it. You know, if you have this, nobody says, but for some reason, church folk like to say that for mental health issues, you should not be taking medication that doesn’t even make sense.
So I kind of had that same response to the particular person who said, you need to be relying on Jesus. I’m like you think I don’t already do that. You know me better than that. Sure. So it must be enough, to seek help from science and the wonderful things that God created for us to manage.
Carrie: Yeah, I’m a firm believer that you can have Jesus and science, Jesus and therapy, and I don’t understand why that’s such a hard thing sometimes for people to grasp in the church. Because we embrace science in all kinds of other ways and other avenues. And we encourage people to get treatment for a variety of illnesses and diseases.
And we’ll still pray for people too, that are going through cancer, but we also want them to go see their oncologist as well. Like it’s interesting, both and thing, and the same thing for anxiety, you know, we want to pray for you and encourage you and love on you. And also we want you to get professional help, and those two things can work together and…
I just believe God uses everything that’s available to us to meet us right. Where we’re at. And some people, medication is a great option for them. Some people have a hard time with medication or finding one that works with their system really well and just want to pursue counseling. And I’m just kind of like whatever you want to do, I’ll support.
Jeff: Yeah. I have seasons where I need both, like, I need my medication adjusted or whatever. I have seasons where talk therapy is something that I really need. I have seasons where I don’t have much to say. It’s always, the way to manage for me is that combination.
Carrie: Do you eventually made this decision to leave the on-stage worship ministry experience. Was this a part of that process towards health for you?
Jeff: Actually, it wasn’t a spiritual way. Not necessarily an anxiety way. I was kind of going through a spiritual deconstruction situation and I wasn’t sure where I was in that walk anymore.
And so I really felt uncomfortable leading people. When I wasn’t so sure myself and, you know, a lot of people I’ve talked to have gone through spiritual deconstruction and they never went through reconstruction. And so I was happy that for me, I was able to find the reconstruction aspect and come back and feel like, okay, this is a faith that I am 100% in. Right. So, but no the anxiety portion wasn’t, thankfully wasn’t a part of that decision. At least not directly it’s possible that it was somewhere in there, but for the most part, it was a spiritual decision and just maybe even in sort of an integrity move.
Like I just felt like it wasn’t a good thing to kind of not, almost not believe anymore at that point and still sing and lead people. I just didn’t think it was honest. And so I wanted to be honest at this point, I would feel comfortable going back to it.
Carrie: Can you tell us a little bit more about what that spiritual deconstruction and reconstruction looked like for you? Because I’m sure that there are other people listening to this that have doubts and questions and are going through their own faith process. I know that I had to process, my faith has evolved over time as I’ve become a part of different churches and different streams and faith systems and having my own experiences with God and the holy spirit has definitely shaped things and change things for me as well. So I’m just curious what that process was like for you.
Jeff: Well, I mean, it all just kind of started, you know, they always talk about the seed of doubt that’s planted. And I guess it sort of started with a seed of doubt where I just started to think is this all just make-believe. My buddy was like, oh, you’re just going to pray to your invisible sky daddy. He’s not a believer that I’m very good friends with. And, he would say things like that. And I mean, you know, I don’t know. Maybe that is what this is. I need to figure it out. And then there were some things that I don’t want to get too in the weeds about, but there are just some things that I’m like, man, I don’t know about this. This doesn’t seem like a God that would, that just doesn’t feel like the God that I know and that I experienced, there were some early, you know, I grew up in the church, so there was some guilt shame, things like that were there for me that I don’t think were fair. I think they were planted by people and not God. So they were like getting rid of beliefs that were based on those things. And then ultimately it was just saying, I’m going to live in this space of doubt and uncertainty for awhile and see if God meets me. And I did feel that it was almost like I’m not going to say it was prodigal son-like because I didn’t leave to go pursue something that on purpose. That was not of God. I just needed to find, I think I needed to find God again and God needed to find me again is kind of where that was. And now my relationship is just so much different. It just feels more authentic and real and less… How can I put it? It’s just not the culture of Christianity that we, a lot of us… I’m 36 years old. A lot of us grew up in anymore. Not that. You know, no making purple at youth group kind of vibe anymore. It’s not that these are the harsh rules that it’s more of the God loves you just as you are a much more, and I’ll get pushed back for saying something like this, but I’m much more comfortable living in that space.
It’s not always right. That’s why I’m saying the pushback. It’s not always a comfortable place,
but something feels right about it. And so that’s just kind of where I’m sitting right now with it.
Carrie: It’s so much easier to have a free-flowing and open relationship with God when it’s based on love and not terror. And unfortunately, so many of us grew up in a Christian society where there are a lot of rules and a lot of religion-based things that man put on us, not what God put on us. And so If you have a relationship based on love, perfect love, casts out fear. It’s just different. The vibe is totally different. So I relate and jive to what you’re saying with that.
The rules have to flow out of the relationship and the guidelines for life have to come. The relationship has to come first, just like you don’t, you have a good relationship with your parents. You don’t want to do things that are going to disappoint them. You don’t want to be afraid of your parents like I’m going to get in trouble all the time. It’s a very different feeling for sure.
So you went from not wanting to talk about this being ashamed of it, and now you have a mental health podcast. So how did that come about?
Jeff: Well, I was a part of a podcast with my friend. His name is Chris and he had a podcast called pond offs anonymous because he is a recovering alcoholic.
And his faith is a very interesting one. He is very close to God. He also has a very dirty mouth. So you can listen to any of those episodes. We have to mark them explicit. He’s just a very honest person. He is who he is, and doesn’t really apologize for it. But I started producing this podcast for him, just helping with the technical side and the first podcast, he starts talking to me on the microphone. And I’m like, okay, here we go. I don’t have a microphone. So the next episode we did, I made sure I did. And I sort of became a co-host in a sense where he would talk about sobriety and addiction and sobriety. I would talk a little bit about the mental health part of it because I just experienced anxiety, I experienced depression. We ended up kind of talking about both things. So it was supposed to be more of a podcast about addiction and sobriety and recovery. And it ended up being about that and mental health. And we went on a hiatus. We’re still on hiatus. We’ll probably end up back sometime this year. Just a lot of life changes that need it. I mean, I had a baby, but also he had some major life changes. He had an adoption go through, so he had a kid too. So we’re on a hiatus. So I thought, “man, I miss talking about this.” There were some things that like when I was first diagnosed, I didn’t realize, and maybe this is dumb, but I’ve heard other people agree with me. I didn’t realize that you could go to your general practitioner and they could diagnose you with an anxiety disorder or depression. I just didn’t know that.
So my podcast is called simple mental health and the whole idea is to break it down as simply as possible. Invite people on to share personal stories, but also invite professionals on. I was so glad to have you on there. You broke down anxiety and maybe the clearest way I’ve ever heard it broken down before. It was perfect. I quote you all the time to friends and that’s the whole idea of it.
I wanted to do a few episodes just to help people. Maybe they’re experiencing, we’re still in the end of a pandemic year, maybe a guess they say it is that we’re still in it.
And so everybody’s feeling anxious. You know, it may not be diagnosable, but everybody’s having anxiety. And so I guess I wanted a place where people could go and hear people like them. And then people who are professionals who would speak very plainly and in layman’s terms about anxiety, depression. Maybe in some future episodes, maybe we’ll get into some other things, bipolar, OCD, things like that. So that’s really why we started. It was supposed to be five episodes and then I was going to be finished, but we have grown a community online. We have a Facebook group of over 500 people now out of five episodes of the podcast. And they are demanding more. So I’m so happy about that and we’re going to do more.
So I think I’m just going to do a season one, five episodes, season two, five episodes, and go until people stop listening.
Carrie: That’s great. That’s awesome. Just something like so small that has grown big and that just shows you that there’s a need for it. There are so many people out there struggling with anxiety and depression and OCD, and they’re looking for answers. They’re looking for what are other people doing in their day-to-day life with this. How do we manage it together.
Jeff: Yeah, for sure. I really see that for sure. You know, people have had a lot of people reach out. And just say, I didn’t even realize that these might be symptoms of anxiety, just like 20 years of my life had no idea that I had anxiety. So I’ve had people reach out in that way. And I’m really glad.
Carrie: Towards the end of every podcast, I like to ask the guests to share a story of hope, which is a time in which he received hope from God or another person.
Jeff: Well, I think for me, the hope that I found in God was through that reconstruction that I was talking about earlier. I really found that I began a deconstruction because of the doubt that was placed in my heart, but also because of my childhood upbringing in the church. I grew up in a very conservative church in a very small town in my understanding there, just made for a lot of duty-guilt obligation style faith.
The weird thing is that when I was starting the reconstruction, a lot of old songs from when I was a kid, things that we would be, you know, these old Christian songs that people would think are kind of like hokey now. So it would start coming into my mind. I’m having a thought about that song in forever.
Some old, like rich Mullins’ songs were popping up in my head.
Carrie: So good.
Jeff: And then I would just find that I would find this immense comfort in that. And so I feel like, I’m a musician and in a way, I had stopped leading people in worship. And so I kind of just put my guitar down and hadn’t picked it up in a while and I feel like God was meeting me back in that place with music again, God knew that he would find me there. And so my hope was in, in that, I would say I was starting to reconnect. I connected with a friend at church here. Another person on staff here who does not do music as part of their job. She is a fantastic singer. And we started during the pandemic. We started to record some videos for our online worship at the time, and we both found our passion for music and in ministry specific again, and maybe like even a calling was coming back. So into the hope from that, I found in that it was almost that like, I called it a reconstruction, but God really reached out and made that happen way more than I did.
I didn’t so much have to work on that as God found me again. I guess I was in a place where I stopped feeling God’s presence or stopped looking for God and God came calling. So that’s my place of hope, I think.
Carrie: It felt like God pursued you.
Jeff: Yeah, in a way that I had never experienced when all my years of ministry. This is what I did as soon as I got out of high school as I went to college for a semester, but then I ended up on a traveling worship team and immediately started working in churches, My whole life I’m working in ministry and in a way I never have felt God call me.
I felt God calling me back.
Carrie: Yeah, that’s so great. What I love about that is a sense of God knows how to speak to each one of us individually like it’s an intimate relationship that we have with him. And so if he was going to meet you, it made sense that he was going to meet you through music.
And that was really cool. It was a beautiful picture. And just a reminder that God’s in the details and. I just, I guess I encourage people that if they’re going through spiritual struggles like that, to be open, to just remain open to God, meeting you where you’re at because God already knows where the condition of our hearts and minds in those dark seasons. I don’t know.
I don’t remember who the author was, but he kind of called it like this dark night of the soul, you know, where you have these spiritual wrestlings and you’re in a place of sometimes it’s sadness or grief or feeling like you’ve been wounded by God in different ways. Thank you for being vulnerable and sharing that.
Jeff: Sure. Yeah. Another thought I was having, you know, with that, with kind of what you just said, and, and I shared this morning in my Facebook group is my background is for most of my life now has been in Western theology, a Methodist. So that’s kind of where John Wesley would have these group meetings. And he would always open up the group meeting with the question, how is it with your soul? And so I asked that question to my group this morning, the Facebook group that I was telling you about. And it was really interesting because it’s not a group. My podcast is not a Christian podcast but people’s worldviews come into play.
So if I have a Christian person on they’ll often bring up God, but I told him, I said, How is it with your soul regardless of your faith? What is it like? You know, I got a lot of not great today. You know, those kinds of responses I got. I’ve had some it as well with my soul kind of response. And so I just, I think about that, I think that that’s a practice, especially as Christians, that we could start utilizing a little more. Maybe wake up every morning and think how is it with my soul today? So that’s just a random freebie for the day because I was thinking about it today.
Carrie: That’s good. I think just the sense of self-reflection that sometimes we don’t take the time to do, because either we’re super busy or we’re in our heads and we’re not in a. A full-body experience in our faith.
Jeff: Oh yeah. And that’s one of those questions. It’s like, uh, how are you really question, right? How is it with your soul man? That’s personal, that’s deep, that’s offensive and it’s beautiful. Crazy.
Carrie: Well, it’s been great having you on to share your story and how this impacted your faith and your faith wrestlings and all of that. It’s been really amazing and check out the simple mental health podcast. And I’m on episode one, if you want to check it.
Jeff: Yeah. Check it out. She’s amazing. Thank you for having me as always.
We will put all the links in the show notes for you to Jeff’s podcast, as well as the specific episode that I was on. If you have a personal story of anxiety or OCD that you might like to share, please feel free to contact me anytime through our website.
www.hopeforanxietyandocd.com. I am currently looking for someone who has overcome a phobia who would like to tell their story. I would also love to talk with someone who has worked through some social anxiety and how they process that. So if you have personal stories in either of those areas or maybe, you know someone who might be willing to tell their story, please have them contact me.
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.
I had the privilege of interviewing John Stange, a lead pastor, professor, coach, counselor, certified speaker and author. John has written several books and his recent one is called “Dwell On These Things.”
Pastor John Stange shares with us his struggles with anxiety and his great wisdom and insight on overcoming negative self-talk through looking at God’s perspective toward us. We also talked about dealing with perfectionism as I am also a recovering perfectionist.
John Stange’s personal journey through anxiety, having sleepless nights, negative self-talk and excessive worries about “what if’s.”
Analyzing the root of his anxiety and preaching the truth of the gospel to his own heart
Factors that make people who are serving the ministry quit their role after a short period of time
“Why walk a defeated life when Christ already secured victory over our sins?”
Questions to ask yourself if you really want to understand Bible scriptures
Helpful concepts about seeing yourself through God’s eyes based on John Stange’s book, “Dwell On These Things”
Hope for Anxiety and OCD episode 31. Today’s episode is with John Stange who is a pastor and author. He’s recently written a book called Dwell On These Things based on Philippians 4:8. John has some great wisdom and insight into overcoming negative self-talk and seeing ourselves the way that God sees us.
So let’s dive right in.
Carrie: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today.
Pastor John: Well, happy to be here, glad to be with you.
Carrie: Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Pastor John: My name is John Stange. I have been in full-time pastoral ministry for 23 years and my wife and I have four children. Two are in college, two are in high school. And in the midst of my ministry, serving as a pastor I’ve also gotten quite involved in podcasting and writing and have really been pursuing both of those as avenues where I really have a great opportunity to hopefully encourage people in their faith and hopefully help in a variety of ways. But that’s where I’ve been spending a lot of my time in addition to my service to the church and my ministry, just to my family.
Carrie: One thing that I’ve found really interesting about you in my research is that while you do have a degree in the Bible, you also have a master’s degree in psychology. How did that process develop?
Pastor John: Well, one of the things that I noticed when I became a pastor is that a lot of your preparation to become a pastor trains you to teach and preach the Bible and teach and preach theology. And that’s very helpful, but there are two other aspects to your role as a pastor that you really need to figure out a way to invest in one is leadership. So I spent a lot of time just studying leaders and going to leadership training and reading books on leadership and really invested in that. But then the other thing that is typically asked of you is that you be involved in a lot of counseling. And so when I was deciding what to do for a master’s, I decided to pursue counseling and psychology because so much of my task as a pastor involves counseling.
And it probably wouldn’t surprise you to discover that over the course of this past year in particular, I had more counseling than at any other time in my ministry. To the point where I actually had somebody tally up in one given week how much time I was spending on counseling when things were at their worst. And they said a full 29 hours of my week is being spent just counseling. In addition to all the other things that you have to do. So I actually had to figure out a way to balance that a little bit better because it was becoming quite excessive, but that is definitely a role that pastors are asked to actually step in and help out with. And so I wanted to make sure I did it well. And when I got my master’s, I thought, you know what? I’m going to pursue counseling, psychology. Learn these tasks and learn these skills so that I could serve our church even better, hopefully.
Carrie: I think that’s an important point because you can be a really great teacher and lack people skills and being a pastor, you have to find that balance between being able to communicate the word of God and also being able to relate and lead people, like you just talked about.
Pastor John: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. And I’ve seen that a lot where people are really skilled in a particular task, or they have a lot of knowledge in a particular area, but they really struggle to take that from their brain to another life. And because that relational piece seems to be missing, so yeah, I agree.
Carrie: I’ve also interviewed a few people on the show who started out as pastors and ended up becoming therapists. And those stories are really interesting as well as kind of like an outflow of just the ministry that they were doing.
Pastor John: Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me. That’s great.
Carrie: We’re talking about anxiety today and incorporating that with spirituality, obviously. And I’m curious about your particular struggles with anxiety.
Pastor John: Yeah, it’s interesting because I don’t know that at one season of my life, I would have really thought of myself as being particularly anxious. In some respects, I tend to think I’m an easygoing person. And then as life went on and I took on more responsibilities and as I was trying to lead my household well and try to lead our church well, I started to notice seasons where I would really struggle to sleep.
I’m not a great sleeper to begin with. So I’m just going to confess that I think there’s something biological there that factors into that, but it was even worse than normal. And I can remember certain times where I would just find myself looking out the window of my bedroom, just looking outside, wondering in my mind why can’t I sleep.
And then as I try to lay my head down on the pillow, I would be thinking about all these what-if scenarios. What if this happens with your family or what if this happens with the church or what if this happens with your finances, all sorts of things. And I realized that I was becoming a rather anxious person.
I don’t know that I always demonstrated that to other people, but within my own mind. In fact, I actually think I tried to make a pretty strong effort to not demonstrate that to other people just to kind of portray that everything was fine. But in my own mind, I have to admit to you I really have gone through seasons where I felt particularly anxious and kind of went on a journey to try and figure out what’s at the root of this and what can I do that would be actually be helpful so that this doesn’t become such a dominant feature in my life.
If I’m going to be doing the things that I think God’s called me to do, I can’t be paralyzed by anxiety constantly. And I can’t give this full sway over myself. So I need to call it out into the light and I need to do something that’s going to actually help me overcome it.
Carrie: What was that process like for you?
Pastor John: I had to kind of analyze what was at the root of it at first. And what I noticed about myself is that I was trying to control too many things, and I was trying to do too many things without help. And I don’t know if that was a pride issue. I think that’s part of it. I, you know, I think certainly it was a pride issue in some respects, but I also think it comes from this thought of not wanting to burden other people with your problems.
And then also just this thought that sometimes you get in your mind when you’re trying to lead, this is your responsibility. So you just think, look, this is my job. I have to handle this. I can’t give this to somebody else. I just have to do it. Right. It’s just my role. And so the first thing I needed to do was just figure out what was at the root of this.
And again, it was just control issues and a desire not to burden other people and just, you know, the burdens that come from leadership. But the solution for me was multifaceted. And a lot of these things I think come back to preaching the gospel to your heart, where sometimes if you’re trying to do too much, it’s almost like you’re trying to take Christ’s job and do it instead of relying on him to be the strength that we need. And so it was almost like a works-based false gospel that I was starting to preach to my heart that can be very unhealthy. And when I phrased it that way in my mind, my theological triggers went off and said, “Wait a second. You can’t preach something false to your own heart. You have to stop this.” And so I thought, all right, well, what does it look like to actually apply the truth of the gospel to my own heart? What does it look like to be content in Christ and to trust him to do the things that I can’t do and to rest in the fact that he is perfect? I am not, and I’m fine with that.
And so this was part of the journey that I went on, but when I started analyzing that seeing what was at the root and then preaching the truth of the gospel to my heart, that really made a huge difference.
Carrie: I can really relate to that because I started this podcast and I was doing entirely too much. And I ended up hiring an assistant this year and it was super scary in the beginning.
Just the sense of like, “Okay. I’m like, yes, it’s a great thing that I have help, but I’m also like having to let go of control of things that I’ve been doing and what’s going to happen if I start letting go of that control and somebody else is gonna take over, and I think we do that with God so much in our own lives. We try to take control over things that we have no control over, even things like our own health like I’m up at night worrying about all of these things that could be happening to me are going on. And instead of saying, okay, I don’t have control over this. God loves me. He cares about me. He’s for me.
And I think that’s what you’re talking about in terms of having a theology of how God sees us. And really speaking that into ourselves is so important.
Pastor John: Yeah, exactly. I agree. A hundred percent.
Carrie: So, talk to us about negative self-talk because I think a lot of people really struggle with that. And what have you found to be helpful in your life?
Pastor John: There’s a variety of things that I have found helpful. And one of the things that I’ve noticed that is helpful for me is to know that I’m not the only person that wrestles with this. So when you serve in a public role, right now you’re putting yourself out there publicly doing a podcast, right?
So you’re just basically, you’re subjecting yourself to the opinions of others. And that could be a challenging task to do no matter what role you do it in. So you can imagine when I became a pastor I was subjecting myself to the opinions of many, many people and my opinion being sometimes the harshest and frequently, I would find myself preparing a message.
So I’ll use a sermon as an example. I’d prepare a message. I’d have it all straight in my head. I’d get up and I’d preach it. And then afterwards I’d have this thought that it didn’t go as well as I thought, or maybe the feedback I got on it wasn’t exactly what I was anticipating. And I would find myself spending the rest of Sunday beating myself up over perceived weaknesses in my presentation or times when I tripped over my words or ways that I could have said something better or something that I forgot to share that I meant to share or someone’s reaction that I misinterpreted or whatever it may be. And I just have all these thoughts going through my mind. Just the imperfections of what I had just shared and all this negative self-talk about, oh, why can’t you be as good of a speaker as this individual or that individual. And that’s a very unhealthy thing to start drilling into your mind. And I would suspect that’s probably one of the contributors to a lot of people who serve in public ministry roles quitting after a short period of time because they just spent a lot of time in self-accusation instead of refreshing their heart with the truth of the gospel and preaching the same message to their own heart that they just preached to their congregation. And eventually, I needed to get to the spot where I started to see the opportunities that I was being given to speak or to lead as opportunities to help people, not opportunities to look good while you’re helping people. And what I mean by that is this: Yeah it was a big change in my mind. I thought I used to wrestle with after I would preach a sermon, or lead a meeting, or whatever it may be. “How did you look doing that? Did you do okay?” And it was basically “how did you look doing it?” And then somewhere along the way, the Lord helped me to flip that in my mind to say, “did you help somebody?” And judge what I had just done by whether or not I was seeking to glorify God and help people. And when that became the measuring stick that really helped me with probably the major area of negative self-talk that I was wrestling with. Just trying to understand what it looks like to glorify God and help people Instead of worrying about how I looked while I was trying to do it.
Carrie: I think that’s been probably one of the greatest gifts that this podcast has ever given to me, just like, you know, through the Lord’s work, it’s showing me that it doesn’t have to be perfect to help people and I consider myself a recovering perfectionist. So I know that I have to go back and listen to these episodes and we joked. Before I hit record, there was a squeaky chair in one of them and it drove me crazy like I can hear that chair. And probably other people are listening to this in their car or they’re in the bathroom getting ready in the morning and they don’t care. You know, they’re probably not even noticing that. And somebody is going to be really blessed by that episode. But here I am and all I’m focused on is that annoying chair in the background.
Pastor John: Right. Instead of thinking of all the ways that you’re producing helpful content, you’re just hearing that chair that needs a little grease or a little oil.
Carrie: Right. So now I’m like, you know what? It goes out. There’s some people that like it and it’s helping some people and that’s all it really matters and it doesn’t have to be perfect in order to benefit other people. So that has been an unexpected gift, I guess, of going through this process.
You actually were really gracious enough to send me a copy of your book, “Dwell on these things” and I am really enjoying it. So I appreciate you for writing it, and you encourage readers to dwell on 31 different truths in God’s word. It’s written a little bit like a devotional, right? To kind of read one each day.
Pastor John: Yeah, it could be used that way for sure. Yeah. I wanted it to be useful in that way. If someone wanted to use the chapters in that kind of fashion, they definitely could.
Carrie: So would you be willing to share a few of these with us and how they can transform our thinking and self-talk.
Pastor John: Sure. There’s a variety of things that are mentioned in the book that kind of point us to things that the Lord is trying to communicate to us that sometimes we forget to communicate to ourselves, or we forget to repeat to ourselves after he’s communicated them. And so when you look through the book, you’ll see on day one, we talk about the fact that you are loved more deeply than you realize, and we start off the book with that concept because we want that to be a baseline for what we’re thinking about as we start to adopt God’s perspective toward us as our perspective toward us, as well as we work through the book, we talk about the blessing of walking by faith rather than by sight to experience greater joy.
I think a lot of times we think that there are all sorts of things we need to see ahead of time or know ahead of time to be able to actually experience contentment in life. But scripture shows us that we can walk by faith. We don’t have to walk by sight If we’re going to experience the greater joy that the Lord wants us to have.
I think something else that’s in the book that is most certainly a helpful concept for any of us. If we’re feeling anxious or just worried about a variety of things is the fact that scripture encourages us to have hearts that are ruled by the peace of Christ. And so when we get into the third section of the book that we talk about letting your heart be ruled by the peace of Christ. And I can tell you just from experience, there are all sorts of things that I have tried to soothe my heart within this world or all sorts of things that I have told myself, this will bring you peace if you just acquire this or achieve this or obtain this or whatever it may be. And there’s nothing this world offers me that has ever produced lasting peace in my mind or in my life.
And when you look at what scripture teaches us, scripture teaches us that we can let our hearts be ruled by the peace of Christ. And when his peace is ruling in our heart, we’re actually being ruled or led by something that’s everlasting, not something that’s temporary, not something that’s just here for a moment and then goes away.
Some of the chapters in the book talk about ways in which we can live out the things that the Lord has taught to us. And so there’s a chapter where we talk a lot about giving grace to those around you. And that can be a very helpful thing for us internally as well, because we start to realize that we don’t have to demand perfection from ourselves. And we don’t have to demand perfection from others. And as recipients of the grace of God, we can demonstrate the grace of God to other people. And I love what scripture tells us in the book of acts, where it reminds us that Christ taught that it’s better to give than it is to receive.
And in a moment like that, where you’re giving grace to somebody else. I think we even have the opportunity to see how that plays out where just giving grace to somebody that ends up being a blessing in our own life and in our own heart. So those are some of the concepts. There’s 31 different concepts that we focus on in the book, but those are just a few of them-just a sample of some of the things that are in the book that I truly hope will be helpful to others. If they’re trying to develop a perspective of what does it look like to actually talk to yourself like God talks to you and repeat a message to your heart that actually lines up with the truth of his gospel.
Carrie: That’s good. I know that in my counseling practice specifically, I work with a lot of people who have OCD sometimes like there’s a form of OCD called scrupulosity. And we’ve talked about it on the podcast before. It’s where you have all of these intrusive thoughts about God. You know, maybe God is angry at me. Maybe I’ve sinned. Maybe I’m going to hell, even though I know that I’m saved, those types of things people tend to ruminate on. And a lot of times people I work with are somewhat spiritually confused because they’ve sought out teachings to try to soothe some of this from a variety of different sources. You know, this person says you can lose your salvation. This person says you can’t lose your salvation. How do I know who God really is? And I know a lot of times people say, “okay, well in order to know God read the Bible that’s his word that’s his love letter to you.” How do we form this healthy theology of an understanding of who God is if there are so many different teachings that are saying are based on scripture.
Pastor John: Yeah, that could be a tough thing for a new Christian, in particular, to try to discern. Thankfully we have the internal witness of the holy spirit and he points us in the direction of truth. So I believe that any suggestion I give needs to come under the fact that the holy spirit will actively point us in the direction of truth. I do believe he does that. So I would encourage anyone that’s really wrestling with that to just begin with prayer and trust the holy spirit to lead you in the direction of truth. And then as we’re looking at scripture, I think it’s also helpful to know that when you’re reading through the Bible if you really want to understand the Bible, you need to ask the question, what does this section have to do with Jesus? Or maybe I could say it this way: how is this portion of scripture trying to point me to Christ?
So if I’m in the book of Genesis, I need to be asking that question. If I’m in the Psalms, I need to be asking that question, but I mean the gospels or the letters of Paul or the general letters or the book of revelation, the whole thing is trying to point our minds to Christ. And specifically, when you look throughout scripture, you see the message of redemption as the Lord is trying to redeem lost humanity. And he’s trying to redeem fallen creation, right? Like it’s all, there’s this message of redemption all throughout. And so that points us to the gospel and the gospel is if you want to summarize the gospel, you could summarize it this way. It’s the life, the death, and the resurrection of Christ.
And so in Christ lived the perfect life that we could never live. He lived that on our behalf. He walked a mile in our shoes. He’s our merciful sympathetic high priest. He knows all details of all things, and he actually walked it and lived it. And he did it perfectly without sin. And then in his death, he paid for our sin.
He took our sin upon himself so that ultimately we could be justified so that we could be declared righteous because he who knew no sin became sin for us. And then in his resurrection, he defeated the power of sin, the power of Satan. And the power of death. And he shares that victory with all of us who believe in him with anyone who trusts in him.
So the life, the death, and the resurrection of Christ, I think it all comes back to that. So now, you know, let’s think about some issues that sometimes we deal with and let’s plug it into that metric. If I’m dealing with, and we were just joking a few moments ago about perfectionism and the desire to kind of get everything right.
You know, whether the chair’s squeaking or whether all the words we say are exactly right, or whatever it may be. We deal with perfectionism. Well, let’s plug that into the gospel. Well, scripture tells us that we are not perfect. But Jesus is, and he came to live the perfect life for us because we couldn’t do it, which tells me I need to stop pressuring myself to be perfect because I’m not perfect.
And if I’m pressuring myself to be perfect, I’m preaching a false gospel to my heart because Christ came to this earth and was perfect for me because in my own strength I couldn’t be perfect. And so, you know, so that’s one element of how I think preaching the gospel to our hearts. Actually helps and it helps point us in the right direction. But then when you get to issues like Christ’s death, you know, I think sometimes we think that we have to be some sort of sacrificial martyr who can’t ask for help or can’t ask for assistance that we need to somehow, you know, die for our own sin or suffer for our own center, whatever it may be. And yet Jesus came to this earth to die in our place because we couldn’t die for our own sin ultimately, and have any sort of redemptive aspect come out of that.
And so Jesus who is perfect died in our place. And then scripture tells us that he rose from the grave. He defeated sin, Satan, and death. And so that victory gets shared with me because I trust in him. He’s already secured that victory. So what sense does it make for me to walk a defeated life or to just spend all this time telling myself how I’m defeated in this area or this area, or this area? Christ already secured victory over my sin Christ secured victory over my faulty thing.
He secured victory over death. I don’t even need to live in the fear of death because he’s already secured victory over it. He defeated death and even the deception of Satan or the accusation of Satan scripture tells us Satan loves to accuse God’s people. And I think sometimes we repeat Satan’s accusations in our own minds, almost like we’re trying to do his job for him. And that comes right back to the resurrection as well because Christ secured victory over sin, Satan, and death. And so Satan is defeated. So I don’t need to act like Satan is victorious. He’s been defeated. And so for me, it comes right back to preaching the gospel to my heart and understanding that the message of the gospel is woven all throughout scripture.
And if someone teaches something that does not line up with the truth of the life, the death, and the resurrection of Christ, then that gives me a good metric to know how I can actually filter that out and not welcome that into my thinking.
Carrie: That was a lot. That was good though. It was a lot. I was really trying to filter in thinking through some of the things that we just talked about like is God mad at me? Well, you know, God loves you. God loves you. He sent his son to die for you. There’s no greater love than that. Nobody else is going to be out here giving their life for you.
Pastor John: Right. When you look theologically, what scripture says, it says, you know, prior to coming to faith in Christ, we were under the wrath of God, right?
We were like, yes, you were under the wrath of God. It speaks of that in the book of Ephesians. Okay. But then Christ came to this earth and took the wrath of the father upon himself so that we could become objects of mercy. Instead of objects of wrath. And so scripture actually says, you’re an object of mercy now. So if scripture is telling me I’m an object of mercy and that Christ already took the wrath of the father upon himself, then why don’t I just believe what it says instead of just trying to make it up. You know, it’s like, we’re trying to make up the opposite of what scripture says because we want to make ourselves feel bad sometimes.
And it’s like, let’s not torture yourself. You know, just believe what it says and believe what he is.
Carrie: Or sometimes we try to take over maybe the role of the holy spirit and almost like over-convict ourselves. Sometimes people can air on one side or the other, right. Then they’re never open to correction or conviction. But then on the other side, it’s like, let me pick apart and confess every single thing I’ve done. Even the things that I know I’m already forgiven for. I keep bringing up the past sins over and over and over again. And we’re just really torturing ourselves at that point.
Pastor John: Yeah. You’re absolutely right.
Yeah. We’re prone to extremes.
Carrie: Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So tell us where people can find “Dwell on these things”.
Pastor John: “Dwell on these things” can be found literally anywhere. So you’ll be able to find it on Amazon. You’ll be able to find it at Barnes and noble. You’ll be able to find it pretty much any store you go to and which I’m really excited about the wide release that the book is receiving. But if you’d also like to find out some more information about it, or if people would like to read the first three chapters for free and just kind of see if it’s for them, just go to my website: desireJesus.com and you can read the first three chapters of the book right there on the website for free.
The publisher gave me permission to be able to post that. And so that’s right there. You’ll see a link to it right on the front page of the website.
Carrie: That’s great. And we’ll put a link in the show notes too. So since our podcast is called hope for anxiety and OCD, I like to ask our guests to share a story of hope, a time where you received hope from God or another person.
Pastor John: Certainly. So in 2008, my wife and I feel like the Lord was calling us to move to Langhorne, Pennsylvania, which was a couple of hours south of where we were living up in the Pocono region of Pennsylvania. And we felt like the Lord was leading us to move here and replant a church that was just about to close down.
And you know, shut its doors forever. And so we moved here to get involved in church planting, church revitalization. And I remember at the time being very convinced that the Lord had called us to do that, but that doesn’t come with any guarantees. So when you’re moving to a new area, you’re not certain if you’re going to be able to connect with people. And I believe that the Lord was paving a way for us to do so. And in my heart, I did believe that it was all going to work. But I remember at one point very, very early in the process, this was just a couple of days or a couple of weeks, I guess I should say before we moved down to this area, I agreed to do a wedding down in this area, in the building that we were going to use. So in the church building. And I remember at that point, there weren’t really very many people that were part of the church. There were just about six or so active people that had been part of the church that hung on to help us plant the new church. And I remember as the wedding was about to get underway, I started watching people pull into the parking lot and I saw one car pull in and another car pull in and another car pull in and before I knew it, the parking lot was filled and I thought, wow, this is exciting to see for this wedding. I’m just hopeful that the day comes when we have worship services here, that people will actually become part of this church, that we actually have the opportunity to build a church. And I just remember looking out at that full parking lot and just praying to the Lord, just a very simple prayer.
I just prayed, Lord, may it be so. May this be the type of thing that we get to see again when this church really gets underway, not just for a special event, but for the believers gathering together for worship gathering together on a Sunday morning gathering together mid-week whatever, whatever the Lord willed. And so I just remember having filled with the hope of Christ in that moment. And just a confidence that the Lord was going to help facilitate that even though I was certainly tempted to drift toward anxiety in that process because it was certainly a big step of faith for our family to come and, and move to a new area and try and get the church going.
But I remember sometime after that, a few years after that, when the parking lot really was filling up on Sunday mornings and looking at that in my mind, coming right back to standing on that porch and thinking, all right, Lord, this is wonderful. You answered that prayer. You filled us with your hope.
You gave us confidence in you. And now we get to see with our eyes, the type of things that we were seeing by faith for the past several years. And that was a real blessing to me. It was confirmation that when the Lord leads you in a particular direction, it’s best to just obey because he’s got the details already figured out. And sometimes he asks us to make big steps of faith. And so we just go and we get to see what he has planned on the other side of that step.
Carrie: It’s so beautiful when you’re able to just look back and see how far the Lord has brought you in a particular area and things, and all the challenges that there were, I’m sure along the ways of like, are we ever going to be able to do this? Is this ever going to grow? That’s awesome.
Pastor John: Yeah. You’re right. Big challenges.
Carrie: Well, thank you so much for being on the show and talking with us about preaching the gospel to our hearts. I think it’s been a great conversation.
Pastor John: Well, Carrie, thanks so much for having me on. It’s been a real pleasure.
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I felt like we had a little bit of therapy on myself today on this episode, talking about my perfectionism and difficulty letting go of responsibilities and delegating them to my VA. In all seriousness, I really needed those reminders today that Jesus has overcome sin, death. Nothing is too difficult for him.
As I like to remind myself on a regular basis, God is way bigger than my problem. So allow that to encourage you today. If you would like to stay up to date with what’s going on on the podcast, you can join our email list at www.hopeforanxietyandocd.com. Thank you so much for listening.
Hope for anxiety and OCD is a production of by the world 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.
I had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Steve Grcevich of Key Ministry. Dr. Steve is helping churches learn how to minister to people with disabilities including mental health.
He shares about what moved him to begin his mission of connecting churches with families of kids who have physical and mental disabilities.
Different scenarios and social interactions in church that trigger the anxiety in kids and families.
Barriers that make it more difficult for kids and families to be part of the church.
How to help kids and families with anxiety and other mental health issues feel welcomed and included in church.
Communication strategies and inclusion plan to help people feel more welcome in church.
Hope for Anxiety and OCD episode 25. Today, I had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Steven Grcevich. I believe that’s how you say his last name. He also told me I could call him Dr. Steve. Dr. Steve is going to tell us about a ministry that God laid on his heart to start that helps churches know how to reach and effectively minister to people with a wide variety of disabilities including mental health. So without further ado, let’s get into the interview.
Carrie: Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Dr. Steve: Carrie, thanks so much for having me on your podcast. I wear a lot of different hats. So in my tentmaking job, I am a child and adolescent psychiatrist. So I’m with physicians. I went to medical school, actually, I got accepted into medical school when I was 17 years old. It’s a little bit of a Doogie Howser kind of thing through an accelerated program. I have a private practice in suburban Cleveland. I teach at a couple of different medical schools, the child psychiatry fellows. I helped teach evidence-based medicine to medical students. Again, maintain a practice. I do some training for Mental Health Professionals and some of the surrounding counties. And then the other thing that probably takes up about half of my time is that almost 20 years ago, I was involved with starting Key Ministry, which I think we’re going to talk a little bit about today.
Carrie: So, how did you get to that place of seeing a need for key ministries or a desire to start that?
Dr. Steve: This is probably about 25 years ago. I was on the elder board at my church. This is mid-1990s after the fall of the iron curtain. We had a whole cohort of families who went over to Russia and Bulgaria and adopted some kids with some really complex emotional behavioral, developmental issues, trauma out of orphanages in Russian Bulgaria after the fall of the iron curtain.
And I’m sitting at an elder board meeting and the person who at the time was our children’s ministry director ended up on our ministry board later on down the road. I came in to do a presentation to talk about some of the struggles that these families were having in terms of staying engaged with church. As you can imagine that these were folks who had been very devoted, highly committed. These are people who are volunteering. They’re serving in leadership roles.
And then kids with other mood disorders kind of in that order. And so not like anything that we would go ahead and submit to a journal or as some sort of formal study. Over the next three months, I just did a survey of families as they were coming through the office for routine follow-ups.
There was one question, “what impact did the challenges that brought you and your child to our practice have on your ability to participate at your church or place of worship?” And I was floored by some of the stories that we started to hear. One in particular that was really memorable was that there was a family that I was seeing where they had a couple of little boys with pretty severe ADHD.
They started describing to me sort of what their experience was like going out, trying to find a church for their family on the west side of Cleveland with these two boys in town. Interestingly enough, they ended up at our church. And we’re giving their testimony at one of the services, talking about the impact that the supports that our children’s ministry was able to offer it had on their family. And the comment that the mom made is the people in the church oftentimes think they can tell when a disability ends and bad parenting begins. And so we oftentimes find that when we have kids with different emotional behavioral issues, and in my practice, I see this a lot, where kids who are anxious oftentimes manifests in anger, moodiness, and irritability.
I’m sitting there, listen to this stuff became obvious that there was an issue. And as God would go about orchestrating things around that time, I had one of the three original research grants for Adderall, which became the most commonly used medicine in kids with ADHD.
I got asked to travel around the country, do a lot of lectures to different medical groups, physician groups. And in the introduction, wherever I went I would say something about the work that our church was starting to do with families who were having some of these kinds of struggles. And the church started getting inundated with requests for help. Basically, Key Ministry came about.
Our current mission statement is that our mission is to help connect churches and families of kids with disabilities, for the purpose of making disciples of Jesus Christ. At the core of that, and sort of our original focus on what we saw as the unmet need was that our focus was on helping churches welcome and include families of kids with quote, unquote hidden disabilities, emotional behavioral, developmental neurologic conditions where the disability wouldn’t be obvious, say in a still photograph of that child. Johnny is just an absolutely wonderful lady. She did great work in terms of helping folks with physical disabilities be part of that. Around that time, the early two-thousands, we began getting like more and more awareness of some of the challenges. For example, families face when they had kids on the autism spectrum as more and more kids got diagnosed.
So, the next wave of this is that churches became very proficient or many of them became proficient. There were good models for serving families where they had kids who quote-unquote special needs. Basically kids with more severe intellectual or developmental disabilities, but by far and away, like if you take a look at the child population in the United States, 75% of kids with disabilities have primary mental health disabilities.
And there’s some fascinating research that came out a couple of years ago. Andrew Whitehead, who was a sociologist at Clemson University, went through about a quarter-million interviews with parents from three waves of the National Children’s Health survey. It’s done every two to three years by the federal government.
This is where they get these statistics that like one in 46 kids has autism, stuff like that. And interestingly enough, one of the questions that they ask as part of this is, “has your family attended a church or a place of worship at any point in the last year?” And what they found was that families who had a kid on the autism spectrum were 84% less likely than other families unimpacted by disabilities to ever set foot in a church. But it was 72% for families where they had a child with depression, 55% for kids with a disruptive behavior disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, conduct disorder, and 45% when we’re talking about kids with anxiety disorders. There’s actually 19% for kids with ADHD. In comparison to that, when they looked at other disabilities, like for example, Tourette’s disorder, kids with intellectual disabilities that didn’t have much of an impact in terms of church attendance at all.
And so when you start talking about sheer numbers and so in the population we serve, children and teens, probably about one in 10 meets criteria for a significant anxiety disorder. The number of kids and families who are impacted by these mental health concerns is far, far larger than the number of families who struggle with what we have traditionally referred to in the church as special needs.
So within the context of what we do in our ministry, there’s a lot of stuff that we do that we put on an annual basis. We couldn’t do it last year because of COVID, but the largest disability ministry conference in the United States.
We have a group that we moderate for 2100 special needs and disability ministry leaders from around the country. So we do all kinds of training consultation, offer all kinds of free support to churches.
My role specifically had been to work on developing a model for churches that are interested in doing mental health inclusion. So we have other folks on our team who will consult and work with, again churches that are looking to serve kids with sort of the traditional intellectual developmental disabilities.
[00:10:44] My piece has been developing a mental health inclusion model that churches can follow if they want to serve this larger population of families. That is probably, and it’s interesting, there’s guy Lamar Hardwick who’s up. Fascinatingly, he’s an African-American pastor of a mixed-race church in Atlanta who was diagnosed with autism in his mid-thirties, wrote this book called Disability in the Church.
And one of the points that Lamar made is that the largest minority group in the United States are individuals and families affected by disability. With all the conversations that are going on in terms of talking about diversity and the need for our churches to become more diverse, one of the places we need to start is by thinking about folks who have this range of conditions. Where many of them, the presence of their mental health condition or the presence of a family with that condition has made it impossible for them to be part of church.
Carrie: Can you talk a little bit more about that as far as what specific things were they encountering that were keeping them from being able to go to church? Like lack of feeling welcome maybe because their child had a disability or just their child being too anxious to be in a group setting.
Dr. Steve: So what if we take a look at sort of mental health, if we think about sort of mental health collectively as a whole, in the model that we put together, part of what we train churches around is the idea of there being seven barriers. The first one is stigma. In that, for example, there was a study. This is maybe six or seven years old from Lifeway research, where when they interviewed quote-unquote unchurched adults, 55% of them endorsed the notion that people with mental illness aren’t welcome at church.
Carrie: That is so sad.
Dr Steve: And interestingly, in some of maybe the more theologically conservative denominations that are more focused on outreach and inclusion, like going back to theological devotee, sixties, seventies, and eighties tend to be the ones that have less insight and less understanding about the nature of mental illness. But no, this stuff is not necessarily a sin problem. There are things that people are born with. And as you know, in your practice, that there are ways in like the lives of individual people who wrestle with this so that there are ways that God uses this stuff in terms of drawing people into closer relationships and deeper relationships. So the churches that are most interested oftentimes in doing outreach and inclusion are the ones that in some instances are the places where maybe mental health concerns tend to be more stigmatized. So that’s the first one.
The second one is anxiety. And I would argue that that in and of itself. Of all these barriers that’s probably the most common one and the anxiety disorders out of all the different mental health disorders are the ones that are most likely to keep the most people out of church. But we’ll talk about that a little more in detail.
The third has to do with executive functioning and self-control. Pretty much every mental health condition that you think of ultimately, or to some degree will impact people’s capacity to self-regulate emotions, to modulate impulse control, to be able to plan to exercise self-discipline. And folks with conditions like ADHD would be sort of the prototype of this.
Again, there are many other mental health conditions, significantly impacted. If you’re a family and if you have a kid who has a hard time sitting still, or not shouting out in the middle of a worship service. I had a very memorable case. This was a family that came from out of State to see me.
This may be 15 or 20 years ago where the father was a Southern Baptist pastor in Appalachian, West Virginia, Virginia, somewhere like that, where he came up to see me. And actually, his family doc gave him the money to come on up to our practice where they had adopted a little boy who had pretty severe issues with ADHD and impulse control or aggressiveness.
Shortly after they adopted this five-year-old boy, he punched the son of the guy who was the chair of the elder board. And they fired the father for not having appropriate spiritual control over his family when it was obvious that they adopted this kid who had been through very traumatizing situations.
But when you think about like in the Bible and you think about scripture, like the book of James, self-control is very closely acquainted with sort of godliness and spiritual maturity. Ability to demonstrate that especially for kids becomes like really important. If they’re going to be able to fit into a lot of activities at church.
The fourth is sensory processing. Folks think about this as being an issue with folks on the autism spectrum, but it turns out that folks with pretty much every condition and DSM can experience issues with sensory stimulation. And it’s particularly common, in addition, autism among folks with anxiety disorders and ADHD.
And so that for some people like the bright lights, the very loud music, the very sort of stimulating worship environments. You see in a lot of the contemporary churches, for some folks becomes absolutely overwhelming to the point that it’s aversive.
The fifth is social communication. We think about churches by nature are intensely social places.
And so if you’re somebody where maybe you feel uncomfortable with self-disclosure with other people or you have a more difficult time picking up on tone of voice, inflection of voice, body language, facial expressions, you’re really going to struggle in terms of like the interpersonal stuff that goes with those being active at church.
The sixth is social isolation because as you know, think about folks with common mental health conditions, people with depression isolate, oftentimes as a symptom of that depression. Folks with social anxiety oftentimes they’re going to avoid situations where they’re going to come in contact with and meet a lot of people and make a lot of new friends. Families who have kids with mental health issues.
The kids are less likely to be involved with athletic activities are less likely to be involved in extracurricular activities. They are less likely to be in situations where they meet other families who will invite them to church. Not to mention the fact that for a lot of the kinds of families that like your practice serve and that we serve, mental health treatment can be fairly expensive.
And a lot of times, I mean that there are lots of treatment costs that these families are incurring either for themselves, for their children, and either finding babysitters or childcare is too expensive. Or when you have a kid where you just can’t let any 14 year old down the street come over and watch them. It was very hard to become part of the social fabric of your neighborhood or the community.
And then the seventh one is past experiences of church because I don’t know about you, but about 30 minutes into child psychiatry school, I think I figured out that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree and that the kids who have these struggles oftentimes have parents who have these struggles.
And so part of the challenges is if the parent had an issue that kept them from being part of church, when they were younger, it’s highly unlikely that any of their children in particular kids who may have a similar mental health condition are going to be part of church. So those would be sort of the big ones that we ask churches to think about. Stigma, anxiety, executive functioning of self-control, sensory processing, social communication, social isolation, and past experiences at church.
Carrie: One thing I will say about that, that’s interesting is there’s this thing with church, it seems like with leadership and wanting to reach people where you either get one of two situations with a church.
You either walk in the door and it’s almost like everybody attacks you. Like you have the football like it’s “so we’re so excited to see you and, oh, it’s such a great day. Have a good Sunday. Here’s your bulletin.” You know that you either get that response or you kind of sneak in the door and then you sneak out the door and no one talks to you. But then maybe you go home and you go, “No one talked to me at church today” you know, I guess they really don’t care about me.” So how do churches like find this balance and this fine line between reaching people and letting them know that they’re loved and cared for in that environment without overwhelming them?
Dr. Steve: One of the first things that we try to help churches to do, because the level of understanding, again, from church to church, depending upon what kind of education the pastors have had, the people who are serving on staff at that church can vary so much. One of the places that we’ll start is by helping to kind of educate them about some of the things that they would anticipate being struggles in folks with common mental health issues and to kind of try to put them in their shoes here. I’ll give you an example of a little exercise that we would use as sort of like a little starter, like if we’re going in and if our team we’re doing a big training or if we were training an individual.
Let’s imagine that Samantha’s family lives down the street from your church. Samantha’s a single mom. She has a nine-year-old son and a seven-year-old daughter. The nine-year-old son got invited to vacation Bible school loves it, wants to go church every week and is begging mom to take the family to church. The nine year old son has ADHD and dyslexia. His seven-year-old sister has a separation anxiety disorder and the mom has social anxiety disorder and agoraphobia.
Think about all of the potential places where something could go wrong and where they might encounter a problem the first time that they would go to attend a church. And so one of the ways I talk about this with families in our practice on the church leaders is that as you know from a lot of the research has been done in terms of neuroimaging. To try and understand what’s different in the brain in folks who struggle with anxiety disorders is that we know that they’re basically hardwired to overestimate or distort the level of risk involved with entering into new or unfamiliar situations.
And so think about what that’s like if you’re visiting a church for the first time. For their family, one of the places that’s going to start is I would bet that mom is going to be looking on that church’s website before she even thinks about putting her kids in the car and going, because the kinds of things she might be worried about would be, “Am I going to stand out?
Will I be dressed differently than everyone else? Will my kids be dressed differently than anyone else?” But there are enough sort of strange stories floating around. It’s interesting, my son-in-law and my daughter in medical school, down in Alabama. And I heard stories from my son-in-law when he first moved down there, it was like looking for a church and, “oh, he was a newcomer.”
And so everybody stood up in the church and came around him to lay hands on him, to welcome him. Yes. So again, if you’re a mom with social anxiety, even the most remote prospect of something like that, or having somebody walking around during prayer time, handing you a microphone, and asking you to introduce yourself, it would be terribly overwhelming.
So you get over that. You figure out how you’re going to dress and you get to church. How many social interactions does mom have to navigate the first time she goes before, she herself, is able to go into the worship center and sit down. So you have the greeter in the parking lot. You probably have like the greeter or the person at the main entrance or the entrance for children. Now because of there for the first time, she has to register both of her kids.
So that there’s like the children’s ministry volunteers who are at like the check-in and the worship center. And of course, they’re going to want to introduce them to the volunteer people who are teaching their Sunday school class. And maybe if the church isn’t too large, probably the guy, the children’s pastor or the student pastors probably going to come over and want to introduce themselves.
So by the way, when the daughter finds out that the expectation is that she will be hanging out with like other girls in the first or second grade Sunday school class, and not with mom on the other end of the building in the worship service, the daughter starts to have a meltdown because of her anxiety at the prospect of being apart from mom.
So by this time, they’re already like five minutes into the worship service, Mom gets to the worship center. And mom with agoraphobia finds there are only middle seats open in the front five rows in the worships.
And then is there some time during the service where people are expected, like pre-COVID to greet each other and people are shaking hands and hugging on your way out. You have people who are a lot of places have like a welcome center for like new visitors. If you fill out the card, somebody may go ahead and give you a phone call afterwards.
And what if you find out that like people who joined the church, one of the things that you’re expected to do is you’re expected to very shortly thereafter become part of a small group with a group of total strangers in which there’s an expectation for folks to disclose fairly personal things. That’s why you tend not to see so many anxious people oftentimes at church.
And so part of what we’re doing when we’re working with churches is that, in contrast, to something like special needs ministry or something that’s a standalone program. This is not a program. This is a mindset. And so that we’re trying to get pastors and folks on staff at churches to understand some of the things that are going to get in the way, because like the best inclusion strategies are going to be things that are going to help everybody.
And in particular, one of the reasons why the ways that we had traditionally done disability ministry didn’t work and don’t work for the folks that we’re talking about is it the last thing that my patients want to do is to be part of something that’s going to single them out as being different.
And in fact, my kids and teens, what they want more than anything else to be treated just like everybody else. So, you can’t put them in a special needs ministry or you can’t expect the folks who we’re working with kids with autism or developmental disabilities to have a good handle on what do you do with the kid with profound social anxiety or the kid on the autism spectrum with 147 IQ who has no social skills and is very awkward in terms of how they interact with other folks.
Carrie: Have you had churches that did certain things to help with kind of getting people through that front door. That’s probably the scariest part is kind of the whole process of entering the worship area for the first time, dropping off your kids, those types of things that you just mentioned. What does that look like in a more anxiety sensitive, I guess.
Dr. Steve: Okay. So coming back to like what we were talking about before. The more people with anxiety can visualize an experience, especially if they’re going to an unfamiliar place, the easier it may be for them to be able to get over that hurdle. So one of the things that we talk about when we’re working with churches and one of the components of what we have them think about doing is a communication strategy.
One component of that is to take a look at your website. And you want as many pictures, video. You want folks who are exploring the website to be able to have a good picture in their mind of what it is that they’re going to be able to experience. And so this is where this would be especially true is that I have kids in my practice where for example, they’re okay at going to church. And by the way, one of the ways that you figure out who the anxious kids are at church is walking into the worship center of the sanctuary, like when it’s time for the sermon and see who’s still sitting next to their parents. That’s probably like a pretty good bet. I have kids where maybe they can get to church and, you know, they can sit with mom or dad, but the prospect of going to like Sunday school would be overwhelming.
One really memorable kids. So there was in like third grade. This ADHD separation anxiety, some dyslexia kid ended up doing well with some cognitive behavioral therapy ended up in a private school that specializes in working with kids with learning differences. Didn’t hear anything from the family for three years.
Kid is in sixth grade and at the church where the family’s going, he’s not part of Sunday school, but he is going every Sunday with mom and dad. And the biggest event of the year for middle-school ministry was this weekend retreat. And the mom and dad were friends with the middle school pastor who put a great deal of pressure on them to have their child go.
Well, the kid was still struggling with lots of separation anxiety. And when the kid came home one day and considerably larger at this point, when mom informed them that they needed to go to the retreat, the kid became extremely agitated and aggressive. And if mom’s brother had to have just happened to drop by the house, this boy was so upset that she might’ve gotten seriously hurt.
So, the kid has separation anxiety. If we added the details that the middle school retreat is for a full weekend on an island in the middle of Lake Erie that you can only reach by ferry that only runs during the daytime. Can you imagine?
Carrie: There’s all these barriers.
Dr.Steve: Yeah. So for example when you’re asking people to do something, that’s like a little out of the ordinary.
So with a middle school retreat or a high school retreat, or like churches where people go on mission trips, the same thing applies that an anxious kid would want to know. What am I going to be doing? Where am I going to be eating? Where am I going to be sleeping? Or they’re going to, you know, are they cabins?
Are there going to be bugs around? What’s going to be happening all day long? So that, to the extent that you can go ahead and help folks to visualize that whether they’re serving in a soup kitchen or going on like a weekend or like a week-long retreat to like Appalachia, or whether it’s like two days with other kids from middle school and high school. The more you can envision of what you’re going to be experienced and the more you can prepare folks the better. So, the same thing when you think about this with, in terms of say kids who might be dealing with some degree of anxiety. Making sure that you have maybe other kids around who are greeters, who come from a number of different schools.
So the kids are likely to see familiar faces when they come in the same way. Like for example, I think about some of our kids with anxiety who have difficulty transitioning when they’re going to a new school. Giving them the ability to come and check the church out, maybe in the middle of the week, when there aren’t a lot of people around and either to like meet in person or maybe meet by video their Sunday school teacher so that, here’s where your room is at.
Here’s where you’re going to be going. Here’s what you’ll be doing. The more preparation you can do with someone, for example, who struggles with anxiety, the easier time they’re going to have with it.
Carrie: These are really good ideas. I think in terms of being able to visualize things I used to have before COVID and I went fully online.
I used to have all kinds of pictures on my website of the office. And I actually paid a professional photographer to come in and take pictures so that people could kind of see the journey from literally like the parking lot to the waiting area, to the hallway where my office was in the suite.
And it was really neat because the photographer actually told me that whenever his wife goes to a new restaurant, she looks up the pictures online just to kind of familiarize herself with the area. And I thought that that was really interesting. So, I think it’s a great idea for churches to use things like pictures or videos, which is a pretty simple solution.
To snap some different pictures and put it on the website to help people feel more welcome or they know what to expect when they’re walking in the door.
Dr Steve: Yeah, I would add, I mean, there’s some very simple things that churches can do in terms of implementing a communication strategy that are very helpful when you’re dealing with families that are impacted by anxiety, other mental health conditions. In an earlier Lifeway survey, when they asked family members of adults with serious mental illness what they most wanted from their churches was for their pastor to talk about mental health-related topics from the pulpit. It gives everybody else permission to talk about it.
There was a fairly large, interestingly enough, Southern Baptist church here in Northern Ohio that we worked with, who they ended up developing an inclusion plan, where they won the regional award for cultural competence from the National Alliance for Mental illness.
So like some of the things that they did speaking into this is that they did a five-week teaching series on what the Bible has to say about anxiety to address the issue of people feeling more comfortable about self-disclosing. I was there on a Sunday at their worship services because I was training about 75 of their children and student ministry volunteers about how, what they could be doing in terms of interacting, including kids in their ministry.
So I went to a worship service and they ended up renting a video about three minutes long that day with one of the guys who was in their worship band, who talked about his experience with panic attacks and how that impacted his faith for a period of time and how he worked through it. The guy who is a founding pastor of the church did this wonderful. It’s about five minutes long. It was a Facebook video that they produced specifically for folks in the congregation of the church to share with their friends and neighbors who might be struggling. And he started off, “Hi, I’m Rick Duncan. I’m the founding pastor of Kyla Belly Church. And I want you to know that those of you who are struggling with mental health concerns are welcome at our church.
My father was a pastor. He struggled with depression. We know what this is like.” So something as simple as that, that that’s. So de-stigmatizing put in the hands of the people of the church to share it with their friends and neighbors who they know are wrestling with this. I mean, they’ve done a fabulous job. So, in addition, they have, they actually have a licensed therapist
who’s on staff at the church to be able to see folks who have issues. They have a celebrate recovery group. They offered NAMI groups. We are seeing like churches in our area. There are a couple of wonderful ministries that we work with. One is called Fresh Hope and the other one’s called Mental Health Grace Alliance. Where there are now networks like hundreds of churches that are doing Christian-based mental health support groups for teens, college students, and adults with mental health issues and support for their families.
And so, I mean, it’s just wonderful to see the way that like the resources are exploding. And, and I think that it helps that there probably enough folks on staff at churches with personal experience of this firsthand. That they get how it can be an issue for other people.
Carrie: I love that. I love that because what you said about. Some things being said from the pulpit or from the stage, it gives permission for everyone else to talk about it. And if we don’t talk about these things in the church, it just makes us feel like, okay, well we just, we just don’t talk about that here. It’s kinda like parents when they don’t talk to their kids about sex.
It’s just kind of like, well, that’s a taboo subject, I guess that’s off the table. And we don’t realize a lot of times how impactful that is. And especially because too often, we put people in leadership on pedestal pedestals and think they don’t have any problems, but they have problems too just like everyone else.
They have struggle and sin and things that God’s working on in their life. It’s so powerful when we’re able to have authentic vulnerability in the church. And I hate that so many times there’s too many barriers to respite to be able to do that. But it’s life-changing when that happens in a positive and healthy way. Too many of these things that you listed and this, the seven things, really keep us from being able to connect in community with other believers, the way that God has designed us to be in community and to stay connected and to grow closer to God and grow closer to each other.
Tell us about a little bit about your book, the Mental Health and the Church.
Dr. Steve: Okay. So mental health of the church is basically sort of the detailed version of our inclusion model that we share with churches. The first part of that, we talk about that there are seven specific barriers that oftentimes make it more difficult for families and individuals impacted by mental health illness.
We also give them seven. We also give them seven specific strategies or ways that they can like, think about how they might think about like responding. And so that, so that some of the things that are like really essential would be like having the church commit.
That they’re going to do an inclusion plan and that there’d be some education of the leaders of the church. The second has to do with the little acronym is teacher. So the first is setting up an inclusion team. The second is looking at sort of the ministry environments or the nature of the physical spaces in which ministry takes place.
So are there ways of making them more sensory-friendly? Are there ways, for example, to design we’re involved with a church where we were like helping them redo their middle school and high school ministry area so that kids who have attention issues would take away more from the teaching and the experiences that they have?
A stands for focusing on activities that are most essential to spiritual growth. So that if you want folks to be in part in a small group, it’s very important to train the leaders of your small groups, in terms of like how you welcome someone who might have issues with anxiety or someone who might be withdrawn because they’re struggling a little at that point in time with the exacerbation of depression.
C has to do with the communication strategy we touched on. H has to do with offering practical helps that in the Lifeway study.
One of the largest disconnects between what pastors believed about their churches and what family said about their churches was that most pastors believed that their church had a current list of mental health facilities and professionals that they could refer people to. But 70% of families said that that wasn’t the case. One of the things that like the church that I go to does is that before COVID we had large respite events where we would have like 85 kids at the church on a Friday night. And probably the majority of them had a primary mental health issue, where again, the parents were able to get an evening out and then.
Our most popular blog post a couple of years ago was entitled, We had no casseroles. And it was about 60 minutes segment that was done, where they were talking about the struggles that parents in Virginia were having like the teens and young adults getting mental health service. And so the whoever from 60 minutes was interviewing the one mom and she goes, “You know, when our 13-year-old daughter broke her leg in a skiing accident and was in the hospital for a week for surgery every single night, somebody from our church brought us food. Six months later, when she overdosed and was on a psychiatric ward of the local hospital, we had no casseroles.” And so like, why do we, as the church think about like treating those things so differently.
So what are some practical things that we can do to help them? There is education and support, offering like a fresh hope group, offering like a grace group through Mental Health Grace Alliance, having NAMI doing their education and family support groups, making sure that the folks who are in leadership positions in the church get the training they need to understand.
And then our has to do with releasing your people for ministry. For this to work, folks on staff at churches have so much on their plate that they’re overwhelmed that the people need to take ownership of this because God has positioned all of us in terms of where we work, where we go to school in our neighborhoods. We all know people who struggle with.
And I actually think the best inclusion plan is having a trusted friend coming alongside you the first few times that you go to a church. Who can help to navigate the overly exuberant door greeters and some of the other challenges and help their friends and help their loved ones to be able to navigate some of the things that might make them a little more uncomfortable.
Carrie: Yeah, that’s good. That’s really good. I think all of this information is really helpful and I’m glad that you started this ministry and God put it on your heart because I’m sure it’s grown and there continues to be a need for it as more churches are becoming open to how can we include all people.
As we’re winding down towards the end here, at the end of every podcast I like our guests to share a story of hope, which is a time in which you received hope from God or another person.
Dr. Steve: Well, I think that the thing that brings me the most hope is seeing the way some of the churches that we serve and other like-minded ministry servers are embracing and understanding this cause. That when we started doing this, there, I mean, there’s literally nothing out there that we have a group that we moderate for mental health inclusion, ministry leaders that not as several hundred members. We’re seeing churches implement plans and we’re seeing them welcome more people.
We’re into the hundreds now in terms of churches that are hosting Grace groups and, and, and, and, and hosting fresh hope groups. And when we get invited to like different conferences and have the opportunity to train, there are more people signing up for this mental health stuff than for any of the other things on the program, but these conferences.
And so it’s really encouraging that after a very long time when we see churches get it. I was at a very large church, training over 200 volunteers, one weekend it’s a church people would be familiar with that was very interested in doing this. And so I stayed for worship on Sunday and it was interesting because the lead pastor wasn’t there, but he knew what was going on. At the beginning of the worship service, he starts it off by saying “I’d like to start by praying for anyone who’s with us today who might be struggling with depression.” He didn’t have to do a whole sermon on it, but simply by doing, just simply by saying something like that the folks who were there that day, who may have been wrestling with stuff knew that they would be welcome and knew that it was okay to talk about.
Carrie: That’s good. That is very hopeful. Thank you for coming on and sharing your wisdom. And I’ll put all the links in the show notes to Key Ministries and the book and how people can get in contact with you.
Dr Steve: Well, yeah, that would be awesome. And you know, I’d like to get together and say, hello. My daughter goes to Belmont University in Nashville, and she’s hoping to become a psychologist.
We have issues with anxiety and depression and things like that. So, I do get a chance to be in your neck of the woods fairly often. Ms. Carrie.
Carrie: You’re welcome to sit down with me for lunch anytime. We’ll get together.
Dr Steve: I’ll look forward to it. Thank you.
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My hope really for this episode is for people to share this type of information with their pastor or ministry leaders, small group leaders, children’s ministry leaders.
Your church really may not know that this help and support is available. And so this episode may be an open door for you to start to talk with the people in your congregation about some of your own mental health struggles. So, if it helps to share the episode with them and say, Hey, sometimes this is my experience at church.
I hope that this episode helps you do that as well. So I promised for our 25th episode that I would be giving something away and I am, I am giving a $25 Amazon gift card away to one of our email subscribers. So if you’re saying, “Carrie, how do I get on the email list?” It’s super easy. You go to www.hopeforanxietyandocd.com.
There’ll be a box up at the top where you can put in your name, and your email address, and then you will automatically get a free relaxation download. It’s something that I use with clients that people have found particularly helpful. You have two weeks to become a subscriber to qualify for the Amazon gift card.
And I will be letting the winner know by email and also posting about it on Facebook and Instagram as always. 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 Benjamin Bynam. Until next time. May be comforted by God’s geat love for you.
Bailee is a local therapist who talks with us about using Equine Assisted Therapy to help with anxiety. We joke about how horses are HIPAA compliant, and I share my story of overcoming my fear of horses.
Bailee’s story about how she became an Equine Assisted Therapist without being a “horse person.”
What is Equine Assisted Therapy?
Different models of Equine Assisted Therapy.
How does equine therapy help with anxiety and other mental issues?
Human-animal emotional connection. God says take care of the animals.
Horses read and respond to human emotions like anxiety.
Stories about how equine therapy helps people with anxiety
Hope for Anxiety and OCD episode 24. Today on the show, Bailee Teter comes on to discuss Equine Assisted Therapy. You even get to hear a little story about how I overcame my own horse phobia that I had developed from a bad horseback riding experience as an adolescent. Without further ado, here is our interview.
Carrie: : Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Bailee: I’m originally from Texas and moved to Nashville in 2014. I came here to go to Lipscomb to complete my master’s in clinical counseling and ended up meeting my husband here, and so I stayed. We really love where we are and our church community has been such a blessing to us. So we really love it.
Carrie: That’s awesome.
Bailee: Fun fact, aside from equine counseling or equine-assisted counseling, I also direct a Christian dance program. So when people ask me what my job is I’m like, “I work with horses and I teach dance classes.”
Carrie: Those were two pretty unique interests.
Bailee: Yeah. They’re not anything I would have ever planned for myself. If somebody would have told me like in 2016, in the future, you’ll be directing a dance program and doing equine-assisted counseling, I would have been really stressed out about how to make it happen and really confused because I’ve danced my whole life but I did not grow up with horses. And so before I started working as an equine assisted counselor, I didn’t really have much background with horses. So that’s been a really cool story in and of itself.
Carrie: Tell us how you got on that track because when people go to graduate school for counseling. Obviously, there’s a lot of different places that they can take that. And so how did you get into the equine-assisted route?
Bailee: Well, I didn’t go to school for equine. I actually have a really big heart for using creativity to help people heal and help people grow. Someday, a long-term dream of mine is to have my own organization that helps people connect to God through creative outlets. And through that comes healing. And so in the counseling program, I did my specialization in play therapy.
We did toys and sand tray and creative arts and music and all of these things were my electives in the counseling program. After school, I worked for a community mental health organization for a year and a half. I was really burned out. It was hard for me to be in an office. It was hard for me to be sitting still.
I felt really isolated. I didn’t feel like I had a lot of support just where I was. I was contracted into a school. And so I was at the school, but not part of the school. I learned a lot. I worked with a lot of different ages of kids and teens, and a lot of different things about case management too, but it was not the place for me.
I am not an office person, which you can see that now by the jobs that I have. So I had contact with a professor from Lipscomb and he knew for probably about six months that I was just really unhappy and I was searching and I was praying a lot like, “Lord, what are my options? Where do I go from here?”
I don’t even know if I like counseling. I just did this degree and now I’m confused and really burned out. And after about six months, one day, he was just like, “You know what? You need to go meet my friend. She’s interested in art and she does something with horses.” I was like, “okay.” So I went out to Unbridle Changes is where we are in Goodlettsville.
And I observed two sessions, two days of sessions. And she, at the end, Don, who’s the other therapist out there was like, “well, if your professor trusts you. I’m really good friends with him. I trust you. You want to join us?” That was that.
Carrie: That’s amazing networking right there. I love it when that works out.
Bailee: Yeah. And I feel like I’m not a good networker. So that was all God.
Carrie: Yeah. I know for me, like when I’ve been in certain environments, whether it’s counseling or other things. Maybe you’re not this intuitive, but was there a feeling or a sense like when you went to Unbridled Changes, you’re like “Oh almost like I can breathe. This is where my soul is meant to be.”
Bailee: Yeah. Definitely. Every time I drive over the hill, when you get there, we’re at the end of a hill, we’re not long off of long hollow pike, but every time I drive over that hill and you just see, we think there’s about 50 acres of fields and horses. it’s just like I’m here. It’s a peaceful place. All of the staff members are believers. And so there’s just this connection. We all have that fundamental similarity. Even though we’ll see clients that are not necessarily Christian and we respect where they’re coming from and their stories, but just having that as the core. There’s peace for sure on the property and the horses add a big part to that for sure.
Carrie: That’s awesome. So tell us for, those who don’t know, which is probably a lot of our listeners haven’t had interactions with equine-assisted therapy. What does that look like?
Bailee: Part of the story where I got involved too. I did not have to be a horse person to do this type of therapy. There’s different models. I am trained in EAGALA, which is Equine Assisted Growth and Learning Association. There are a few different models. I think one is called Path where they do therapeutic riding or the people ride the horses. And there’s some just different versions out there, but through EAGALA you have an equine specialist and you have a mental health person. And I am the mental health certified person. I did my training with another girl who is an equine specialist. And to do that she had to have over 6,000 hours of working with horses and the horse background and all. Knowing their personalities and their behavior. We worked together and all of our sessions and clients keep their feet on the ground.
And very rarely do we teach them any kind of horsemanship. Sometimes in our program or for me, we’ll step outside of the EAGALA model and teach us a little bit of horsemanship so the kids or the adults will feel a bit more comfortable. But usually, we keep our feet on the ground and let the horses have free rein to interact with the clients, whoever they want to.
There’s actually some research that has come out, I think probably in the last 10 years. The most recent article I saw was 2017. There’s some preliminary research about something called coupling where horse heart rates and human heart rates will start to mirror each other when they’re in close proximity.
And so there was one research that had three different scenarios in this situation where the horse’s heart rate was closest to the human was when the horse had free reign in this situation. They weren’t being restrained. They weren’t behind the bar. They had free rein and they could choose to come and interact with the person.
So that’s kind of how a lot of our situations go. We’ll bring a horse into the arena. We’ll have a client create something out of props or toys. Kind of a very common one early on, it shows me what it feels like to be you. So they’ll build something out of toys or props or different things. And then we’ll kind of watch the horse.
And a lot of times that horse will approach like as they’re building and show curiosity and show like their sensitivity to what’s going on with the person. The reason horses are so effective is because they’re naturally prey animals in the wild. So like a dog, if it gets scared or if it gets hurt, it’ll fight back.
A horse usually won’t. It’ll run. They are so sensitive to their environment. They’re so sensitive to whatever is going on that when they look at a human they expect the human to kind of be quote unquote, “the predator.” And so they’re sensitive to what’s going on with people. And so if you come in showing a lot of anxiety, you’re carrying a lot of anxiety.
Even if another person could look at you and not tell, the horse can tell, and the horse will respond to you differently whether you’ve got anxiety, depression, trauma, they can pick up on some of those things.
Carrie: That creeps me out a little bit. So if you go in there and you’re anxious, the horse runs from you, or is the horse kind of like a little more empathetic than that?
Bailee: I would say it depends on the horse. It wouldn’t necessarily run. Usually what we’ve noticed is it will kind of put its head up or it’ll be on alert a little bit. But in coordination with the counseling, we’ll say, “can you go help that horse be calm?” And so as the person is trying to help the horse calm down, they essentially calm themselves down as well.
And just that connection with the horse to the human. It’s like an externalization of whatever’s going on inside your heart. The horse will kind of act on it. Some of them are just really empathetic and can tell, especially the ones we’ve used a long time for therapy though, they’ll be gentle.
Carrie: I’m sure there’s a selection process that goes into which horses would be good therapeutic leave versus not that’s already been done by the organization.
Bailee: Yes. EAGALA’s model is that any kind of horse could be used for therapy. The horses that we use most of them are all-natural Tennessee walking horses because the farm is also like a breeding farm. We have 25 to 30 horses, but also the equine specialist, that’s kind of their job to be able to know horse personality. Which ones are sensitive to the weather. Which ones are sensitive to kids versus adults. We choose which one we think would work best.
Carrie: Do people usually work with the same horse over time, or do they work with different horses? Kind of, depending on what their needs are?
Bailee: That depends on the person too, and the situation. I have one client, she is really, really connected with a specific horse. Every time she comes, she at least has a little bit of time to spend with that horse. She just feels really comforted by this horse, really safe with this horse. So even if we have her doing something, and it didn’t feel do we have her doing something in the arena, she’ll always at least get a few minutes with this one particular horse.
And a few weeks ago she came and that horse, I actually got a little nervous cause the horse was just like laying on the ground. And I was like, “oh no, was the horse okay?” But it was just kind of a calm day. And usually if you approach a horse that’s laying down, it’ll get up. Kind of that prey instinct as well.
But this woman was having kind of a rough week. She was feeling overwhelmed. She was feeling like there was a lot going on, but she’s so connected to this horse. She walked over there. The horse looked at her and then laid its head back down. And so she crouched down next to the horse and it was heading it and stroking it. And when she came back she was like, “oh, I feel so much better. I feel so much calmer here.”
Carrie: Wow. That’s awesome. I think what’s interesting too because I’ve looked into other kinds of therapy that use animals like animal-assisted therapy with dogs or things of that nature. And sometimes people talk to their animals and I have cats and I talk to my cat.
Sometimes I like to think we have little conversations. But there’s something about this sense of being in the presence of an animal. And now that I’m doing more telehealth therapy, there’s something about people having their animals in session too. [00:13:08] That’s really powerful. That certain level of comfort or draw that they can get from that. And I wonder if that’s a part of this equation too. A lot of times people who have challenges in their relationships, they feel like they can connect to animals more easily than the other people around them.
Bailee: Yeah. I can definitely see that. Because animals don’t judge us and they hold secrets very well. We’ve told clients multiple times if you feel like you can’t tell us something, you can go tell the horse cause they keep secrets really well. I definitely think there’s something to that relationship between human and animals. I mean, God created it that way. Even in the beginning, he said, take care of the animals. There’s a special connection there.
Carrie: Your horses are fully HIPAA compliant.
Baillee: Yes, definitely. They don’t tell the secrets. They keep them.
Carrie: What are some of the issues that you see people coming in with? Obviously this is a show focused on anxiety and OCD, so feel free to speak to that, but I’m sure there are a variety of issues that people seek equine-assisted therapy for.
Bailee: Anxiety is a big one for sure. Just the nature of being outside in creation without the constant barrage of information and technology and in a new environment. I think the environment in itself helps reduce anxiety and then along with the horses. So we do get quite a bit of anxiety, trauma, depression.
I’ve been there for about two years. In the past two years, we’ve had kids that come with sensory issues that are also just looking for ways to cope with a lot of that and getting to touch the horses and feel the ground and smell the smells. That is just really beneficial for them.
Relationship things, family conflict, adjustment, a big variety, anything you would see a regular therapist for equine would work for as well.
Carrie: I’ve always thought for myself that I should, at some point or another, pursue equine therapy because I don’t have a positive relationship with horses.
And I thought maybe I should try to improve my horse relationships at some level. I was scared. Absolutely somewhat terrified of horses for many years. Not that I had to be around them. It didn’t cause problems in my life enough to go to therapy over it, but I had a traumatic horseback riding experience when I was 16 years old and basically was just kind of thrown on a horse.
And it was like, “Hey, pull the reins this way to go right, pull this way to go left, pull back and say whoa if you need to stop.” And that was pretty much my horse instruction. There was no, let’s walk around the corral a little bit or anything of that nature. And the horse took off just running because there was a break in between us and the next trail horse.
And they were kind of trained to fill in the gaps. So that’s what the horse was doing. Just filling in the gap. And I was so nervous. I was of course very anxious and screaming because that was the only thing I was taught. And I’m bouncing on the horse and I get off of there and I was like, “I don’t like this. I’m never riding a horse again. This was an awful experience, blah, blah, blah.” And so I wish tried to push myself a little bit to do things because I feel like I’m always asking my clients to be brave and to try new things and to step outside of their comfort zone.
About a couple of years ago, I was taking a day off and I decided to go to Land Between the Lakes. Have you ever been to Land Between the Lakes? It is a big area to fall. So for those who don’t know is this just this big like park area on the border of Kentucky and Tennessee. And they have all kinds of things. They have a place where you can drive through and see buffalo. And that was super cool. And they have a planetarium and tons of hiking trails.
I saw that they had this little sign that said horseback riding, and I had absolutely no plans to go horseback riding, but I thought, here’s your opportunity to get over your fear horses. And you should just go in here. Don’t give yourself time to talk out of it. Just get over there and, and talk to the people.
So I explained to them, I said, “Look, this was my experience. I had a very traumatic horse experience but I’d like to go horseback riding.” And they said, “This horse is so old. It will not run. It’s not even going to down upon you.” It just walks through the woods. It’s very relaxing. And I was the only person, I guess because it was a weekday and I was the only person on the trail ride with the trail guide. And so I worked through. I made friends with the horse before I got on and I worked through my fear of horses. So now I guess I don’t need to go.
I’ve always had a curiosity or an interest in it. And I think a lot of people don’t really realize that this is an opportunity for them. I would say, especially if someone has been through a lot of talk therapy where they have a hard time maybe articulating or opening up about things. Do you feel like pursuing these more creative approaches to therapy like a good avenue or a good route to try?
Bailee: Yeah, absolutely. I remember in grad school, I don’t even remember exactly which project it was. It was in research class and as a dancer, I’ve always been interested in the way that creativity impacts our brains and our emotional wellbeing. And I feel like we are more like God when we are creating than any other time. And so I did some research on just research articles and looking up things. And there were some studies, I think they came out of somewhere in Europe that said our brains connection when we are doing experiential therapy is so different than when we do talk therapy. Especially because we have learned how to build up barriers and convince ourselves how to answer and respond to things in very structured and safe ways when we use our words. But when we use art, when we use toys, when you do sand tray, when we’re moving, even being active, like with the horses, experientially, our bodies are processing things. Our minds are processing things that bypass the language part of our brain.
And so I definitely think that any kind of experiential therapy is helpful when people kind of get to a stuck place in therapy, or if they just want to try something different. I think that equine therapy is really helpful in combination with talk therapy. I kind of do a mix of both in my sessions, and I know that we’ve had therapists bring their clients out to the farm to do one or two off sessions with us just to gather more information or to gain more awareness for the client.
Carrie: That’s an interesting route too. I hadn’t really thought of that. So, if someone is looking for equine-assisted therapy, what do they need to look for? What kind of training would you recommend that they searched for?
Bailee: I think I mentioned earlier, I know of at least two different types of equine-assisted therapy. One is EAGALA, which is what I’m trained in. The other one is Path. They’re both therapeutic. Path is therapeutic riding, so you get on the horse. You’re engaging the horse a little bit, probably what you did when you went to land between the lakes, building that bond, that relationship with the horse.
There’s a really cool book that I read a couple of years ago. I think it’s called Hope Rising. And it’s just stories about kids somewhere in the Northwest who came out of a traumatic situation and they were paired with a horse who came out of a traumatic situation. And they learned and they became friends with each other and they grew and it was horsemanship.
So that was a very unique thing in that situation. There’s a lot of benefit to therapeutic horsemanship I think, like learning how to walk a horse, how to ride a horse, how to train a horse. But what I do is not horsemanship. Like I said earlier, we let the horses just be free and interact on their own accord.
So I think you would want to determine what you’re looking for in equine-assisted therapy. Primarily, if you’re looking for counseling, you want to make sure that you have a credentialed counselor. Somebody that knows what they’re doing and what they’re talking about. I would say somebody that aligns with your beliefs.
If you want a Christian therapist, you can find Christian equine therapists. You can find people that are marriage specific. There’s a variety around Nashville. There’s really quite a few. But then make sure that the people that you’re working with are also credentialed or trained with a specific program because you wouldn’t want to just show up to somebody’s house and they brush their horse and they call it therapy.
And it’s not really therapy. So you want to just check their background, their resources. And I would say too, making sure that the horses are treated ethically. Because if you’ve got a location, that’s got one or two horses and they’re seeing 20 clients a week, that’s not going to be good for the horse’s wellbeing.
They get burned out too. They give a lot in a session. We have quite a few that they have been so involved deeply in sessions that when we are finished with them, we have to tell the other therapists. “This horse needs a break. They’re done for the day.” So having like a variety of horses or just a plan in place for the horses get burned out. That’s part of the equine specialist job is to look out for the wellbeing of the horses.
Carrie: That’s awesome. That’s really neat. It’s cool that they have that emotional connection and they get worn out as well. And then they need a rest.
Bailee: They sure do. We’ve had some really, really cool sessions of just the horses feeling so much of what’s going on inside these people. I’m thinking of one specific incident.
We had a kid whose family was going through a lot of changes, a lot of chaos. There was some addiction involved and the kid kept telling me, “I’m fine. I’m fine.” And we were just like, “There’s no way you’re fine” like to that language, setting up that barrier. And we brought in the specific course, and typically we don’t tell clients the horse’s names because we don’t want them to have preconceived notions, we let them pick names themselves.
But I’ll tell you the horse’s name to make this story easier to understand. We brought in John Henry. It’s because if you have a best friend it’s named something and then we tell you that that horse has your best friend’s name it might change the way you view the horse.
And we want them to be as blank of a canvas as they can be, at least in the beginning, so that we can put our own expectations and our own projections onto the horse and deal with it that way. We’ve had people call a horse, that horse has called math. That one is English. That one is social studies. It worked out that way because they’re struggling in one of those subjects.
So there’s so many different ways that you can do it. This specific incident, this kid kept telling us he was fine and his mom was like, “I’m just not sure he’s fine like there’s so much going on.” And we brought John Henry into the arena and something happened, but John Henry started running circles. Running in circles, he started bucking, throwing his head around, just huffing and puffing and snorting. And this is a big horse, when he stands up on his hind legs he is tall. After he kind of calmed down and we looked at that kid and then we said, “well, what do you think about that?”And he was like, he had his arms crossed and he kind of had his brow frown and he was like, “Nothing. I don’t feel anything.”
And we’re like, but you reacted like your body reacted. We can see that you reacted and so that was a place where we were able to start getting some of those. We specifically noticed this happened, or he reacted this way even though his words didn’t want to tell us something was going on in his heart. And eventually it came to that. The way that horse was acting, represented how he felt inside.
Carrie: Wow. That’s so neat. That’s really cool. Yeah. It’s almost like the horse gave him a language that he didn’t have,
Bailee: Yeah. That’s definitely a big part of it, for sure.
Carrie: Are there any other stories or things that you wanted to share about how you’ve seen equine-assisted therapy be helpful for people with anxiety?
Bailee: I had a couple that kind of came to mind when I thought of this question. Another John Henry story is he’s a really good therapy horse. He’s actually had some traumatic experiences, so he is very in tune with people. I think they say that horses will either go to the extreme where they’re really not interested in people, not interested in anything, or they will become really gentle and really sensitive. He’s a really sensitive horse.
So one of my very first sessions was actually with the kid who was experiencing a lot of anxiety and irritability, but he was non-verbal. And so his parents brought him. They were just hoping that something more hands-on and something more natural would be helpful for him. And so my equine specialist at the time, she gets John Henry because we know he’s a pretty good horse, like with kids. And she had him on a rope because she was a little nervous about how the kid would respond. So usually we let them go free, but she kind of had him. She was sort of controlling the situation and we were trying to get the kid, “Hey, come pet the horse.”
The horse can see that like no response from him at all. He completely ignored us, sat down on the ground, and started building piles of dirt. And we were like, “okay, this is not going how we expected it to go.” And John Henry is pulling at the rope and acting kind of irritable, kind of crazy.
There was like a few cats around and they were just like meowing like there was just a lot of chaos in the situation. And I told my equine specialist, I said, how about just let him off the rope and see what happens. She was like, well, are you sure? I’m like, yeah, let’s just let them off. And so she let him off and he made a beeline for the kid kind of quick.
And then he slowed down until he got to a really gentle last step right up behind the kid and put his mouth down to the kid’s head. And when he touched a kid on the head the little kid turned around and looked right at John Henry. And that was the first interaction of anything in his environment
we had seen him do besides the dirt. So for the rest of the session, that kid would play in the dirt a little bit and then turn around and look at the horse. And if he moved, John Henry would move and he would stay right there with him. And at one point the kid became really fascinated with this horse, his feet, which most horse professionals be like, “Don’t get near the feet. Don’t get near the feet.”
So my equine specialist got a little nervous, but then she noticed that horse wasn’t moving a single muscle. He was so aware that this kid was by his feet. He was so aware of what was going on with the kid that he was totally still. Just after that, the kids started opening up more, started interacting with us more. We got more eye contact. His parents said he realized he was less anxious at home. So that was a really sweet one just because it’s kind of unique in that he wasn’t verbal. He couldn’t do talk therapy.
And so using the horses and using the environment was really cool. And then I had another.. These are a little shorter. That first one was a little long. So I know, remember one, this client, she was in her mid twenties. She came from a really chaotic home environment, had a lot of trauma, anxiety, and depression including some suicidal ideation and she had tried talk therapy. She really didn’t connect with her therapist. It was not a good situation. So she came out to see us. And so we invited her to spend a few minutes outside with the horses.
Just a lot of times we’ll say, go make friends with the horses or go, just figure out what it means to be still with horses. Depending on what the people bring we’ll give them a prompt and send them out into the field with horses. And this time we just said, “What does it mean for you for your heart to be at rest? “What does it mean for that anxiety to come down and that depression to release?” And she stayed out there for, I don’t know, 10 to 15 minutes. She came back and her face looked completely different. And she had spent a lot of time with a specific horse. And I was like, “so what did you learn?” She was like, “Well, you know, I realized I don’t have to work so hard. I don’t have to fight all the time. These horses, I enjoy their company just because they’re here and they enjoy mine just because I’m here. I have value because I exist.” And that was just like such a light bulb moment for her and just totally shifted her perspective of herself and of her value in the world.
And then another one was a woman who is about 40 and she had walked through a season with miscarriage and just had a lot going on grief, anxiety in relation to like what would happen in the future. Just a lot of baggage that comes with that as well. And so we gave her the prompt to just go see where she feels like she can actually connect, which horse she feels connected to. And she ended up really spending a lot of time with one of my favorites and her name is Gypsy. The woman came back and she was telling us about why she felt like she connected with Gypsy. And she just felt so much calmer when she was with her like the horse could really understand her. And she spent some time talking to the horse. We don’t know what she said but you know, Gypsy HIPAA compliant, she keeps her secrets that she was just out there for a while. And she was telling us all these things and telling us about her season of the miscarriage.
And I was actually able to share in that moment that Gypsy had also had a miscarriage. And it’s that, like the client, she just started crying and she was like, “I just knew. I knew there was something she understands me.” So after that, each time she came back, she would just feel really connected to Gypsy and did a lot of work with that horse.
Carrie: That’s so cool. Towards the end of every podcast, I like to ask the guests to share a story of hope, which is a time that you received hope from God or another person.
Bailee: We could talk about this all day.
Carrie: It’s a good topic.
Bailee: It really is. And especially for the time that we’re in right now, we feel like hope is elusive to some people.
For me, I feel like it has been such an anchor. And I hope it’s definitely in the Lord, but in the dance program, I teach, I get to write a spiritual curriculum each year. And I felt like this year, the Lord put on my heart the theme to be the promises of God and just took that scripture from Hebrews 6 where God makes a promise to Abraham and he’s like, “I will bless you and I’ll give you many descendants.”
And it says that God had nothing bigger to swear by. So he made an oath on his own name and it says, when God makes a promise, he cannot break it. He cannot lie. And because of that, it gives us strength because we can trust that he is who he says he is. That hope is an anchor for our soul. I picture that as like putting my heart on something that’s stable rather than on like the world around me. I felt like that was so important for me in this past year because it’s the story of everything in 2020. Everything has shown to be shakable. The world has been completely shaken. Everything has been ripped out from underneath us.
Things have changed. People have died. There’s so much I want my students to know. I want my students to know that God is so firm. And that’s where I’ve really found my hope. When he says he will bring all things under his rule and he will renew heaven and earth.
He’s not joking. He’s not playing games. His word is secured. I’ve seen God do many things, transform lives, speak identity, serve on a prayer team at my church too, and just seeing him work in that. As I was thinking about this, I thought of just this cool concept. I had my first garden this past year.
And it was a total experiment. I was like, I don’t know if this is going to work. I don’t think I have enough sunshine, but here we go. And it was abundant. I had so many cucumbers that I didn’t even eat them. It was amazing. And so I’m planning for my next year. And last week I was doing some garden prep. So, do you know what one of the best fertilizers for a garden is?
Carrie: Is it horse manure?
Bailee: It is. It is because they eat so well. All the grass. So last a couple of weekends ago, I got it from a place in town in Nashville, and I went over and got buckets full of manure. Buckets full of manure to transport in my car.
I don’t have a truck. And I came and I was like spreading it out all over my garden and just in preparation for this next season. And then it was just, God was just teaching me more through this. I work with horses all the time and we get the good parts of them. We see the way that they interact, we see their hearts, we see their compassion, but the manure is kind of gross. The poop is gross. The clients don’t like to walk around like, “Oh, it’s horse poop.” And I’m like, “well, it’s part of having a horse.” There’s some gross parts. And then planting my garden, what I wanted was those gross parts because that’s what eventually will break down and out of that becomes beautiful things.
And so just like the Lord takes our broken stuff and he brings redemption and beauty out of broken things is just the way the garden works. Come this fall or come this spring and summer out of that horsemen, there will be grown seeds of nourishment and beauty and that’s just been really hopeful for me.
If nothing, I feel like God is a God of redemption. He brings beauty out of brokenness. So just thinking like using horseman manure to bring beauty and a garden, that’s just given me some hope recently.
Carrie: I love that. That’s really what the show’s all about is giving people hope and seeing that God can take the hard parts of our story and the painful things and make something beautiful out of it. Thank you for coming on and sharing all that. This has been Inspirational but also so informative. There were so many just different little nuggets that you got to share with us.
Bailee: Thank you for having me. It’s so fun to get to talk about it. I love what I do, and I know a lot of people don’t really understand it. So it’s fun to get to explain a little bit more in detail.
Carrie: Awesome.
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I love having these types of interviews on the show because we’re all about increasing hope here. And if you’ve found that one particular type of counseling didn’t work for you, or you feel like I don’t know that I could do the whole talking thing, or that’s not a good fit for my child, this might be something to look into as an option.
We have some exciting interviews coming up on the podcast, as well as a very special mother’s day edition. Next week, I will be discussing a giveaway in honor of our 25th episode. So make sure that you stay tuned for that as well. I’m also asking you to save the date of May 15th. We are going to have our very first webinar on reducing shame. So what I’m hoping to do through these webinars is have a little bit more of a time for me to present some information, as well as have follow-up questions and answers. Or if you have questions about shame that you would like me to address during the webinar, I certainly can do that.
Please feel free to send those questions through our website contact form wwwdothopeforanxietyandocd.com. And we will see you on the webinar at 10:00 AM central time on May 15th. As always, 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 completed by Benjamin Bynam. Until next time it may be comforted by God’s great love for you.
Today, I had the privilege of having not one, but two guests on the show! Alexa Hulsey and Trey Brackman, both licensed acupuncturists came on to talk to us all about acupuncture and how it can be helpful for anxiety among other things.
What is acupuncture and how does it work?
What happens during an acupuncture session?
Modalities acupuncturist use for patients who feel anxious about acupuncture needles.
Some theories about how acupuncture helps with anxiety
Hope For Anxiety and OCD, episode 23. Today on the show we are talking all about acupuncture. I was able to interview Alexa Hulsey and Trey Brackman from in circle acupuncture. They are both a licensed acupuncturist and they talk to us about what an acupuncture session looks like and how acupuncture can benefit anxiety.
So let’s dive right in.
Alexa: My name is Alexa Hulsey. I’m a licensed acupuncturist. I have been practicing since 2005. And I am the owner of Encircle Acupuncture here in Nashville. We have two locations in Nashville. I like to say that I became an acupuncturist because I wanted to help people. And then I became a community acupuncturist because I wanted to help a lot of people. Community acupuncture is set up in a way to make acupuncture affordable and accessible to really anyone who needs it because we offer our services in an affordable way.
Carrie: Awesome and Trey?
Trey: How did I get into acupuncture. That’s almost 30 years ago. I got my first acupuncture treatment right out of high school and decided that that’s what I wanted to do after my own experience. I’ve been practicing now for 18 years in a community-based setting. And I did private room acupuncture for a long time and was really hard for me because I couldn’t do it with enough people and it wasn’t affordable enough for them to get it enough to be beneficial to them. And when I found Alexa, nine years ago, I actually went into one of her clinics to get acupuncture and I was like, this is what I want to do and how I want to do it. I’ve been with Alexa full-time for nine years this year.
Carrie: So tell us a little bit about the difference between what you just said there about maybe a private acupuncture versus a community acupuncture clinic.
Trey: So private room acupuncture is one person in one room, typically on a massage table and community acupuncture, we have a big room and pre-COVID, 21 or two chairs in east Nashville. And in Bellevue, 13, 14 chairs recliners, and you’ll have a patient every 10 minutes and in a community acupuncture setting. Typically in private room, you’ll have a patient every 30 or 45 minutes. So you can treat a lot more people in a day than you can do in community acupuncture than you can in private room.
Carie: Awesome.
Alexa: Community acupuncture really gets back to the root of how acupuncture has been traditionally practiced for thousands of years in China and in other Asian countries. Acupuncture was typically done in groups. In some areas, an acupuncturist would travel to a village and just treat people in somebody’s house. And so our set-up, it kind of feels like a living room. Everybody’s in a comfortable chair and it makes it so that we can see more people and that way we can charge less.
Carrie: Awesome. I really liked that concept in terms of receiving care and receiving health in a community setting. Whereas a lot of times in America, our healthcare is so individualized and isolated at times too, because of that. That’s really neat. A lot of the listeners probably have never had an acupuncture session so we just want to talk with them a little bit about what does that even look like?
Alexa: Sure. I’ll walk you through what a typical acupuncture session is like. We start like pretty much any medical appointment with you, filling out some paperwork, we’ll ask about your medical history and then we’ll do a brief intake with a new patient.
The goal of our intake is really to just figure out why are you here? What can we help you with? What’s really bothering you. And we try to really focus in on a patient’s chief complaint and what is going to be the thing that we really want to focus on. What patients will find often is that if we focus on one or two things for their first few treatments, then all of these other things that they might not have even mentioned to us also start to feel better because everything is connected. So it’s kind of fun when that happens. We really focus on a patient’s chief complaint.
We will recommend a treatment plan based on what they’re seeking help for and what our experience is in treating that condition. A treatment plan varies, but generally people need a course of treatment and not just one acupuncture treatment. So it’s like taking vitamins. You can’t just take one vitamin, you got to take a lot. So you’ll need a course of treatment. Usually, sometimes we have people come in once a week. Sometimes we want them to come in every day if their pain is so severe that they can barely walk. So we talk about a treatment plan.
And then we’ll have a patient, they’ll be in a recliner in our clinic we use points on the extremities. Patients will just roll up their sleeves and pant legs. They don’t have to change clothes or anything like that. And we will needle a few points on the head, arms, and legs. Usually, we’ll use somewhere between 10 and 20 needles during a treatment. Once the needles are in, we cover up the patient with a blanket and walk away. And then that’s when the real magic happens is when a patient is resting with the needles in. We typically let them rest for about an hour and then we’ll take the needles out and, and the treatment is done. So really most of the acupuncture treatment is the patient lying there, relaxing, doing nothing.
Carrie: That sounds like a good time to me, just relaxing and doing nothing. I have had acupuncture and I did find it to be super relaxing. And that’s one of the reasons that I wanted to have you both on the show because we’re talking a lot about anxiety.
It’s interesting. The point that you brought up there, Alexa, about how when you work on one issue, you don’t always realize the domino effect that’s going to happen If you’re working with someone in terms of pain and then all of a sudden their pain is relieved. They notice they start sleeping better and then they notice it’s like a ripple that happens and that’s really neat. Or then maybe they come up with some other things like therapy, they come up with some other things that they want to work on once one thing is relieved. It’s like, “well, maybe can you help me with this too?”
Alexa: Yeah, that definitely has,
Trey: I would say 90% of the time. Yeah.
Carrie: Yeah. In terms of anxiety and pain and other physical issues, sometimes when you have physical issues the anxiety surrounding dealing with those issues can be so great and almost worse than the actual medical problem that you’re having right now.
I know that happened to me a couple of years ago, I was dealing with some digestive issues and someone said, “Well, maybe you’re just stressed about it.” And I said, or “maybe you’re just stressed in general and that’s causing these digestive issues. And I said, “I don’t think you understand my stress is from the digestive issues” because I can’t figure out what’s going on and how to fix it. This is not a psychosomatic complaint.
Alexa: Anxiety and depression are huge components especially of pain conditions. Dealing with pain for a long time that does become depressing. You start to think my life is never going to be the same again.
You become anxious about what the future holds. And then those anxiety and depressive feelings can compound the pain that you’re feeling and taking a pain medication can help the pain, but it’s not going to do anything for your depression and anxiety. Whereas what we do with acupuncture is a much more holistic approach.
Carrie: Can you explain a little bit of from maybe what’s been studied about how does this actually work?
Trey: Well, there have been a lot of modern-day studies that through MRIs and thermal imaging, that show that it reduces inflammation, improves blood flow, can stimulate hormone releases, balance your hormones, but how the body actually knows to do that when we take the needles and put them in these specific points, there is no definitive answer as to how the body knows to do that when we’re doing acupuncture, but it works. It’s been working for thousands of years and just in the 18 years I’ve practiced, just observing people come in and get better and reduce their pain or help their anxiety or their OCD or their arthritis in their knees, whatever it is, how it’s doing that, I’m not sure anyone has really discovered the real true one answer to that.
Carrie: I’d love a good mystery and intrigue, but I’m also very intuitive. So I’m kind of in that camp of like, well, if it works let’s use it. You know, I don’t need you to always explain everything to me on a scientific study level.
Testimonials are very valuable. Do you think that this is a little bit of an offshoot of a question, but things like acupuncture and chiropractic and holistic wellness, a lot of times aren’t valued or paid for by insurance companies. Do you think that we’ll get to a point where we shift from a disease model to a health model at all? Do you think that we’re making any strides towards that?
Alexa: I do think that we’re making some strides. Acupuncture is being used by the military and is being paid for by the military. There is talk of acupuncture being used by medicare to treat acupuncture specifically for treating lower back pain is going to be covered by medicare one of these days. Trey probably has been hearing the same line too, since he went to acupuncture school. I’ve since I enrolled in acupuncture school, I’ve heard insurance reimbursement for acupuncture universally is just around the corner. It still hasn’t happened.
So our work around has been just, well, let’s not even worry about insurance. Just charge a price that everyone can afford. Our prices are less than a copay and now we don’t even have to worry about insurance. We don’t have to fill out insurance forms and that gives people a lot more flexibility because insurance will usually limit, some insurance does pay for acupuncture.
We will usually limit the number of treatments a person can get or what it can be used for. The way that we approach it is, let’s just let the patient decide what they need and just make it available to them.
Carrie: And the community based acupuncture model, I just wanted to point that out that that’s not just in the Nashville area that people can actually go online and find community-based acupuncture in their area.
Trey: Yeah, worldwide.
Carrie: Oh, worldwide. That’s awesome.
Alexa: Worldwide, absolutely. There are clinics everywhere. If you do an internet search for community acupuncture, type in the name of your city. Not every town has a community acupuncture clinic, unfortunately, but it becomes more and more prevalent.
Carrie: Whenever you guys want to come to Rutherford county, you’re welcome. It’s open invitation.
What about if people are anxious surrounding needles, if people say, “I don’t really know if I can do that acupuncture thing, because she just said she was going to stick a lot of needles in me.”
Trey: We actually see that quite a bit and my personal approach to that is I’ll use four needles on somebody who’s typically a little bit anxious.
You can do a really good treatment with just four needles, especially for someone who has anxiety surrounding needles. And that first one or two treatments for them is about them getting used to the idea and feeling acupuncture needles go in and realizing that it doesn’t hurt. I have several patients that are still needle-phobic, but they come anyway because it really helps them, but they just put in their earbuds, turn on their meditation or whatever, their music, and they close their eyes and they just don’t watch and then they’re fine. Usually, I start very slow with them and just do four, maybe four, sometimes six needles, and go from there.
Carrie: It could be a really good exposure for some people that have that specific phobia, it might help them have a more positive experience. But also the needle size that you’re talking about is a lot smaller than a typical needle.
Trey: Yeah. Two of your hairs together. They’re like 36 gauge. They’re tiny.
Carrie: Yeah. So maybe that helps relieve some people’s anxiety here thinking about trying acupuncture. It’s not as bad.
Alexa: It’s truly not as bad as you think. A lot of patients report that they don’t even feel the needles. Which if you’ve never had it, it seems impossible, how can I not feel the needle going in me, but it is because they are so, so thin and fine. We did this more before the pandemic, but if someone wanted to bring in a friend or a family member who was anxious about the acupuncture, we would invite them to come in, just like say, “Hey, come sit next to your friend and watch what happens and just relax. See what it’s like.” It’s more difficult to do that now during the pandemic obviously because we have a lot more restraints on how many people we can have, but our model does allow for friends and family to come in together. So if somebody wants to try it and they want to bring a friend for moral support and the two of you get treatment at the same time, we can do that.
Trey: And we’ve had lots of children over the years and teenagers who have come in to get it and their parents will come and sit with them and hold their hand while they get their first few needles. We’ve done that as well for four kids.
Carrie: Yeah, I think that’s really helpful for people to know that this is a good option for children and adolescents too. A lot of times people are looking for more natural remedies because they don’t necessarily want to put their child or teenager on medication right away, and this might be a good alternative option for them to look into.
Alexa: Definitely.
Carrie: Anything else that you wanted to say in terms of how you’ve seen acupuncture be helpful for anxiety?
Alexa: I think we could probably both speak to a lot of cases where we’ve seen acupuncture be helpful for anxiety. I would say that, that is probably the number two thing that brings people into our clinic. The first being pain. We do treat a lot of pain and the second is probably anxiety. We see so many people with anxiety. People don’t always have great results with some of the pharmaceutical options that are out there to treat anxiety.
They might have side effects, or they just don’t want to be taking that and they’re needing solutions. I don’t know how much we want to get into sort of the theory of how it helps anxiety.
Trey mentioned that there’ve been some studies showing that acupuncture reduces inflammation, increases circulation. The way that we look at it is that acupuncture is going to basically remove blockages in your body. So we look at the body as a system of energetic flow and we call that energy Qi in Chinese medicine. Qi reaches every part of your body and it’s really what makes us alive. Qi gets blocked easily by lots of different factors.
And so we’re really using the needles just to remove those blockages and restore balance, and then the body does. The work on its own that it needs to do to be into a balanced and harmonious state with something like anxiety, a lot of times we’re working on the heart system and that doesn’t necessarily mean that someone with anxiety has heart disease, their blood pressure might be fine.
Their blood flow might be fine, but there’s an imbalance there in that system. The heart is the center of the emotions in traditional Chinese medicine and it gets out of balance easily when there’s a lot of external stressors. And so a lot of times we’re working on restoring balance to that system.
The heart system also is related to sleep. So people with anxiety often experience a lot of problems with sleep. So we can work on those things in tanem. Sleep is one of those things that we’ll often get better without someone expecting when they’re coming in for acupuncture. And then they’ll come back, like you said, after a few treatments and say, “oh, I’m sleeping better. And I wasn’t expecting that.”
Carrie: That makes a lot of sense to me in terms of what you were saying about the heart because a lot of people who experience anxiety have a more rapid heart rate and their stress system is getting over-activated in times where it doesn’t need to be activated. It’s also connected to pain because the pain pathway in our brain also runs through that limbic system controlling the fight, flight or freeze response. It’s interesting how all of those things are interconnected and then when we’re out of balance, as you said, and something gets stuck, if you can release that it’s like the body already knows what to do to heal itself, which is very similar to a type of therapy I do called EMDR, which works at the brain level. And it’s kind of from the same premise like your body and your brain already know what to do to reach that point of healing. It’s just a matter of getting you unstuck. So that’s really neat.
Alexa: Yes, absolutely.
Trey: I always referred to it as getting out of your own way and letting your body do what it already knows how to do.
Carrie: That’s good. Let’s talk about maybe people who are coming from a Christian faith perspective. I did a previous show on mindfulness, which was super fun and we talked about origins of mindfulness and how that can integrate with Christian faith. I think when things come out of Eastern origin, some Christians are like, “Oh, that’s not Christian.[00:20:46] That’s more rooted in Buddhism and we have to watch out for that. It could be a spiritual practice that goes against our faith.” Would you mind speaking to that concern a little bit?
Alexa: Sure, absolutely. Our approach, first of all with acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine, spirituality is a huge part of health. And so it’s important that a person feels that their whatever practices they’re doing are aligned with their spirituality because that’s going to promote healing. Traditional Chinese medicine comes from a tradition of Daoism. It’s really rooted in Daoism and Daosim isn’t a religion, it’s a philosophy.
And it’s a way of looking at the world and the body and health based on observation of nature. So we take those observations of nature and then apply them to the body. So for example, we talk about the pathways of chief low in the body. We relate those to bodies of water, and some points are described as being like springs or like rivers or like wells because those points behave the way that those bodies of water would, it would behave in nature.
So Daoism can really be in alignment with any religious beliefs. And for that reason, a person of any religious faith can get acupuncture, can be treated by an acupuncturist, and still rest assured that the treatment is going to support their spirituality. It’s going to support their religion. It’s not going to be in conflict with anything that they believe.
Carrie: Do you find that some people have spiritual experiences, like when they’re receiving acupuncture like having a sense of spiritual connectedness?
Trey: Yes, and that was one of the things I was actually just going to touch on in all the years I’ve practiced. I’ve worked on a lot of people who have come in and are Christian and a great many of them over the years have told me one of the things that they love about coming to acupuncture is that it allows them time to pray and when they get their needles because it clears out all the rest of the chatter that goes on in our heads. They turn their phone off. They take their smartwatch off and they truly just rest and it allows them to really actually be clearer about what they’re praying for, or who they’re praying for. And I have seen and heard that a lot over the years that it just clears out the clutter of the brain and it allows them just to focus on that one thing and in that way.
Carrie: That’s awesome because I think I have had that experience in terms of receiving acupuncture. I don’t remember why, but I remember that I ended up crying one of my first few sessions and it was just this, I can’t really explain it other than there was a sense of spiritual connectedness to God in that moment through prayer. And just that sense of being able to just be and just rest and be present is really powerful. Something that we don’t do enough in our society is just allow ourselves to be and to rest and to give our bodies space and openness to heal or to connect with something outside ourselves.
Alexa: It’s so powerful and it’s so healing when you can get into that state where you’re feeling connected to the divine and you’re feeling really in alignment with your own spirituality. It’s a huge part of healing and also when people are going through a difficult time with their health, they really rely on their faith to get them through that.
I love what Trey was saying about people using that time to pray because faith is what gets many of our patients through their most difficult challenges.
Trey: And when there’s a lot of people in the clinic when the clinic is full and everybody’s in there, and they have their needles in and they’re all in their space, you can feel the hum of the energy in the room where all the people in here are doing the exact same thing.
They’re there, they’re resting, they’re healing. They’re letting go of their stress, their anxiety and you can feel that hum when there’s two, three, four, five, six, seven, 10, or 12 people in the room, all doing the same thing. If you’re paying attention, you can feel that hum of all of them trying to heal and whatever level they’re trying to get it to.
Carrie: Does that feel like a lot of energy or does that feel like a release of energy? I’m just curious.
Trey: It depends on the people. Sometimes it’s really heavy and strong and it’s like you’re parting it to get to the people and sometimes it’s light and airy. It depends, I think on who’s in the clinic and why they’re here and what they’re praying about or meditating about or focusing on while they’re here. So the feel of it actually changes.
Carrie: That’s very interesting.
Alexa: And it’s cool because in that way, each patient in there is contributing to the healing of the other patients as well. You’re creating this collective healing space. So we’re all helping each other, which is not a typical approach in healthcare.
Like you said, it’s usually very individualized, very isolated, but our approach is we all have something to offer. We can all give and receive in the process of healing. So it’s beautiful to be able to be a part of that. And Carrie, you mentioned about having an emotional release and that is not unusual at all for someone to have an emotional release during a treatment or after treatment crying. Sometimes people laugh.
And I noticed that especially with patients who are dealing with anxiety because anxiety can be so much work to manage just in your daily life. Just trying to navigate situations that people without anxiety wouldn’t find difficult when you have anxiety. It is difficult whether it’s going to the grocery store or having a conversation with a coworker.
So it’s so much harder to do some of those things that when you finally do get the chance to rest and relax, you don’t realize how much emotion you’ve been holding on to and then that release feels great and it’s an important part of healing.
Carrie: That makes a lot of sense to me because it does take a lot of energy when you have anxiety, too, whether it’s to get through the day or sometimes that energy is used to suppress other painful emotions and that makes sense to me.
So we’re kind of winding down to the end of our interview, but I do want to say that I’m going to put some links in the show notes for those who are local to look up Encircle Acupuncture and for those who are not local to look up community acupuncture near them so that people can join in on this experience.
Since the show is called Hope for Anxiety and OCD, I like to ask our guests to share a story of hope at a time that you received hope from God or another person.
Alexa: I’ll go first. I feel so lucky because I get to hear stories of hope pretty much on a daily basis from our patients. It is very inspiring to be around. One patient in particular, who has really inspired me as a patient who a couple of years ago received a very scary cancer diagnosis. She had been coming to the clinic for a long time, just for various ailments, and then she received this diagnosis and it was so scary but she was determined to do what she had to do and she followed her doctor’s advice to the letter.
She did all of her chemo. She does all of her radiation. She did all of that. She put a lot of trust in what her doctor was recommending and at the same time, she also said, “I’ve got to do more. This is the fight of my life and so I have to be all in.” She did more research and homework than I’ve seen most patients do.
And she really became an expert on healing her cancer and she did, she beat it, and she’s more than a year cancer-free now. Even some of her nurses have made comments to her, like, “wow, you are really doing so much to heal.” And her response has kind of been like, “well, you know, I have to.” She’s a very spiritual person and really relied on her faith to get her through
the scariest time in her life. And I still see her every week and she’s doing great. She’s just to me, an example of courage in the face of something really scary and using that as an opportunity to learn. She’s come out of this even healthier than she was before. She’s a huge inspiration.
Carrie: That’s awesome.
Trey: I have several. I could probably filter through but mine is oddly more personal, which is normally not what I would share. Nine years ago, Alexa and I hashed out an agreement on a little over nine years ago, hashed out an agreement on a napkin actually. And I lost the job that I had and I called Alexa that same Friday at like noon.
She called me back at two o’clock and I started the following week and it really has allowed me to do something I was ready to walk away from because it wasn’t fulfilling for me. And that totally changed in the nine years I’ve worked for you. We’ve treated hundreds of thousands of people, and it’s brought a lot of joy to me personally, and by extension to my wife and kids.
Carrie: That’s awesome.
Alexa: And Trey I just love that we’ve been working together for so long, but I think everybody can relate to that feeling of just being in a place where it’s just not right and you want to change and it’s scary to make a change, but you can do it. It can transform into something that you love. [00:32:00] So that’s an inspiration to me too, I’m glad you shared that.
Carrie: That’s awesome. Thank you so much for being on the show and for sharing with us, your wisdom and your experience with acupuncture and kind of letting all the newbies know what it’s like, and hopefully, it’ll encourage people to try it out sometime.
Alexa: I hope it does. Thank you for having us.
Carrie: You’re welcome.
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I know I talked on this episode a little bit about my own experience with acupuncture. I wanted to do that because initially going into it. I was really nervous like is this going to be something that’s not in alignment with my Christian faith? And I did a lot of research, read everything on the website, as well as some other information on the internet about acupuncture and how it works and what the process was. And I said you know what, I don’t see anything for me personally that goes against the Bible or goes against the major tenants of Christian faith. I believe that acupuncture is one of the tools that God has given us to help heal our bodies and lead us towards a place of greater health.
And for you, it may or may not be for you and that’s okay. Hopefully, I won’t get any hateful emails on this issue. If I do, I’ll just ignore them and pay attention to the people that are enjoying the show.
Speaking of people who are enjoying the show, did you know that we have people who are listening all over the place, including Mt. Juliet, Tennessee? Which is not too far from here. All the way to West Lake Stevens, Washington, and Paradise, Nevada. I know that we have some people who are listening in Europe, Africa, and Australia as well. So, where are you listening from? Let us know by messaging me on Instagram or Facebook, I would love to hear from you. And if you aren’t following us there, please do.
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.
Lindsey Castleman, a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist trained in IFS therapy holds the belief that we were all designed for relationship and connection with God, ourselves and others.
What is IFS (Internal Family System) Therapy
How did Lindsey get into Christian counseling
How did she incorporate Christian faith principles into her practice
Looking at the core of self through attachment and faith-based lens
Some parts of self want attention come in different forms like anxiety and OCD
Bringing all parts of yourself connected as God is three in one
Hope for anxiety and OCD episode 22. One of the things that I really love about this podcast is that I have the opportunity to meet new people and learn new things, which is super fun for me. So just know that as you’re learning along today that I was learning this information for the first time too.
I got to interview a local therapist, Lindsey Castleman. She is going to talk with us today about a specific form of therapy called Internal Family Systems or IFS for short. The cool part is that Lindsey is going to incorporate Christian faith principles in her explanation. So without further ado here is Lindsey Castleman.
Carrie: Lindsey, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Lindsey: Hi, Carrie. Thanks for having me. I am a licensed marriage and family therapist and I have been practicing since 2014. Right now, I’m certified in emotionally focused therapy and then I’m also trained in internal family systems, which is IFS and then brain spotting.
So those are kind of the specialties that I’m in, but I really have just enjoyed this journey. I’m in private practice here in Brentwood, Tennessee, and have been here for several years, but I’ve also practiced in a church. And then right now, I am the counseling director at a church here in Brentwood, Tennessee. I’ve got a fun group of people that I get to practice with out here, so I really enjoyed it.
Carrie: That’s really neat. It’s kind of unique being in a church environment. There aren’t that many churches in our area that have counseling services within the church building.
Lindsey: It has honestly been something one that I didn’t expect to have happened. I’ve actually at this place, I have experienced counseling here myself before and then just through a series of kind of pretty cool God moments that it just ended up to where we were able to partner and I was able to bring in a lot of my therapist friends, which is nice, but also some new therapists I didn’t know before. Just everybody that kind of sees clientele through just an attachment and faith-based lens, which is really where I lean in a lot of the ways that I work.
Carrie: That’s really neat. It’s always good to have a positive jelling work environment. If you’re working with people that you’re friends with that’s a good thing.
Lindsey: Oh, for sure and I know for me, and being in private practice on my own, not with the group, how lonely it can be.And so when I get to step outside my door and there’s people I know, and people I like, it lights the fire. It makes it more exciting to come do what we do, because then I’m like, “Oh my goodness. I’m not alone in these places.” Somebody else is in the next room going through the same thing I’m going through. So that’s really nice to just know and have that felt sense of somebody in the same building with you.
Carrie: So we had another licensed marriage and family therapist on. We talked a little bit about that bent of counseling and that license. Tell us how you decided between becoming a licensed counselor or licensed marriage and family therapist.
There’s lots of different avenues that therapists can go down. How did you get into this realm of attachment and Christian counseling?
Lindsey: Part of it is personal, part of it is professional in the sense that for myself, I’ve been married to my high school sweetheart. I think this coming up this year, it’ll be 17 years. As we all know, in any kind of relationship, you will have friction, you’ll have disconnection. Things will go awry because it’s two humans, not perfect humans in relationship together, and that’s really what marriage is supposed to be designed to is to hold up that marriage to say, “We’ve got some stuff we got to look at.”
So going into marriage counseling ourselves for us as a couple was really, really great, really helpful. And then also I used to work for a ministry. I did their marketing, I did public relations, just things like that, even training. It was a small group ministry, I would get to sit in small groups. I would even lead small groups.
The funny thing too is I would look at those small groups and I would be like, “Oh my gosh, all these people have so many problems like why can’t they just stop it?” Why can’t they just stop it like Bob Newhart like you got anxiety, whatever. Just stop it.
That was a little bit of my mentality. But as I started sitting in these groups and hearing these people’s stories, I started to see things from a bigger perspective. Nobody’s choosing this in that sense of like these are places that they turn to cope. These are places that they turned to because, in their family, there wasn’t a safe place to turn to.
I’m fortunate that for me, growing up, I had safe places to turn to. So I think also why it was so foreign to me, but then I start to hear other people’s experiences and I was like, “Oh my gosh, they, they didn’t get what I got.” It was vastly different, which makes sense as to why they show up the way they do.
You start to see things are connected. It’s going into systems. It’s systemic in that, just looking into LPC or LMFT, just everything within the LMFT track for me it felt like, it’s not just the one person, it’s the relationship with parent, the relationship with self, the relationship with other, the relationship with God. It all had to do with that sort of connection. That to me felt just really right. It felt like it fit even how I believe that God relates with us and how he wants to be our safe base, how he wants to be our safe haven. How he shows his care for us. How he’s available to us. How we can trust him. He never leaves us. He never forsakes us. All of these things felt like attachment. It kind of magnifies and really says in a way like, Hey, here’s how God designed us and I feel like a lot of people that study human behavior, the more they study it, the more they see that we are created for connection. It’s almost like it points back to our creator, that to me just felt really beautiful and I’m going “okay I can align with that.”
Carrie: Yeah, that’s great. There’s a lot of people that have done research regarding attachment related to spirituality in terms of attachment to God and attachment styles related to how you interacted with your parents, affecting how you view God and how you connect with him, which makes a ton of sense.
Lindsey: Oh, yeah. That’s very common. Anytime we do an attachment history and we go through, there’s a lot of times where you’ll start to go, I see how you’re related to mom or I see how you’re related to dad and then when we start to move into how did you view God? How do you feel like God viewed you? A lot of times you’ll see those similarities based on maybe how they felt like dad viewed you or you viewed dad, or how mom viewed you or you viewed mom. There can be a lot of similarities in that, but then there’s also those instances where parents weren’t safe, but somebody modeled the love of God to them so they were able to see “God is different than what I got at home” if home was unsafe. So I’ve also had those two which have been beautiful in those ways.
Carrie: Yes, that’s good. I wanted to have you on the show because I liked to talk with people and educate them that therapy is not a one size fits all approach.
And so there are many different models and theories regarding therapy. And so one of the ones that you shared a little while ago that you use is internal family systems and this is actually one that I’m not as familiar with, but I’m curious about it and would love to hear just kind of, like a brief overview, even just how you would explain it to clients.
Lindsey: Sure. Internal family systems for me, I honestly, truly didn’t know much about it until some therapists here in Nashville who I respect and admire were like, “Have you heard about this? This is pretty incredible” and for me, truthfully, I mean, truth be told, I usually work with couples. Couples are kind of a little bit more my jam and working with individuals was a little boring to me. There’s not as much energy. There’s not as much excitement. You’re not holding as much. Sometimes I catch myself yawning in session. I mean, there was just something where I was like I feel like I’m not getting as much traction as you do when you’ve got the other person there is that stimuli to really get things moving and going, and also to be kind of truth-tellers about what really is happening in the other person.
When I started to learn more about IFS, I started to go, “Oh, Whoa.” I get like excited to do this. This is something where I feel like we’ve got movement going and it feels like it lines up with even what I’m trying to do with couples in the room.
It’s almost like what you’re trying to do within your client and themselves, it’s like to have a good relationship with himself, just like I try to do with couples. It’s like, “Oh, I get this.” This is like self to whatever’s happening within you and relating to it, because what you’ve probably seen, Carrie, even in your practices is like people show up that are very disconnected to themselves.
Carrie: Yes. Very true.
Lindsey: Maybe they’re only in their head. Maybe they’ve got something in them that just comes and takes over and it like floods them. So there’s no relationship. It’s almost like it pushes them out of the way and says, I got this or the anger is going to come out in this way. It just started to make so much sense to me. So that’s kind of why I was like, Ooh, I like this, this kind of jives with what I like to see in couples therapy, just that relationship piece. But I’m going to back up to say, okay, so what is it?
So what internal family systems is, is that there’s this idea, the theory, which I believe is more than an idea or a theory because I’ve watched it happen live and in myself is that at the core of us, we have ourselves in IFS terms. They call it the self for me, just a way that I look at it through the lens of faith, I find it as the image of God because I believe scripture says in all of us, we are all image-bearers of Christ. We’re all image-bearers of God. There is something that says, there are times when the self or for me, the way I view it, that’s not IFS that’s Lindsey lingo for it. That’s just me kind of putting it into my face frame. It says, there are times when, based on things that have happened in life, relationships that we’ve had where we have got more limited access to the image of God, to self because things have threatened it and we’ve needed to in some way protect that in us even thinking about like protecting our heart really, and we’ve needed to do that. And there are different ways that we protect those more vulnerable places in us. With IFS, they say, we protect with what’s called managers and we protect with firefighters and what we’re actually protecting are called exiles. I know this can all sound confusing, but you think of exiles, exiles are usually in some way they’re younger parts of us that were scared, that needed a safe place, that needed a safe haven and it didn’t happen. We didn’t get it in some way. What’s happening here is that we have developed ways to protect that from being hurt in that way, again, from being affected in that way again.
The manager is going to be something more that says, “Hey, we’re going to come up and try to manage whatever pain is happening. We’re going to try to manage it.”
Maybe what we do to manage it is we keep you up in your head and we keep you always just analyzing. You’re never actually like feeling anything. You’re just analyzing everything.
Carrie: That happens with OCD quite frequently actually that people with OCD live in their head.
Lindsey: Yeah, totally and that makes sense. Then there’s also managers that will say, Hey, let’s just stay busy. Let’s just make sure everything is tidy in the house, or let’s make sure that we get all of these projects done. I mean, managers can come up in so many different forms.
And then you’ve got firefighters. Firefighters are going to say, Oh, there’s the pain there. We’re not going to take time to manage the pain. We’re going to try to put the pain out the fastest way we can do that. We’re going to try to put the pain out. So let’s numb the pain. Let’s maybe even you’ll find alcohol can be in this place, even pornography can be in this place. It usually can feel a little bit more dangerous at times, but it’s doing its job. It’s trying to put the pain out. This is hard, but like even like suicide, suicide alley that can even fall into that category that says this pain is too much, let me tell you how to put this out very, very quickly.
What happens is, is that for a lot of these managers and firefighters, a lot of different modalities will maybe in some way try to push past them. Try to say, let’s just get to the exile or let’s just get to the heart, let’s get to the deeper thing that’s been hiding in there, but IFS says, “No, we need to work with the whole system.” We need to actually move into, befriend and we need to help these managers and these firefighters because when they trust us, when we can start to work with them, and teach our clients how to work with them, then we’re going to start to get access to these exiles that they really need our help and our attention, but we don’t want to get there without working with the whole system to get there if that makes sense. Because what they’ve found and even Richard Swartz who founded IFS, part of his work had to do with eating disorders, what would happen is he would say. “Hey, try to get rid of this eating disorder” like just try to stop it some way.
Carrie: Behavioral management.
Lindsey: Right, I think even if I’m remembering correctly, there was, he was working with a woman that was cutting herself. So he was trying to figure out like how to make that stop happening.
And then every time he kind of gave the client a directive to try to, in some way, get rid of that part of her, it would come back with a vengeance and she would cut herself even more like more harm would be done to the body and so he started to lean in and go “What’s happening here? Why is that happening?”
“And what would happen if I actually like leaned into?” It almost felt like a part of her that was coming in to try to do this to her. What if I leaned into that instead of trying to get rid of it? What if I leaned into that? Even for me, I love that picture of saying, “Hey, there’s all of these parts of us that show up.” What happens if we lean into them and get to know them instead of trying to throw them away, trying to push them aside, but we almost help them. And I’ll tell you to Carrie, the reason why I love that so much is because one, for me, it lines up with my belief of what it is like to actually bring our thoughts captive for me.
I don’t feel like bringing our thoughts captive or something that says, okay, bring them and then ignore them.
Carrie: Just thought replaced, just think something else, that’s kind of what the church tells you to do a lot of times like “don’t think that.”
Lindsey: Right, or just give it a scripture message, you know, but it kind of like bring your thoughts captive and captive is not like we’re not trying to strangle it.
We’re not trying to hurt it. It’s really like, bring it, bring it forward captive, like even thinking of captivity it’s like bring it forward and let’s talk to it. Because whatever is happening to it, needs help. Maybe in some way, this part of us has been in some way, it’s been in the dark for so long that it’s only been trained.
And again, this is me looking at it through the faith-based lens. Maybe it’s been the dark so long, which what I look at it is like it’s been trained by the flesh. Maybe it’s doing what it thinks is best, but it’s been trained by the flesh, which is not that healthy. And when we start to take it captive, when we bring it up, we can start to see what it’s doing and start to help it to be trained by the spirit because we’re taking it out of the dark. We’re bringing it to light so that it can start to see. “Oh, my goodness. It’s actually harming” like “this is what I’m trying to actually do, but by doing that, I am actually hurting other parts of the system.” I had no idea because we weren’t connected.” So it’s bringing in trying to make the whole system connected, all parts connected, which again, I love because from my lens when you look at Jesus, God, and the Holy Spirit, they’re three and one. So in a way, it’s kind of like there are three parts, but they all work together in that. That’s kind of what we’re wanting to have happen within us too, is have all parts of us work together instead of working against each other.
Carrie: What I really like about this is I think there’s a reducing the shame component in terms of accepting all parts of yourself. And as a therapist accepting all parts of the client that’s coming into the room because there’s so much time spent trying to hide ourselves from other people that the things that we don’t like about ourselves. And so many people have tried even before therapy from a self-help standpoint to squash certain behaviors instead of really examining like how was this behavior helpful or purposeful in my life? Like the person with an eating disorder. There was some reason that even though that’s destructive, there was a reason, like you said that developed as a survival skill probably to keep them in connection with other people in their life like if I could only be perfect. If I could only be this perfect size and I can get this acceptance and this love that I’m desperately craving.
Lindsey: Totally. It goes back to really a big theme of IFS is all parts are welcome because the belief is, is that they’re all trying to show up to do something actually for
you. The thing is you’ve had it even shared to me in several different metaphors or images, which I love. One is like as an orchestra. You’re the conductor but all of these parts of you are the different horns, strings, things like that in the orchestra and you hear like the flute section is going out of tune. It needs your attention. You’re not going to go, “Hey, flute section, get out of here.” You’re going to say, “Hey, flutes, come on over your out of tune.” Let’s kind of see what’s happening. What’s going on? And you’re going to give it attention because it’s like the more that you ignore it, the more you push it aside, the more you push it down, the more you suppress it, dismiss it, all of those kinds of words, the louder and more out of tune it’s going to get.
It goes, you have to actually learn how to interact with yourself in a healthy way that shows compassion. And what I also love about IFS is, you know when you are in self or even when you know, you’re in it within the image of God, you know when you’re in this place because the way you start to feel towards these parts of you that want attention.
You start to feel towards them a sense of compassion, of creativity, of clarity. There’s a whole bunch of wonderful c words in there that you start to feel towards it because you’re starting to see it from this place of, “Oh my goodness. You’re trying to help me.” What happens is you get to conduct the orchestra, instead of then maybe the flute section, in the past could come up and kick you out of being the conductor and saying, “I’m going to conduct it right now.” You get to actually be the conductor.
The other image that I’ve been given that I love is the same thing of driving the bus. You want to be the one to drive the bus. But then there are moments where you might feel scared, feel vulnerable, feel any of those types of things, and then all of a sudden, a part of you is going to see that and it’s going to say, “don’t worry, I’m going to rescue you. I’m going to take you out of that pain that starts to drive the bus. But you want to start to build such a sense of self that you’re able to go, “Oh, I know something’s happening in me right now” and instead of letting it take over, I’m just going, like, I kind of imagine it, like you’re driving the bus and a part of you is like a little kid on the bus it’s like tugging on your leg and then you’re like, “Hey, what do you need?”
Or it maybe, if you can’t listen to it that moment, “Hey, I’ll get back to you in an hour. Come back in an hour” Because there’s a lot of parts that come up for me, if I’m in session, I’m like, “I can’t tend to you right now.” In that way, because here’s what I know and even with kids because I’ve got my own, is like, if you tell a kid “go away, I’m not going to listen to you.” [00:24:24] It’s going to come back bigger, going to come back stronger, going to pitch a fit or gonna just tuck and go away and might not come back for what it needs. Either way, what you’re kind of imagining is these parts of you that wants your attention. Be it coming in the form of anxiety. Maybe it’s coming in the form of OCD. Maybe it’s coming in these different forms that once your attention that you bring it in and you start to help it. It might not always be like saying what’s true, it could be a fear part that’s showing up that’s scared and you might have to help it. It happens to me all the time, especially in session.
Like for me, there’s a part of me especially if I’m about to go into a session with very like angry, angry, and especially men. I notice that there’s this anxiousness that starts to happen in me and so I kind of bring it forward like you do a child and say, “Hey, what’s wrong? What are we upset with?”
“Scared scared.” Yes, I get it. I get it because they are bigger than me, know their anger is scarier for me and this is what I do, is I imagine God coming in, I’ll invite God in and I’ll invite God to just sit and to hold that scared part of me and to say, “Hey, you’re okay” and, and I know what to do when they get angry.
I know what to do. I’m okay and I know God’s with me. I also know where pepper spray is, just kidding. I can move in to reassure and I can also imagine and allow God to sit with that part of me, even during the session, and to say you’re okay. You’re okay. You know what to do. And you know that within this person that gets so big and gets so angry is also a scared little part of them too. So it helps bring that sense of compassion even towards the person you’re scared of in that way.
Carrie: Yeah. I want to speak to something that you said about there are these parts that are trying to help because a lot of times when you have something like anxiety or OCD, people will only see the negative like, “I don’t like this. I don’t want to have it. I just want to get rid of it” and sometimes that anxiety is protecting from sadness. Sometimes it’s protecting from anger that they haven’t ever learned how to express in a healthy way. Sometimes it’s protecting from vulnerability like not being able to trust other people.
There are so many purposes a lot of times that or roles that anxiety can play in a person’s life and if you’re able to get work with that and get those needs met in a healthier way rather than worry or going in your head. Sometimes the going in your head protects you from the body sensation that feels really intolerable. I like this a lot. I started doing parts work with my clients in a kind of a different vein through ego state therapy about a year ago and at first, I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know how you felt when you learned IFS, but when I first learned ego state therapy, they talk about parts being fully adult and parts being children kind of similar to the exiles. And I thought, this is weird like I don’t know if my clients are gonna get behind this. I find it a little weird. So I just tried it with some people and I said, look, I know this is going to sound a little weird, but I learned this new therapy and I think it might be helpful.
Is it okay if we roll with it, you know, and you kind of know your clients that are, that are good with rolling with things. So I tried it on some people and it was so powerful and so transformative that I really started incorporating it with almost everyone. Talking about having different parts of yourself, because whether we are aware of it or not, we go through times in our life where we feel such an internal conflict. And I think that makes sense in terms of what you were saying, it makes sense in terms of our faith, in terms of the flesh versus the spirit in. In terms of I want to do the right thing, or I know what the right thing is, but I can’t seem to make myself do it, that struggle that Paul talked about. I really think that this element of parts of ourselves having these wounds that maybe haven’t been healed and if we can get to that place where we allow God to enter into that space and get that deeper level of healing, it’s just incredible where it can go.
Lindsey: Oh, for sure and to watch it happen in front of you is fantastic and that’s one thing. But then also to allow yourself to do that same work that you’re asking your clients to do, that’s another thing where you can kind of move into like hair club for men like I’m a client but I’m also the owner, whatever it is. You’re able to move into that place and go, Hey, I know what this is like, I’m not trying this woo woo step on you, in the sense that I have not also tried to work out within myself as well, can be really, really helpful to say, “Oh” because sometimes what I’ll do is I’ll say, “Hey, here’s what it looks like for me” even giving that example of like when the angry man and how I allow myself or kind of invite God into sitting with that fearful part of me that it’s helpful even for my clients to conceptualize it and to go, “okay. Oh, and that’s how you practically use it” then they go, “okay. Okay. You do it” so maybe it’s not just me. It’s not just something wrong with me that I got to do this crazy out there kind of thing, but to be able to normalize it for them is pretty huge as well for sure.
Carrie: So you teach people actually how to talk, how to maybe identify first of all, these different parts of self and then how to communicate with them in a healthy, healthy way.
Lindsey: Yeah, that’s a big part of IFS. They call it the six F’s and I wish that I knew all of them by heart, but really what you are trying to do is, first, you identify there is this part of you, let’s just for the sake of example, say it’s anxiety. So we know there’s this anxiousness in you.
Sometimes for me, I’ll even have my clients imagine, imagine the last time this anxiousness showed up in you, paint the scene for me, take me to that memory. When did it show up? What was happening? So they’ll start to kind of say, “Oh, it was at school and it was right before I was about to have a test.” Then I say, “Okay, so now, as you’re talking about this, this anxiousness in you, this anxious part of you, where are you even feeling it in your body?”
Like, can you just even know where does it stay in you? Where is it in you? Oh, it’s in my chest. It, yeah. What’s it like in your chest? “It’s flattering, it’s moving. It’s busy.” Could you just maybe just kinda notice it, take a breath, just kind of really like see if you can really get a good sense of it.
And then here’s the different part is that you then ask that anxiousness if it will step outside of the body. If it will kind of take a step outside and stand in front why the client is looking at it.
I’ll usually ask the client either if they’ll be open and closing their eyes, or even if they’ll just find a spot and stare at it kind of like how you do when you daydream. Then they’ll see it. They’ll move it out. I’ve had people call it like, they’re like, Oh, you say, what is it? What does it kind of, what’s it like in front of you kind of what sends to you? I’ll have some people say it’s like just these ping pong balls going everywhere, or even have one person like “this looks like this weird dancing pizza.”
I was like, “okay.” That you just really try to help them see in that way, in that moving it outside of themselves, you’re not trying to get rid of it. You’re not trying to say, get out of here, but you’re trying to say let me see you in a way that I can get to know you. Let me be able to see you so I can know you more fully. As that happens, then you start to notice how does the client feel towards it.
Which I think Carrie, this is a little bit of what you were saying before the way people can start to see OCD or anxiety they’ll have, “Oh, I hate it. I want to get rid of it. I don’t, I wish it was never there.” All of those types of things, which make sense, but conceptually, we as IFS therapists know those are different parts.
That’s not the self. That’s not the core because that’s not compassion. It’s not understanding. It’s not caring. It’s not any of those things. Even curiosity, it’s not that. It’s judgment. It’s wanting to just get rid of it because it makes sense there’s all these parts that are, have developed that have said, when you do this, it takes you away from this. It takes you away from that. It makes sense to these other parts are going to come up because they’re going this isn’t managing well with us. And in a way, it’s not because you’re not, they’re not all connected. They’re not all working together in this place. Just kind of like if you were doing family therapy and you’re trying to talk with a child, but the child keeps looking at the parent so they won’t talk.
And then you asked the parent to move back, move away, move out of the eyesight of the child so they won’t be intimidated. So you can hear more what the child wants to say. That’s a little bit of what you do here with the part. You ask those parts that want to get rid of it that are frustrated with it. You listen to them because all parts are welcome and you make sense of it. Of course, that makes sense that you’d feel that way, but just right now, and these next 20 minutes, 30 minutes, will you step back? Will you just give some space for us to get to know this anxious part and why it shows up? And usually, they will stand back or usually it’s kind of like, they’ll just say like right at the shoulder and it’s kinda wild. Then they’ll step back and then you ask your client again to kind of look at the anxiety. Sometimes when those parts step aside, the anxiety starts to look different. Maybe instead of ping pong balls, it starts to look more calm. It starts to look more solid. Sometimes it starts to turn into looking like a person. Usually, in those moments, you kind of start to know, maybe you’re getting a little closer to maybe an exile, maybe not, but you kind of were still curious. And then you asked your client again, how do you feel towards that anxiety?
And if it feels like they’re more curious, like, “Whoa, it’s changed. What’s going on. I want to know more about it.” Then you start to kind of approach it and you ask the anxiety, right? What is its job? Why is it showing up? What’s it doing to try to help? Because we’re assuming that all of these different parts are trying to help in their own way, even if they’re backwards, even if they feel backwards. Then you move into that place to say what do you feel like your job is? How are you trying to help client? How you’re trying to help and it’s wild because sometimes you will get a sense like that anxiety will start to share a little bit of why it’s there.
Usually it’s like with anxiety, it’s like I’m here because I know that she can be scared about these things, or I know that she can be alarmed about these things and then I need to show up to let her know that this is happening, that these things could be happening again. And then you move into this place too of what does that anxiety feel like would happen if it didn’t show up like that? What would happen if it didn’t show up in that way? Sometimes be more vulnerable to whatever happened last time that they were unaware was even going to happen. Maybe they got blindsided by something. I don’t know. There’s all different.
Carrie: Different places they could go.
Lindsey: Completely. But even as the client starts to hear this from anxiety, they start to get almost a sense of like gratitude like, “Oh my gosh, I didn’t realize that’s what you were doing for me.” That’s so helpful because then we start to get the client to relate to anxiety in that way. “Oh, it’s trying to just alert me to this.” It’s trying to alarm, say that this is happening and it’s afraid this would happen to me. I need to bring it in and help it know kinda like I did with that. I’m okay. This man’s anger, I’m actually okay with, like I know what to do if he comes at me with it or if he comes at his spouse. I know what to do now because before that fear, when I love, cause I feel like fear is actually good and fear actually helps lead us to wisdom, if it’s in its healthy place. I was like, I’m good because you’ve had me scared about this before. So I went and listened to a lot of podcasts and I watched a lot of people do stuff with anger. So I am equipped now, I know now, that’s what you want. You want for these parts of you to be helpful, to be in the system is helpful.
And not to be in the system as like pushed out. And then there’s a whole other thing which it’ll take a whole other hour to talk about, but even just to then move into what’s underneath. What those parts are protecting and what do we do when we start to get there, because there’s a whole other protocol for there that’s also beautiful. But this kind of, what we’re talking about today is more, how do we start to befriend and work with and help really bring in and appreciate and train those protective parts of us and that’s what we want to start to do.
Carrie: Yeah. I think this conversation is really helpful even if people don’t pursue IFS therapy, just to understand like how to get to a place of self-acceptance and understanding our acceptance by God of all of us, of our sin, our shame. Everything thing that Jesus took on for us, like we are fully loved and fully cared for. And if we, a lot of times we’re in the way, because we don’t see that, or we don’t acknowledge that, or we don’t live in that beloved space. I love how this helps people get towards that place in their relationship with Christ. I think that’s really neat.
Lindsey: Yeah, totally and I love to, even with IFS calling right that core of a self and even what we do and how the self then talks to all these parts of us and really helps and can invite God in and things like that, that it does even lean towards one of the fruits of the spirit, which is self-control. That’s even kind of what this is modeling. What this is showing is literally how do we bring self up. And again, control is not the captive like I’m taking you by the throat, but it’s like control in the sense of “Hey, I want for us all to work together.” We’ve all got functions here. Being able to say we’re all working in harmony together and that feels really good.
That’s that place of self control.
Carrie: So I know we’re getting towards the end of the podcast here. I usually ask our guests to share a story of hope with us a time that you received hope from God or another person. So what does that for you that you wanted to share?
Lindsey: Yeah. Truly, Carrie, there are countless times, which I’ve been super thankful for, and I feel like there was a moment for me where I realized that there was this person in my life and they were always looking for these moments of hope. These moments of where God is showing up and was very much like if you’re not present to see how has God showing up, you’re going to miss it. It’s been kind of neat to slow down and to go, “Whoa, Oh God, was that you. Oh, that was you.” I’ve just missed it or call it happenstance or coincidence, but it was you.
This kind of the memory I’m going to tell you about now is kind of cool because my husband and I, we just decided on a whim we were married, we were young, and we were just like, “Hey, how can we serve at the church? Let’s just go be Sunday school teachers. Let’s just do that.” We went and we were Sunday school teachers and there was this other couple that were Sunday school teachers with us and we hit it off. The four of us hit it off. So we would like go out on double dates, things like that. And then they said, “Hey, our community group just opened up. Would you guys like to join our community group?” We’re kind of like being recruited, which was kind of fun. It felt like reminded me of sorority days. So I was like, “Ooh, we’re being recruited.” We went and we were in this community group.
During this time and being in this community group, we found out my husband and I found out that we were not able to have children. And then there were six couples. Four out of the six couples found out that they could not have children which was crazy and didn’t know it before we became like it.
We weren’t like, “Hey, let’s do an infertility community group.” It just like, it just happened and then we all discovered these things. Hopefully, it wasn’t something we all drank, but so we were in this together.
We started to go through this adoption process for us, my husband and I, and one day, one of the girls in the community group texted me and she was like, “Lindsey, my mom is in a Bible study with this woman who’s asking the whole Bible study to pray for an adoptive family for her nephew’s son like it’s kind of a big goal. And she was like, “my mom remembered you guys and community group and dah, dah, dah”, like, would you be interested? And I’m like, “what?” Now it was kind of wild because I was actually at this church that was like, when I got the text message, I was literally in church and they were about to do this worship and they do this forever long worship.
So I’m like, all right, some do I’m worshiping and I’m asking God, I’m like, “God, is this our son?” Is this what we’re supposed to do? And I heard a very clear yes and I don’t hear that kind of stuff all the time. Sort of very clear yes, and so I said, ”all right, God, well, you’re going to have to tell my husband that you said yes.”
Because he’s a little bit more of my risk-averse kind of guy. I’m a little bit more the risk-taker. Anyways, I called my husband because I was on a trip so he was back at home and I was in California. I called my husband and I said, “Hey, the girl in our community group said, what do you think?” And he was like, “I’m open.”
And I was like, “Oh my gosh” like, that’s not usually the response I get. I usually get all the worried questions and if you’re in the Enneagram world, he’s an Enneagram six. So that makes a lot of sense. To make a long story short, even though I’ve already made it long, we ended up meeting with that family. And then on a Tuesday, they told us that they chose us and then we brought our son home that Saturday. We kind of look back and we go, “Oh my goodness” like even just us being kind of like obedient to want to serve and not obedient and like little begrudging, but just like, Hey, we really would like to serve.
Just how God placed us with all of these people that then placed us with our son who could not have been a better fit. And if I go into the emotion of it, I will cry right now, but I’m not going to make it stay in my head about it. But just in that sense of like, we couldn’t imagine our lives without them. And so in this place of feeling so hopeless in infertility, like God was already working behind the scenes and bringing us hope. Just through these things, we could have never orchestrated for us to be able to be parents to our son. So that for us is like, anytime it’s like, oh, it’s God working on like, “Heck. Yeah, he is.” He is. And working today, like working today, not just in biblical times. He’s working today and he is a God of hope and he is a relational God that loves us and wants to be so close to us and that’s beautiful in that way.
Carrie: That’s really beautiful. Yeah, I love that story.
We’ve had a lot of stories on the podcast recently about God bringing members into people’s families and they’re each unique and different, but it all just shows the intimacy like you were saying of God caring about the details and working everything together just right. So, that’s awesome.
Lindsey: Yeah. He’s a loving father. It’s kind of nice to see and to feel that firsthand.
Carrie: Thank you so much for coming on the show and not only sharing your IFS wisdom, but also incorporating the spirituality Christianity piece in there. I really enjoyed that, I think it was helpful in conceptualizing.
Lindsey: Sure. Of course, I have to fit that. I have to make sure that that all comes together because it’s very important I feel like in just healing with our hearts.
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What I really find compelling about this interview and what we talked about today is that God is able to meet us right where we’re at, and he loves you wholly and completely. Just as you are, right now and God also loves you enough not to leave you that way.
If you can wrap your mind around God loving you just where you are right now in the midst of whatever you’re facing that is absolutely transformative and will be something that will help you break through any shame that you might be holding on to.
Since this is our episode right before Easter, I just wanted to say happy Easter to everyone and He is risen, indeed.
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.
Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD, episode 21. I had the absolute privilege to interview a mentor, Laura Mullis and I brought her on the podcast to talk a little bit about attachment wounds from childhood and how these can contribute to anxiety in adulthood. So let’s get into that interview.
Carrie: So Laura, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Laura: Hello, my name is Laura Mullis and I am a clinical social worker from Moultrie, Georgia. That’s kind of in the Southwest corner of Georgia. I tell everybody about an hour from Tallahassee because I don’t expect people to know where Moultrie is. I am a therapist who offers a different type of therapy in the sense that I had my own practice and the way I set my practice up was that I offer intensive therapy where people come and they book a few days with me at a time and we really dig into whatever it is they want to change in their life.
The other way that I am probably different is one of my main focuses is not just on helping people heal from the things that happened to them in their life, but also the things that should have happened that didn’t, and that’s called attachment trauma, which is something I’m sure we’ll get into later on into the podcast.
About me, I have been working in the field of therapy in some capacity since 2004. So that’s 16 years and I started off in the field of substance abuse because in my own personal history, I’m actually in recovery myself. So of course we’re all wounded healers, right? So I went to go try to help people who were in recovery get the same breakthroughs I got. And as I started working in that field, I realized that majority of the people who I worked with had deep, deep, deep wounds that they were carrying from events that had happened to them in the past and just relationships that had really, really, really hurt them and so that sent me on a quest. I went on a quest and I’m still on my quest, but I don’t think the quest is ever done. My quest to try to figure out how to help people really overcome and heal the wounds that caused them to keep recreating patterns in their life or to keep living below what their full potential is capable of. And so until I’d be on a journey of many, many trainings and many, many learnings, I just tell people that I’m eternally curious. I will go learn about anything.
Carrie: I love that you’re terminally curious because I think the best therapists are the people who are willing to continue learning and continue growing.
I’ve met people in the field, unfortunately, and you probably have too that feel like they’ve already arrived and you can’t teach them anything and that’s very frustrating. So I love it when people love to learn and grow. The quest is never over. And the cool thing about that is that you always run into clients with different issues that come up and it’s like, “Oh, well, I don’t think I’ve quite dealt with this before. This is a little bit new. What are we going to do here?”
Laura: Yeah. Interesting thing. There’s always something new. I heard somebody say once before “wisdom is knowing you don’t know” and so I always hold that as my motto, that wisdom. I don’t know and if I think I do know then I’m missing a lot.
Carrie: So, let’s get into talking about attachment trauma and how you would define that.
Laura: Attachment trauma is basically I call it attachment wounding because trauma. When you think of the field, it’s so much about what happened and attachment wounding is more about what did not happen. So all of us were born into this world and are raised by somebody. It might not be your parents or paternal parents, but you are raised by somebody and those people who raised you almost leave an imprint on you based on how they treat you or what they don’t do for you and the imprint or the impression or the impact that they leave on you is that attachment wounding. So if you were raised by caregivers who didn’t see you, didn’t hear, didn’t value and, or raised you in a way where it was confusing, sent mixed messages, or raised you in a way where they didn’t know how to manage their own emotions, so then they couldn’t teach you to manage your emotions. Then you almost internalize all of that and you take that into yourself and then you grow up and you repeat all those patterns in your relationship with yourself and your relationship with others.
And so then when you go to a therapist and the therapist says, “well, tell me what happened.” You’re like, “I don’t know. It’s just my exist. Yeah. My childhood was good. I mean, everybody had problems. They didn’t beat me. I wasn’t hurt.” I wasn’t all the things that you think of when you think of trauma and people don’t really know that there’s was anything different because it’s just like the existence I grew up in. And so it’s really hard for people to share what did not happen or what happened that felt almost like it didn’t match what they knew they were supposed to receive. So that’s attachment wounding and attachment wounding I have found is really driven or kept alive by unmet needs.
So our needs did not get met in childhood and that caused a part of our brain to almost get stuck at the age at which the need wasn’t met. And then we are at times in our life responding out of that age or that sense of absence and what we then grow up and do, we then look outside ourselves for somebody else to meet our needs.
So we have these unmet needs. We grow up and we become adults with unmet needs. And then we want other people in our life to meet those needs and that’s just not going to work because they have unmet needs too and this causes a lot of the dysfunction in relationships and the world. In my opinion, everybody wants somebody else to meet their needs.
And so what I do is I help people learn how to start to identify the unmet needs from their past, and then meet their own needs. And as I meet their own needs, it’s almost like a cup of water that’s empty and it fills up one drop at a time and it just feels relieving and satisfying and the person feels more complete because there’s nobody that can meet our needs, but us.
Carrie: That’s interesting. How would you kind of put a spiritual overlay on that as far as God meeting people’s needs versus people meeting their own needs?
Laura: So when I do the type of therapy, I’m a turn like curious so I have lots of tools in my tool belt, but the one I’ve found to help attachment trauma is called ego state therapy, which is basically like parts work.
And so part of what I help people tap into is almost a resource part of them who has all of the things that they needed when they were a kid and didn’t get. And one of the parts of them that I help them tap into is almost like a spiritual self if they’re open to that. Some people just are not ready to go theorem and I understand that, but if their spirituality is a cornerstone of their belief system then they have a part of them who is able to receive the love of their spiritual source and that part of them has the capacity to really, almost expand to meet their needs in life today. So I see it as in my own personal experience and going through recovery. I saw that in my life, I had first received the love, the unconditional love of God and out of that unconditional love of God, I could then love myself unconditionally.
Carrie: Yes, that’s so good.
Laura: And that was my path, I was doing exactly what I described at the beginning. I was trying to have my friends and my family and everybody else love me unconditionally.
And they’re just not capable of that. So it’s really tapping into that unconditional source of love, which then feeds your unconditional love for yourself and then you will just naturally know who belongs in your life.
Carrie: That makes a lot of sense. I know that I see this with people where there’s a lot of grief that goes on over these unmet needs like “I don’t understand why my mother couldn’t just love me unconditionally. I don’t understand why she couldn’t love me as much as my sibling,” etc, etc. Do you feel like that’s a long-term ongoing process for people that part of this being able to meet their own needs, relieve some of that.
Laura: Yes. Being able to meet their own needs, relieve some of that but when you describe that to me, that tells me that there’s like a younger part of their mind stuck in a place where they may be in their forties, but part of their brain or mind still feels like they are a kid needing a mom to take care of them.
And so part of what I help people do is help those parts of the mind that are stuck in that almost bortecs of why can’t mom love me, because when you’re four, you need a mom to love you for survival. But now that you’re 40, you don’t really need a mom to love you. It’d be nice but you don’t need it. And continuing to try to go back and have a person who’s not capable of loving you, love you is actually causing you to have unmet needs of the present. So I feel like it’s a part of the mind that’s stuck back in that place of feeling it’s like they’re four or whatever age and feeling unresourced and incapable of taking care of themselves.
So part of the work I do is help those parts of the brain realize this is life today and you have the ability to have this for yourself. There is an element of grief to the work, but there’s a difference between grief and almost like avoiding sad and like avoidance sadness. So, some people will stay in this level of sadness and denial, and that’s actually keeping them from the deep grief that they need to come to a place of acceptance. “I can accept who my mom is, and I can accept that whatever happened to her in her past made it to where she just could not pass that down to me.”
Carrie: Do you think that people, even if they don’t get those from their parental or caregiver relationships like these needs that a lot of times they get them met in other relationships, and that provides that internal resource for them to be able to have that?
Laura: Yes. However, I think that a lot of times because of the unmet needs in the past, people can choose people to be in their life out of their wounds, and unfortunately, it just winds up recreating the wounds. So there is that rare bird who comes, who actually has a healthy marriage or healthy relationship and within that marriage in a relationship, they can almost have their adult life had their needs met, but they still have that unmet needs from the past that will crop up sometimes. It will show up sometimes and will wind up causing them to get in fights with their partner or pull away and avoid or shut down or be too anxious.
And about their person’s love and affection for the like this is all the ways that attachment shows up in life today is how we relate to other people. And so if you have a lot of unmet needs from childhood, emotional safety in a relationship is difficult to maintain.
Carrie: So feeling like this person might leave me which could show up in a lot of different ways. If this person gets mad at me, they might leave me, or if this person gets too close to me or knows too much about me, they might discover my flaws and might leave.
Laura: Yes, and so then people respond to that in different ways. They either pursue the person harder
and want the person to meet demands or want the person to check boxes, but those boxes aren’t going to bring the relief they need anyway, or they pull into their own shell and shut down, or they do both. This push-pull dynamic that comes up sometimes and all of it is because there’s not a sense of emotional safety inside the person.
Carrie: Right. What’s manifesting outside is reflective of what’s inside.
Laura: And so I tell people, build the emotional safety inside and then things outside changed.
Carrie: That makes a lot of sense and I think that sense of the healthier that you are, the healthier people that you attract into your life.
Laura: Yes you do.
Carrie: And the opposite is true as well. Unfortunately, yes.
Laura: I have people come to me and they want their spouse to be different. They want their children to be different and they want their family to be different and always say, listen, if you change your family changes, you can’t do it in reverse order.
If you change and who you are is different than they will just start responding differently to you or you will come to the place where you realize in order to get better, you have to create that distance.
Carrie: Talk with us a little bit about how this issue of attachment wounding can cause anxiety to develop in people.
Laura: The place that we learn to feel internally safe is through our caregivers. So when a baby is born, it doesn’t have any way to manage the emotions or the feelings going on inside their little body. And so they are dependent on the person who is raising them to do things like pick them up and soothe them and rock them and soothe them for them. As that happens repeatedly over time, that baby will internalize the ability to soothe themselves. So if a person doesn’t have a caregiver who has the ability to soothe themselves then they do not have the ability to help the baby internalize that ability to soothe. So if you have a mom or dad or a grandma or whoever is raising you, who, when a baby cries gets anxious and panics or gets angry and then is trying to soothe baby out of that panic and anger, the baby is going to internalize anxiety, anger, frustration.
So we, in some ways, how we cope with the world at the core is a replication of how our parents coped with the world.
Carrie: That makes a lot of sense.
Laura: And in order to really develop your own ability to cope with the world, you have to get rid of, or heal what your parents passed down and it might not even be parents it could be bullying in school, could be different things. And what I’ve found is when it comes to attachment wounding, what happens is when we have an event happen in our life that is overwhelming or shocking, it’s like our brain turns on an internal recorder, literally almost like cutting on a recording system and it records people acting in that way and the message that they were sending us and the message at different times in our life. When we go through something that feels similar, we’ll turn it on and start replaying it in our heads as if that thing from the past is happening now. And so then when we have something in our life that’s upsetting or anxiety-provoking, we’re not just responding to it, we’re also responding to the messages inside our head.
Carrie: The internal dialogue.
Laura: Yes, and that internal dialogue, if you hear it for so long, it gets hard to separate. Is it mine or was it theirs? Where do they even start? And so a lot of the work I do is helping to figure that out and kind of turn that dialogue that does not belong to the person off.
Carrie: The messages that other people have put towards us that weren’t true, but we adopted them as truth for ourselves.
Laura: Well, we didn’t have a choice. You know, at times in our life we’re like sponges, we just absorb what’s going on around us and so we didn’t choose it, and then it gets implanted in our mind and we just don’t even realize it’s there.
Carrie: Working with people that have had also major trauma experiences, besides just the attachment wounding. One of the things that I’ve noticed is that sometimes the worst part of that traumatic memory was the attachment piece, maybe where they told the caregiver and the caregiver didn’t believe them or they told the caregiver and the caregiver just didn’t do anything about the situation or they were put in a situation that was unsafe. Sometimes that’s worse than the experience itself. It seems like.
Laura: Yeah, I agree with that. Also want to say that one attachment wound that I’ve encountered lately, in past few years, is really hard for people to explain is what I call an invisibility wound. So that’s when a child grows up in a home where they just did not feel seen. It’s almost like they existed within the home and parents carried on separate lives and this can come when parents are in the world we live in today. There’s a lot of demands and so parents can work long hours. Sometimes two jobs. Maybe one parent is out of the home all the time working and then when they are home, they’re taking care of the household and trying to maintain an orderly life and so the child’s needs just are not seen.
Parents prioritize physical needs over emotional needs. And so when the child’s emotional needs are not tended to, they wind up feeling invisible and that invisibility wound causes a lot of anxiety because they now show up in life today and don’t know how to be seen when they are seen, it feels very foreign and unfamiliar and they want to try to hide. And it shows up as anxiety, panic attacks, overwhelmed, shame, all the things that cause people to own their shrink into themselves.
Carrie: Social interactions
Laura: Because they didn’t learn how to socially engage. I think that’s so important. So the invisibility of women is a big one. That’s in the attachment wounding family.
I’ve seen a lot of people who struggle with it, really struggled to try to explain what happened because it’s a lot of what did not happen.
Carrie: A lot of no one asking me how I felt about a situation or what I’m thinking or what I’m needing. It’s just kind of like we all go through the flow of life and this is how it is.
Laura: Yeah, or go play. They’re playing in their room, so they’re fine. They were always quiet and didn’t ask for much. That’s not a child’s natural behavior.
Carrie: Do you think that this can happen? A lot of times there’ll be a situation in a family where one child may respond externally. Like they may be throwing fits or rebelling at school or getting in trouble and a lot of times the focus is maybe on that child versus the quiet compliant child that just kind of goes along to get along with everybody.
Laura: Yes, that’s another way that the attachment wounding can occur and that will increase in visibility wounds and the one that goes internal and the one that goes external while a lot of times learn, the only way that I can be seen is if I have to help. So then they grow up to engage in addiction and other behaviors. Same dysfunctional, but haven’t had a reason. One of the things that I always tell people is whatever you’re doing has a good and perfect reason for existing. it served your needs in some way.
Carrie: That’s good. That’s really good because our behavior isn’t just in some kind of vacuum. There’s a reason that we got to where we are and if we can peel back those layers and understand that process, that’s often a key to healing, but not just the inside of it, the actual working through it, working through the woundedness.
So talk with me about the people that come in because I probably have them come to see me and you probably have them come to see you that say, “well, I don’t want to blame everything on my parents. They weren’t that bad. I mean, they’re okay. I’m an adult now and I can’t just be going and blaming everything on them.”
Laura: Yeah, and I completely understand. I think that majority of parents are doing the best they can. And I think that this is another topic altogether but wounds are generational. What they didn’t heal, their parents didn’t heal, got passed to them and get passed to the children. You have to look at it from more of a 30,000-foot view sometimes in order to get the understanding you need.
What I tell people is that we’re not here to put your parents on trial. That’s not what we’re doing. We’re just here to know your truth exactly as you felt it and once we know your truth, we heal your truth and what will happen is that will radically shift your relationship with your parents today. It will radically shift your relationship with your parents today so that you can have a more adult-adult relationship with them. If you have a lot of unmet needs, then in some ways you’re staying in a relationship where you’re still the child and they’re still the parent even though you are an adult and you met. The people I work with, they have professional careers functioning, and raising their own kids, but when they go around their parents, they still act in that parent child dynamic and it continues to replicate the unmet needs. So if we can heal the wounds and just learn your truth, and you could be more adult-adult not just in your relationship with your parents, but in your relationships with others.
Carrie: That’s good because what we’re talking about affects people at work. It affects them at home and affects them in their intimate relationships. It affects them with authority, figures, parents, anybody. It’s really huge and once you kind of get down underneath all of those layers, then it have some healing there of these wounded parts, it can be really true formative.
Laura: It really can. It truly can.
Carrie: I’m curious how you got through this process of, cause I’m assuming that you were providing weekly therapy in the past, how did you make that shift from like weekly therapy to just doing intensives?
Laura: So I was doing weekly therapy and one of the things that I do work with, which is, again, another topic altogether is dissociative identity disorder, which is people who have literal such isolated parts and multiple personalities. And in that, I figured out you couldn’t do hour-a-week therapy with them. It just does not really fit the way that their brain is structured and so I started to do intensives with them all starting with two to three-hour sessions and then working my way up. And I realized that I just like it better. I’m a person who believes that you can’t recreate moments. So what that means is if we’re in a session and we get to a big breakthrough and we have to just keep going through it, if all of a sudden we uncover a layer and it’s a new truth or a new understanding or a new trauma or a new attachment wound that we need to work on.
That it’s really hard to say, “okay, let’s stop here and come back next week and we’ll resume at that spot.” The mind doesn’t work like that almost. I believe once you get there, you just have to keep going and heal that piece, and then you can rest and go back in and kind of work on another layer because I realized with my an hour a week with people that we would get to a point like that and then they’d come in the next week and we’d be off on something else. And even though I said, “but that was really, really, really important.” It’s like, “Oh no, but now this is important.” And so we had a lot of places we got to that were never resolved.
Carrie: And that doesn’t feel good. I imagine not feel good to me.
Laura: I imagine it didn’t feel good to me and it truly didn’t feel good to the people because I would lose sight of what we were even working on half the time.
I would say, well, what, what exactly are we doing here? So, uh, I’m thankful that my, the DOD clients taught me that the mind truly works better when you do it from an intensive approach. And what that means intensive, just so listeners can understand is people book days with me at a time and we do about six hours of therapy a day.
And I look at the mind almost like a ball of yarn, that’s all tangled up and so in that time we just kind of pull on a string and we just follow the stream and let the mind untangle itself and it’s really, really, really, really cool how the mind untangled itself.
Carrie: Do people tend to just be really exhausted by the end of that day, after doing six hours of therapy?
Laura: Not really, you’ll be surprised that I think it’s more exhausting to open something up and an hour a week and then close have to figure out how to close it down and exist until another week. When they come, it’s almost like they know I’m coming here to work on this issue, whatever it is they want changed in their life, and I’ll provide it in a setting. It’s almost like a retreat, like a setting where people can go, there’s cabins and they stay in a cabin and we meet in the cabin. So the setup works also with the way the mind works, which is compartmentalization. I’m actually leaving my day-to-day life. I’m going to this place where what I do in this place is I work on myself.
Carrie: Very specific purpose.
Laura: And they know that this is what I’m doing here and they don’t have to worry about anything else except for healing. So I have found that it really for the people who are ready for it, because not everybody would be ready for it. But for people who are ready for it and want to take the journey, the intensive approach in my opinion is the best way to go.
Carrie: That’s good. That’s what it’s for. Just very interesting and different. And I think a lot of people don’t know that that’s even an option out there for them because so people have a hard time with like you talked about busy-ness of schedules, just even making an hour of therapy a week work for them and trying to deal with things like childcare and transportation issues and so forth and so on. So, it’s really awesome. We’ll put your links and so forth in the show notes for people so they can find you if they want to look you up that way.
Laura: That’d be great.
Carrie: At the end of every podcast, since our podcast is called hope for anxiety and OCD, I like to ask our guests, what is a time that you have received hope from God or another person?
Laura: I guess I would say that one of my transformative shifts in my life was when I was in treatment for recovery from addiction. I was praying and I was praying for everybody else in my life, “Oh God, I want you to do this for this, I don’t want you to make sure this person remembers me and I want you to do this.”
And I was telling God exactly what I wanted him to do. It was like audibly, I heard God say, “All right, listen up. First, you work on your relationship with me, then you work on your relationship with yourself. Then you can work on your relationship with your family and then I will add who I want into your life.”
And that moment changed everything for me because I realized that that was the order. That was the order for healing. And I was kind of go top-down rather than bottom-up and I’ve lived my life that way for the past 19 years and every bit of it has come true.
Carrie: That’s awesome. That’s really, really cool. I liked that God told you to listen up because you’re a very direct person and I feel like you would say that to somebody else.
Laura: I was just and all of a sudden I heard God say, “listen up.”
Carrie: I feel like God knows how to meet each one of us where we’re at and how we are and so you’re like this really sweet, gentle, kind person, but you also have like a directness in you too. And so I was like, “that just so fits”.
Laura: Yeah. It was like, “boom!” I was like, “Oh, okay, I’m listening.” But it changed everything for me when I realized that and I also feel like in my work, it also shapes how I help people on their process. I feel like it helped me see a clearer path for not only how I got the healing I needed, but how people can get the healing they need.
Carrie: Yeah. That’s good. Well, thank you so much for coming on and sharing with us about attachment trauma. It’s been really good. Really informative. All right.
Laura: Thank you, Carrie.
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I think it’s so tempting for us to say, you know what childhood was in the past that doesn’t affect me now. All of that stuff is over and I’m over it. But a lot of how we act today is affected by how we were interacted with by our caregivers and the patterns that developed. And I have seen amazing transformation when people unpack those patterns and heal from those past wounds and allows them to move forward into a more healthy adulthood. So I wish all of that for you who are listening.
I have a very exciting announcement, which is that I am going to be doing Hope for Anxiety and OCD is first giveaway, I’m going to be giving away two copies of my ebook, finding the right therapist, which is about how to find the therapist who is right for you in order to enter, you have to be subscribed to the podcast, wherever you subscribe to your podcasts.
It doesn’t matter. Take a screenshot showing that you’ve subscribed or showing that you’ve written us a review. If you have written us a review, you will get five entries instead of one entry. So one entry for subscribers and five, for people who have written a review, you could take a screenshot and send it to the email address, giveaway@hopeforanxietyandocd.com.
Again, that’s giveaway@hopeforanxietyandocd.com to enter and you will have until the end of March in order to enter and I am so excited to be able to give those away. And I hope that that helps someone out there, but also encourages people to subscribe to our show and to tell other people about it.
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.
