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242. Why You Don’t Need to Be Afraid of Your Thoughts as a Christian

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

In this episode, Carrie explores why Christians with OCD do not need to fear intrusive thoughts and how understanding the difference between thoughts, desires, actions, and identity can loosen the grip of scrupulosity.

Episode Highlights:

  • Why having an intrusive thought does not mean you will act on it
  • How mental compulsions like rumination, rebuking thoughts, repeated prayer, and neutralizing can keep Christians stuck
  • Why OCD can attach frightening meanings to thoughts about faith, relationships, harm, or sexuality
  • How ICBT helps distinguish intrusive thoughts from your true desires, values, and identity
  • What Scripture says about the Holy Spirit, the mind of Christ, and your identity when OCD tells you something different

Episode Summary

Do Intrusive Thoughts Mean I Have Sinned as a Christian?

I’ve seen how one statement from a pastor, spiritual teacher, or trusted person can get lodged in the mind of someone with OCD and suddenly become a source of intense spiritual fear. In this episode, I unpack the idea that “all sin starts in the mind” and explain why Christians need a more thoughtful understanding of intrusive thoughts, especially when scrupulosity turns an unwanted thought into evidence that something is spiritually wrong.

Why Do Christians With OCD Feel So Guilty About Their Thoughts?

I often work with Christians who are doing everything they can to get rid of unwanted thoughts, whether that means rebuking them, repeating a prayer or Scripture, replacing them with something positive, or mentally reviewing them over and over. Some of those responses may look spiritual on the surface, but when they become compulsive attempts to relieve anxiety, they can keep the OCD cycle going and make us increasingly afraid of what is happening inside our own minds.

Does Having an Intrusive Thought Mean I Secretly Want It?

One of the most painful tricks of OCD is convincing us that a thought must reveal something about our true desires or character. I talk about why thoughts, desires, and actions are not interchangeable, how ICBT understands egodystonic intrusive thoughts and phantom sensations, and why the meaning we attach to a thought can sometimes become even more distressing than the thought itself.

What Do Intrusive Thoughts Say About My Identity in Christ?

OCD may whisper that a disturbing thought means I’m secretly bad, not really saved, or somehow outside the family of God, but that feared version of myself is not where I want to anchor my identity. I return to Scripture, including 1 Corinthians 3 and the truth that God’s Spirit dwells within believers, to explore what changes when I view my imperfect brain through the finished work of Christ rather than through the accusations of OCD.

Can Christians With Scrupulosity Ever Find Freedom From Intrusive Thoughts?

When intrusive thoughts and rumination have been present for months or years, hopelessness can start sounding convincing, but I don’t believe the length or intensity of the struggle gets the final word. I share why there is still hope through appropriate OCD treatment, professional support, ICBT principles, and the spiritual truth that believers have the mind of Christ and are still being transformed by God, even when their brains produce thoughts they never asked for.

Listen to the full episode to discover why intrusive thoughts don’t define you and what God’s truth says about who you really are.

Transcript

For those of you who don’t know, I conduct intensive therapy, and sometimes people will travel out of state, come visit me in Tennessee for a few days, and we’ll work very intentionally on trauma that is contributing to OCD symptoms or childhood woundings Different things that may be really exacerbating OCD symptoms, and then we’ll integrate inference-based cognitive behavioral therapy, or ICBT, into their treatment process. So someone came to visit me a while back for one of these, and they said something that a pastor said that got stuck in their mind, and it got me really thinking a lot. And this is common with OCD, as you’ll hear something from a pastor, spiritual teacher online, maybe a parent, and it just really gets stuck. And then OCD utilizes that stuck thought, maybe a true thought, maybe a not true thought. But it gets stuck in your brain, and then OCD will misuse it in your own mind against you. So this thought that someone got stuck on was, “All sin starts in the mind.” And of course, that can create some hypervigilance over someone’s thought process. Now, as I’ve reflected on this, I think that there’s a lot of sin, at least in my own life, that’s impulsive, that maybe I should have thought about, and had I thought about it, I wouldn’t have engaged with it. So I don’t know that I agree with this statement or this argument that the person was teaching or making. However, I wanted to talk today about why, as a Christian, you don’t need to be scared of your thoughts. And I think that this is an important point, and I want to make it spiritually and psychologically for you. So if you’re kinda new to hanging out with me, that’s what I love to do, is really integrate psychological principles with truth from the Bible and things that God has shown us through His Word, and how those integrate with what we know on a psychological, emotional, and mental level. Now, a lot of Christians have been told to be really careful about what you think because thoughts turn into actions. And we’ll talk a little bit more about this later, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes our thoughts turn into actions, but many times they don’t. I’ve known many Christians with intrusive thoughts who may have had an intrusive thought for months or years without ever acting on it. So let’s talk a little bit about what an intrusive thought is. An intrusive thought is something that you don’t want to think, you don’t desire to think, you wish it wasn’t there, and probably you’re jumping through all of these hoops in some way to manage or get rid of the distress associated with the thought. So you may have mental compulsions like rebuking a thought, saying a short prayer, saying a scripture. Some of these things you may have even been taught in the church to do to handle thought processes. You may try to neutralize it with thinking of a positive thought or positive image, or you may just ruminate on it and get stuck in the same thought circle going round and round. That’s actually pretty common. So these are all mental compulsions that I see with a lot of Christians that I work with, is oftentimes they may not have physical compulsions related to scrupulosity. Although some people can get into things like hand washing To help manage their thoughts as well. So if you’re engaging in any of those behaviors, just know that I’ve also seen that happen as well. You were created with a mind, but you also have the Spirit of God inside of you to lead and guide you as a Christian, full stop. How crazy is that? Like, I mean crazy in a good way. How wonderful and amazing is it that as believers, we have the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God living inside of us. I do not understand this. This is something that I have to embrace the mystery on of our faith. And I will say as a side note that this is really helpful for Christians with OCD because you’re not gonna understand it all. It requires faith. I’m totally mind-blown. You can’t contain God, so how is it that God somehow is contained in our body? Or how did the God of the universe enter a womb? The womb is so small. God is so big. Anyway, blows my mind. I could go on and on for that, but I believe it by faith, and I just think it’s incredible, and I believe it because the word of God says so. And I wanna read this verse to you, 1 Corinthians 3:16-17. You probably heard some of this before, but I want you to really look at it in a new way in the lens of your intrusive thoughts. “Do you not know that you are God’s temple, and God’s Spirit dwells in you?” This is what we were just talking about, right? “If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple.” You’re probably thinking, “What? I’m a holy temple? That doesn’t make any sense.” I can tell you my body’s imperfect, does weird stuff, has aches and pains, doesn’t always do the things it’s supposed to do. I mean, if you know, you know. We get headaches, we get stomachaches, sometimes we get really sick, sometimes we have broken bones. I mean, all kinds of things happen to our body, right? And our brain is part of that bodily system, right? So even though my body itself is imperfect, God is calling it holy as His temple. Now, it’s not anything that I did. I could eat all the vegetables, love some good vegetables, especially if they’re fresh. I can do my little mini trampoline workouts and lift some weights and do all these things, right, to help my body. But that’s not why my body is holy. My body is holy because of what Jesus did in the finished work on the cross. It’s not anything that I did. Once again, amazing. God has chosen to put His Spirit in us to dwell inside of us, and so we don’t need to be afraid of what is happening inside of our brain. You don’t need to be afraid of these intrusive thought misfires that are happening. So let’s talk about thoughts and their relationship to actions. Just because you have a thought doesn’t mean that you’re going to act on it. Everyone has intrusive thoughts regardless of if you struggle with OCD or not. I’ve shared a little bit about some intrusive thoughts that I’ve had. Most of mine involve a phobia of heights, and so I’ve definitely had intrusive thoughts about falling from a variety of places. When I used to go walk the running track at the top of the Y, I would have visualizations of me just toppling over the railing and falling on somebody that’s working on the treadmill. It’s totally ridiculous, like would not happen. I can identify that as an intrusive thought. Obviously, I have no desire to fall from anywhere, and I think that’s, it’s just my brain’s, like, safety mechanism in overdrive. I also wonder if some of that is a little genetic, ’cause I’ve had other family members that have been afraid of heights. Who knows? Regardless, I’ve had intrusive thoughts about driving my car off the road on a bridge into some water. I certainly haven’t acted on any of these intrusive thoughts. I had an intrusive thought about falling out of a window in a really high building ’cause it had these really big windows. Lots of things. Certainly didn’t act on any of those visualizations and certainly didn’t want to have any of those visualizations, ’cause they’re quite scary when you think about falling from high places and not surviving or being seriously injured, which is typically what can happen. Let’s talk about some more common thoughts that you haven’t acted on. So have you ever thought about skipping work or school and not done it? You’re like, “I could just, like, call in today and not go to this job.” Maybe you don’t wanna deal with the boss. Maybe you don’t wanna deal with the customers, coworkers, whatever it is. You’re like, “Oh, I could just so skip today.” But couple of things, you probably need a paycheck. You gotta pay your bills somehow. You’re thinking, “Hey, I gotta stick with this until I can get something else.” You may have some of those thoughts and not act on it. You could say, “I could just roll over and not go to my first class today, but that’s probably not the best idea ’cause I probably need to be learning what’s in there so that I can pass the test later. I might actually need this information for the final exam or to complete some type of project.” I would say those thoughts are probably pretty common for people. We’ve all had that at least once, all right? I had some of those 8:00 classes in college. I was not a fan. I get up early now, but I did not get up early then. I did not wanna go to class that early, was not fully awake yet. Have you ever thought about eating something, but you didn’t do it? Maybe you went to a restaurant, and you’re like, “I really want those french fries, but I think I’m gonna order the side salad instead. I’m gonna try to stick with my health goals.” Maybe I really want to eat this whole pint of Ben & Jerry’s right now, but I’ve decided that’s really not gonna be a good idea. I’m gonna get a stomachache. Not gonna feel so good. So let’s not do that. It’s very common for people who are married to notice other attractive people that are out just walking in the world, going to the grocery store. This can really freak out people who are dealing with OCD, any type of, like, sexual or relationship themes. If they see an attractive person, they may go, “Oh no, that means I don’t love my spouse,” or, “Oh no, that means maybe I wanna leave them,” or this is gonna transfer over into some type of lustful thought. So I may see somebody out in the world as I’m going about my day who’s an attractive person, and I don’t have to make any meaning out of that. I can just be like, “Oh, moving on. I’m married. Not gonna pursue that thought. Not gonna do anything about that thought. Not gonna take it any one step further or start daydreaming about being with somebody.” It’s like, no, I’m married. I’m happy. I’m moving on. I don’t need to entertain this. We have thoughts all the time that we do not act on Let’s say you get angry at someone, and your initial urge may be like, “Ugh, I really wanna be mean to that person. I wanna yell and scream,” but I walk away. I don’t. Maybe somebody just really pokes you and tries to goad you into an argument. You’ve probably met some of those people, right? Like, they really try to get you going, and you just walk away. You’re like, “No, I’m not giving into that anger and what I’m thinking about doing right now. Gonna move away.” Or you may have had situations where you struggled with an addiction, regardless of what that addiction was, and if you had started to have thoughts about using, especially earlier on in your recovery, you’re like, “I really want to go use right now,” or, “I’m really just thinking about it. I’m thinking about what the steps would be for me to use.” And then you wake up and you go, “This is not a good idea. Let me call my accountability person, my sponsor. Go to a meeting. Let me tell somebody else what’s going on so that I don’t have to be sitting alone in these thoughts.” And you actually in opposite to what you were originally thinking about. So God has given us this great ability to filter through our thoughts, to reason through our thoughts, and sometimes it may be a thought that we just need to not think a ton about. Maybe we just need to let it go, like some intrusive thoughts. Like, okay, I don’t have to latch into this thought. It just needs to kinda move along in the mind. Just keep that train going, and I’m not gonna hop on that train. I’m gonna let it pass on by. Easier said than done, and does take a lot of practice, so I’m not minimizing how difficult these things are. But I’d also like to talk with you about the meaning that you may be making about some of these intrusive thoughts. And this is really important, because intrusive thoughts are scary enough, but oftentimes the meaning is worse than the actual intrusive thought itself. So here’s some common meanings that Christians ascribe to their intrusive thoughts. One, you may tell yourself, “Because I’m having this thought about God, or about sex, or about harming, or about relationship, somehow this must mean that I’m not a Christian.” Nope, not the case at all. Intrusive thoughts don’t mean that you’re not saved or not a part of the family of God. Go listen to our personal story episodes. Of the last couple summers, we’ve done a whole personal story series where I’ve interviewed a bunch of Christians who have dealt with OCD and who still deal with intrusive thoughts from time to time. They just have a better grip on how to handle those than they used to when they come up, and they come up a lot less. Lots of people who love the Lord struggle with intrusive thoughts. So if you’re dealing with intrusive thoughts, even ones that are really hairy, scary, that you don’t wanna say out loud or tell anyone about, just know that there are other Christians who’ve walked that road, and you’re not alone. So if you hear nothing else from today’s podcast episode, that’s what I want you to hear. You may say, “These thoughts mean that there’s something hidden, secret, dark, really deep wrong with me.” Nope, that’s not true. Actually, intrusive thoughts typically point to what you value. So if you’re afraid of harming someone close to you, it probably means that you really value those relationships, that you love those people. You would never want to harm them. If you’re struggling with intrusive thoughts about God, maybe blasphemous thoughts or questions about what you actually believe, it means that your faith’s actually important to you. And I think this is something that’s important to highlight because often dealing with OCD leads you away from your values. You may start to avoid certain things or people, um, spiritual practices because you’re so afraid of being triggered. And so what we wanna do through treatment is help you move back towards your values. In doing so, be able to manage these intrusive thoughts differently. OCD also really thrives on this whole secretive thing, right? There must be something secretive here. There must be some kind of like hidden knowledge that I just have to keep scratching at and digging at to uncover. Nope. This is a trick that OCD uses all the time, so don’t let it play tricks on you that there’s something secret in there. You may say to yourself, “Well, if I’m having thoughts about this, this means that I want it, and that’s really scary because I don’t want it.” And you may even feel certain things in your body. We call these phantom sensations in ICBT, and they may lead you to believe that there’s some kind of like pull or urge or… People describe it different ways, but you may start to believe that you really desire what this intrusive thought is telling you. Desires and thoughts are not the same thing, so it’s really important that you separate those two things out. Just like thoughts and actions are two different things. We explored that earlier. You need to separate out the thoughts and the actions, separate out the thoughts and the desires. Sometimes we do have thoughts about things we desire, but in terms of intrusive thoughts, they’re not things that you actually desire. They’re what we call egodystonic thoughts, which means they’re really in opposition to yourself and what you want. You may ascribe the meaning that I must just be a bad person. These thoughts are so shameful. They may be really violent or horrific, and you might be ascribing some type of meaning that I’m just bad. That is not the truth. Everyone at some level or another has dealt with an intrusive thought, and people with OCD come to believe this false feared version of themselves. That’s called the feared possible self in ICBT, and “I’m bad” could be a feared possible self. If you are in Christ, you are a child of God, you are loved, you have been redeemed from sin and death, and you are being made holy into the image of Jesus Christ, God’s Son. So we don’t need to hold on to this thought of “I’m bad.” That is contrary to your identity in Christ. And the last thing you may be saying to yourself is, “I’ve just been dealing with this for so long, I don’t think I’m ever gonna be able to get over it. I don’t think there is any hope for me.” And that’s simply not true. I want you to know that there are good Christian counselors out there. There is good OCD treatment. It is hard to find a marriage oftentimes of people who are marriaging the psychological and the spiritual, but there is hope for you regardless of how long you’ve been dealing with OCD, regardless of how intensely you’re dealing with OCD. You may just feel like you’re in a constant cycle of rumination. I just want to say that there is treatment, there is help, there are medications that are given to us by God. There are many options out there for you. And you may feel like, “You know what? I’ve done a lot of it. I’ve tried some ERP. It was overwhelming or too much, or it just didn’t seem to jive with my faith, some of the things they were wanting me to do.” I want you to know that I have an online course called Empowered Mind, which teaches these inference-based cognitive behavioral therapy, ICBT, principles from a Christian perspective. We’ve had lots of students go through it and achieve success. We’ve told some of their stories on the podcast, so there is hope for you regardless of what you’re facing today. God loves you. He wants you to walk in freedom and in the abundant life of Christ. I want to leave you with one last scripture. Regardless of what you’re struggling with, believers, you have the mind of Christ. This is what it tells us in I Corinthians two:sixteen. “For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ.” If you are in Jesus, you have the mind of Christ. That doesn’t mean that your brain is always working the right way. It doesn’t mean that you aren’t gonna have intrusive thoughts. Remember what we talked about before, that the Holy Spirit lives inside of you, that you are in a transformational process. From the point you are saved till the point you get to heaven, God is working in your life. “He who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete it,” Philippians one, six. And we know that God is continuing to work in us to transform us to become more like His Son. And so don’t let OCD and all of these lies consume you. Know that the enemy wants you to believe these things. He wants you to believe there’s no hope for you. He wants you to believe that you’re never gonna get better. He wants you to believe that you’re secretly bad or outside God’s family or all these other things that you may be led to believe. And it’s important to identify those things as lies, to say, “Hey, to the best of my ability, I’m not gonna buy into this lie anymore.” And when we let go of the lie, we are better able to embrace truth. But oftentimes, we have to let go of the lie first is what I’m really seeing, and see it as the lie that it is. That’s the first step for you. Thank you so much for joining with me today. I’m in the process of writing a book for Christians just like you, struggling with OCD and intrusive thoughts, specifically scrupulosity related. If you wanna be the first to know when the book comes out, you definitely want to get on our newsletter at carriebock.com, and we’ll put that link in there for you so that you can access kind of some weekly devotionals, that thoughts that I send out to you guys, and can find out about book updates. I’m so excited. I’m just furiously, uh, writing and can’t wait to bring that to you all 

241. How to Make OCD Worse or Not!

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

In this episode, Carrie revisits an earlier conversation about the connection between stress and OCD, taking a deeper look at why stress can make OCD symptoms worse and how to navigate stressful seasons without letting OCD take over.

Episode Highlights

  • Why stress can make OCD symptoms worse, even after a period of recovery
  • How positive life changes can create stress and trigger an increase in OCD symptoms
  • Simple ways to stay grounded in your relationship with God during busy seasons
  • How movement, boundaries, and focusing on what you can control can help you manage stress
  • Why saying no and asking for help can be important when life becomes overwhelming

Episode Summary

Why Does Stress Make OCD Symptoms Worse?

I’ve seen many people experience a major life change and suddenly feel like OCD is running rampant again. Even if you’ve had a period of recovery or your mind has been quieter, stress can activate OCD and make symptoms feel much louder.

We can’t completely eliminate stress from our lives, and trying to do that isn’t realistic. What we can do is recognize when stress is affecting us and become more intentional about how we respond to it. That’s where I want to take this conversation a little deeper.

Can Positive Life Changes Make OCD Worse?

Not all stress comes from bad circumstances. Some of the things we want most can also bring significant stress. Moving, buying a house, starting a new job, getting married, or having a baby can all disrupt our normal rhythms and routines.

If you’re going through a major transition and your OCD suddenly feels more intense, I want you to recognize the connection. Sometimes understanding what is happening can help you stop judging yourself and start looking at what you need during this particular season.

How Can Christians With OCD Stay Grounded During a Stressful Season?

When life becomes hectic, it’s easy for your normal spiritual routines to get thrown off. Maybe you’re not sleeping well, you’re skipping your usual time with God, or everything simply feels out of sorts.

I talk about finding small ways to remain connected with God throughout the day, and explore how to keep spiritual practices from becoming rigid rituals where you feel like you have to do everything exactly right.

What Practical Habits Can Help When Stress Is Making OCD Worse?

When you’re already overwhelmed, taking care of yourself can easily fall to the bottom of the list. OCD can also pull you into all-or-nothing thinking, making small efforts seem like they don’t really count.

I want to challenge that mindset. There are simple ways to support yourself during stressful seasons that don’t require completely changing your routine, and some of them may be easier to fit into your day than you think.

How Do You Focus on What You Can Control When You Have OCD?

OCD can make you feel responsible for situations and outcomes that aren’t actually within your control. The more you try to manage everything, the more stress you may end up carrying.

Learning to recognize what is truly yours to handle and what you need to release can help you move forward without carrying responsibilities that were never yours to begin with.

Why Do Saying No and Asking for Help Matter When Managing OCD?

There are seasons when we have to acknowledge that we simply cannot do everything. I’m experiencing this myself as I make space to write my book about discerning between what OCD sounds like and what God sounds like. Saying yes to writing this book means I’m going to have to say no to other things.

If stress has been making your OCD louder, there’s more to explore in the full episode about recognizing what’s happening and taking small, realistic steps to care for yourself.

Transcript

I am in the process of writing a book. I am so super stoked about it. God has just really blessed me with an amazing writing coach to help me with outlining and making sure that my chapters are on point, and that I’m sticking to what I agreed to say to.

The book is gonna be about discerning between what OCD sounds like and what God sounds like. I really just am so impassioned that this book needs to be into the world. But part of that process for me has been just making space to have time to write and for this book to bring it out into the world. So one of the things that I’m doing as part of that process, which is actually kind of fun, is we’re gonna be doing some revisiting episodes We’re gonna be revisiting some concepts that I’ve talked about on the podcast before, some of our popular episodes, and I’m going to be adding to them, shifting what I’m saying a little bit.

It’s not a rerun, it’s a revisit. And today we’re revisiting episode 137, which is This Thing Will Make Your OCD Worse Every Time. And we talked on that episode about stress and how stress will make OCD worse every time. So I’ve done a little fun retitling for you, and today we’re gonna call this How to Make OCD Worse or Not.

How can we make OCD worse? Well, not manage your stress very well, not do anything to take care of that. Now, we cannot completely eliminate stress from our lives. That would be totally impossible and unrealistic, although you may try to do that in different ways from time to time. And I certainly do what I can to reduce stress from my life.

But let’s face it, some of the things in life that are stressful are things that we want. Have you ever done something like move? You may have really wanted to move, whether that was a local move or whether that was a move to a completely different state or even a different country. And the moving process, as we know, is very stressful regardless of how you do it.

Have you ever bought a house or started a new job, gotten married, had a baby? All of these things can be stressful even though they are things that we want. And that’s important for us to know that we even have what I would call positive stress showing up in our life that can make OCD worse. So you’re going through a transition, a major life transition or change, and it just seems like OCD is running rampant.

Just know, welcome to the club. You are normal. I hear this from many different people, that they have a major life shift, and OCD really gets activated, even if you’ve had a period of recovery or a period where things were just quieter in your mind with OCD. If you are looking for tools to deal with your OCD, I have an online course called Empowered Mind specifically for Christians who are looking to learn inference-based cognitive behavioral therapy, iCBT, and are looking to integrate their Christianity with this evidence-based practice.

So you can check that out by going to carriebock.com/training. All that information is on my website. So let’s talk about some steps to mitigating stress and managing OCD. Number one is to stay grounded in your spiritual practice to the best of your ability. I know that when you’re going through a busy, hectic, crazy season, that can be hard.

All of a sudden, you’re not sleeping well, and then you’re skipping time with God in the morning, or you’re just feeling all, like, out of sorts. Maybe you’re not feeling well or you’re displaced locationally. Maybe you had a rhythm and a routine, and that’s gotten thrown off. So let’s talk about some just small ways that you can stay grounded in your relationship with God in just a crazy season or a stressful season.

One of those may be just that you put a verse or two up around your house. So I have the same verse in the kitchen, and it’s right by the area where I would, like, chop vegetables or make food. So essentially kind of on the countertop near the stove, that area. And I don’t really have backsplash, but if you had backsplash, kinda sorta where that would be.

Not right behind the stove, but next to it. That’s irrelevant. However, I have one there, and I have one in my bathroom because those are places that I go to every single day, right? At some point or another, I’m gonna go make some type of food for my family. At some point or another, many times a day, I’m gonna be going to the bathroom in the morning and the evening if I’m at home.

I know that I will be able to see that scripture verse and read it over and really take some time to meditate on it and say, “Okay, what is this saying? How is God speaking to me through this particular verse?” If you struggle with scrupulosity, I really encourage you to pick verse about God’s love to have around you as a reminder.

It could be a verse about God’s love. It could be a verse about God’s grace maybe that you really need to think and lean into in this season. Could be a verse about forgiveness. So many different things that you could pick certainly. But just putting the word of God in your heart and in your mind is so helpful because then it comes out when we need it, and it comes to mind when we need it.

Other ways to remain grounded, praying in your car, taking these small pockets of time maybe where you’re waiting or where you don’t have much to do. Instead of giving into that initial urge of like, “Okay, I’m gonna pull out my phone, I’m gonna check this email, or I’m gonna go scroll on social media,” maybe just take a moment to take a few deep breaths and say a breath prayer.

We had an episode on that. I encourage you to listen to. Just breathe, take a minute, and really maybe just thank God for something at that moment. Just a small way throughout your day to remain connected with God. That abiding in Christ is gonna reduce your stress level overall. Even the secular people will tell you studies about meditation and prayer and how those reduce our stress.

I think that’s a good thing for us to remember is, like, we already have these spiritual practices that can help us reduce stress. Now, if you’re struggling with scrupulosity, you may say, “That period of time really stresses me out in the morning.” And so I understand that, and I hear you, and I just want you to know that God understands that, too, and He understands that you may be struggling with certain rituals or feeling very rigid about your spirituality.

So anything that you can do to kinda shake that up, make OCD mad, maybe just focusing on a small passage of scripture instead of feeling like I have to be reading for this amount of time, or I have to say my prayer exactly this way. Maybe leaning into something different, making sure that you’re not repeating things over and over again because you didn’t feel like it was sincere or didn’t feel like it was right.

Just do the best that you can, and God knows your heart, and He knows that you want to love Him and that you want to serve Him and grow closer to Him. And so if the time with God is hard, just take it one step at a time and one day at a time and see what you can do, what’s feasible in this season of stress or in this season of OCD.

Number two, I want you to be real with yourself in recognizing what’s going on, and then entering into a state of self-compassion. In really hard seasons, just saying to yourself or saying to a loved one, “This is a hard season right now,” or, “I’m going through a stressful time. Even though I really want to have this baby, it’s stressful going through these hormonal changes.

It’s stressful with my body changing and doing all kinds of things. It’s stressful just waiting maybe and not knowing, like, how things are going to turn out, and going to all the appointments can be stressful.” All the things, right? Giving yourself that permission to acknowledge maybe a mixture of feelings that you’re having.

I know that this was a big one that I felt, particularly when I was pregnant. It was kind of like, “Oh, hey, I’m supposed to be, like, super happy all the time. This is really great. I’m having a baby when I’m older. Not everybody can have a baby when they’re older, so therefore, like, I should be super grateful.”

It’s all like whenever you tell yourself how you should feel, it usually just ends up backfiring, and it’s better to just be honest with yourself about, “How do I actually feel?” And at the time, I was going through some depression for a variety of issues of different things that were happening. I think there was also some physiological stuff happening with sleep apnea getting worse, and I think that that was also driving my depression.

I didn’t know that at the time. All I knew was I was pregnant and depressed, and I wasn’t, quote, supposed to be according to how I was self-judging myself. So entering into a state of compassion for yourself and just being like, “You know what? I feel anxious.” Or I feel sad. These are just part of our human experience, that we have this wide range of emotions, and we certainly have emotions because we’re created in God’s image.

If you’re angry, you’re angry. That doesn’t mean that you have to go act on it, but it doesn’t mean that you suppress it either. It means that you say, “You know what? Let’s just lay this on the table. This is how I feel,” and then I can sort those things with God and figure out what to do about it, how to handle it in a healthy way.

You’re not perfect. Don’t expect yourself to be perfect when you’re in a season of high stress, and you may be caregiving for a loved one. You may have a child that’s having some behavior issues. There are so many different things that we face in life, and crises happen every single day. So just being really gentle with yourself and saying, “Hey, I’m not where I want to be right now, and in terms of coping with my OCD or maybe even in terms of coping with my stress, I’m not where I want to right now.

But that’s okay, because I can just take small steps today.” And those small steps will lead to bigger and bigger steps for you. Number three is move your body. Do some type of physical movement. That’s really, really good for stress. It’s really good for depression, anxiety, and especially when you are dealing with OCD.

I know different people have thoughts about medication. I’m personally like, hey, if medication is a good avenue for you and you wanna talk to your doctor about that. But there are plenty of studies that really show that good OCD treatment works well when someone engages in some type of medication and therapy working together, and oftentimes people will tend to pick one or the other, and then there’s, like, this missing link.

However, what I tell people is that if you’re not going to use medication, if you just say, “That’s absolutely not for me,” or, “I’ve had bad side effects,” that I really encourage people to exercise, because that’s so good for your brain and so good for your body. That can really benefit you. It’s not going to cure your OCD.

It will help you cope with stress better though, and you will feel better as a result. You may say, “Well, I’m stressed out, and I’m way too busy to exercise,” but I think that’s where it’s important to find these little pockets of your day to engage in some type of movement, whether it’s a short walk in the morning, whether it’s a walk on your lunch break, taking the stairs instead of at your office building when you go to lunch instead of just using the elevator.

There are many different options for you to engage in small bursts of movement. Maybe you get up, and you do 20 squats before you get out the door. Whatever it is, just finding these little pockets where you can do some type of movement. Oftentimes what I find with OCD is people will engage in this all or nothing thinking, right?

Like, “I’ve either gotta be like hardcore in, and I’ve gotta like go to the gym and really get into lifting weights,” whatever it is you’re telling yourself. But small changes add up to bigger changes. Finding things that you can do within your physical ability level as well. We’re not trying to create further problems because you went gung ho for a workout that your body wasn’t prepared for.

That’s part of recognizing where you’re at in the previous step and being compassionate. Maybe you are only able to do walking for 15 minutes. That’s okay. Like start wherever you’re able, and your brain and body will certainly thank you. Definitely helpful for stress. I know that many people are getting walking pads nowadays.

I recently, because I do so much sitting for work, I finally said, “You know what? I really need to do this walking pad,” and have gotten to the point where I can do a little bit of walking and working on the computer at the same time. But however you get your movement in, definitely get it in. The next step is to focus on what you can control.

You cannot control everything, although OCD will cause you to believe that you can control things that you actually can’t control. You cannot control other people’s feelings, other people’s behavior. You cannot control the weather. You cannot control many different factors that are outside of your control in terms of job Housing market.

There are just so many things we could list, right, that are outside of our control. But what we can say is for the things that are within our control, we can look at, what can I actually do in this situation? Maybe it’s a rough job market. What can I do? Can I work on my LinkedIn profile? Can I go to a networking meeting?

Can I talk to other people in my field and see what they’re doing? How can I get more training or better myself so that I can improve my job standing? Maybe we just talked about health, and that’s really this whole thing. What small changes can we make to improve our health and reduce stress levels?

That’s one thing that we can control to some extent. I can control how I communicate in a relationship. I can’t control how that person receives what I communicate, but I can work on my words, my tone of voice. I can express how I feel. I can express wants and needs in a relationship, but I can’t make that other person provide those wants or needs.

I can’t make that other person do anything that they don’t want to do. So recognizing, what’s my responsibility, what’s my role here? And then these other things that I can’t control, I really have to be able to surrender and release those things over to God and say, “Okay, God, I can’t control this. This is your department.

I can pray that you will soften this person’s heart. I can pray that you will give me wisdom and understanding. I can pray that you will give me the right words to say, that you will help me to have self-control, be able to remain calm in this relationship, maybe where I have a tendency to get hot-tempered.”

These are things that you can connect with God over. And as you pray through those things and as you really surrender and say, “Hey, it’s not my will, but yours be done. I can’t do this on my own. I desperately need you to intervene,” that God gives us a sense of peace back, where He says, “Okay, you can trust me to move forward and to keep going Our next point is learn to say no.

No is a complete sentence. If you are going through a busy and stressful season, there are going to be things that you have to say no to. I shared earlier that I’m in this book-writing process, and I really believe that I’m about to enter a season of no, that there are gonna probably be many things that I say no to in order to say yes to writing this book, in order to getting it out into the world.

I have said no many times to individual therapy clients so that I could really focus on intensives and focus on Empowered Mind, the ICBT course that I have. By saying no to one thing, it means you’re saying yes to something else, and that’s important for you to keep in mind. You cannot do all the things in this season, and that may mean that you do grocery pickup or delivery.

It may mean that you do some more, like, ready-made meals rather than cooking everything from scratch. Saying no can be a hard skill to learn, and if you find yourself constantly struggling with boundaries, I really encourage you to get some therapy surrounding that. And I am certainly happy to help you if you’re interested, looking at some intensive therapy or a therapy retreat surrounding being able to be assertive in your communication and being able to say no.

Oftentimes, it goes back to, uh, difficult experiences in childhood where you weren’t given a voice or weren’t able to stand up for yourself. So I would love to process through some of that with you. Or if you have a therapist in your area that you can see and get some specifically tailored trauma therapy surrounding, that would be really helpful for you These are things that you can learn and you can practice.

They’re hard at first. They feel uncomfortable, but if you have trouble saying no, just know that that’s something that you can work through and get better at over time. And our last step in managing your stress and helping your OCD is to ask for help. It is okay to ask for help. It is okay to say, “Hey, can you watch my child for a few hours while I pack up these boxes to prepare for our move?”

It is okay to ask your spouse, “Hey, can you help me with this particular house project so that I can get it off my to-do list and not be stressed or worried about it?” Or, “Can we carve out three hours this Saturday to really tackle this particular organization project or a lawn project that we have?” That is really gonna help you.

It’s okay to ask for what you need. That’s an important thing to note. And asking for help, just like boundaries, can be really hard at first, and it takes a certain level of humility. This is something that God has had to work with me on in terms of being able to ask other people for help. But I know now that it is so important.

We weren’t meant to be an island, to be alone and isolated. We were meant to live in community and be somewhat interdependent on each other, and I mean that in a very healthy way, not in a negative way. So if you need to ask somebody for help, then don’t be afraid to use your support system. All right. I hope this episode was helpful for you.

Thanks so much for tuning in today and letting us revisit a really important topic on dealing with stress in relationship to OCD. If you are on YouTube, please hit like and subscribe, comment, and let me know if this episode was helpful for you. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.

Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area.

240. How Do I Know If I’m Obsessing Right Now?

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

In this episode, Carrie helps you distinguish between everyday uncertainty and OCD by exploring obsessional doubts, compulsions, rumination, faith-related OCD, and the ways ICBT can help identify when OCD is turning uncertainty into a crisis.

Episode Highlights:

  • How to recognize when an everyday uncertainty may be turning into an OCD obsession
  • Why OCD often targets the people, beliefs, and values that matter most to you
  • How urgency, internet research, rumination, and reassurance-seeking can signal OCD
  • What ICBT teaches about the difference between everyday doubts and obsessional doubts
  • How Christians can respond to uncertainty without trying to force absolute certainty

Episode Summary:

How Can You Tell If You’re Experiencing Everyday Uncertainty or OCD?

This is one of the questions I hear most. Waiting on medical results, getting to know someone new, worrying about someone you love, these are all normal parts of life. You genuinely don’t know how they’ll turn out. OCD shows up when that not-knowing suddenly needs to be solved right now. I break down how to spot that moment.

Why Does OCD Go After the Things You Care About Most?

OCD rarely bothers with things you don’t care about. It goes straight for your health, your marriage, your kids, your faith. For Christians, this can be confusing, because a normal question about prayer or sin turns into an urgent spiritual crisis. I explain why OCD works this way, and what it doesn’t mean about you.

What’s the Real Difference Between an Everyday Doubt and an Obsessional One?

I use an idea from ICBT that changed how I explain this. Everyday doubts land eventually. The test comes back. You make a decision. You land somewhere on a hard question. Obsessional doubts don’t land. Your brain just keeps asking for one more search, one more check, one more round of reassurance.

How Does a Normal Problem Turn Into an OCD Crisis?

Not sure if your boss likes your work? Not sure where a relationship is headed? Both are normal. But OCD can take that uncertainty and build a whole imaginary story around it, jumping straight to the worst case with little evidence behind it. I walk through how that jump happens.

How Do You Live With Uncertainty as a Christian Without Feeding OCD?

Tolerating uncertainty starts with knowing what’s actually yours to carry and what isn’t. There’s a difference between responding to what’s in front of you and trying to control the future through checking or replaying it in your head. Sometimes faith means leaving a question open and trusting God with the next step, not the whole outcome.

If you want to recognize the subtle moment when normal uncertainty turns into an OCD rabbit hole, listen to the full episode.

Transcript

Today on the podcast, we are answering your questions about scrupulosity.

First, I wanna say thank you to everyone who submitted a question, either via email who get our weekly newsletters. I was asking people if they had questions for this series. So we had some email replies and then, of course, our survey that we did a while ago prior to episode 200. Some of you, I just kind of took the comments from those survey responses and utilized those as questions for this episode.

Welcome, OCD Warriors, to the Christian Faith and OCD podcast, where we are all about reducing shame and stigma of struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories and replacing uncertainty with faith as you develop practical tools for greater peace.

I’m Carrie Bach, Christ follower, wife, mom, and licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. I pray you are blessed by today’s episode.

For some of these, you wanted to remain anonymous, and we’re respecting that, and for others, you said that we could use your first name in respect to the question. So if you hear a name on the podcast, it’s because that person gave us permission.

Just so you know, our first question is from Sabrina.

Sabrina asks, does anyone else struggle with critical thoughts, especially towards God or his word?

Now, this can be a common intrusive thought, right? You may have a thought, something to the effect of, how do you know the Bible is real? How do you know God’s word is really true?

Some people have other intense, intrusive thoughts that have to do with blasphemy, and of course, these thoughts can be very distressing for someone with scrupulosity because your faith is important to you and you don’t wanna have these particular thoughts about God.

So I would say understand that God knows your brain even better than you do, and the quicker that you’re able to identify these as intrusive thoughts, the easier it’s gonna be to be able to know that you don’t have to respond to them. That it’s not your true inner desire or value to disrespect God, his word, or anything else as a part of your faith system.

One of our podcast listeners, Steve, ask about scripture verses and how different groups or denominations have different interpretations. There may be one that’s stricter than your particular belief, and so how do we deal with these interpretations of scripture?

He said, it doesn’t seem like it’s a hundred percent imaginary because there are people that believe this way in the here and now, even people that don’t have OCD, so of course someone with OCD may think, okay, well now I need to live according to this stricter interpretation of scripture.

What we wanna do is we’re not just automatically looking at sense data with ICBT. I think that’s a misnomer maybe for a lot of people that listen to this podcast even and hear me talk about it. It’s not just about sense data. We also have to look at the obsessional reasoning process.

And so when we look at the obsessional reasoning process, what we’re saying is that we’re distrusting what’s actually in the sensory information in the here and now, which is opening us up to the hypothetical imaginary what ifs, and then applying some logic to those what ifs.

Now we wanna get down to what’s the actual primary obsessional doubt that’s going on, and I would say the primary obsessional doubt is not, What if I’m not interpreting the scripture correctly? At first glance, that may be what you think that doubt is. However, when you look at it a little bit closely and go a layer deep and a layer deep and a layer deep, so what if I misinterpret this scripture and then I say, okay, that means I’m getting something in my relationship with God wrong.

If I’m getting something in my relationship wrong, then the next layer deep would say, well, I don’t have a good relationship with God. You could even start to doubt if you had a relationship with God.

You wanna really get down to that primary obsessional doubt. Is it I’m offending God in some way? Is it I’m going to be disconnected from him in some way? Is it, I’m going to, maybe if you don’t fear losing your salvation, but you fear something else, like being far from God or not following God’s commands for your life, and that’s what you’re really trying to look at.

And then we would say, well, what evidence do we have for that? That you don’t care about God and his commands? We probably don’t have evidence for that as a generality.

If you are a person who is seeking to walk with Christ, we’re not trying to be perfect, but we’re saying, Hey, I am engaging in these spiritual practices to know Christ and to understand him better, like I’m listening to the Holy Spirit. I’m allowing the Holy Spirit to lead and guide me in interpreting the word of God.

To me, that’s part of the Spirit’s job as you’re reading the Bible, to reveal those things to you that you need to pay attention to and understand that people’s belief systems change over time, and sometimes that’s due to living life and personal experience.

I’ve shared about a couple of my things before, but honestly, I was raised that Catholics were not true Christians. Somewhere along the lines, I picked that up. I don’t know if that was parents or other teachers, but I have met some Catholics that are fully devoted to following Jesus, and I believe that they have a relationship with the Lord.

Ultimately, it’s not for me to judge who’s in God’s kingdom or not. That’s up to him.

But I’m just giving you an example of something that I was taught, like, Hey, this entire group of people, they don’t know what they’re talking about and they aren’t saved, versus examining that belief and saying, you know what? These people may practice differently than I do, but I also see that they love Jesus and are trying to follow him.

We had a question about Romans 14:23, but whoever has doubts is condemned if he eats. This is in terms of the food sacrifice to idols, because the eating is not from faith, for whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.

We have to be careful about getting stuck on any one particular scripture passage for a multitude of reasons. We wanna look first at: What is the context of that scripture passage? Who is being spoken to in it? How does that passage or verse apply to the entire chapter? How does it apply to the book? How does it apply to other verses that are similar to it? What are some parallel passages that may speak to some of the same things?

Ultimately, OCD can misapply scripture verses, and you’ll kind of going back to that obsessional reasoning process. Where you’re distrusting, the sense is you are opening up to the imagination and then there’s this logic that’s misapplied, and sometimes scripture verses actually get involved in that misapplied logic, either misunderstanding scripture verses, but not just that. Really just taking them out of context to something that they don’t apply to in the here and now.

Actually, if you look at this, this goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden. Did God really say this?

And you also look at the temptation of Jesus where the devil is using scripture against him saying, Hey, throw yourself down off this building because basically the angels are gonna come and rescue you. And it’s essentially a misapplying, the Psalm to Jesus in that moment.

We know that in essence is something that the enemy does is lie to us about scripture and what it really says. We have to be cautious.

Kind of going back to wanting to get at that primary obsessional doubt is that if OCD has you hung up on one particular scripture or a couple particular scriptures that you need to go back to, what are we actually doubting here and how is that contributing to the story?

How is this logic that I’m believing from the scripture potentially being misapplied to my actual here and now present situation of what’s going on as I’m making decisions, as I’m discerning God’s will, as I am seeking to live out my Christian faith?

We also want to just remember when it comes down to commandments, there are two main commandments and they’re pretty simple. Love God, love people, love your neighbor as yourself, and we can be so hung up on how to do those things that we actually miss the point entirely, that we actually end up not loving God very well, or not loving people very well because we’re so paralyzed on how to actually do it.

That’s not what God wants for you. That’s not God’s heart. He wants you to be able to freely love him and love others to the best of your ability.

In this particular scripture passage, intention is important. What is your intention when you encounter other believers?

A lot of times in modern day, this gets applied to alcohol, although I don’t think that because we don’t necessarily have meat sacrifice to idols, at least not in the US. That may happen in other parts of the world. I don’t know. I know that in Asian countries sometimes they leave food out for spirits and things of that nature.

However, in my particular context, what does it mean to try not to cause another believer to stumble? It might get applied to alcohol. It might get applied maybe to movies or TV shows that you might consume, whereas you might be okay with that, and that may not affect your spiritual life negatively, but somebody else may watch something, listen to something, and it affects them negatively.

God knows where each person is at, and if I know personally that I don’t drink, but if I did drink, I brought alcohol to someone’s house and didn’t know what their stance was on alcohol. As a believer, maybe that’s probably not the best idea. I might wanna ask or be respectful ahead of time, like, Hey, do you have any qualms about this? Are you okay with it or not?

I think that’s just a matter of respecting other people’s beliefs and preferences and practices.

If you know somebody that is fasting chocolate for Lynch, you’re not gonna bring chocolate over to them. I mean, these are kind of some common sense type of examples of just how we respect other people and where they’re at spiritually and not desiring them to stumble.

I think there are so many times that we overcomplicate things. Simple a lot of times is better.

Someone gave us something about giving up on God. That’s a note that I have from my assistant. I’m not sure exactly what that means. I don’t know if they mean they feel like giving up on their faith because they have scrupulosity and they’re really struggling with it.

I find that that doesn’t seem to be helpful or congruent with most people who struggle with Scrupulosity. Sometimes they feel like, well, if I just give up and just don’t believe anymore, then that’s going to resolve this, when really that’s not the case.

And unfortunately, they may have even been told by some therapists, well, you’re taking your faith way too seriously and you may need to just take a step back and not have those particular high values. Of course, that’s, uh, not what I would consider to be an ethical stance. However, because it’s your values that you’re bringing to therapy.

However, I will say that if you just say, okay, well, I’m not going to believe or I’m not going to follow God, then what I’m gonna do is that that’ll resolve things that OCD is just gonna attach itself to something else. Like if you were able to do that. So it’s not actually going to fix the issue.

Plus, it’s not very easy for us to just automatically change our value system. If we’ve had it for a while, eh, that’s not really true. We can change our value system.

So if I didn’t answer your question on giving up on God, I might need a little bit more detail there.

One of our listeners, Leslie, said, I bet lots of other Christians with OCD feel like Pharisees. We get so hung up sometimes on a little rule instead of focusing on loving God and others like ourselves.

And I would agree with that. I think that that’s completely true and really what we were just talking about. So thank you for confirming that, Leslie.

We had a comment, which I really appreciated, from someone who heard our podcast on hearing from God.

Back on episode 208, we had a podcast called, Is It OCD Voice, or God’s Voice, Hearing From God for Healing with Heather O’Brien, and we got some feedback on that episode.

Someone had said, seemed like some of the things that we talked about seemed like good, spiritual things to be aware of, but other things like dreams, a word from another believer praying for open and closed doors or signs seem to be things that they have encouraged their loved one with scrupulosity to stay away from. Some kinds of things that may be heard in church about God leading people with a particular feeling. That can be prevalent is not very helpful for those with scrupulosity.

So what I wanna say to that, and first of all, apologies for any confusion that may have been occurred by that episode, and I’d love to hear other people’s feedback on that because it’s been a very popular episode that many people have listened to.

So definitely would love further feedback if others have it regarding whether some of those things were helpful or harmful in the scrupulosity discussion.

These are things that I plan to kind of explore further in writings and teachings in the future, because I really want people to be able to discern God’s voice and to be able to discern leadings from the Holy Spirit versus is this OCD trying to just train, wreck, everything that’s going on.

And what I would say is that God speaks to people through a variety of different ways. We can see that in scripture where God did speak to people through dreams in scripture.

At times, I don’t think that God necessarily speaks to me through dreams. I haven’t had that as an experience. God will wake me up with a specific thought sometimes on my mind. Of course, sometimes that’s just Carrie stressed out, so I have to discern those things. I have to take them to God in prayer.

I think that confirmation sometimes can be helpful for us, that there may be things that we’re praying about that someone else says, Hey, and they’ll just affirm something that we’ve already been praying about or thinking about. That can happen quite frequently and be very helpful just in terms of is this God or is this not?

And we also see, I believe in scripture, where Paul was prevented from going to Macedonia. That’s in Acts 16. God has the ability to speak to us in a wide variety of ways, and so I really don’t want to limit God.

I also have to say that what we really wanna look at is, is there a lens of fear here? Is there a lens of, I’ve missed something? Is there a lens of this is not resolving? There is no peace as I’m praying through this and processing it.

Because with OCD, it’s a loop. It goes around in a circle, so it’s something that you’re wrestling with over and over and over without any kind of peace or resolution to it.

Oftentimes, God is speaking to us in a way that is not urgent, like you have to do this exact thing right now. It’s something that he has been teaching us and showing us over time. It’s something that repeatedly comes up for us.

It’s not cloaked in an enormous amount of fear because God is loving and kind to us and gracious.

And I know for me, there are times where I totally miss it. I’m just gonna be honest with you guys. I’m like, oh, like that’s what God has been trying to show me. That’s what he’s been trying to tell me, and I just didn’t get it. And God is gracious to speak it to you again.

So just know that. If you are following him and seeking him and praying, sitting in silence, reading the word of God, you are not going to have to worry about missing what it is that he has for you, missing what he’s trying to speak to you.

If there is an intense amount of, it’s all my fault. If I make the wrong decision, God’s gonna be mad at me. I’m incredibly afraid there’s gonna be eternal consequences, even for something that’s not an eternal consequence situation.

Those are just some really good clues for you that that’s OCD. That’s just a different conversation.

And if you’ve been living with OCD for so long, you’re so used to that voice. You’re used to the condemning voice, you’re used to the fear. You’re used to maybe feeling like that voice was directing you or protecting you in some way or keeping you safe.

We want to do is to open you up to the voice of the Holy Spirit, which is calmer, quieter, peaceful, gentle, loving.

And it may be a situation where you are walking out in faith and don’t feel like God is talking to you all the time.

I think we hear people in church say, God is always speaking and we’re just not listening, and I don’t believe that.

Here’s why. I don’t believe that I can sit with people that I really love, that know me really well, and we can have a connection and we don’t have to say anything. We don’t have to constantly be talking to each other. Just enjoy spending time in each other’s presence.

Now, if a loved one has something to say to me and I’m there, and I’m present, and I’m available, then they’re gonna be able to speak to me about it.

And I believe the Lord is the same way. We have to get quiet sometimes so that we can listen and open ourselves up.

I think in a busy society, that’s the hardest part. Just actually taking the time to slow down long enough to listen and to be available and to be reading God’s word because those are the words of God, so that we can know them and receive them and plant them, get them rooted down deep into our soul and spirit so that they come out at the times that they need to, and God can bring those remembrances to mind for us.

How do I teach my children about the Lord when it causes so much fear for me?

I dunno. What about children’s songs? I’ve been thinking about this myself for my daughter. How can I start to teach her some of these truths?

And we’ve started listening to kids Christian worship music on the way to school, and she likes it because it’s kids singing and it’s fun and upbeat while it’s still teaching her spiritual truths.

We talk about what is she learning with the other kids in Sunday school? She used to go to a Christian program, but now she’s in a secular program, so we’re not getting that from there.

But we have kids’ Bibles and devotional books and things of that nature. Sometimes that’s a little bit easier to access the children’s materials if you have scrupulosity than the full-blown adult materials.

And of course, we want to try to simplify things for children anyway.

I think just taking it one step at a time and leaning on other people and other supports in your life.

This came from someone in the one of our survey respondents, but I, I appreciate that question. I think it’s important.

Another one from the survey, how can you feel good about yourself and still feel Christian?

Yeah, this is one that gets very confusing for a lot of people. They think it’s prideful to feel good about myself.

However, being prideful is like if I brag on my accomplishments and I say, oh, they’re my achievements and I’ve done this, and look at what I’ve done and it’s all about me, like that would be a place of pride.

So I could tell you a prideful story about this podcast would be totally laughable. I’m laughing just thinking about it because what I’m about to tell you so not true is ridiculous.

Here’s my prideful podcast story.

I have over 200 episodes and I have worked so hard on this podcast and I have done a lot of training on OCD and I’ve read all the ICBT books and I have really done the hard work to learn how to share this information with you, and I’ve had to learn about podcasting and how to grow a podcast and it’s all been about Carrie and her effort, and that is why we are here today.

Not a true story at all.

Y’all do not even know how many times I have cried and prayed about this thing and just y’all just.

The more true story would be God broke my heart and caused me to want to share this message of hope for the world. That’s the only reason that I’m here.

Whether it has a certain number of downloads or followers or subscribers, whatever, doesn’t really matter to me. Because it’s about whatever God wants to do for it, and I just really need to be here and be obedient and do the best that I can with what God has stewarded me with.

But really, there would be no Christian Faith in OCD. Uh, prior to that, it was Hope for Anxiety and OCD. There never would’ve been any of that had it not been for God.

Had he not put that on my heart, had he not led me to the right people that could help me and support me along this journey, had I not had, I wanna say fan club.

And what I mean by fan club, I mean is like my husband, very supportive of this podcast. My mother, when she was alive, she was like my number one cheerleader of the podcast.

Listen, she was like passing out podcast cards like crazy. Every time she met somebody, she’s like, my daughter is a podcast. She’s like an ambassador for the show. Really, truly.

So I’ve been blessed to have a lot of support along the way when I had like no episodes. I mean, friends got on here and let me interview them. Very blessed. Very thankful.

You look at those two stories are very different.

I feel good about the second story because I feel like all I did was show up and do my best to do what God asked me to do.

It’s not really because of anything that I have done, but only what God has been able to do in and through me, and people are like. Will contact me and be like, oh, thank you for doing this. This is so great. And I’ve just been so encouraged and I’m like, okay, praise God. Like, that’s awesome.

That’s the only reason we’re I’m able to be here. And just so I’m thankful for that. It’s, it’s not about me.

So I think it’s how you interpret your circumstances in terms of yourself, like feeling good about yourself and what you’re doing in the world, but it’s more than that.

Feeling good about yourself to me is recognizing my value and worth because of Christ, not because of me as a person.

The only reason that I have value is because I’m created in the image of God, because he loved me first, because I was still a sinner. Christ died for me. Like that’s the reason that I have value and worth is because I have been forgiven and because God loved me and sent his son to die for me.

That’s feeling how I can feel good about myself and still be a Christian.

There you have it.

This one came from the survey and it’s about prayer.

We have had episodes in the past about prayer, but they were talking about it should be simple, but I find it so hard. And are there different ways that you can pray? Does it need to be certain way? How do you know if you’re just praying or you’re thinking something in your head?

I would say there are many different ways to pray.

You know, we’ve had an episode in the past on breath prayers. That was back on episode 75 with Jennifer Tucker.

And essentially what a breather is, is it’s where you take, uh, pieces of scripture and when you inhale, you say part of that scripture in your head.

So it could be like Psalm 46. The Lord is my refuge and strength. You would inhale and then exhale and ever present help in times of trouble.

There’s a Psalm 23. You could inhale the Lord is my shepherd, and then as you exhale, I shall not want, or I have what I need. Kind of depending on what translation you are looking at there.

That’s just one example of how to pray.

When we did prayer and fasting at our church earlier this year, our pastor put together a booklet of different ways to pray.

One of them is praying through the Lord’s Prayer, and not just praying through exactly as it’s written in scripture, but using that as a starting point.

So praising God, recognizing his name and his holiness. Recognizing him as your father, praying about God’s kingdom, advancing God’s will, being done, presenting your requests and your needs before God, submitting your will over to him, et cetera.

So that’s one way to pray.

There are, there’s praying scripture. You can pick specific scriptures and pray through them, putting your name in there. Many different ways to pray.

I know that some traditions have specific like liturgical prayers that they pray, maybe specific times or specific seasons.

There’s many different ways to pray, or you don’t have to have a very rigid, specific structure.

Sometimes your prayer can just be, I need help right now, or I feel overwhelmed, or, God, I need you.

That is a prayer in itself. God, I need you today, or I need you right now.

I think that we don’t need to overthink it or over structure it, or it’s just talking to God and finding a way to connect with him.

Another thing this individual said, which I feel like is a really good point to talk about, is, is that I don’t feel like I can feel my feelings. Because I’ve prayed about it. If it’s surrendered over to God, I’m supposed to be at peace when I’m done praying.

And the reality is that’s the ideal, but it’s not always what we experience.

Sometimes we pray about something and our feelings have not fully caught up, and that’s okay. Sometimes we still may feel distressed about something because we’re still in uncertainty. The situation hasn’t been resolved at this point, and we have to sit with that and trust.

Trust can be really hard. It can be hard to trust God, especially if you’ve been hurt by a lot of people in your past, or even spiritual leaders.

Maybe you feel like God didn’t handle it the way that you wanted him to with the situation in the past. So you feel like, well, God, you allowed this negative thing into my life. So it’s hard to trust you with this piece right here.

We can pray that our feelings align with our faith, and sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t.

And so we still have to find ways to process our feelings, whether that’s sadness, grief, anger, frustration, guilt, shame, like all of those things, we have to learn how to cope with them in a healthy way.

Praying doesn’t mean that I don’t need any coping skills or that prayer should be like my only way of coping with my emotions.

I think it’s a great way, don’t get me wrong, being able to pour your heart out to the Lord and bring things to him and wrestle through issues that you might be facing. That’s really great for your mind, your body, and your emotions.

But sometimes you may still be in distress, and you know what? You may need to go for a walk or you may need to take some deep breaths, or you may need to call a friend, or you may need to enlist some other healthy, godly coping skills as well.

We had some questions about receiving support for OCD from a spouse or from other people that you might be in ministry with working with.

Now, back on episode 142, we did have, How Do I Tell Someone I Have OCD? That episode may be particularly helpful for some of you if that’s something you’re wrestling with.

Now, I do want to have like a marriage and family, more relationship type expert on to talk with us about involving spouses in treatment processes and what that would look like.

So that will be coming in the future when I find the right person to connect with and we’re able to record that. I think that that would be a very helpful episode for the audience, ’cause I know that that’s something that comes up a lot.

We have other things that I’m still trying to curate guests for.

We are gonna do an interview at some point on OCD and autism overlap, hopefully one more with family situations and marriages this summer peripherally. If it all comes together, we’re going to have another personal stories, theories of people who have struggled with OCD.

I’d love to have an episode on Christian neuroplasticity, being a parent with OCD. I think there are so many great topic suggestions, and some of these I would really feel more comfortable addressing with guests that know more about it, certain aspects than I do, especially since I don’t work with children with OCD.

That hasn’t been my experience and haven’t really done a whole lot of family therapy or couples counseling in that realm.

We had someone reach out recently who had experienced trauma. They had been in remission from OCD symptoms and then experienced a trauma, which seemed to open up and exacerbate. I don’t know if it was a new theme or a prior theme that had come back up from their past.

And so, know that intersection of trauma and OCD, it’s something that I feel very passionate about in dealing with some of those, whether it’s childhood traumas or adult traumas, things that seem to be really stuck.

I’ve just found in my experience, that can exacerbate OCD symptoms or cause this high level of hypervigilance in the body.

We also know that about 25% of people with an OCD diagnosis also qualify for A-P-T-S-D diagnosis, and many other people that don’t necessarily qualify for a full-blown PTSD diagnosis have been impacted by some type of difficult life experience that has ingrained and affected how they view themselves or how they view God or the world around them in terms of safety.

So if you feel like the trauma piece is really loud, I would say don’t be afraid to talk to a trauma therapist that knows about OCD.

Even if they would say, I really focus more on trauma than I focus on OCD, how much of that are they able to understand or are they able to work with an OCD specialist to help you kind of get pair and get the treatment that you need?

You know, that may look different for different people.

It may mean that you go to a trauma therapist for a little while and then you go to an OCD specialist for a little while. It may be that you go to the OCD specialist and then go to the trauma therapist.

Just kind of depending on how your symptoms are, what feels the loudest right now? What feels the most urgent that you need to attend to?

And usually professionals can help you tease out those pieces if they aren’t able to deal with both.

In an ideal world, you would have somebody have a therapist that had an understanding of trauma and an understanding of OCD to be able to craft a good, solid treatment plan for you moving forward.

We had a question about obsessional concerns regarding Mark of the bees type situations.

I’m not an expert on end-times theology by any means, but my understanding is that that’s not something we can just do accidentally, but that this is something that during the time of tribulation that people are going to voluntarily get in order to be able to buy and sell goods, and that’s gonna be a decision that has to be made.

I don’t know that believers are gonna be able to get that. I don’t know how all of that works, but I do know that it is not something that we have to be concerned about in the here and now according to how I am reading scripture.

Other people may look at that differently or examine times of tribulations. Some people believe we’re in it right now. Other people believe it hasn’t started yet. We haven’t gone through it, and that is of course up for debate and interpretation.

What we do know is if you’re so wrapped up in that, any type of these type of theological issues, if you’re super wrapped up or stuck on it and it’s getting in the way of you living your life, it would make sense. That’s OCD, distracting you from the things that are most important to you, that you really value, whether that’s getting up, going to work, connecting with your family and friends and ministry partners, and that’s what we want to be able to do to help you function in those realms so that you can keep moving forward in your walk with Christ.

Thank you so much for listening today, and I hope that this Q&A episode was helpful for you.

If it was, maybe we’ll do one every once in a while. We’ll kind of keep it around.

I am hopeful that maybe we’ll be able to do a relationship series at some point or another. And I would love to kind of have some different guests and talk about OCD in the context of various relationships.

As always, we love suggestions and questions, even if it takes us a little while to be able to get people on the podcast who can speak to some of those issues.

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

Christian Faith in OCD is a production of by the Well Counseling. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area.

238. Is God Asking Me to Give This Up?

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

In this episode, Carrie shares a personal story about how God led her to let go of something she had enjoyed for years, using that experience to help Christians with OCD recognize the difference between the Holy Spirit’s gentle conviction and fear.

You’ll Learn

  • How to recognize the difference between the Holy Spirit’s conviction and OCD’s urgency.
  • Why enjoying something doesn’t automatically make it an idol.
  • Biblical questions to ask when evaluating the entertainment you consume.
  • Why lasting spiritual transformation begins in the heart, not through fear or pressure.
  • How to respond to personal convictions without falling into condemnation or legalism.

How Do You Know When God Is Leading You to Let Something Go?

Recently, I made the decision to stop watching a certain type of TV show that I had enjoyed for years. It wasn’t something I felt pressured to do, and it wasn’t a decision I made overnight. As I reflected on that experience, I realized it shed light on a question I hear often from Christians with OCD.

How Can I Tell if God Is Convicting Me or If It’s Just OCD?

As a therapist, one of the questions I hear most often is, “How do I know if this is God speaking or if it’s just my OCD?” Those moments can feel confusing, especially when fear and conviction seem to overlap. In this episode, I share what my own experience taught me and why that distinction matters.

Does Enjoying Something Mean It Has Become an Idol?

I’ve worked with many Christians who become anxious because they enjoy something. They wonder if that enjoyment means they’ve put it ahead of God. This episode explores a different way of thinking through that question and the biblical principles that helped me evaluate my own situation.

How Should Christians Think About the Entertainment They Consume?

Not every decision about entertainment has a simple answer. Rather than looking for a list of rules, I found myself asking a different set of questions. Those questions helped me think more carefully about what was shaping my heart and my relationship with God.

What Does God’s Gentle Work in Our Lives Look Like?

One of the things that stood out to me most about this experience was what happened after I made my decision. It reminded me that God often works in our hearts in ways we don’t immediately recognize. I hope this conversation encourages you to be open to His leading without being driven by fear.

If you’ve ever wrestled with whether God is asking you to let go of something, or you’ve struggled to tell the difference between His conviction and fear, I hope you’ll listen to the full episode.

Transcript

Hi, I’m Carrie with Christian Faith and OCD. One thing that I see a lot of Christians struggle with, with OCD is this thought that, “Well, maybe if I really like something, that must mean that it’s an idol or it’s bad in some way, and God wants me to give it up.” I thought I would share a personal story for you of something that I gave up recently Welcome OCD warriors to the Christian Faith and OCD podcast, where we are all about reducing shame and stigma of struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories, and replacing uncertainty with faith as you develop practical tools for greater peace.

I’m Carrie Bach, Christ follower, wife, mom, and licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. I pray you are blessed by today’s episode I’m not going to go into massive detail about it, but I will tell you that it was a TV show, and it wasn’t really just about this TV show, it was more about the genre of TV shows that this one in particular represented.

So it wasn’t just that I gave up necessarily that TV show, but other TV shows that were similar to it. And the whole entire process was actually really peaceful, and it got me thinking about how different it is than the OCD spiral operates. So the OCD comes in with a panic and says, “Hey, you really, really like this thing.

Maybe God doesn’t want you to do it,” or, “You don’t wanna do that thing. Well, therefore, maybe it means God wants you to do it.” Uses, like, this weird reverse logic against you. But in my own personal story, I was watching this TV show for many years, consuming this type of content for many years. The reason I’m not gonna go into depth is because I don’t want you to spiral out if you happen to watch these type of shows.

But what came to mind one day, I had finished the episode and I realized, you know what? I’m not in a good head space mentally, emotionally, and just something about this just really doesn’t jive with my spirit internally. And I thought, “Is this actually really benefiting me, or is it doing the exact opposite?

Is this something that’s tearing me down spiritually?” And like I said, it wasn’t a panic or a rush of anything that I had to do right away. It was more just a moment of contemplation that I believe came from the Holy Spirit of what is actually the fruit of this experience that you’re dealing with. And I wanted to bring up this verse for you.

This is 1 Corinthians 6:12, and Paul says, “All things are lawful for me, but not all things are helpful. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be dominated by anything.” That’s the ESV. Paul goes on to talk about food, but then he also goes on to talk about sexual immorality, so the context of the verse is really about sexual immorality and some freedoms that people were taking in the Corinthian church that they shouldn’t have been.

However, this verse got me thinking, and then there’s also another verse that talks about being innocent of evil, and I didn’t look that up ahead of time. But this comes up in Romans 16:19. The second part of the verse says, “I want you to be wise as to what is good and innocent as to what is evil.” That was another thing that came to mind was, am I consuming something that has some sense of evil in it?

Now, I’m not saying, like, the entire TV show was evil. I think there obviously are positive and negative aspects to many different things in our lives that we may come across on the internet or on TV. However, for me personally, after I had this evaluation moment after watching the TV show one day, I thought, “You know what?

I think I’m gonna stop watching this.” There wasn’t any grief over it. I wasn’t upset about it. I wasn’t panicked about it. I wasn’t worried about it. I just said, “You know what? Let me just see how I feel about disengaging, about not consuming this type of material anymore.” In the context really of what God has been doing in my life, I really feel like I’ve been in a place of refinement where God has been rooting out things that don’t need to be there, where God has been cutting off things that aren’t producing healthy fruit, where He has been just really refining different areas of my life, whether that’s relationships or activities I’m engaging in, the way I’m taking care of my health, et cetera.

And kinda knew already in the context, like, that’s what God has been working with me on, and part of that refinement process is just being able to be here and show up for all of you in a really healthy way, and that’s obviously something that I am desiring to do and desiring to honor God with my whole life and love Him with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength Several months ago, I didn’t exactly write down the date of when this occurred.

I’m not even sure how I would go about finding that out, but I know that it’s been several months now, and I can honestly say that I don’t miss it. So this was another important piece I wanted to share with all of you, is that I really feel like the Holy Spirit led me towards cutting something out of my life, and it doesn’t feel like a loss.

I don’t miss it. I’m not yearning for that. I’m not saying, “Oh, man, I remember when I used to watch that and it was really great.” I just don’t want to have anything to do with it anymore. And that was the part that actually surprised me the most. I found it, like, really bizarre. I was like, “Wait a minute.

What do you mean?” Like, this is something that I look forward to, like, new episodes coming out. Like, “Oh, there’s a new episode. I should go listen to it. What day does it come out on streaming that I’m gonna go stream it and watch it and consume this content?” I used to be, like, really excited about it. Now, I genuinely don’t care.

I’m not looking for it. I’m not interested. I genuinely believe that this has been a change from the inside out, that as God has been working on my heart, that He has removed a desire for something that I used to have and used to really enjoy. So a lot of times with OCD, what I see is that people get really works focused and get very externally focused and forget that we’re in a relationship with God on a day-to-day basis.

It’s a daily walk. It’s over the period of our life, however long that is. It’s not a sprint. It’s not a, we have to do all the things right now. There’s not a sense of, I’m not gonna be completely transformed by God tomorrow. And take it one step at a time. Like, as you spend time in the Word, and the closer that you are abiding in Christ, the more that you are spending time with Him, the more that you are getting to know Him.

Like, this transformation happens at a heart level, and then it extends out to what you do and how you live. So if there is something that you’re panicking over about whether or not God wants you to give that up, I wanted to send out this short encouragement to say that God does not bring this intense level of fear upon you to change.

It’s the kindness of the Lord that leads us to repentance. So if you’re in an immense amount of anxiety, that’s not being produced by the Holy Spirit. It is probably being produced by OCD. And so just take some time. Now, what I will say is just be open. If you’re consuming some type of content online, or if you are– have been following along with something and you do feel convicted, just leave that openness and that willingness to lay it down and say, “Okay, let me try to lay this down.”

Give it over to the Lord, disengage, and not continue to consume that. I know that TV shows are really interesting, especially if you’re following along with certain series. Sometimes they can start out kind of benign, they can be okay, and then they can dip into some really dark territories, and my husband and I have watched certain TV shows like that where all of a sudden it was going down this really dark road theme where it didn’t start out that way at all, and started out more as a lighthearted type of show.

So just be conscious of what your spirit is telling you and really being able to examine what’s the fruit of this experience. But to make these types of decisions, OCD can get super hyper-focused on specific decisions like this. Should I watch this TV show? Should I not? Is it a sin if I watch this? Is it not?

And I think that for me, I wouldn’t say to someone, you know, “Hey, if you watch this particular TV show, that’s a sin,” unless you’re just watching something that is about the abuse of children or females or et cetera, things that we know that are very clearly against our faith. But pornography-type stuff.

But if you are just watching television, I think that God deals with each of us individually, and certainly this is probably something that I could have given up a long time ago, and I think probably had wrestled with that at different points in my life, at different seasons. And I’m glad and thankful that God didn’t give up on me and didn’t shame me and didn’t condemn me for the period of time that I did hold onto it.

But I’m also very thankful to be on the other side to say that as a result of letting this go, like, that I can definitely see there’s more peace in my life, and the fruit has been that I’m not constantly getting sad when I watch this or anxious or being aware of certain things that I just don’t need to have any knowledge or awareness.

I know that this is a little bit of a shorter episode today, but I hope that it helps you as you’re thinking through or if you’ve run across this specific obsession for yourself of, is God asking me to give this thing up? I hope that this provides you some sense of grounding and encouraging that the Holy Spirit is loving, patient, gentle, caring towards you and wants your absolute best in your connection with Jesus Christ.

And so we don’t have to be afraid of conviction, because it’s conviction from the Holy Spirit. It’s not condemnation. Keep striving. Keep abiding in Christ. I love all of you, and we’ll be back next week. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling.

This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area

237. Natural Support for Your Hormones with Celisha Gerber, LAc, ND

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

In this episode, Carrie sits down with naturopathic doctor and acupuncturist Celisha Gerber to explore how natural hormone support can help women understand the connection between hormonal changes, CCD, anxiety, and emotional resilience, while offering practical, faith-centered strategies for working with the body instead of against it. 

Episode Highlights:

  • Why hormonal changes can intensify OCD, anxiety, and intrusive thoughts
  • How perimenopause, stress, and nervous system regulation are deeply connected
  • Simple lifestyle habits that naturally support hormone balance and emotional health
  • The surprising role of nutrition, sleep, movement, and relationships in calming your brain
  • How to recognize what your body is communicating instead of assuming something is wrong

Episode Summary:

Why Do Hormonal Changes Make OCD and Anxiety Feel So Much Worse?

Many women notice their anxiety, OCD, or intrusive thoughts become more intense before their period, around ovulation, or during perimenopause. These shifts can feel confusing, especially when nothing else in life seems to have changed. In this conversation, Celisha explains how hormones influence the brain, nervous system, and stress response. Understanding these connections can help us respond with greater compassion instead of fear and recognize that our bodies may be communicating a need for support.

What Are Natural Ways to Support Hormone Balance?

There isn’t one simple solution for supporting hormone health. Instead, we discuss practical, sustainable habits that work together over time. Nutrition, quality sleep, regular movement, stress management, and nervous system regulation all play an important role in helping our bodies function well. Small, consistent changes often create a stronger foundation than chasing the latest health trend.

How Are Stress, Hormones, and Mental Health Connected?

Chronic stress can affect hormone balance, making anxiety and OCD symptoms feel even more overwhelming. As we care for our nervous system, we’re also supporting the systems God designed to help our bodies adapt, heal, and become more resilient through every season.

Which Daily Habits Can Support Better Hormone Health?

Healthy hormones aren’t built by one supplement or one perfect meal. We talk about simple habits like eating enough protein, supporting blood sugar, prioritizing sleep, moving your body, and cultivating healthy relationships. These everyday choices can strengthen both physical and emotional health without adding unnecessary pressure or perfectionism.

How Can Faith Shape the Way We Care for Our Bodies?

Caring for our bodies is part of faithfully stewarding the gift God has given us. We don’t have to fear every symptom or strive for perfect health. Instead, we can approach our bodies with curiosity, grace, and wisdom while trusting that God walks with us through every step of the healing journey.

I hope this conversation encourages you to care for your body with compassion and gives you practical tools to support both your hormones and your mental health.

Connect with Celisha: www.nd-care.com

Transcript

Carrie: Welcome everyone. Glad that you are tuning in to the podcast with us today. I’m very excited about today’s episode. We’re talking about hormones, specifically with women. Now, if you’re a guy who’s listening, maybe you wanna understand your wife better or another female in your life, we’re happy that you’re here as well.

But we’re talking about balancing hormones naturally to help with OCD and anxiety.

Welcome, OCD warriors, to the Christian Faith and OCD podcast,

where we are all about reducing shame and stigma of struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories, and replacing uncertainty with faith as you develop practical tools for greater peace.

I’m Carrie Bock, Christ follower, wife, mom, and licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. I pray you are blessed by today’s episode.

This is an episode that I’ve wanted to do for a couple different reasons. One is that so many women have told me, “Hey, when I’m around the time of my period or right before, I’ve just noticed my obsessions are way worse and I’m really struggling a lot more with OCD.”

It could be maybe during ovulation when there’s some shifts and changes, too. I’m also in the very early stages of perimenopause, trying to navigate and figure that whole thing out, and I’m noticing even within myself, I consider myself a reasonably regulated person, but I definitely can feel some of these hormonal shifts and how they’re affecting me mentally, emotionally, and physically.

I just think it’s an important thing for us to talk about. A lot of more people are becoming more aware and more astute and looking for resources online to navigate hormones in our life. So today, I am inviting Salicia Gerber here to talk with us. And tell us a little bit about yourself and the type of work that you do and the people you work with.

Celisha: Well, I am a friend, mother, daughter, sister, wife. I also going through different things, and I see around me loved ones. As a naturopathic doctor and acupuncturist, I help people understand what their bodies are trying to tell them through symptoms. While I work with a variety of health concerns, many of my patients are overwhelmed women struggling with anxiety, hormone imbalances, exhaustion, chronic stress.

The way I approach it is with functional wellness, nervous system regulation, and lifestyle medicine mainly. I believe the body was designed to heal, and when we give it the right environment, support, we remove those obstacles to heal, it does. One of the things I’m most passionate about is helping women realize that they’re not broken.

Their body’s not working against them. It is trying to compensate. So symptoms are often the communication from our body that something needs support, so it’s understanding that and helping them work with them, see what their body needs.

Carrie: Yeah. And I find for myself, too, like I always think of like pain as communication So if something’s hurting, it’s like, okay, what is my body telling me that this area of my body needs that is in pain?

I’ve been through just kind of like a variety of different things that way, so I like that. It’s like you can look at it as communicate with yourself however you want to about your body and your symptoms and say like, “Oh, no, I’m falling apart,” or, “Everything’s broken,” but instead saying, “What is my body actually trying to communicate that I need right now?”

What do you find is the correlation between hormone imbalances and anxiety and OCD just that you’ve seen in your patients that you work with?

Celisha: One of the biggest misconception is that hormones only affect reproduction, and it doesn’t. Hormones are deeply connected to the nervous system and the brain.

The nervous system is constantly wanting to find out, am I safe? So if it perceives safety, we’re able to think clearly, we’re able to rest well, sleep, digest, connect with others, things work well. But when the brain perceives threat, it activates the stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. Many of the reproductive years, estrogen and progesterone, uh, will buffer that nervous system function against stress, so you don’t feel it as much perhaps.

But I often compare that to shock absorbers in a car. The bumps are still there. You’re still going through the stress, but the ride is a bit smoother with those hormones. And then as women enter the perimenopause, those change in hormones, even on a cyclic basis like you were saying at ovulation and just before the period, there’s significant changes naturally.

But when perimenopause starts, progesterone declines first, and estrogen, while it’s also declining, becomes erratic, so it’s going up and down, up and down in a downward motion. Women suddenly notice more anxiety, more intrusive thoughts, OCD tendencies, sleep disturbances, emotionally overwhelm. And that’s typically because progesterone is an important part of the brain’s calming pathway, specifically GABA signaling if you’ve heard of GABA.

As progesterone declines or becomes erratic, women lose that natural buffering system that help them stay calm and resilient. And at the same time, this fluctuating estrogen that happens affects blood sugar regulation, the sleep quality, serotonin production, and stress resilience. So if you’ve had a history of trauma, anxiety, or OCD, these hormonal shifts, they amplify those symptoms that were already present beneath the surface.

Carrie: And I just wanna say in relationship to that with people, another thing that I hear is, “Well, yeah, I’ve kinda sorta had this OCD for a while, but it’s been manageable. Like, it’s been okay.” And then what will happen is a couple of different things. Either one, there’ll be some type of trauma or major life shift that happens to them.

They lose a loved one, and that kinda rocks their whole world, or they go through a traumatic experience. They become a caregiver. Like, then all of a sudden, there’s extra abusive stress which always makes our mental health symptoms worse. They’re wondering, like, “What in the world happened?” I just feel almost like you’ve gotten knocked off your horse.

Like, you were riding through life, everything was okay. Yeah, okay, I had a little OCD, and then bam. So I could definitely see how that could happen to women in perimenopause because there are also just so many different life changes that happen during that time, depending on ages and stages of children and parents.

I have a weird situation in my life just in the sense that I have a young child in my 40s, whereas a lot of people have teenagers in their 40s that they’re trying to launch out into the world. So I have that stress. Parents, a lot of people’s parents are getting older. I’m weird ’cause my parents have already passed away, but that whole sandwich generation.

Is that something that you see a lot showing up in your patients as well? Just the time period of perimenopause can be unusually stressful as well.

Celisha: Most definitely. Life is not consistent typically. So this time you’re usually straddling caring for parents and caring for children. Maybe work is not stable, so you’re thinking about financial stressors.

Yeah, life always has its challenges, and the change in hormones does impact it. One of the things that is important to understand too is that hormones, they don’t work in isolation. They interact with what we do on a lifestyle basis, how we sleep, our nutrition, how we’re moving, just overall nervous system health.

While we can’t stop aging, there are things that we can do to improve the resilience. So as that buffering declines, there are other systems that actually become even more important than estrogen and progesterone, and we can talk about that if you’re interested.

Carrie: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s really helpful for people to know.

Kind of getting into some lifestyle things that you’re talking about, like getting sunlight. Is that what you’re meaning? Like, those types of things are more important. Movement.

Celisha: Yes. There is a system that works to producing oxytocin, which is a hormone and neurotransmitter. It’s often called the love hormone, and oxytocin’s associated with that trust, connection, gratitude, feelings of safety.

When we are imbalanced and having that question, “Am I safe?” Progesterone, it’s gonna go down over time. It’s not gonna go up. It goes down over time. What we can do is we can take advantage of this hormone, oxytocin, and cultivate that. That actually calms and counteracts the cortisol. Many of things that you can do that increase oxytocin, helping that nervous system to feel safe, is healthy relationships, community, gratitude, service, prayer.

Carrie: That’s really good. I think we underestimate the power, like, of our social relationships and, and interconnectedness. And so it’s like if you feel yourself withdrawing from relationships or you’re not as close to your spouse, or you’re not as close to friendships, like, it might be a good, like you said, warning signal to try to start reconnecting there.

Or if you’ve gotten out of church, and you really need that community and need that support, like, it’s a good time to think about leaning in and what does that look like. Maybe I do need to get more involved in service or in a small group or something like that. And I think some of these, like, proactive approaches that you’re talking about help us feel less victimized by our hormones, because I think a lot of women, and I’ve probably felt that way at different point too, like, “Oh my, I just have this surge of anxiety happening right now, and it feels completely outside of my control.”

What are some other things that people can do to not feel like, “Hey, I’m just totally out of control over maybe mood swings that are happening with them”?

Celisha: Yeah. I teach what’s called the eight laws of health. They correlate with the days of creation in Genesis. If we look at the days of creation, we can gather insight into how we were designed to function, and if we cooperate with that design, we can better live out our purpose to love and be loved.

1 John 4:16 says, “God is love, and he that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God, and God in him.” Like the law of gravity, there are just basic needs the system has to function properly. And for the body to adapt gracefully to hormonal transitions, these eight laws are fantastic So they’re basically sunlight, rest, which was day one, air and water, nutrition, exercise, temperance, and trust in God, connection, relationships, all those.

Just incorporating those is going to help regulate the stress hormones, inflammation, metabolism, nervous system function. The goal isn’t to fight your hormones, it’s to build a body and nervous system that can adapt to change. That’s the biggest. Simple things, but going back to how were we created.

Carrie: Yeah, and as far as the stress happening, I know a lot of women struggle with maybe weight gain or struggle with not being able to lose weight at different points.

Can you tell us a little bit about that connection to hormones?

Celisha: That weight gain usually is just because of that change in hormones that’s happening, so as estrogen drops, we actually get more blood sugar instability, and when blood sugar drops, we create a response of stress. Cortisol increases, adrenaline increases, and what does that do?

It tells us that we are hungry and we want carbs, and the insulin sensitivity gets worse. If we can focus on eating protein, fiber, healthy fat at every meal, but especially at that first meal of the day, whenever that is, and then once we start eating, making sure we’re eating at predictable times, ’cause the nervous system is observing that, and it can start producing those stomach contents to protect the stomach, to start digestion.

The liver, the pancreas, all those w- can start their process, and if it can predict it, our nervous system is gonna be much more stable. So I encourage women to prioritize definitely a variety of colorful vegetables which are rich in vitamins and minerals, especially magnesium, vitamin B6, having protein at every meal, but especially plant-based proteins.

Why? Because they’re alkaline. They promote an alkaline pH. And then healthy fats, because we need those fats to make our hormones. That’s the base. All of our hormones come from cholesterol.

Carrie: So don’t be afraid of fat. It just has to be healthy fat.

Celisha: Exactly, not inflammatory fats, ’cause inflammation does also become worse with the decreasing or erratic estrogens.

It will actually stimulate things to kick off like autoimmune disease or inflammatory processes, so that’ll be happening as well. But let’s talk about some, a couple things we can do to specifically support estrogen and progesterone. Our cycle starts day one as the start of a period, right? Your start of a bleeding.

And that phase is where you really wanna support estrogen balance. It’s the heavy estrogen time of our cycle. So from that day one to ovulation. And a couple things you can add diet-wise is flaxseed and pumpkin seeds. There’s also things in nature that God gave us that are considered phytoestrogens. So what is that?

Acts like an estrogen in a weaker way, attaching to those receptors in our body. And a few of those are red clover, hops, non-genetically modified soy, and alfalfa, stimulating, promoting the healthy estrogens, and then detoxing of those xenoestrogens. Xenoestrogens are toxins that also bind to those estrogen receptors, and then they make you feel like you are in excess of that estrogen stimulation, and therefore, even further imbalance into the progesterone balance.

What you can do to detox would be sour, bitter foods in nature. So that’s like lemon, lime, grapefruit, dandelion, artichokes, bitter endives, lots of leafy greens. And then going to the second half of the cycle, you wanna promote more of the progesterone. So that’s from ovulation to when you’re gonna start your period again.

You can add things like sunflower seeds and sesame seeds, evening primrose oil, borage oil. Some of the herbs that are phyto progesterones that attach to those receptors on the progesterone receptors are vitex and wild yam Usually the body likes more sweeter type, starchier vegetables during that time, so like sweet potatoes, squash, berries, those are good things.

You don’t wanna overly restrict your calories during that half of the cycle ’cause you will blunt progesterone, and you’re already dealing with that decreasing progesterone during perimenopause.

Carrie: Yeah. So instead of just definitely don’t wanna do any, like, starvation-type stuff on your body, but balancing out the protein and the healthy fat is gonna help you be fuller.

And of course, the vegetables, things of that nature, are already lower in calories is a good way to balance things out, you feel like?

Celisha: Yes, most definitely. And then avoiding things that are inflammatory like alcohol and caffeine, processed foods. That’s gonna increase inflammation and pull more of our resources, our anti-inflammatory resources, from what our body would prefer to make progesterone and the calming-type hormones.

Carrie: Yeah. I think people can get in this really bad cycle with caffeine and sleep, or it’s like they’re using a lot of caffeine during the day, and then they can’t sleep at night, and it’s like, “Well, I didn’t sleep, and so I… Now I need caffeine,” and trying to get that rhythm back can be really challenging for people.

There’s a lot of chatter, of course, about supplements on the Internet and social media. Why do you feel like diet and lifestyle is more of a primary solution than supplements?

Celisha: Yeah. Supplements are great when they’re needed, but they should never be expected to do the work of lifestyle The body runs on inputs.

It responds to what we give it or we expose to it. So food becomes hormones, it becomes neurotransmitters. Sleep regulates cortisol, sunlight regulates circadian rhythms. If someone is sleeping five hours a night, skipping meals, relying on caffeine, living under chronic stress, there’s not a supplement powerful enough to consistently overcome those factors.

Carrie: Yeah. And this is something that I see a lot, where once you kind of peel back some of these layers and you find out maybe, like, how much caffeine someone is intaking, or you find out that they’re not eating at regular intervals, like you said, they’re not eating all day and then they’re eating at 2:00, or they’re eating at 5:00 is, like, when they’re having their main meal of the day, I’m like, “Of course you don’t feel good.

Of course your mental health is really struggling,” because kind of I would say on the mental health piece too, if your physical health isn’t at least somewhat regulated, we’re not gonna be able to make massive changes to your mental health through therapy. And I think that’s why it’s so important for people to have just some, like, baseline physical health stuff going on.

I know we have a lot of people out there that I meet in the Christian community specifically that don’t want to be on medication for OCD, and I always say, like, “Okay, well, if you’re not gonna be on OCD medication, like this is my opinion, you’ve got to exercise. That is not optional because that is so healthy and so important for your brain.

You can’t just not do anything. Like that’s not gonna be good.”

Celisha: It’s so hard to separate ’cause we think, “Okay” exercise is only for our muscles, but in reality, it works just like all the other hormone systems together. They all interact with one another, so you need the whole picture. Just like each of our body parts are necessary, each of our pieces in our body are important for balance and for us to have that spiritual, mental, physical health.

Carrie: Yeah. In the modern age, we’re not getting the level of movement that humans used to get in days past. We were more agrarian, and farming, and out in the fields, and milking cows, and I mean, there’s certain movements that are having to happen to make all of those things work. I think about my grandparents and the kind of movement that they got, very different than today’s desk job situations.

Being able to even recognize that God created our bodies to move, I really do believe that, and figuring out how we can add little movement breaks in throughout the day is helpful, on your lunch break, using the stairs, those types of things. So I’m sure there are women listening maybe who say, “I feel like my hormones are involved in what I’m experiencing mentally and emotionally,” and I think sometimes whenever people feel like there’s some type of mental health diagnosis on their record and that it’s always excused as mental health, and maybe some of the physical health hasn’t been dug into, but if there’s women listening who feel like, hey, their doctors dismiss them, or they’ve said, “Yeah, all your labs are normal, everything’s fine, you’re in normal range,” but they still feel off, they’re like, “Something’s not right here,” what can they do?

Celisha: So this is very common. I hear, “All my labs are normal,” but a normal lab result does not necessarily mean it’s optimal.

Carrie: That’s good.

Celisha: Labs are good for ruling out disease, but it doesn’t explain why people feel exhausted, anxious, overwhelmed. I look at labs from a functional point of view, and that can give me a clue as to what systems are stressed, but I also encourage women to listen to their symptoms.

They are not crazy. What they are feeling is important. Many women, especially during this change in hormones, they’re functioning at a constant state of low-grade stress activation. So even though their labs are normal, they’re dealing with poor sleep, and so that’s upsetting their nervous system, that elevated stress, that blood sugar instability, perhaps some unresolved trauma and inflammation just by way of that declining hormones.

All of those affect the nervous system, and what we learn is that the nervous system has two settings, so an alerting pathway, which keeps us awake, motivated, able to start and finish tasks, and then calming pathways, which helps us feel safe. So when we are consistently cultivating sleep, sunlight, healthy relationships, movement, gratitude, prayer, rest, we’re gonna strengthen the body’s ability to return to that state of safety.

And that’s what’s most important. Healing often begins when we stop asking, “What’s wrong with me?” And we actually start asking, “What is the body trying to tell me?” We wanna look at how we can best cooperate with the vessel that the Lord gave us to steward. 1 Thessalonians 4:4 says that, “Every one of you should know how to possess his vessel in sanctification and honor.”

And then in 9, 4:9, “For ye yourselves are taught of God to love one another.” And we know that we were created to love and be loved.

Carrie: That’s really good. I like that. I think that this is a valuable conversation for so many reasons. I hope that people kind of picked up on, like, a little nugget here and there.

What I’ll say from the mental health side too is I think that people underestimate what chronic stress does to your body, and they may hear you use a word like trauma, and they may be like, “Yeah, I haven’t really been through anything traumatic.” But when you look at what they’re dealing with on a day-to-day basis, like we talked about before, caring for a child with special needs, caring for a loved one with a disability, caring for multiple children over the course of your lifespan and trying to maybe dealing with some stressful situations that your teenagers have encountered where you didn’t know if they were being safe or not in various situations.

That can add up and cause a, an effect on your body that can put you in a state of hypervigilance, of the fight, flight, or freeze. Or maybe you had something that you thought was buried that happened a long time ago, and it didn’t get awoken until maybe your kid got to a certain age where you experienced the trauma.

That can also happen. So if you had a traumatic experience at 16, for example, you were trucking along, everything was okay, you felt like it was buried and done with. Your daughter turns 16, all of a sudden you’re re-triggered all over again. You’re afraid bad things are gonna happen to her, whatever that situation is.

Um, just for people to kind of be aware, ’cause I think sometimes people don’t even recognize or they’re not in awareness of how much stress they’re under or that their body has experienced. Are those some things that you’ve encountered, people that just have chronic stress that’s not even on their radar that they have chronic stress?

Celisha: Stress is quite common, and that also impacts the hormones. So you’ll see that with higher stress, you’re gonna have a weaker ovulation. Compound that on top of perimenopause, and then it will affect your lifestyle, it’ll affect your sleep, it will affect how your adrenals are producing the cortisol and those, that adrenaline.

Carrie: Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming on here and sharing your wisdom today. I know that people are gonna learn new things and just appreciate what you’ve been able to share.

A couple follow-up thoughts on this episode. I feel like the older I get, the slightly more crunchier I get. So I find these types of topics really fascinating to me.

I have been reading The Menopause Reset by Dr. Mindy Pelz. There’s so many things in that book, and so I’m really just trying to focus on a couple small key changes that I’m making in my life to handle my 40s in a slightly healthier way. They definitely have been hitting me kind of hard the last six months.

So if you’re there in this stage of life, I definitely feel you. We’re gonna make it. For our next couple episodes, we’re switching topics over into some spiritual discernment. Next week we’re gonna be talking about, is God asking me to give this up? Where I’m gonna be sharing with you something that I gave up recently, what I learned from that experience, and then I’m applying that over to what OCD usually asks of people in regards to giving things up.

And then we have a special guest coming to talk about discerning God’s call in a new season and just her personal testimony. I think you guys are gonna get a lot out of these episodes.

Celisha: Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you. Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By the

Carrie: Well Counseling.

Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of myself or By the Well Counseling. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area.

236. When Autism and OCD Overlap with Nikole Krueger, LMSW

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

In this episode, Carrie welcomes back licensed clinical social worker Nikole Kruger to explore the overlap between autism and OCD, why many adults are identified later in life, and how understanding neurodivergence can reduce shame and improve treatment.

Episode Highlights:

  • How autism and OCD can overlap and why the two are sometimes difficult to distinguish
  • Why many adults don’t realize they’re autistic until later in life, even if they’ve always felt different
  • How masking can lead to exhaustion, burnout, and challenges with identity and relationships
  • Why understanding the function behind a behavior is essential when treating OCD and autism together
  • Practical ways therapists, churches, families, and individuals can create more supportive environments for autistic people

Episode Summary:

Could Autism Be the Missing Piece Behind Your OCD Symptoms?

As awareness of neurodivergence continues to grow, more people are asking whether autism could be part of their story alongside OCD. If you’ve ever wondered why certain struggles never seemed to fit neatly into one diagnosis, or why social situations, sensory experiences, and relationships have always felt more difficult than they seem for others, this conversation offers a thoughtful place to begin exploring those questions.

I’ve seen more conversations about the overlap between OCD and autism, especially when people feel like traditional explanations haven’t fully answered their questions. As Nikole explains, autism affects much more than social interaction. It influences how someone experiences sensations, relationships, and everyday life, which can sometimes make OCD look very different than people expect.

Why Are So Many Adults Only Realizing They’re Autistic Later in Life?

Not everyone fits the picture of autism that many of us grew up hearing about. Nikole shares why years of masking, strong intelligence, and learning to compensate can allow someone to go unnoticed well into adulthood. For many people, the questions don’t begin until they recognize similar traits in their own child or finally have language for experiences they’ve carried their entire lives.

How Can You Tell the Difference Between Autism Traits and OCD Compulsions?

Two people can have the same outward behavior for completely different reasons. I’ve learned that understanding the purpose behind a behavior matters just as much as the behavior itself. That distinction can completely change how someone approaches treatment and recovery.

Why Do Sensory Sensitivities Matter in OCD Recovery?

Sensory sensitivities are often overlooked, yet they can influence everything from daily routines to OCD symptoms. I’ve found it fascinating how something as simple as a smell, texture, or bright light can increase distress and even become intertwined with compulsive behaviors. Looking at the whole picture often leads to a different understanding of what’s really happening.

How Can Churches Better Support Christians With Autism?

Church should be a place where people experience belonging, but sensory overload and unspoken social expectations can make that difficult for someone with autism. I hope this conversation encourages us to look beyond what we can see and consider how greater kindness, direct communication, and simple accommodations can help people feel welcomed, understood, and connected to the body of Christ.

If you’ve ever wondered whether autism and OCD might overlap, or you’re trying to better understand yourself, a loved one, or someone you serve, I hope you’ll listen to the full episode. 

Transcript

Carrie: Welcome back, everyone. We are here with Nicole Krueger again. You may remember her from our episode that we did on the overlap of ADHD and OCD, and today she’s back to talk with us about the intersection of autism and OCD, so I’m very excited about this conversation as well

Nikole: Welcome, OCD warriors, to the Christian Faith

Carrie: and OCD podcast, where we are all about reducing shame and stigma of struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories, and replacing uncertainty with faith as you develop practical tools for greater peace.

I’m Carrie Bach, Christ follower, wife, mom, and licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. I pray you are blessed by today’s episode And Nicole is a LMSW who practices online and in Grand Rapids, Michigan. So if you’re in Michigan, you can find her at Nicole Kruger Counseling. We’ll put her website in the show notes.

Nicole, welcome back. Glad to have you here.

Nikole: Yeah, thanks for having me again.

Carrie: How would you define autism for someone?

Nikole: Autism is really neurological difference or a difference in the person’s nervous system. Estimates are that it is, that over 2% of the world’s population is autistic, so that’s a lot bigger number than we previously really thought of in terms of having autism.

It’s very much a genetic disorder, a genetic difference, I will say. It’s not a psychological disorder, so similar to ADHD, it’s something that you’re born with that persists throughout life, and that really impacts how you experience and process and respond to the world and to the different inputs to your nervous system.

It can impact how people experience different external and internal sensations, so like think hunger, thirst, pain, noise, texture, light. It can impact movement patterns. A lot of people are familiar with the concept of stimming, um, or self-stimulation. It can impact communication styles. Autistic people generally-

Carrie: Yeah, things like flapping hands or, like, what kind of stimming behaviors might you see with someone?

Like, what might they look like?

Nikole: Yeah. Stimming can take the form of flapping. A lot of, like, lower support need autistic people won’t necessarily do that publicly, maybe in private, but a lot of people are aware that’s not really a socially preferred type of behavior, and so they’ll mask that. They might do more acceptable types of behaviors that might even just be, like, fiddling back and forth with an object.

It might be kind of like mild rocking back and forth. A lot of autistic people that I know love, like, swinging.

Carrie: Okay.

Nikole: Even backyard swings. Again, that’s not something that you’re necessarily gonna see when you’re out in public, but in private, finding those ways to self-soothe. It can even be sometimes, like, skin picking or scratching or rubbing fingers together.

Carrie: Okay.

Nikole: So different things like that.

Carrie: Yeah. How is this, the different views of autism in terms of it as a medical disorder versus this idea of neurodivergence?

Nikole: Historically, they’ve kind of looked at autism more from a medical model of a disability or a defect within a person, and so looking at it in terms of there’s a normal way of being, and then anything that’s significantly outside of that is seen as a flaw that requires correction, right?

Now, we’ve moved more towards a neurodiversity paradigm, which is much more humanizing for people who are autistic, and looking at seeing autism more as a natural form of human variation. Not a genetic mistake, but just that brains come in a lot of different varieties, and that the disability Really comes from the mismatch between the person and their environment, and that when that fit is poor, that creates these difficulties in compensation that cause kind of the outward impacts of autism that people struggle with, and that can cause a lot of misunderstanding or overwhelm in social situations or causing anxiety and such.

Carrie: I think this is an important distinction when we talk about intelligence, right? Because there are people who deal with autism who are quite intelligent, whereas if you look at it as a disability, like, that doesn’t seem to line up with what we know about other intellectual disabilities, for example.

Nikole: Yeah.

And with autism, we do see higher than in the neurotypical population percentage of people who have neurodiversity as also having, like, learning disabilities or intellectual impairment, but that’s not the whole spectrum. And so many years ago used to be where we had the autism diagnosis, and then there was Asperger’s, which was considered kind of that, like, lower support needs end of the autism spectrum, and now it’s all considered autism spectrum disorder, which there’s even debate over that.

A lot of autistic people don’t like that phrasing either.

Carrie: Right.

Nikole: But looking at it as a spectrum, and one end of the spectrum we have more of the intellectual impairment and disability overlap, but those are two separate things.

Carrie: Sure.

Nikole: Autism does not encapsulate the intellectual impairment aspect within its diagnosis.

That’s a separate diagnosis that does often overlap on that end of the spectrum. But then we also have the other end of the spectrum. Of course, it’s, it’s continuous, but on the other kind of end of it, we can see very high intelligence in fact, and even sometimes people who are considered, like, savant level, highly intelligent, and have incredible abilities in certain areas.

But that is a big way that I think many people have been missed in the autism diagnostic process because we were for so long only looking at people that had outwardly visible Characteristics of like arm flapping and intellectual disability and things like that, where it was evident from a very young age or under that there were significant differences in their social functioning, versus all the kids that have grown up and have found ways to get by and to lead relatively successful lives or struggle, but have made it to adulthood without being detected through masking and through just lack of information and awareness out there of what autism actually is.

And that can lead to also a lot of just shame and discouragement from not understanding your brain and how it functions, and taking a perspective that this is something wrong with you rather than just that you have a different type of nervous system that needs to be accommodated differently.

Carrie: I think one of the challenges is determining maybe what’s the difference between someone who, or a child or an adult who’s dealing with some type of social anxiety, like they’re really struggling to make social connections because they’re anxious, versus they’re dealing with being on the autism spectrum.

Nikole: Yeah. That’s a great question, and I think there is a big overlap between those two. So social anxiety can certainly exist on its own, but a lot of people who are autistic are also socially anxious Really what we have to look at when differentiating those two things is, are there the diagnostic criteria of autism also at play, or is this just solely an anxiety disorder?

In that sense, we really have to look at how is this person intuitively understanding what the social expectations are. Are they able to understand non-verbal communication? Are they able to have relationships perhaps with people that they do feel comfortable with, that they’re able to maintain over time, or are they struggling to make any relationship at all last for any duration of time?

So we really have to dig into then what is the criteria for each and are they met or not.

Carrie: Yeah, I think that’s a good distinction about relationship longevity. You talked a little bit about masking and about people struggling throughout the lifespan, but kind of getting by. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Nikole: Yeah, for sure. Masking is really when someone adapts their behavior to match the social expectations around them. Obviously, we all do this to some extent. It’s a normal part of socialization throughout your growing up years, and even in adulthood in different social contexts, like I’m not gonna go and talk to my boss the same way I’m gonna talk to my spouse or my kids or my friend.

So we all adapt how we present ourselves in different situations, but typically, when someone does not have autism, this is experienced more as kind of just an intuitive thing that they know how to do naturally, not something that they have to think about and prepare for and practice and worry about.

Versus when you’re autistic, people are masking for much longer periods of time, much more frequently, and it’s experienced as being very effortful and exhausting. Typically, after masking for a long period of time, these people can feel very tired, fatigued, need a lot of time to recover afterward because their nervous system is literally just exhausted.

And when you do that over a lifetime, it makes it harder to understand who you are and you develop your own self-identity. It makes it harder to develop and maintain relationships because if you’re just trying to fit in and look at what everyone else is doing to determine what’s expected of you and then match that, then it’s hard to develop those deeper lasting relationships because who are you?

Like, where’s the you in that? And so it can ultimately lead to a state of burnout for autistic people, which there’s three elements of burnout. So that includes loss of skills that they previously were able to do, excessive fatigue- And then heightened sensory sensitivities. So sensory sensitivities is one of the criteria in autism, but in burnout, those are extremely even more heightened.

Carrie: Okay. And is this typically like when you might see an adult come into therapy, “I’m not exactly sure what’s going on, but I’m having struggles in my relationships and I’m exhausted all the time trying to fit in or trying to make friends. I’m very anxious,” these types of situations?

Nikole: Absolutely. Those would all be red flags for that to look into that more.

The thing about compensation strategies, you can compensate for a challenge, but that’s not the same thing as not having that challenge in the first place. If you had a broken leg, you could compensate by going in a wheelchair or lugging yourself up the stairs to get up, but that’s not the same thing as being able to walk up the stairs with two good legs.

So if you kind of make that equivalency with autism, you can find ways to study and copy how other people behave, or you can follow scripts in conversation, or you can remind yourself to make eye contact or train yourself to, like, look at someone’s forehead or between their eyes if it’s too uncomfortable for you to make eye contact.

You can hide your stimming behaviors. You can ignore your sensory needs. But all of that takes mental and emotional effort and intentionality, and that’s gonna drain you the more frequently you’re doing that and the more contexts you’re doing that. It’s just gonna leave you feeling really dry and exhausted, and we actually do see in the research that people who are autistic seek therapy at much higher rates than non-autistic people, and that therapists very often feel ill-equipped to serve them because they don’t feel like they have enough training in autism and knowing how to help these type of people.

But obviously, it’s very important that we get better trained because they’re seeking care at higher rates, and they need to better understand how their brain works so that they can create an environment that is conducive to their flourishing instead of just constantly trying to mask and fit in to what the rest of the world expects.

Carrie: Right. Sometimes in certain situations, it may not come upon a person’s awareness until they have a child that is really struggling with school or really struggling in social environments to make friends, and they get assessed. And then the parent says, “Wait a minute. All the questions you’re asking, I dealt with those things as a child,” or, “I still deal with some of those issues.”

And that’s an interesting parallel that can happen for people.

Nikole: Absolutely. Yeah, I see that quite frequently. And then there’s a lot of just discouragement of, “Why didn’t anyone see this for me? Why did it take this long for someone to notice this or to say something?”

Carrie: Like the grief and loss piece of it all.

Like you were well-behaved, so you flew under the radar, and nobody noticed that there were other things going on.

Nikole: Right. Exactly. And how much effort it took to reach the goals that you’ve been able to reach. Why didn’t anyone notice how hard I was working and how it was different?

Carrie: Let’s talk about this overlap of OCD and autism because this is certainly something that I’ve seen more of in addition to like the ADHD.

Sometimes they all are occurring together. That’s a lot to try to untangle, but how do you approach therapy in a way that really like respects their neurodivergence while still addressing the OCD? What kind of adaptations might they need in therapy?

Nikole: I think this really starts out from the very beginning.

If you’re a therapist, I really encourage you to think through like what do you have on your website? What directions do you give people to your office? What do you tell them to expect during that first appointment? Autistic people generally feel more anxious in new environments because they rely heavily on past experience to guide their understanding of what to expect.

So if you don’t have that information, it can be very anxiety-invoking to meet someone new or go to an unfamiliar place alone. And so I really encourage clinicians to be clear and direct when they’re providing directions to their office. Even like having pictures of your office on your website, having like an outline of what you’re gonna cover in the first session.

Is this like a standardized assessment? Is it just an open-ended get to know you? They’ll probably be uncomfortable with that. Or like what should you expect? And then during therapy itself, just being kind and flexible and noticing what seems to make the person uncomfortable, inquiring about their needs, just being sensitive to the fact that like if it’s like the overhead fluorescent lighting, like that might be really sensory overwhelming.

If there’s– everyone’s sensory systems has different needs. So we see a lot of overlap in sensory sensitivities between ADHD, autism, also like even kids with learning disabilities. Finding out what works for them, and does your office meet that? I discourage strong scents of cologne or perfume. Anything that’s strong or overwhelming may not go over well.

It might be fine, but just being sensitive to those things. And then particularly if someone is not making eye contact or struggling to put into practice the things you’re asking them to do, instead of framing that as being oppositional or rigid, really looking at like what’s the function of that? Like digging a little deeper and tell me a little bit more.

How does it feel for you to make eye contact? Feels really overwhelming and effortful, and it’s distracting them from being able to process what you’re doing. I tell clients all the time, “You don’t have to make eye contact. It doesn’t bother me.” So just not taking things like that personally, but understanding that it might come from a different nervous system profile and needs, and that that’s not anything personal.

And then I think for developing a treatment plan, it’s important to look at what’s the function of the behavior, and then is that something that is adaptive or maladaptive in the person’s life? An example might be stimming. You might have a client who’s stimming because it’s sensory soothing for them.

And then you might have… That would be more of an autistic presentation. That’s– you could have a different client that is doing a repetitive behavior, like flicking a light switch a certain number of times because they’re worried that if they don’t, then their mom’s gonna die in a car accident That would be more of an OCD presentation.

So in the first case, we wouldn’t wanna target that as an area for intervention because it’s regulating their nervous system. In the second case, we would want to challenge and target that as a point of intervention because it’s a compulsive behavior that’s reinforcing the OCD cycle. So you really have to look at what is the function of that behavior, where is that coming from?

And it’s tricky when there’s both, ’cause sometimes it’s hard to figure that out. But really asking that question of the client, “Is this something that is soothing to you? Is this something that is because of anxiety?” And making a treatment plan from there.

Carrie: I think what you’re saying, curiosity is really key, is a great thing in our field.

Obviously, we’re taught to make evaluations, and so you have to be careful not to make your evaluations too quickly, and to just be curious about like, “Oh, I wonder what this is about,” and, “Hey, I’ve noticed this pattern with you. I’ve noticed like it’s really hard to make eye contact. What do you think is going on with that?”

And just being more curious about, like you said, why they’re engaging in certain behaviors. What’s the reasoning behind it or the function behind it?

Nikole: Absolutely. And I always find that personally, I like just being direct as well, but you can be direct and kind. But most of my autistic clients really appreciate and would prefer that people are very direct with them.

And if they have a question, just ask that.

Carrie: It’s good to know.

Nikole: If you want someone to follow through on this, explain, “This is exactly what I want you to do and why I think it will be helpful.” Just be direct versus beating around the bush or trying to, like, explain it in a sideways direction. Like, that doesn’t usually work very well because there’s a lot of that non-verbal communication and social emotional, like, reciprocity that gets missed sometimes in that kind of communication.

Versus if you’re direct and straightforward, it’s a lot easier to stay on the same page.

Carrie: Okay. Good. What encouragement would you give to someone who kind of like in a spiritual way they’re feeling like, “Okay, my brain works differently. I don’t feel like I’m relating to God maybe the way that other people are.”

And maybe there’s some shame around that or some discouragement, like it’s impacting their faith in a negative way. How would you address that with someone?

Nikole: God is our creator, and He knows how our life is going to be before even created in our mother’s womb. While I certainly understand and can empathize with the frustration of feeling different or feeling people don’t understand you or that you have to work a lot harder than neurotypical people do to get the same results or make the same progress.

I don’t think he makes mistakes, and I also don’t think he wastes their pain. So I would encourage them to pray and bring that to the Lord, and also to learn more about autism and how it impacts people, because I think a lot of times some of the internalized messages that people have about is where that shame comes from is because of misunderstanding how their nervous system works, ’cause they never had an explanation.

And so it just became a character flaw or a fault that got internalized. And when they have a proper understanding of how their brain works, then it’s no longer a character flaw. It’s just A reality of life. And then there’s something they can do about it. If you’re highly sensitive to certain sounds or lights, you can put different light bulbs in your house, or you can wear noise-canceling headphones, or you can plan your social life so that you have recovery time after a big social outing.

Or you don’t have to go to public concerts where there’s tons of people and noise and smells and overwhelming things. So it just allows you to have more control over your environment in a way that lets you engage with people and have those close relationships in a more comfortable and consistent way with how you experience the world.

Carrie: Right. It’s really about navigating some of these compensatory-type strategies as far as, like, therapy goes, trying to figure out what’s gonna work to have your nervous system be at a less heightened level. Is that a good way to say it?

Nikole: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I don’t think there’s any reason why someone who’s autistic can’t be just as close to the Lord as someone with some other struggle or with no mental health or developmental struggles.

Again, I think it’s understandable why people feel anxious and frustrated and all of those things. But having a better understanding of how their brain works, again, I think will help eliminate some of that internalized shame, and hopefully give them some new handholds to move forward. And just like with anything else, we have to depend on the Lord for our strength, regardless of whatever difficulties we face in life.

Carrie: Yeah, I mean, I was just thinking too, as you were talking about that, like, how we really have an opportunity in the church to be more neurodivergent-friendly, that I think a lot of times we don’t take the opportunity to do that. If you go into a lot of churches, it’s loud. There’s bright lights. That’s kind of the thing nowadays in some contemporary worship settings.

So I could see how that would be really challenging for someone that’s dealing with these sensory sensitivities to just even go into church like that, and they may have to find someplace maybe that’s a little bit smaller or a little bit more low-key or make some of those accommodations like you were talking about, wear earplugs during worship or something.

Nikole: Yeah, and I think it’s definitely a call to action for churches because they’re a wonderful place of connection and hopefully a family of faith and love. But a lot of times, we still have our little, like, cliques at, at church and our friend groups and our small groups and things like that, and then we don’t always notice the people on the outside or that are struggling to make connection or to share or who maybe have a little bit different way of relating that seems a little quirky to us.

That can also make it really hard for people who are autistic to feel a sense of community and connection in those spaces, and there can be a lot of misunderstanding that can come from that. That direct communication style can be interpreted as rude or blunt, or difficulty seeing a situation or a comment from someone else’s point of view can again be misinterpreted.

Even things like body positioning, personal space, eye contact, facial expressions, being able to un-infer meaning from other peoples and how you’re presenting yourself impacts them. Like context matters, and it changes when you’re one-on-one versus in a group, church versus at work. And so even when you have compensatory strategies to mask or to try to accommodate the environment, like those aren’t gonna work in every situation.

And so if you go to a new church, and there’s a different culture there, or you’re new to church in the first place, and you don’t know what’s expected, that’s not gonna necessarily work. And so it can be really frustrating and hard to find community in a situation like that.

Carrie: Yeah, I can definitely see that.

In terms of what you’ve seen, I wanna go back a little bit to the OCD piece. Are there particular themes that OCD latches onto more? Are the OCD themes more relational, I guess, is what I’m asking.

Nikole: Yeah, I think they can be. I’ve seen a lot of that, which makes sense in the context of if you think about ICBT and OCD logic of past experiences when you have been rejected, when you have lost friends and not known why or what you did wrong, it’s really easy to then have a narrative form around, “Well, that could happen again.”

I’ve also seen themes around contamination, particularly when someone has those hypersensitivity to certain textures or feelings or smells where they can have those contamination themes around needing to wash, needing to get rid of anything that feels off or different.

Carrie: My favorite T-shirt doesn’t feel right because I got some kind of smell on it, and now I went somewhere and it was smoky maybe, and now I can’t– it smells like a barbecue joint, and now I can’t- Yeah

get it out of there.

Nikole: Anything like that, or just touch– your hands touch all kinds of stuff like rubber bands and food and needing to feel like you need to wash frequently to get rid of those smell, where most people might not even notice a smell. But if you have a heightened awareness to smell And that’s tricky because it’s not really imaginary.

Like, you are smelling it, you just have a heightened awareness, and so then we’re looking at what are your values? Do you want to have, like, chapped, bleeding hands? Okay, that’s probably not gonna be best for you, so how do we address this from that?

Carrie: So almost hand washing may develop from a texture sensitivity at times.

Is that what you’re saying?

Nikole: Yeah, or olfactory sensitivity, yeah.

Carrie: Mm-hmm. Hmm. That makes a lot of sense, actually. Those overlaps makes a lot of sense. I think this is really great for our listeners, but I know we also have some therapists that listen too that are trying to understand their neurodivergent clients better too, so this…

I’m definitely learning some things here. If someone’s been diagnosed with OCD, and maybe they’ve had some treatment, and they feel like what you’re saying, “Okay, some of this stuff is really resonating with me. I do have some of these sensory sensitivities. I’ve had struggles in my social relationship. I think I might have autism, too,” what is their first step towards, like, getting that diagnosis?

Nikole: I would say it really depends on, just like with ADHD, it really depends on what’s your purpose. Is getting a diagnosis, is it very important to you to have a professional assess you and give you a stamp on a paper that says, “Yes, you are autistic,” or is it more just something you want to explore to have greater self-awareness about yourself and how you understand the world?

Official diagnosis can provide a lot of relief for people, and I’ve known people that really just like, “No, I need to know from a professional.” Can eliminate those labels that might be inaccurate or judgmental. It can give you legal rights for accommodations or support. It can give you more of that gift of non-judgmental self-understanding so that you can kind of view past experiences through a new lens of, rather than self-blame and shame, through this lens of why this might have been more challenging for you throughout your life.

And all those things can be really helpful for understanding yourself, for feeling less emotional distress, and just for giving yourself permission to care and advocate for your sensory needs. But I would say seeking a diagnosis is really a personal decision, and a lot of people choose to just self-identify as autistic, learn about it as much as they can.

They don’t feel like they need an official diagnosis stamped on paper, and I think that’s perfectly appropriate, too. Different clinicians differ on this, but it’s not like there’s medication for autism or something that you can only get access to if you have an official diagnosis. It’s really more about accommodating and meeting those needs and learning how to teach those that you love why you need these things and how to best help.

So I don’t know that a diagnosis is always necessary. I do love the book, Is This Autism?

Carrie: Okay, great.

Nikole: So you can link that in the show notes, but it goes through all the different criteria for autism and how it presents in people who are on that lower support needs end of the spectrum, where they’re– they don’t have intellectual disability, for the most part fairly successful in life, but wondering if they might be autistic.

Maybe they’ve had a child diagnosed, like you mentioned, and just trying to understand what could that look like if there isn’t that intellectual impairment also. It’s a great book. It is not from a Christian perspective. I will say, fair warning, in the autistic community, there’s a lot of overlap with just gender spectrum questions in that whole community, so and I think that’s another area where I would love to see more Christians engaging with and helping people to wrestle through those questions.

Because pretty much anything you find on autism out there from this perspective, and I have not found much from a Christian perspective, will have LGBTQ gender type content as well along with it. So there is some of that in the book, but I think it still has a lot of really, really helpful resources and information that people will find helpful.

Carrie: Yeah. It’s a lot to think about. Even if you’re just listening to this episode, and maybe you have a loved one that you’re trying to understand better or kind of listening because you’re really interested in this overlap, I think there’s a lesson here for all of us to say, “It’s okay for us to have needs.”

And I think sometimes we don’t think it’s okay for us to have needs, especially in our relationships. We think we always have to be kind of the one to sacrifice, or we always have to just go with the flow, don’t make any waves. And I think it’s fine to say… I used to go to these trainings and– or I was involved as helping out with some EMDR trainings, and one of the things that they would say, they would give everyone ahead of time was say, “Please don’t wear strong perfume.”

I think that’s a reasonable request, because if you’re sitting in a training all day and you’re becoming overwhelmed because someone got really happy with the body spray, then that’s a deterrent. I don’t wanna be here smelling that all day. Just small little requests like that I feel like can make a big difference, and we can’t always, obviously, control what other people do.

But just to know, like, it’s okay to say, like, “I need to just stay at home today and not be social because my nervous system is very tired, and I’ve done a lot,” or, “I’ve been around other people a lot.” And to give yourself the freedom to really partner with God in knowing yourself and knowing what you need and knowing how to advocate for your needs in a really healthy way.

I just wanna land the plane and say I think that’s a message for everybody, whether you’re on the autism spectrum or whether you have OCD or whether you have anxiety in social settings. Whatever you’re dealing with, that’s a good thing to note.

Nikole: Yeah. And I think it’s very interesting because I think a lot of the things I’ve said and even, like, encouragement for clinicians, like, all those things are also really helpful for anyone who’s neurotypical.

Carrie: Yes.

Nikole: Be patient, be kind, assume good intentions. If someone is doing something that seems odd to you, there’s probably a reason for it. There’s wonderful clinicians out there, but I think too often we can almost jump on this like, well, anything that seems different to us is bad. And I think that comes from a place of just wanting to have clear boundaries to feel safe.

And I think sometimes we need to push back on that a little bit and go, “No, same does not equal safe.” We can allow differences, and that can make our community that much more vibrant and beautiful. And if we don’t allow for that, then we’re missing the beauty of so many people that could be really wonderful members of our churches and communities if they were given a chance and then given a space where they felt safe enough to contribute and to not feel like they have to just try to blend in.

I think if we can all learn a little more kindness and just allowing that space to exist for people, that would go a long way.

Carrie: Yeah. Huge.

233. When Health Issues, OCD, and Faith Collide: A Personal Story with Whitney Paige

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

In this episode, Carrie sits down with Whitney Paige to share how her journey through OCD, scrupulosity, chronic illness, and spiritual struggle reshaped her understanding of God’s love and faithfulness.

Episode Highlights:

  • Why chasing certainty often keeps Christians stuck in the OCD cycle.
  • The connection between chronic illness and mental health.
  • Practical ways to anchor your faith when your feelings tell a different story.
  • What scrupulosity can distort about God’s character and His love for you.
  • The role of community, treatment, and biblical truth in finding lasting hope.
  • Whitney’s award-winning book, By His Stripes, and how her testimony is encouraging Christians to trust God through OCD, chronic illness, and seasons of suffering.

Episode Summary:

How Can One Story Bring Hope to Christians Struggling With OCD?

I’m so excited for you to hear Whitney Paige’s story. Whitney is an author, OCD advocate, and the recipient of the 2026 Georgia Independent Author of the Year award for her book, By His Stripes. She joins me to share her personal journey through OCD, scrupulosity, chronic illness, and the spiritual questions that shaped her faith. If you’ve ever wondered whether God is still with you in the middle of suffering, I believe Whitney’s testimony will encourage you to keep holding on to hope.

Why Do So Many Christians With OCD Feel Like God Is Punishing Them?

One of the biggest struggles Whitney faced was believing her suffering meant God was disappointed in her. No matter how much she prayed, read Scripture, or worshiped, she never felt like she was right with Him. As we talk through her story, you’ll hear how scrupulosity distorted her view of God’s character and what began to change as she learned to trust His truth instead of her feelings.

How Are Chronic Illness and OCD Connected?

Whitney openly shares how living with chronic illness affected her OCD and anxiety, creating an exhausting cycle of physical pain, fear, and emotional fatigue. Our conversation explores how physical and mental health often influence one another, while offering encouragement for anyone carrying both burdens. Even when healing feels slow, there is still hope for the journey ahead.

What Happens When You Stop Chasing Certainty and Start Trusting God?

One of the themes that runs throughout Whitney’s story is the search for certainty. Like so many people with OCD, she wanted answers that simply weren’t available. We talk about what began to change when she stopped trying to solve every unanswered question and started placing her trust in the unchanging character of God instead.

How Can God Use OCD and Suffering to Encourage Someone Else?

Whitney didn’t wait until she had everything figured out before sharing her story. She wrote By His Stripes while still walking through her own healing journey because she wanted others to know they weren’t alone. Her testimony is a beautiful reminder that God often uses our greatest struggles to strengthen someone else’s faith and point them toward His hope.

Connect with Whitney Paige:

www.whitneypaigeco.com

Check out Whitney Paige’s book By His Stripes:

www.whitneypaigeco.com/author

Transcript

Christian Faith and OCD Episode 233 

Carrie: Welcome, OCD warriors, to the Christian Faith and OCD podcast, where we are all about reducing shame and stigma of struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories and replacing uncertainty with faith as you develop practical tools for greater peace.

I’m Carrie Bock, Christ follower, wife, mom, and licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. I pray you are blessed by today’s episode. Welcome back, everyone, to our personal story summer series. Today, we have a special guest. Whitney Paige is an author. She is a graphic designer and an outdoor enthusiast.

She is here to talk about her book, By His Stripes: Navigating Life With Mental And Physical Suffering. I have it right here. Whitney just found out that she has been honored as the Georgia Independent Author of the Year in twenty twenty-six. Congratulations. That’s exciting.

Whitney: And thank you so much for having me.

Carrie: Yeah. And you’re also an advocate with the International OCD Foundation. Is that correct?

Whitney: Yes. And I’m on the OCD Georgia board as well.

Carrie: Oh, awesome. Why did you decide to write a book about your experience, this navigation of mental and physical suffering?

Whitney: Yeah. I kinda just wrote the book that I wish I had when I was in the deep pit.

I really longed to hear from somebody that experienced something that I was experiencing. I genuinely thought I was the only one going through what I was going through with such torment. So a really simple goal, I wrote this book just to help one person feel less alone, then it would be worth it. It was a hard process, but sharing my story was a way to offer hope and give, like, a purpose to my pain.

Carrie: Yeah. That’s huge. You talk in your book about, like, the physical health struggles that you were dealing with, IBS. You also had some chronic pain issues that– that were very intense. Like, how did those two things play off of each other, like, the physical health affecting the mental health and the mental health affecting the physical health?

Whitney: That’s a great question. I feel like it’s kind of like an endless loop a little bit.

Carrie: Yeah. I

Whitney: also happen to have both physical and mental health challenges that connect the brain gut. I really feel like that significant connection, and I feel like I’m kind of a brick wall sometimes because my OCD, anxiety and depression, that often worsens my stomach pain, my fatigue.

I often found that when I’m in a OCD spiral or a depressive episode being super fatigued, that it really is a struggle to fight the OCD and fight depression and just because you’re just so mentally fatigued that you just don’t have anything. You can’t really recall all your toolboxes that you have and all that kind of stuff.

And that’s, again, why I’m thankful for my book ’cause I have a physical resource I could look back on when I’m having those episodes. But it makes it hard to manage the symptoms when you’re super fatigued and you have all All these health issues, and I think that it’s very challenging to determine what is causing what, and that’s a hole that I know now not to go down because I wanna figure it out, and I wanna know, is it my physical symptoms that are acting up, or is it my mental symptoms that are acting up?

But really, I’ve had to kind of lay that down and surrender and just not try to find any of the answers, just move forward anyway.

Carrie: What kind of OCD themes have you struggled with?

Whitney: That’s a long list. But I will say, kinda sums it up, and most of my OCD is invisible, and I’ll talk about that. Really, a lot of mental compulsions on a lot of various topics.

Scrupulosity is one main one, attacks my faith. Just constantly analyzing how I feel, if I’m not saved, not being right with the Lord. That’s kind of a big one. Another one is my brain anticipates and replays, like, violent accidents or events that haven’t happened, but I think that they are gonna happen to my loved ones.

Often, that’s referred to as harm OCD. I have kind of another one that I really deal with a lot, but I don’t really talk about it a lot, is existential OCD. It’s really like I’m just trapped in my brain about just distressing questions about what’s the meaning of life, what’s the meaning of this existence, kind of thing like that.

And then health OCD is really a big one for me. I think it might have come from all the things that I’ve dealt with, but again, I can’t go down that road and figure that out. But I do know that I struggled with a lot of health issues in the past, and I do have that consumed fear of when every symptom hits or what if this headache is a brain tumor, or what if the doctor’s missing something, or just kind of constant kinda health stuff for me.

Carrie: I can see how that would be easy to go down based on your own personal experience, where the doctors would run these tests and they’re like, “Ugh, I don’t know,” like, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you,” or, “Well, you’re having this symptom, but that’s really rare,” or something like that, or, “It’s not seen in people your age,” that type of stuff.

Tell us, kinda like tie that in a little bit to the zebra theme behind your book. So your book has a zebra on it. Tell us a little bit about that. I enjoyed that piece of the process.

Whitney: Awesome. Thank you. The zebra. I’m not gonna share everything ’cause you gotta read the book. Throughout my book, I kinda relate my story to a zebra.

Each chapter, I kinda bring it back to the zebra’s experience and bringing it back to what I experience and how they’re similar. At the end of the book, I kinda describe why zebras are so important to me and how they’ve kind of shaped my life. I literally– like, the Lord gave me By His Stripes as a title, and one of my dear friends, we were sitting, just talking about a book and just thinking, “Oh, my gosh, I can’t believe God told me to write a book.

This is big.” And we were just sitting and dreaming about it. The zebra, by his stripes, like, we just connected stripes with zebra and- It was kind of a moment like I’ll never forget. We were just like, “I don’t know what the cover’s gonna look like, but I know it’s gonna have a zebra.”

Carrie: Yeah.

Whitney: Yeah. So that was pretty cool.

Carrie: That’s awesome. It’s a nice way, I think, for different stories to come together and for people to kinda see, have a theme there. I wanted to talk with you about this quote from your book, and you brought this up kind of a little bit earlier. You alluded to it, but you said, “Take it from someone who has tried focusing on everything but God in a storm.

I often entertain thoughts focused on figuring out where the storm came from, how it got here, why it was here, where it’s going- What I will lose, how bad it will be, and these unanswered questions are like pouring gasoline on the fire. How have you seen, like, this trying to figure out all these things to be either harmful or at least not helpful to you or others that are on that OCD recovery journey?

I see this a lot.

Whitney: All the unanswered questions and uncertainty is just … It’s a big weight, especially with having OCD and having that just need for that certainty. I know everybody has kind of that in their daily walk, and I’ve just kinda come to what I have to choose what I focus on. And if I focus on the storm, that’s all I see, and I get even deeper into the storm.

I had to s- again, surrender just the act of, like, trying to figure everything out. Instead of that, I’ve kind of leaned more on an act of trust, and I quote in my book, I say, “I don’t have to understand what He is doing because I know what He has already done.”

Carrie: Yeah. That’s good.

Whitney: That quote seems like I have certainty, right?

But in reality, it’s not. It’s just trust. I’m trusting in my faith. You know, faith is about trust, not certainty. So I have to kinda remind myself that all the time, and to not listen to OCD and compare what OCD is telling me to the word of God, and build my life off that truth because God is the only one not changing.

My OCD, my feelings, my anxiety, my situations, everything is changing. And so I can stand on the foundation that doesn’t ever change, and that’s why I always have something to kind of combat the lies with truth. And every time I do that, I feel like being vulnerable, part of me, is another hard thing. It also develops greater resilience and just courage to, “Okay, I did that, and I can get through the next thing.”

It helps me in a way to kind of remember that.

Carrie: I think some Christians with OCD have a really hard time, like, trusting in the goodness of God. Did that come up for you, especially in the midst of suffering? It’s like, “I’m going through this really intense suffering. I wouldn’t wish this on anybody. It’s just really hard to deal with.

I don’t ever know what kind of recovery process I’m gonna be able to get to. Am I ever gonna be able to be in some kind of remission from this?” So there’s all these types of questions. I don’t know. Talk with us about that. Did you wrestle with, “Hey, God’s dumped a lot on my plate. It doesn’t feel like He’s good”?

Whitney: Yes, that’s a great question and a great point. And I’ve struggled with that a lot. That’s actually kinda one of my main struggles, is because I thought that all the pain I was experiencing, I thought God was punishing me because I was a bad Christian. And I kind of somehow down the road connected my pain to my relationship with Him because I never felt right.

Like, I never felt right with the Lord. I never felt like our relationship was okay. No matter what I did or how many times I prayed, how many times I read the Bible, how many times I’ve worshiped, I had that feeling. And so I struggled finding a good church all my life, and I’ve so thankfully found a church local.

It’s been such a blessing to me, and I was in a church service one time, and I still had this belief that God was punishing me. They preached very simple gospel in how, like, when sin entered the world, that wasn’t God’s original plan. God’s original plan was to be in basically paradise with us and to be fellowship with us.

But we had to go and change the rules and the plan by sinning, and I think that my brain just kind of, like, a light bulb went off of, like, that wasn’t his intention. But because that happened, that’s just new story, but the goodness of his graciousness in– like, comes into play of, like, me thinking, “Okay, well, he doesn’t really owe me anything.”

I mean, he’s already done everything for me, and he rewrote that story by dying on the cross for me and saving me. And so I’m kind of in this, like, waiting period right now that I am saved, but I’m still living in this sinful world, and that’s why trial there. It’s not anything that I did or that he’s doing to me.

I’ve had to kinda rewrite that story in saying that the only reason trials exist is because we live in a fallen world, to remind myself that he did not intend it to be that way. But he’s so good that he literally is with me through the trials and in the trials, and he gives me strength to get through them.

I mean, how is that… Like, that’s just the definition of a good God. He doesn’t leave you. He just gives you the strength to get through. I think a big thing in my journey is I’ve kind of come across, like, the saying, “Do the opposite.” Because I will say that nothing my OCD tells me is gonna be good, and I have just kind of come across this thing of, like, just do the opposite of what my OCD says.

It’s usually the opposite of what truth says as well, so it kinda works in that realm. And also, I really believe that there’s an active enemy trying to steal, kill, and destroy us, and I think that the enemy’s not gonna have anything to say as well. Once I realized that God was not punishing me, our relationship began to, like, change slowly and be able to trust Him a little bit more.

And every time that I come across, like, a roadblock, I– “Listen, we’re gonna do the opposite, and we’re gonna move forward.” And even though I still don’t feel right with God, I haven’t ever gotten that certainty. I’m just moving forward in faith. Some days are harder than others.

Carrie: Few key points that you’ve made is, is faith requires belief in something that we can’t see.

I think that’s one point that’s really important. And so we’re leaning into that one day at a time, and we don’t have all the answers. So trying to, like, get absolute certainty is a lost cause, essentially. I love what you said about just kind of like getting involved in a healthy church community. I think that’s so great for anybody out there that needs to hear that.

I wanted to talk a little bit too about what you’re saying with, I don’t know, with OCD, and I think scrupulosity specifically. There’s a lot of lies that people believe, and it’s not as easy as like, okay, find the lie and replace it with truth. But as you’re going through treatment and understanding these processes, you do have to kinda come to examine your own theology and what you actually believe about God.

And I think that can be a missing piece in different forms of OCD therapy if you don’t have somebody to help you navigate, whether that’s a pastor, spiritual mentor, leader, counselor, whoever that person is. Would you agree with that? Like, there just there’s a lot of Christians with OCD just kind of believing a lot of lies about God or about themselves or about the world.

Whitney: Yeah, I agree with that, and I’ve been in that boat, and I’m still trying to kind of fix my view of God because I feel like that really is my foundation. If He really is the Lord of your life, do you trust Him in every area? Do you go to Him for everything, even your OCD and anxiety? I’m not gonna lie, that’s like my number one struggle is fighting that lie and fighting those beliefs and trying to rewrite in my brain that He’s a loving God.

He died for me. What explains love more than that? Just kind of just have to constantly remind myself. I’m a big truth card person. I have truth cards right here. I have them all over my house. I have scriptures written down. I have just reminders that when I’m in the pit, I also have all these things on the wall, like inspirational sayings, all that kinda stuff.

Like, just because when you’re in it, you need those reminders. That’s why I have tattoos. It’s a constant reminder. I look down at my arm, and I remember.

Carrie: Yeah. What does your tattoo remind you?

Whitney: My tattoos are all about Jesus, except for there’s one, and it’s about my dog.

Carrie: Aw.

Whitney: It’s his heartbeat. I’m working on a sleeve.

I’m pretty proud of it, and they all point to Jesus in a different part of my journey.

Carrie: It’s like your testimony written out.

Whitney: Yeah, on my arm.

Carrie: Yeah. There you go. You have several different stories in your book about times where God really came through for you. One of them was, like, about going to New York for school.

That was, like, a very hairy, scary, but, like, you did the scary hard thing. And there were other stories too about animals and different things where what you couldn’t have imagined happened, happened. God totally provided a way for different things. Like, I kinda consider them like spiritual anchors. How did that strengthen your faith kind of as you were going through that process, and did that help you build more trust in God as good and loving?

Whitney: Yes, absolutely. I still to this day repeat to myself when I have to do something hard that I did New York City. I repeat it to myself all the time. Even there’s hard days, and I– it’s hard to go to the grocery store sometimes, and I repeat, “I did New York City. I’m going to the grocery store.” But yeah, spiritual anchor is a great way to explain it.

I think that each time God answers a prayer or a blessing, I remind myself that He owes me nothing, and this is purely out of His love for me. And it really helps me strengthen and grow my relationship with Him. And I think that what baffles me is that He just continues to pour His grace and His mercy in my life, like, and everybody’s story, and it’s just kind of like His act of love, not obligation.

But, like, that’s my greatest defense against OCD, because I have somebody on my side and I have somebody that loves me, and I have somebody that has done something, died on the cross for me, that will one day take my OCD away, and that brings me a lot of hope.

Carrie: Yeah. Just thinking about heaven is like, one day this will not be a struggle anymore, or I won’t have any of these physical digestive issues.

Everything will be new bodies. We’re getting new bodies.

Whitney: I don’t know what it’s gonna look like, but I know that I will be able to eat bread … which I’m highly allergic to. I will be in no pain mentally and physically, and it gives me hope.

Carrie: Yeah. And I think that’s important for people to hold onto. We can get so focused on the here and now and forget that’s not all there is, that God has something prepared, something ahead of time for us.

That’s really beautiful, and that we get to spend eternity with Him. What else do you wanna say just to the Christian OCD community, people really… Love these personal stories, and I think they latch onto them because probably they’re having maybe similar questions or struggles or obsessions that you’ve wrestled with and dealt with.

Tell us a little bit about, like, what going through treatment has been like for you.

Whitney: Yeah, that’s a good question. I’ve been suffering from OCD in silence for 29 years, and when I finally realized it, I remember reading a book that my dear friend helped me realize I had OCD. She gave me this book, and I read it, and it literally took my breath away of, like, that I was reading myself in the book.

It was just so powerful for me. That was kind of the moment that God was like, He gave me that little vision of, like, “You’re gonna do this one day.” I laugh because of where I was at, like, but I think about that memory often and how powerful it was for me to feel not alone and not being the only one. I think that fueled me, and I really wanted to hold onto that and use that as my motivation.

The OCD community has been such a blessing for me. I’ve kind of dove in, doing a lot with the OCD Georgia board and doing a lot with IOCDF and now this book. This book is my way of sharing my testimony. It doesn’t look like a mission trip overseas or something like that, but it looks like it for me, like what God wants me to do.

And I would encourage people to ask the Lord is, like, “What do you want me to do with my story?” I think that God has a purpose for everything, and so ask Him what the purpose is for your OCD, because it might just be to bring hope to others that don’t have it and to be there for others. I kinda encourage you to ask the Lord that.

Carrie: Yeah, I think someone that was going through some immense suffering and had actually, you know, lost his daughter, he had said, “I don’t recommend people ask the question why, like, ‘Why is this happening to me? What’s going on?’ But more to ask, ‘What is God doing?’ Like, what is God going to do through this? How is He going to use this?”

Whether it’s in your life or in someone else’s life, I think that those are definitely, like, very good questions for us to ask.

Whitney: Absolutely.

Carrie: Well, is there anything else that we didn’t touch on that you wanted to talk about?

Whitney: I’m just so thankful that you to have me on this podcast, and so thankful to all the viewers.

I hope you like the book.

Carrie: Yeah, definitely. They can get a copy of that on Amazon.

Whitney: Yes, they can go to Amazon. I also have a website that have a couple more resources on whitneypageco.com.

Carrie: Okay. Yeah, we’ll put that in the show notes for people that might be listening in the car or something like that, they can check back and check out your website.

Sometimes people just wanna contact you and say hello after you’ve been on the podcast and say, “I resonated with your story.” So just know that may happen. But I’m so glad that you came on here and shared your story, and that you wrote it down for people. I mean, I think that this is just a really helpful…

I’m trying to think of that saying where something like, one day your testimony is gonna be somebody’s survival guide.

Whitney: Oh, I think I’ve heard that.

Carrie: Yeah. I feel like that’s a lot of what your book is. These are some truths that we need to remember when we’re going through some hard times, and here are some ways you can navigate some of this OCD stuff moving forward.

Whitney: Thank you for saying that. And it is for me too, ’cause honestly, I’m still in the thick of it. I’m not an expert by any means. Still going through it. I’m going back through my book that I wrote that sometimes, I’m not gonna lie, I’m like, “I wrote that?” It’s crazy how our brains can just erase what we’ve learned and what we know, and so it’s a testament for me, too.

Carrie: It’s so funny that Whitney said that about forgetting what she wrote in her book, because I know there have been times where my assistant has pulled stuff out of episodes for social media, and I’m like, “I said that on there?” So that just kinda made me chuckle a little bit. Uh, Whitney, it’s, it’s not just you.

I have that, too. I haven’t talked about this a ton. There will be more to come, but I’ve just been in this messy process of trying to outline and start writing a book that I want to write for the Christian OCD community. And I will say that going through this process, I now just have mad respect for anyone who has put a book out there into the world, because it’s quite the process, and it’s not easy.

If you’d like to get more updates from me regarding what’s happening around the podcast as well as the upcoming book, whenever that is able to be launched out into the world, please subscribe to our weekly newsletter by going to carriebock.com.

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

Christian Faith and OCD

Carrie: is a production of By the Well Counseling. Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of myself or By the Well Counseling. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area.

232. Postpartum Inpatient Stay to OCD Recovery: A Personal Story with Kathy Young 

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

In this episode, Carrie sits down with Kathy Young as she shares her journey through postpartum OCD, multiple inpatient psychiatric hospitalizations, a misdiagnosis of postpartum psychosis, and the lessons she learned on the road to recovery.

Episode Highlights:

  • How to recognize when postpartum OCD symptoms may be mistaken for postpartum psychosis or other mental health conditions.
  • Why sleep deprivation, hormonal changes, and anxiety can intensify OCD symptoms after childbirth.
  • How perfectionism and the need for control can quietly fuel obsessive thinking during motherhood.
  • Practical ways to communicate your needs and build a stronger support system during difficult seasons.
  • Strategies for navigating intrusive thoughts, embracing uncertainty, and leaning on God throughout the recovery process.

Episode Summary:

What Does Postpartum OCD Really Look Like After Having a Baby?

In this conversation, Kathy Young, a writer, wife, and stay-at-home mom, shares a deeply personal story that began after the birth of her first child. Like many new mothers, she found herself navigating sleepless nights, changing responsibilities, and the pressure to care for her family well. What she didn’t realize at the time was that something more was happening beneath the surface.

One of the reasons I wanted to share Kathy’s story is because postpartum OCD doesn’t always look the way people expect. Her experience shines a light on challenges that can easily be misunderstood during the postpartum season.

How Do Sleep Deprivation and Hormonal Changes Affect Postpartum OCD?

The postpartum period brings significant physical, emotional, and hormonal changes. For some women, those changes can intensify existing mental health struggles or reveal patterns that may have gone unnoticed before.

Kathy shares how several factors converged during a particularly vulnerable season of life, creating challenges she never anticipated. Her story highlights why understanding the connection between postpartum health and OCD symptoms is so important.

What Happens When Motherhood Triggers a Need for More Certainty?

Motherhood often comes with questions, decisions, and responsibilities that don’t have clear answers. While planning and preparation can be helpful, the desire for certainty can sometimes become overwhelming.

As Kathy reflects on her experience, she shares how fear, expectations, and the pressure to get everything right affected the way she approached motherhood. Her story offers an honest look at the tension between wanting control and learning to live with uncertainty.

How Can OCD Affect Your Identity as a Mom?

Many mothers wrestle with questions about whether they’re doing enough, making the right decisions, or meeting everyone’s needs. When OCD enters the picture, those concerns can take on an entirely different weight.

Throughout this episode, Kathy opens up about the challenges of navigating motherhood while struggling with symptoms she didn’t fully understand. Her experience provides insight into how OCD can influence parenting, self-perception, and daily decision-making.

What Does Recovery From Postpartum OCD Actually Look Like?

Recovery is rarely a straight line, and it often looks different than people expect. Kathy’s journey involved learning new ways to respond to intrusive thoughts, navigate uncertainty, and accept support during difficult seasons.

She also shares how this experience reshaped her faith, her relationships, and her understanding of what it means to trust God when life doesn’t go according to plan. 

Listen to the full episode to hear how she navigated uncertainty, found the right support, and discovered hope in the midst of one of the most challenging seasons of her life.

Connect with Kathy:

lessnoiselowwhispers.substack.com

Transcript

Carrie: So I hope everyone has enjoyed our summer personal story series so far. And today we’re back at it with another story from Kathy Young. So I’m gonna let Cathy just introduce herself for a little bit here.

Kathy: Hi. I’m so excited to be here. My name’s Kathy Young, and as of now, I am a stay-at-home mom. I do have a background in writing, and I have run a copywriting business for a little bit of time and focused on marketing specifically, and that’s what I went to school for as well.

But right now, in this season of life, I’m just focusing on staying home and connecting online with other writers as well with OCD and who are also believers, and that’s a little bit about me and what I’m doing right now

Carrie: Well, that’s awesome. Sounds like a really good mission in life right now.

Kathy: Yeah, I’m loving it.

Carrie: Yeah. And how old is your daughter?

Kathy: Yes, I have one daughter, and she is… She’ll be two and a half next month. Well, she’ll be two and a half by the time that this comes out.

Carrie: Awesome. That’s a busy and cute age.

Kathy: It is.

Carrie: All right. We’re talking a little bit today about kind of a, a very dark season in your life, and so I just kinda wanna warn people about that.

And also that I think it’s just really important to talk about the things that can happen potentially to people’s mental health during postpartum. So tell us a little bit about the events that led you down this road, essentially to being assessed for postpartum psychosis.

Kathy: Yeah. So I can add a little context, too, with the season of life I’m in right now.

I had no intention to be a stay-at-home mom, and it was postpartum experiences that literally halted me and forced me to stop, reassess, and to kinda take a hiatus to focus on my mental health, and that was something, like I said, I hadn’t planned. It’s something that, as I explain a little bit more, you’ll see how it led to the postpartum psychosis in the first place.

So at the point when I was 12 weeks postpartum, that’s around the time that, at least for me, like hormones start to change. So my milk supply had dropped. I was pumping at the time, and my daughter was three months old, and it was like three to four month age is when they say that babies start to have like a sleep regression.

So that was happening. Because I was a freelancer and I owned a copywriting business, I had set aside maternity leave for myself, and it was around, around 12 week was around the time I had… It was the entire, like it was all that I had set aside, essentially, for my maternity leave. So three months, 12 weeks, I figured, you know, I’ll bounce back, totally easy.

Carrie: Lots of women do it. That’s just the expectation. Like, oh, you stay home for a few months, and then you go back to work.

Kathy: That’s it, and even some moms only have six weeks, and so I’m thinking, “Okay, 12 weeks is a good like buffer,” right? And so all these things were kinda swirling in my head, and I was stressing a lot about my daughter’s ability to like sleep and nap on demand, hyper-fixating and researching on like how to pay attention to her sleepy cues and how to keep her awake for certain wake windows and when to know how many naps she needs, and when she needs to drop a nap or like all the things that go into that and being a first-time mom, too.

So I was putting a lot of pressure on like, okay, if my baby can like sleep on demand, ’cause I was working from home, and I didn’t really have like plans for extensive support. I was like, “Then I can watch my baby, and then I can like work, and then it’ll be totally fine.” And so I was thinking it’s just a, a simple math equation, right?

Like, I’ll just figure it out. And it was on that week leading up to when I was supposed to go back to work, I had spent an afternoon at my in-laws just kind of practicing going out of the house for the first time, trying to navigate naps, and when she napped in the car seat, and when she transitioning naps, and once she wakes up from a nap, what to do after that, blah, blah, blah I didn’t know it at the time, but my family had mentioned to me after the fact that I was, like, starting to show a lot of hyperactivity in the sense of I was talking really fast, I was, like, telling people, “Hey, you need to do this,” or, like, “Make sure you get this.”

And also I was, like, getting really fat as well, and just, like, fatigued. And to me, I was like, “Oh, this is what moms do.” Like, I’m just running on adrenaline. This is normal. But it seemed to be a bit of a concern for my family, but not so much so that it was, they were thinking about postpartum mental health issues yet at that time.

Carrie: Yeah. They were just like, “We’re gonna monitor this and, like, see how it goes. She just seems a little rapid fire right now.”

Kathy: Yeah, exactly. And so after I finished that afternoon with my in-laws, I’m driving home, and I just feel, like, a sudden panic in my nervous system of just, like, I’m not in control anymore.

Like, my brain was, like, going super fast, and my body was just kinda keeping up, and I’m, like, in the car with my baby in the backseat, and the first thing I think of is I call my sister-in-law, ’cause luckily she was, like, in the car behind me. She was gonna come to my house to pick up something. And I call her, and with, like, I don’t even start with pleasantries or anything.

I’m like, “Amanda, I have postpartum depression.” And I start, like, yelling it. And she’s like, “Oh my gosh, are you okay?” Like, “Pull to the side of the road.” I’m like, “Yes, we do.” And so we pull to the side of the road. We’re safe, thank goodness, and that’s kinda when I started to really show a lot of hyperactivity in the sense of I’m saying everything I’m thinking, my subconscious is just, like, spewing out of me.

I’m not focused at all. I’m not really aware. I’m tethered to reality. It’s not like I wasn’t aware of what was going on, but I was, like, so in my head that I was not grounded in reality, if that makes sense.

Carrie: Were you just lacking a ton of sleep at this point? Was your sleep just really erratic because of the baby and when she would sleep and then you felt like you had to get other stuff done or?

Kathy: Oh, for sure, and that was a big part of diagnosis as well. At that time, I was lacking a lot of sleep, and when I had reached that afternoon, it was, like, several hours of me, like, having insomnia, and it was after several hours that my family had made the decision to Baker Act me, which I don’t know how it’s like in other states, but in Florida you’re involuntarily sent to a behavioral center just for your safety, and you can be discharged once you kind of show that you’re a little bit more in a mental frame, like a stable mental state of mind.

That’s essentially what happened. Even when I got to the center itself, like, I had no idea what was going on. Like, I saw these all, all these people in green scrubs, and I’m like, “What is happening? Where am I? Am I in a dream?” Luckily, they give you medication at the behavioral center, and they force you to sleep, and they’re really on top of your mental hygiene and stuff, and your physical hygiene too.

And it was after befriending a patient who said, “Hey, you should talk to a staff member.” Ask them why you’re here, ask if you have a diagnosis, and that’ll get you home. And I was like, “Oh, okay. Yeah, I’d like to go home.” I wasn’t even thinking. You know what I mean? I hadn’t even connected the-

Carrie: So you were just really disoriented and, like, really confused, and your family drove you there, and they were like, “You need to be here,” basically?

Kathy: Yeah, and they didn’t know how long I was gonna stay. Like, there wasn’t so much contact from the behavioral center, like allowing me to get contact with family, unless, like, I showed the initiation that, hey, I feel stable to, like, talk to family right now. But even at the time, I was like, “I don’t know why I’m here.

This is, like, a weird experience overall.” But yes, they were the ones that decided. They drove me to make sure I was safe, and then I was, like, put into a unit with other patients, and I stayed there for about, like, six days.

Carrie: When you figured out what your diagnosis was and why you were there and all of that, was it a surprise to you?

Was it a relief?

Kathy: It was a relief In the sense that I had always this feeling that my brain was just wired differently, and I couldn’t articulate. I did not know how to explain it to other people, and later, this ended up being a misdiagnosis for OCD, which has brought even more answers. But it was almost like a relief to be able to, like, explain to the people around me that I love, “Hey, I’ve been dealing with stuff.”

I did not know how to voice what I needed or how I needed, but this is how badly I needed it. And it was definitely, like, a relief to have just, like, an answer or something to, like, look to so that other people around who were helping could see, like, “Oh, okay, this is what led to it. This is what it involves,” and just understanding me a little bit more, too.

Carrie: Were you having certain intrusions, intrusive thoughts, like, at that point?

Kathy: At the behavioral center?

Carrie: Yeah, like, kind of leading up to going in there. Were a lot of your thoughts just surrounding kind of, like, “I’ve gotta keep this rigid schedule,” or something bad’s gonna happen, or, “I’m not gonna be able to go back to work,” or?

Kathy: Oh, yeah. So I had originally thought that I was pumping, and so that also led to a lot of anxiety and stress as well because I was on a strict pumping schedule. And so at the behavioral center, all of your personal items are kept in storage closet… not closets, but area somewhere. And if you need it, then as the patient, you have to be the one ask for it, and it’s the family that actually packs the bags and packs your essentials since you’re obviously being sent involuntarily.

You don’t know what you need and don’t need. And so they do your best to, like, pack clothes and, at the time, my pump. And so I was like, “Oh, my gosh, I need the pump. I need the pump. I need the pump.” And so I was, like, constantly asking the tech for my pump, and then they were like, “Okay, this is not, like, a medical need.

This is not, like, a physical need. This seems more like a irrational hyperfixation on you needing to pump even though you physically do not need the pump right now.” So that was just, like, one example. There was also a lot of, like, things that I was hyperfixating as well on my physical sensation. So I was thinking that I was soaking at some points and making this connection of, like, if I take care of my body, then my baby will be safe.

Like, I don’t know. It was a lot surrounded by, like… Because especially when you’re pumping, you’re providing nourishment for your kid. And so I took that idea and I ran with it, and I was like, “Okay, I’m really thirsty, so if I’m thirsty, that means my baby’s thirsty. I need to drink right now.” And I would, like, drink so much that I would, like, hurl it back out because obviously I didn’t need that much water.

So it was a lot of, like, really taking notice of, like, the cues of my physical body and assigning meaning to them in ways that obviously did not correspond to reality, if that makes sense.

Carrie: Yeah, it does, and I could see, too, so they misdiagnosed you this as postpartum psychosis, and they said, “Go home, get enough sleep,” prescribed you medication, and they set you up with therapy or anything of that nature?

Kathy: Yeah, they did. So the original therapy that they had set me up with, we had a insurance at the time that was not really best suited for mental health services. It was just very minimal, especially ’cause I was a freelancer. My husband’s an entrepreneur as well, and so we were just very, like, just preventative stuff, low maintenance.

‘Cause we were just… We didn’t really see the need for anything else. I was set up with a, just a generic therapist and a generic psychiatrist who just saw, like, a full range of different people, and not saying anything against them at all. Like, they were very helpful to get my foot in the door. Eventually found out that I did need a little bit more specialized care, ’cause it was six weeks later that I had, like, a relapsed episode, and then ended up back with the behavioral center.

Originally, I forget the medication they had put me on first, but the second time I was discharged, we sought out a little bit more specialized care. We looked for, like, women’s mental health psychiatrists who knew women’s postpartum situations and things like that. And it was with her, with that psychiatrist, that I was screened for OCD, and that it was very likely that I was not dealing with postpartum psychosis.

It’s more likely that I was dealing with aggravated OCD on top of, like, the lack of sleep.

Carrie: The hormonal changes, yeah, can exacerbate some of those OCD symptoms. And so it’s helpful for people to know that. And a lot of people don’t know that if you go without sleep for long periods, that you can even start to hallucinate.

Like, they’ve done studies on these things, and so it makes sense that certain things can look like psychosis that may be lack of sleep, hormonal imbalances, and OCD going on, especially some of the fixations that you had. I could see how people would misdiagnose that. OCD have also been misdiagnosed as being suicidal when they weren’t, or homicidal when they weren’t as well, because they have intrusive thoughts or violent thoughts about themselves or others, and I think the education piece is just really important there.

Obviously, was that a big hit to you mentally, emotionally, spiritually, when you had to go back? Were you like, “Oh, great. Here I am again, doing this all over again”?

Kathy: Yeah, definitely was. It threw me for a loop in the sense that, like, I almost had this chip on my shoulder, and I found that I had this… With all my episodes, ’cause I had three, two where I was involuntarily hospitalized, and then one where I was in the comfort of family’s house, and so I would stay and they would monitor it there.

With all three of my episodes, I had noticed a conflated confidence in just, like, my ability and just, like, my ability to see things. So for example, I would see other patients, like, dealing with their physical and, like, mental needs. And so I thought to myself, “Oh, well, I can heal them. I’m capable of healing them.

Like, I’ll just pray and then they’ll stop.” It was just like that And obviously, like, I would not think that, and I do not think that if, when I’m in a normal state of mind. I’ve never had that thought ever. And so it was definitely this over-inflated confidence of like, “This person just needs this, and then they’re gonna be okay.”

Or like, “Oh, I think that God must be, like, trying to tell me a specific message to tell you,” kind of thing. And I know it gets really tricky because people have different spiritual experiences, and I don’t wanna take away from that. But I know for me, it was coming from a place, like I was lacking sleep. I was not taking care of myself.

OCD was taking the things that I love, which is what it does, like, which is my faith, and, like, misconstruing it and twisting it in a way that made me think reality was something else when it wasn’t. And so that was something that I ended up having to stop when I was stopped the second time, and the third time I had the episode as well, something that I had to wrestle with in terms of I know that I should be depending on God for this thing, and I know this is like a dark valley.

But also, I’m thinking these things that I probably shouldn’t be thinking, that I know are not biblically sound or accurate and not based in the gospel. And so it was just like ping-pong conversations back and forth with myself, trying to engage with my faith at that time.

Carrie: That makes sense, and I’m sure this was probably, like, pretty scary for your family, too, just feeling like the unknowns and what’s gonna happen next.

Were you still trying to work through this period as well after you’d gotten out of the hospital the first time?

Kathy: Oh, after the first time, my husband and I made the call of like, “I just need to not work right now.” It wasn’t really that we had a plan for me to go back to work. It was more of like, “We’re going to just have you not work for now, and then we’ll see in the future if that ever changes.

But for right now, that’s not gonna be the case.” Luckily, I had a savings in my bank account, and so we basically were able to use a lot of those funds to help with, like, the medical bills and kind of transitioning us into, like, me being able to stay home. And I was able to have a lot of support as well, too, before I was able to watch my daughter on my own, and that was so, so, so helpful and crucial for me as well.

It was definitely thrust upon me of like, “Okay, we’re not gonna have you work. We’re not gonna risk it. We’re not gonna try. We’re not gonna play with fire. We’d just rather be safe.” And so I think that was the right call at the time.

Carrie: How do you feel about it when you look back now? How do you reflect on those times, like, differently, being over two years from that?

Kathy: Yeah. I think I just wanna give myself, like, a big hug because it’s just, a lot of it was legitimate concerns and fears that I had, just, like, grappling with my identity as a new mom and what it would be like to work and what kind of mom I’m gonna be and just putting so much pressure on trying to be the mom I’ve always wanted to be, even though I was only less than a year in.

And I look at myself with just such grace and compassion and a little bit of humor because some of the things that I thought I just think are really silly, or the things that I did, at least to me it was. It’s almost like I’m able to look back and see how far the Lord has brought me and how I’m not perfect.

I have a better understanding life and motherhood is not, you figure it out and you’re done, like, you check the box and you move on. Like, as much as I thought it would be- It’s very humbling in the sense that I’m able to look back at that time and think, “Man, I really thought I was God.” I thought that I could just have everything in my control perfectly, and then everything would turn out how I wanted it to.

Like, if my baby would just sleep, if I would just get back to work at a certain time, whatever the case may be.

Carrie: It was like this illusion that I could be in control of all these things. I just wanna point out, I think it’s, like, harder for moms now because we have too many voices in our ears, really. There are so many different influencers on Instagram and other places that, “Oh, you should do this, and you should do that.

This can help with this, and that’ll help with that,” and just almost, like, too much information versus, like, trying to filter that all through and learn your specific child and what they actually need. And I can remember, like, when I was a first-time mom, like, trying to read the books and go, like, I’m reading the book, and I’m like, “Okay,” like, “I think I can do this.”

I’m feeling a little, like, semi-confident. And then you get the kid, and of course, it doesn’t go the way the book tells you it was gonna go. And then you’re like, “Oh, no. What do I do now? Help. Somebody come get me.” I mean, I, I guess I just wanna, you know, normalize that for everybody out there is, like, yeah, there’s a lot of parenting information on the internet.

You could read some good books, and none of that’s bad. But just know that, like, it’s not gonna go textbook according to plan. I’ve known moms where, that have had two different experiences with their kids where, like, one kid was a great napper and slept really well, and then the next one just, like, never slept and was up all the night and had just really rough times.

Each person’s story and situation, and even from kid to kid, is a different experience, and you really have… I mean, it’s an opportunity, I think, to lean on God and to say, like, “Okay, I don’t know what to do about this here. I’m just doing the best I can. Like, please enter in and help me through the craziness that is parenting.”

Kathy: Yeah. Absolutely. And I am so grateful that I have learned that lesson and that I closed the chapter on that book, or I’ve closed that book, and I’m like, “Okay, I’m done. I don’t have to re-learn that again.” I’m sure I will have to re-learn that in the future, but I think it was exactly what I needed in order for me to just start to look up and focus more on the Lord and who He is and trusting in Him rather than trying to figure out the puzzle pieces of, like, what’s going to happen next?

What does this mean? Will I be the mom I want to be? All of these, like, what-ifs and things like that, I’ve been able to learn to just sit with that discomfort a little bit of, like, I don’t know what’s gonna happen. It’s definitely the tender space for me in my heart, like with moms in my community and in my church, and just people online as well, kind of encouraging them.

Oh, it’s okay to not know. You won’t know, and you’re gonna make a plan, and it’s not gonna work out the way you want it to. And even if it does, something else will. But it’s– I’m learning to be more okay with or accepting uncertainty, the unknown, and discomfort, and I think that’s a lot of what OCD, like, struggles with in terms of wanting that control, wanting to know, wanting a vision of, like, security in knowledge or whatever the case may be.

Carrie: Yeah, and I can see where perfectionism can really get attached to parenting and wanting to do things right because, oh, there’s some kind of belief that I’m gonna mess up my kid. And what I’ve learned working with a lot of people, a lot of kids, a lot of families, is you can be a really good parent and still mess up a lot, and learn how to make repairs and learn how to do things differently.

And you don’t have to be perfect, ’cause there is no perfect parent. So that’s an impossible standard. So tell us about your OCD therapy journey and what that’s been like for you. What kind of things have you done?

Kathy: Yeah. So a lot of my OCD therapy has been, I did start a little bit with, like, CBT therapy, like cognitive behavioral therapy, and then I had slowly transitioned into fear exposure.

And I know especially with mental compulsions, a little bit harder to, like, expose yourself, those types of things. Because I’m a writer and therapist knows that I’m a writer, too, it’s just been a lot of journaling and considering and reflecting on the what-ifs give me anxiety, and kinda sitting with that and writing about it and reflecting on it and not trying to…

Just being okay with, again, sitting with that discomfort. That has been really helpful for me. And obviously, I’m still on medication. I’m not sure when I will stop, just because I am still in a season wanting to grow my family, and so I’d like to be on the safe side and just continue to keep the medication for now for when that next season comes.

That’s something that has been helpful as well. And if I do find that I have trouble sleeping or things like that, like, I have methods and things that I do to kinda wind me down, whether it’s, like, physically or mentally. So that has been the majority of, like, what my OCD recovery has looked like.

Carrie: Do you feel like you have a different relationship, I guess, with managing stress?

Did you really have to bring in a lot of tools to help you manage, like, physical, emotional stress?

Kathy: Yeah, a lot of stress came from maybe not having clear communication with my husband about expectations of what parenthood will look like, what my role will be, my responsibilities, his role. Truthfully, a lot of it was just, like, having these conversations of just, like…

‘Cause he had his own experience, too, with taking care of me and becoming a parent for the first time and trying to take care of the daughter while taking care of his wife. And so a lot of the stress that we would harbor, we wouldn’t bring to each other, and we would just kinda keep it to ourselves.

We’ve definitely learned to be more open with our stress, even if it’s, like, small, even if it’s, like, little microaggressions or things like that, things that are just, like, bugging us. We’ve learned to just bring it up rather than just hide it, and that has helped a lot with stress. But also, like, physically with stress, I have learned the things that I normally love to do anyway help me a lot with stress.

So I love to color, I love to walk, listen to music, and read, and just kind of, like, engage in those very quiet activities. Um, and that usually grounds me as well. I find that if I’m in my head, I need to be grounded, and so I need to, like, engage physically with something, whether that’s walking or even exercise.

Exercise has been really helpful for me, too.

Carrie: Yeah. No, I think all of those are good things, and it’s important for people to remember that stress exacerbates OCD symptoms. So being able to have just, like, overall coping skills to lower that stress level a little bit. We can’t completely eliminate stress from our lives, right?

But we can– Like you said, I think there’s too many people trying to run at, like, this really high octane, go, go, go, I can do all the things and be Superman, Superwoman, and it’s just not healthy for us physically and emotionally. God didn’t create our bodies to run at that like a cheetah all the time.

Maybe some short sprints, but then we need to come back down and relax, like, is good for– That balance is important for our nervous system. What encouragement would you maybe provide to some other moms? Or we have a lot of women, I think, on the podcast who listen and they want to become a mom. Maybe they’re not married yet, or maybe they’re married, but really kind of trying to figure out, how does this being a mom fit in with my OCD recovery?

What encouragement or support would you give to them?

Kathy: Yeah. So I kinda mentioned a little bit before, but really being okay with uncertainty. And my husband follows this guy named Jocko Willink, and he is an ex-Navy, retired Navy SEAL. And he has this quote that says, “Have a tight ship and loose plans.” We love that, and so we kinda try to abide by that because sometimes we think, “Oh, if I’m okay with uncertainty, then I’m irresponsible.

Life planning, then I’m not– I’m just, like, going on a whim and not really knowing what I’m doing.” And I don’t think that’s necessarily true. And so obviously, you plan as best as you can, and you leave the outcome open, and that is something that I’m learning as a lesson over and over again with every interaction with my daughter.

And so that is one thing, I guess, just an encouragement being accepting the uncertainty of it and knowing that it’s okay. And then also, I think that with postpartum specifically, we focus a lot on the physical support of postpartum, and there’s a lot of humility, we’re involved with, like, getting help with showers and having people bring you meals and getting out of bed and going to the bathroom.

And I think that the humility that we have to, like, ask and need, we don’t even ask. We need the help, right? We need the physical help. I think we should have that same posture with our spiritual healing and our emotional healing as well in postpartum I don’t know, just learn to be a little bit more radically honest with yourself and, like, how you need support and what that looks like for you and not being afraid to voice it, and knowing that other people are probably dealing with the same things.

Or, like, you might hear stories from your in-laws or from your own parents that, “Hey, we had this experience, too.” And then you would’ve had no idea if you hadn’t voiced it. And so I think that there needs to be more of an awareness of, like, taking the time to just sit and, like, and reflecting and meditating on that transition, because it’s a huge transition, especially the first time.

I know as you grow your family, you have different challenges as well, but I do know after talking with a few moms, it’s really the zero to one that they get sticker shock, I feel like. Taking the time to have a support plan. I guess having a plan for what that emotional support will look like for you and having the humility to accept it.

And then I guess when it comes to, like, practical, ’cause I know I love practical things, ’cause it sounds like, “Oh, it’s so nice. Great. What do I do right now?” It was really helpful for me, at least in hindsight and moving forward now, especially being in toddlerhood, thinking about from pregnancy to, like, that first year, just, like, thinking about the first three months and, like, not thinking about anything else.

Like, just focus on short long-term goals of, what do I need to focus on in these next three months to take care of my body, to take care of my mind, prepare for baby, and when baby gets here, what do I need to do for these next three months? ‘Cause it’s nice that the Lord gives us this huge buffer of time between pregnancy and when we have the baby.

And even when we have the baby, to, as they continue to grow, like, it takes so much time for them to, like, develop these new skills and things. And so it’s helpful to just kind of focus on, like, okay, what is one thing I need to do in this season? And everything else can go to the wayside, that’s fine, but, like, I choose to focus on this.

And that was something that I was taught in behavioral center, too. Like, just focusing on, like, if you really have to get down to it, just like, what do I need to do today?

Carrie: It may look like taking a shower, you know?

Kathy: Yes.

Carrie: I’ve gotta figure out how to get a shower today.

Kathy: And that is such a win. It’s not even a luxury.

And then I guess the last thing is, and you mentioned this, too, is just, like, doing what works for your family and, like, not being influenced by other voices, even if it’s voices in your own family or, like, meaning, like, extended family or people that you may know, like, in work or in faith circles, whatever the case may be.

Like, everyone has a different circumstance with how they need to navigate work and feeding and transitions and all the things. And Everyone will have a different opinion. Everyone will do it differently. You just have to do what works for you and your family, and that sounds so cliché, but it’s something I continue to latch onto and cling to whenever I start to question myself like, “Why are we doing this?”

Oh, yeah, ’cause it brings us peace. Like, even if other people don’t think it makes sense or vice versa, like-

Carrie: Everyone’s gonna have an opinion about what you do, especially when it comes to parenting or having children or other things. So you feel more positive kind of next time around, like, that things will go better for you now that you’ve put some of these things into place to help your physical and mental health, and know what you need and how to advocate for what you need, like the support that you need

Kathy: Yeah, I absolutely do.

I feel hopeful. I feel grateful for how I was able to learn these lessons, like dark as that season was for me and for my family. It’s just the Lord definitely brought beauty from ashes, and he just took care of me and ministered to me in the ways that I didn’t even think I needed. It makes me hopeful for how I want to continue to create that space and create that sense of hope in my own home, like now that I’m a mom and now I am a little past that season of life.

And stepping into potentially growing our family as well, like seeing how much I can just enjoy it instead of worry, meditating on how good God is instead of meditating on the worry of like what if, what if, what if.

Carrie: Right. What does recovery look like for you today? Do you find you’re having to journal and sit with those uncertainties a lot less?

Do you find you’re maybe easier able to dismiss certain intrusive thoughts? What does it look like today for you?

Kathy: Yeah, I think I had this unnecessary– Or I, I had this false narrative that like, oh, after I take medication and I’m in therapy, like these intrusive mental compulsion– or like mental compulsions, intrusive thoughts, they will go away entirely.

And for me, that has not been the case. And so I think it’s been more of a sense of noticing quicker as opposed to it happening less. If I start to hear things in my head, I know whether it’s something that I can actually trust or if it’s based in truth, or if it’s something that OCD is trying to like distract me from.

And so if I do find myself having those thoughts, I’ll know, “Hey, honey, like I need a, a second just to journal a little bit,” or, “I’m gonna go take a walk,” or like, “I’m gonna work out for a little bit.” Like I know how to advocate for when I need to like ground myself a little bit again. So I think a lot of practicing communication for like what I need and how I need to just kinda deal with when those things pop up, and they do, truthfully.

And being okay with knowing that like they won’t necessarily like stop, at least for me. It’s not one of those things. It’s something like being okay with how the Lord made me instead of trying to fight it, but trying to work with it.

Carrie: No, I think that’s great, and I think it just shows like you can have a certain level of peace without having to completely eliminate all these thoughts.

And I think that’s good for people to hear and to know.

Kathy: Yeah, absolutely.

Carrie: Yeah. Thanks so much for being brave and sharing your story today.

Kathy: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me, and I’m just so grateful to-

Carrie: I really appreciate Cathy’s vulnerability in this episode. While no one wants to go to an inpatient treatment center for their mental health, if that’s what you’re needing at the time, there shouldn’t be any shame in getting that type of help.

So I think it’s, uh, really important for us to reduce the stigma and the shame surrounding going to inpatient treatment, whether it’s for OCD or for other mental health conditions. And there may be a time where you don’t need inpatient treatment, but you need some type of more intensive treatment, like an intensive outpatient program where you go for a few hours a day, several days a week, or you attend online, depending on the program.

These types of programs can be really helpful if you’re having a hard time functioning in your day-to-day life. I think there has been some confusion surrounding my intensive therapy services and the type of person that’s for. And sometimes we have people who are reaching out who really need more of a hospital setting or an intensive outpatient setting.

Just know that if I feel like that’s what you’re needing, that’s the services I’m gonna direct you towards. And people who would benefit from, like, an intensive therapy retreat-type setting typically have some type of base-level coping skills. They have some ability to regulate emotions when they come up.

They’ve either been to therapy before or done some significant self-help work on their own. They kind of have a certain level of awareness and motivation towards treatment. So I wanted to say a little bit about that just to provide some distinction for those of you maybe who have seen the intensive services on my website.

They’re not meant to be a replacement for intensive outpatient care, but more so for people who have been in treatment a while and just feel stuck. Maybe you’ve done some workbooks, self-help, done a little bit of individual therapy that maybe wasn’t fully effective. So if that’s you or you’re not sure if it’s you, feel free to check out the intensive therapy retreat services on the website at CarrieBock.com, and you can always send us a contact form as well.

230. Handling OCD Flare Ups with ICBT: A Personal Story with Rachael Kelley

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

In this episode, Carrie sits down with Rachael Kelley, a Christian writer and former Empowered Mind student, to discuss navigating OCD flare-ups, overcoming scrupulosity, and learning to trust God’s love throughout the recovery journey. 

Episode Highlights:

  • How Rachael Kelley learned to navigate OCD flare-ups without viewing them as failures in recovery.
  • The primary obsessional doubt that was driving many of her scrupulosity fears.
  • Why OCD often disguises itself as spiritual conviction and how to recognize the difference.
  • The ICBT strategies that helped her challenge intrusive thoughts and obsessional reasoning.
  • How learning to tolerate uncertainty strengthened both her recovery and her faith.
  • Practical tools, support systems, and mindset shifts that continue helping her move forward when OCD resurfaces.

Episode Summary:

The Recovery Truth Most Christians With OCD Don’t Expect

What if one of the biggest signs of growth isn’t the absence of OCD, but how you respond when it comes back? Many Christians begin recovery hoping for a day when intrusive thoughts completely disappear, only to find themselves discouraged when symptoms resurface. In this episode, Rachael Kelley, Christian writer, OCD advocate, and former Empowered Mind: Christian ICBT for OCD student, shares her honest journey through scrupulosity OCD, relationship OCD, and one of the most difficult seasons of her recovery. 

Why Do OCD Flare-Ups Happen Even After Significant Progress?

Many people assume that once they’ve found the right treatment or recovery tools, OCD should stop showing up altogether. Rachael shares what happened when intrusive thoughts returned after significant progress and how those moments challenged everything she thought recovery was supposed to look like. Instead of signaling failure, these flare-ups revealed something unexpected about the healing process that continues to shape her journey today.

How Can Christians Tell the Difference Between God’s Voice and OCD?

One of the most painful struggles of scrupulosity OCD is the fear that intrusive thoughts might actually be God trying to get your attention. Rachael opens up about how this fear kept her trapped for years and why learning to recognize the difference became a turning point in her recovery. She shares a framework that helped her begin separating anxiety-driven messages from the character and nature of God.

What Is the Hidden Fear Driving So Many Scrupulosity Obsessions?

On the surface, OCD can appear to be about dozens of different concerns, from theology and morality to relationships and decision-making. But what if those obsessions are all connected by a deeper fear? Rachael shares the primary obsessional doubt she uncovered through ICBT and why identifying that root issue changed the way she approached recovery.

Can Your Brain Really Change After Years of OCD?

When OCD feels relentless, it can be hard to imagine life looking any different. Rachael describes a season when anxiety became so overwhelming that she questioned whether she could continue functioning normally. What happened next wasn’t an overnight transformation, but a series of changes that gradually shifted her relationship with intrusive thoughts and helped her find hope again.

Why Does Uncertainty Feel So Intolerable With OCD?

Whether it’s a major life decision, a theological question, or a new relationship, uncertainty often becomes fertile ground for OCD. Rachael shares why the search for certainty kept pulling her deeper into anxiety and what she learned about moving forward when answers aren’t available. Her perspective may challenge the way many Christians think about faith, trust, and control.

How Can ICBT Help You Break Free From OCD’s Reasoning Traps?

One of the most powerful parts of Rachael’s story is learning how OCD convinced her to distrust what was right in front of her. Through concepts like primary obsessional doubt, sense data, and obsessional reasoning, she began recognizing patterns she had never seen before. These insights didn’t eliminate every struggle, but they completely changed how she responded when OCD tried to pull her back into old cycles.

What Happens When You Stop Chasing Perfect Recovery?

For many people with OCD, perfectionism quietly follows them into the recovery process. Rachael shares how letting go of the expectation of perfect healing opened the door to something far more sustainable. 

Rachael also shares the surprising realization that helped her navigate future flare-ups, the practical email inbox analogy she uses to sort intrusive thoughts without getting stuck in them, and the encouragement she wishes someone had given her during her darkest season. If you’ve ever wondered whether recovery is still possible when OCD keeps showing up, this conversation offers hope, perspective, and a powerful reminder that setbacks don’t have the final word.

Connect with Rachael:

www.instagram.com/rachael.anne.writes

rachaelannewrites.substack.com

rachaelannewrites.substack.com/p/the-ultimate-resource-guide-for-christians

Transcript

Carrie: Today we are returning with our summer personal story series, and I have with me today Rachael Kelley, who was one of our Christians Learning ICBT students, that we have rebranded that course to Empowered Mind Christian ICBT for OCD. I’m excited to hear from her since it’s been a little while since she’s taken the course and just kind of has had a little bit of time to practice, and we’re talking about those times where OCD flares up today and how to continue practicing skills that you’ve already learned.

Carrie: I know this is gonna be relevant for many of you as you’re on your recovery journey.

Welcome, OCD warriors, to the Christian Faith and OCD podcast, where we are all about reducing shame and stigma of struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories, and replacing uncertainty with faith as you develop practical tools for greater peace.Carrie: I’m Carrie Bock, Christ follower, wife, mom, and licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. I pray you are blessed by today’s episode

Welcome, Rachael. Glad to have you here today.

Rachael: Thanks. I’m glad to be here.

Carrie: Yeah. How did you discover that you were dealing with scrupulosity OCD? How did that come about?

Rachael: Really, when I look back at my childhood, I can see kind of patterns of OCD popping up, but it wasn’t really until I was in college that it really manifested itself as relationship OCD to start. A couple years after that, I was dealing with a particular string of intrusive thoughts that led me down a research rabbit hole, and eventually to a Reddit forum that made me realize, like, “Oh, this might be OCD that I’m dealing with.”

Rachael: I’ve been a Christian my whole life, but my faith has really become more and more important to me over the past couple years. And as that was growing, the scrupulosity also started growing. It seemed like the more I cared about doing the right thing in a Christian sense, the more my OCD was latching onto that and twisting it.

Carrie: That’s frustrating, right?

Rachael: Yeah, definitely. I had a friend who I met with super early on in the process of, like, learning that I had OCD too. Just that initial dose of empathy was really helpful, like, okay, somebody else gets it. And from there I kinda started doing my own research, which eventually led me to finding this podcast, which was just about four years ago now that I first stumbled upon it.

Carrie: Awesome. You’ve been around a little while then. People have different thoughts about OCD recovery. I think initially they’ll come and say, “Okay, I just never wanna have another intrusive thought ever again,” and we have to educate people. Everyone has intrusive thoughts, even people that don’t have OCD. How has your perspective on, like, healing and OCD recovery changed from maybe where you were in the beginning?

Rachael: That’s a good question. Actually, like a long time ago, probably like a year or two after I had listened to the podcast, I remember, and I don’t know if you remember this, but I had, like, sent you a Facebook message or something, and I was like, “Hey,” like, “thanks so much for just what you’re doing for this community.

Rachael: It’s awesome.” And then you had said something like, “Well, we’re always looking for people to share their story on the podcast if you’re interested.” At the time I was like, “I don’t think I’m at a place where I can go on that podcast and be like, ‘Look at what I’ve learned,'” ’cause I was really just in the thick of it still.

Rachael: And so I kind of over time formulated this goal of like, okay, one day I’m gonna reach this point of healing where I feel good enough and, like, perfect enough to go on the podcast and be like, “All right, guys, you can make it through, like everyone else made it through to this perfect healing state, and now I’m there, too.”

Rachael: So that has definitely adjusted. Over the past, like, six months or so, like there’s been growth throughout the whole journey, but definitely the most healing has happened over the past six months, and that’s thanks in combination to getting on a good medicine And at the same time taking the ICBT course with you.

Rachael: But even since then, I’ve experienced the whole healing is not a linear journey thing that people say. I’ve had plenty of flare-ups along the way, especially if there’s, like, something new happening or a change, or I have to make an important decision. Yeah, things can really flare up for me. But with the new tools I was learning, God has, like, given me The grace to start getting back to this new normal that I now get to live from.

Rachael: Yeah, such a blessing, and probably something I now take for granted. But now when I go through flare-ups, I get frustrated, but I also trust that it’s gonna pass, ’cause, like, if God got me through all those other ones, then He’s gonna get me through this next one, too. Now, coming on the podcast, I don’t feel like I have reached that 100% healed state.

Rachael: I don’t think I’m gonna get there, or any of us will get there until we get to heaven or the new creation. But I think it’s important for people to know that even if they still feel like they’re in the middle of this healing process, which all of us are, that struggling with their OCD doesn’t mean you’re failing.

Rachael: God is really teaching us something different each stage of the journey, and there’s no rush to achieve a certain level of healing by any particular point. We can do what we can, but we just gotta trust His sovereignty. Just trust that there’s still gonna be growth happening, even if we can’t feel it, and we can still pursue our values and still live meaningful lives even when we are struggling with OCD.

Carrie: Yeah. Was that a hard acceptance to come to you of, like, “Okay, sounds like I can still live a good life even though there are gonna be some of these mental health struggles that pop up from time to time”?

Rachael: I think it took me a while to get there, and probably, like, something I would still struggle with, ’cause I feel like a lot of people that have OCD are also either perfectionists or have some control issues in some way.

Rachael: So I definitely spend a lot of time being like, “All right,” like, “it’s not just quite right. Like, if I could just obsess a little bit less, it would be perfect, and then I would be better.” So I still have to check myself in that area sometimes. But I think my overall mindset towards it has shifted, and I’m like, “Okay, like, I’m at a livable level.

Rachael: I can get through the day. I can connect with people.” Not every minute is fun. Sometimes I’m struggling, especially during lunch, for some reason. I don’t know if it’s ’cause I, like, take a break from work, and now my mind is wandering.

Carrie: Free space to think.

Rachael: Yeah. But I think it’s just normal to go through those ebbs and flows.

And kind of releasing the control of, like, it has to be perfect all the time, it’s been helpful.

Carrie: Where were you at before you took the ICBT course? Like, what was going on that you said, “You know what? I need a little bit of extra help or support at this point in my life”?

Rachael: Over those few years after I realized I had OCD and, like, deciding to take the course, I had tried a lot of different things.

I was working, and I still work with a Christian counselor, but she’s not trained in OCD. So we had tried some things like EMDR that didn’t quite touch on the OCD, but it was helping with other things. So I would do a lot of stuff on my own. I would try ERP things on my own. I would do different workbooks.

I had tried getting healing prayer, just, like, asking God, “Heal me, strengthen me.” And I had even tried an ICBT workbook on my own, like, earlier last year. So I took the course in the fall, and sometime in, like, the spring or summer- I had tried, what’s the guy’s name that developed OCD?

Carrie: Dr. Ardema.

Rachael: Yeah, I had his workbooks, and I made it through the first one, and then the second one is very dense and overwhelmed.

Carrie: You were like, “What in the world is he talking about right here?” Yeah. Number two has a lot of meat in there

Rachael: Yeah, during the summer last year, I was hitting really, like, a rock bottom point. My OCD was so flared up that it felt like everything I looked at was just triggering an obsession. That might be a hyperbole, but that’s what it felt like in my brain.

There was a point where I was obsessing a lot about my job, and I was afraid, like, am I gonna be able to, like, keep functioning and keep working, or is this OCD gonna, like, make me so that I can’t even work? And I ended up being able to stay at work, and I didn’t drop out or anything, but it was right around then where I decided to take the course.

I had to prove to myself, like, okay, can I make it through another week of work? And if so, then I will take this course. If not, then do I need to go to, like, get more extreme treatment somewhere? I don’t know.

Carrie: Wow. So you were on the verge of, “I might need to go somewhere and get residential or intensive outpatient-type treatment.”

Rachael: Yeah, there was one day that was especially bad where I was like, “Oh, my gosh, is this where I’m headed?” Luckily, that wasn’t the case. God was able to get me through that day, and then got through the rest of the week, and I feel like that was a turning point where I was really like, “Okay, I cannot keep listening to this voice of OCD.”

Like, I have to be like, “No, I’m not gonna listen to you because it was just destroying me from the inside out.” So that was kind of this turning point, and then when I felt that little bit of strength again, like, okay, I can make it through a work week, I think this course is the next right step. So I decided to take the course, to invest in that.

Rachael: There were so many things that helped me through it. I feel like I recommend it to everybody now because.

Carrie: Aw that’s sweet …

Rachael: yeah, there were just so many, like, aha moments throughout. It really breaks down OCD and helps you understand it a lot better, like how does it work. And I was kinda glad too that I had done some of the resolving OCD workbook beforehand ’cause it felt like, okay, I’m, like, getting a review of these things I was learning now.

But now from having that Christian perspective as well was really helpful, so I felt like that really grounded me. Overall, it was a really good experience. I remember every Monday afternoon, it felt the little safe haven where I was like, okay, now I’m gonna have somebody that understands me, speaking life, and, like, helping me not feel my brain is beyond repair.

Carrie: Yeah. I think the hope piece is so huge. Like, that’s one of the reasons that we’re here. Whether people take the course or not, just them being able to have hope that they can get better, have a different relationship, you know, with their OCD is, is really important and really huge for people to hear, regardless of how bad it feels right now.

Carrie: Tell us about some of the things that you learned that stood out to you in terms of ICBT, learning about primary obsessional doubt, those types of things.

Rachael: Yeah. I feel like, I mean, so many things from it stuck out to me, but the primary obsessional doubt was one of them. Also, the idea of, like, sense data So basically checking if an obsession is based on sense data is, okay, is this obsession grounded in reality or is it coming from the imagination?

And that’s a really good litmus test to see if something is OCD or not. The primary obsessional doubt was really eye-opening. Just like the idea that all of our obsessions, or at least you could have a couple different primary doubts. Is that right?

Carrie: Yeah. I mean, I think you can, but in terms of scrupulosity, you want to really…

Carrie: Like, it can just go in so many different directions and have you stuck on a particular scripture verse or stuck on a particular obsession over here, and you can get lost in the weeds, and you never really actually get to the root of what the doubt actually is, if that makes sense.

Rachael: Once I kind of thought about that with your help, I think we had an email exchange, and you were like, “Hey, don’t get distracted by all these obsessions and where they’re taking you.

Like, look at what is the thing that is connecting them all. What is the root of all this?” And for me, I learned that was the obsession that if I do the wrong thing, God is gonna stop loving me, and this is, like, nowhere in the Bible does it say that. But in my brain, for some reason, that’s what I was afraid of.

So I had a lot of obsessions targeted around, like, okay, is this thing sinful or not? Can I watch this movie? Can I read this book? Can I listen to this certain pastor? Can I be friends with this person? Just really being distressed by the idea of I have to make sure I’m not sinning, or else I’ll lose God’s love.

Rachael: When I’m outside of that OCD head space, and I look at that, I’m like, no, scripture says that God, no one can snatch me out of His hand, and He loved me when I was still His enemy, so, like, why would He stop loving me now? But when you’re in the head space of that, it just seems totally legit that, oh, yeah, what if God doesn’t love me?

Or, like, what if He stops because of something I’ve done?

Carrie: Yeah, and it kinda goes to the obsessional reasoning process that the first step is that you distrust the sense data. I think sometimes that’s distrusting the scriptures, and, like, for Christians, well, I don’t know if that really applies to me ’cause OCD will tell you, like, “Yeah, that’s for other people,” or, “I don’t think that really applies to you or what you’re dealing with.”

Carrie: Yeah, like, feeling disconnected from God’s love or heard that from other people as well. But I think obsessions that you’re talking about, about decision-making and morality and sinning and not sinning are very common for a lot of different Christians. So really targeting that, and then what was it like for you when you went into, like, your alternative narrative, and you were able to utilize some of those scriptures?

Carrie: Did that help you, you know, through that process?

Rachael: Yeah. The alternative narrative was really powerful for me. Basically, and correct me if I’m wrong about any of this, but the alternative narrative is kind of presenting, like it seems, an alternative story that you can tell yourself versus this obsessional story that OCD has been telling you.

Rachael: OCD, like, takes all of these facts, or things or facts, and weaves together this narrative and then tells you this story of, like, “This must be true.” But then the alternative narrative kind of presents this other option of, like, “Hey, but what if this is true?” And so for me, developing the alternative narrative, I really wanted to focus it around that primary obsessional doubt and, like, refute what it was saying.

Rachael: So I wrote this really long thing in my notes app that was, like, basically just a bunch of statements and affirmations, and each one was backed by a verse from scripture. And over the course of one or two months, I would read it every morning, and it would reaffirm truths like, I can’t lose God’s love.

God loves me like a father. My attachment to him is this secure attachment, things like that. It was really helpful, I think, and now I have alternative narrative version two that’s, like, targeted at other things that I’m struggling with right now.

Carrie: Okay.

Rachael: One thing that I think is important to note about the alternative narrative, too, is to not use it when your OCD is really flared up, because then it could just become another reassurance compulsion of like, “Oh man, I’m anxious.

Let me read this thing to convince myself that I’m really okay.” So taking the time to engage with it when your OCD is quieter, like, hopefully you do have a moment like that and can engage with that. I think that can help your brain kind of rewrite those beliefs in a healthier way, rather than, like, the compulsive, “My gosh, I need to think a different way.”

And a kind of example of that change happening, I remember near the end of last summer, there was a month or two where things were– when I was really in the thick of it, every morning I would wake up an hour and a half before my alarm, and the obsession of the day would pop into my head, and I wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep, and I would just be flipping around, thinking about whatever it was, and eventually I’d have to get up and go to work, where I was also obsessing about what I was doing all day.

But over time, as the medication started to kick in, as I was taking the course, as I was reading this alternative narrative to myself, things gradually started to change. I started to notice, like, “Oh, I’m falling back asleep again. I’m not staying up from four to five thirty AM.” Then I had been, like, waking up with this pit in my stomach every day, and then that kinda stopped happening.

And then all of a sudden, I started waking up, and I would lay in bed, and I would just be like, “Wow, I’m really loved by God. That’s so awesome.” It was just, like, this complete reversal of what had been happening, and so much so that I’m like, “Okay, only God can do that.” It hasn’t been, like, all up and to the right since then.

Like, I don’t wake up every morning just, like, overjoyed about my salvation. Sometimes it feels a little more neutral. Like, sometimes I still get worried about things. But it’s just a testament to, like, your brain can change. Even if your OCD is flaring up, even if you’ve been stuck in this pit for a long time, and it feels like it’s gonna last forever, God can change your brain, and He can help you get through that.

Carrie: That’s huge. I think a lot of people look at this as, well, it’s a neurobiological disorder. It has some genetic ties. Maybe some people, they’re like, “Well, you know, my grandmother had it, and my mom had it, and my brother has it,” so forth, and they can look at that and feel hopeless, like, “Oh, well, I’m just kind of, like, destined to have OCD.”

Like, what you’re saying is, like, there is help, and there is treatment. You know, there are medications that can be helpful for people, and there are tools and strategies that you can learn and different ways to interact with the OCD. So I think all of that is really beautiful, and just coming to this understanding of “God loves me,” I mean, that’s huge because so many people with OCD, Christians, just feel bad or sinful, or God doesn’t love them, God’s disappointed in them, God’s angry with them, whatever.

Carrie: Fill in the blank. And these beliefs are shaped by a variety of different things, whether it’s parents, past teachings, OCD, and believing OCD’s voice is God. And that’s kinda one thing that you’ve struggled with in the past. How have you been able to differentiate that this is OCD versus this is God?

Rachael: Yeah. That was one thing that I think kept me trapped for a really long time because I would think that, what if God is speaking to me through my OCD? So I would hear this voice in my mind being like, “Oh, don’t watch that movie. Like, what if it’s sinful?” Or, “What if this pastor is gonna lead me astray?” Something like that.

Of course, like, I wanna be obedient to God, so it puts a lot of pressure on, like, “My gosh, am I supposed to be following this voice now?” Whatever decision I make, it just felt super anxiety-driven, and I can’t mess up. And there were a couple things that really helped me break out from that, and, like, that is still something I struggle with all the time when OCD flares up.

It is just so convincing when you’re in that head space, and you’re just like, “Okay, but what if this time it’s God?” And, like, you have to go through the whole process again, be like, “I know that’s not God.” There’s actually some people, like, that I’ve told in my life that I’m like, “Hey, when I’m in the OCD head space, I might reach out to you and be like, ‘Please tell me not to listen to my brain right now, because it’s just being irrational.'”

So having that support system is really, really helpful. One thing that was helpful, I remember on a podcast, I think, you just saying multiple times, like, God does not speak through OCD. Maybe He’s gonna sovereignly use your OCD to teach you something or, like, I don’t know, build your trust in Him, but the voice of OCD is a voice of confusion and condemnation, and that is not what God sounds like.

Rachael: I don’t know if I’m saying his last name right, but Michael Kear’s book that I was introduced to because of this podcast, that was really helpful, too. He has a really great chapter in his book, Waging War against OCD, that was really helpful, just differentiating between, “Here’s what OCD sounds like.

Here’s what the Spirit sounds like.” So he used verses 1 Corinthians 13:4-8, Galatians 5:22-23, that’s, like, fruit of the Spirit passage, and then James 3:17 to present examples of, like, “Here’s what the Spirit sounds like. He’s loving, He’s kind, He’s full of joy and peace and patience, and He’s reasonable and full of mercy and good fruit.”

So you look at all that, and you can get this picture of, like, “Okay, this is what God sounds like.” And then you look at OCD, and it’s, like, a completely different story. It’s urgent rather than patient. It’s condemning rather than gracious. It’s confusing rather than bringing clarity. So there is a really stark difference between just the mess and the chaos that OCD creates versus when I feel like it’s God convicting me of something, it’s always this gentle nudge that’s very clear, like, “Hey, this might actually be a good way to move in this direction.”

Whereas OCD is like, “What if I need to do it this way?” So I think of in John 10 when Jesus talks about His sheep knowing His voice, I think that is part of our challenge as Christians with OCD is to learn what does His voice sound like versus what do all these other voices, including this really loud voice of OCD, sound like.

And it’s gonna take a lot of mindfulness and patience and practice on our part to learn that difference, but I think that He equips us and helps us get there.

Carrie: Yeah. You mentioned mindfulness. There are some mindfulness, like, integrations into the course, and we’ve kinda added a little bit more in there too.

How was that helpful for you in that process, or did you find it helpful, some of those exercises of just really, like, being still and paying attention to what’s going on right now?

Rachael: Yeah, I think different mindfulness practices have been helpful for me at different times. I think just, like, in general, cultivating this awareness of what’s going on in my head, and sometimes I might be a little too focused on it.

Like, every thought I’m like, “Oh, I’m thinking this. Oh, I’m thinking this.” But just in whatever way helps a person get there, just being aware of– I’ve heard it said, like, “Paying attention to what you’re paying attention to.” What are the thoughts that are coming through your head? And yeah, whether it’s some kind of contemplative prayer practice where you’re sitting there focusing on a word or an image that brings you back to God, and then just noticing when those other thoughts pop up and kind of letting them go to the side.

A lot of times I’ll picture, like, a river in my mind, and I’ll see this thought kind of pop up. Sometimes it’s like this weird, like, cloud kinda shape in my mind. For some reason, when I let my thoughts go away, it always goes to the right. I don’t know why, but I just imagine the thought just kind of floating away to the right, and I imagine that God’s hands are there at the end of the river, like, waiting to catch the thought, kind of giving it over to Him.

That’s been helpful.

Carrie: But it separates I’m having a thought versus I am this thought, which is really huge for OCD too, because people make all kinds of meanings. “Oh, I had this thought and therefore it’s me, and it must mean, like, something bad about me because I had this intrusion. I must really want to do this awful thing that I had an intrusive thought about,” versus what you’re talking about, kind of a, we call it thought diffusion.

Carrie: It’s like just noticing and, like, allowing the thought to kinda go by in whatever. There’s different imagery that people can use for that, like thoughts on a cloud, that type of thing, thoughts on the river. So, you’re letting it go by, and then it, it just creates a little healthy separation I think, which is very helpful.

Carrie: I find that when people have been dealing with OCD for a long time and they’re really getting sucked into that OCD bubble very easily and very quickly, the mindfulness helps them be able to slow down to notice that process so that it doesn’t happen so fast. I also wanted to rewind a little bit and touch on your support systems.

I think that’s great, and I think that we all need people in our life to tell us, like, “Don’t listen to your brain right now.” Like, I think my husband definitely has done that for me in the past. Like, “You’re not thinking clearly. Like, okay? So maybe go to sleep, go take a bubble bath, relax, do something different, because maybe you’ll see this with a different set of eyes later, different clarity.”

I think that we all need that. And so I love how essentially you kinda trained your support system, right, of how to respond to you.

Rachael: Yeah, I think with OCD and, like, really any mental health condition or really anything you’re going through, people don’t always know what you need, or sometimes they have that natural instinct and they know exactly what you need.

Rachael: But most people cannot read minds. And especially if you struggle with reassurance-seeking as a form of a compulsion, you can tell people in your life, like, “Hey, if you notice me coming to you with a bunch of questions that I’ve already asked before, and it seems like I’m just trying to get reassurance, please tell me, ‘Hey, let’s not give into this compulsion.

Like, we can talk about this maybe when your brain is out of this state. But because I love you, I’m not gonna answer this question right now. I’m gonna let you sit in this uncertainty.'” But yeah, kind of guiding people in how to best support you, and then hopefully too, you can learn how to best support them as well, and you can just be that for each other.

Carrie: Yeah. That’s great. So tell us about your email inbox analogy, like when it comes to sorting through your thoughts.

Rachael: So yeah, this is something that I had kind of thought about it, and then during our pre-interview, it really, like, solidified itself. So it’s kind of this idea, so if you picture your brain as this email inbox, there’s thoughts, messages coming in all day, and your job is to effectively sort through them.

Rachael: The first step is building this awareness of what does OCD sound like, what does God sound like? Sometimes you’re not always sure, but it’s a good place to start as you start to build that awareness and almost, like, building this filter that is gonna take any thought that sounds like it could be OCD and put a little flag on it of, like, all right, this sounds like it might be OCD.

Rachael: So step two is figuring out, okay, what do I do with it now? ‘Cause I don’t want it to just sit here in my inbox all day, or, like, it’s just gonna keep sending me the same message over and over. When this new message comes in, it gets flagged with, “This might be OCD.” So I can ask myself then, okay, do I have sense data to support this?

Rachael: Is this a thought that’s grounded in reality, what they call an everyday doubt? So an example would be, like, I’m sitting in my apartment, I smell smoke, and I think, “What if something in the oven is on fire?” That is a thought and a doubt that can be easily resolved by walking over to my oven, opening it- Looking inside, is there food burning?

Rachael: No. Okay, doubt is resolved. But sometimes, if the doubt is something completely different, like, “Oh my gosh, what if my boyfriend isn’t the one for me? Like, how do I know if he’s the right person?” That is not a thought that can be resolved in a matter of checking one time and resolving it. That would be more of an obsessional thought.

Rachael: So if you find out that this thought is based in the imagination rather than on reality, then it goes into either the spam folder or you put a label on it that’s, “Not right now,” or, “I’ll deal with this later.” If it’s OCD and it’s just completely irrelevant to the moment and it’s not anything that you need to resolve at any point, it’s just straight to spam.

Rachael: You just think of it, if you have your little mental river or your sky full of clouds, you just watch that float away. Every time it comes up, you just practice it over and over again. But if it is something, like for example, something I’ve obsessed about a lot is theological ideas or, like, controversial beliefs, that kind of thing, and even if it’s irrelevant in the moment, like say I’m at work and I suddenly think about some controversial topic, it’s not relevant to what I’m doing at that moment, but it is something that maybe I do wanna look at and get a better understanding of.

Rachael: So that’s where I would apply that, “All right, not right now,” tag. It forces my brain to take a pause, to not instantly Google something and get that reassurance. And making yourself wait can be really painful, so that’s another way my support system has come in handy. Like, there was a stretch of time where I just kept wanting to Google things while I was at work, so text my friends and be like, “Hey, this is my accountability text.

Rachael: I’m not gonna Google anything until I get home. Just sending that there.” And then having that extra level of accountability was helpful. When your brain does return to a clear-headed state, you can kind of revisit it and be like, “All right, is this a topic that I want to do a little bit of research on?” Or maybe now I’m like, “Eh, that’s not really important.

Rachael: I’ll just let it go.” And just know, like, if you do end up doing research, setting some kind of time boundary or something like that is helpful, or just being aware if you do start to kind of dip into obsessive territory again, like, just backing up a little bit. But it is important, I think, to, like in the topic of theological issues, like, I don’t know, I could just be like, “Oh yeah, that’s OCD.

Rachael: I’m not gonna worry about it,” and then I never look it up, so I, I have no idea what the different perspectives are or something. I don’t wanna live in ignorance. But I also don’t wanna give into that compulsive research thing, ’cause that’s not healthy and not beneficial for me or anybody.

Carrie: What do some of these things in Revelation mean?

Carrie: Like, that’s what you’re talking about. Like, I would hate to say it’s not important that because it’s in the Bible, like, there’s a reason that it’s there. It’s not that it’s not important. Is it earth-shattering and gonna affect us today? No. Should we probably look at, try to examine the scriptures and examine some different beliefs about what it means?

Carrie: Will we be able to absolutely prove it with 100% certainty? No. Like, those are really challenging areas, what you’re talking about. But I like what you said about the time limit and noticing, like, when it’s becoming obsessional, because I think you could start researching something that’s valid that you wanna have more information about, but then OCD says, “No, you have to resolve this with, like, 100% certainty.”

Carrie: And you have to say, like, “No, there are, like, people that are way smarter than me that have, have, like, theology degrees, and they don’t agree on what this scripture passage means.” And so I am gonna have to wrestle with that and say, “Hey, here’s where I land today,” and move forward or to say, “You know what? I just don’t know, and that’s okay.

Carrie: I don’t know.”

Rachael: Yeah. I was actually talking with somebody yesterday about my OCD, and I described it as a blessing and a curse, but usually a curse of having OCD And they ask me, like, “How is it a blessing?” I feel like having OCD has really challenged me to trust God in those gray areas, in those uncertainties.

Rachael: Like, the passages in scripture that I’m like, “I can’t understand this in this life, in this finite human body. I can’t make my brain understand this.” And we’re not meant to understand everything. Having OCD has forced me to be like, “Okay, I can’t know everything. I can look into things if I want to, but some things I just have to be like, ‘I don’t know.

Rachael: I just have to trust you on this, God.'” And so getting more comfortable with that uncertainty has been a big part of my story, and I think helped me develop more of a reliance on God for the things that I don’t know.

Carrie: We wanted to talk a little bit about the flare-ups that you’ve had since learning the ICBT skills, kind of like how you work through that.

Carrie: Is stress involved? You said there’s some newness or different things. And tell us a little bit about how that’s shown up and how you’ve kind of dealt with that.

Rachael: Yeah, I think flare-ups can happen for a number of reasons. I’ve noticed sometimes it’s just, like, one intrusive thought that I start to consider as, “Oh, what if that is actually God talking?”

And once I consider, like, maybe it’s relevant, it just, like, opens the floodgates for me. So many things I’ve obsessed about in the past suddenly, “Oh, my gosh, what if that, and what if that?” Sometimes it’s just like, okay, there’s that little chink in the armor that it wiggles its way through. But sometimes I think our circumstances can also cause OCD to flare up, or at least have, present the ground on which the weed of OCD can grow more easily.

I think figuring out what that is for you, a lot of times, I think it can be stress. Or for me, like I mentioned, if I have a big decision to make, if there’s a big change happening. With decisions, sometimes I can get really obsessive about, “How do I know I’m making the right choice in God’s eyes? What if He’s telling me to do this?

What if He’s telling me to do that?” Also, situations where there are just a lot of natural uncertainties, like if you’re dating somebody new, you don’t know how it’s gonna work out. There’s a lot of things you don’t know about them, and those aren’t things you can’t know right away, so that’s just the perfect framework for OCD to kinda latch on and be like, “All right, let’s try to figure all of this out without having any information.”

So I think just recognizing, like, when you’re in a season that could cause flare-ups can help you kind of prepare and give yourself a bit of extra grace. And even today, as I was thinking about this podcast, like, I was on my lunch walk. Sometimes with things like this, I’m like, “Okay, I need to make sure my brain is in a perfectly clear state when I’m doing this podcast or when I’m talking to this person or whatever, because I don’t want OCD to interrupt it.”

Rachael: So I knew I’d probably, little obsessions were gonna come in, and they did. And each time I was like, “Okay, yeah, I kinda figured I would obsess about that, but we’re just gonna push it aside.” Kind of being aware, being prepared, not being scared of like, “Oh, my gosh, when is the next obsession gonna come at me?”

Just being okay with being human and being like, “Yeah, God, I’m not perfect. I’m gonna go through these flare-ups.” Like, it’s not gonna be this perfect experience of like, I don’t know, I have fewer and fewer obsessions every day until one day I have none. It’s gonna be like this really bumpy journey most likely.

Carrie: Yeah, and for females too, sometimes hormones can be involved certain times of the month or pregnancy or postpartum, perimenopause. I mean, we just go through so many things as women with our hormones. And so just to kind of, like you said, have grace and self-compassion at times for yourself. There may be times where I’m just like a snotty mess and somebody’s like, “Why are you crying?”

I’m just like, “Just hit me at the wrong time of the month.” If I wanna go there with that person, it’s like I probably wouldn’t react this way at a different time, but right now it’s like really the most depressing thing for whatever reason.

Rachael: Yeah. That’s a really great point. And yeah, something that I think has helped me get through flare-ups a little quicker is just recognizing they’re gonna happen.

I don’t have to beat myself up. Last year, like I used to really just, the self-condemnation was so intense. Like, “Ugh, how could I be here again?” Like, “I should know better.” Instead, I find my brain nowadays being more like, “Okay, we’re here again. God has got me through it before. He’s gonna get me through it again.

God, I need your help again, please.” But not having this picture of God as like… I mean, it’s hard and it goes back to like- How do you view God, and how do you think He views you? Because if you’re viewing God as this very harsh figure, then of course, if you’re struggling again, you’re gonna see Him as like, “Oh, I can’t believe you’re here again.”

But if He’s this loving, compassionate father that is sovereignly, He knows everything we’re gonna go through, He has orchestrated our entire lives, why would He look at me when I’m struggling and be like, “Shame on you”? Like, no, He’s like… Well, I mean, I don’t know what He’s actually thinking, but now lean more towards the way of He wants to help me.

He is looking at me with love. He wants to give me. There’s that verse in Isaiah, I think 41, when he’s talking to the Israelites at this point, I think, but he’s like, “I will strengthen you. I will help you. I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.” I’d like to think that He wants to do the same for us.

He wants to strengthen us and help us. He wants us to rely on Him and depend on Him. He is on our side. He’s for us, and if God is for us, then who can be against us? So just understanding that God’s not our enemy.

Carrie: Yeah. We have the Holy Spirit intercedes for us. We don’t even know how to pray, basically, is what the Bible says.

And when we– when we’re a mess, and we don’t know how to pray, the Holy Spirit intercedes for us. He just kind of translates the mess for what we really need in that moment. And I think just, like you said, God being a loving Father and being for our good and wanting to see us be in a place of where we can go to Him with things, where you’re not scared of God to go to Him for things.

Carrie: Just kinda like I wouldn’t want my kid to be scared to, like, ask me for something or be scared that they’re gonna mess up so that… Or scared all the time of, like, punishment, those types of things. Is there anything else that you wanna share before we wrap up and talk about your Substack?

Rachael: I just kind of wanted to end by saying, like, how grateful I am for this podcast and just the OCD Christian community in general.

I feel like, yeah, Substack has allowed me to connect with a lot of people on there and just empathize, and this podcast has introduced me to a lot of great resources, like the course Being One, and different books. Especially, like, during those times where OCD has been more intense, it just feels like this blanket of comfort to be able to sit down and listen to somebody else talking about their OCD and be like, “Okay, they get my brain.

I’m not alone in this, and there is hope.” What I hope that this episode can be for people, like, I don’t know who all God is gonna lead it to, but I’m just grateful for all the people who have gone before me and shared their story and offered encouragement and hope and done the hard work. I appreciate all the effort that you put into bringing this podcast to life, and just thankful for the people who have inspired me to share as well.

Carrie: Yeah. Well, I’m so thankful that you’re here and that other people have gone before you and been brave and shared their story. And hopefully, your episode will allow somebody else to breathe a sigh of relief and maybe inspire someone else to share their story. You just never know what’s gonna happen. So God is good and has been very faithful in the process.

Check out Rachael on Substack. We’re gonna put a link in the show notes. It’s called Stories for the One. Is that right?

Rachael: I think if you go to substack.com/rachaelannwrites, and that’s Rachael with the extra A, Ann with an E on the end. That will allow you to go from there and either sign up for the, the email alerts for my publication Stories for the One, or if you have a Substack, you can follow me on there, too.

Carrie: Awesome. Yeah. We’ll put the link in there for people to click on it. It just would be nice for them to hear the personal experience when you write about your OCD stuff on there, too, so that’s great.

Rachael: And I also … There’s a certain post I did called The Ultimate Resource Guide for Christians with OCD, and that took, I think there were seven or eight other people from Substack, so either people who have OCD or there was one guy who’s, like, a therapist who specialized in OCD, so a bunch of people.

And it’s just basically a compiled list of resources and links to things that people have either found helpful or they recommend. There’s, like, links to the ICBT course and this podcast, but there’s links to lots of other places. So I would love to point people to that, to be like, “Hey, it might feel…” Like, when I first got involved in this world and was, like, looking for resources, it felt like I couldn’t find stuff.

But there’s actually a lot of stuff out there. It’s just sometimes hard to find. So that was a way of trying to kinda compile things and be like, “Here. Go explore.”

Carrie: Okay. Thank you so much. I hope that Rachel’s story really helped you understand how recovery is a messy process, and there are gonna be ups and downs.

Carrie: It won’t be perfect, but it’s important to stick with it and keep using the skills that you’ve learned. If you wanna find out more about Empowered Mind Christian ICBT for OCD, you can go to keribach.com/training. I’m so thankful that this resource has been able to help people all over the country, and really all over the world.

Carrie: If you’re in Tennessee, I would love to get a more intimate therapy group started here for Christians who are practicing ICBT skills. So if that’s you, please reach out through the website keribach.com/contact.

Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you. Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling.

Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of myself or By the Well Counseling. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area

229. Navigating OCD, ADHD, and Autism: A Personal Story with Erica Hackworth 

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

In this episode, Carrie welcomes Erica Hackworth to share how discovering the connection between her ADHD, autism, and OCD transformed her relationships, faith, self-understanding, and journey toward recovery.

Episode Highlight:

  • Discover how ADHD, autism, and OCD can overlap and influence one another in unexpected ways.
  • Recognize the hidden signs of OCD that extend beyond contamination fears and perfectionism.
  • Identify the difference between OCD-driven fear and genuine spiritual conviction.
  • Learn practical ways to communicate neurodivergent needs within relationships and family life.
  • Apply ICBT principles to break free from shame, intrusive thoughts, and self-condemnation.

Episode Summary:

Why Do So Many Women Reach Adulthood Before Discovering They Have Autism?

For years, Erica knew ADHD was part of her story, but there were pieces that never quite fit. As life became more demanding through marriage, parenting, and everyday responsibilities, the coping strategies that once worked started falling apart in ways that couldn’t be ignored.

What struck me most about Erica’s experience was how easily autism can remain hidden, especially in women who learn to mask their differences from a young age. Her story highlights why so many people spend years believing they’re simply “too sensitive” or “too much” before finding answers that finally make sense.

Could Neurodivergence Be Affecting Your Relationships More Than You Realize?

One of the most powerful parts of our conversation was hearing how Erica’s neurological differences created misunderstandings within her marriage. Things that felt obvious to her internally often looked completely different from the outside.

I’ve seen many people carry deep guilt because loved ones misinterpret forgetfulness, overwhelm, or sensory struggles as lack of care. Erica shares what changed when she stopped viewing herself through a lens of failure and began helping others understand her experience more accurately.

What Hidden OCD Symptoms Are Many Christians Mistaking for Spiritual Sensitivity?

When people think about OCD, they often picture contamination fears, checking locks, or arranging things perfectly. Erica’s experience looked very different.

As she explored her faith, she began noticing patterns of guilt, excessive responsibility, and rigid spiritual routines that felt holy on the surface but were actually keeping her trapped. Her story opens an important conversation about how OCD can disguise itself in ways that are difficult to recognize, especially within faith communities.

How Can You Tell the Difference Between OCD and the Holy Spirit?

For years, Erica interpreted constant feelings of fear, guilt, and urgency as spiritual conviction.

Through treatment and deeper reflection, she began noticing critical differences between condemnation and genuine conviction. What she discovered brought tremendous freedom, and her insights may challenge assumptions many believers have carried for years without realizing it.

Why Does Understanding Autism Change the Way You Care for Yourself?

Receiving an autism diagnosis didn’t change who Erica was, but it completely changed how she understood herself. Instead of viewing sensory overwhelm as a character flaw, she began recognizing it as a real neurological need.

Sometimes the path forward isn’t forcing ourselves to endure more discomfort. Sometimes it’s learning how to honor the way God designed us and responding with compassion instead of criticism.

What Makes ICBT So Effective for Breaking Free from OCD?

Erica describes her experience with Inference-Based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy as life-changing. By learning how OCD creates doubt, fear, and imagined threats, she began seeing patterns that had influenced her thinking for decades.

When people understand how OCD operates, they gain opportunities to respond differently. That shift can open doors to freedom that once felt impossible.

How Do You Stop Living Under the Weight of Constant Shame?

For years, Erica believed something was fundamentally wrong with her, shaping how she viewed herself, her faith, and her relationships. In our conversation, she shares how learning to challenge those beliefs brought greater peace, self-compassion, and freedom from self-condemnation.

Erica’s story offers hope for anyone navigating ADHD, autism, OCD, faith struggles, or chronic shame. 

Listen to the full episode to hear the insights and breakthroughs that made a lasting difference in her recovery journey.

Transcript

Carrie: Welcome back everyone to our personal stories series on the podcast for this summer. I know that all of you really enjoy hearing from other people who are struggling with similar best that we’ve gotten on the podcast is to talk a little bit more about intersection of different types of neurodiversity, so intersection between OCD and ADHD, intersection between OCD and autism.

Carrie: So today we have a personal story that really encompasses all of those diagnoses with Erica Hackworth. Welcome to the show. I’m so glad that you’re able to join us today. Thank you so much for having me. Tell us a little bit about kind of like your treatment journey, kinda what caused you to first get into treatment for ADHD, and how did this kinda lead to finding out about other diagnoses?

Erica: Yeah. I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was in elementary school, and I was treated for it all the way up through college, and then I went to a church and participated in biblical counseling where they basically told me it wasn’t real. Wow. I was on other meds too for depression and other things, but I got off all my meds.

Erica: Was actually doing okay for a while.

Carrie: I was coping okay. Do you think that was because you were out of school? Like, when you were in school and you had certain expectations that you had to meet, then having the ADHD medicine kinda helped you meet those expectations, and then getting out of school, maybe you didn’t need it as much, or?

Erica: I think to a point. Maybe in high school it was like that, but then college, like, I actually never graduated because everything fell apart. Like, I couldn’t just rely on my intellect anymore. I had to be able to do the executive functioning, planning, writing papers, doing those things, and I didn’t have the structures I needed.

Erica: Plus, I had a depression, a lot of other things going on that caused my life to fall apart. So yeah, I don’t know about that.

Carrie: This biblical counseling, though, that created a lot of shame then, I would imagine.

Erica: I think confusion too. Initially, it was kind of like, “Oh, well, there’s nothing wrong with me.” I was told for a really long time that I have all these things, like, it’s not real.

Erica: And so I think initially it felt like a blessing and like it was freeing, but then as time went on, I realized I think there’s actually something to all of this. Where I got married, I had my first child, and then my second, and then my third, and the stuff that I used to rely on to cope and keep everything together just totally fell apart.

Erica: Like, I couldn’t just get through the way I was getting through before. About a year ago, I started to kind of revisit the idea that maybe there is something to this ADHD thing. I think particularly because my husband and I were having difficulties. I would forget all manner of things. He kind of felt like it was personal, like I didn’t care.

Erica: I was like, “No, I do care.” And so that’s kind of what caused me to be like, “No, this is real. I’m not just a lazy, forgetful, horrible person. There is something going on neurologically.”

Carrie: I think that’s huge. I just wanna pause there for a moment, because it’s so hard sometimes to communicate to other relationships in our life, like, what our internal experience is like, and it, things can be misperceived.

Erica: It was so hard. The amount of times that I heard him say, and he meant well, but he was like, “I don’t understand you. My experience is nothing like what you’re describing.” For a while, that made me feel pretty alone, but then that was the impetus to be like, “Okay, so let’s help you. How can we help you understand what I’m dealing with?”

Erica: I had gotten some coaching back in my 20s from the ADHD Center of West Michigan. If you’re in ADHD circles, that’s Tamara Rosier’s group. I went back there and decided that relationship coaching was gonna be a good way forward to help my husband kind of understand what was going on. And then kind of in the background, I’m, like, on neurodivergent social media now, kind of, ’cause I’m trying to educate myself.

Erica: There was a video that came up that was like, “You might be AuDHD if blah, blah, blah.” It was like, you think about social interactions for days after they happen, and you feel, like, drained after spending time with people even though you love it, and all of these things. There were more things to it, but I just remember, like, the bottom dropped out.

Erica: I watched that and I was like, “Oh.” So it might not just be ADHD. ‘Cause I felt like ADHD fit who I was, but, like, not 100%, ’cause there was this other part of me that’s pretty routine oriented, pretty regimented, pretty structured, like things just so. I do things the same way every day, that kind of thing. And so that’s where I think the autism kind of

Erica: That was the other thing that kinda clicked into place, like, oh, okay, so it’s not just ADHD. It’s probably AuDHD. I better seek out a diagnosis for these things, just to kind of help me understand myself, help my husband understand me, and chart a way forward.

Carrie: I think with some women getting diagnosed later in life, like, their experience looking different than maybe a male autistic experience, can you talk a little bit about that?

Carrie: Like, oh, I think a lot of times when people think about autism, they think about people who are severely impaired, for example, or-

Erica: Or they’re thinking of someone of what the stereotypical Asperger’s kind of male guy looks like, who’s very high intellect, but just kinda socially awkward. This, I think, it looks different.

Erica: I think as women, we’re kind of socialized early that fitting in is survival. I learned over time, if I’m gonna stim, I’m gonna keep it small. I’m gonna keep it internal. I’ll stim with, like, my tongue around my teeth or, like, my hand in my pocket or things like that. And I learned to work really hard to appear like everybody else.

Erica: I can pretend to make eye contact. I really look at your nose or middle of your forehead or your chin, things like that. Or, like, if I’m in a situation where I really wanna rock, but I know it’s … Other people are gonna look at me and think it’s weird, maybe I’ll resist doing that. But all of that masking builds up, and it gets exhausting.

Erica: And you don’t really ever feel like anybody really knows you.

Carrie: Does it create a lot of internal anxiety and tension, just kind of like trying to almost fit this square peg in a round hole? Like, I don’t really quite fit in here, but I’ve gotta pretend like I do and be just like everybody else. Absolutely.

Erica: It’s pretty painful. And I remember in high school feeling like this just immense sense of loneliness, and it, that carried with me for a long time, just feeling like nobody knows me And if they find out, then they’re gonna realize that I’m crazy or weird, or they’re not gonna love me.

Carrie: Tell us about that process of then when you did get the autism diagnosis, what was that like for you, or how did that shift your self-perception?

Erica: I think it really helped a lot. Initially, it was kind of like, “Okay, what do I do with this?” Like, I’m still the same person. But I think what it really did for me was to realize that the things about me that I felt were too sensitive, too needy, like, “Why am I reacting like this? I should just be okay.” For example, my husband and I just traveled in an airport, and instead of having a big meltdown that was very mysterious to me, ’cause I would always meltdown on travel days, and I didn’t really get it.

Erica: I was like, “I’m just a difficult person. I’m really annoying. My husband shouldn’t have to deal with me,” which is also kind of some OCD thoughts, you know? But, like, instead of doing that, I wore headphones, and I was able to communicate to him and say, “Hey, listen, I’m struggling with all of this. I need a few minutes.

Erica: It’s not that I’m upset with you. This is a lot.” And so I allowed myself to accommodate myself. I wore headphones the whole day, even in the car on the way to our Airbnb, because the overstimulation was too much, and it prevented me from becoming a meltdown-y rage monster.

Carrie: That’s good. They also have these things like sunflower tags or badges, something like that.

Carrie: Have you seen those for airport workers? I’ve seen them.

Erica: I haven’t utilized it, but I’ve seen it. Yeah,

Carrie: for anybody out there that may be struggling, it’s to identify someone who has a invisible disability such as autism, or it could be used for OCD. Maybe airports really spike all of your OCD symptoms or other things.

Carrie: So people can, the airport workers can kinda know to treat you with a little bit more gentleness or understanding that, understanding that people may need more time and so forth when they see the sunflower badge. That was something that I saw last time I traveled in the airport that I thought, “Oh, this is really wonderful to have out there,” because my husband walks with a cane, but for a long time he just had vision issues, and people wouldn’t realize that he couldn’t see them in his side line of vision.

Carrie: And I thought, “Wow, that would’ve been really helpful for us to have some kind of communication like that.” He’s struggling, kinda watch out a little bit. Tell us about now when you have these sensory needs, it sounds like you’re able to accommodate a lot more for them. Like, how have certain things changed for you in your relationships, like within your family or friends, or just kinda day-to-day life?

Carrie: What does it look like differently now that you’re aware of this diagnosis?

Erica: Yeah, I think I have been able to communicate effectively to the people in my life about the diagnosis, and they expect me to have headphones on. They expect me to need to take a minute if I’m feeling overstimulated or overwhelmed.

Erica: I can say the word meltdown, and they know what that means. I think it’s just, like, deepened my ability to trust the people that I love dearly because now they get it. And it’s not that I’m difficult or bad like I believed for so long. It’s that I have a different sensory profile, and I process the world differently, and that’s okay.

Erica: It doesn’t have to mean anything bad about me.

Carrie: Yeah. So how did OCD show up? Like, when did that kind of come onto the scene or into your awareness?

Erica: Yeah. I have always thought I’ve been a very spiritually sensitive person, and conservative Christian circles where I kind of run around, that’s a very good thing, right?

Erica: It’s good to be sensitive spiritually. But as I was kind of uncovering the ADHD and the autism and starting to kind of lean into my special interests and, like, realized, oh, I don’t just get obsessed with things, and it’s not idolatry. It’s a special interest. It’s something that I find regulating, and it’s okay that it’s regulating.

Erica: As I started to kind of do that, I started to feel some immense guilt because I would spend a long time researching certain things for a while. Autism was my special interest, so I was, like, researching, researching, researching, trying to figure everything out. And I would spend hours, and then I started to feel like, oh, but I don’t read my Bible that long, or I don’t pray that long.

Erica: Maybe God’s mad at me for doing this. Maybe I’m sinning. Maybe I’m this, that, and the other. I mentioned that to my ADHD coach. She was kind of like, “Have you ever thought about OCD?” And I was like, “No,” ’cause I’ve had friends with OCD. Mine doesn’t look like theirs necessarily. But after that session, I did a couple self-tests, and I was like, oh, highly likely.

Erica: Great. Okay. Another diagnosis that I need to pursue. Let’s see here. So I went back to the place that I got diagnosed and said, “Hey, can we do OCD testing?” And they did, and it came back positive, and severe, actually. I think realizing that OCD doesn’t always look like symmetry or germaphobe or these other things.

Erica: It can be excessive thinking, excessive apologizing. It can be checking the relationship. Are we okay? It can be, for me, it was also, like, I had to do my devotions in a certain order, and if I didn’t do it in a certain order, it didn’t feel like God would be happy with that. Like, it’s not okay. It’s not done enough.

Erica: Or if I didn’t write down my prayers, then they weren’t real, things like that. All of these things felt very much like a prison for a really long time. And I just didn’t even know that I was living in it. It was kind of like I just thought I was sensitive and a nice person, ’cause I always wanna make sure everybody’s okay.

Carrie: That really, like, inhibits your relationship with God if you feel like I have to write down all of my prayers. I mean, that can be time-consuming, and then it doesn’t give you any kind of freedom to just say, like, “God, I need help right now,” or, “I just need some sense of comfort or peace or reassurance that you’re here.”

Carrie: Yeah, so it’s interesting how these symptoms overlap, right, with the autism of wanting the craving for, like, structure and routine and things being the same, and then the overlap of OCD saying, “No, it has to be this way, or else something bad is gonna happen, like, if you don’t do it.”

Erica: And then I think also with the ADHD in there, too, I have very much, like, flighty thoughts, right?

Erica: They all feel like hot air balloons that just kind of float away. I think sometimes I do crave that concreteness of thought in order to kind of keep a train going, which is not a bad thing, but when it becomes a necessary thing in order to feel like I’m okay,” that’s where I think it becomes more prison-like rather than a tool to help.

Carrie: Right. Tell us about your experience with inference-based cognitive behavioral therapy, ICBT. What was that like for you?

Erica: It was life-changing. I actually just graduated, and we did the Y-BOCS again, and I’m subclinical now, so that’s really cool. Um- That’s awesome.

Carrie: Yay.

Erica: Yeah, I went from severe to subclinical, so I’m praising the Lord every day for it.

Erica: I really appreciated learning about how OCD functioned, how the patterns of thought, what they looked like, what they sounded like, and I realized that so much of my shame and my fear and my sensitivity was actually just this, like, yucky, faulty alarm system in my brain that was telling me I was in trouble all the time, that something bad is gonna happen.

Erica: And understanding the patterns behind the thoughts helped me to realize, like, I don’t have to enter the bubble. I can make a choice now that I know what this is to go the other way and trust what’s around me, trust myself. I think that’s been one of the biggest thing, is that I’ve learned to trust myself.

Carrie: When you say trust myself, like, you’re talking about, like, my true intentions, my true desires spiritually, like, those types of things.

Erica: Who am I as a person, right? Who did God make me to be, especially now that I’m His child? I can trust that I have remaining sin. I don’t have the reigning sin. I don’t have the sin that I’m enslaved to anymore, which is such a freeing thought.

Erica: I think, too, because of the other neurodivergence, I have struggled to socially trust myself. A lot of times when I was younger, something would happen that I was completely bewildered by. Somebody rejected me, and I had no idea why, and so I think I made these rules of like, “Oh, it’s because I’m bad. It’s because I didn’t care enough about them, or they didn’t think I cared enough about them.”

Erica: And so realizing that, like, I can trust myself now in a social setting, I can be myself and it’s okay, and I don’t have to constantly be scanning for renet- relational, like, danger anymore.

Carrie: Right. That’s really good, and I think very helpful ’cause that causes you to be in your head and be disconnected from the people that you’re trying to connect with in that moment.

Erica: Right. And never quite feeling like you can do it right. Pretty isolating. So it sounds

Carrie: like that the feared possible self versus the real self, like modules, those concepts were really helpful for you. The OCD bubble, like if I understand kinda how I get into this OCD reasoning process, then I can know, oh, hey, I don’t have to follow that train of thought, like when that obsession comes up.

Carrie: That feels really good. Yeah. I even

Erica: started to recognize what OCD feels like in my body. I often would have this, like huge knot in my stomach that basically lived in my body for 30 years, and I thought it was a sensitive conscience and the Holy Spirit talking to me, and it’s not. Basically, this nervous system reaction of fight or flight all the time.

Erica: And so once I was able to distinguish the difference between, like the Holy Spirit convicting and OCD condemning, and really make that difference clear in my mind, I could recognize that that bodily sensation was imaginary, too. It’s happening, but it’s not based upon a spiritual reality. It’s not the Holy Spirit convicting me.

Carrie: Was that a hard thing to recognize? I think I’ve talked to different people where they’ve said separating that out, the Holy Spirit- Versus OCD has been challenging for them, as well as going, “Wait a minute, I thought that I was constantly being condemned or corrected, and now I’m having to learn this new way of being with God.”

Carrie: Like, what was that process like for you? It

Erica: was kind of the last domino to fall with the OCD therapy. I suddenly had this realization, ’cause I started engaging again more into my special interests. I’ve been in autistic burnout, and so one of the things that helps with that is really leaning into those special interests.

Erica: Well, as I was doing that, I started to have that gnawing sensation in my stomach, and was like, “Well, maybe this is the Holy Spirit.” And then it, it just kind of occurred to me, like, what does Scripture say about how the Holy Spirit operates? What does condemnation in the life of a believer look like? It’s gone.

Erica: I think it’s been really freeing to have a relationship with God that’s based upon love for Christ, love for His Word, love for truth, and not based upon, “I’m afraid He’s mad at me. I’m afraid that God hates me. I’m afraid that I’m a bad person and not successful as a believer,” those kinds of things.

Carrie: It sounds like just this concept of this verse that talks about perfect love casts out fear, because fear has to do with punishment.

Carrie: And so if you’re able to connect with God is loving, what I see in the Scripture is God speaking to people in a still, small voice, that not a loud, booming, “You have to do this right now,” urgency level of OCD. I think that’s a huge distinguisher for people, right? Like, oh, OCD gets really loud and really urgent, and I have to do it absolutely right now and perfectly.

Carrie: It’s true.

Erica: I think the other thing that I recognized is that OCD often can be very ambiguous, so it’s a lot of like, “You’re bad. Something bad’s gonna happen. You’re a terrible person. You are a bad mom. You’re a bad wife.” When it’s the Holy Spirit, it’s, “I’m convicting you about this thing.” It’s specific, it’s targeted, and it’s not based upon who I’m as a person.

Erica: My personhood isn’t on the line anymore. It’s, “I want to sanctify you. I’m going to grow you. I’m going to make you look more like Christ.” And it’s a beautiful thing, and it’s a gentle thing. Sometimes there’s chastisement and stuff like that, but I feel like in the life of the believer who really loves God, I think it’s gonna be a more molding kind of movement, rather than, like, He’s gonna tear me apart and I’m gonna get struck down.

Carrie: I like that. I like the specificity in terms of, like, this particular sin is the one that you need to handle and deal with and confess and walk away from. You know, what does it look like for me to turn my back on that and to do– act in a way of repentance, something completely different versus, “Oh, no, something vague, bad is going to happen to you because you didn’t read your Bible in the exact manner that I prescribed.”

Carrie: Isn’t

Erica: actually in scripture. Right.

Carrie: These were just rules that either OCD made up or somebody before you said, “Hey, do it this way,” and it didn’t mean that you had to do it that way every single time. It’s just, “Hey, here’s a general guideline,” that maybe OCD hopped on. This is really good. Sounds like for a lot of your life, just a general sense of feeling shame and bad, and I run across a lot of people who listen to our podcast that feel that way.

Carrie: And stepping out of that shame of who you actually are can be really, really challenging. Any other, like, encouragement or advice that you would have for those folks that just feel like they’re stuck in the “I’m bad space”?

Erica: I think for me, in my ICBT, there was an assignment to write an autobiography. I really found that extremely powerful because in those moments when I’m feeling that condemnation, “I’m a bad mom, I’m a bad wife, I’m a bad Christian, I’m not doing anything right,” I can look at the truth of what I actually know about myself and what do I see around me.

Erica: I think a lot of times, again, there’s this ambiguous cloud of bad, but if my OCD is telling me that I’m a bad mom, but I can look around and see that my children are smiling and fed and happy and we love each other, that doesn’t mean I’m a perfect mom, but I don’t have to believe that I’m a bad mom. I can get more specific in my own mind.

Erica: Okay, is there something that I wanna adjust with my kids? Maybe. Then let’s think about that. Let’s not do the condemnation hamster wheel that doesn’t actually get us anywhere. I think, too, the more I’ve allowed myself to do things because I want to and not because I’m afraid what if I don’t, has been life-changing as well.

Erica: It’s like I’m allowed to enjoy my life, you know what I mean? It doesn’t always have to based upon fear.

Carrie: Yeah, I think that’s a good word for parents. We do have a lot of parents that listen to the podcast, and it’s like you’re never gonna be a perfect parent. There is no such thing. You’re gonna do things that don’t land very well with your kids, and sometimes you don’t know until after you do it, and then you’re like, “Wow, that didn’t really go well at all.”

Carrie: And so looking at God understanding, like, your heart and where you’re at and looking at very specific things. “Okay, that didn’t work,” or, “I didn’t handle that situation well. It’s an opportunity for repair with my child. It’s an opportunity to look at how could I handle that differently next time.” But I find that when people are really stuck in this shame, it’s very paralyzing because it doesn’t actually help you make positive change.

Carrie: Like, if you constantly believe that you’re a bad person, you’re gonna continue to engage in behaviors that you feel like are bad so that then you can go back and punish yourself, and it’s not conscious. It’s very, like, under the surface that that happens,

Erica: right? I think for me, the reverse bridging in those moments when I’m feel like I’m getting sucked into that feeling of condemnation, like, okay, notice where I’m at, notice the thought.

Erica: What is the thought? Okay, the thought is that I’m a terrible mom. Okay, look down. What are the feelings that make me feel like I’m not doing enough? And recognizing that they’re imaginary. If it’s imaginary, I don’t have to do anything. I can turn around. I can reenter reality. I can hug my kids. I can notice my life instead of constantly being in my head.

Erica: I think my desire is to be present Yeah. That’s huge. I can do that.

Carrie: Yeah. This is really great. I mean, what you had said before about, like, the– for anybody that doesn’t know that Y-BOCS two assessment, uh, is where you score kind of how much time obsessions are taking and how much time you’re engaging in compulsions, and what happens if you try to resist, and how hard is it, et cetera.

Carrie: So there’s those questions. And so to go from a severe range to a subclinical range, like, that’s incredible. That’s amazing. What does recovery process look like for you nowadays?

Erica: It looks like being okay With having the beginning of an OCD spiral, ’cause they’re gonna happen, and even the middle of an OCD spiral.

Erica: But when I can recognize what’s happening and be like, “Oh, that’s OCD, I don’t wanna do that,” I can make the choice to move along. The other thing that it looks like is I can talk to my husband, or I live with my sister and a friend of mine too, and just be like, “Hey, just so you know, I’m fighting an intrusive thought, and I’m gonna pull myself out of it.”

Erica: And sometimes we’ll talk a little bit about the substance of it, but I have to be really careful not to do a sneaky check or, that’s what I call it, is a sneaky check is like, “I’m having an OCD thought that you’re upset with me.” Like, don’t do that. And I always am clear to be like, “Please don’t reassure me.

Erica: I don’t need that.” But just, like, letting people in can help too sometimes. Sometimes I don’t need to. Sometimes I can just be like, “Oh, I had this thought. I don’t need to engage with it. I can move along.” I think for a while I was having fears about, like, oh, well, if, if I’m in the spiral at all, that means I’m failing, and that’s just not true.

Erica: ‘Cause it’s gonna happen. You can’t make the OCD go away totally, but you don’t always have to listen to the fire alarm or the screaming baby. You can just kind of, like, “Okay, I hear you. We’re concerned about something, but we can move along. It’s okay.”

Carrie: Yeah, and then it’s like, okay, just reengaging with the present moment and what’s actually happening and moving towards my values and what’s most important.

Erica: I think the physical sensation was one of the hardest things for me to get past, because it was like this perpetual feeling of just nervous energy, anxiety, and gnawing at me all the time. And the fact that I have tools now that I can trust, that’s not gonna be around forever. Like, okay, you feel bad.

Erica: That’s okay that you feel bad. You’re not gonna feel bad forever. We can move along.

Carrie: That will die down as I don’t engage with it. If I engage with it, it’s gonna become bigger and worse and scarier, but if I don’t disengage, then that is gonna eventually die down. I think is really good for people to know.

Erica: Yeah, ’cause it’s imaginary

Carrie: too. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for this. I hope that you are enjoying the Personal Story series. I’m so glad that Erica was willing to share her personal story with us. I know we’ve had people ask about OCD and autism occurring together. We had an episode previously on ADHD and OCD.

Carrie: So we will have one of our previous guests, therapists, come back and talk about OCD and autism together in the fall. I’m very excited to bring you that episode. And of course, if you have any guest suggestions, you can always contact us via the podcast, carriebock.com. I’d love, love, love it if you would sign up for our email newsletter.

Carrie: It comes out once a week, and it lets you know just little devotional thoughts about OCD, managing that, as well as things that are going on in my life, podcast direction, upcoming things that are happening. You’re gonna become the first to know, and you can sign up for that on the homepage of carriebock.com.

Carrie: Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you. Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of myself or By the Well Counseling. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area