Counseling – Page 7 – Carrie Bock – By The Well Counseling

Do I have Anxiety or OCD?

Written by Carrie Bock on February 23, 2021. Posted in Anxiety, Counseling, OCD.

Understanding the difference between anxiety and OCD can be challenging. After all, both disorders affect the mind and body. Those with anxiety or OCD can experience physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual distress. Let’s start by looking at the symptoms of each disorder.

Common Symptoms of Generalized Anxiety:

body tension
increased heart rate
frequent worry
difficulty concentrating
feeling edgy
difficulty sleeping

At a basic level, anxiety occurs when your internal fear response kicks in when it’s not needed. Our fear response is a good thing, given to us by God to keep us safe. The problem is that our brains and bodies are imperfect. Thus, the fear response can get turned on in response to something that is not actually going to hurt us. As an example, let’s say that you have generalized anxiety and get nervous when put in new situations. Your brain has made a connection somewhere along the way that new situations are potentially dangerous and must be avoided or engaged in with extreme caution.

Today, you are meeting your new male coworker. You may have worrisome thoughts. What if he’s mean or rude? What if he doesn’t like me? I’m always so awkward in these types of situations. What should I say? Your body starts to get hot and a little sweaty. You notice your heart has started beating a little faster. You take a few deep breaths, wipe your sweaty palms, and tell yourself everything is probably going to be fine with the coworker. You’re still a little edgy, but have calmed yourself down enough to meet him. Meeting a new coworker is not a life or death situation, but your body may be so worked up that it feels like it is.

Understanding OCD:

OCD involves the presence of both obsessions and compulsions. An obsession is an intrusive thought that feels real, doesn’t respond to logical reasoning, and often creates internal doubt. While obsessions are a thought process, they are accompanied by distressing emotions and body sensations that are similar to what a person with anxiety experiences. This is the part that is confusing and often leaves the OCD undiagnosed for years. Compulsions are a behavior that someone feels compelled to engage in as a way to satisfy the obsession. Like scratching an itch, there is temporary relief, but in the long term, engaging in a compulsion strengthens the obsession, starting the whole obsession/compulsion cycle over again. Obsessions and compulsions can vary widely, but I have listed some common examples here:

Examples of common obsessions:

Offense: I must have hit someone with my car while driving. I offended my coworker. I have sinned or offended God.
Cleanliness: I have touched something that caused me to be contaminated. I’m dirty. This surface is dirty. I’m going to throw up.
Harm: You may picture yourself harming yourself or someone else. You may be concerned about harming yourself, spouse/loved one, or child.
Relationships: Am I destined to be with my boyfriend/girlfriend? Maybe I married the wrong person.
Just so: Something doesn’t feel right, so I have to keep focusing on this aspect until it feels “just so.”

Examples of common compulsions:

Checking: Checking the appliances multiple times before you leave the house or turning your car around to see if you hit someone
Counting: completing actions according to a certain number such as flipping the light switch 3 times, avoiding certain numbers
Repeating: re-doing schoolwork because you didn’t like your handwriting, repeating certain words in prayer or repeating a prayer a certain number of times
Reassurance seeking: Asking your boyfriend multiple times if everything is OK between the two of you, asking your boss if you have done the right thing, asking for permission to do something you don’t need to ask permission for, asking someone questions a different way until they give you a desired response.

Let’s circle back to the example of meeting the new coworker, looking at it from an OCD lens. You have obsessive thoughts you can’t seem to get out of your mind about potentially harming the coworker. You picture yourself spilling coffee on him or accidentally tripping him. You put your coffee cup back on your desk. Your body starts to get hot and a little sweaty. Your heart has started beating a little faster, but you’re too consumed with your thought process to notice. Please don’t let me be awkward, you pray internally. It doesn’t feel right, so you say it two more times. Please don’t let me be awkward. Please don’t let me be awkward. You feel a small sense of relief, but then wonder if you should find the boss to get more information about the coworker in order to make sure you don’t offend him or harm him in some way.

The importance of determining if you have anxiety or OCD:

Why does it matter anyway? The key to effective treatment is proper diagnosis. If you see a therapist who practices Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for anxiety, they may teach you to challenge the anxious thoughts like you are in a court of law, looking at contradictory evidence. This would only seek to strengthen OCD, causing more distress. You may see a kind therapist who misses the OCD and provides reassurance that everything is going to be OK. You see the therapist every week, feeling a little better, but after six months of therapy, you’re not any better than when you started. You still have tremendous struggles outside of session. OCD treatment involves increasing one’s ability to tolerate distress. This can be done through several different therapies: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR).

In my experience, EMDR is a great treatment for both anxiety and OCD. Unlike other forms of talk therapy, EMDR works at a brain and body level to help reduce uncomfortable body sensations. Clients defeat the avoidance that anxiety and OCD bring by learning mindfulness and distress tolerance skills. Present behavior is traced back to past learned experiences. After processing, clients may notice some obsessive thoughts, but they are now in the background instead of the foreground. Clients are able to experience the obsession without engaging in the compulsion. If you are in TN and interested in EMDR therapy, click here.

What is EMDR?

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

Why Don’t Counselors Accept Insurance?

Written by Carrie Bock on February 17, 2021. Posted in Counseling. No Comments on Why Don’t Counselors Accept Insurance?

If you go searching for a counselor, you may quickly run into a problem: finding a counselor who accepts your insurance plan. While most doctors and dentists accept a wide variety of insurance, many counselors accept one or two plans or none at all. Why is this?

Find out how you can practice mindfulness as a Christian.

16. Is Mindfulness for Christians? with Dr. Irene Kraegel

Written by Carrie Bock on February 17, 2021. Posted in Anxiety, Counseling, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 16. Is Mindfulness for Christians? with Dr. Irene Kraegel

Mindfulness is a buzzword in conversations surrounding anxiety. Dr. Irene Kraegel, writer of The Mindful Christian defines mindfulness in an easy to understand way while explaining how mindfulness fits in with the Christian faith.

What is mindfulness?
How to practice mindfulness formally and informally
Why you can’t go wrong when practicing mindfulness
Contemplative streams in Christianity: Ignatian tradition, Lectio Divina, and Centering Prayer

Links and Resources:
Irene Kraegel’s website: The Mindful Christian
Book: The Mindful Christian
Free Online Course: Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction
Support the show

More Podcast Episodes

Transcript of Episode 16

Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD, episode 16. I’m your host Carrie Bock. Today on the podcast, we are talking about mindfulness with Dr. Irene Kraegel. She’s written a book on it and she leads people in how to develop a mindfulness practice. So I think you’re really going to get a lot out of this episode and I can’t wait for you to hear it.

So let’s dive right in.

Carrie: Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do.

Dr. Kraegel: Thanks. My name is Irene Kraegel and I am the author of a book called The Mindful Christian. I teach mindfulness through a counseling center at Calvin University, which is where I also serve as a Director of the Student Counseling Center there at Calvin. I’m also a clinical psychologist by training. I’ve been a therapist for many years and I still do a bit of that on the side and also run some different kinds of clinical groups in the university.

Carrie: Sounds like you have a lot that keeps you busy.

Dr. Kraegel: Yes, there’s a lot of good work to do. I feel blessed by that.

Carrie:I also saw on your website that you do training’s on mindfulness sometimes for churches.

Dr. Kraegel: I do as part of my work connected to the book, then I often do speaking engagements or I have a workshop series that’s four weeks long, or sometimes people actually spread it out a little bit longer than that.

It’s really great for any kind of group setting such as a church or a Sunday school or a Bible study. I’ve done it in a retirement home before. That’s a great way for people to get introduced to mindfulness specifically from a Christian perspective if they’re interested in doing that kind of integration.

Carrie: That’s really interesting. Do you feel like the way that you grew up spiritually was very mindful or did that come later for you, like in terms of your spiritual practice?

Dr. Kraegel: I would say it came later. I think I was blessed to be in a few different traditions growing up that did acknowledge the need for silence as part of the spiritual journey. I learned early on that it was helpful to take long periods of time just to be present to God and to engage in different types of spiritual disciplines that you are more than just talking at God but also receiving from God. So I think all of that laid a really good foundation. I’m not sure that I knew exactly what to do with all of that silence.

So I knew that it was encouraged within the Christian tradition that I’d been exposed to, to practice silence, but I wasn’t really clear on how to use that well. I wasn’t really aware at the time of how cognitive my faith was and even in those times of silence, how much I was perhaps overly focused on thinking about God and developing words to say to God. Maybe even trying to hear words from God. I wasn’t really aware that that was even a framework that I was working out of. So I would say it was later after going through mindfulness training, really through a secular perspective that I recognize that there are other ways of relating to the world besides just thinking about it. And that became very relevant to my own faith journey as well, to realize that there were different ways of relating to God, besides just thinking about God or speaking to God. It’s really been my experience of mindfulness that has integrated with some of those early lessons I received in my own upbringing about silence.

It’s been that integration of the two that’s allowed me to feel more connected to God and maybe a little bit less conflicted. It’s about questions of faith and more just present to God in a more kind of communal way. So I’m very grateful for that.

Carrie: That’s so good because I think I grew up in a faith setting that was more scholastic and it was a lot about learning about God and who he is and thinking and emphasis on even changing your thoughts to make them more godly so to speak. This idea of practicing silence or silence being valued wasn’t something that I grew up around, even though now I would say that I definitely value that.

I’m curious how you got interested or involved in this kind of vein of mindfulness.

Dr. Kraegel: Initially, it was really a professional interest. As I mentioned I’m a psychologist by training and really the mental health field has become very focused on mindfulness over the last maybe 15 years or so and it’s become recognized as one of the main approaches to dealing with depression and anxiety and also some physical concerns, chronic pain, different things like that.

I had been hearing about it working in a university context. I was aware that I wanted to bring the latest and best tools to the students that I work with there. At the same time, it was a time in my own life where I was experiencing some personal suffering and feeling that as circumstances in my life had actually come together and some really great ways, my mood wasn’t catching up with that. And so some of the grief and loss and difficulty that I had experienced in the past wasn’t feeling healed. I sort of felt like I was longing for a deep practice like it helped me to heal in some important ways and learn to experience joy and so both professionally and then also personally, I really felt drawn to this practice of mindfulness, knowing that it involved silence, but not just in a way of sort of gritting your teeth and bearing it, but more bringing us into silence with a specific set of guidelines and techniques that helped us to work well with that silence.

At that point I signed up for a mindfulness space, stress reduction course, which is a standardized approach to teaching mindfulness and found that through the consistent practices of that course and just learning about the framework, that attitude that we bring when we’re practicing mindfulness. Some of the underlying beliefs that all jelled so naturally with what I already believe in terms of my Christian faith, and also what I knew about psychology as a clinical psychologist.

It was a very transformational experience for me to go through that kind of training. I’m not a person who has great habits over time in terms of disciplined practices every single day. I’m always really upfront about that. You don’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to be the person that’s on your mat 20 minutes every morning and every night to get benefit. I always say I would get more benefit in that way and being exposed especially early on consistently coming to those practices. Even over a couple of weeks of meditating each day and trying on these new attitudes and approaches that mindfulness offered, it was a very transformational experience for me.

So when I bring it now to clients and when I work with students around learning mindfulness, I really do it right from a personal passion as much as a professional understanding of the topic.

Carrie: People who are listening to this podcast probably have heard the word mindfulness or being mindful, and it’s somewhat of a buzzword right now. It has been studied and had good results in terms of what you were saying with anxiety and depression. What exactly is mindfulness?

Dr. Kraegel: The concept of mindfulness is actually fairly simple. A quick definition is that it’s bringing our attention to the present moment, doing that with intentionality, and doing it with an attitude of non-judgemental, open acceptance, or whatever it is that we find there. So it’s a simple definition. It’s not an easy practice. So we all know that our minds tend to wander very frequently outside of the present moment, we really spend a lot of our time in general, thinking about the past and rehashing what’s already happened. What’s been said, what our experiences were, and then we often spend a lot of time in the future as well, imagining how things will turn out and both when our minds go into the past and when they go into the future. There’s a tendency for us to be wandering around and sort of negative thoughts or negative emotional States, either remembering the worst or preparing for the worst.

And so that’s not great for our mental health. It’s not great for our levels of happiness and contentment and joy. Mindfulness is this idea of noticing that our minds are doing that. We don’t stay in some perfectly present state of awareness all the time. As you said, we don’t have to be perfect with this.

It is actually sometimes helpful to debrief what’s happened in the past or to plan for the future. Mindfulness allows us to notice when is that movement of our mind helpful and when is it not helpful. And to over and over bring our awareness, our attention back into the present moment with quite a bit of focus here on our physical effects.

So we learned to notice thoughts, emotions, and often what’s grounding us is an awareness of our physical sensations. There can be a tendency sometimes to live life kind of neck up, to be lost in thinking lost in sort of a swirling rumination and so mindfulness included this expansion of our awareness to include our whole bodies. So we’re noticing what’s happening maybe on the bottoms of our feet or the tips of our fingers maybe noticing temperature, noticing clothing on our skin, noticing services that were in contact with. All of those things can have a very grounding effect for us emotionally as well. So the simple definition is it’s paying attention. It’s learning to pay attention to the present moment and as we do that, we are coming to the present moment with that attitude of curiosity, openness, non-judgment, and also with kindness and compassion towards ourselves and towards whatever we find in the moment.

Carrie: Right. That non-judgemental stance piece is really important because sometimes we’re aware of what’s going on in the present, but we’re trying to dodge it and avoid it and hide from it and feeling states may be especially either feeling states or pain like “I don’t want to feel that it’s hard. it’s too much.” Mindfulness is a good way for people to increase their distress tolerance and in my line of work and working with a lot of people with trauma tends to prepare them for the deeper levels of trauma work.

Dr. Kraegel: Absolutely, there are so many ways that when we are experiencing pain emotionally or physically, there can be a very natural response of avoidance and it makes sense. We don’t want to hurt. So if we’re feeling pain, there’s a tendency to turn away from that to try to get away from it.

And one of the foundational philosophies of mindfulness is that resisting our experience as part of what creates added suffering in our lives. And so we can’t avoid experiencing pain that’s out of our control because every human being experiences pain. What we can learn to do is to notice ways that are our avoidance of that, and our resistance to that is actually increasing our suffering. So we talk about ways that our minds create their own suffering that goes beyond whatever is present in the moment and so just like you said, mindfulness is learning then to turn towards those experiences rather than avoiding them to be able to stay present to whatever’s there. That’s very difficult as you mentioned and in cases of trauma or other situations where we may be feel flooded by an emotion that’s associated with a memory, our bodies hold all kinds of experiences in them that sometimes can be triggered without our awareness, even. So when we learn mindfulness and learn to stay present to that, it can be very difficult. Mindfulness is not for the faint of heart. You mentioned it’s a bit of a buzzword these days and I think it has this implication that mindfulness equals calmness or that when we practice mindfulness, that feels good. That’s not necessarily the case. I compare it much more to exercise as someone who doesn’t love exercise myself.

Sometimes when we work out physically, it feels good, and sometimes that’s pretty miserable, either way, we get benefit from physical exercise and mindfulness as much the same way. There are times where we do practices of mindfulness that lead us to feel calm and joyful and content and grounded and happy. There are other times where it’s miserable. Now, we’re just noticing all the thoughts. We’re noticing those painful emotions coming to the surface that maybe we’ve been trying to avoid. We’re noticing restlessness or just kind of a desire to stop whatever that practice is and even then there’s benefit because it’s bringing awareness to that present moment that has a healing effect for us, even if it’s uncomfortable in the moment, right?

Carrie: There’s this level I think sometimes when people try to practice mindfulness, which is counter to a lot of things in our society, because typically we’re focused on about five things at once and we don’t take the time to pause, but I think there’s this tendency maybe to wonder, “am I doing this right?” Or like you said, to try to make something happen, like, “okay, I’ve got to be mindful now, what do I do? what do I focus on?”

Dr. Kraegel: Yeah, absolutely and one of the things I noticed students saying as they’re starting to learn this practice is it’s not working. So we’ll kind of debriefing a mindfulness meditation and someone will say it didn’t work or it wasn’t, or they’ll also sometimes evaluate the practice in terms of, “was I doing it right or wrong?” And student might say, “I don’t think I was doing that.”

The beautiful thing about mindfulness is that we’re learning to notice that pressure to do things a certain way to get things right and also that desire for things to be a particular way. So if we say a practice isn’t working, usually what we mean is I didn’t feel calm during it, or I noticed that there was unpleasant emotion there that I had a lot of thoughts. So fortunately mindfulness does not equal clearing the mind. It doesn’t equal being in some sort of perfect state of Nirvana somehow. Really it simply means being present. So you can’t mess it up whatever’s there, and we’re more learning to kind of give up that striving and that need to perform, or that need for things to be a certain way so that we can really practice being present to whatever is there. And for me, a lot of my passion has to do with incorporating mindfulness into the Christian journey. This is where I see this coming together so naturally is that I believe that when we are learning to let go of our grip on things, having to be a certain way, then we’re really creating space to start to notice what God is doing. So we’re creating this awareness of things as they are, where we can start to see God at work more clearly, but we have to get out of the way. First, we have to learn, give up that need to push and pull, and kind of force things to be a certain way. We have to give up some of that control so that we can see more clearly that divine work that’s at play in any given moment.

Carrie: Sometimes that just means slowing down long enough to examine where God is at work in our situation and our world or surrounding us.

Dr. Kraegel: Absolutely. For me, I think slowing down with an awareness that lets me receive things in a moment instead of just thinking about them, you kind of going back to that option to learn. There’s a different way of relating to the world, besides just thinking about it. So when I practice mindfulness, I’m recognizing that God is at work in this moment. It’s not about what I think about that, it’s more just, can I slow down and pause and have to open up my hands and receive whatever is there and so that physical groundedness of mindfulness helps here when I become present. For example, to the chair that I’m sitting on. This physical sensation of the chair and the floor that’s under my feet, that’s provision. I actually did not make this chair that I’m sitting on nor did I make this floor heater on right now. And so when I become aware of the solidness of that chair and that floor, when I connect with that and I become aware of my body is sitting upright in this place. These are all gifts that I’m normally not noticing unless I pause to bring my awareness into the present moment without judgment and then that becomes a spiritual practice. Different people may have different labels for that depending on their worldview. When I become aware of something like the chair on the floor, holding me up with so little work on my own part to make any of that happen, I then received that as a gift from God. This is a divine gift. That there were people in the world who made this house, who made this chair and I have this body right now that’s been given to me that I can hold up on this chair as I sit here. That’s a gift. I think that there’s extra power for me and recognizing that when we slow down and open up our awareness. There are gifts in every single moment for us to become aware of.

Carrie: In essence, it opens yourself up to gratefulness and thankfulness.

Dr. Kraegel: Absolutely, and it’s different than deciding to be grateful. I do know people that seem to have that ability to intentionally turn their mind towards gratitude and that doesn’t come very naturally to me, just to say I’m going to be grateful today because as soon as I start to think of things I’m grateful for, it’s very easy for me to think of all the things that are going wrong. So like, “okay, I have this, but I don’t have that” or “this good thing happened, but that bad thing happened.” And so it can become our circle in my own mind. Practicing mindfulness, it’s a bit different in that it just gets me in touch with what’s right here right now so that there’s no power struggle around it. I’m not trying to think a certain thing about it, that’s grateful. I’m simply receiving it and that really does then open up my heart to gratitude so that it’s not just a cognition, but it also becomes an emotional and even a physical experience to open up and receive that.

Carrie: I know that mindfulness really has its origins in eastern traditions like Buddhism. I think that has led some Christians to be kind of wary of it, or maybe they’ve been involved in a place where someone did a mindfulness exercise and it did have that Eastern Buddhist type bent to it.

How do you see mindfulness aligning with the Christian faith?

Dr. Kraegel: Yeah, I think there are a lot of different ways we can approach that. And the definition itself is so simple that I’m not sure we can attribute it just to one religion or cultural tradition. Certainly Buddhism as a tradition that has highlighted present moment awareness and has really built a whole set of spiritual practices around present moment awareness and provided some really beautiful ways to pursue that. And present moment awareness is present in every major world religion. So really wherever people are seeking God, they are going to need to learn to be present in the moment. That’s the only place we can meet that. And so certainly in the Christian tradition, we can see the role of silence and contemplation and present moment awareness throughout scripture, throughout a variety of different traditions within Christianity. Even in modern times, there are some sort of older practices that are coming back that are becoming more popular lately that have this present moment awareness, very deeply interwoven in. So I think of things like the Ignatian tradition. That has a lot of language in it that very much overlaps with mindfulness principles, things like TSA worship, which has a very contemplative present kind of approach. Lexio Divina, where we’re practicing entering into the experience of scripture being read in the moment. Centering prayer is very much a mindfulness type of practice with God really as the object of our attention during those practices. So those are just a few examples, but really I don’t think any one religious tradition can say they have the corner on present moment awareness, but certainly, in the last few decades here in the United States, the popularization of mindfulness principles have very much come through that Buddhist tradition and that can sometimes make it more uncomfortable for people that don’t align with those beliefs or those traditions. And so I often talk about this in terms of culture and needing to be interculturally competent, and also to understand it’s always important for us to be sorting out the differences between culture and theology.

Sometimes when people are reacting to mindfulness with some fear. Sometimes people are fearful. Is this a new-age practice? Is this a Buddhist practice? Is this opening me up spiritually to something that’s not safe?

Then I think it’s important to take a step back and just look theologically at the concept of present moment awareness. Is there anything about present moment awareness that is dangerous in and of itself? And really the answer is no. So becoming more aware is a good thing and for anybody that wants to pursue God to be more fully aware and present to what God is doing right there in the moment is key. It’s crucial. And then from that foundation, there are all kinds of ways that we can integrate these concepts together. I think for me, one of the most powerful things is just recognizing that God is always present. When I’m practicing mindfulness, I’m practicing, being present that is putting my attention where God already is.

I do love in the Christian tradition that we’re often inviting God, maybe at the beginning of a church service, we might invite God to join us or ask the Holy spirit to come. That is beautiful and at the same time, God is already there. God is everywhere all the time. When we’re inviting God all we’re doing is acknowledging something that’s already true, which is like, God is here.

And so mindfulness wakes us up to that and this is kind of the foundation of where this integration occurs, but when we practice being present then we are aware of God being part of the present moment, that can only enhance our spiritual connection than with God and increase our ability to hear and to feel, and to be connected to this divine being. But recognizing that it doesn’t have to be about a certain set of thoughts or that really when we’re present in the moment to God, that’s kind of like being present to somebody that we care about. My husband and I have been married for 20 years. Sometimes we talk, sometimes we don’t and however I feel about him in a given moment, doesn’t change that. He’s my husband and he’s here and I think it’s kind of like that with God. So like sometimes I might be talking to God and we’re having a conversation and I’m feeling things or I’m thinking about things but whether or not that’s happening, God is still here. God is still God, I’m still me and so mindfulness just gives me a chance to notice, to look around and say, “Oh, God is actually right here already.”

Carrie: I want to make this really practical for people. So say someone’s listening to this podcast and they’re like, “yes, mindfulness sounds like it would be really helpful for me.”

Where do people start? How do they get started in developing that on a practical level in their day-to-day life?

Dr. Kraegel: There are really two different ways of approaching mindfulness that go hand in hand. And so the first piece is a whole set of formal practices that have become kind of traditional, at least in the more modern Western manifestation of mindfulness.

And so a lot of these come out of mindfulness-based stress reduction, which is MBSR for short. MBSR is a very secular approach to teaching mindfulness and for people who really want to have some thorough training that’s often a great place to start. And so a training course like that is going to guide somebody in a set of formal meditation practices that include things like a body scan, where we’re going through our body noticing what’s present my sitting practice, where we’re tuning into our breasts and our physical sensations and noticing thoughts and feelings on sounds things like movement practices. So it’s not uncommon to do mindful yoga as a way of noticing this interaction between our minds and our bodies, as we move things like a walking practice, which can be done with other types of movement as well for people that don’t walk. And so that can help us bring our awareness to different activities or movements we might normally do just without even thinking about them.

So that’s an example of some common mindfulness meditation practices. Those are really best done with a guide, and there are lots of free mindfulness meditation guides online. I’ve collected quite a few of them on my website at themindfulchristian.com. Just looking I’m always on the lookout for guides that I think can be especially helpful for Christians who are either looking for some Christian integration or at least want something that’s kind of secular in nature that they can then integrate with Christian faith as they would like. And so learning those formal practices is important then to be able to develop that other aspect of mindfulness, which is what we generally refer to as informal practice. So if the formal practice is a little bit more like setting aside a certain amount of time where you sit or lie down, or you’re engaged in some kind of intentional practice, usually with a guide, then the informal practice is more bringing your awareness throughout each and every day back to the present moment. Whenever you notice you have an opportunity to do that and so informally in the course of the day. For example, I might choose while I’m brushing my teeth to tune into those sensations and notice what is it actually like to be brushing my teeth right now. What are the direct sensations that I’m experiencing during this simple activity that I do every day? Where are my thoughts going? What kinds of emotions are coming up for me? Or maybe just informally in the course of a day, I noticed a moment where I’m feeling a little emotionally riled up, so mindfulness and that moment might look like, let me kind of turn towards myself right now and just check in what are my emotions?

What are the thoughts that are here? What are the urges or behaviors that I’m noticing in myself what’s happening in my body? That would be sort of an informal, mindful moment and maybe taking a few breaths and then continuing on with my day.

Now the informal application of mindfulness is much more challenging if we haven’t done some of the formal practices first. I know I had started with the informal practices when I was first learning about mindfulness and did not find them particularly helpful. But I wasn’t really aware of how I was triggering and re-triggering thought patterns in my own mind during those practices and it really took me coming back and learning formal practices before I was able to become more aware of my thought triggers which really opened me up to practice informally. Now, I already mentioned that I’m not like the world’s biggest rock star at the formal practices. That’s easy. So they’ll see those as crucial in getting me started and also I know when I need those, so it’s kind of like drinking water where I have to pay attention to like, am I thirsty? I shouldn’t take a drink. And now I can notice those times where I really need to reach for one of those formal practices to make sure I’m grounded. So everybody’s balance of those will look a little bit different. Some people are very heavily focused on the formal practices and others work that in less frequently. It really is just a matter for each person of what they need, but I would definitely recommend that for people who would like to pursue this more, they either look into an MBSR course, if they’re feeling ready for that, or certainly just starting to go through some of the guides that we can find online. Practicing, dipping, our toes into it a little bit can be a great place to start as well.

Carrie: And I will definitely put those links that you talked about in the show notes too. So if people want to look and dive into it a little bit more then they can. So towards the end of every podcast, I really like to ask the guests to share a story of hope, which is a time that you’ve received hope from God or another person.

Dr. Kraegel: Yeah, that’s really a beautiful question and I’ve given some thought to this because you did give me a heads up you would be asking me this and so as I’ve thought about hope for myself, I do think of particular stories from my life where things felt like all was lost and God came through. I’m thinking of all kinds of particulars like they were years for example where I had multiple pregnancy losses. I write about this in my book as well, too. Not really knowing how that would resolve. God brought us a child and we have this beautiful nine-year-old boy that we love. That’s something that brings me hope or to think about even just my own marriage as being something that’s a blessing to me after going through an experience in early childhood where my parent’s marriage didn’t work out. So to have a marriage now that feels solid brings me hope, but I say all that to say that I’m not sure that that’s what fuels my emotional hope.

I think what actually instills hope inside of my heart is these little tiny micro-moments of provision and the one that came to my mind when I thought what would be the story of hope that I would share is actually just something simple as my morning cup of coffee. I wish I could remember who said this, I know there’s a quote out there from somebody who talked about how his morning cup of coffee is what gave him hope for the world. I really think that there’s some truth in that, that when I bring a mindful awareness to the present moment around those things that bring me joy, something in the morning like a cup of coffee, smelling it, the warmth of the cup, recognizing all the people involved in bringing that coffee to me. All of the growers and the people who worked to process it and the people who packaged it and brought it around the world. The people who made the coffee pot. And I mean, you can kind of go on and on about all the people involved in something as simple as a cup of coffee, and then to be present to that experience that is what actually ignites hope in my heart. Those little things happen throughout the course of every day on those little moments of provision. Those moments of recognizing that no matter how lost things seem in the world, they will always seem broken in the world we live in, no matter how aware we are in any given moment or any given year of how challenging things are, there are still these small pieces of provision every single moment and that truly gives me hope. So that’s what kind of awakens my heart up to say, “Oh, I’m okay.” The world’s okay where I’m being given what I need right now. And I know that in every moment, moving forward, God will continue to give me what I need and that’s a hopeful thing for me.

Carrie: That’s awesome. Thank you so much for sharing that. I think it’s just very relevant to what we talked about today.

Dr. Kraegel: Certainly this particular season too as we’re kind of nearing the end of 2020 here, and it’s been a year where we recognized globally so many challenges in terms of health and mental wellbeing and injustice on so many different levels and so many layers of difficulty. It hasn’t been a year that we’ve been able to pretend that things are okay. So something like mindfulness, I think, has been crucial for me and recognizing that we’re not okay because we have it all figured out and we know what’s going to happen. We are okay because God is providing for us in each moment and so mindfulness really helps open me up to that awareness.

Carrie: That’s so good. I think that the show was very helpful and informative and practical for people and I hope that it sparks a desire and encouragement for them to start practicing mindfulness on their own if they haven’t or if they have started it to know you can’t mess it up.

I love things that you can’t mess up. How great is that?

Dr. Kraegel: Yeah, well, I hope it is helpful for people and I think, you know, for people who pursue mindfulness, oftentimes it’s just finding the right style, the right resource. It’s a very simple concept, but can be practiced in a lot of different ways. So I hope that those listening will give it a chance. So thank you so much for the chance to talk about it today. I really appreciate that.

Carrie: Yeah, thank you.

______________________________________________________

I hope that you all enjoy listening to this interview as much as I did getting to talk to Dr. Kraegel. it was really insightful in how we can meet God in this present moment as he is always with us. That’s so awesome and such a beautiful part of our faith experience.

Definitely check out the show notes on this episode If you’re looking for more information on mindfulness.

Would you like to give suggestions for future shows, hop on over to hopeforanxietyandocd.com and click on the contact page.

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.

Find out how to support your anxious spouse on this podcast episode!

15. Supporting Your Anxious Spouse with Summer McKinney, LMFT

Written by Carrie Bock on February 10, 2021. Posted in Anxiety, Counseling, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 15. Supporting Your Anxious Spouse with Summer McKinney, LMFT

I haven’t done any marriage counseling since my internship in graduate school, so I asked my good friend Summer McKinney to be on the show to talk about how you can support your spouse who is struggling with anxiety. She provides some excellent tips such as

When is it a good time to pursue marriage counseling? Hint: not when most people do!
How to be present for your spouse
What they might need from you when anxiety hits
What to do if you are driven nuts by your spouse’s anxious behavior or OCD rituals
Anxiety as a third party in the marriage

Resources and links:

Summer McKinney
Support the show

More Podcast Episodes

Transcript Of Episode 15

Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD, Episode 15. I am your host Carrie Bock. Today we are talking about supporting your anxious spouse. I was able to interview my good friend Summer McKinney who is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist to have a conversation just in what do you do if you have a spouse who’s struggling with anxiety or OCD. How can you be supportive and helpful to them in that process while at the same time working through maybe some of your own frustrations that you might have with how the anxiety is affecting the marriage? I think there are some good takeaways from this one. So let’s dive right in.

Carrie: So tell us a little bit about yourself.

Summer: My name is Summer McKinney and I have a private practice here in Smyrna in marriage, family, individual counseling and I’ve been practicing therapy for the past eight years.

Carrie: Awesome. How did you decide to become a marriage and family therapist? There are many different types of therapists and many different specializations, and some people are licensed clinical social workers. Some people are licensed professional counselors and so you chose this licensed marriage and family therapy route.

Summer: Yes. I started out working in church high school ministry as a high school girls director. I had gone through and got my master’s in education. I had taught missions and stuff, and God put me in that position, opened up those doors for me to be in that position. I was working a lot with youth and a parent had asked me as I was talking with her child and stuff, she said, “well, what are your credentials?”

I had always wanted to do counseling, but I guess not confident and stuff I had already gone through and I went back and furthered my education, secondary education, thinking that I was going to teach. In the back of my mind, I’d always loved counseling. My dad does counseling at a school corporation and so that was always kind of there but I was really nervous. Just not really confident like, “Do I have what it takes to go and get this degree?” And stuff like that. That kind of question, “What are your credentials” really hit me a lot because I wanted to be able to be credible in that. That pushed me to go and pursue the degree.

I chose marriage and family because that just hits home with me more so. Relationships, working amongst the family system, the units that people are in. My parents did foster care when I was in high school and so just seeing how systems impact a child or a whole family unit whether does that family system itself or extended family or extended systems. To me, that just made a lot of sense. So that is why I chose marriage and family therapy.

Carrie: It’s really interesting when you look at how much we’re impacted by other people and other relationships in our life. Looking at somebody as a whole person, who do they have surrounding them and whether that’s supporting them, or sometimes, unfortunately, that’s leading to some of the dysfunctional behavior that they have. It’s interesting to me to what you were saying of when that lady questioned you about your credentials. You already had a master’s degree in education, right?

Summer: Yes. I’m a life learner, whether it’s back at school or just self- learning and it’s just me, I value education. I value knowledge. Of course, I totally agree with that saying “The more you know, the more you don’t know.” It’s just like, “Wow, there’s so much out there.” I want to be able to say yes, I have the right to speak into this because I have training. I have knowledge. I have wisdom in this. It’s not just my opinion and so that especially I think in today’s culture is really important because everybody has opinions. Where’s the facts? Where’s the research? Where’s the truth and all of this but it can’t be found. Sometimes there’s multiple truths and things, but that’s really for me that’s something I value.

I think God used that to push me in that direction. Again, knowing that I was not confident in myself at that time and so he used the words of that parent to push me in that direction because I wanted it. I really did want it deep down.

Carrie: It’s interesting how much overlap to between education and counseling because as counselors, we are educators, we are teaching people new skills. So we are informing them about research. We are talking with them about mind, body connection issues. So that definitely worked well together and you probably see how God has woven all of those things in your life to where you are now.

Summer: Absolutely. Just the marriage of the two. I do a lot of psycho-education and workshops and just speaking whether it’s a school or whether it’s a church. I just love that piece of bringing that knowledge to other people. It’s not like, “Oh, I’m this expert in this area” and counseling as well. You have the same skill sets and knowledge. It’s just we all have different population groups. We all have different spheres of influence that we can take this information that maybe other people don’t know, or maybe they know, but they don’t know how to apply it. I love the marriage between education and therapy. It’s one of my favorite things.

Carrie: One of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show was to talk a little bit about marriage counseling because that’s not one of my specialty areas. It’s funny and a little bit comical to me that people sometimes will email me or call me and say, “Hey, I’m looking for marriage counseling and we really wanted you to do that” even though that’s nowhere kind of on my online listings or profiles. I’m like, “if only you guys knew the last time I did marriage counseling was in my internship over 10 years ago. I’m pretty sure those couples aren’t together anymore. This is not a good situation.”

Maybe you could answer a little bit for people who feel like they’re struggling in their marriage in some way, shape or form, how do you feel like people know when it’s a good time to pursue marriage counseling? Just in general.

Summer: I actually start back and I tell people that are even just dating, don’t wait for an engagement to start premarital therapy. You can back up therapy. If you’re really serious, go ahead and go in and talk about some of the things. Communication is huge. We all think, especially in the initial phase of dating like “yes, we could stay up till four o’clock in the morning talking to the phone.” We’re great communicators and really that’s just talk. That’s not necessarily communication. When you get married, things just exacerbate things from before that maybe were not that big deal, or maybe you just kind of laughed it off, or oh, that’s so cute that they do this. And it really, it becomes that petty that you just want to, “Oh my gosh, just stop.”

Things when you get married, definitely get bigger. Having some of those tools. It’s just all about utilizing the skill sets and these tools in ways that are going to help build communication, help bring resolve when conflict does come or when there’s differences because you’re not marrying a duplicate of yourself. You’re marrying somebody else with their own background, their own experiences, sometimes their own beliefs, their own values. You can have shared values but a different priority of those shared values, which can create conflict. I think that any time during the course of a relationship it’s beneficial to go to therapy. Don’t wait for a problem to happen.

We take vitamins or we work out. We do all these preventative things in other aspects of our life. So go ahead and do care and enrichment in your relationship, whether it is married or engaged, dating. Go ahead and do those things because it’s only going to help it. It’s not going to hurt it.

Carrie: Right. I know for Steve and I, we had a little bit of premarital counseling and we also met with someone that I considered to be a mentor and it was nice to get some of those hard questions asked by an objective third party. So it would be like, “okay, tell us about a fight that you got in?” How did you resolve that? Or I think they asked what annoys you about the other person. And we were able to hear each other’s answers so that you didn’t just look at everything like it’s all flowers and rainbows and wonderful, like you said with kind of some of the honeymoon glasses on. I appreciate what you’re saying going when you don’t necessarily have a major problem. Maybe you just feel like you’re not seeing eye to eye with your spouse when you’re trying to communicate things and you might be able to learn some skills that could help you moving forward so that you don’t have to get into those big problems. I think sometimes people wait to get marriage counseling until one or both parties is ready to jet out.

Summer: Right. It’s an ultimatum or the rescue itself. A lot of times there’s such deep wounds there that it’s hard to repair. I mean not always. I mean, don’t lose that hope but it is hard if you keep pushing those things off.It doesn’t get better.

I’m glad that things are changing. The stigma around therapy is improving. The stigma around mental health is it’s getting better. We’re not there yet but I’m so glad that people are open. So many of my clients are like, “I tell everybody that I go to therapy because I want them to know that it’s okay.”

And I love that they feel free to do that and so many of their friends have looked up a therapist in their area to talk with. That just makes me feel good knowing that something that I do is helping another person and that they are then helping other people by normalizing that piece of therapy.

It’s not just when things are bad or you need mental health or whatever it’s like. This is really good for just health for life.

Carrie: Yeah. That’s so good. I think that was one of the reasons that we’re on this podcast, talking about these things too, is because a lot of times in the church, maybe people haven’t heard those positive messages about therapy, or they think they have to have it all together because they’re a Christian and really we’re just broken people trying to follow Christ and figure out life and how to pursue Him and the calling that He has on our lives.

So that’s so great. The points that you pointed out about we are reducing stigma but we also still have a little ways to go too.

So we’re talking about supporting your spouse when your spouse has anxiety or OCD, or I’m sure some of these things apply for other areas as well like depression. I imagine maybe there are spouses who want to be supportive, but they feel paralyzed or like, “how do I really help my spouse with anxiety?” What kind of thoughts or advice do you have on that?

Summer: Sure. I think the first thing is to listen and be that support. Listening to hear what are the needs. Don’t be dismissive or minimize the fear or the concern that’s there. Just being able to be a sounding board for them. When you come along you’re like, “Oh, that’s silly. Don’t worry about that.” You minimize something that is very real to them. I think it’s really important just to be that support. You had mentioned Carrie, about being in the church and things around stigmas in the church. A big one that I come across a lot with that anxiety is that “you’re just not trusting God” or “you’re just not praying enough or maybe your faith isn’t strong enough” and that creates even deeper wounds especially if it’s a spouse coming in and bring up or that positivity piece, “You just gotta be positive and think positive.” People with anxiety or really any kind of mental health issues, they don’t want this. They didn’t ask for this. To come at them in those kinds of negative ways just creates even more shame. I think being a good listener, being a good support for them through that is just really foundational.

Carrie: I think we underestimate whether it’s in our relationship with our spouse or in friendships or in people that we encounter in the church.

I think we underestimate the power may be of presence, of just giving our time and our attention and really listening. Not listening for what’s the right answer, “Do I say back to you?” But listening for like, “I hear you. I see your story. I’m so sorry that you’re struggling with that. How can I help you?”

Summer: Absolutely. I think we are in a culture that’s busy. We strive to achieve and there’s so much stress. We wear stress as a badge of honor.

Some of the things that I do with my clients is it’s just helping them to be present and to be able to know their bodies because we’re just so accustomed to stress that it’s normal. It’s like, wait, that’s not normal. Just because society or culture say that this is normal to feel this way but no. You need to be able to hear your body and, you know, “Oh my shoulders are really heavy. Okay. Well, I need to be able to rest or decompress or find some peace” because stress creates a whole lot of health issues. It can further that anxiousness. I think stress, the busyness, we don’t have time for people. We do those, those cordial, you know, “We’re in the south

and so it’s, “I’m just being nice and asking, but I don’t really care.” “How are you? If you go beyond fine. “I gotta go here or there.” And so we’re really missing connection on those deeper levels and so I do think that even a family unit could be like ships passing in the night with whether it’s kids or work and different things going on.

Being able to take time for each other to hear each other, to be present, as you said. It’s okay to not know, it’s okay to be there, “I don’t know what to say to you.” “I don’t know how to help.” I say that sometimes even just those words, “I’m not sure what to do” can be refreshing because too many times, people try to come and fix it. [00:17:32] I don’t need a fixer. You need somebody who can just be in it with you.

Carrie: Right. Do you find that, not to pick on husbands, but I think sometimes husbands tend to be more of the fixers and women tend to be a little bit more emotional. Do you find that husbands a lot of times want to put a bandaid on it or say like, “Hey, it’s okay” or “Oh, don’t worry about it.” And they’re trying to keep it like you said, “positive and lighthearted” but really what the woman might be experiencing is, “Oh, he just totally dismissed what I just said or my feelings.”

Summer: I know that there is the stereotype of men being that way and women. I think it’s more personality because “I am the fixer” trying to help him fix things, but I’m the one that tries to solicit that advice that’s most of the time unwanted. I think it’s more of the personality traits that come into play on those things and so it’s being mindful. It’s being aware of, “okay, I need to step back. It’s not about me trying to fix it.” That’s not what that person needs. Well, actually, what I need to do is ask them what they need.

It’s both on communication. It’s the job of the person who is presenting whatever symptom it may be, whether it’s anxiousness or depression, or anything to communicate, “Hey, this is what’s going on with me.” And it’s also on that end of that person who’s receiving and hearing this, or even saying it to say, “Hey, what do you need?”

How can I help you?” rather than inserting what they think is needed because what I would want can be completely different than what my husband wants. And honestly, most of the time it is completely different than what my husband wants. So I think we need to do more of asking than assuming or fixing how we would want it fixed.

Carrie: I think you bring up a good point there of like support looks different for different people. And I don’t know if that’s related to love languages at all, but for some people, they may want someone to talk them through a situation. For other people, they may just want that person to not really talk a whole lot and just let them vent or let them get it out.

And so by saying, “What do you need me to do?” Like for example, when you’re having a panic attack, “how would you like me to respond?” “What do you think might be most helpful?” That person may not know right away. There may be some trial and error that has to happen in order to figure out what works best.

Summer: And that is a huge piece of being able to identify “What is my need?” This goes beyond me. This is anybody. When I can identify my feeling, what is that feeling communicating what’s going on? What is that anger saying? Or what is that fear saying? [00:20:52] And then being able to say, “okay, what does it need? What do I need?” Sometimes you’re right, we are not sure what it needs and how to help ourselves, but sometimes we do sometimes it’s “I just need a hug.” “I need that reassurance.” And it is scary to communicate that because we fear rejection. As people, no matter what age we are, we fear being rejected [00:21:18] and so it can be scary to communicate those feelings and those needs at that moment, but if we don’t take the risk and this is a huge part of marriage therapy is we have to take the risk to be vulnerable because if we don’t take that risk, then we’re totally missing out on something that could be amazing and great. The very thing that we need is that support, we could be missing out on that.

Carrie: Yeah, it’s so good because I think a lot of times people may have been in situations where they felt guilt, either over having needs or guilt over expressing their needs. Sometimes telling clients it’s normal to have needs, that’s a part of being human and not only is it normal and okay to have needs, but then it’s okay for you to ask someone else for what you need. And that doesn’t make you selfish or an awful person, but sometimes we can get in this caretaker mode of that causes and creates insurance up anxiety of “okay I have to take care of everybody”

and then myself is like totally last. I don’t take care of myself and then nobody’s advocating for myself or what I want or need.

Summer: Yeah. That self-care is so important. When you get on an airplane, put on the oxygen mask first, before you get other people, and it goes against our instinct especially if you’re a parent with children. It goes, we want to

[00:22:59] get to them first that were of no help if we passed out. And so that same thing in your relationship, or as a caretaker, any of those aspects of dynamics that come into play, if you’re not making yourself a priority, you are not going to be the best version of yourself that you can be for your family unit, for your relationship and so you have to have self-care. You have to make yourself a priority in that. I do want to say when you are being vulnerable and sharing those things, you need to make sure that it is a safe person. If you are in an abusive relationship or a relationship where there are certain areas that maybe it’s not safe emotionally or spiritually or mentally. That would only do further damage.

Some of these skill sets, being vulnerable, sharing the needs and stuff, it’s important to be in that safe environment because if it’s not a safe partner or safe family member, it’s only going to cause more damage.

Carrie: Absolutely. I think there may be people who are in situations as well that aren’t necessarily to that extreme where they’re unsafe, but they may feel like, “Okay, I’ve tried to open up to my partner before, or I’ve tried to talk with them about what’s going on with me and it just kind of falls flat” or “I don’t get the emotional response or the support that I’m looking for.” I think in those situations, it’s really great as far as having a marriage counselor who’s a third party to be able to comment and say like, “Hey, did you see what your spouse was just trying to communicate to you there?” You see what you need from this person now and it helps bridge a gap of communication for them to be able to receive that support.

Summer: Absolutely. I think that part of my job is to feel those pieces where things maybe start to heighten a little bit, soften those areas, and allow that emotional engagement in a new way to take place. Because so many times we are in that negative mindset that it can’t happen because “it didn’t happen before and see all those times in the past when we tried and I was minimized.” And so being able to allow a new experience of doing that is still important. That’s why therapy is really great to help give new experiences to the old so that you know, “we can do this.” You’re setting up some wins in there for the relationship and it’s so beautiful to see those happen and the connection and just the love that takes place whenever couples finally, “Oh wow. He does care.” “She does respect me or love me and value me.” It’s just so neat to see some of those things take place because a lot of times these wounds have been going on for years and so to finally be met with what you’ve been desiring all along, it’s just beautiful to see.

Carrie: Yeah. I know too that there can be situations and maybe you’ve experienced this with some of the couples that you’ve worked with, sometimes anxiety can drive the other spouse a little nuts because they feel like either the person who’s anxious is maybe asking a lot of questions or they’re trying to control things out of their anxiety. [00:26:56] They may be asking for a lot of reassurance and it might be exhausting or wearing on that spouse. And I’ll throw into for OCD, sometimes people with OCD will rope their spouses into their process, into some of their compulsions and want them to engage in some of those with them. So I guess talk a little bit about that. Maybe some help for those spouses who feel like I’m just being driven badly by this anxiety.

Summer: I think it’s really important to have boundaries. Sometimes those can be hard to define and so I think again that can be where therapy can help. Individual therapy for the person with the anxiety, so that they can gather their own coping mechanisms and skill sets. Those self-regulating self-soothing kind of skill sets. Couples therapy can help them to communicate together, to help establish some boundaries. It’s not that you can’t ask any questions, but when you have 30 questions, that is exhausting.

Rather than being dependent on that person to rescue you or to somehow fix or change what’s going on, being able to say, “okay, what do I have within myself to help me where their support is an aid to it.” So the partner is not the savior, not the rescue.

It’s really important when you get into knowing your cycle. So if you’re anxious, knowing your anxiety cycle, that’s there knowing your couple dynamic and your couple cycle. There is going to be really important too because then you can start to identify it earlier and catch it before it spirals and so that’s really important too is to identify that.

Carrie: I think probably one thing that would be really loving for a spouse maybe to say to someone is, “Hey, I’m noticing that this topic of conversation or this situation that you’re dealing with, or maybe a problem that we’re trying to solve, it seems like, it’s ramping up your anxiety.” Because the spouse may notice possibly before the individual that they’re getting anxious, just depending on people’s awareness levels. A lot of times people can see things we can’t see in ourselves.

Summer: Yeah. It’s when we identify those pieces, sometimes the other person’s maybe not aware of it, but we’re on the outside and we can maybe bring that to attention or if that person identifies those pieces, being able to communicate that. So for example, my husband deals with some anxiety. At night, if I bring up bills or money or financial talk, like it just kind of just gets his mind, he has a hard time shutting it down and so I have learned, and sometimes I have to be reminded not to talk about this at night. For me, I’m just so busy through the day that whenever I’m finally in bed and my mind coming down from the business of the day, all of the different things start coming into play and I’ll be like, “Oh, hey, did we?” and I’m gonna be up for a little bit longer just processing for himself.

We need to be respectful of the requests of our partner, whether it’s, “Hey, at this time of day, I don’t want to have these kinds of conversations” or, “Hey, I get really stressed out” or “we go on a trip.” I’m kind of a crazy person before we go on vacation. I want to make sure the house is good.

So whenever we come back home, I don’t have to do any cleaning, you know and just packing and all that kind of stuff and so my husband knows I just sometimes need space and so if he takes our child and goes out for a little bit just to give me the house to myself so I can be my crazy self by myself for a little bit.

It’s kind of knowing the needs of your spouse, knowing your spouse and being able to respect and give that space or whatever the request is that they have to help them in that process, whether it’s just stress or whether it is that full-blown anxiety or those panic attacks.

You know, if it’s social anxiety being able to say, “Okay, here’s a code word that we have a little bit like I’m, I’m starting to feel certain things.” Let’s start heading out kind of a thing. So it’s not like everybody else, you know, cause embarrassment is a big thing. It’s just between you guys, “Okay. I heard the code word. All right. We’re going to celebrate it by and we’re gonna start to head out.”

So there’s different ways that you can accommodate and support each other based on those requests, those needs. It’s both communicating when you are aware of those things, but then also for the partner to maybe inquire like, “Hey, I’m noticing this, do you find that to be true for you?”

That way, because you’re exploring it together you’re a unit. Anxiety can be like the third person in the marriage. The worst thing is just to dismiss it and act like it’s not there. Acknowledge it and give it a name if you want to. I have a client that her anxiety is called “the jerk.” The jerk went with me today to the grocery store and I love it and I encourage that even the couple dynamic. Rather than pitting at each other, the blaming, and stuff like that, let’s call our cycle. It’s the cycle doing this. It’s not you. I think that that can really help to alleviate because it is a third-party in the marriage. It is a third party in the relationship and so I think that being able to put that some shift, that blame so to speak where it goes rather than the person allows room for grace.

Carrie: Yeah. That’s so huge because if you look at it “as my spouse is not what I’m fighting against” like I’m wanting to maybe work with this anxiety and manage it differently, not my spouse. And so that takes the attention away and maybe eases some of those conflicts that may occur. I think accommodating each other in marriage is a huge thing and being willing to sacrifice your own interests at times. You may want to stay at the party for three hours, but you know, you’re like, it’s going to be amazing for your spouse to tolerate one hour. Sometimes you may just have to be like, “Hey, let’s just go to the party for one hour or we’re just going to quickly drop in and drop out.” And it’s not a big deal, but also encouraging someone with maybe some social challenges to still get out there, “Okay. Let’s not stay home because that would just be giving into the anxiety.”

Summer: Yeah, that only perpetuates the cycle. I think it’s identifying that there is a shame piece that comes into play here. You feel bad that you are impacting your partner’s life in this way. You feel guilty about different things and then you feel just an adequacy of yourself as well. And so while you’re trying to find relief from the negative and unwanted feelings that you have, the way that your partner interacts with you can really make a difference on that shame piece because it can perpetuate it. If you come at with those accusations or just that resentment and that bitterness, it can really perpetuate those wounds that are there.

Carrie: Right. So we talked a little bit about listening to your spouse. We talked and he like really, truly listening saying, “how can I help you and support you in this?” Maybe sometimes making compromises or meeting halfway there. Anything else that you’d add to that advice?

Summer: I think just the acceptance. Accepting them, accepting your partner for all who they are. That’s important regardless of having anxiety or not having anxiety. I think sometimes we forget, we only see the negative things that come into play or the external stressors that impact relationships and family units and we forget the good. And so I’ve seen loving, accepting all of who they are and anxiety is a piece of who they are. It doesn’t define them. That doesn’t define who you are, but it shapes an aspect of who you are and so being able to accept that piece of them and loving them through whatever episodes or symptoms they are displaying. It kind of goes back to just some pieces of those attachments of feeling worthy, feeling loved, valued.

As spouses, as partners, as family members, as we interact with each other, being able to dig down into those deeper aspects of acceptance and love and, and worth I think that’s just really huge.

Carrie: We don’t realize how accepting people where they’re at is transformative. We think if I accept you where you’re at then that means you’re just going to stay stuck, [00:37:24] but really it’s that beginning point that stirs up something within you of like, “I want to grow. I want to be a better person. I want to have positive outcomes because this person is really seeing me for who I am and they are totally loving me and totally accepting me and now I want to be a better person.” I think that that happens in marriage. I really think that that’s a parallel of what happens in our relationship with Christ, like part of this sanctification process.

Summer: Yeah. I totally agree. It makes me think of Paul in Acts and he comes across, I can’t remember the name of the man that he was baptized by John the Baptist and he was teaching and he was having people that were coming to followers and he was teaching, but Paul approached him and he was like, “No, you stopped. You heard from John the Baptist and then you just stopped and you didn’t know about Christ.”

I mean he just stopped right there and it’s like, “Whoa! no hope.” A whole bunch of stuff has happened since then but he was stagnant. He was stuck at so he was misleading people based on the very limited information and things that he had and so Paul was able to tell him the truth about Jesus Christ and even John the Baptist pointed to Christ. He didn’t just stop there. I think that is so true. Don’t stop. Don’t stay where you are, even as a believer, don’t just, “Okay. Yep. I already know about Jesus. I know this. I know that. I’m good. I’m good.” It’s like, “Whoa, but you’re missing out on so much more.”

I think that when you look at relational health, sometimes we’re like, “Yep. I got the tools. I got the skill sets. I’m done. I’m good” but wait, you’re missing out on so much more just because you have these things here. Are you actually applying it? Are you continuing to grow in that? Education is so huge with anything but especially mental health.

I’ll ask people when they come in and said, “Okay, so you got this diagnosis. What do you know about it?” I am sometimes surprised at some people like, “I don’t know. This is what I was told.” And I was like, “okay, let’s explore.” or I will have a partner who says, “well, this is my wife she struggles with anxiety.” And I’m like, “okay, well, what do you know?” And like, “no, that’s her thing” like, “I don’t need to educate myself about it. I live with it.”

I’m like, “No, you need to educate yourself as well” and really that speaks volumes to your partner. If you were to say, “wow, okay, let me learn about this. Let me get in a support group with people who are married to somebody with bipolar or anxiety.” It builds a deeper support of like, “wow, you’re actually trying to understand me” and not just that, but you are accepting this part of me. You’re not just in this denial that this is going on. You’re actually accepting this and you are wanting to learn more about it, which is going to benefit the marriage itself.

Carrie: Right. Absolutely. I love that. So we’re kind of winding down towards the end. So I’ll ask you the question that gets asked of everyone on the show. So since it’s called Hope for Anxiety and OCD, I’d love for people to share a story of a time in their life where they received hope from God or another person.

Summer: It’s hard to narrow. I don’t wanna say narrow it down, but when we actually stop in and give that gratitude and that praise. It’s just amazing how much God is in the detail of things. A lot of times when I think of the hope or just the faithfulness of God in my life, I have to look at my own marriage. I was single until 28. I got married at 29. I came from a very large family and always wanted many children and of course the older I got, I could do the math in my head. “Okay, Lord, this isn’t like going to happen. Of course, that was before like people in their forties started having kids and stuff but there’s like, “okay, wait my large family is going to happen” but God was in the details of my husband and I knew each other from way back when, but just went our own separate ways but we reconnected. I inherited three amazing children in our marriage.

My deal breaker was I wanted a child and so if my husband were going to get married, he would have to agree that we could have a child together and he said, “okay”. So again, “Okay, Lord. I have three children and I want that camaraderie. I want them to grow up with a younger sibling.” And so my timing was shortly after, “let’s settle in to married life and blended family life,” but few years were going by and it’s like, “Okay, Lord, is this going to happen?” Just a lot of questions. My husband kinda gave up like, “okay, it’s not going to happen around him” and it took us a few years. God knew again, being in the details and perfect timing. The bonding that I was worried about. The boys were in high school whenever we had our son and through college, one of the boys stayed home and commuted and the bonding was just amazing.

It was just all of those fears and all of those concerns or those questions. It wasn’t my timing but the timing was just perfect. It wasn’t always my way, but God knew what he was doing and just being in the details. And so that to me was just the hope of a large family, the hope of the bonding and that unity among the family and God just blessed it. When those doubts or when fears or things come into play, whether you’re single or whether you’re in an empty marriage or divorced, and you still have that desire I think that God is in the details and his timing is amazing. It’s not always our time where I think about the big things in my life where desire and hope and blessing come together. I would say it’s definitely my family unit.

Carrie: It’s amazing how God will give us those desires like for you it was for to have a large family and God totally filled that in a way that you couldn’t have imagined at that point in time like you were thinking that all of those children would be completely biologically yours and you ended up with a beautiful family picture and it’s amazing how God’s dreams are much better than things that we could dream on our own. And when we try to do it our ways or in our timing, it just never quite shakes out and we can become disappointed. I appreciate that story cause I do believe it’s hopeful and will be hopeful for many people listening.

Thank you so much for taking the time to be on the show and share your wisdom with us now.

Summer: Thank you for having me here. I appreciate that.

____________________________________________________

Summer and I have had lots of conversations off the air about reducing shame and stigma in the church in regards to mental illness. So it was an absolute treat to be able to have some of those conversations on the air to be able to share those with you all.

I wanted to share some feedback that I received today regarding the podcast. Erica writes, “I enjoyed your first podcast about your life. It was so inspiring. It had it all. I laughed. I cried and I got goosebumps with your transformation.”

Thank you so much Erica for sharing that. I really appreciate it.

If you want to share what the podcast has meant for you, you can either write a review or you can go on hopeforanxietyandocd.com and reach me in the comments section. 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.

Find out how to find the right therapist for your personal situation

14. How to Find a Therapist Who is Right for You

Written by Carrie Bock on February 3, 2021. Posted in Counseling, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 14. How to Find a Therapist Who is Right for You

On this solo episode, Carrie shares about how to find a therapist who is right for you.

Carrie shares her own experience searching for two different counselors and how she made the decisions she did in her search.
How to evaluating your personal situation with time, scheduling/location, and budget before beginning the search
How to start the online search for a counselor and what to look for

Resources and links:
For more detailed information on finding a counselor who is right for you, check out Carrie’s ebook:
Finding a Good Fit on the First Try: The Ultimate Guide to Finding a Therapist

If you are anywhere in the state of TN and would like to see Carrie Bock, click here.

Other sites for finding a therapist:
Psychology Today
Open Path Collective (low cost option)

Support the show

More Podcast Episodes

Transcript Of Episode 14

Hello, welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD episode 14.

Today on the podcast, we are going to talk about how to find a therapist who is right for you. Maybe you’re in the process of looking for a therapist or you’ve thought about looking for a therapist in the past and the process seemed really overwhelming. Hopefully this will break it down for you to make it a little bit easier.

I have found that finding a therapist is much different than finding a medical professional. Unfortunately, a lot of times people approach it the same way, ending up in disappointment and frustration.

I want to start by telling you about a couple of different times that I tried to find a therapist to start us off.

Many years ago before I got divorced and I was still married, I was dealing with some work stress and my relationships stress. I decided that I wanted to go to counseling. I was looking for someone who was a Christian not because I was concerned about being given advice that wasn’t Christian or somehow being led astray from the faith, but I thought it’s just going to be a lot easier on me if this person has that shared experience. There will be a lot less that I feel like I have to explain to another person because to explain my faith to someone else is going to take a lot of time and so pretty important dynamic in my life.

I also was looking for someone who was within say about 30 minutes of my house. I wasn’t particularly concerned about driving, but I didn’t want to drive too far. I was thinking that I was probably going to be a little bit more comfortable talking to a woman than a man at that point. I was also looking for someone who would be able to take my employee assistance program which if you don’t know what that is, it’s something that’s usually a part of your benefits package with your employer and that allows you to have three to five, sometimes all the way up to eight sessions for free. Because at that point in time, my budget for therapy was zero. So free was good.

The other thing I knew was that I was going to have to go to therapy probably in the morning because the majority of my work responsibilities were taking place in the afternoons and evenings. I was seeing kids and so I needed to be able to see them after school got out.

This led me to a few different people. The first counselor that I tried, I didn’t have a good connection with. In fact, I felt like she was rather judgmental concerning my situation and what I was dealing with and coming in for. So I only went one session to her and did not go back, but I ended up finding another counselor who met those criteria and I did really great work together. She was the main one that actually helped me through my divorce process because I saw her before really during and after for an extended period of time and got a lot of my own stuff worked through.

I’m definitely so thankful that God led me to her. Then I had a therapeutic break. Life was pretty stable and going relatively well, but I got to a point as I talked about in episode 10 with Steve, where I wanted to get back into dating, but every time I tried to, my body basically completely revolted against it, and my mind was all over the place. So that was not going to work for me. I knew that there was probably still some past residual stuff from my last relationship that I hadn’t fully worked through.

And at this point, I was still looking for a counselor who was a Christian and I was looking for a male. I decided to go see a male because I wanted to get the opposite sex perspective on dating. I didn’t know how healing and therapeutic that would be for me to end up with a male therapist, but it was so beneficial for me. I’m glad I went in that direction.

I wanted to see someone online via telehealth therapy. There were really two reasons for that. One reason was that I had recently started providing telehealth therapy to some of my clients and I wanted to see what the experience was like on the other end. The other reason I wanted to do telehealth was because I did not want to see any of the therapist near me. Therapy circles are relatively small. I didn’t want to have to worry about seeing this person at local professional gatherings or local connections of different EMDR therapists.

I was looking for EMDR trained therapist because I am very familiar with it. I have done EMDR in the past and it was very helpful. It turned out in the most amazing way. That’s not mainly what we did. We ended up doing some somatic experiencing work together, which was also very healing and very therapeutic for me. That was an unexpected blessing of this particular therapeutic journey.

I was looking to pay cash because I did not have health insurance at the time. I had health sharing through medic share at that juncture. I knew that counseling wasn’t going to be covered anyway. I had to kind of figure out what my budget was going to be, what I was going to be able to afford to pay and decided to go every other week to help with the cost factor. I also didn’t necessarily need weekly therapy. I was looking for someone who worked on Wednesdays because Wednesdays at that point was my filing paperwork day. I didn’t see clients and had more flexibility to do personal appointments.

In each of these examples, I was looking for some things that were similar and some things that were different, but I had to go through these processes of what I was looking for before I got lost in the search process.

You know how it is when you go to Google something, and next thing you know you’ve clicked on 20 different links. You don’t know how you got there. You have a huge list of people to choose from, and it can become super overwhelming and hard to narrow that list down.

The first advice that I would give you if you’re a Christian, if you believe in God and prayer like I do is to pray that God will lead you to the right person. God knows exactly what you need. If you need a therapist and you need somebody that can walk you through the speed bump of life that you have hit then I believe that God is going to be faithful and open up that door and lead you to the right person at the right time.

Before you start searching and get lost in the internet jungle or the phone calling jungle, you want to think about several different considerations. One is who do you think that you would be most comfortable talking to about these personal issues? Would you be more comfortable talking with someone who is a Christian? Would you be more comfortable talking with a female or a male? Does it matter if they’re older or younger? Some of these may seem superficial to you but they’re legitimate.

As I explained in my stories, there was a reason I went to see a female at one point and there was a reason I went to see a male at another point. That’s nothing against female therapists out there. That just wasn’t what I needed at that time. I don’t think there’s any shame in saying, “Oh, I think I would be more comfortable with someone older” if that’s the case. That doesn’t mean you’re negatively judging younger therapists.

The second thing that I encourage you to think about is what do you want to get out of therapy? This is really important, so crucial. Most people don’t think about it and the reason they don’t think about it is because they’re in a crisis. All they know is they’re feeling awful and they want to feel better.

Sometimes I’ll have people fill out in their paperwork comments like, “I just want to be happy.” What in the world does that mean because happy to me may look completely different than happy to you. So you need to get really clear about what it is that you’re hoping to accomplish. Is it something where you would say, “okay, I’m looking to learn some new tools to manage my anxiety in a healthier way” or “I’m looking to gain more insight into myself because I’m recognizing that I keep getting in situations or patterns that aren’t a good fit for me?” “I want to be able to communicate in healthier ways with my husband.” All really good goals.

Now in light of that, you may be looking for a counselor with specific training in a certain area whether that’s some kind of training with OCD or training that has to do with processing past trauma. Maybe you need someone who has experience working with addiction because that’s something you’re struggling with right now. Whatever it is you want to make sure that your counselor is going to be able to treat you for what you’re bringing in. Counselors typically don’t work with all issues they tend to after they graduate, get more specialized training. We all have to get a certain number of continuing education hours and so we tend to funnel those hours towards things that are interesting to us.

I like to tell younger therapists that your specialty finds you. You don’t find your specialty. For me, I believe that was God leading me in the direction that I ended up going because I had an interest in trauma early on when I was working with children and that caused me to get trained in several different types of trauma therapy to be able to help them.

Now that I’m working with mostly adults and a few teenagers, I’m really working on childhood trauma but it’s just manifesting in adulthood. I ended up getting some additional training in OCD that I’ve found interesting because I had clients who were presenting initially with anxiety and then after some time we found out that their symptoms were really related to OCD. So it seemed like a gradual shift for me to get more training in that area.

If you see a counselor who looks like more of a generalist, and they’re saying that they treat a lot of different areas. You may just want to ask them if there’s a theme of what their continuing education has been in, or if there are certain diagnoses or types of clients that they feel like they work the best with.

You want to consider the location of your counselor. This may or may not be important to you. I think many times people pick a counselor who is close to their house, which is not a bad place to start looking. It may make more sense for you to look for someone closer to your work or in between your home and work that you could see on the way to work or on the way home from work.

I would also encourage you to consider telehealth counseling because if you are willing to see someone online via video, then that opens up your network to any provider who’s licensed in the state that you’re in. This can specifically help If you have a hard time finding someone in your area who is on your insurance panel. So the people closest to you may be full who take your insurance, and then you can expand that search out and possibly find someone maybe in your surrounding area that’s accepting new clients via telehealth. Telehealth is also really helpful for people who live in small towns. Maybe you’re concerned about confidentiality or you have personal relationships with the counselors in your town. There may be some ethical boundaries that might be crossed if you were to go see them. So definitely consider telehealth as an option for you.

Now let’s talk about budget, the dreaded B-word. You need to think about what your budget is for counseling before you ever go. So sit down, look at your finances, talk to your spouse, if you have one. Crunch some numbers and figure out what could I afford to pay either weekly or every other week to be able to see someone. Your budget for therapy is really going to help you determine whether or not you want to find someone who accepts your insurance or whether or not you need someone who does sliding scale or whether or not you can afford to pay for therapy out of pocket.

So let’s talk about each one of those. If you are using your insurance for therapy, please, please, this is so important. You need to understand your benefits before you are thinking about utilizing them on a regular basis. We’re not talking about when you go to the ER because you’re in a dire emergency and you hand someone a card and you get a bill later. You’re going to have a patient responsibility. When you show up for counseling, it’s important for you to determine what that is. That also helps you figure out the whole budget thing as well. You need to know who the carrier is for your mental health benefits. This is not always the same as your physical health benefits.

I know that’s very confusing and sounds bizarre for some of you listening to this, but I promise you if you flip your insurance card over and there is a different number for behavioral health than there is for physical health, you probably have a different company that is covering those mental health benefits. Most people don’t know this. So they will seek a provider that takes the coverage where their medical benefits are and sometimes that gets discovered by the counselor ahead of time. Sometimes it doesn’t get discovered until billing comes back and you’ve been denied. Then next thing you know, you owe that counselor for the rest of the balance of those appointments. So don’t let that happen to you if you’re looking at using insurance, be a good consumer and understand all of your benefits before seeking services. When you call the insurance company or go online, you’re going to want to ask about your mental health benefits specifically for outpatient therapy. You’re going to want to know if you have a copay or if you are meeting a deductible. Oftentimes if you’re meeting a deductible that’s shared with your medical health deductible. So it’s coming out of that same fund. This is important because if you get knee surgery in February and you know that you’ve met your deductible or almost met your out of pocket max, you’re probably going to be pretty golden to go to therapy and not have to pay If you have your out-of-pocket max met. On the other hand, if you have a super high deductible and you hardly ever use your insurance, it may not necessarily be cheaper for you to use your insurance in that case. You’d want to really cost compare and look at that.

The last thing I want to point out for consideration before you start looking for a therapist is time and scheduling. You need to look at your time that you have and what you have scheduled with work childcare, responsibilities, etc etc. You need to think through when would I actually be able and available to go to therapy? Now we have time for what we make time for. I have clients who see me before work. Clients who get out of work early towards the end of the day to see me. I have clients who meet with me on their lunch break. So I know that you can make it happen if you want to make it happen. This may mean making some kind of special arrangements with your employer to work something out one day a week or one day every other week. You can do this. If you absolutely are on a very rigid schedule and you can’t do that with your employer, then what you need to do probably is look for a counselor who does evening or weekend appointments. So you’ll want to make sure that you clarify that as you’re calling and as you’re looking at websites, you will want to try to see if you can figure out the hours that that therapist works, or when you call them, ask if they work evening or weekend hours. If you think about what you need ahead of time, you’re going to be able to advocate for yourself and weed out people that aren’t able to accommodate your schedule.

So you’ve looked at the various considerations and now you’re ready for your search.

Is there a pastor or a church leader that you can ask for a counseling referral from? Do you have friends that you know that I’ve been pretty open about going to therapy? If you’re looking for your kids, does maybe the guidance counselor at your school know some referrals? Or you could just pull up your insurance list if you’re looking at using insurance and just seeing who the available providers are.

Now as far as with getting recommendations from maybe friends or family, what they’re looking for in a therapist may not be what you are looking for in a therapist, but sometimes it’s a good place to start and you can at least check that person out and see if they might be a good fit for you.

Since we are living in the age of the internet, there is so much information that you can find out about therapists online without ever having to pick up the phone and call anybody. I know that that’s really hard for some people who are anxious to make those phone calls. So the beauty is often you can reach out via email or through someone’s website. Also sometimes it’s difficult to reach therapists on the phone if they handle their own phone calls and are not a part of a bigger office, then oftentimes you’ll end up getting their voicemail because they’re in session and aren’t able to answer the phone.

When you’re doing your online research, you may want to keep some type of list or a spreadsheet with who you reached out for and reasons that you may want to contact them or not contact them. For example, maybe you find out that Susie Smith doesn’t work with OCD, so they might be ruled out for you If you’re looking for a counselor who works with OCD. You may find that John Smith doesn’t do couples therapy and that’s what you’re looking for is couples counseling. He was referred to you by a friend of yours who’s seeing him for individual therapy, but then you realize he doesn’t actually have what you’re looking for. Maybe you rule out another counselor because they don’t take your insurance and you can’t afford their self-pay rate.

There are many different places that you can look online for a therapist, probably the most popular one is psychologytoday.com. Psychology Today has a magazine. They’re a secular entity but there are many Christian therapists on there if you’re looking for a Christian. Just because it’s a popular place to post a profile and it’s relatively inexpensive on our end to be able to do so. You can narrow down the searches on Psychology Today, which I really like. You can narrow them down by location, insurance, male, female, the issue that you’re coming in for and that really helps you narrow down your search.

You can also look for counselors through a specific professional organization. For example, the AACC has a counselor search on their website. If you’re looking specifically for EMDR therapy, you can go to the EMDR international association website. I’ll post these websites in the show notes for you guys, just so you can kind of see. If there’s a specific type of therapy that you’re looking for, you can look for a therapist who has training or certification in that specific therapy.

Hopefully, your search has led you to maybe about three different names. If you can narrow it down to just a few people and then reach out to those few people and see who contacts you back. Unfortunately, sometimes counselors are really bad about getting back to people. I don’t know why this is because I think of everyone who contacts me as an individual who is brave enough to reach out for help. And so even if I don’t provide what they’re looking for, at least I try to steer them in the right direction or be kind enough to say, “I’m sorry, I can’t help you.” That would be a good thing. But if you don’t have people call you back just know that that’s not on you and it’s not an uncommon experience fully. One of those three people will call you back and you can either ask them additional questions that you may have, or you can go ahead and schedule with them and try it out.

Even with all the work to find a therapist, you may end up in that first session feeling like this is not going to work for me for one reason or another. I want to let you know that’s okay. Sometimes, as they say, it’s quote just a “not a good fit.” So if it’s not a good fit or it’s not gonna work for you for some reason, don’t give up, go back to your list. Go back to the search process, get back up on the horse, and try again. I can say from my own experience that I’m really glad that I kept trying until I found somebody that I could trust and a place where I could get exactly what I needed.

I’d like to end with a story of hope as I normally do when I have guests on the podcast. This story is actually about finding medical help. I had an issue that I had been struggling with for several years. I had convinced myself that this issue was psychological and that somehow it was my fault and I needed to just fix it psychologically. It turns out that wasn’t the case. I actually had a physical medical condition. So when I finally got brave enough to talk with a doctor about it, they referred me to another person. And after a little while, I was working with that person and we really weren’t getting anywhere, unfortunately, and I said, “Hey, what we’re doing is not working here” and they said, “well, I’m just going to send you back to the doctor that referred you over here.” And I said, “that doesn’t even make any sense to me like they didn’t know what to do with me so they referred me to you. How are you going to refer me back to them?” And when I went back to that doctor, I actually saw a different provider in the office. I had to advocate for myself guys, because sometimes you have to do this in medical situations and I had to say, “I’m not at all getting what I’m needing here from you guys. This is why I came in and I’ve been on this wild goose chase that’s now lasted a couple months and nobody’s helping me.” I was almost like to the point of tears. And he said, “Okay, let’s do this test or let me look at this.”

And he said, “I think I may know what’s going on with you, but, you know, I don’t really have that much experience treating it.” He was just so wonderful in the sense that even though he wasn’t able to help me. He was able to let me know there is something physically going on with your body that you need taken care of.

I just didn’t give up guys. I just think that’s so important. Just don’t give up. If you aren’t getting the help that you need, keep searching, keep going forward, keep looking.

I did some online research and I found this doctor in the next county over and I made an appointment with him and he was able to help me to the point where I’m not having that issue anymore. I was just so thankful and so blessed but it was a journey that took me months. It took me time, energy, money, three different medical professionals, test after test, but I got to where I needed to be and I’m so thankful to the Lord for that. First of all, that he gave me the courage to keep going and the hope and the strength to not give up, and that he steered me in the right direction for the people that could help me so that I didn’t have to continue in that suffering anymore. The only regret that I have about going on that journey is that I didn’t start it sooner. I really wish that I had.

So if there’s something that you’re facing and you can’t do it alone and you need to get help, if the first person doesn’t help you, try the next person, and if they can’t help you, try the next person. Don’t give up guys.

Would you like to share your story of hope? You can do that by going to hopeforanxietyandocd.com and clicking on the contact link.

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. May you be comforted by God’s great love for you.

Five Signs It May Be Time to Get a New Therapist

Written by Carrie Bock on February 2, 2021. Posted in Counseling.

You’ve waited a long time to get help, finally gotten the nerve to go to therapy, but just aren’t sure about your therapist. Is this really helping? How do you know when it’s time to keep working with your current therapist or walk away? Here are five signs it may be time to get a new therapist:

1. You don’t feel heard.

Sometimes, you may feel like your therapist just isn’t getting it. They try to summarize or reframe what you’re saying, but get it wrong. You may just have a gut feeling that there is no way they can empathize with the story you are telling. Now don’t get me wrong, it would be impossible for me to have gone through everything my clients have gone through. However, it’s important for me to be able to empathize with feelings of sadness, anger, shame, or disappointment they have had in a particular experience. In my own experience of receiving therapy, I’ve been to therapists who were cold or kept steering the conversation to what they wanted to talk about instead of what I was coming in for. It didn’t feel good, and I didn’t go back.

2. Your therapist doesn’t have experience treating the issue you’re bringing in.

If he or she knows in the beginning, the ethical therapist won’t take you on as a client. Unfortunately, many therapists say they treat OCD without specific training or experience working with it. They may treat the OCD thoughts like they treat anxious thoughts, by challenging them or providing reassurance for them. This is problematic. While arguing with the thoughts or attempting to reassure them provides short term relief, it only ends up strengthening the OCD.

In addition, therapeutic issues evolve over time. Destructive behaviors over time may rise to a greater level of concern than when therapy started. What isn’t a problem today may become a problem in three months. I’ve had clients in the past be referred to inpatient or intensive outpatient for substance use issues. Sometimes, clients do not reveal all their issues up front due to shame or lack of awareness that the issue is even a problem.

3. You aren’t able to attend consistently.

Your therapist’s schedule may be so full that he or she cannot see you as regularly as you would like. Maybe your schedule has changed and no longer aligns with your therapist’s availability. You may be fighting to stay for a while because you dread starting over with someone else. However, in order to avoid losing momentum in therapy, you typically need to be seen at least every other week.

Another reason people are not able to attend consistently is financial. If you were paying cash, but then had a change in financial situation, you may have to find a therapist who takes your insurance or is willing to work for a lower fee.

4. You aren’t reaching the goals you and your therapist have set together.

Counseling goals initially tend to be broad such as a client saying, “I want to feel less anxious” or “I want to be happy again like I used to.” To turn these more general goals into action steps, additional questions need to be asked such as: What would you be doing if you were less anxious that you are not doing now? What skills might you need in order to be less anxious? What does happiness look like for you? What is one small step you can take towards happiness today?

If you have completed several sessions of therapy and don’t sense that anything is getting better in terms of your education/awareness regarding your issues, perspective on the issues you brought in, or how you are coping, it may be time to examine why. If you come into your therapy sessions rattling off everything that happened to you that week, you might want to examine if this is the best use of the time with your therapist. Think through what you would like to get out of your sessions or what topics are most important to you. Come with questions from time to time.

I challenge my clients not to see therapy as part of their routine. While they may see me every Tuesday at noon, I don’t ever want that to be just something they do on Tuesdays. I want them to progress beyond where they are today, so they don’t have to continue seeing me each week. If you’re not sure if you’re making progress, ask someone in your life such as a spouse or a best friend if they have noticed any differences in you. Ask your therapist as well. Frequently, my clients have high expectations of themselves and feel like they aren’t making progress when they are.

5. You want more out of the experience than you are getting.

I have a question on my intake asking if people have been to therapy before. The next question has them rate that experience as positive, neutral, or negative. The neutral responses are the most interesting. Clients will say, “My therapist just nodded and validated my feelings. I needed more.” I’m a big proponent that clients should advocate for themselves in therapy if they don’t feel they are getting what they need. If you aren’t happy, let your therapist know what you would like to be different and see if they can accommodate your requests.

Other clients have reported a desire to “go deeper,” but their therapist didn’t ever dig deeper. There may be many different reasons for this. Good therapy is supportive; however, it’s also challenging. Your therapist’s job is to push you towards things you wouldn’t do on your own. If you could have figured out how to manage your problems or issues by yourself, you probably would have done it. Unfortunately, some therapists have not done enough of their own work to go into the deeper waters with you because they have never been there themselves. I’ve probably had hundreds of continuing education hours after graduate school at this point, but the most transformative thing I have done to become a better therapist is to go to therapy myself. Working on my own issues prevents them from coming up in the therapeutic relationship. I am able to show up more present and compassionate for others because I chose to show up present and compassionate for myself first.

What now?

If you found yourself in one or more of the above categories and have been attending for several sessions, try talking to your therapist first. They are there because they want to help you. Talking about your experience with your therapist and the process is important. Give your therapist the opportunity to be on the same page you are on. If it doesn’t work out for some reason, move forward, knowing there is another provider out there for you.

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

What is EMDR?

Written by Carrie Bock on January 26, 2021. Posted in Anxiety, Counseling, OCD.

When people first hear about Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), they are often skeptical. That’s OK because I was too once. I wasn’t sure how waving my fingers back and forth in front of my clients was going to change how they felt about the past. However, I was desperate. Cognitive behavioral therapy for the treatment of trauma just wasn’t cutting it for the complex client presentations I was seeing. We could talk for hours about how the abuse a client experienced wasn’t their fault. They could give me the right answers, but didn’t feel it. They could change their thoughts, but their bodies were still reactive. Once I started using EMDR and saw first hand how great my clients were feeling, I was hooked.

What is EMDR?

EMDR is an experiential therapy that allows clients to process trauma at a brain level to access healing at a different level than traditional talk therapy. Other approaches to healing from trauma such as Exposure Therapy or Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) require the individual to tell the entire story of the trauma repeatedly in order to become desensitized from it. However, with EMDR, telling the story of the trauma is not a requirement. This brings a sense of relief for clients who do not want to retell the entire story, cannot remember the whole story, feel it would be too lengthy to tell, or are bound by security clearances.

The other difference between EMDR and cognitive based therapies is that EMDR addresses body sensations associated with traumatic memories. A rape victim may no longer believe the rape was her fault (changing the thought), but may still carry a sense of shame and distressing body sensations that accompany that emotion. Trauma is often stored in the body can manifest as physical sensations such as chronic digestive issues or panic attacks. I have seen several clients have a reduction in physical symptoms after EMDR therapy.

What is the EMDR process like?

There are eight phases of treatment in EMDR. The initial phases involve screening and preparing the client for being able to reprocess the trauma. The therapist works with the client on building awareness of their present experience emotionally, physically, and mentally. The client also develops skills to tolerate a variety of emotional states and cope with day to day symptoms such as anxiety, nightmares, or intrusive thoughts/memories about the trauma. Clients with an extensive trauma history may take months to prepare for trauma processing. On the other hand, clients who have had previous talk therapy and have coping skills to manage their day to day life may find more value in doing an EMDR intensive.

The next phases are focused on targeting traumatic memories to reprocess the various aspects of the trauma. The client may see pictures, feel intense emotions, and experience body sensations that were happening at the time of the trauma. This process can be difficult and disturbing to the client, which is why not rushing the preparation phase for clients with complex PTSD is crucial. Bilateral stimulation to the brain is utilized through the use of eye movement, tactile stimulation, or alternating audio sounds. The bilateral stimulation is not painful and does not cause the client to go into a hypnotic trance. The client will be present during the reprocessing.

EMDR allows the traumatic material to get unstuck and connect to more positive, adaptive material in the brain. At the end, memories that were highly distressing are no longer distressing to the client. Sometimes the change is very surprising because the client expected to always be bothered by the memory! By healing from these past wounding experiences, clients are able to respond to present situations in new ways. Sam no longer blows up every time there is a conflict at home. Susan is no longer having frequent pain attacks. John still has intrusive thoughts related to OCD, but he is able to dismiss them instead of giving into compulsions.

How do you get trained in EMDR therapy?

If you are interested in learning more about EMDR therapy, you can visit www.emdria.org. This is the website for EMDRIA, the EMDR International Association. Therapists who have been trained in EMDR through a training approved by EMDRIA have completed six days of training and 10 hours of consultation. Training in EMDR therapy is an experiential process. The therapist has to perform EMDR on others and receive it themselves in the client role. Those who have been certified in EMDR have completed an additional 12 hours of advanced training along with an additional 20 hours of consultation with an EMDR consultant. An EMDR consultant has gone through additional hours and has had their consulting supervised by another consultant.

I was initially trained in EMDR in 2013, pursued certification, and became a consultant in 2019. Over the years, I have been able to help clients suffering from PTSD, recent traumatic experiences, anxiety, phobias, panic attacks, OCD, depression, and dissociation to name a few. I have also started providing intensive therapy in EMDR for individuals who are looking to heal faster in a shorter amount of time.

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

How Do You Know If Your Childhood is Affecting Your Adulthood?

Written by Carrie Bock on January 19, 2021. Posted in Counseling.

How do you know if your childhood is negatively affecting your adulthood? You don’t want to be a victim to what happened to you as a child and blame everything on your parents, but you still feel that childhood experiences may be holding you back. If you have worked hard to avoid thinking about the difficult things that have happened to you, you may believe you have put the past behind you. After all, you made it through the past fires and they aren’t burning anymore. You’ve moved out of mom’s house. However, things still aren’t going the way you hoped they would. Here are four indicators that your childhood may be affecting your adulthood.

Your intimate relationships follow a negative pattern you can’t seem to escape.
If you’ve dated several versions of the same guy with a different name who is all wrong for you, you know what I am talking about. You may find yourself responding to others the way mom or dad responded to each other. Typically, people end up in a romantic partnership with someone who treats them very similarly to how they were treated as a child or a partner who is on the opposite end of the continuum. For example, if you were raised by an emotionally neglectful parent, you will most likely have an emotionally absent partner or one who is emotionally dependent on you in an unhealthy way. You will gravitate towards someone who treats you how you believe you deserve to be treated. You may even push away healthy people because you don’t believe you deserve the love they have to give to you. The healthier you are, the healthier people you will attract into your life. The reverse is also true.
You have intense emotional reactions that don’t match the present situations.
If you react to a situation with an emotional level of 8 when the situation calls for a 3, you might be reacting out of trauma. Understand that your brain is constantly linking situations together in order to protect you. When you experience something similar to when the unsafe event happened, the emotions and body sensations connected to that memory flood in faster than you know what hit you. This can happen without a specific picture or memory coming to mind. You may not even be aware of what triggered the emotional reaction or why. If you have experienced trauma, you might say, “I feel crazy.” Often, an immense amount of guilt and shame follows these emotional outbursts. You feel like you should be more in control of your emotional responses and have tried to change, but the same things still keep happening.
You can’t stop thinking about your childhood or you can’t remember it at all.
These are two extremes that can happen as a result of trauma. You may have frequent flashbacks of the difficulties that happened in childhood or frequent nightmares. These are classic symptoms of PTSD. On the other hand, you may have difficulty remembering anything before a certain point in your life such as age 10. Not remembering large periods of your childhood is a symptom of dissociation. Dissociation happens when what you experience in the present is too much for your nervous system to bear, so you have to disconnect from it. This can happen without conscious awareness. If you lose large periods of time in the present where you “zone out,” this can also be a symptom of dissociation.
You don’t feel fully adult.
You can point to many of the adult things you do such as working full time or attending college, and raising children. However, you don’t feel it internally. You regularly encounter situations in which you feel like a child: helpless, lost, and alone. You may know mentally that you can leave your job, but emotionally, you feel stuck. You may know that you can say no or set a boundary, but when you try, your voice is shaky.

The good news is there is hope.
If you believe that your childhood is affecting your adulthood, therapy can help. Learning new ways of coping, relating to others, and processing trauma can get you to a place where the past is truly in the past. When you are no longer haunted by the experiences in your childhood, you can progress forward into a more healthy adulthood.

11. Vulnerability, Grace, and The Power of Church Community with Randy Draughon

Written by Carrie Bock on January 13, 2021. Posted in Counseling, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 11. Vulnerability, Grace, and The Power of Church Community with Randy Draughon

What happens when pastors are isolated
How pain can be a good thing
Vulnerability as a gift we give each other
How to build a Christian Community

Verses discussed: Ephesians 1, Tim 1:15, James 5:16

Resources and Links:
Midtown Fellowship, Nashville

More Podcast Episodes

Transcript of Episode 11

Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD, episode 11. Today’s show is on the incredible power of Christian community and how that can impact mental health in a positive way. I wanted to make a very special dedication of this episode on Christian community to BJ Howard. In the process of putting this recording together, I’ve found out that he passed away.

This was someone that was very connected and involved in church, connected to encouraging and mentoring people that were younger than him. He was someone who was able to give me a lot of hope in my life when I needed it the most to keep going and to keep following the Lord and keep trusting his plan for my life.

Thank you so much BJ for your influence. I hope that in some small way this episode and not just this episode, but this podcast is a way to move forward and can carry the torch of the light and the love that you showed to me, to be able to show that to other people.

I got the opportunity on this episode to interview one of the local pastors in Nashville, Randy Draughon. He is the Pastor of Midtown Fellowship, and we were able to get into some great dialogue about being a Christian and living in the Christian community and what that looks like.

Let’s dive right in.

Carrie: For those that don’t know, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Pastor Randy: I’ve been in Nashville for almost 30 years now, married have three kids. I started Midtown Fellowship around 2001. Our passion then was to go into the heart of the city and to start a church for people that had given up on church.

So we were from a very traditional style church and we shed the skin of all that and started a church and a skate park. Most of the folks that were coming to Midtown were musicians or college students. Back then the city had really not gone through any kind of transformation. This was pre-Titans.

Nobody really lived down there unless they had to, which meant that they couldn’t afford to live anywhere else. Downtown was the cheap place to live.

Carrie: Wow, not anymore.

Pastor Randy: It’s true. We’ve seen a lot of change over the years and we partnered with a ministry called Rocket Town and they built a skate park and a big music venue down in the city.

When we got to a point where we needed a bigger space, they opened their doors and they were incredibly generous to us and we needed that because everybody coming to our church was so poor. None of them had any money. We had a philosophy early on never to take an offering because we were shedding the skin of the idea that when you come to church, the church wants so much from you. We’re operating from the philosophy of we just really believe that God has so much to give to you. So God just took care of us.

Carrie: How in the world, like, did you get paid? You didn’t take up an offering. This is incredible.

Pastor Randy: We just prayed and people just gave. I really can’t tell you that we ever spent much time around the budget, trying to figure out how to make it happen. We just were so busy just doing the work of ministry, meeting with a lot of people. We really had a simple philosophy and that was, we really believe that when God impacts one person, the ripple effect of that to their community and their family actually ripples out into the city.

And so we spend a lot of time trying to keep bongo, Java, and business and Fidos and all the coffee shops. You’ll appreciate this, our first offices were on 12 South because it was the cheapest place to get an office. It was just a rolling crime scene over there and obviously, it’s all changed since then.

Carrie: A lot has changed in Nashville. I’m sure over the years that you’ve been there and in terms of like ministry that has shifted somewhat, the population that you’re ministering to, is it more diverse as Nashville becomes more diverse?

Pastor Randy: You can tell me how much you want to get into this. I’m happy to talk about what we’ve done over the years. Midtown, about the first 18 months, was a slow crawl. We had maybe 10 people coming to church and then it began to build and we started to see the Lord really doing some really cool stuff in people’s lives. When we moved to Rocket Town we literally bought a hundred used folding chairs and we called it the purchase of faith.

We believe that the Lord was going to fill these hundred seats and within a year we had close to a thousand people that were coming to services at Rocket Town, and it was insane. We couldn’t get everybody in. In fact, the stage was full of chairs and the floor, and the balcony.

We really had a dilemma because we realized that the bigger that we were getting the least effective we were at reaching our mission, which was creating a safe place for people that had given up on church, that we were really good at attracting Christians from other churches because we’re a huge artist community. So our bands were killer. Like you can imagine coming to church and looking up in the band area because we wouldn’t put our band on the stage.

We actually moved them off to the side where you couldn’t see them because none of our artists wanted to perform on Sunday morning so it was about the Lord. It wasn’t about them and all of them were professional musicians. So the big dilemma that we had is, do we go to multiple services and see how big we can get this?

I didn’t feel led to do that. So we went to San Diego and we met with a group of people that helped start a Tim Keller’s church up in New York. They were doing something very unique out in California that we brought it back to Nashville. We customized it and then adopted it for ourselves, which was to, instead of going to multiple services, why don’t we take a big chunk of these people and send them back to their slice of Nashville and let them be the church in their community.

Carrie: A lot of churches are doing that now having kind of multi-site campuses.

Pastor Randy: The uniqueness of our model is really based on a couple of ideas. One is then this will interest you as a counselor, is that we really believe that pastors can sometimes be the most dangerous person in the church. They get isolated and isolated men that have power are very dangerous people when they’re isolated emotionally or they’re isolated relationally. There’s some expectation that a whole community of people are putting on them, but they know internally they don’t live up to. That can be a really dangerous scenario for him and If he’s dangerous, then he’s dangerous to the people he’s shepherding too. So we came up with this model of grading campuses. We’re one church, but we have multiple campuses and every campus has its own pastor, but that pastor is in a fellowship with other pastors and we take serious responsibility for one another’s emotional journey, spiritual journey, the whole heart. So we’re kind of a support group for one another.

Carrie: How did you, your church get to that point where you realized we really need to invest in that, not just the spiritual health of our pastors, but the emotional health and the other aspects?

Pastor Randy: Great question about how we got there. The easy answer is I think the Lord just reviewed this so many times through all our failures that he drove us there.

I think maybe the more detailed answer is before coming to Nashville, I’ve worked for some really large churches. I was in youth ministry for 15 years and I got to witness firsthand like national ministries and the men that led them and realized that they were isolated and that the trickle-down effect of that, wasn’t always a pretty story.

When you peek behind the curtain and we began to dream about what would it be like for a pastor to actually open the curtain? And that he ministers out of that place where he’s first in line, as the one who needs grace, He’s kind of the chief repenter and his community that he’s the most vulnerable of anybody.

We realized that the only way that’s going to happen is if we began to mature emotionally and began to mature spiritually at the same time. I’ve seen spiritually mature people that can quote the Bible from the beginning to the end and have these huge prayer lives but they’re not emotionally mature and as a result, a lot of times they’re just hurtful people and they’re not very safe to be around.

Carrie: They don’t know how to have healthy relationships and form healthy connections.

Pastor Randy: Yeah and you know, that’s fair because a lot of times, pastors, men that are called into ministry and women are called into ministry too.

A lot of times they’re intellectuals. They love to study. They love teaching. They love books more than they love people. So a lot of times they’re disconnected from their own heart and therefore they’re disconnected from the people around them because I don’t believe you can be disconnected from yourself and actually connected with other people. I also believe it hinders your connection with the Lord. But if you’re not self-aware enough to know how you need the Lord and where you’re at, I think it’s very difficult to have a meaningful, profound relationship with him.

Carrie: Right. I was thinking about that versus you were talking how

Paul was a big spiritual hero in a lot of ways, but he said himself, like, “I’m the chief of sinners” and such a puzzling verse because you’re like, how can you be the chief of sinners? But he just had that understanding and that awareness of like, “I need all of the grace too.”

I think that’s really cool what you’re talking about to this overlay of like where Christians meant to live in community and so that’s not healthy with pastors being isolated. Also this sense of our relationships with other people and those connections, a lot of times maybe mirroring our connections with God. Would you agree with that?

Pastor Randy: Yeah. Say that again and say it a little differently.

Carrie: Okay. I think that a lot of times we place on God like our ability to connect with him. We place on him things that we’ve received from other relationships in our life, often parents, fathers. And so if our fathers were disconnected or neglectful, then we receive this sense from God that we feel like God’s just kind of distant.

He’s not really there. Sometimes being able to connect healthily with people can help us heal some of that, like Christians. I don’t know the God in you maybe healing that piece of being able to love someone in Christ may help them connect more with God. I don’t know if that’s making sense.

Pastor Randy: That’s so good and you’re really the expert here. I’m just dabbling in your world when I talk about counseling here. We all have trauma in our lives and some of us have pretty severe trauma and it’s trauma that’s either been produced through parents or through relatives. Some of us have trauma that we produced ourselves and that trauma often I’ve seen, it digs these trenches in our lives that it seems like whenever we enter into any situation that triggers that trauma, which could be relational, we tend to go back to that ditch. So if our father was harsh with us, the only way we ever experienced God is as a harsh God. That’s why one of my mentors always tells me if something is hysterical, it’s probably historical that if we don’t understand ourselves enough to know that we have that trauma, then we’re not aware enough to know that I need healing in that trauma so that I can rewrite the script in a fresh healed way. Maybe it’s more than a healed way. Maybe it’s a healthy way.

Carrie: What was that journey for you of your journey of self-evaluation?

Pastor Randy: Well, for me personally, I’ve always sought out older men that would invest themselves in me. I’ve been fortunate I’ve had some amazing men that have the gift of listening and they also have the gift of wisdom. So they let me talk myself out and then they speak wisdom into those places. And if it’s true that our thoughts are really a bad neighborhood and we should never go there by ourselves then the men in my life have gone there with me. They’ve helped me fight the shame stories and we all have shame stories. But probably the most, I would say maybe one of the most impacted things was about six years ago. Our oldest son at 25 died unexpectedly. That story of grief for me and my wife and our family was so traumatic for me that it caused me to start to question everything. In fact, to get a little vulnerable here, I couldn’t let go of the thought that it was my fault and I felt deeply responsible for that. And as I began to unpack, why is that? I began to realize there were a lot of my own issues of codependency that I have not dealt with growing up. I grew up in a home where addiction was a part of our home. And so I just jumped into a whole community of people that had shared experiences like that and began to unpack my own lenses that I’ve put on to how I process my life and how I’ve processed the Lord and how I process other people. So it’s been an amazing journey over the last six years of embracing the joy of grief and the healing power of community and the Lord.

Carrie: I think a lot of times it’s the tragedy points that brings us closer to God and closer to other people, but it can really challenge your theology in the best way and wonder if that happened for you.

Pastor Randy: I think that pain is so misunderstood because I think that many of us live and I don’t want to, maybe I should use an “I” statement here. I lived thinking that if something is painful that means something is wrong, that we didn’t get something right because the right life is not a painful life, but the reality of every relationship is there’s pain. And that’s a part of relational health is realizing that if you’re going to love somebody you’re going to hurt and if you’re going to let somebody love you, it’s going to hurt. That pain is a part of the relationship.

It took a real season to realize that pain doesn’t have the ability to change what is true, but pain does have the ability to change what I believe is true. For me to bring my pain to my community and for me to bring the pain narrative to my community and whether that was through counselors or whether that was through just mentors or friends or people that were fighting for me, letting them fight for me so that my narrative of truth [00:16:12] can come alongside my pain and really call it good, which may sound strange to people that are in pain, that your pain is good, but it can be because the Lord uses that to bring healing in her life.

Carrie: Just as a connecting point to him and to other people.

Pastor Randy: And I mean, that’s what I’m saying, I’m swimming in your waters right now. You’re the pro in this area, but I’m just sharing my own personal experiences. Not necessarily an ocean of therapeutic knowledge.

Carrie: I think it’s really great though, to hear these kinds of messages from pastors, because depending on people’s backgrounds, they may not have had a pastor that has ever been this vulnerable about difficult things in their life like you were talking about the isolation. Maybe there’s the sense that I have to present as the most spiritual person in the room and therefore, somehow that means I present with no problems or no pain. Anyway, I have the Lord. The Lord is good, nothing wrong here.

Pastor Randy: You think about it that if the only time I can preach is when I’ve mastered what I’m preaching and I want to preach with vulnerability. I really don’t have any sermons because who can do that unless you put up a facade and you’re a counselor. What happens when people put on mask and they spend their lives to manage an image and they manage this facade so they can keep their jobs, which is their income.

They can keep people’s respect, which is, they believe my reputation is that if everybody was like me, then we would all be so much like Jesus. It takes a lot of energy and effort to do that so what would it be like for the joy of preaching from a place of, “Hey, I really need this more than any of you need it.”

I’m preaching from a place where I feasted on the Lord this week and I’m just sharing with you what he served up for me. If you have a community that would allow you to do that it’s a beautiful place to be.

Carrie: I love that. I think there’s something really about authenticity that’s attractive to people [00:18:25] and unfortunately, the church has gotten a bad rap for being fake. A lot of times, or Christians have gotten a bad rap for being hypocritical.

Pastor Randy: Because we are, but some of it’s a good rap.

Carrie: Some of it’s true. I used to become frustrated when people would talk about Christians becoming hypocritical and then I realized that Jesus was most frustrated with religious people in the Bible. And so I was like, “Oh, it bothered Jesus too.” There’s a relate-ability there. So if you’re frustrated with the church or people who appear religious, then you know, Jesus understands that.

Pastor Randy: Right and so true. I think that there’s such a gravitational pull to unhealthiness. I mean, you’re a counselor. There are a lot of people that don’t come to see you, people that their whole world of dysfunction and they live in it until they go to their grave.

There’s a huge pull to having a world that you completely control and that it’s not dangerous and you’ve minimized pain by medicating or avoidance or distraction. I think that that pull is so attractive when you realize that vulnerability and openness and willing to admit that your imperfect is so scary.

I love what Bernay Brown talks about is that courage is the ability to let yourself be seen and it really is true. That takes a lot of courage to let your true heart live itself on the outside.

I don’t think that any of us can do that by ourselves. Maybe some can, but I think it takes a community of people that are jumping into that water with us to give us the courage to keep jumping into it.

Carrie: I’ve been processing this verse in James that talks about how you confess your sins to one another and pray for one another that you will be healed. I just find that so powerful because we’re told Jesus is our high priest. So he’s the one that has to absolve us, so to speak of our sin, who we go to for forgiveness. But yet we’re told to confess to other people for this level of healing. That I believe is emotional of just saying, “look, I’m struggling and I need your support and love and prayers.”

Pastor Randy: I’ve never been involved in AA, alcoholics anonymous. I have been involved with adult children of alcoholics ACA, and there’s a fundamental belief in those communities is that when I get vulnerable, when I speak out loud, what I have on the inside of me, there’s something that gets healed in me when I’m sharing that in a community that’s accepting me and go on me too. When I get vulnerable and also I believe it heals something in you, it’s a gift that we give to one another that knits us, not just together, but gives us strength and courage to live our hearts on the outside.

Carrie: Right. Do you believe that kind of going back to isolation? So for people who don’t have these communities, maybe where they feel like they can be safe and vulnerable and open up, whether that’s a church, small group or support group, or something of that nature. Do you feel like that isolation just kind of continues to feed the dysfunction you were talking about?

Pastor Randy: It’s strange that the things that we begin to accept in our lives and even the routines that we began to allow to exist in our lives. And I think that for a lot of people that experience things like we’ve talked about pain, but also like loneliness that they receive loneliness as a curse rather than the emotion of loneliness is actually a blessing and understanding what that blessing, that inviting emotion is actually inviting you to.

They use that loneliness as a means by which they stir in shame into their story and then stepped back from community because they don’t feel like they’re worthy of community and then when you pour resentment on top of that shame and that loneliness, it leads to a real isolated place. But if we understand that loneliness is a gift from the Lord it’s a part of our hearts that’s crying out for, longing and for community and whether I’m lonely for myself or I’m longing a friend or for Jesus. It’s inviting me to something and that’s why we need community because that takes a lot of courage and loneliness to call somebody and go, “I need you, could we go out to dinner or can we go grab coffee?” or “Would you consider meeting with me once every Wednesday morning and let us just encourage each other.” That takes a lot of courage because that person may say “no”.

I think it’s, sometimes it feels easier just to isolate and medicate which is a tragedy. It’s really why we do what we do with our pastors because in ministry, who do you call and say, “I need you” when you’re the pastor of a church, you’re the person everybody calls for, you’re the need meeter. You’re the one that helps everybody else out and the tragedy of that is, imagine a pastor who is very healthy in his need for his community.

I’m not talking about being over needy in the sense of inappropriate but really needing the strength of the community to be spiritually healthy.

Carrie: Don’t most pastors have connections to other pastors though? I’m just thinking about this from the therapeutic lens. If I have a really difficult day or really hard session, I could name for you three or four people that I could call and in a confidential manner and say, “this is what happened to me today” or “this was a really hard session I’m having a hard time dealing with it personally.”

Do you feel like most pastors have that? Or some do and some don’t.

Pastor Randy: My experience is that most pastors don’t have that. My experience is that most pastors would say that they have friends who are pastors, but that their relationship with them is not on the level that you just described, where I can call that guy if I have to four times a week and connect with them, or even once a week. I think I don’t have them in front of me, but you can google search stats on how pastors are doing and it’s not a pretty picture.

Carrie: Just in terms of a lot of people dropping out of ministry or moral failings.

Pastor Randy: Yeah and even surveys about, do men feel fulfilled in their calling? Would they continue to do with what they’re doing if they could get another job?

It’s just ministry doesn’t have to be this miserable place of isolation. It’s miserable in the sense that you’re suffering as you’re caring for sheep, which is a hard, hard job. But you can do it in such a way that if you’re self-aware enough to take care of yourself so that you’re healthy and taking care of other people.

Carrie: That’s really huge. Being able to make sure that your needs are getting met and as Christians, yes, that’s from the Lord, but it’s also from Christian community. I don’t think we can just say, “I go to Jesus and he fills me up.” That’s great but our faith is so communal that we need that interaction and we need the accountability and the people to call out our blind spots, the things that we’re not seeing.

Pastor Randy: Yeah, we were born into a family. I love worship music, but I always chuckle when I hear songs that “All I need is Jesus” and as a pastor, I’m like, “Okay, that’s good” but that’s not what Jesus says. Even God in the garden said to Adam, it’s not good that you’re alone. Adam had God, he’s walking in the garden with God and God said, yeah, you need community. So we’re gonna create community right here. So I need people in my life and it’s how I often see Jesus is the community that God puts around me or the community I help build around me. And that’s the thing I see a lot is that people say, “Man, where do I go and find that community?” You probably aren’t going to go out and find that community, but you can start by you building that community, by finding one other person that you practice vulnerability with and then see who God adds to your number because I don’t think that there’s a whole community of people somewhere out there that are just waiting for us to join them. I think the Lord invites us to go and build that.

Carrie: It’s hard because we live in such an individualistic society or we’re taught possibly from a young age to be very independent and to not have needs and to make sure that we take care of our own business or don’t talk about things outside of the family a lot of times. So it can be a challenge to start engaging in that process. But like you said, if it’s just one person, if you find one safe person that you can be vulnerable with and start to develop that community, I think it will be attractive to the people that need it.

Pastor Randy: How do you help your clients do that?

Carrie: It’s tough. It really is tough. I think it depends on what their background is, faith-wise. Some of my clients, they don’t feel like they can go to people in their church and say, “Hey, I’m struggling with anxiety” or, “Hey, I have OCD.” That would be absolutely terrifying to them because unfortunately, church does not feel like a safe place, or they may have received different messages in the past like the Bible says, be anxious for nothing and you need to go pray about it some more. So there’s all kinds of different Christian communities and their responses to mental health obviously.

It’s so therapeutic for me that we’re having this conversation because I know for me personally, even pastors that I’ve dealt with in the past, I don’t think I could have had this kind of conversation with them.

And it’s always been very passionate for me to figure out how I can support the church as a mental health worker. Sometimes it’s received, sometimes it’s kind of like, “yeah, we want you here in this space” and other times it’s not received very well. So that’s been just an interesting personal journey amongst working with pastors. [00:29:14]

But now I’m in a very supportive place where my pastor is very open about mental health issues, and we’re able to talk about those things and how can I support the church and what does that look like. I’m in a good space with that now. Not all churches are open to counseling or those types of things, or it’s very taboo like “what’s really going on there? Is that really Christian? Is that Godly?”

I interviewed a woman and asked her about her experience in terms of mental health in the church. She literally said that pastors have their heads in the sand, like an ostrich. I was shocked by that but I was glad that she was honest and she just said, “that’s been my experience”. And I said, “Why do you think that is? And she said, “Well, because they would have to look at themselves first.” She said because we all at some level have some anxiety or some depression, or like you talked about trauma childhood wounds that maybe haven’t been healed yet and if we don’t do that internal process, how are we going to be able to support someone else that’s on that journey?

Pastor Randy: Yeah. That’s why when I was growing up, I went to a very traditional Southern church I grew up believing that joy was the bully of all the other emotions. That if you’re in pain, “Hey, just rejoice.” This is the day the Lord has made rejoice and be glad. It said joy comes in and beats up everywhere, whether it’s sadness or grief. You’re not a “good Christian” if you’re not rejoicing all the time and just happy, happy, happy, happy.

We get stuck with these crazy messages that mess with our heads which keeps us from navigating our hearts and so my experience, and even here at Midtown, we really celebrate the gift of counseling.

We really believe it’s a gift that the Lord has given to our community to help our people really do an internal journey because a lot of us need master navigators like you to guide us through this jungle called our heart and help us to put language to some of the things that we’re experiencing that our family never taught us how to talk about.

The gap that I often see that makes me sad is the gap between what’s happening in a counseling office to that person’s community. Ideally, I would love just to see a community of people from the church that are journeying with that person as they go to counseling. Out of counseling, that community is supporting them and carrying them, and listening to them. So that counseling with community or helping that person really becomes a full-hearted person. He was really maturing deeply in their life, but often even with very healthy people, what happens in the counseling office stays in the counseling office and what happens in community is often the tip of the iceberg or real surface kind of stuff.

I think that the work has to really be done on our side of this fence that the church needs to realize that AA group that’s meeting in the basement is experiencing vulnerability we need to take that out of the basement and bring it up into the sanctuary, and it’s going to start with the pastor. The only way his community can go on that journey if he’s not gone on that journey is if they go around him and if they go around them, it’s going to hurt him, the church.

Carrie: Wow. That’s so good. I know that I’ve been in group counseling situations and walked away from it and said, “that’s what church is supposed to be like.” This sense of unconditional acceptance for where people are at.

I see you. I see your struggle. I accept you and “Hey, I’m struggling on this journey too” and a lot of times, unfortunately, that isn’t people’s experience in church, but I think that things are shifting and changing. The more that we have these conversations, I hope that this podcast and these types of conversation, I hope it like provokes the church in the best possible way to start looking at this integration of our spiritual life and our mental health and how we can grow together. That those things for many years were believed to be in opposition of each other. “Don’t seek out that secular counseling stuff, that’s not in the Bible” and now we’re realizing that everything that we know about the brain and childhood trauma and all of these things, nothing is against what’s in the Bible in terms of our knowledge of psychology.

When we look at studies about forgiveness, we’re like, “We already knew that as Christians. We already knew that that freed you up” like it’s right there. So it’s just a passion for me to really integrate those two pieces really well.

Pastor Randy: I think It’s really crazy how we as human beings and you probably know more about this than I do, but how we as human beings love to label everything black and white. We love to put things in the categories that we accept and the categories we don’t accept. So there are people that would look at counseling and go, “all counseling is bad and they would give anecdotal stories where Aunt Betsy went crazy after seeing a counselor or whatever. People can say that about the church too. That there are churches that are crazy. They’re just crazy, but that’s not the entire Christian community. So I say that finding a really healthy counselor that really has a good idea of how to guide and care for their people I think is really an essential part of our lives, especially when we’re going through seasons of our lives that we can’t navigate or to understand ourselves even better or joining a support group just to grow emotionally. I would say to people, I would really encourage you to find a group of people in your faith community that can go on that journey with you as well. That it’s a partnership.

I just hate the thought that people go to counseling and they have to leave their faith community when I think that the faith community can actually go with them and support them and care for them and actually grow with them. That’s really a dream of mine.

Carrie: Yeah. I think I have had situations where when people healed from the shame. They were able to go back into their Christian community and talk more openly about their struggles once they were able to work through some of the trauma or the shame pieces, they were able to go back and say, “Hey, these are the things that I struggle with.” And then that opens up other people to say, “Oh, I’ve had some of those struggles too”, or “yes, I’m struggling, what are you doing about that?”

I think just this sense of when people are in therapy if they have support, that therapy process is so much easier than if they don’t have support. If we’re really like straining and stressing to find the sense of who are you connected with [00:36:41] that’s positive and healthy. That just takes a lot longer. Sometimes it ends up being the therapist. The therapist ends up being the positive relationship in their life until they can develop a healthy, positive relationship outside of therapy, but it works so much better if they have even just some kind of support people that they feel like they can call or talk to, or be open with.

So I wanted to ask you if you have any specific encouragement, maybe for people who are struggling with anxiety or OCD,

Pastor Randy: I’m not an expert on either one of those, but I’ve experienced both of those in my life and in the lives of people I care about. I would say that if anything to take the shroud of shame off of those things and to really get aggressive at seeing yourself as someone you’re willing to invest in and not being content with just trying to manage either one of those, but in that state, jump into counseling and find somebody that can help you understand what’s going on inside of you. Help you get some tools to really build and live a healthier you.

I’d also encourage you to find a church that would speak the gospel to you, and really speak the truth of God’s grace in your life. Find a community of people in that church that are willing to go on that faith journey with you that you can be vulnerable with and bring out of counseling into the open.

What’s happening here you might discover that people don’t run and hide from you when you share those vulnerable moments in your own life. You may actually find other people that are going, “me too.” That’s the journey together. You begin to see that what’s happening to you is not as unusual as you might think it is. That normalcy of our own struggles, I think let’s just take a deep breath and remove all the stuff from it that shouldn’t be on it anyway, which is just shame and embarrassment and the kind of things that we don’t want other people to see.

Carrie: That’s so good. I feel like it’s somewhat of a summary of the things that we’ve already been talking about.

Pastor Randy: What I’ve experienced in all the years that we’ve done in Midtown is nobody here has a hard time understanding that their centers, that relates to that’s a message that preaches itself, but you know what? Everybody has a hard time believing is that I’m Holy, but what Jesus did for me is he made me his beloved. That in Ephesians 1, it says that he chose me before the creation of the world and he has lavished grace on me and he did it because that’s his pleasure. That the pleasure of God is to pour on me a new name and love and wisdom and understanding. Sin, I have no need to convince me of that, but my shame is so loud sometimes believing that I am beloved, that my father in heaven is for me and he’s not against me.

Those are the things that I find unbelievable and there are things that are in the way for me to find that unbelievable. Sometimes there are barriers and sometimes there’s trauma and sometimes it’s addiction and sometimes it’s relationships and marriage that are hurting me. I feel belittled by my spouse or my children don’t respect me, or maybe I don’t love my kids

and I feel ashamed about that. All the things that we dare not even whisper in the shadows. And I would say to people, men, you need to pull all those things out and put them in the light of day. And a counselor is a great way to start but a community is a great place to trust. And then maybe you can start to believe the unbelievable story of what Christ came to do for us and what he’s done for us.

Carrie: Yeah. So good. At the end of every podcast, I ask our guests on the show to share a story of hope, which is a time in which you received hope from God or another person.

Pastor Randy: So you sent me this question, what was this like 5 days ago and I thought about it. I could give you such great platitudes right now, Carrie, and talk about hope in Africa or all that kind of stuff and I thought that would be so unfair after this conversation. So I’m going to give you the real story. Okay, so in my garage, like I’m a motorcycle guy. It’s been something I’ve done since I was 15 and I love motorcycles in my garage. I have a couple of motorcycles and one is a project bike that’s been sitting in my garage, unmoved for almost a year and a half.

Sunday afternoon, one of my old friends called me and he said, “Hey, what are you doing this afternoon? Let’s get in your garage and play with that motorcycle.” I said, “okay, come on over.” And he’s one of those guys that we never get together and just talk small, talk like football, sports. He’s very open. He’s very vulnerable. He runs a prison ministry, he’s a musician and he plays to guys on death row. He’s just a very interesting guy. We played with that motorcycle for three hours and after it was done, that motorcycle started and I drove that thing up and down my street to the irritation of my neighbors because it has no muffler on it.

When he left, I realized there are things in our lives that sit dormant and we just avoid them. And I’m with that motorcycle for a year and a half, it’s in my garage and it wasn’t started, and sometimes it just takes a friend that calls and says, “Hey, I’m coming over and we’re going to open your garage.”

I just want to talk about that thing you have in your garage that should be running and it’s not, and it didn’t take a Herculean effort to get it started. It just took a Herculean friend who was willing to come over and when he left it just birthed hope in me that that’s what community is, is someone who’s willing to pick up the phone and say, “Hey, I’m coming over.”

And I would speak to the people in your audience who says, I don’t have a friend like that. And I would say, go be a friend like that. Go and be that friend and you’ll be surprised at how quick those kinds of people will gather around you and then come over to your garage.

Carrie: That’s really good and it only took three hours.

Pastor Randy: I know now they’re all my friends and they crack up that I still like riding motorcycles. Their kids love my motorcycles though. They’re very excited about that.

Carrie: They wave to you as you’re going down the street.

Pastor Randy: They want to get on the motorcycle with me.

Carrie: Very cool. Thank you so much for sharing this wisdom about vulnerability and community and connection with God and others. It’s been really great conversation and I think it’s really going to benefit people.

Pastor Randy: It’s a real joy to be with you, Carrie. Thank you so much.

I really think there are some great takeaways from this interview of just being there for other people, being the kinds of friends, and loving people that we want other people to be towards us. There’s a saying that if you’re able to be a friend, you’re able to make a friend.

I encourage you to find ways to make deeper connections. If you haven’t stopped by yet, I hope that you will visit our website, which is hopeforanxietyandocd.com.

Let me know what you would like to see on the website. I’m trying to compile some resources on there for you that I hope will be helpful.

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.

Is ERP the Only Option for OCD?

Written by Carrie Bock on January 12, 2021. Posted in Counseling, OCD. No Comments on Is ERP the Only Option for OCD?

Individuals who are diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) are often told that they need to receive Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) in order to treat their OCD. While ERP has been widely researched and works for some individuals, ERP is not the only treatment option for OCD. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) can be effective for treating OCD, especially with individuals who have a history of childhood trauma.