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118. How Do I know if this Thought is an OCD Obsession? with Carrie Bock, LPC-MHSP

Join Carrie as she helps you distinguish personal thoughts from OCD obsessions. She breaks down common OCD themes and the urgency they create and offers practical tips for navigating the complexities of OCD.

Episode Highlights:

  • How to recognize common themes of OCD thoughts.
  • The urgency often associated with OCD obsessions and the behaviors they provoke.
  • The tendency of OCD to make insignificant issues feel overwhelmingly important.
  • The importance of mindfulness in discerning the true significance of intrusive thoughts.
  • Strategies for embracing uncertainty and resisting the urge to seek reassurance.

Episode Summary:

Welcome to episode 118 of Hope for Anxiety and OCD. I’m your host, Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor here in Tennessee. Today, we’re diving into a question many of you have asked: “How do I know if this is an OCD obsession?”

Let’s break it down into four key points to help you identify whether what you’re experiencing is an OCD obsession.

1. Align with Your Typical OCD Themes: Think about whether your current obsession matches the usual themes of your OCD. For example, if you struggle with scrupulosity, your obsessions might revolve around fears of offending God or committing sins. If your thoughts fit these recurring themes, it’s likely an OCD obsession.

2. Sense of Urgency: OCD often creates a sense of urgency, making you feel like you need to resolve or answer something immediately. This urgency can manifest as excessive rumination or seeking reassurance, like re-reading scripture or asking for advice repeatedly. If it feels urgent, it could be OCD at play.

3. Perceived Importance: OCD tends to magnify the importance of certain thoughts, making them seem like the most crucial issue at the moment. For instance, you might obsess over a past interaction or perceived mistake, even when it’s not relevant to your current life. Practice mindfulness to gauge whether these obsessions are overshadowing more immediate concerns.

4. Embrace Uncertainty: If you’re still unsure whether a thought is an OCD obsession, embracing uncertainty can be key. OCD loves to create a false sense of certainty, pushing you to seek answers immediately. By learning to sit with uncertainty, you can reduce the power of these obsessions. Remember, it’s okay not to have all the answers right now.

I hope these insights help you navigate your journey with OCD. If you need more support, head to carriebock.com/services/

Explore related episode:

Hi, welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD episode 118. I’m your host, Carrie Bock, and I’m a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. I wanted to talk with you today about “How Do I Know If this is an OCD Obsession?” This is something that comes up for a lot of people, right? Is it God? Is it the devil? Is it OCD?

Is it an OCD obsession or is it really just me? I want to break it down for you a little bit, maybe give you four ways that you can know whether or not this is an OCD obsession. Number one, does it fall in line with your typical OCD themes? You know your themes that OCD typically runs through. For someone with scrupulosity, for example, “Have I offended God in this way?” “Did I actually sin?”

A lot of times, OCD starts with, “What if?” What if I hurt that person’s feelings? What if I ran over someone with my car? What if this is not arranged properly, then something bad might happen, that superstitious type of thinking that can come along with OCD? Is the obsession or the thought process that you’re having, is it in line with what your themes typically are?That’s number one. 

Number two, does this feel urgent? OCD will tell you, you have to do something about this right now and it may not be an external action. So it may not be like a typical checking the doorknob or checking to make sure that the stove is off one more time. It may be a rumination of. I have to figure this out right now, and I have to have an answer right now.

It feels very urgent, so that may lead you to say, “Okay, if I need to know right now, that means I’m going to go Google about it. I’m going to go call my best friend and ask her the same question that I’ve already asked her and I’ve already received an answer to.” That’s reassurance seeking. “I have to sit here and think about it, or I have to find three scripture verses that tell me yes or no. I have to look at what this pastor that I listen to, let me try to see if he’s done a sermon about this situation.” If it feels like, yes, I’ve got to engage, I’ve got to do something, I’ve got to figure it out and it’s so urgent. It’s like, I’ve got to do it right now. That’s a good indicator that you are dealing with an OCD obsession.

Number three, does it feel like it is the most important thing, even if it is not? OCD has a tendency to just cloud and zoom in and tell you this is the thing that you need to be focused on. Right now, you need to be focused on, did you hurt that person’s feelings three years ago when you told them the truth about their boyfriend, that he wasn’t the right person for them.

OCD may have you stuck on that for a long time. And if you’re able to zoom out a little bit and look at kind of your life in total, Is the most important thing to be focusing on right now, or is it just that’s what OCD is telling me? It’s the most important thing to focus on right now. Because what happened between you and your friend three years ago when you made a comment about her boyfriend wasn’t the person she should be with.

I imagine that you have many other things going on in your life right now, whether that’s work, school, family responsibilities, current friendships, maybe you’re still in a relationship with that friend and things are fine right now. What’s actually happening in the present. This is why I teach people mindfulness skills.

This is why I stress those and have a course on mindfulness because learning to be able to be in the present helps us know what’s the most important thing right now. And a lot of times it’s not what OCD is telling you. Sometimes, we can be running from the stress of the present moment into an obsession and you don’t even realize that you’re doing it.

It’s much easier for me to like, it’s a familiar pathway in my brain, maybe easier is not the right word, but it’s a familiar pathway in my brain ruminate about this scripture verse and trying to figure it out. Versus sitting with the uncertainty maybe of my present situation of a family member who’s sick or of not being certain if I’m doing a good job on this work project.

Thinking about what is OCD possibly trying to distract you from that’s uncomfortable in the present. And as you’re able to sit more with some of those present uncertainties, that’s going to help you be able to manage the OCD and to recognize. That it’s not the most important thing right now.

Acceptance and commitment therapy or act teaches you to move towards your values, to move towards what’s important to you. And so if you’re sitting in your room obsessing about something or seeking a lot of reassurance, a lot of times that’s taking time away. From what’s most important to you at that moment.

Even though OCD is telling you, Hey, you’ve got to figure this out right now, you’ve got to sit and ruminate on it. Thinking about what are my values? What’s actually most important to me? How can I move towards that value system instead of being stuck in this OCD loop over and over again, where I like to tell people that OCD is trying to get you to scratch an itch that you can’t scratch.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had an itch on your back that you couldn’t reach. It’s a little bit like that. It’s like, well, maybe I can, maybe if I just move this way, or, oh, maybe if I just put my arm that way, maybe I’ll be able to get to it. That’s what OCD obsessions are like. It wants you to believe that you can scratch that itch, but really you can’t.

Really, you have to learn to be able to sit With the discomfort to sit with the uncertainty. And as long as you keep chasing, being able to scratch that itch, the more and more uncomfortable you’re going to be. And it’s just going to continue back that loop of obsession and compulsion. We’ve covered three different points so far on the four points of how do I know if this is an OCD obsession or not.

Let’s say point number four is that you’re still unsure. You’re still not sure if this is an OCD obsession or not. And I would say, encourage you to embrace that uncertainty in any way that you can. I know that may seem big or impossible for some of you who are listening to this. With anxiety or OCD, but embracing uncertainty is what allows you to be able to say, Hey, I can move forward towards my values.

I can keep living and functioning in my day-to-day life. I don’t have to figure this out right now. There are some things that take us a long time to figure out. Is this the person that I’m supposed to marry? Probably shouldn’t make that decision in a day or in an hour. We don’t necessarily need to know that absolutely right now, but that is what OCD is telling you, to say, let me sit with this uncertainty.

Let me gather more data over time, not gather more data by Googling a bunch of stuff. But let me take my time on deciding, is this the person that I should marry? If it’s a spiritual obsession, a lot of times people can get stuck on sins and making sure, “Okay, I have to eradicate every sin from my life, sins in the present, sins in the past.” Can I sit with the fact that maybe there are some things that I’ve done in the past? Maybe sometimes I can reconcile those things. But there are some things that we just can’t that it might be damaging to go back and rehash something with somebody that they’ve already healed from, but you might still be stuck in shame about that’s something that you might have to sit with.

Embracing that uncertainty and that discomfort in the present is going to help. Slow you down, slow all the racing obsessions down because the less that you give into them, the less that they’re going to reoccur. Everyone has uncertainty in their life. Everyone has things that they don’t know, and it’s okay to not know, and it’s okay to have a mindful moment and acknowledge there are some things that I’m questioning right now.

There are some things that I am uncertain about. I can sit with those things. I can recognize that discomfort, but I don’t have to become a slave to it. I can continue living my life. I hope that these tips have been helpful for you and you can reach out to me anytime at hopeforanxietyandocd.com. I encourage you to click on the courses tab and check out the options there.

I have a great course on mindfulness that can really help you learn to sit with some of that uncertainty, learn to sit with those uncomfortable feelings and recognizing you don’t have to act on them. 

Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By The Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the use of myself or By The Well Counseling.

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

117. Demonic Oppression or OCD? A Personal Story with Jessica Ray

Carrie interviews Jessica Ray about her experiences with OCD and faith. They discuss how OCD developed alongside Jessica’s newfound faith after childhood trauma.

Episode Highlights:

  • The challenges of navigating OCD within Christian community.
  • The importance of recognizing the difference between demonic oppression and mental illness.
  • Jessica’s journey of finding relief through diagnosis and treatment.
  • The supportive role of Christian community even at times they didn’t understand mental health struggles.
  • Specific things that helped her along her journey of healing. 

Related Links and Resources:

Jessica Ray’s YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/@JessicaJoy34

Instagram: www.instagram.com/joynicole_34/

Episode Summary:

Welcome to Episode 117 of Christian Faith and OCD. For the past three years, I’ve seen firsthand how sharing personal journeys can deeply resonate with our community. Many of us facing anxiety and OCD may feel isolated, but connecting through shared experiences and faith can be incredibly uplifting.

In this episode, I’m honored to speak with Jessica Rae, who opens up about her personal battle with OCD. Jessica’s story is remarkable as her symptoms began in her late teens, right after a profound conversion to Christianity. She describes how her OCD manifested through relentless obsessive thoughts and paralyzing panic attacks, particularly around her role in evangelism and her personal relationships.

Jessica’s path to healing has been both challenging and inspiring. Initially, she encountered some misconceptions about mental health within her church community, which complicated her journey. However, Jessica’s perseverance led her to seek professional help and receive an accurate OCD diagnosis. This pivotal step marked the beginning of her significant progress in managing her symptoms.

Jessica’s experience highlights the critical role of recognizing mental health issues and finding the right support. It also emphasizes the power of faith and community in the healing process.

Explore Related episode:

One thing that I’ve learned over the course of three years doing these podcast episodes is that you guys love personal stories. You find them very relatable because so many people dealing with anxiety and OCD feel isolated They feel like I’m the only one that’s going through these things.

So it really helps you to hear from other Christians who are also struggling and how they’ve seen God in their redemptive story. They’re still in process of working through some things. You know, we’re all on a journey to become more like Christ and in pursuit of healing from him. Today on the show, I have with me Jessica Rae and Jessica had emailed me when I was looking for guests and just offered to share her story. If you would like to be a part of our email list, definitely go on www.hopeforanxietyandocd/free. Hit up any of our downloads and then you can kind of be in the know and get random questions thrown at you sometimes.

Carrie: Jessica, I appreciate you responding to that and welcome to the show. 

Jessica: Thank you for having me. Excited to be on. 

Carrie: Tell me a little bit about how OCD showed up for you when you were younger.

Jessica: Whenever I was very tiny, under the age of two years old, I was a victim of sexual abuse. And I can remember having anxiety attacks, probably starting around four or five years old.

I also had an issue with food at a super young age. As a whole, I wouldn’t say that anyone ever recognized that I was an anxious child, but I definitely remember having things pop up like anxiety attacks if I was away from my parents or in a place that I wasn’t comfortable in. Anxiety really didn’t pop up for me until I was around 19 years old.

So my story’s probably a little bit different from other people. I didn’t really have any OCD type symptoms manifest until a little bit later on, until around 19, 20 years old.

Carrie: Okay. Do you feel like the people in your life just kind of saw some of these maybe as Age appropriate behaviors, like it’s somewhat normal for children to go through separation anxiety, and maybe they didn’t realize internally how much that was affecting you or how troubling that was for you?

Jessica: I would say so. I can remember having a very black and white bend in my thinking. And a shame oriented type thinking, especially if it had to do with getting in trouble or rules, or if I’d done something wrong, I could only hold it for so long and I had to go and confess it. I can remember going to church off and on as a kid and somehow I only heard hell.

I didn’t hear the gospel. My brain focused in on the idea of hell and I just thought I was going there. I can recognize internally that I had some issues. Very black and white thinking and some shame based thinking, but outwardly, I would say I appear pretty, if you want to call it, normal. Right. So it would make sense that my parents didn’t think to take me to a professional or anything like that.

Carrie: Yeah. What showed up when you were 19? What happened there?

Jessica: 19 is when I was born again. 19 is whenever I began my relationship with Jesus. I had a very, very radical conversion for lack of a better way to put it. Things changed for me overnight. God really just changed my heart and I was truly born again.

I was all in 100 percent and that is when the obsessive thinking, the panic, the anxiety started to manifest. I would say the first, after two or three months in going to church regularly. Being in the scriptures, starting to be discipled, I started to have some behaviors and some ways of thinking, looking back on it, that I’m like, there’s OCD.

Some examples that I could share would be, a few months in, I had a thought that I needed to end a relationship that, a friendship that I’d had from childhood. And this person wasn’t a believer, but she wasn’t bringing any sort of that influence into my life. And I just had this thought that I needed to end this friendship.

Even after talking to my youth pastor and them encouraging me not to do that, the anxiety, the obsessive thinking that what if that was God’s voice and I’m being disobedient, that sort of thing. Just was so intense that I ended the friendship. That was kind of the beginning of it. After that OCD latched on to evangelism.

I was a baby, baby Christian. I’m introverted by nature. I’m not somebody that just walks up to strangers and let me tell you about Jesus. It usually happens in a relational form for me, but it seemed that anytime I would hear a teaching. And it seemed that I was deficient and are not doing things that I should be doing, quote unquote, not doing things the right way my brain would latch on to it.

So very early on, I had an evangelism obsession. The anxiety of walking up to a stranger probably outweighed the anxiety of OCD in most points, but I remember going and knocking on doors at my grandma’s apartment complex in absolute torment. Praying for people having a pure heart wanting to honor God, but just not knowing what was going on And having thoughts and every thought that I have, I think it might be God.

I was in quite a bit of torment the first year of my walk with God because of undiagnosed OCD.

Carrie: Wow. The people that were discipling you, did they pick up like something just doesn’t seem quite right here? Like, were you asking for a lot of reassurance or, but maybe they couldn’t put their finger on it of what was going on?

Jessica:  Yes. About three or four months in, the evangelism compulsions hit. I was living in Northeast Texas, which is not where I’m from. I’m from Houston area. And I started going to this church. I went to church by myself. My dad would drop me off and I would just go because nobody in my family was really following the Lord.

On my journey, God’s really put people in my life really to protect me. People that were very kind, but were also very patient and would kind of deal with the reassurance that I needed. I had a pastor that I would call at seven o’clock in the morning. He was so kind and patient, but yes, I had the wife of my associate pastor and then the pastor of the church that I was going to, my best friend, I would call her at three o’clock in the morning because I couldn’t sleep, I was just absolutely tormented and they would try to direct me and give me reassurance.

You have to be led by the Holy Spirit. All these things, I was so new in the faith and I’m dealing with this anxiety disorder and. It was like dropping a quarter into a bottomless pit. It just, it would come back. I don’t think anyone around me knew what OCD was. I don’t think anyone around me even thought, Oh, this is a mental illness, which kind of tells you the lack of awareness that we have in the church.

Definitely, I think maybe what was going on with me at first was branded as like legalism. I come from more of a charismatic background and so maybe more of like thinking it was demonic oppression or things like that. No one really even thought, Oh, this could be something that maybe she needs a doctor. That conversation never happened.

Carrie: I really wish that we could put out more educational materials to the church to let them know some of these warning signs of scrupulosity. So that if they have someone who seems quite distressed and is coming and asking a lot of questions, instead of saying like, okay, this person is really trying to figure everything out, or they’re dedicated to their faith, or, and like, it could look a lot of different ways.

That they really have some information to point that person in the right direction to say, Hey, this is potentially what it’s called. Go to a mental health professional and see if you can get assessed and get some help so that you’re not living in such a high state of distress. I wonder if when you got saved and then there was all this psychological torment, was there a part of you that sensed there’s some kind of peace in here?

I know God’s with me. Like even in the midst of all of that that was going on because you kept following Christ, like you didn’t give up on your faith.

Jessica: I think that I had such, for lack of a better way of putting it, I had such a supernatural experience. My conversion experience was very much, I knew nothing about Jesus and I just came to God in absolute surrender and I was changed.

Literally overnight, I fell in love with Jesus. But in a sense, I fell in love with the God that I didn’t really know yet. I know I was absolutely convinced that Jesus was it for me. I didn’t want anything else. But honestly, the first couple years, I didn’t have that peace. It was several years down the line of the Lord really intervening in these places where I was super tormented.

There are some pretty wonderful stories that I have in ways that God just supernaturally would just drop things in my life to be like, hey, this isn’t who I am. This isn’t me. But it was rough. It was rough for quite a while. That’s that piece, that anchor didn’t come until a little while down the road.

Carrie: It seemed like you held on to your salvation experience though. I find that even in the midst of like all of the OCD distress, usually, people can name a time or two out of their life where they really saw, whether it was their conversion experience or whether it was experiences after that as well, like, okay, I know that God is real and I have encountered him in this experience in a positive way.

It’s almost like the Israelites when they picked up stones from the river, it’s like kind of remember that you crossed the Jordan and you each get a stone so that you can remember that God did this miracle for you. And I feel like we need those markers in our own lives as Christians. To say, hey, things are really rough right now, and I don’t have stable footing, but I know God did this back here, and so I know that he’s going to be able to do, lead me through the next part of life that feels scary or uncertain or troubling.

Jessica: Yes. I would say at the beginning stages of my walk with God, he really showed up for me through people. I had wonderful people around me who loved me really well, and who were very patient. It’s kind of mind-boggling the way that looking back, I can see how God protected me. It was almost like I was in this little bubble, but he did it through people.

That was one way that I definitely look back and go, “wow.” There are a few other just short moments that I could share. One, I was in Northeast Texas and my best friend was around Houston area where we lived and she knew what was going on with me, what I was experiencing because I was calling her at three o’clock in the morning, which she was really in it with me, which I’m so grateful for her.

We’re still best friends. She was driving home from work, and she said the only way she could describe it is she felt internally like God yelled at her. Hell, Jessica, this. And what she felt was, stop trying to answer all of your questions. Give me all of your questions. Look at what this does to you. Look at the fruit of this.

If it tears you up, it’s not for me. When she told me that that was like, okay, I held on to that for about like 10 years. I held on to those concepts. And so anytime I would have these looping thoughts or I would have this. Anxiety that I felt like I couldn’t manage. I would literally just be like, God, I have no idea.

I don’t have the answer to this. I would just say, you have it. He just carried me that way. I live pretty normally for about 10 years. Okay. Using those few things, and of course, if you look at scripture, scripture backs that those concepts up. And the way that you traditionally treat OCD, in a sense, kind of lines up with, you know, surrendering things to God, the Ian Osborne, Catholic Christianity Cure OCD, I think he calls it something along the lines of, I can’t think of the word, but the whole concept is just surrendering these.

Formenting thoughts and doubts up to God and letting him be big enough to carry them. So I was really applying these principles before I knew I had OCD, which is a testament to the faithfulness of God. That’s one thing. One other story that’s really close to my heart is I was cleaning a room one day in my mom’s house.

This was about five or six years into my walk with God. I’m still wrestling with these tormenting doubts about certain theological issues and there’s a Bible on the floor and the room was a wreck and I was cleaning it and I opened up the Bible and it opened up to a scripture that God had highlighted to me and Isaiah about a year before.

He’s speaking to the Israelites. And he says, “Oppression will be far from you for you shall not fear.” And it’s all these promises of God establishing them in righteousness and them being free from fear. And he had used that scripture before to show me like, your life is not going to be what you’re experiencing right now.

This is not going to be your life. And that day when I was just in the muck and the mire of anxiety and obsessive thoughts. And we all have those moments when we’re dealing with that kind of anxiety, where we think we’re not going to make it. And when I opened up the Bible and it was right there to that passage, I was like, okay, I mean, how could that not be God?

I’ve had a lot of those stories on my journey, but that’s one that I can really highlight is that was just maybe a small but a supernatural act of God to keep me going really.

Carrie: You talked about having a period where OCD didn’t bother you. It bothered you really intensely and then you were able to surrender some of those doubts and having to figure it out to God and you kind of had a more peaceful period there and then things came back and that happens with OCD sometimes.

The symptoms kind of wax and wane. It depends on life change and stress and other issues. Tell us about when that came back. What happened? Was that closer to you getting a diagnosis?

Jessica: Yes. I had had some pockets off and on in my twenties where I would have those looping thoughts and that anxiety. But every time that that would happen, I would eventually just say, you know what?

The way that I was taught was it was just demonic oppression. And so I’d be like, Oh, this is the spirit of fear. And I’m going to choose not to listen to this. And then I would come back up for air and kind of go on about my way. When I was 30, I got into my first serious relationship as a Christian adult.

That’s when OCD was triggered, and really, that’s when everything came to a head. So one of the major themes that I wrestled with is relationship OCD. Relationship OCD and scrupulosity have been the two, a little bit of body image issues, body dysmorphic disorder type issues, but those are the two main themes that I’ve struggled with so I got into this relationship.

It was not a bad relationship. It was not abusive We were both believers. It was good. It wasn’t we were young and whatever but I began to obsess over Every little thing everything he did everything. He said I was terrified that I had to break up with him I was terrified that he was crazy, that there was just something horribly wrong with him, with his character.

At that time, I was living in a house with some ladies from the church I went to. The woman who owned the house, she was like a mom to me. There was a good two month period where I was in just an absolute panic and torment constantly, almost every single day, and it got to the point where I was sleeping in bed with her because I didn’t want to be alone.

I wasn’t eating very much. I wasn’t sleeping very much. I probably lost 20 pounds. Kind of one of the parts, I think, that kept me from getting help a little bit sooner was that the church culture that I was involved in at the time really believed that any sort of mental illness was demonic. Not that the person was doing anything wrong, but that this was demonic oppression or however you want to say that.

There was no awareness of, hey, mental illnesses are actually demonic. Medical and biological. This could actually be something that needs medication or a doctor. There was no grid for that. I started having panic attacks multiple times a day at work because I’m single, never been married. I didn’t have a lot to fall back on financially.

I had to get up every day and go to work. There’s no option there. So I’m having panic attacks. I started having really horrifying, intrusive thoughts. The worst thoughts that you could imagine. Blasphemous, violent, those kinds of things. That was really the breaking point where I thought that my life was over.

I literally thought that my life was over. I don’t know how, I didn’t know what I thought was going to happen to me, but I just thought one night after getting one hour of sleep, I called my pastor. Everybody loved me really well through this, even though they weren’t, but they still love me very well. I called my pastor.

I had gotten one hour of sleep and he just said, sweetie, I think it’s time for you to go to the doctor. I had been involved in a ministry that referred me to this psychiatry practice in my area that was Christian, that they kind of worked in tandem with. I called, I set up an appointment. On my way to work, I dragged myself out of bed and went to work, and on my way to work, a friend sent me an article on harm OCD.

She had been kind of Googling, praise the Lord for Google sometimes, unless you’re using it for a compulsion. Yeah. She googled my symptoms and she found an article on Harm OCD. And I got to work and I read it and I was like, Oh my gosh, not just the thoughts, but the OCD cycle, the obsessions, the looping thoughts, the reassurance and the anxiety coming back.

I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is what’s happening to me.” I have this article in hand, and I show up to the psychiatry practice that I still go to, and met my psychiatrist for the first time, such a wonderful man, I’m just so thankful for him, and he confirmed this is textbook OCD, and so I got the diagnosis.

Carrie: Where you more shocked or relieved, or how did you feel at that point?

Jessica: I was relieved to know what was happening to me.

Carrie: To have an answer finally. 

Jessica: Yes. I’m very much a solution-focused person, and so I’m like, okay, this is what’s happening. All right, give me the tools. What do I do? I texted my pastor and said, “Okay, this is what’s going on.”

He was really supportive, and I just started devouring anything and everything I could surrounding OCD and how to treat it. I remember that night coming home after being diagnosed and finally sleeping, finally having a good night’s sleep. That’s where my recovery journey started was right then.

Carrie: It’s hard to have mental health issues, but I find it more terrifying to think Evil is constantly oppressing me on a daily basis.

Jessica: Yes, and having an anxiety disorder, and having this thought in your head that this is a demon, well, I mean that, in and of itself, that just runs them up internally. I remember being afraid that my sanity was going to be stolen from me because panic attacks, a genuine panic attack is from what I understand is your fight or flight response, just going crazy.

You feel like you’re going to die. You feel like you’re going to go crazy. I was experiencing derealization. I felt like I was coming out of my skin, like it was horrifying. And so to not know my body’s doing this. I’m not being taken over by some demonic entity and having a panic attack to not know that in that moment. That’s even more terrifying, I would say.

Carrie: How did your theology, I guess, shift after that point? Or did you end up like switching churches or changing things at some point? Like, what was that process like? Because I think that we have different experiences and not that your experience is the litmus test of God. That’s the scriptures, but God works in our lives through experience, sometimes to teach us about him. I do believe that’s biblical. So what was that process like? 

Jessica: All of the above. I do go to a different church now. The house that I was living in, the woman who owned it, wonderful, godly woman, loved me so well, was so patient with me.

I guess my church community didn’t have, like I said, a grid for mental illness. I guess. I’m a truth person, I’m a justice person, and if I know something to be true, then I’m not going to say that something else is going on. I’m a very open book. I jumped into recovery headfirst and embraced that I have obsessive-compulsive disorder.

This is a thing. I started to learn, well, naturally, if somebody asked me how I’m doing, or if I’m having a conversation, I’m going to share. I just got this diagnosis, or whatever. I stayed at my church for a couple years, but these things that I had learned just started not to line up anymore, and the more I understood mental illness, not just OCD, but schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia is a brain disease. I just started to realize these things that I’ve been taught, they don’t work, they’re not helpful, they’re not necessarily 100 percent scriptural, and I felt such a peace on the inside of me from God. I just started. That hey, this is what’s going on. This is your avenue of healing.

This is where I’m leading you Is to understand these things I slowly but surely just really started to feel like I couldn’t fully be myself anymore in this beautiful church family that I had been in because there was this part of me that was seen as, well, I experienced it to be seen as she’s oppressed demonically.

Carrie: The primary problem is spiritual, not the problem is medical, mental health, emotional And so many of those things overlap, right?

So it’s hard for us to sit here and tease out and determine sometimes, what’s medical? What’s mental health? What’s spiritual? What’s going on? I personally do not believe that we need to be afraid of demons because we have the Holy Spirit inside of us. Greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world.

There may be times where we are tempted and thrown off track or discouragement comes our way. And we know certain things are clearly not from God. So those pieces are hard to tease out, but I think it removes kind of like what we were talking about before. It removes some of the fear if you’re able to say, “Hey, I know at least that I do have this medical mental health diagnosis, and  I don’t need to be afraid of that,  I can actually, like you said, embrace it as, okay, this is what I’m dealing with now that I know, now that I can do something different about it. What is that recovery process been for you like, and just kind of share with us where you are now.

Jessica: Like I said, I began to really just devour any and all resources that I could get my hands on.

I found a book by a local pastor named Jeff Wells. It’s called breaking free of OCD and it’s about his 30-year-long battle with OCD and how knowing God as a father and applying scriptural principles and he had a lot of recovery. I read that book and I found Jamie Eckert. She has scrupulosity.com. She has a coaching group. I joined that. I really started to get some tools in my tool belt and really apply the standard OCD tools, like how we treat it with acceptance and commitment therapy, some ERP exposure-response and prevention tools, Jamie Eckert, her materials helped me probably more than any of them.

Things like, I’m going to put this on ice for two days or for a week. I’m having this obsessive thought, you know what? Put it on ice. It’s going to be okay. You know, that kind of thing. So I would just say workbooks, online resources. I do have therapists, but I never sought classical OCD treatment. There are so many resources that are free. 

I’m an advocate for therapy, 100%. If you have that, and if you can afford it, and if it’s accessible, 100 percent go for it, but there’s just a lot of online resources. I refuse to be debilitated, and there’s so much hope in the OCD recovery community. No OCD doesn’t get to run your life.

I just really started applying tools. I got to a good place. I was diagnosed in June of 2020. It took me probably about nine months to a year to get it back to like, I would say more normal everyday living. In 2022, I had this reemergence of evangelism, compulsions, and scrupulosity that took me out for a couple of months. During that time, I had been feeling the Lord. He just orchestrated some circumstances that kind of booted me out of my church. I started going to a local church, and Jeff Wells is the pastor of that local church, that book that I referenced before.

So he understood OCD. It’s called Woods Edge Community Church. They offer a recovery group called Regeneration, or for short, Regen. In that place of crisis, I started attending that church, and that first week after I had left my church, I went to a Regen meeting, I signed up, I was like, I need something, I need help.

I don’t even know fully what I’m doing, but I need help. It’s a 12-step program. It’s very biblically based and the basis of it is we are powerless to overcome these things in our own strength with the power of the Holy Spirit. God can transform anything that we might be going through. And so the recovery group was different from other 12 step programs.

It wasn’t just about addiction. It could be codependency, mental illness. I went through the program, and God really confronted unbelief in my life. I had this lie that I lived in for all of these years that I’ve been walking with Jesus that He expected me to fix. My own issues that he expected me to solve my own problems.

I finally got to probably the end of myself realizing I cannot fix this. There are parts of me that just feel utterly broken. There are parts of me that feel disabled, the way that my brain works. When you have OCD, your brain tends to be so black and white that you genuinely at times, at least for me, still can’t discern certain things.

This foundation, the first three steps are admit, believe, and trust. Admit that you’re powerless. Believe that God is all powerful and can change and transform anything that you’re going through and trust that he actually wants to and that he will and that the believe and trust. I was like, “Oh, man, I don’t trust God at all.”

It pushed me into the scripture in a way that nothing else ever had. And if you really look at scripture, there is this ongoing theme of as humans, one, we can’t fix ourselves apart from me. You can do nothing. We don’t have the power to overcome these things. God doesn’t expect us to, and his willingness to help come alongside and heal those that simply look to him and trust.

I mean, it’s everywhere in the scripture. I just came to this point of, are you going to believe what this book says about me? Are you going to believe your circumstances? Your circumstances look really dire to you. They look really big and really hopeless, but is that what my book says? He really started to heal this view that I had of him.

Slowly but surely, I’ve come to a place of, John 15, 4 through 5 is one of my favorite scriptures and it says, “Abide in me and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.” And it goes on to say, for apart from me you can do nothing.

God has really just brought me to this place of rest. Where the situation comes in my life. I don’t have an answer for I go to him and I invite him into the situation and I’ve seen him just do amazing and just mind blowing things with these situations that I just give over to him and I simply make space. I make space for the Holy Spirit to do his work.

Carrie: That trust piece is, it’s so hard and it’s so huge. I know it’s something that God has really worked with me on in my own life. In our culture, there’s so much striving and so much working and so much self-improvement. Even, you know, we’re kind of self improvement junkies.

Sometimes, like you said, what God wants us to do is like, be still and know that he’s God, and take the step back and say, okay, I surrender, I give up trying to do it on my own, and I need you to enter in. But sometimes God has to get us to the end of ourselves. He’s like, okay, you’re ready now. You’re ready now for me to step in and to do that work because you came to the end of you.

Our pastor shared this quote recently by Jackie Hill Perry about trust. And it said this is because God is holy. He cannot sin, and if he cannot sin, that means he must be the most trustworthy being on the planet. It’s hard for us to wrap our minds around that because we’ve been so hurt and wounded by other people in our life, just from living life.

It doesn’t matter who you are or how old you are, you’ve been hurt and wounded by somebody or something that’s happened to you. Just recognizing that character of God is so different that we can trust him, we can rest, we can let go. But sometimes it means that we have to do the hard work of surrendering and letting go and trusting and embracing that God is here and is with us in the midst of this.

Jessica: Yes, I realized along this journey that I couldn’t actually surrender. I couldn’t even surrender in my own strength because you have these faulty beliefs. It could be because of trauma, like with me experiencing sexual abuse, especially being so young. I was under two. I mean, that shaped your worldview like nothing else does.

And I realized I genuinely don’t know how to trust you. I don’t know how to let this go. And he’s so beautiful and so kind. He gave me the power and the strength that I needed to even do that. That’s why I love to encourage and try and share this hope that you can do any of it on your own. And that’s actually wonderful.

We don’t have to, he doesn’t expect this to you. The other day I was reading, I can’t remember what book in the scripture it is. You hear about the Holy Spirit being our advocate. Well, the scripture also references Jesus as being an advocate as well. And I looked up the definition of an advocate, and one of the definitions was one who comes alongside.

That’s good. That just, it just gave me so much more hope, and it was so much more confirmation that I don’t have to do this life by myself. Paul said that I will boast all the more in my weaknesses, my sufferings, when I’m weak, He’s strong. His power has made perfect in weakness. I don’t wish mental illness on anybody or physical illness or any suffering.

I do believe, though, that when we come face to face with our weakness as humans, it’s beautiful because that’s when we really experience God in a sweeter, in a deeper way. I believe at least. That’s been my experience.

Carrie:  Awesome. Thank you, Jessica, for being so willing and open to sharing your story, and I’m glad that you have gotten a variety of different support along the way, whether it was people just loving you, even when they didn’t understand everything, to getting more specific help medically and discipleship help through the church.

It sounds like God has really used a variety of different things in your life to bring you. to where God wants you to be. So thank you for being here and sharing all of that. 

Jessica: Yes, thank you for having me.

Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee.

Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of myself or By the Well Counseling.

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

5 Ways Therapy Can Make OCD Worse

Usually, when people talk about mental health therapy, they refer to therapy making things better. This is what all therapists and clients hope for. However, can therapy make OCD worse? The short answer is yes. Let’s look at the five different ways OCD can be made worse by therapy.

1. The therapist misdiagnoses OCD as Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) or something else.

Unfortunately, it often takes years for a person struggling with OCD to receive a proper diagnosis. Oftentimes, it’s difficult for individuals struggling with OCD to open up about the thoughts they are having that they may label as “bad” or “crazy.” They may have obsessions or fears about going into a mental hospital. They often present with a complaint of being anxious. Unless further assessment is done such as a YBOC II, OCD may go undiagnosed. A proper diagnosis is crucial for proper treatment.

2. The therapist uses logic with OCD thoughts.

 If a therapist is not trained in OCD, they may challenge the thought or provide logic to a client’s concern. For example, telling a client with contamination OCD to remind themselves that they cannot get AIDS from using a public toilet or telling a client with relationship OCD to remind themselves that offending someone is not the end of the world. Individuals with OCD know how irrational their thought processes are when they are in a moment of clarity. However, intrusive thoughts don’t respond well to logic. When someone is dealing with OCD, using a public toilet or offending someone can feel intensely distressful. This type of approach will typically leave the client with more shame, frustration, and disconnection from the therapist.   

3. The therapist provides excessive reassurance.

Therapists naturally want to be a voice of calm and reason for clients. Even good therapists can fall into the trap of reassuring their clients too much. If a client tells a story about something hurtful they did towards their spouse and says, “Does that mean I don’t love my spouse?” A therapist without training in OCD might reassure the client that based on conversations they’ve had with client, it seems like they love and care for their spouse. Instead, therapists who specialize in OCD will help clients recognize thoughts as OCD and learn to sit with the discomfort of uncertainty. 

4. The therapist fails to be trauma informed.

Trauma amplifies OCD symptoms. Therefore, treating past trauma or childhood wounding experiences (attachment issues, lack of nurture received, etc) can lead to a reduction in OCD symptoms. I have seen this time and time again in my own practice and heard the same from other trauma informed therapists as well. I’ve treated clients whose PTSD from childhood was triggered by exposures completed in Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) therapy. Once the PTSD became the focus of treatment, the clients deal with less intrusive thoughts and are able to dismiss them more easily.

Therapists who are strict behaviorists or strict ERP therapists may be so focused on changing present behavior that they fail to make a connection between global elements like the need for control, over dependency on others, or lack of confidence in decision making as being connected to past trauma and attachment experiences. When these global issues are taken into consideration and targeted, individuals will respond differently to intrusive thoughts. One of the issues with OCD is that the obsessional themes can morph and individuals can be playing exposure wac-a-mole if they don’t get to deeper level core issues. 

5. The therapist is insensitive to a client’s religious or spiritual beliefs.

As a therapist with Christian faith who sees many Christian clients, I have unfortunately heard stories about therapists banning clients from praying, asking them to state things they know are not in line with their belief system (for religious OCD), asking them to look at pornography (exposure for sexual obsessions), or dismissing/invalidating concerns about sin or hell. Clients who feel like their beliefs are not respected or understood are less likely to follow through with treatment recommendations. The International OCD Foundation contains guidelines for religiously sensitive exposures.

While therapy can make OCD worse, there is hope! OCD is treatable often by combining therapy and medications. When choosing a therapist, ask about their training in OCD, specific treatment approaches, and how often they see clients with OCD.


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

111. Using Humor with ERP with Judy Lair, LPCC

This week, Carrie is joined by Judy Lair, a licensed professional clinical counselor specializing in OCD therapy, to explore how to use humor in ERP therapy and how laughter and creativity can be powerful tools in overcoming challenges on the journey to healing from OCD.

Episode Highlights:

The use of humor and creativity as powerful tools in overcoming anxiety and intrusive thoughts.

Customizing ERP techniques based on individual interests and strengths.

Strategies for incorporating creativity to confront OCD challenges.

Insights into the sanctification process and the choice between living in faith or seeking constant certainty in managing OCD.

Episode Summary:

Welcome to episode 111 of Christian Faith and OCD! Today, I’m thrilled to have Judy Lair, a licensed professional clinical counselor, with us to delve into the use of humor in ERP (Exposure and Response Prevention) therapy.

Judy’s journey into specializing in OCD began from her own experiences with anxiety and a background as a litigation paralegal. After a transformative period working with a psychiatrist and discovering her passion for counseling, she transitioned to working in OCD therapy. Judy’s approach incorporates humor as a tool to help clients navigate the challenges of ERP therapy.

In this episode, Judy shares how she uses analogies, like the haunted house, to help clients understand and manage their OCD. By embracing humor and creativity, she empowers clients to face their fears in a more light-hearted and less intimidating way.

Judy also discusses the importance of recognizing OCD’s inaccurate threat levels, likening it to a malware virus that skews our perception of danger. Her innovative methods, including using personal interests and humorous visualizations, make ERP more accessible and less daunting for those struggling with OCD.

Tune in to gain valuable insights into integrating humor into ERP and how it can make a significant difference in the therapy process. Don’t forget to subscribe and leave a review!

Related Links and Resources

www.treatmyocd.com/therapists/76492/judy.lair
Jusy Lair’s Books on Amazon

Explore related episodes:

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD, episode 111. Today on the show, I have with me Judy Lair, who is a licensed professional clinical counselor, here to talk with us about using humor in ERP therapy. We had a previous episode on ERP that you can go back and listen to; we’ll link that episode in the show notes for you, where we did just a brief overview of what it was. It was also a personal story from Stacy Quick, sharing some of her experiences with OCD and how she became an ERP therapist. Stacy was a therapist we met through NoCD, and we talked about that on that episode. Judy also works with NoCD. 

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Carrie: I’m  happy to have you here today on the show.

Judy: Hi, Carrie. I’m glad to be here. Even with this not being my real voice, I think I can still talk.

Carrie: Yes, she is recovering from a cold here, so thank you for bearing with us on that one. I heard you speak at the AACC conference. That was how we met, and it was exciting to see how many Christian therapists were there interested in a presentation on OCD. That’s not something often covered or has been covered, I guess, at that conference.

How did you specialize in OCD? How did you get that to be a specialty?

Judy: I’ve had a lot of different types of jobs in my life, but one of the things was when I was on the other side of the couch, working through my anxiety and such for about a year, talking to me like, “You can do this, you can be on the other side of the couch.” I’m like, “No, here’s a whole bunch of reasons why, no, it’s not going to be me.” I was never one of those people that everybody came to for advice and stuff; that’s not me. Much more cognitive, I’m much more thinking about thinking, planning, strategic types of things. It’s my forte and stuff. So I’ve worked in a number of areas in different things, especially I was a litigation paralegal in a law firm for a bunch of years.

That was really my background. Then I started working in a doc psychiatrist’s office, and that’s when I kind of got that message from God about, “You really could do this.” So I went back to grad school quite late in life to do that. I found that was my niche, that was the thing I was doing all along; I just didn’t know it. Being a paralegal, educating, and helping people through, I did when people got injured and hurt and helped them through that. That was the start of me counseling. I just didn’t know it at the time.

Carrie: Yes, there’s so many overlaps, I think, between counseling and education and problem-solving. I’m sure that there were things that problem-solving that you had encountered, so I could see how all of the skills would be beneficial.

Judy: Right. I had finished grad school, and I was disappointed because I wanted to work in a Christian counseling agency. Once you spend the time and the money to get your degree, you have to spend extra hours to be able to get your independent licensure. That’s where, at least where I was living, they all wanted independent licensure, and I’m like, “How do I get that if I can’t get that?” It was a quandary. I still worked at the law firm that I was looking at for a bunch of years, and I opened this out of my house. I did evening counseling out of my house. Shortly after I started, there was this woman who came to me and said, “Well, I know I have OCD. I was diagnosed with it years ago. I’ve had treatment at some of the well-known facilities. I now live in my area. So do you think you can help me?” She explained her obsessions and compulsions, and I’m like, “Fascinating. Okay, so when you do this and you do this, then it ends up like this. If you do this instead of this, does it go like this?” She’s like, “Oh my gosh, I have never heard anybody get it who did not have OCD themselves.” I could just get it. It was definitely a gifting from God too. I understand the logic of OCD, which has a lot of logic in and of itself if you understand the root part of it. Once she recommended that, and I started working with her, then I read Jonathan Grayson’s Freedom from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. I’m doing everything in the book; I already organically knew what to do and how to walk people through that, which was really exciting. I found my path away. So I eventually took the International OCD Foundation’s Behavioral B2BI training. I spoke at one of their Annual conventions, gave continuing education conferences in Columbus where I was at the time. It just really happened from my niche in my area. Now, 22 years in January, that has been my specialty.

Carrie: That’s awesome. I always used to tell counselors that I was supervising, your specialty kind of finds you; you don’t really find it. I didn’t necessarily think that I was going to be working in the areas that I’m working in now, but I’m happy that God has brought me along this path. Mine kind of branched out of working with anxiety, and once you see enough people with anxiety, you’re going to eventually run into some people with OCD, and it looks a little different.  You have to kind of readjust the toolbox and reexamine some of the things that you’re doing. We talked on that previous episode about creating hierarchies in ERP, the idea behind it that you’re exposing yourself to some things that are uncomfortable, starting with some smaller things and then gradually building up to the scarier stuff. You use a helpful analogy with your clients about a haunted house. Will you go through that with us? Just kind of like you would tell a client.

Judy: ERP, exposure response prevention, seems like anybody who’s heard about it has horror stories that it’s going to be so hard, so scary. But using the framework, thinking about a haunted house, if you’ve ever been to an actual haunted house, there are two things that you know to begin with. 

Number one, you know that nothing in the haunted house is designed to physically harm you. You walk in with that kind of knowledge. Second, the reason why people go to haunted houses is they like the uncertainty. They like the thrill that you get when somebody bumps out, and you don’t know or a noise, and you don’t know when it’s going to happen. You get this feeling, this anxiety. I call it anxiety because it would make me have anxiety, but other people are like, “That’s a thrill.” They get this thrill going on. The first time you walk through a haunted house, it’s full of uncertainty. You don’t know what’s going to happen, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t continue to walk all the way through and get out the back door. 

The good news for us is that God created a program in our brains called the habituation program. I like to call it Pac-Man. I just like the visual. So you’ve got OCD going, “Scary!” and then we’ve got a big old Pac-Man coming up, and we want to close scary down organically by inside, not us internally doing compulsions or something, but letting Pac-Man do that. The way that happens is if you walk through a haunted house the first time, it’s the scariest because you don’t know what to expect. You walk out the back door, come around the front, you walk through the same haunted house three times; you’re not going to be as scared by the 10th time. Pac-Man’s closing it down, closing down the anxiety to the accurate threat level, which generally is zero. But it closes it down so by the 10th time; it’ll be pretty funny. You walk through it; “Oh, the guy with the fair is going to show up. Yeah, then they’re going to dangle these things and go, ‘Boo!'” You can make fun of it, even if there’s still some level of nervousness in there. If we use humor in that way, like, “Oh, this is going to be silly, funny, scary,” it allows your brain to have that Pac-Man to start readjusting what is true about the threat level and close down the feeling, that adrenaline surge that you get, that feeling of anxiety.

Carrie: Talk about that a little bit more, just the inaccurate threat level related to OCD. Like OCD is telling you that something is going to be super scary, horrible, awful, but like your brain is malfunctioning there.

Judy: Yes, and that is key to OCD versus generalized anxiety disorder. With GAD and other anxieties, there’s still a thought where, “Oh, what if?” kind of thing to it, but your brain is able to quickly, if you use some logic, use some cognitive behavioral stuff, kind of, “Is it really true? Is that really that scary? Has that happened before in the past?” If you use some of those CBT kinds of things, generalized anxiety, your brain is like, “Oh yeah, that’s not really true. Calm down,” but when it’s OCD, it’s like, “No, maybe not that one, but another one and another one and another, and they pop up all over the place like that.” So the key, in terms of understanding if you have OCD, is the inaccurate thread. I call it a malware virus program in your brain. 

If you think of your brain like a supercomputer that God made that always has this underlying operating system running, just like your technology, you’ve always got an operating system running underneath in our brain; that operating system is currently using our senses. What we see, taste, touch, hear, smell. It’s looking for data. Internally, the data it’s looking for are thoughts, feelings, body sensations, and observations. The way it was designed is that if we get one of those pieces of data that pops up, it’s a neutral piece of data initially that brings it to the first program in your brain in the frontal cortex. That program’s design is to say, “Is this piece of data a threat or not a threat?” Definition of threat is jumping out of a plane without a parachute. That is the only definition. There is no other definition that goes with threat. Anything less than that is on a continuum scale of something that don’t really like, gross, that’s really terrible, but none of those are threats. That’s where the malware virus program of OCD gets in there and cherry-picks and hijacks the things that matter to us and skyrockets the threat and says, “Oh, there’s definitely going to be a threat here.” Then it starts pushing those buttons with adrenaline and neurotransmitters, makes you feel like there’s something going on. 

The urgency of now, we have to do it now, we have to figure it out now, know it now. All of that works together to combine to keep the threat being imminent, urgent, right now. That’s the part that with OCD there is no factual evidence that is what is actually true right now. You just think it and feel it, and therefore you feel like you must. Do something to fix it right now, going over and over because you do, you respond to it as if it actually is a threat. Then you create those neural pathways saying this is always a threat.

Carrie: That’s a really great explanation. Originally when I went to a two-day training in ERP with some people from Rogers and I got. Nothing against Rogers, by the way, it was just the training specifically really turned me off to ERP because there were a lot of extremes just we’re going to ban this behavior. You’re not going to be allowed to wash your hands at all, or you’re not going to be allowed to pray because you’re confessing too much to God.  I walked away just feeling not only was this very rigid, but I felt like I was being asked to torture people. And I’m curious, what you’ve done is kind of taken some of these principles and used the scientific evidence of what you’ve learned and yet added humor and made it more fun or let’s laugh at OCD or make fun of it. Tell me about some of those things that you incorporate with your clients.

Judy: I feel like that ERP, if you understand from a faith-based perspective, you know, how God made us and the interaction, learning how to do ERP is very much the same sanctification journey that we want to do in life anyway. We’re always those concepts, the broader concepts of struggling with our fleshly nature. Paul was talking about doing the things he doesn’t want to do and can’t do the things that he wants to do. That sounds very much like doing ERP to me, always has. That’s why I view it in that way. I’m looking at what is the root issue here. And the root issue is that the malware virus is scaring me. That’s something that matters to me is really big and scary. It tells me I should take care of it. I should do it on my own, which is the opposite of what we want to do in a faith-based journey. Yes. In a faith-based journey, we always want to bring God into things. We want to wait on God. We want to hear the truth that God gives us rather than us going ahead and trying to fix things or do it all on our own. So to me, that always made sense in terms of how I do ERP. 

I honestly don’t ever care if somebody who’s afraid of germs is able to reach out, grab a doorknob, and open the door. I really don’t care if they do it with their hand or paper towel. What I do care about is actually finding the courage to get through the door to find out. That really was their brain just scaring them about something and then they’re like, Well, I’m gonna let you do that to my life. I don’t need a paper towel. I’m just gonna keep on moving through. So attitude, that’s the attitude is one of the things that I feel like helps move us through things when we’re nervous and anxious and scared, kind of thing. That way of, let’s go, Jesus, the Rodney staff is with me, let’s go, let’s move it on, get to the banqueting table on the other side. That’s what I’m looking for, is the ability to have somebody be empowered to walk it out. 

Humor and creativity is one of the things I see in the Bible so much. Think about, there’s some amazing, interesting things that, how God does things in the Bible. The biggest one to me is Jericho. Seeing how they won Jericho. That worship band is out front, and all the people are behind singing and worshiping God, and then the walls fall down, like, oh my gosh. 

There’s other things, and I see other stories about how God used different people or situations. We’re very creative that we’re not the norm of how you do that. And that’s what works because God is showing that there’s all of these interesting creative ways of doing things. What I found is humor is really helpful if we can look at OCD. I have people come up with separating OCD as a separate entity and making a Fred Flintstone or one of the funny cartoon characters so that you can like, Fred, I don’t know anything about this thing, germs, or my relationship thing here, Fred Flintstone, what now? Um, and even though inside they’re going to feel like all of this, if you can make fun of OCD in that way and get your family member to say, you leave my wife alone, and then they’re both laughing and the laughter brings that level of urgency and oh no, and oh, it brings it down because you’re like laughing at it. Like you are ridiculous. You just think and think, or “Honey, I think you do,” Yes, you’re the worst thing in the world, being dramatic or silly or whatever. Doing it in these creative, silly ways really helps us as people to move towards something scary long enough for our brain to figure out, like, close it down. It’s not really actually that scary.

Carrie: Yes, I think of the two guys in the Muppets that are up in the balcony, and they’re just yapping around or somebody that’s heckling a comedian, you have that internal heckler, and sometimes it’s helpful to, like you said, create that separation, because it all feels like reality when you’re in what they call the OCD spiral, it just feels like everything’s so real now, but if you’re able to step back and even say, OCD is telling me that I’m going to get sick and die if I don’t do this, or if I go out in public and do these things, Then that helps you kind of create some of that mental separation. I think mindfulness and other activities that we teach clients thought diffusion helps with those things as well.

Judy: It’s really important how God made us and that’s one of the things that I always look for is something that’s sort of organic to how God made us rather than something so rigid and like you said extreme that they’re not, we actually have OCD or not we’re like, that sounds way too far. I would never do that kind of thing. I just feel like that people lost. That’s a little bit too much of the traditional ERP and that makes me sad in terms of understanding that if you work with somebody and with the way we were designed, that it actually helps us to go with the flow. One of the things that when I customize ERP for each client, I always want to find out about their background, things they’re interested in, who they are, if somebody is competitive, say in sports or something. 

I had a teenage client that was like a volleyball player. I’m having her visualize and practice spiking the ball into OCD’s face when it’s trying to give her a hard time because that’s a natural thing that she does and she can use it quickly to say I still feel all of this but I’m going to picture OCD standing there and I’m going to slam this ball in his face. If you’re a sports fan like me and you have your rival teams and you’re like, Oh, that rival team is not going to beat me. No, come on, buddy. You can’t beat me at all. I become animated and silly on purpose so that I can show my client that they can be animated and silly in terms of that. 

We use whatever types of things in that person’s life that they can use as a strength and empowerment strength to stand firm and be able to give some sass and give some, like, you are not the boss of me, give that one to kids a lot. You’re not the boss of me, which they love because they can’t tell that to their parents. They can tell that to OCD.

Carrie: Yes, I love it. I could see my daughter getting in on that if she had all those words right now. She would probably say that. “You’re not the boss of me.”

As far as like traditional ERP versus using humor and creativity, a lot of times I’ll have people just kind of sit and wait it out, right? Like, let’s wait for this anxiety where you’re trying to make the anxiety board, I guess, traditionally kind of wait it out. So you’re using some visualizations with people or. Some other, like, creative techniques where they can visualize and imagine themselves overcoming OCD in that process.

Judy: When you’re just waiting in the midst of it, you’re white knuckling. I hope it goes away soon. I hope it goes away. How long is it going to be? Is it done yet? Is it still here? When is it going to go away? That does not facilitate habituation, that doesn’t give the room for Pac-Man to go and close things down. We have to approach it, even kind of fake it till you make it, in a more empowered kind of stance. So that’s where, come up with a bunch of different ways that somebody can be active, but active exposing themselves and going towards OCD, and active while you’re waiting for that Pac-Man to do its job, rather than just sitting there and white knuckling. and stuff. 

One of the ways that you can do it is that you can say, “Oh OCD, I’m so glad you showed up. You’re such a good guy. I’m glad you’re showing up today. Let’s watch some TV. Do you want some popcorn? I’m not going to talk about what you want to talk about. Talk about TV. Let’s just look here. Oh yeah. You want to talk about this? Eh, don’t really want to talk about that. You can hang around all day you want, but not going to talk about that. Let’s talk about making sandwiches. What kind of meat do you like on your sandwich? What kind of pizza toppings do you like? No, I’m not going to talk about what you want me to talk about. Let’s talk about ice cream flavors or something.”  That is a more just calm, peaceful way for folks that like to be just kind of chill, calm, peaceful. 

You’re accepting that OCD is there. You’re just refusing to talk about what it wants to talk about. You can move it on to being something like I said before, kind of dramatic, real dramatic. This is such an important thing. “Oh my gosh, you are so helpful, OCD. Tell me every little thing. I don’t quite understand how you know. Do you have a question? It’s a hotline to find. Are you on the psychic hotline? Maybe you’re on the psychic hotline. Maybe I didn’t know that you knew all of those things.”

 Some of this like making fun of it, talking about what you’re not gonna take me on, you’re the opposite team. Any of these kinds of ways where you’re active, you’re active in doing ERP, which means you’re keeping your focus on OCD is there, um, looking at your OCD, I’m talking to you, but I am not talking about the topic that you want me to talk about because that thick is your inaccurate threat level on something, I’m not going to go there, you don’t have a driver’s license. You don’t have legs, and you don’t have arms, and you don’t have a face, and you don’t know how to drive. And kind of make it sort of funny that way. You’re being active while you’re waiting for the habituation to happen.

Carrie: You had talked about in your training singing silly songs like Old MacDonald or just other goofy songs.

Judy: I always have to make sure the clients understand there is, any school can be used as a compulsion, so anything you say or do can be a compulsion. Of course, the definition of a compulsion is doing something to make you feel better to avoid and get away from the anxiety, but anything can be an ERP tool as well. 

There are some people that are very behavioral that say you can never sing a silly song or you can never talk about pizza to things. Because it’s always a compulsion, and I disagree, you can use anything to say, “I’m going to look you in the eye, and I’m going to talk about that instead, because I get to talk about what I’m going to talk about.  This is my brain, this is my body, I’m going to talk about what I want to talk about”, and such. You’re using it to expose yourself, where OCD is trying to pull you to its topic, and you’re like, no, not going there. I feel it, not going there. That’s the key, the habituation. It’s not to have your hand on the doorknob for 24 hours without washing your hands. I guess maybe that eventually gets there. But it’s this struggle, this fleshly nature struggle, that where we choose to live by faith in that way, I’m not giving in to our feelings and our thoughts and our worries. As we do that, and we’re an intentional participant, that’s what makes that work better.

Carrie: Yes, I love that verse that talks about working out your salvation with fear and trembling because it’s God that works within you because we have a part and God has a part. One of the things that you and I run into in working with Christian clients is we’ll have people ask us or say things like, I’m praying, I’m waiting for God to take this away, and we’ve talked a lot about healing on the show. We’ve talked about various theologies and prayer and different aspects, but I love what you talk about with this being part of the sanctification process, because whether you have OCD or not, we’re in a struggle with our own minds on a day to day basis regarding are we going to be focused on the things of God and what God wants us to do? Are we going to be focused on sin and self and what other things that are negative? It really kind of fits in line with that sanctification process. What would you say to someone who says, “I just don’t understand. I’ve prayed and why hasn’t God just healed me from this yet? Or Why isn’t he helping me more through this process?”

Judy: What I’d say is that has to go back to our understanding of our role in God’s role and who he is. We have to broaden that picture too.  The Bible is very clear. Our thoughts are not God’s thoughts. We do not have the understanding, whether it’s about something in our personal life, or why God allows terrible things in the world, and such. It has to go back to, we always make the choice of, are we going to be the ones trying to figure it out and try to get God to answer to us about things that we don’t understand and figure out or if we understand the parental way of doing things. 

If you’re a parent, you understand that there are things that you say you can do with your child that they won’t get. They don’t understand because their age, their developmental age, or they haven’t walked through something yet. We know why we’re asking them to do or not do something, and they just think we’re being mean and they don’t get it and they don’t understand. To me, that’s parallel. “I don’t understand why you don’t take this away from me. I don’t understand why you allow things in the world. That causes me in my immaturity, that’s where I think that comes into our immaturity, back to sort of childishness of like, “I want to understand, I’m going to demand that I have to understand. I demand that you explain it to me”, whatever that might be, which includes that, “why haven’t you healed me” kind of thing, then our immaturity comes out and that’s what I think some of that’s a design to show that coming to the surface again, our fleshly nature is coming to the surface rather than saying, I choose to believe God is my heavenly father, who’s created me and loves me unconditionally therefore, everything he does is for my good. Even though it doesn’t feel like that and they don’t see it that way, I choose in faith to trust that and just walk out. I need to walk out day by day because that’s how I get to a healthier place that God wants me to be. That’s now how we get maturity is choosing to walk it out in faith even when we don’t see that may or may not change at any point in time.

Carrie: How do you work with clients dealing with scrupulosity, who are having some of these difficulties with trusting God, with the uncertainties of our faith and life?

Judy: I have a lot of folks who are like, what if, what I’m thinking or feeling, or even the thoughts that I have are sinful and if I’m not pushing them away, talking about not pushing away the scary thoughts or I’m not reacting to them, then that means, in their mind, that means I’m not faithful, I’m sinning because I’m not trying to push things away.

I go back to the broader concept. We talk about what is their view of God. How do they see God as in a punitive way, as their Heavenly Father? If they’re parents, well, if your child thought this about you, would that be accurate? That kind of thing. Have them understand that this one area that they are worried about doesn’t overshadow all the other things that they actually believe about who God is and how God loves and cares for them.

It’s just out of their fear and anxiety that they want to go out that they want to get certainty and know for sure but nobody has that nobody has that we’re humans and so we don’t have 100 percent certainty of anything honestly about God this side of heaven we really don’t we would like to say we do and folks with especially scrupulosity but let’s see they feel like but my friends or my family say they know what’s Certainty that God loves them or they’re going to have it or whatever they are so certain, well, yes, but no. Nobody has actual sexual certainty and our feelings about anything. If you ask that family member and you track their feeling of certainty from our, to our day to day, year to year, that would change too. It’s just a, a way of speaking at any given time about where we are. feelings but feelings do not equal truth. I broaden it back to how do they want to live out their faith? Do they want to live it out as a faith based journey where they’re walking you know and taking risks in faith or do they want to be the one that trusts in chariots and their own manpower and their own knowledge and their own understanding?

I always bring people back to which one of those two do you want to live out? Well, right now you’re trying to live out your own understanding and getting answer knowing for certain and such and nobody has that, so you can keep doing that if you want your life to keep feeling like this versus choosing to take this risk.

Carrie: I think that normalization of doubts and normalization of uncertainty is huge because in certain faith circles, there are things said like, do you know that you know that you know that you know that you’re a Christian and do you know, you know, you know you’re saved and that’s probably like the worst thing that you could say to someone with OCD because we all have to live with a certain level of uncertainty and unanswered prayers and not knowing. We’re not going to know everything, like you said, and we have to accept that, that we’re in the child space in our relationship with God, and we may not know all the ins and outs and the whys and so forth.

I think this episode is going to be really great and helpful for people who are dealing with all different kinds of OCD and maybe some people that are even in ERP therapy that can utilize some of these strategies that you’ve talked about to help them create a little bit more lightheartedness about it and not have to engage with it in such a serious, like you said, scared manner.

People are scared to engage with this type of therapy sometime. I think your presentation and dealing with other mentors that I’ve had have kind of helped me soften a little bit towards my ERP initial standoff ed ness that I had at the beginning of learning about it, I thought, this maybe, I don’t know that I can really do this, but it just kind of opens a doorway for me to be able to integrate some of these things with the clients that I’m working with.

Judy: Yes, at the beginning, the first couple of years, I had somebody, again, not to nullify Rogers, but who was in the Rogers program, and they contacted me for follow up care, and what they wanted me to do was come to their house, time them taking a shower, make sure they got out of the shower on time, and then time them when they were washing their hands to make sure that they got out of it because that’s what they did at Rogers. I did that for a couple weeks and I’m like, this, I can’t, no, I don’t believe in this. I don’t think this is going to help you long term. Have a babysitter stand there and watch you do these things. That’s not how you’re going to learn. You need to learn how to underline. I don’t want this for my life.  I’m not going to let you OCD do this for my life. So I’m going to find some way to give you some sassiness. And some silliness because I don’t want to live this way. That’s what I can provide to people and that has made such a difference. I am so blessed. I feel so blessed and thankful to God that every day I help people get out of these terrible places, these prisons, these torment place because I can help show them the pathway is that God designed this already that there is a way to get there and that you can do it. There is hope. That’s what we bring to folks is the hope that life can change, things can change and God already has it in your head. Let’s go use what God gave you to be able to get you out of this terrible place.

Carrie: Awesome. Well, we’ll put a link to your NoCD profile in the show notes. And I know you’re licensed in several states so people can. Look you up and see you as a option if they’re in one of those states, so that would be awesome too.

Judy: Not bragging, but I have written some books, so if you want to go on Amazon and my name is Judy Lair. I have a series called “Freedom from Fear.” There’s a specific book on OCD. There’s also one in Generalized Anxiety Disorder and one on stress and worry because men do not have anxiety, they might have stress and worry and then have a big one that talks about my journey with anxiety. It also talks about OCD and, and how I’ve come through all of that in the background I came through, how I got here. That talks about my faith and looking at faith in terms of that. You can go on Amazon and find those things if those are helpful resources.

Carrie: Yes, that’s awesome too. I forgot you were an author, so it’s good to put that in at the end. All right, thanks for your time today. 

Judy: All right, Carrie.Thanks!

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Carrie: I wanted to let you all know that we have a new freebie on our website called How to Handle Difficult Thoughts. You can find this at www.hopeforanxietyandocd/free. We have several different free downloads that you can benefit from there, but this download specifically is to help give you a little bit of a taste of our mindfulness course coming up.

This is to give you a little taste of “Reclaiming the Mind: Learning to be Present.” One issue that a lot of clients talk to me about is having racing thoughts, not being able to know how to slow their mind down. Mindfulness is a great way to do that, so this course will be launching soon, and if you get our emails, you’ll be finding out all about it. I Can’t wait to share it with you. 

Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of myself or By the Well Counseling. Until next time, may you be comforted. by God’s great love for you.

109. What Christmas Teaches us about Managing Anxiety and OCD with Carrie Bock, LPC-MHSP

In our Christmas special, Carrie talks about the Christmas story and how it can help with anxiety and OCD. By connecting Jesus’ experiences with our own struggles, Carrie offers insights and understanding for a more hopeful holiday season. 

Episode Highlights:

  • Timeless lessons from Christmas to help you deal with anxiety and OCD.
  • How you can relate Jesus’ challenging times to your own struggles, especially those related to anxiety.
  • The role of Jesus as a counselor and the guidance of the Holy Spirit, especially during uncertain times.
  • The value of connection over absolute certainty in managing anxiety and OCD.
  • Tips on managing anxiety during the holidays (excerpt from Episode 55)

Episode Summary:

Hello and welcome to Episode 109 of Christian Faith and OCD! Today, we’re diving into a unique perspective: what can Christmas teach us about managing anxiety and OCD?

One of my favorite modern Christmas songs by Chris Risen says, “This is such a strange way to save the world,” and it truly was. Jesus, who could have saved us from afar, chose to enter our world—full of hurt, pain, and anxiety—to be with us, as Emmanuel, “God with us.”

Jesus, fully God and fully man, experienced everything from hunger to betrayal and even intense anxiety, like when He sweat drops of blood before the cross. This tells us that God understands our struggles intimately. When we feel isolated by our OCD or anxiety, we can remember that Jesus chose to live in this world and experience its difficulties, so He truly gets what we’re going through.

Jesus also showed us the ultimate example of humility. He could have come as a mighty king but chose to be born in a manger, living among common people. In a world that’s so focused on appearances and perfection, Jesus’s humility reminds us that it’s okay to be open about our struggles, whether it’s anxiety, OCD, or anything else. We don’t need to hide our flaws but instead can share our testimonies even in the midst of our trials, trusting that God is working through it all.

That’s what Christmas teaches us about anxiety and OCD: Jesus came to be with us, to model humility, and to guide us as our eternal counselor. Merry Christmas, and I look forward to journeying with you in the new year!

Check out related episode:

Hello and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD, Episode 109. What does Christmas teach us about managing anxiety and OCD? Before I hop into our topic today, I want to share with you some really exciting things that are coming up on the podcast—things that we’re working on for January, covering a variety of topics, including mental health topics and our physical health. We have several people lined up to interview in January that will carry us through a good chunk of the year, and I’m excited to share these interviews with you.

I’m also excited because next year, I’m going to be launching a smaller course on mindfulness. This is going to be an excellent course for anyone who’s struggling with any type of mental health issue, whether that’s anxiety, depression, OCD, difficulty focusing, or difficulty sleeping. These are the types of things that people are telling me they’re having problems with all the time. They want to know, how can I get better? How do I deal with these anxious thoughts? Well, the long and the short answer is mindfulness. It is going to help you with all of these different areas. Mindfulness is really about training your mind to focus on what’s actually happening right now, what’s going on in this present moment.

Mindfulness lets me become aware of what’s going on and also embrace a level of acceptance—acceptance over the things that I can’t change, acceptance over my feelings, whether I like them or not, acceptance over this thought process that keeps running through my head. I don’t have to continue to feed it, I just have to say, “Yes, I’m aware that that’s there, and it’s unhealthy, and it’s anxiety-driven, or it’s OCD-driven, and I’m gonna let it pass by and not continue to give in to that rumination cycle.” So that’s what our mindfulness course is going to be about. 

I have some things that I’ve worked on over the years—different recordings, different things that I’ve written out. I’m excited to be able to share those with you. It’s going to be a lower-cost offering for folks, just as kind of a good entryway.

It’s going to help people who are just starting out their therapy journey to help them increase awareness. Lots of good things coming up in the new year. Every year for December, we kind of take a step back, only produce maybe one episode, sometimes two, really just so that myself and those that work behind the scenes on the podcast can get a break towards the end of the year, regroup, and gather up.

This will be a little bit of a shorter episode. We’ve done some things in the past as far as how to handle anxiety and OCD around the holidays. So really, I asked my assistant to compile some of that advice, and that comes from Episode 55. And so we’re going to include some snippets from Episode 55 at the end of this episode, if some of those things would help you in terms of going to holiday parties and all of that.

What does Christmas teach us about managing anxiety and OCD? Well, one of my favorite modern Christmas songs is a song by Chris Risen. It says, “This is such a strange way to save the world.” And truly, it absolutely was. If you’ve been a Christian a while, you know, we have a tendency to just gloss over the Christmas story.

We’ve heard it so many times. And I wanted to talk today about how can we apply the Christmas story really to managing anxiety and OCD. And I know this may seem like strange or weird. Like, what is Carrie even talking about right now? One, Jesus chose to come and enter our world in Matthew 1:22-23. “Now all this took place to fulfill what was spoken by the Lord through the prophets. See, the virgin will become pregnant and give birth to a son, and they will name him Emmanuel,” which is translated as “God with us.” God could have saved us from afar. He didn’t have to come out of heaven to save us. God can do anything he wants to, but he chose to enter our world full of hurt, pain, misunderstandings, and betrayal.

He experienced all of these things so that you could be in a relationship with him. And Jesus needed to eat, and sleep. He had a full range of emotional experiences. He cried, including anxiety. Luke tells us that prior to going to the cross, Jesus’ sweat was like drops of blood, which only happens when you are in a very intense state of distress.

Jesus was rejected, he was betrayed by a close friend. Can you imagine Judas was hanging with the rest of the twelve for these years of Jesus ministry, and then this guy sells him out at the end? I mean, that’s awful. Sometimes we feel like we have this idea God doesn’t get it, he doesn’t really understand.

What I’m going through but through Christ he does on the earth Jesus was fully God and fully man our ultimate example of how to live how to be in relationship with others and I would say be in a relationship with God and ourselves as well just trying to figure out what it looks like to take care of our Human body and the needs that it has.

Jesus is still Emmanuel. He’s still God with us today, even in the worst of times, even in the midst of your most anxious moment when you feel like you are on the verge of a panic attack through negative thought spirals. Jesus is still with you. He never, ever leaves and because we have a savior who is familiar with suffering, Scripture even calls him a man of sorrows in Isaiah.  We have someone who understands and the devil is going to try to tell you lies that Jesus doesn’t understand your struggle. He doesn’t really know what it’s like to have OCD. That simply isn’t true. God created our minds. Jesus understood what it was like to experience those lies from the devil, even if just trying to elevate himself or break his fast.

If you go back to the temptation of Jesus, Jesus knows what it’s like to struggle mentally.

Point number two, Jesus was the ultimate example of humility for us. Jesus came into the world as a baby. He could have come down as a fully adult man, riding on a white horse, or even born into a king’s palace. Instead, He was born in a manger as a commoner. People looked down on him because he was from Nazareth, so he wasn’t even from the right part of town, so to speak. We live in this very self-centered, social media-driven world where people elevate themselves however they can. We’re constantly trying to look better than we actually are.

We elevate the positive and hide the negative, but Jesus didn’t try to hide where he came from or whose parents were. During his years of ministry, he traveled around, he stayed with various people. He didn’t have a home to go back to. He wasn’t seeking to be in the most coveted neighborhood or around the most important people.

He ate with tax collectors and sinners. One thing that’s really changed for me in the past year is that I care about inviting people into my home more than making sure my house is spotless. I grew up in a home where we weren’t super neat, except for when someone was coming over and then we just pretended like we lived that way all the time, I guess.

It seemed very incongruent to me because I would ask my parents, why are we cleaning up so much before people are coming over? And they would always try to hide it and say, no, no, we’re not doing it because people are coming over. We’re doing it because the house needs to be clean. And just having a toddler at home and everything that you try to do, they undo.

I’ve realized that inviting people into my home, having that community and that connection is more important to me as a value than making sure my house is spotless. I don’t even apologize for it anymore because this is my value, and I don’t need to apologize for my value. That’s a sidebar, but maybe it helps somebody this year, but the point was Jesus was about connecting with all different kinds of people, about inviting them to places and sitting down and having that community and that connection.

In a world where everyone’s trying to elevate themselves and hide their flaws, sometimes it’s okay in a safe space to say, “Hey, I struggle with anxiety or I struggle with OCD.” And you may not even understand what that means or what that looks like, but I want you to know that I’m working through it day by day with God’s help.

I’m seeking out these self-help resources, or I’m going to therapy, and it hasn’t completely gone away. It’s still here. It’s something I’m wrestling with, and God is still loving, and God is still good towards me. That’s an incredibly powerful testimony. We don’t want to share our testimony a lot of times until our trial’s completely over.

We’re like, “Yes, I’ll talk about that after Jesus delivers me from it. No, no, no, no. We need to be able to tell our testimony in the middle with faith and say, “Hey, I don’t know how all of this is going to work out right now, but I am staying connected to God and I love him. I’m reading the word. I’m seeking him out in the waiting and I’m trusting him with the plan.”

That’s what we need to be able to share with others. 

Three, Jesus was sent as a counselor. I love this. It’s my favorite thing. He left the Holy Spirit as our counselor inside of us. If you are in Christ, you have the ultimate counselor in Jesus. Isaiah 9:6, “For a child will be born for us, a son will be given, the government will be on his shoulders. He will be named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.” That doesn’t mean that you never need a human counselor. Obviously, I am a human counselor and we’re very pro-counseling on this show, but even after like years and years of training, all different kinds of clients, different scenarios, there are times in the moment where I’m like, “Okay, I’m just not really sure where to go here right now.”

It’s in those times where I’ve seen the Holy Spirit either guide me or guide the person that I’m working with, like, “Hey, maybe we need to go down this path. What do you think about that?” Or they’ll say, “Hey, I feel like this situation in my past is connected to what’s going on right now.”

I’m like, “Okay, great. God’s showing you that. Let’s go down that path.” The Holy Spirit has just guided the trauma processing many times when I’ve been working with people and talked to people and told them things in the midst of that. It’s incredible. Oftentimes we don’t know what we need. We don’t know how to meet the needs of others, such as even our spouse or our children.

I know for me, having a child has definitely increased my prayer life because I read the books and I listen to the podcasts, and I pray, and I read the Bible, but I’m like, “Okay, God, I do not know what to do with this child right now. Like, she is just outside the box, and I don’t know how to handle this.”

We don’t have all the answers, but the Holy Spirit does in anxiety and OCD. They want you to have an answer. They want you to have certainty right now, and sometimes that’s not actually what we need. It’s what we want. We want that certainty, but what we actually need is connection over direction. So if my daughter is hurting because she fell, or she’s hurting because she’s got new teeth coming in, it happens a lot. I’m not going into some kind of educational spiel about, “Let me tell you about teething and how your teeth are coming in right now. Let me explain the whole process to you,” because that’s not gonna benefit her. She needs a hug and she needs me to tell her, “Hey, I’m sorry that you’re hurting and it’s gonna be okay.”

We’re promised peace through prayer that surpasses all understanding and not certainty. God doesn’t say, “Pray to me and you’ll receive absolute certainty and never have any doubts.” That’s not what we’re promised in scripture. But our faith requires a certain level of faith. It requires a belief into the unknown.

You don’t have to understand everything about how the world was created to believe that God created it. You don’t have to fully understand grace to receive it. Thank God, because I don’t get it. It doesn’t make sense to me on a human level. God wants to have a personal relationship with you. And if you’re just happening upon this podcast, maybe you would say, “Yes. There’s a God, or I pray, or I’m a spiritual person”, but maybe you don’t have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ as written in the Bible, just please contact us and send us a message through the website; we’d love to talk with you more about that. That’s what Christmas teaches us about, anxiety and OCD.

Jesus came to enter our world; Jesus was the ultimate example of humility for us, and Jesus was sent as a counselor and left the Holy Spirit as our counselor and our guide.

 I’m going to pause from this piece, and you’re going to hear some information from our episode 55 if any of you are struggling on how to manage the holidays with anxiety or OCD.

Before we get into celebrating these important holidays towards the end of the year, I wanted to talk with you about surviving the holidays when you have anxiety because there are specific challenges that people with anxiety face in regards to parties, gatherings, gift giving, and that it can really increase your stress this time of year.

First thing I wanted to talk with you about is when you have anxiety, sometimes these large gatherings, even if they are family gatherings, there may be extended family that you don’t see very often, or you may be gathering with say like your husband’s coworkers and you don’t know them because you don’t work with them every day.

Sometimes those types of environments can be a little bit more anxiety-provoking. Knowing your limits and knowing when it’s time to go is important. If you’re with a friend, or spouse, or you rode with somebody, definitely knowing how to communicate to that other person that you would like to leave is important.

Sometimes you may have a code word or phrase that you want to use with your spouse, like, “Hey, don’t we need to get by such and such store before it closes? Oh, we really got to get home and let the dog out.” I’m sure that you can come up with something where you and your spouse will be on the same page and kind of be in line with each other, like, “Yeah, we’re ready to go.”

I find when I go to large gatherings, sometimes just taking a moment to sit down, maybe away from where the big crowd of people is, that really seems to help me in particular. So that may be something that helps you. Just standing requires a little bit more energy. I know that that sounds silly in itself, but you may just need to kind of take a miniature time out from all the activity.

You could go to the bathroom. You could step outside if there’s an indoor-outdoor element to this gathering. My overall point is that it’s good to have a plan going into some of these social interactions to help make them less overwhelming for you. You may not want to plan too much before the gathering so that you have time to rest and relax a little bit versus rushing from this thing to that thing to that thing if you’re traveling for the holidays.

It’s helpful to have a half a day to a day before your trip and then definitely a day when you get back before you have to jump into your work or school routine. Try to give yourself a buffer on the edges of your trips to be able to get things in order. You know, there’s always these last-minute things that we end up having to do before a trip or after a trip. We have laundry and different things that we have to do. Give yourself a little bit of a buffer of time if you can. If you’re going to reduce your stress around Christmas, you want to prioritize the gatherings and parties that are most important for you to attend.

Let’s talk for a moment about challenging family relationships. I’m not going to assume that you get along well with everyone in your family. And so some of those relationships may cause you stress. It’s important to know just internally within yourself how much of certain people you can handle. What I mean by that is that if you know you can only handle a day or two at a time around a certain person, don’t plan to spend five days with them. That’s just a recipe for disaster. Understanding that you’re an adult and you have a choice. You do not have to go and do all the things that you normally go and do.

Letting go of the have-tos is important. So many times we convince ourselves that we just have to do things that we don’t have to do. Don’t be afraid to say no if you know that what someone is asking you to do is going to be too much for you. We all have different limitations at different times in our lives.

Sometimes we’re going through things and we can only do so much and it’s okay. It’s really okay to acknowledge that to ourselves. It’s okay to communicate that to other people as well. No is a complete sentence. You don’t have to give a lengthy explanation. You can just say no or no thank you. So when you’re prioritizing your gatherings and parties, it’s very easy to get overloaded on these.

You just need to put everything on the calendar evaluate it and say, “Okay. Are we really able to give our time and energy to these things? Maybe we really want to invest more time and energy into our kid’s function, and maybe just make an appearance at the work party.” You know how that is, just kind of, “Yes, we’re going to show up a little bit later, say hi to a few people, be a part of maybe a gift exchange, and then head out.” That’s okay. It’s okay that you don’t have to be 110 percent for all of these events. Decide what is most important to you that you’re putting on your calendar. Let go of expectations that it’s going to be a perfect Christmas. The last thing I want to encourage you with, which is also very important, is to have a budget and stick to it.

Oftentimes, people overextend themselves at Christmas and go into all kinds of debt. It’s just not healthy. It causes us a lot of financial stress and, in turn, emotional stress. We have to be diligent about setting aside some for savings every single month so that when we get towards the end of the year, we have some money to spend on Christmas presents for the family and so forth.

If you sit down and budget, how much you’re going to pay for Christmas gifts, who it’s actually important to buy a Christmas gift for. I think sometimes we have this perception that we have to go overboard and buy a gift for every single person that we interact with, and obviously that’s not the case.

That’s the important thing to remember. It shouldn’t be out of obligation, you know, some families to help with finances will maybe draw names and each person gets a different person in the immediate family or the extended family. And then. That way we’re reducing the amount of money that we’re spending around Christmas and we’re also able to get good gifts for each other.

I think sometimes when it comes to holiday spending, we way overthink things or we make them more complicated than they actually have to be. So have a budget, and stick to it, that’s going to reduce a lot of your stress. I know it’s a little late to be saying save money, you know, throughout the year.

Now you know, going into next year, save a little bit of money every month for Christmas. It will help you out tremendously. You can put that towards presents, towards travel, if you’re having to travel with family. It’ll be great. And finally, let’s take the opportunity this Christmas, to not forget what it’s all about, we can get so caught up in making the food, attending the gathering, and spending time with people that we miss the point that Christmas is an opportunity for us to celebrate Christ’s birth is an opportunity for us to reflect on the fact that he chose to come into the world in the humblest way possible as a baby.

Don’t get lost in the commercialization that you forget the simple and that you forget what’s most important. If you have children, talk with them regularly about why you’re celebrating these holidays. Read the Christmas story, focus on those things more than opening presents. Find opportunities to give to others who have less than you.

I think this is such an important part of the Christmas season. You may be in a really difficult situation this Christmas, and may not feel like you have a whole lot to give. But I’m sure that even in those situations, there’s something small that you can do for someone else just to let them know that you care and that you love them.

Christmas is about love, joy, and giving to others. Let’s not lose celebrating our Savior’s birth. Let’s not lose our focus in the midst of all the activity. 

Thank you everyone so much for listening today and just standing firm with this podcast. Some of you have been around for a long time. Some of you are new.

I just wanted to let you know that recently we hit our three-year mark of doing the podcast in November. It’s been an incredible journey. So much has happened in my personal life, as many of you know, through this process, butI’ve been just totally blown away by how God has used us to impact people positively, to give them a sense of hope and encouragement.

We just received news that we have had 50,000 downloads. In that three-year span overall, which is really exciting, and we just love that some of you have shared the podcast with others as well. If you want to find out more information about what’s going on. With the show, and what’s going on with the mindfulness course coming up in 2024, please definitely get on our email list. We’ve got some great free stuff on the website for you to download. It’s www.hopeforanxietyandocd.com/free. Thank you so much for listening today.

Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of myself or By the Well Counseling. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.

108. OCD Personal Story with Michael Kheir

On today’s episode, Carrie sits down with Michael Kheir, the author of “Waging War Against OCD: A Christian Approach.” Michael shares his personal experience with OCD, shedding light on the challenges he faced. He delves into how faith and a deep understanding of God’s grace were pivotal in his journey towards healing and recovery.

Episode Summary:

  • The importance of reducing stigma around mental health, particularly OCD and anxiety.
  • How OCD can lead to obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors, even over seemingly insignificant matters.
  • The impact of strict religious upbringing on OCD and the concept of legalism.
  • The power of understanding and embracing God’s grace in dealing with mental health challenges.

Episode Summary:

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD, Episode 108! I’m Carrie Bock, and today I have the pleasure of speaking with Michael, the author of Waging War Against OCD: A Christian Approach. Michael was kind enough to send me a copy of his book, which has been incredibly insightful for our discussion.

In this episode, we dive deep into Michael’s personal battle with OCD. He shares how his journey began in childhood and has evolved through adulthood. Michael has extensively researched OCD from both Christian and secular perspectives, and his book reflects this thorough exploration. He recounts a poignant story from his college days, where a seemingly small incident triggered a flood of obsessive thoughts and compulsions.

Michael also opens up about the stories he revealed for the first time in his book—stories he hadn’t shared with his family before. His openness underscores a crucial point: mental health struggles do not define our worth or intelligence. Instead, they are a part of our journey, and understanding this can help reduce stigma.

Michael’s reflections on his experiences highlight the importance of embracing God’s grace rather than being trapped by rituals and compulsions. This conversation is a powerful reminder that faith and understanding can guide us through the complexities of OCD.

Join us as we explore these themes and more. If you find this episode helpful, please subscribe and leave a review to support our mission of breaking the stigma surrounding mental health.

Related links and resources:

www.wagingwaragainstocd.com

More to listen to:

101. A Secret Life (OCD) with Jim Juliana

Join Carrie as she sits down with Jim Juliana, an author, former high school teacher and an athletic coach, who opens up about his journey of enduring and overcoming OCD. He candidly reveals the obstacles, triumphs, and the profound impact of combining faith and therapy in his recovery.

Episode Highlights:

  • The intensity of Jim’s OCD episodes and how they affected his daily life.
  • The impact of OCD on Jim’s academic and professional pursuits.
  • The familial nature of OCD and its genetic implication
  • Jim’s struggle to reconcile treatment approaches with religious beliefs.
  • Jim’s book, “A Secret Life: Enduring and Triumphing Over OCD

Carrie also offers her insights on Jim’s treatment, providing additional context and highlighting the importance of individualized therapy plans for OCD.

Episode Summary:

Welcome to Episode 101 of Christian Faith and OCD. I’m Carrie Bock, your host. In today’s episode, I’m thrilled to introduce Jim Juliana, author of “A Secret Life.” Jim shares his deeply personal journey with OCD, detailing his experiences and treatment.

Jim first noticed something was wrong during elementary school in the 1950s. He recalls an incident where he fixated on an inappropriate image, leading him to fear eternal damnation. Despite being a top student and devout altar boy, he struggled with feelings of guilt and scrupulosity, intensified by his religious upbringing.

As a teenager in the 1960s, Jim faced increasing OCD symptoms, including tics and obsessive thoughts. He recalls an event where he ran away before returning to high school, seeking refuge in a tree house. This marked the beginning of his journey toward professional help, although he did not receive an official OCD diagnosis until 1980.

Jim emphasizes the importance of recognizing OCD in children, noting how it can affect well-behaved students who may internalize their struggles. He shares insights from his own experiences and from conversations with educators and parents about the prevalence of OCD in younger populations.

Join us as Jim delves into his past, the challenges he faced, and how he ultimately found healing. Tune in to hear his full story and gain valuable insights into living with and overcoming OCD.

Related Links and Resources:

Jim Juliana

Jim Juliana’s Book: A Secret Life: Enduring and Triumphing Over OCD: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

International OCD Foundation

More Episodes to Listen to:

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD episode 101. I am your host, Carrie Bock. On today’s episode, we have a personal story of someone who’s dealt with OCD and has gone through treatment and has written a book about it. So I’m very excited to have Jim Juliana on the show talking about his book, “A Secret Life.”

Welcome to the show.

Jim: Thank you, Carrie, for having me.

Carrie: When did you really first start to show signs of OCD and like, what were those? Even if you didn’t have a diagnosis or you didn’t know that that’s what it was.

Jim: I first knew something was wrong when I was in elementary school, we’re going back now to the mid 1950s, I’m showing my age, and I can remember and relate in the book, an incident where we had a plumber or electrician at the house working.

For my mom and I was snooping around the truck outside and there was a picture in the truck of a partially naked woman and of course I fixated on it. And then after the gentleman left, I started having very serious feelings that I had done something wrong. I was the oldest of eight children. I don’t think we had eight at this time, but went to Catholic school through 12th grade.

Was very religious. I was an altar boy. I was at the top of my class academically, and I thought I was a pretty good person. And then this event occurred and it took my mother and me. The rest of the afternoon for me to realize or come to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to go to hell for having looked at this picture.

Wow. And I remember it very, very vividly. My mother was my best friend all through my teenage years, and I worshipped her and loved her very much, and it was, uh, mutual. And she sat me down, I remember, in the kitchen and tried to explain to me what had transpired, and it wasn’t a mortal sin, and I wasn’t going to hell, and eventually I felt better about it later in the afternoon, and we’re talking several hours where she consoled me and talked to me, and so that was the very first incident where I knew there was something unusual going on.

Back then, the word scrupulosity came into play because of my religious background and upbringing. The other event that took place, which was really probably the most important event in my adolescent years, I had completed the first semester of Catholic high school. In an all boys Jesuit high school, it was Christmas vacation and I was scheduled to go back to school the next day to start the second semester in January.

Now we’re talking 1964 and as I had mentioned, I was a straight A student did very, very well. I like school, enjoyed school, but I had been having a lot of problems. My first semester at PrEP, Georgetown PrEP, was headaches, and I had developed some facial and bodily tics. And it was all trying to get rid of thoughts or ideas that I thought were sexually wrong or inappropriate.

And my grades had reflected this interruption, so to speak. And I was just afraid to go back to school, so the night before I was supposed to return, I ran away. And basically what I did was I went into the park. We lived near Rock Creek park and my friends had a tree for tree house. So I spent the night there freezing my butt off and got back to the house about eight or eight 30 in the morning.

And of course my folks were beside themselves. And that was the first time that I ever received any professional medical help for what was going on. I had just turned 15 years old then.

Carrie: Did they know that you were struggling with this thought process? Was there a lot of confessing that was going on to them?

Jim: No.

Carrie: Or assurance seeking? Okay.

Jim: It was my secret only at that point. And I was very timid. Even though I was a good athlete and a good student, I was behind the eight ball a little bit socially. I was very quiet and introverted. Even with my parents, they would have to pull things out of me, so to speak. You can imagine having a house full of children, all ages, all in school.

We had a nice middle class family and I was pretty happy most of the time, but this was an offshoot of what had happened in grade school and it just kept getting worse and worse and more invasive in everything that I did to the point where. I knew I needed help. I didn’t quite know how to ask for help.

So this was my way of speaking up and getting my parents involved.

I think it’s important to note for parents and others that sometimes like the kid that’s well behaved, that doesn’t mean that they don’t have the internal struggles going on. Because a lot of times we see situations where. A child can be very well behaved and they’re good in school, but then they’re holding on to this anxiety inside and unless it manifests in some way externally, a lot of times people don’t know.

Yeah, and I think I’ve mentioned to you, we have 4 children and 3 of our girls are school teachers. It’s amazing today just how many youngsters suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder. It would shock a lot of parents and… Through discussions with my girls and in the last few years I taught, it was just startling how many children are affected adversely in school and in their activities and at how young it happens.

My wife and I spoke to a lady who was a secretary work for our financial planner and Betsy started talking one day to her and she had twins, seven years old, and one of the twins was having nightmares. and all kinds of problems, and had been diagnosed with OCD. And this was just a couple years ago.

Carrie: Yeah, fortunately, like, they’re catching it a lot earlier, so that there can be earlier intervention.

Yes. Whereas, you know, many years ago, they did not catch these types of things earlier. When you got help at 15, did you get a diagnosis of OCD then, or no?

Jim: I’m laughing at remembering. We went to a doctor, psychiatrist that was a good friend of the family, Dr. Fitzgerald. He had a couple of sons attending prep with me.

He was a good friend of the family. And my parents and I never received or heard the word OCD until 1980, if you can believe that. I was married, had four children and into my career as a teacher and coach. Before OCD was ever mentioned.

Did you label yourself with something random, like I’m weird or quirky, or I feel crazy inside because I think a lot of times people with OCD do feel internally crazy until they get a diagnosis.

Yeah, you’re right about that. A lot of people I’ve met, they don’t want to talk about it. They’re embarrassed. Yeah. I think would be the word I would use, or they feel they’re lesser human beings.

Carrie: How did you explain this to yourself?

Jim: To this day, I think of what happened to me freshman year in high school, for lack of better words, is I had a nervous breakdown of some sort.

I had an emotional… breakdown. I had a mental disorder of some nature that I had no idea what was going on. In fact, just within the last couple of years, when I was meeting with my present Dr. Jim Gallagher, who inspired me to write my book, he talked about the fact that I was a 15 year old, going through puberty, going through all kinds of Emotional, physical changes at that time.

And a lot of that was part of what produced the headaches. The headaches were real. A lot of my teachers thought that I was faking it. I remember that. It was much, much more complicated than anyone thought back in 1964. And it encompassed everything I did, every day, every minute, something was going on and I knew it.

I knew I was different. In fact, later on in my adolescence, when I dropped out of college, I was drafted. It was during Vietnam and our pediatrician was able to write a letter and explain what was going on with me. And I really wasn’t trying to dodge the draft. In fact, I was thinking about going into the service.

They wouldn’t take me because I was, I think the phrase they used was mentally unstable or mentally incompetent. I was four F and didn’t have to worry about going to Vietnam.

Carrie: Wow. Well, you said it took until 1980 for you to get a diagnosis and hear the words O c D. While you were going through this in high school and beyond, was it always mainly themes of scrupulosity, like worried about offending God or going to hell or other things?

Jim: Yes, my wife and I were high school sweethearts and started dating. Oh, I first met her when I was 14. So right around, so she knows all about this and lived with this more than anybody else now that my parents are gone. And it was always a scrupulosity problem. It always, because of my deep religious Christian faith, my Catholicism, my love of God, but it always was, had sexual overtones.

And it was never talked about that. I had something going wrong with the chemicals in my brain. There were pathways that I had developed forcing me to go sideways in different areas. Even when the O C D was used in 80, I was seeing a doctor here in Denver and he actually was trying drugs, prescription drugs to use some of the effects of the OCD.

They hadn’t been accepted yet by the FDA, so my doctor had to get him from Canada. That’s the point where I was in the 70s and 80s where I’m trying every different prescription drug for anxiety, for depression, for whatever they thought it might work. And I probably went through half a dozen to a dozen different types of drugs.

And drugs have never really been a great assistance to my problem. Never. In fact, Dr. Gallagher says it’s normally about only 30% of people that have OCD find any kind of relief from prescription. Antidepressants, those kind of things.

Do you remember what some of the things you were on? Were you on like, because this was before the standard treatment now is SSRIs.

Were you on like a tricyclic antidepressants? Or do you remember? I was

on Prozac at one time. I know my brother. I can’t remember the drug that he used because he’s OCD as well. And I mentioned it to my doctor and we tried and it did have some side effects, but it helped a little bit, but it was never more than just mellowing me out.

Carrie: Okay.

Jim: Kind of controlling my temper and frustration and anger and anxiety in my case anyway.

Carrie: But it never helped like lessen the intrusions for you?

Jim: No, never.

Carrie: That’s hard to deal with. So I imagine that it was probably hard trying to navigate a sense of like healthy sexuality. It’s normal for teenagers to think about sex or be curious about sex or have questions about them.

But those things weren’t talked about. People weren’t having open conversations. Was that hard for you to navigate? Try to figure out like, I don’t know what’s normal versus like what’s OCD related.

Jim: Yeah, what was normal for me was what I had been taught in 12 years of Catholic school, nuns for eight years, Sisters of Charity, which I loved them, they were great teachers, but they were strict, and it was all by the book, the Catholic Church, the doctrines of the church, so I, being the person I was, That was kind of how I acted and reacted.

And if I thought it was a mortal sin to look at a girl walking away from me who had nice legs and a nice butt and swayed. And if that was a mortal sin, then that was a mortal sin. I had to go and confess that, go to church for that. I think like a lot of kids in the fifties and sixties, there wasn’t a lot of, uh, sex education or discourse on sex.

It’s what I learned in school, and it seemed like, as I look back now, just about everything was bad, was wrong. That was my approach, gotta be careful, and I never dated much. I never kissed a girl until my wife to be kissed me when I was probably 16. I was way behind the curve. A lot of it had to do with the OCD and worrying about sin and having to go back to church, confess my sins, talk to the priest, that kind of thing.

Carrie: Did that cause you to engage in confession maybe more than the average Catholic? I don’t know exactly how that works, but did you find yourself going back a lot and confessing impulsively?

Jim: Yes, absolutely. It’s like hitting your head on the brick wall, like, okay, this is going to help. And then you walk out of the confession. Confession works where you can go anytime you want. Okay. It’s up to the individual and it’s a sacrament, just like receiving the Eucharist or marriage. So it’s supposed to receive help from God and grace from God by going to confession, supposed to be helpful. And I turned it upside down on its head and it became drudgery and something that I avoided more than took advantage of.

Carrie: Okay. Did you have a lot of compulsive praying during this time? Like you’d have a certain thought and say a certain prayer or feel like you were repeating certain prayers over and over?

Jim: Yeah, that’s a good point. I’ve thought about that. Yes, most definitely. I used to, in grade school, during Easter, during Lent, Advent, Christmas time, I tried to go to church every day before school. And then in high school, we had mass, daily mass. Optional. And I went a lot. In fact, half of the kids that went to prep were boarding students. So about 200 day, we were called day hops and then 200 boarding students from all over the United States. And we would go back in early August for football camp to start practice.

And I was one of the captains my senior year. And the tradition had always been go to church, go to mass every morning before we start practicing the day. And a lot of kids were rebelling against that. And I remember along with the other co captain, we had a team meeting and I was the one that said, Hey, we’re going to go to church every morning.

We’re going to keep this tradition. And a lot of guys were upset with me. As I recall, that was an example of how. Impulsive I was about the religious. I even carried it into my responsibility as captain of the football team, making the rest of the guys go to church every morning, just because I thought that’s what I wanted to do.

It wasn’t anything I was hurting him, but I’m sure there’s some guys to this day that are still resentful why Juliana made us go to church on, uh, every single day during camp.

Carrie: I think that’s a good point though, where sometimes when people struggle with OCD, they can rope other people into their compulsive behaviors. And this especially happens for spouses, children, others that are closest to you. I’m curious, what was the impact on your wife and children? Because you had told me when we met a little bit before that they actually wrote parts of your book, right? Or you included parts from them in the book.

Jim: Each of the four children, they’re all adults now in their 40s. And then my wife, Betsy, wrote probably half a chapter. And what I wanted people to see is how my OCD affected them. I knew as a father with them growing up and trying to be a good dad, but I knew a lot of times they had no idea what was going on and what my actions, why I was doing what I was doing. I wanted them to have an opportunity to relate people who read the book, what it was like for them , especially for my son, he spent a lot of time with me in the fall. He was always the manager of the football team, and he was around me a lot during football practices and that kind of thing. Both my youngest daughter and Jimmy, our son, I taught both of them at the Catholic school they attended for, I taught them two years, which they talk about a lot of it was fun and it was a good experience, but there were some tough times for them. And then of course, Betsy’s perspective is probably the most intuitive and the most real because she knew me as the boy next door. Literally, her family moved next door to my grandparents at the beach.

She told her father the first summer that we knew each other that she was going to marry me. Now, how she knew that, I still don’t know. She said, Dad, I’m going to marry that guy. But she had an awful lot of insights and I give her a lot of credit because I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for her. She got me through a lot of tough times, especially in college.

When things got really bad, the thoughts got really bad, I called them episodes or sessions in the book, I think, where I would have a thought and it would kind of take control of my brain. When I went to see Gallagher in 2015. Those sessions amounted to 60, 70 times a day. I was interrupted in my mind related to something having to do with OCD and oftentimes sexual nature, 65 to 70 times.

Carrie: That’s a lot.

Jim: It’s terrible. In graduate school, I got my master’s because of my OCD. I couldn’t read my textbooks because I was interrupted so often. And I loved to read. There were times before that where, and I said, I think I mentioned I developed tics, shaking my head and trying to get rid of these thoughts and the children and Betsy offered, I think, excellent perspective to the book.

The other point that people should realize is OCD is familial. It’s genetic. Everybody, all my children have some form of OCD. My dad had it. My uncle had it. In fact, in 15 or 20 years ago, the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland was doing a study trying to isolate the familial gene that causes OCD.

And about eight people in our family, my family, participated in the study to isolate that gene. Now that I’m better, and we can joke about it, but back then it wasn’t, like my dad was super OCD and perfectionist, and, but he would never admit that he had OCD or suffered from any kind of, It’s actually, I think, technically referred to as a phobia, OCD.

And yesterday, for the first time in several years, I went to see my doctor, just to kind of, he calls it a tune up. We talked for an hour and just got caught up, and he mentioned that I’m losing my train of thought, he, I can’t remember what the point I was trying to make, but anyway.

Carrie: What was that process of treatment like for you? So when you went in 2015, you feel like that was when you got some really good therapeutic help.

Jim: Yeah, it’s capital E, capital R, capital P, Exposure and Response Prevention Therapy. And I could spend 20 minutes describing it exactly. I’m not a doctor. I don’t want to do that, but it’s very controversial. My doctor, Dr. Gallagher, is the expert in the western part of the United States. People come from all over. In fact, the waiting list in 2015 to see him was a couple of years when he found out my age and what I had been through, I was getting close to 70 then, and it had to do with sex and religion. He knew he could treat me and help me.

So he saw me right away and within weeks and then months of seeing him, I experienced a change. Basically what he does is, for example, he went to my daughter Stephanie’s house. Stephanie has a mild case of O C D and it’s the cleanliness O C D. Okay? You wash your hands and organizational, everything has to be perfect, that kind of thing.

And some of those attributes are good, especially if you are a teacher. She teaches the little one second, third grade. So he went over to her house and he’s walking around our house and he would see a picture and he’d make the picture crooked and he’d move the furniture and play games with her head. We have fun talking about that.

And my uncle Charles, he had all his clothes organized. He showed me one time later in life. Perfectly white shirts, colored shirts, striped shirts, Hawaiian shirts. It’s amazing the way people will react to the OCD, and I was in the process of writing the book in the 2018, I guess, and there were two sisters that happened to live in Colorado, and they were in their 20s.

And they had suffered their entire life from clemennitis OCD to the point where they hardly ever left their home.

Carrie: Yeah, it can get really severe with the avoidance.

Jim: Yeah, and at one point, I mean, they were taking showers five and six times. Anyway. They moved out of their home and were living together, and during the course of my writing the book, they committed suicide. And Dr. Gallagher had never treated them, but he had been in a seminar where they were present, and he talked about some of the things that he might have done to treat them, but that was a really sad story. There are a lot of people that attempt suicide or commit suicide because of OCD.

Carrie: Tell us about, do you remember some of the exposures that you had to do that were really hard, like, I don’t know if I can do that, and not, like, give into a compulsion, because essentially that’s what they’re asking you to do, is kind of expose yourself to certain things and then, or have an intrusion and not give into the compulsive, whether it’s the tick or the prayer or the thing that you usually do, to kind of resolve that angst.

Jim: I had a doctor, a psychiatrist, MD, treated me for over 20 years, and he was the one that recommended Gallagher. We had talked about Gallagher before, but he knew of my strict Catholic faith and my religious background and everything, and he never thought I was ready for the exposure and response therapy because of what it asks you to do sometime.

Betsy and I saw Gallagher first time. He said, I’m never going to ask you to do anything that’s illegal or hurtful or harmful or against the law or anything like that. What I ask you to do may go against what you’ve been taught in your religious background. And I was to the point Betsy didn’t think I was going to do.

He said, if you do what I tell you to do, I can cure you. That’s how confident he was. And I was all in. I was surprised Betsy thought I was going to get up and walk out. Which a lot of people do. He told me that. And to answer your question directly, what did he have me do? He had me stop going to church.

Stop praying. I had never purchased any kind of a pornographic book or a Playboy or any of that kind of stuff. Second visit, we went on a field trip. He took me to a Barnes and Noble and told me to, and bought me three or four Playboy magazines, told me to look at the pictures, read the articles, that kind of thing. Gave me a couple websites on the internet, pornographic websites. The idea is to totally overwhelm you with what you don’t want to do. Like I said, within weeks and then months, Betsy could tell immediately that just by doing what he told me to do. And then initially I was seeing him a couple times a week. And then it was once a week, and then it was once a month, but it was pretty intensive.

Carrie: So you went weekly at first, or did you go more than?

Jim: I went weekly at first, yes. In fact, I think the first month I went twice a week. And then I went once a week for maybe another month or two, and then we got to the point where I went once a month and for an hour.

Oh, I know what else he did. He made tapes that I had to listen to. Anti prayer tapes. You don’t need to go to church. There is no hell. And a lot of people look at it as being very controversial, but I do too. I mean, pornography and those kinds of things are sickening to me, but it works.

Carrie: So that cut down after engaging in those activities, that cut down on the intrusive thoughts that you were having?

Jim: Absolutely. So what it did was, the pathways in my brain were destroyed by my having done those activities.

Carrie: Hey, Carrie, interrupting this interview just for a moment. Wanted to say that it sounds like what our guest went through was flooding. There’s a difference between in behavioral exposure therapy.

There’s a difference between flooding and gradual exposure. Flooding is kind of what it sounds like where you’re immersed in something very quickly. Gradual exposure is where you bite things off into smaller steps and you have a hierarchy and you move through that exposure hierarchy starting with things that are lower on the exposure level and then moving upward.

It’s quite possible that flooding was chosen in this situation for treatment due to the severity of the level of the issues, but I’m not familiar with many therapists today who are still using flooding techniques. There may certainly be some. I also want to point out that the International OCD Foundation, which is not a faith based organization, has principles of effective and religiously sensitive exposures for ERP.

We will copy that website and put it in the show notes for you so you can read those. They talk about not asking a client to do something that they knowingly would violate their safety or supported beliefs and being able to do the activities that other people from their faith community can do as a part of normal practice and identifying working with the faith community and the therapist.

We talk a lot on the show about various types of treatment, and so just to know that I just want people who are listening to this for the first time or maybe this is their first exposure to exposure and response prevention. I don’t want anyone to get scared or overwhelmed or think that this is going to be the absolute way Treatment plan for them.

Your own therapist has to assess what’s going to be best for you and your situation. So just keep that in mind.

Jim: Like I said, I went from 65 to 70 sessions a day to the peak of where I was feeling my best, maybe one.

Carrie: Okay. Wow. That’s a huge difference.

Jim: I was to the point where suicide was always in the back of my mind. The only thing that kept me from committing suicide was my family and crazy as it sounds, my religion. Because of course it’s suicide is mortal sin is a grievous act. I would assume most Christian churches. And yeah, it was startling revelation. I was a totally different person.

Carrie: How did you reconcile this concept of almost like, I have to sin in order to get better for my OCD. Like, I have to stop doing things that God wants me to do and start doing things that are against my faith system in order to, like, I think that’s a piece that a lot of people would really, like, wrestle with. liike, how can I be asked to do these things in order to get better?

Jim: That’s why the first doctor didn’t recommend Gallagher all those years, because he knew how religious I was. And to answer your question, and the way Gallagher explains it, he’s not Catholic, but he’s Christian. He was raised Christian. I think he’s married to a Catholic woman.

Anyway, I came to the conclusion that no loving God wants any human being to live the way I was living. To suffer at that level. Anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts. If you’re a good teacher, it makes you tired because you put a lot of effort into it. My girls were always telling me how tired they are, and I said, I can relate.

So if you put on top of that, all this other, these thoughts and gyrations that I was going through to not sin, and I would come home at night, totally exhausted. That makes sense. Would sometimes lash out and get negative and be angry. Especially to my children when they were smaller, and to Betsy, because that wasn’t me, that’s not the kind of person I was, but this overwhelming guilt and anxiety and depression was just like a pall that surrounded my whole life.

So when Gallagher and I talked, and it was like, This is not what God wants. God’s a loving God, a forgiving God. If you make a mistake and you’re sorry, it’s over, done with. You don’t have to carry it for the next 25 years. So that’s the way I looked at the pornography and stuff. It was not sinning. It was allowing me to live the life that Christ really wants everyone to live, a happy life.

I have a God given talent to work with kids. And I always knew that, always considered myself, this is not a profession, it’s my vocation. I was meant to be a school teacher and I could motivate kids and help kids. And why would God allow me to lose that attribute because of OCD? That’s not what he wanted.

He wants me to be a good teacher, good father, good person, so in a perverted way, it’s not perverted, it’s not the right word, but in a strange way, doing what would be normally wrong was really making me a much better person, much better individual, able to live the life that I’m supposed to live. That’s why I’m talking to you today.

I feel this is my responsibility. I’m not teaching anymore. Dr. Gallagher told me yesterday, by the way, he said, I gotta tell you, there are three people that have read your book, and they’ve all been my patients, and they’ve all been kids. He said, and I’ve cured them all. That’s positive. And I couldn’t have done that had I not listened to him and done what he told me to do.

Carrie: Why did you decide to write the book? I know he encouraged you to write about your experience, but obviously, like, some of these things are personal, you know, that you’re opening up about. Why did you decide to kind of put yourself out there like that?

Jim: Because I thought it was my responsibility, my worst enemy, to have to live with OCD the way I did, and others do, like those two sisters that the only way out for them was suicide.

That’s not the way life’s supposed to be. The children were a little hesitant when I asked them to write something for the book, and I said, Hey, you could be helping some other people. You could be doing some good. Sure. And Betsy’s always been supportive. That’s her M. O. She’s a good, caring, empathetic individual.

It was kind of a team effort, and when I hear stories like Gallagher told me yesterday, makes it all worthwhile.

Carrie: So can people find your book on Amazon and other places?

Jim: Amazon is the best place, Jim Juiliana, author, is my Facebook, and it has a lot of pictures of the children and a lot of reviews from people who have read the book.

If they think they have it, they need to find out, determine if it is OCD. Especially with children, because so much going on with little children. I remember middle school children getting up out of their desk and falling down for whatever reason. They’re just all over the place, and you never know what they’re thinking and doing, and I hate the thought of teenagers and young children having to suffer OCD and not have any help from parents professionally.

Carrie: Well, thank you so much for sharing your story.

Jim: It’s been great. And I appreciate your putting the word out. Pay it forward.

Carrie: I’m really glad that we had Jim Juliana on the show to share with us about his experience with exposure and response prevention. It was tough for him, but it worked. We are very much about increasing hope on the show and wanting people to know that wherever you are on your OCD or anxiety journey, you can get better.

Never give up. And as always, thank you for listening. May God be with you on your next step towards treatment and greater mental health. Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the use of myself or by the wealth counseling.

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

98. Stories of Hope (Part 2)

We continue sharing inspiring stories of our past guests finding hope amidst anxiety and OCD struggles.

These stories highlight the power of hope, faith, and supportive relationships in overcoming anxiety and OCD.

Episode Highlights:

  • Rachel Hammons, in episode 8, discovered hope through faith and contrasting God’s love with intrusive thoughts.
  • Ed Syner, in Episode 42, found hope with the support of his mother during bullying and emotional challenges.
  • Rhett Smith, in Episode 5, witnessed God’s redemption through his daughter’s confidence in a school play.
  • Peyton Garland, in Episode 26, experienced a powerful moment of hope when a stranger displayed grace and prayed for her during an obsession-related incident.

Steve and I, in Episode 81, also shared our own story of hope, with our daughter, Faith, bringing immense joy into our lives and how her presence reminds us of the goodness of God and His faithfulness.

I also share a bonus story, reminding you of the possibility of finding reciprocal friendships through intentional effort.

Episode Summary:

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD, episode 98! I’m thrilled to share part two of our series on stories of hope with you. If you joined us last week, you heard some incredible testimonies about finding faith and courage amid OCD. Today, we continue that journey with more inspiring stories.

First, let’s revisit Rachel Hammons from episode 8. Rachel opened up about how discovering she had OCD was a pivotal moment of hope for her. She emphasized that understanding the character of God brought her immense comfort.

In episode 42, Ed Snyder shared his story of dealing with anger and emotional abuse. Ed’s experience with bullying and the impact it had on his self-esteem was profound. His story highlights how God often works through people to bring us the encouragement and strength we need.

Next, in episode 5, Rhett Smith shared a touching story about how watching his daughter’s confidence in theater gave him hope. Rhett saw his own struggles reflected in his daughter’s success and felt reassured that God redeems our past difficulties. It’s a beautiful reminder that even though we face challenges, God can transform and use our experiences for good.

In episode 26, Peyton Garland recounted a harrowing moment of her OCD journey involving a car accident. Despite the fear and stress, she encountered a stranger who prayed for her and showed her unexpected kindness. This moment of grace provided Peyton with lasting hope and reinforced her faith in God’s providence.

Lastly, in a special anniversary episode, Steve and I reflected on how our daughter has been a beacon of joy and hope in our lives. Her presence reminds us of God’s goodness and faithfulness, even during difficult times. It’s a testament to how God’s blessings can come in the form of everyday miracles.

Thank you for joining us today. I hope these stories have uplifted and inspired you. I look forward to sharing more about my own journey through grief and recovery in our next episode. Until then, may you find comfort and hope in God’s great love for you.

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD, episode 98. Today on the show we are going to share some more stories of hope. This is part two from last week.

On episode 8, Rachel Hammons shared with us about her story of hope related to the character of God.

Rachel: I think that there’s a lot of little moments of hope for me, and so I think that, like looking back on my story, kind of like I mentioned earlier, the biggest piece of hope for me was learning the fact that I had OCD that was eyeopening and huge, but I also know that I think one of the biggest pieces of hope too, that I had, if you’re a Christian or if you’re a religious faith, reflecting on who you think God is or even doing some research on like. Not necessarily this specific event, this specific sin, this specific fear, but who is God? If I can learn more about the character of God, and I know that times that I’ve learned more about the character of God, the way that Jesus treated people, that is going to look vastly different than the way that my thoughts tend to speak to me.

When I reflect on who God is or at least even if that is a question because sometimes I’m like, well, I don’t know who God is, like I don’t know how he would respond. Well then just reflect on something that you know about God. I know that God is love. so if God is love, He loves me and He wants the best for me.

At least I know that I have that support. I have that hope. If God wants, just like any, hopefully, parents are loving their kids. God wants the best for his kids. God wants the best for me. At least in that, I know that I have someone on my side that’s walking through Ooc D or walking through my struggles with me, and I think that’s kind of what I tend to reflect on, especially when I’m really stuck in the obsessions and I don’t see an end to this particular one reflecting back on what you know, grounding yourself in what you know to be true.

Carrie: I really liked what Rachel said about grounding yourself back to biblical truths and things that you know about the character of God. Think that that’s so helpful.

In episode 42, Ed Snyder shared his personal story about anger and how he had to learn to manage his anger in a healthier way.

Ed: We’re going to talk about probably a lot of anxiety that I experienced in my life with everything else that’s going on. Somebody being bullied like I was, or you’ve got somebody in your life that is, they may not physically be bullying you, beating you up physically. They are beating you up emotionally and making you feel small, making you feel insufficient. It really messes with my emotions and kind of makes my eyes water a little bit when I think about the kid, Ed Snyder, and I knew me. I just love everybody. I just wanted to get along with everybody and everybody’s making fun of me and tormenting me and all of that stuff.

It literally destroyed my self-esteem. I couldn’t see my way up, and if it wasn’t for God putting somebody in my life that I called Mother, where every day I come home from school after going through a day of it’s supposed to be a day of learning, which was a day of abuse, she was there telling me, Hey, you don’t need those people.

You can do anything you set your mind to do. God’s got great things for you in your life. He’s got stuff in you that you’re going to do great with. She was constantly just hitting me with that, and it really was a saving point in my life. I don’t know where I would be if it wasn’t for the time that God used my own mother to tell me, you don’t listen to them.

You are better than that, you’re a good kid, et cetera, et cetera. As I grew, God just kept putting people in my life, one being my wife, we’re together. I mean, we’re peanut butter and jelly, and of course she knows me. I think everybody needs in their life is somebody that knows them inside and out, and she knows when to back off of me.

She knows when to get in my face and with that Irish face of hers, and I take it because I know she loves me. It’s amazing how God puts people in your life that will help you. They’re there. To be a blessing to you, to build you up. And of course, again, I don’t wanna take anything away from God, but God uses people.

God uses work. Have your faith. God can do anything. He is everything. But sometimes he uses the hands and the voices of people to make that work. And of course, we’re responsible for putting in the work. Faith without works is dead. I went to the altar and I prayed after my pastor preached the message. And I cried and I wanted God to heal me of this and get rid of it.

I don’t wanna be like this anymore. And I get up and a day or two later, I’m back at it again. I had to figure out the work. What do I need to do? Myself to partner with God’s power and prayer to make it happen. Maybe that’s what I need to help. It’s a listener of yours in your audience. Whether you’re dealing with anxiety or you’re dealing with stress or frustration or even anger, God’s putting people in your life.

This podcast, perhaps get back to this podcast and get the help that you need so that you can put the work with your faith and God’s going to do great things in your life.

Carrie: I think that’s really great that Ed’s mom was able to just speak truth and encouragement over his life. We all need that kind of support.

In episode five with Rhett Smith, “Can God Use Your Anxiety for Good?”He has written a book on that, and here is his story of hope.

Rhett: I feel fortunate that I feel like there’s a lot of people around me who’ve given me hope or who’ve encouraged me, but the thing that came to mind was my daughter, who I had mentioned earlier, is 13.

She’s in theater at her school, and so last year when she was in a theater production, I was watching and she had a couple different parts where she spoke and I was watching her speak and she did it with such confidence and that really hit me at the core. I think also because I pictured myself at her age and I was in a school play that you had to be in, and I remember stuttering my way through that and living in fear and anxiety. Seeing her be so confident, I think gave me a sense of hope that God changes and he redeems situations. He transforms people’s lives. Even though that I struggled with anxiety and stuttering and things were really difficult for me, he was able to help me work and to grow that somehow maybe changed my daughter’s life in such a way that she didn’t have to deal with those same struggles.

Though my daughter’s not me, I felt like in some way it was a mirror of God saying things are gonna be okay. It just gave me a sense of hope. I saw my younger version of myself in her and that’s been something I’ve thought a lot about. I think over the last probably five or six months since she had that play, and that’s something I’ve been really encouraged by through difficult times, that things are gonna be okay. We’re gonna be okay, we’re gonna get through these times, and God will redeem the situations and he’ll fix the broken pieces. That for me is huge.

Carrie: I appreciated that story about his daughter. I’m definitely thinking about my own daughter and things that I want to be different for her childhood than things that I experienced.

I didn’t have a whole lot of confidence when I was a child and teenager, and I hope that I can instill some of that confidence. In my daughter when she gets into those ages. 

In episode 26, Peyton Garland shared with us a powerful story of hope, about a time that she got stuck in an obsession.

Peyton: OCD is just, oh, it’s wild. Harm OCD for me. I’m always afraid of random people off the road. I’m always turning my car around to make sure I haven’t run anybody off the road. There was one day I was in my little black Chevy car that I had gotten in high school, and I was driving home. And I just had one of those intrusive thoughts of, I tried to pick up my phone because someone was calling me.

I thought, oh my gosh, like for those five split seconds, you have no idea. If you were looking at the road, what could have happened? So I just hit the brakes. It’s a quiet country town, but I still hit the brakes in the middle of the road, and I went to whip my car around and somebody sideswipes me because I’m irrationally flipping my car in the middle of the street and I thought, oh my word, I have just caused a wreck.

I have no clue if this person is okay. I don’t know how I’m gonna tell a cop. I have intrusive thought, OCD and that’s why I’ve had a wreck. I pull off on the side of the road and this woman pulls off and I see her and she’s older and I think, gosh, like she’s 85. I have partially killed her. She’s going to need a hip replacement.

This woman gets out of her car. Now I’ve damaged her car like this was on me. She comes over and grabs my hand and she looks at me. And even in a small town, this was one of those random chances where I didn’t know who this was. She said, “I just want you to know that this is God’s providential hand, that you’re safe and I’m safe.” And she prayed over me and just left. And I’m sitting here going, my insurance is going to go through the roof. I definitely just clipped the back end of her car, so no insurance going up. I didn’t pay anything for this woman’s car. I swear she was an angel, but that was just hope because that was a hard thing.

I made a very, mentally I was in a bad place. I had made a bad decision as a driver. And this woman just prays over me, gives me grace, and just drives off. I will never forget that day. I will never forget her face, the street name, any of it as long as I live. That was some serious hope that I will not forget.

Carrie: This last story of Hope is from Steve and I’s second anniversary podcast. We do one every year around our anniversary, and this one was about becoming parents and what our daughter has meant to us.

Steve: When you’re down or something’s just difficult and you’ve got this baby that is just giggling and smiling and sticking her tongue out at you, you cannot be mad.

You cannot be upset with life. I really believe our daughter has this gift, and that is to be an encourager, to be someone who just, she doesn’t even know words yet, but we just kind of pass her around for the hugs and smiles, and it just really lightens the mood. It changes the focal point from your problem to just this happy little girl that just wants nothing more than to make you happy. Just been a blessing.

Carrie: Yes. I think about that too, and just that faith was conceived and born really during some dark times and some emotional struggles, but that. She’s a reminder of the goodness of God and of the faithfulness of God.

You know, when people ask like, “Why did you name your daughter Faith?” It’s like, “Well, you know, it took a lot of faith for us to get to this point, to be alone, and then to be older and find each other, not knowong if we could have a child or not and have her.” I really believe that she was born for a purpose in, in God’s plan. Had we received this diagnosis before we got pregnant, we probably would’ve said, you know, I don’t think we should do this. I don’t think we should go through with this. So she showed up at just the right time. And part of my process right now is, Just trusting God one day at a time, to be able to gimme the strength, to make it through the day, but also to know that he’s in control, that he loves us and that he’s gonna take care of us regardless of what happens, that he’s going to provide for our needs. Just knowing that God is good and he loves us and even in the dark times that he’s still here, he’s still present, he’s for us and that keeps us going just one day at a time, one step at a time. We’re thankful every day that Steve can walk. We’re thankful for every day that you get to see your daughter grow up.

There was a time period where I was praying that God would preserve your sight, that you’d be able to see even be born. You know, we just didn’t know. There was so much we didn’t know at the time.

Steve: We are so blessed. I hope that as a listener you don’t hear this or someone doesn’t hear this and think we have some problems. I hope you see that we are blessed that yes, there’s something I’ve been diagnosed with, but God’s still blessing me.

Carrie: I want to give you a little bonus story of hope in closing that’s a little bit more recent. I was thinking about a friendship that I have and how this person used to be more of an acquaintance role in my life, and I took the risk to step out and say, “Hey, would you like to hang out sometime, you know, outside of our kind of already acquaintance time that we had” It’s hard to do. It’s hard to be vulnerable and step out and make adult friendships. I know that many times it hasn’t worked out where. I’ve tried to reach out with someone or tried to spend time with them, and they’re too busy.

They’ve got this going on or that going on. Maybe they don’t have room for other people in their lives. Well, what I’ve found is that the more people that you. Reach out to or invite into your world. Eventually, you’re going to find someone who’s also looking for that same sense of friendship and companionship that you are.

It may take you a little while to find your person, but for somebody out there that’s. Feeling a little bit lonely today. I wanted to really encourage you that you have to put a lot of intentionality into your friendships after adulthood, especially after getting married or having kids or working a high stress job.

You just have to be really intentional about getting together with people, and if you’re not, then a lot of times that’s where those relationships sometimes can fall by the wayside. It’s hard to find a reciprocal friend, but I know from experience that if you keep working on it and you keep looking at it, that you will find probably somebody in your acquaintance circle that you can bring in a little bit closer.

It just takes some risk and working through some potential fear of rejection on the front end. I hope you have enjoyed these stories of hope today. Thank you for everyone just giving me a little bit of time and bandwidth to be able to recover from the grief and loss journey that I’ve been on. I hope next episode to be able to share some of that with you, what that experience has been like for me. I went to a grief intensive and it was absolutely powerful and therapeutically healing for me 

Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of myself or By the Well counseling.

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

91. Harm OCD in Pregnancy Sent me to the ER with author Amber Williams Van Zuyen

Amber Williams Van Zuyen, author of Pregnant and Drowning tells about her struggle with harm OCD during her pregnancy.

Episode Highlights:

  • How and when did her OCD symptoms start
  • What happened the first time she sought help for her OCD
  • How her OCD symptoms intensified during her pregnancy and after giving birth
  • What helped her during her process of overcoming her OCD
  • How God helped her get through her struggles
  • Amber’s book, Drowning and Pregnant 

Episode Summary:

Welcome to Episode 91 of Christian Faith and OCD. In this episode, I’m thrilled to share an insightful conversation with Amber Van Zuyen, the author of Pregnant and Drowning. Amber’s story is incredibly relatable for those who have struggled with anxiety and OCD.

Amber opens up about her personal journey with OCD, which began in childhood with compulsive rituals and obsessive fears. She recalls avoiding stepping on lines and constantly checking for lice. Her symptoms worsened in her twenties, especially after experiencing ocular migraines, which she feared were symptoms of a serious illness.

Amber’s story resonates deeply with anyone who has faced similar challenges. She describes her struggles with health anxiety, driven by fears related to her grandmother’s battle with MS and her own obsessive thoughts about having a serious disease.

Throughout her journey, Amber grapples with the stigma around mental health and the misconceptions within faith communities.

Amber’s reflections offer a poignant reminder that mental health issues are real and deserve compassion and understanding. Her story is a testament to the courage it takes to confront and manage these challenges while maintaining faith and hope.

Tune in to hear more about Amber’s journey and the insights she offers for those struggling with similar experiences.

Related Links and Resources:

Amber’s book: Pregnant & Drowning

Explore Related Episodes:

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD episode 91. If you’ve been listening to the podcast for a little while, you know that we love to tell personal stories of people who have struggled with anxiety and OCD. These are so important because they are relatable to other people who often feel so alone, and I think some of you are really going to resonate.

If you’ve ever experienced any type of harm OCD thoughts, you’re really going to resonate with our guest today. Here is my interview with the author of Pregnant and Drowning, Amber Van Zuyen.

Amber, welcome to the show. It’s good to have you today.

Amber: Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Carrie: You have a really unique personal story about anxiety and OCD and how that’s impacted you and your life, especially in terms of being pregnant and having your son. Take us back a little bit earlier to when you first started experiencing anxiety or OCD symptoms.

Amber: Well, looking back, I can pinpoint when I was 24 when it heightened and got to its worst point, but in early childhood, I would do things like, I’d be in the grocery store with my mom and I didn’t want to step on the lines on the squares because I believe something bad was going to happen or I just had to make sure that I did that so nothing would happen to me, or there was a little girl who had lice in class next to me and I obsessed about constantly having lice and I would go home and have my mom check constantly and it never stopped. It was always just, check again, check again maybe that’s kind of where I noticed my OCD in my earlier days. And then when I was in high school, I got obsessed with makeup and I always felt ugly, I had to cover that up during that time in my life, I would go to the bathroom during lunch periods and take it all off and then re-put it all back on just because I didn’t want anyone to see me. Looking back, those were things where my obsessive compulsive was kind of taking over. But when I was about 24, I had this really scary thing happen with my vision.

I ended up having something called ocular migraines which affected only one eye. I thought I was having a stroke, and my grandmother also suffered from MS terribly early on in my life, I saw her in a bad state, and that was also another concern of mine. So I was kind of always having obsessive thoughts about getting diagnosed with something, constantly reading things, self-diagnosing that triggered health anxiety for me.

I went to the doctor and he told me it was ocular migraines, that there’s nothing to worry about, but I also was concerned about MS too because my grandmother had it, and I was just so terrified and it just played over and over in my head that I was basically already living with a disease that I didn’t even have to the point where I didn’t wanna go out of the house.

I was obsessing with medical books, reading symptoms over and over again, and actually convincing my body that I was having those symptom. This went on for about a month, and I went to the doctor and they prescribed me medication, and I refused to take it for about a month, but I eventually did, and I slowly got better I never completely got over it, but I learned how to deal with it differently.

Carrie: Did they recognize the OCD at that time?

Amber: No, they told me I had anxiety, but looking back, I definitely in the mind it’s repeat, repeat, repeat. It was really destroying my life because I obsessed about it so much as I was living at 24 7 but I eventually got on medication and it got better. And then it was one of those things where I’ve always felt guilty about it because it’s like a lack of faith I feel in a sense, but I do feel like it’s an imbalance that I’ve struggled with and that I truly need medication for it. There have been points in my life where I’ve been off of it and then on it again, and then, Recently I’ve had a trigger because I got off a medication and I was triggered again with medical stuff because of stories Christina Applegate just came out with MS and it triggered that time in my life again but with that said about MS, I see a lot of people doing wonderful with it.

My grandma just got diagnosed at such a weird time she didn’t get diagnosed for with it for 10 years people said she was crazy. She went to doctors and they told my grandpa, you know, your wife’s crazy you need to lock her up in a mental institution but really she was really sick with MS they just didn’t recognize it at that time. She got so debilitated and basically, there was nothing that they could do for her she was too deteriorated at that point to help her. A part of me feel so guilty because I see all these people doing so wonderful with it or just having a good attitude with it and that has been a struggle for me, I feel guilt.

Carrie: Going back to the piece about faith, because I think a lot of people have that wrestling that struggles with anxiety or OCD, well, maybe this is a faith issue, “I don’t have enough faith in God kind of flesh that out a little bit more for you was, I don’t have enough faith, if I do get MS, that God’s going to take care of me and I’m going to be okay.”

Amber: Yes to me, I felt so bad because here I am creating these things in my own head when there are people out there suffering with it and doing good with it because the most courageous people that I know, my brother-in-law’s a paraplegic and he’s just a testimony.

Just such an attitude and I just think God, what is wrong with me? Why am I like this? Is it a lack of faith, but really it’s anxiety and OCD, and it’s truly a disorder? And I had to come to terms with accepting that because I know now going through several years, I’m almost 40 and dealing with it, that it is an actual disorder.

When I’m on medication, I can control it and I can think clearly, it’s almost a bunch of trash jumbled up in your head and then it gets cleared away and you could see clearly without the medication I couldn’t see clearly.

Carrie: I think it’s really hard for anybody to accept that they have an issue, whether it’s physical or emotional. There is a sense of grief and loss of saying, okay yes, I am struggling with OCD because it wasn’t something that you wanted, it wasn’t something that you brought upon yourself it just, it happens, and there’s probably genetic and environmental factors that contribute to all of that most mental health conditions. So that piece of just learning the acceptance is hard.

Amber: It is, and a lot of people are just, oh, get over it they don’t understand so there’s just this stigma that anxiety isn’t real, your OCD is just something that you are making up. You get a lot of that from people that don’t understand it, and I think that’s where a lot of the guilt comes in is people just throw it to the wayside.

This isn’t a real problem, this is just a you problem, but anxiety has a face just like diabetes or anything else does, and it’s an actual disorder some people need medication for it, some don’t, I tend to relapse when I’m not on medication.

Carrie: Tell us about that in terms of maybe responses from people in your faith community when they found out that you were struggling.

Amber: Well, I had a really interesting experience while I was pregnant, I was really struggling with really dark, violent thoughts, and I was thinking these thoughts were my thoughts and I was struggling so much my mom didn’t know what to do. She made an appointment with a Christian counselor at her church, and I went, I sat down with her. She was an older woman, and I began to tell her, I’m struggling with these thoughts I’m getting really depressed, I don’t know what to do. And she looked at me in the face and said, you don’t have real problems, my daughter has real problems, my daughter almost died giving birth, you don’t have real problems. And I just couldn’t even believe that she had gone there and said that, because I’m already so fragile she could have pushed me to, I don’t wanna say suicide, but there were moments during my pregnancy that I questioned those things. Without my family I could have done that, which is her saying that, and it was just so shocking coming from a Christian counselor.

Carrie: That’s really unfortunate that happened it sounds sometimes counselors can have an internal reaction to things that people tell them, and if we’re not in check with those experiences that happen within ourselves, we can do damage. And so it sounds she had some kind of, we call it counter transference reaction towards you as a pregnant woman and dealing with things. And clearly it sounds like she was not up to speed on OCD or what those symptoms are.

Amber: Yes. She definitely was not qualified for at least someone with my condition going on.

Carrie: When did you get that diagnosis of OCD? Was it when you were pregnant? Did someone tell you like, “Hey, this is harm OCD, these are some classic things and these are intrusions it’s not really you?”

Amber: Probably I was 12 weeks pregnant, these obsessive thoughts started five days after I found out I was pregnant. I’ve always had that health anxiety and I’ve always worried, I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to have children at the time, and I was still married. My mom’s like, oh, when are you gonna have kids?

Everyone’s like, “When are you going to have kids?” I don’t know. I was 33 and I’m like, okay, I guess we’ll try and I got pregnant really fast. It scared me and I was laying on the couch one day, a few days after I found out I was pregnant and I was petting my dog and I had this thought in my head where she trusts me so much, I could just snap her neck and she wouldn’t even know it and it scared me.

I had no want or desire to do that, but I started to think, am I starting to go crazy? Am I going to get postpartum? And then I let this repeat, repeat and it turned into a big monster, and it got to the point where I called my OBGYN, and I said, these are the things that are going on in my head and I don’t know what to do, I’m scared that they could happen, not that I want them to happen, but they could and she told me, well, thoughts turn into plans, and then things happen.

Carrie: Oh my goodness. Thanks.

Amber: That triggered me so bad that now the thoughts went from my animals to my mother, to my husband to everyone around me is not safe anymore. Any object around the house, I took all the knives out of the house, put them away, I was scared of the knife drawer, I was scared of the cord that goes through your iPod I thought anything could be a weapon. I was talking to my good friend, she’s a nurse, and she was just walking me through all this, and then one night I was lying in bed and I thought I heard a voice say, just do it already but it was really my thoughts but my friend got freaked out and she said, it’s time for you to go get evaluated. I went to the hospital the next day I was so incredibly terrified I thought everyone’s gonna find out, but at least they will shackle me down and I can’t hurt myself, I can’t hurt anyone else, and this baby can have a chance, so I’m gonna go, but I really thought they were going to 50150 me, they didn’t.

Carrie: In terms of involuntarily hospitalize you, that kinda thing?

Amber: Yes they told me that I was suffering from horrible OCD and anxiety, extreme levels of it. I was like O C D interesting, I didn’t really think about that ever being a thing, because you know, when I think of OCD, it’s like locking the door five times or checking. I didn’t do that, but my mom did that I don’t know if it was hereditary. I ended up going to a therapist through my insurance company and I ended up getting on medication while pregnant, and that was a whole other ordeal as well, because I had one doctor tell me he was, I just switched carriers, so I’d gone to a new carrier while I got pregnant.

This is a whole new doctor, and he told me that because I told him I was suffering from anxiety and this was prior to me going to go get evaluated. And I was just kind of seeing what I could do, I tried acupuncture and I was going to try to get a referral cause it was really expensive to go out of pocket every day because I was suffering so bad, because I said antidepressants while pregnant, what do you think about it? And he said it’s equivalent to a mother drinking every day pregnant. And I’m like, what?

I was just shocked well, okay, this isn’t an avenue I can go down this isn’t going to work. I guess I ended up getting put on medication and I had another doctor, a different one after going through the evaluation process, she put me on something, a roll of doses and it turns out that it’s not the stigma that’s attached with taking antidepressants while pregnant. There’s some that are more harmful and then there are others that don’t travel through the placenta quite the others do. And I’ve asked several doctors and they say that it’s a very low-grade risk as far as the baby’s health goes certain ones and the one that I was on in particular, Prozac, was a friendly one for pregnancy.

Carrie: That’s interesting that your first doctor said that because there are all kinds of studies that have also been done on depressed mothers who are pregnant and that can actually cause harm, low birth weights and those types of things.

Depression in itself is not good for pregnancy, but taking an antidepressant sometimes can help, mitigate some of those risks from the depression.

Amber: Yes.

Carrie: Did your baby come out just fine?

Amber: He came out wonderful. I missed one little part of that story when I told my OBGYN my thoughts, she put me on a medication instantly and not a lot of high risk to it. I was terrified I was on that for six weeks, and then they switched me to Prozac, which is a lot better but he came out beautiful, perfect, good birth weight, he was seven pounds, eight ounces.

Carrie: That’s great. Do you feel like that changed the course of the rest of your pregnancy? How far along were you when you got on the medication?

Amber: 11 weeks.

Carrie: You had these symptoms really early and I’m not a doctor, so I don’t know a ton about this, I just know from anecdotal experience that individuals I’ve talked to have struggled with OCD. Some of them, I guess with all the hormones and different things that are going on in your body and pregnancy is somewhat stressful to your body in general, that can increase people’s OCD symptoms.

I don’t know if you’ve talked to other people who’ve had similar experiences or heard or read articles or things like that.

Amber: Actually, I had two girls reach out to me that kind of heard about my story. Their OCD was a little different. One girl was just terrified of throwing up she has this horrible fear of throwing up, and she was obsessively thinking about it during her pregnancy, and it was derailing her from her everyday life.

She couldn’t focus, she couldn’t go to work. I kind of tried to talk to her as much as I could through it, just knowing that she’s not alone, that we’re all in this together, and that we all have different little things, but they’re all kind of in common when it comes down to the core of it. And then there was another girl who suffered horribly with depression and my boss at my job kind of hooked us up and I kind of just texted with her and she ended up getting on medication while pregnant, and that was a big game changer for her too. She didn’t completely get through her OCD depression during pregnancy, but it helped tremendously.

Carrie: That’s great. I think it’s mental health it’s so important to talk about these things while pregnant too and this is kind of close to my heart because I had some mild depression when I was pregnant with my daughter, and I think I struggled so much with like the shoulds. Well, I should be happy because I got pregnant and I was older and had lots of friends and family that had dealt with infertility, and so I put all these kinds of like shoulds on myself. You should be happy and I had this expectation that I was going to still be able to be fit during pregnancy and dealt with some back pain and different things. It was hard I really had to read just things. I guess I say all that to say I want people to know pregnancy is a happy time, but people can still struggle with some pretty significant mental health issues through that experience.

Amber: Yes, I mean when I had my baby, I held him and I didn’t feel anything right after I had him and I’m just thinking, aren’t I supposed to feel all these things? I just felt numb. Before they make you go home they have you watch this video, don’t shake your baby, don’t do this, don’t do that and I just felt, or if you’re feeling these things, come back in it’s one of those postpartum videos. And they’re playing this because they know who I am you know, just like all of these fears and for the longest time after he was born, I would get these bouts of fear changing him. I’d feel I’d lose control over my hands and they would do something to hurt him not that I wanted to, just the fear of it. And I would have to take him to my mom’s and go, just take a breather for a minute, go for a walk, and kind of work through that.

Carrie: I think the things that you’re talking about, one of the reasons OCD goes undiagnosed is because people don’t know what a lot of the symptoms are and that the obsessions can take a variety of different forms.

It sounds like you’ve struggled with your share of harm, OCD obsessions, but also somatic obsessions in terms of your body, and maybe there’s something wrong with me and maybe I’m really ill. Tell us a little bit more about how you got through that dark part in your life spiritually, this is the lowest point I feel like I’m going crazy, I feel there’s something really wrong with me, I don’t know what it is God help me.

Amber: I meditated on the Bible so much, just verse after verse, great glory from harvest I would put him on every night about fear and worry and anxiety, and I just would fall asleep to his messages and it would give me peace and calmness.

That was the only place I found a place where I could take a deep breath and just be like, I’m going to be okay. Another book, which really helped me was Battlefield of the Mind by Joyce Meyer. That just really helped me put into perspective. I can have a thought come into my head, but I don’t have to let it make a home there.

Just that God got me through it I never felt so close to him, but yet so close to the enemy as well I just felt it was a battle for my life. I definitely feel, Yes, I have anxiety and OCD, but there was some massive spiritual warfare I’ve never felt anything like that ever and it’s only by the grace of God that I got through it.

Just prayer, prayer, prayer, talking, I talk to a lot of Christian friends and that’s one thing that I think is a strong suit in me. I don’t have money, but I’m an open book and I tell people I just spill my guts. I think a part of that was a big part of my healing process, just letting it out, letting people know I’m not ok.

Letting them pray for me and I got baptized when I was pregnant was a huge thing for me it was like a rededication. My faith is stronger now than it has ever been, and I’ve never felt closer to God during that time it was wild.

Carrie: Absolutely. That makes a lot of sense. The harder circumstances and his sufferings lead us closer to God and we discover more about who he is through those really hard times in our life. Then you felt led to write this book titled Pregnant and Drowning. Can you tell us about that?

Amber: While I was pregnant and going through all these things, I so desperately wanted something to relate to. I could find little tidbits here and there about women that had suffered from postpartum. Some are a little bit similar to mine, but not a whole lot.

I didn’t find a whole lot on harm OCD when I was going through this, and I don’t know if I wasn’t navigating correctly or how I was searching, but it just seemed so taboo to talk about and I just wanted people to know that you are not your thoughts. One thing that I really struggle with, and this is just strictly my opinion.

When I see a horrible headline where a mother bills her children, I think that is not postpartum in my opinion, that is evil and from the enemy. The devil does all these things to make you think that you’re going crazy and that you’ve got to do these things I’ve never had that desire. When I see that and I see postpartum, I go, I don’t know if can postpartum go that far to where you could harm a child like that.

I don’t know I just wanted to tell my story because I would never do something like that, and I felt like a monster and I was ashamed of it, but I know now that wasn’t me those were just thoughts that I invited in and I just could not get them off of the OCD wheel in my head.

Carrie: I appreciate you being so vulnerable about some of those specific thoughts that you had, because I think a lot of people, even people who come to therapy that I see, it takes a little while before they can even open up and talk about some of the things that are going on in their head because they feel they’re so horrific.

And then if I start talking about it, I’m going to possibly start obsessing about it, it can be really tough for them and I think that other people will be listening to this and find it very relatable of some of the things that they’ve had. I appreciate what you said earlier too, about how you can have a thought come in and it doesn’t have to make its home there, like you don’t have to continue to dwell on it you can notice there’s a separation that we can create. I’m having this thought, but one that’s not a reflection of my character which is so important and then two, it’s a thought. I can separate myself from that and say it’s not the same thing as a desire that doesn’t mean that I want to engage in that.

That’s why we call them intrusive thoughts because they intrude when you think about something that kind of pushes its way in, that doesn’t need to be there. That’s something that a lot of people, especially when they’re first kind of getting to know themselves in OCD that they really struggle with.

They think, Oh because I had this thought about hurting myself, my animal, my kids, whatever that means, somehow there’s some deep-seated secret desire that I want to do that, and that’s not the case so it’s important for people listening to this to know that.

Amber: There’s such a difference and it took me forever to realize that because I thought I don’t want to do these things, but why are they in my head because I won’t let them go I’m giving them value. I’m creating this monster that’s under my bed, and I can’t get rid of it until I can figure out that there’s a difference between a thought and who I am as a person, and that doesn’t reflect me.

Carrie: Your book is about your personal story and some things that were helpful and beneficial to you during that process.

Amber: It starts off in my earlier anxiety and then it moves on to my pregnancy, and there was so much darkness in that time and just the struggle I went through to try to get me in this baby through that journey also, I ended up having another baby and I was on medication the whole time. It was a great pregnancy as far as mental health goes totally opposite.

Carrie: That’s so hopeful too for people to know that they can have a different experience than they did the first time, even if they had difficulty with their mental health.

So you just kind of knew going into the second pregnancy, okay, I know what I’m dealing with I know what thoughts could come up, I have some more tools, skills, or resources to be able to separate myself from those and distract myself and move on. Did you ever get any good therapy in this process to specifically deal with the OCD?

Amber: I went to a couple of meetings. It was kind of far away from where I lived and I should have done the group thing I think it’s helpful. I am interested in joining one now cause I think it’s so important to support each other and to realize you’re not alone and that we can all get through this together, just hearing each other’s testimony, each other’s stories, helping each other through struggles.

I know that for me, I don’t have a lot of friends that struggle with the same things I do. I have one friend that has pretty bad anxiety, so to be able to relate to her is medication and therapy. Just to be like, “Hey, oh gosh, you do that too oh, okay I understand how that feels.” Just knowing that you’re not alone is such a game-changer I think.

Carrie: Amber, you have such a powerful testimony and I appreciate you coming on and sharing this with us, I hope that people will get your book if this is something that they’ve struggled with and so that they can kind of relate and relieve a sense of shame that they may be having over dealing with some of these thoughts.

Amber: Well, thank you so much for having me.

90. My Experience with Faith, Church and OCD with Erika McCoy

On today’s episode, I’m joined by Erika McCoy, an IOCDF grassroots advocate to talk about her experience with Church, Faith and OCD.

How did her OCD develop and why it took a long time for her to get diagnosed

Traumatic experiences that triggered her OCD and how she coped with them

Dealing with her pastors’ and friends’ reactions to her OCD

What OCD taught her about life and her faith.

Her advocacy work at International OCD Foundation

Related links and Resources:

Erika McCOy

IOCDF

Transcript

Carrie: Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD episode 90. I am your host, Carrie Bock and here we are all about reducing shame, increasing hope, and developing healthier connections with God and others. A little note since we recorded this episode is at the date for the faith and OCD conference that Erika is gonna talk about today is actually on May the first, not May, the eighth, and we will put that link in the show notes for you guys if you’re interested in attending.

Today I’m very excited to be here with Erika McCoy from Kansas City, Missouri and she’s gonna talk with us about her personal story of dealing with OCD as a Christian and in the church, some unhelpful things that have happened and some later on, helpful things that have happened in support that she’s gotten at this point, and her advocacy with the International OCD Foundation.

Welcome.

How Erika’s OCD Developed and Why it Took a Long Time for Her to Get Diagnosed

Erika: Hi. Yes, I’m Erika and I’m from born in St. Louis, but my family moved here when I was three years old. So pretty much this is my hometown. And I remember having symptoms of OCD when I was about eight, just from my memory and I did not get diagnosed until I was 24.

Carrie: Wow.

Erika: And yeah, it was a long time.

Carrie: That’s a long time.

Erika: It took a long time. I think it’s about it’s almost average. I know, I think the statistics are anywhere from 11 to 17 years from people when they first start showing symptoms. But a lot of people I talk to now since getting better, they’re getting treatment a lot earlier. That is really exciting news to hear.

I was diagnosed about eight years ago and Kansas City is a pretty big metropolitan area. But there was not a lot of great treatment options. So I was hospitalized the first time when I was 14, but they did not diagnose me with OCD. I think it was a general panic disorder is what I was diagnosed with.

Carrie: Do you think they just didn’t ask all of the questions? Is that how they missed it, or were there certain thoughts or themes maybe, that you were scared to share and you were like, oh, I don’t wanna tell them that that’s really going on?

Erika: I mean, when I look back at it, I feel like it was pretty obvious. I mean, they asked me to put things on scale from one to 10, and my biggest thing was being late or being on time.

And then of course, that’s also when I went to a different high school, a private school. My parents were really big on making sure I was going to a Christian private school. And I went to a private school that was a different faith tradition and that is when the first time that somebody, a priest there told me that I was going to go to hell just because I was a different faith tradition than faith that I was at and that really just rocked my mind. I mean, I just could not believe that was my grand offense and I was gonna be doomed to hell for that. There were some other things that were going on with me at that time.

Carrie: Like a different denomination of Christianity. You went from one denomination to another and all of a sudden it was like, you’re going to hell. Because you don’t believe these exact things here.

Erika: Yes. My family didn’t think it was that big of a deal and I didn’t either, but I went from Luther to Catholic. But Martin Luther is the one that originally broke away from the Catholic church. I guess they’re kind of salty about that.

Carrie: They’re still upset about it.

Erika: Yeah. And they’re doctrine. I don’t know. I’m not trying to like put any other faith down or anything like that. That’s just what happened in.

Carrie: With your particular experience. Yeah.

Erica: There was a lot of other things happening at that time. My father, they said that he had six months left to live and I mean, it was just a lot of things happening at once. What sent me into like a total breakdown at that point in time was my therapist was late. I mean just like five minutes late. It wasn’t even a big deal, it was just five minutes. But that caused me to go down into like a total spiral. Thought the world was ending cause my therapist was late and that’s totally irrational.

And I just felt like I was gonna die. I just looking back on it, I’m just like, what’s going on? And then when I was in the hospital from a scale of one to 10, 10 is World War 3 and one is nothing. What is being on top? How important is, or what is the offense of being late? And I was like, oh, definitely World War 3. And I don’t know, I mean, to me that’s obvious that that’s like OCD, but they did not diagnose with it at that time.

Carrie: They just thought that you were really into punctuality and then that was just a high priority for you?

Erika: Yes. Just a high-priority thing.

Carrie: So do you have any family members that were super, like, we gotta be on time? Was that a thing when you were growing up? You could get in big trouble for.

Erika: My dad. There’s a certain percentage, I don’t know, that have the genetics factor for OCD. My father had it. He passed away. My mother has it, my aunt on my maternal side who passed away as well, and my grandfather on my mom’s side as well.

Carrie: Okay. Yeah. So it’s definitely running through the family there.

Erika: Yes. But my dad was very big. He would always stay all the time that saying, if you’re early, you’re on time. If you’re on time, you’re late. And if you’re late, you might as well not even show up at all and he would say that all the time to me. I don’t know that was just a big thing and my dad had a lot of things like that, and he was also in the military. It was very much a military run house.

Carrie: A lot of rigidity

Finding Help for Her OCD

Erika: When I grew up. I finally found a psychiatrist that got my diagnosis right when I was 24. And that was a sigh of relief, and I was hospitalized again at 24, and then I had to do three different intensive outpatient hospitalizations.

They didn’t do ERP, but the CBT cognitive behavioral therapy helped quite a bit for what it was. But as far as finding a therapist, my psychiatrist knew a lot about OCD. I had to work with my psychiatrist, not on a super regular basis because he’s psychiatrist and very busy, but he gave me the tools and he did psycho-analytical therapy on me to help with OCD.

He taught me what ERP was and then I got like the my OCD at workbook and I kind of had to do a lot of the exposure response stuff by myself, which I do not recommend. Do not do that.

Carrie: That was overwhelming for you to not have the support of therapists or somebody else to do it with you.

Erika: Yeah, like an actual trained clinician, like a weekly basis and do that. I mean, it was very touch and go for me. Because I could only meet, meet him once a month.

Carrie: But you’re not the only one I’ve heard that from. I’ve heard several other people say, oh, I tried to find a therapist in my area that was versed in OCD either didn’t have connection with that person, or I couldn’t find somebody that had some kind of proper training or proper experience level in order to help me through this. We had a guest on very early in the show, Mitzie Van Cleve. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of her. She’s done quite a bit of writing on OCD and Christianity’s Scrupulosity.

She had said, “I tried to find a therapist for a long time and essentially I looked online and watched videos and used workbooks” and kind of had to do a lot of the imaginable exposures on herself in order to get the help that she needed. I don’t think that your story is incredibly uncommon.

It’s a sad state of affairs, and I think that’s why we’re talking so much about this in terms of increasing awareness is people are literally suffering for years without help, without even knowing what they’re struggling with. And then when they do finally figure it out, it’s, there’s this uphill battle to try to get the help that they need. And I hate that for this community. It’s not good at all.

Erika: I was relieved when I got diagnosed, because honestly, at that point in time I thought I was really losing my mind going insane. I had this, I mean, it was irrational, but I really thought I was gonna end up locked away in some sort of 19.

Carrie: Institution or something.

Erika: Institution or something. Like, I really had no idea. I mean, I knew what OCD was. I have no idea it could get that bad. I was really relieved when I found out that I had OCD thankfully. But now though, in my area, it’s on the Kansas side, but there is a Kansas City Anxiety Institute or something like that. That just got accredited for OCD.

So I mean, making waves now, which I think is really great for the people that get diagnosed and I’m talking about eight years ago.

Carrie: Sure.

Erika: It’s, it’s been a long way. A lot of progress have been made.

Church and Community Response to OCD

Carrie: Yeah. Tell us about the church’s response to OCD. I’m sure there’s some people that kind of just, they just don’t really know how to respond when you share that with them.

What are some unhelpful and helpful things that you’ve experienced in terms of trying to connect with faith community as a Christian?

Erika: Sure. In my blog that I wrote, I didn’t totally stay away for 16 years, but I did not go to church for 16 years because I was having really intrusive, horrible thoughts.

These things that were happening in my life, my aunt going missing, being murdered, having to take care of my dad that had abused me my whole entire life. All these things that were happening were rightful punishments from God. For something that I’m not quite sure of what I did, I mean, I know we’re, I’m a sinner and I know I’ve done bad things.

I mean nothing like terribly bad because we’re all sinners. And so I kept wrestling with this fact that I know I’m not perfect. I know I haven’t done the right things all the time, but what have I done that’s so horrible for God just to keep punishing me with these things. Thing after thing after thing in that 16 year break when I was just really felt really scared and I didn’t know it was going on.

I would go to certain, sometimes it was Christian friend. Sometimes it was different pastors, different elders, stuff like that. And I would go to them and kind of, I mean, not tell them everything cause I knew that would probably be too much, but just a little bit of what was going on in my mind. And they were a little shocked.

I mean, the first reaction out of a lot of people is that I had some sort of spiritual battle going on with inside my mind or my prayer life wasn’t doing well, or I had some really bad experiences of people telling me I had demons inside my brain.

Carrie: Which of course is terrifying person to tell you that.

Erika: Absolutely terrifying. Because that was also one of my really horrible what ifs. When you have OCD people say, it’s also known as the doubting disorder. And for someone that has the religious scrupulosity theme to it. My mind, I was having these horrible thoughts of God punishing me, and then I was also worried that maybe Satan was taking over my life. When you go to a religious leader and then they are confirming.

Carrie: Your greatest fear at that point.

Erika: I don’t know how to explain that. Right? Oh, okay. Maybe I am, I don’t know. If this person that is really knowledgeable in these things confirms that to you. I mean, it’s, oh my goodness, maybe that is what’s happening.

I don’t know. That’s what really terrified me and scared me. And I would just try everything. I was praying. They were like, how’s your prayer life? Not knowing, obviously that prayer was a compulsion of mine. I would just keep praying more repeatedly. Are you reading your Bible right? I mean, I would read my Bible so much.

I was reading because reading my Bible is also compulsion. And I guess my thing is that I have a lot of empathy for faith leaders. Because I know that people come to them with outrageous amount of things, all problems, all the time. And I mean that is part of their job description.

That is part of their calling in life is to be there for people. I don’t want it to seem like I’m really coming down too hard on them and I don’t want them to be shut off when they hear these things because they can’t be a knowledgeable in all things with everything. Or they’d be God all knowing they just can’t be all those things. But I think a lot of, a little bit of knowledge can go a long way.

Carrie: Right

Erika: To me I sit around sometimes and listen to people talk, and when they start going a little too far, I’m just kinda like, “oh, maybe we need to investigate that a little bit, get a little bit further into that.” But I guess when I think about the things that I said to different faith leaders of my past, I just wish maybe they would’ve been like, “Hmm, maybe we don’t bring up statement in this situation.”

I haven’t been too seminary or anything like that, but maybe demon possession is real. Maybe it’s not. There’s that uncertainty there. Maybe, maybe not, but for me, I was born this way. It’s a genetic thing for me. That means that God made me this way. He knit me in the womb this way. He knew this was gonna happen.

We’re all made in his image. So there’s something about me and the people like me that deal with this. He’s wanting to bring delight and we all deserve. I mean, it’s just like the beatitude. We all deserve to have a beautiful, meaningful walk with Christ despite all these other things. And I wanna get across to faith leaders, other Christians, even though you don’t understand it.

Just a little bit of knowledge can go a long way and really help people get past their issues that they can’t control bring us all back to worshiping God.

Carrie: I think you just spoke to it right there. We’re on a journey with our faith. It’s a walk, and I think sometimes as Christians, we’re so concerned with getting people to a certain destination more so than we are of walking with them as they’re wrestling and as they’re going through the process.

And for some reason in the church, we’re terrified to say, I don’t know. I’m not sure why that is because I’m sure there were plenty of people in the Bible who at the end of the day, if you read the Psalms and you read the scripture, They didn’t know, they didn’t fully understand everything. And somehow in this context we go, okay, somebody has a problem.

I have the Bible, I have Jesus. There has to be a solution. Okay, let me give them a solution. And it’s this almost like this pressure that we put on ourselves. Instead of just saying like, Erica, I can see that you’re really struggling with this. Let me pray for you. I’m not even sure how to support you through this.

How can I support you through this? I don’t know that I have all the answers that you’re searching for, but I want you to know that I care about you and I love you. I think if we could get that response out of our faith leaders, that would be so much more helpful than trying to dig through all of the nuances of everything that’s going on.

And I think that’s why so many of the stories in the Bible bring me comfort because we forget. We know the end of their story. We know what happened to Joseph in the end. He didn’t know what was gonna happen to him in the middle when he’s in jail or when he’s a slave. He didn’t know that he was gonna have a beautiful ending and that he was gonna be reunited with his family in that same way.

We’re all in the middle of our story somewhere and we don’t know how things are gonna work out a lot of times. Talk with us about how you learned to maybe sit with some of the uncertainties or the mysteries of your faith that you experienced.

What Erika Learned from Her OCD and Her Life Experiences

Erika: Well, yeah, for sure. I think whether you have OCD or not, what I’ve learned is a lot of people have a hard time, just like you said, not knowing they want answers and they want them now.

I think life has just taught me along with having to go through the therapy that treats OCD or at least make living with life with OCD easier to live. That helped me. And then also just the experiences of my life. Nobody has an easy life. I’m not gonna pretend that is the case. There’s just been some circumstances in my life that is just, Or when I look back, it’s just like, “Why? What is happening here? Even with my father, the doctors told us when I was 14, he had six months to live. My dad did not end up passing away. I was 24.

Carrie: Wow. That’s a big discrepancy from what they originally told you.

Erika: For a long time, all of us were just always so constantly worried and we need to spend all the time we can. We have to do everything we can for him cause he is right at this door. Constantly. Every surgery he went into, we had to say goodbye to him as if it was the last time we were gonna see him. And I can’t even tell you how many surgeries he had between 14 to 25. I mean, we had to go and say goodbye to him, and that is not what happened.

That taught me a lot about sitting with uncertainty and not knowing when someone’s gonna go in that case. And then with my aunt, we actually were having a fight when this happened. I had not talked to her for eight months before she went missing. I think people, they disconnect from family members for all sorts of different reasons, right?

That’s a normal thing when, dynamics become unhealthy, sometimes we have to put boundaries in and disconnect. And that’s a healthy thing. One would never think that your loved one would go missing during that time. But that is what happened with my Aunt. And then it took seven months to find her body. And then normally how it goes when you find your missing loved one’s body, you get answers right away. At least some answers.

Carrie: This is what we think happened or this is who we suspect may have been involved or something.

Erika: Something like that. And that did not come and has not come and it’s been eight years. In May it’ll be eight years. That’s another thing that has, I’ve just been, I’m gonna say forced and I did a lot of things to try to find answers. I mean, I was always sharing her information, passing out fires constantly. I did a lot of things to try to bring awareness to that, and no matter what her other friends or other family members. Those answers have not come no matter how much we would like them to.

It’s just not the time and we’re just gonna have to wait it out and that took me a long time to be, I mean, I’m not okay with it, but just kind of like it is what it is.

Carrie: You’ve had to make peace with that at some level?

Connecting to God and Going Back to Church

Erika: Yeah, on some level. I mean, I can talk so I’m blue in the face and knock on doors and do all those sorts of things, and maybe it would make a difference, I don’t know. But at this point in time, I feel like I know the process and it’s gonna take whoever has intimate knowledge to come forward. And that is on them and God and the Holy Spirit working through them to wanna come forward with that. And it’s just outta my control. I don’t have anything to do with that. And then when it comes to my faith with all these different experiences in life, I was really scared when I first went back to church about two years ago because of the interactions I’ve had.

I just really didn’t with Christians and my Christian friends and stuff like that, and faith leaders. But you know, I just thought, been through all these crazy things. I’m still here and that’s gotta be for a reason. There’s gotta be a reason that I’m still here through all these things, and I’m still relatively unscathed.

I’m still attacked and I’m still doing pretty good here. I just really wanted me and my family to really have a connection with God, and I just went ahead and I was like, I’m just gonna do this. And the first church I went back to was actually really great in lots of ways. They gotta help plan Easter and help with their Facebook.

I mean, I did a lot of things that really brought a lot of value and that was the first time I prayed out, in front of a church. Let me tell you, it was not a great prayer. I was so scared to get up there and do that prayer. I think at the end I said, “well, anyway. Amen.”

Carrie: That’s okay.

Erika: It was an awkward prayer.

Carrie: God understands. It’s alright.

Erika: But I did it. It was a great place for me to practice a lot of exposures and I was really thankful for that personally. There’s some problems, but that’s okay. It showed me that there was just a lot of, still a lot of things with OCD and misunderstandings. But I’m still really thankful cause I got to exposures and a smaller place of worship and just be who I am.

I was able to meet a lot of great people that are very loving and kind, and it really was a good place to the stepping stone. It also taught me to stick with it because honestly, if you would’ve talked to me, I don’t even know how long in my, I don’t wanna say my former self, but in the. If I would’ve done that and went through that, I would’ve been like, okay, we’re done here.

I’m never trying it again. Prior to treatment, I would’ve been, we’re done here. I tried. I gave it a good effort, but nope, I would’ve taken that as a sign that God doesn’t want me to be in church or something ridiculous. But because of the tools where I am in my mental health journey, where I am in my faith journey, I knew that I just had to keep going and eventually, even if it wasn’t the next one, I would find a place that would be where I’m supposed to be. No church is gonna be perfect. Okay we know that we’re all people. There’s lots of people interacting and that’s another thing to keep in mind to, but thankfully it was just one other church that I stopped at and it’s been a beautiful thing.

There’s a lot of really understanding people. At least all the people I’ve come across are very encouraging. They might not understand exactly what I’m talking about or what I’m going through, but they’re very encouraging, loving. I’ve even got some questions about what it is that I’m talking about. Not in like a weird, judgmental way or anything like that.

Carrie: Healthy curiosity.

Erika: It’s just a healthy curiosity. It’s just such an amazing feeling to go into a place after all the things, preconceptions, being scared and all those things. And to finally find a place that you can just be who you are and just be able to work on your relationship with God. Even if that means that you do some weird OCD things while you’re working on your ERP and not have to be worried about the judgment of others, and you can just focus on growing the relationship between you and God.

Carrie: I appreciate that message. I think for a lot of people who are disconnected from the church right now because they’ve experienced spiritual hurt or even abuse in some cases, and I appreciate that. Don’t give up on the body of Christ and don’t give up on yourself and the community. That could be really healthy in supporting you, and we’ve talked about that in various episodes on the show.

I think supportive faith communities can be really transformational, like you’re saying. I think we weren’t meant to kind of do this whole walk and journey alone. We need other people surrounding us and to know that God’s with you in guiding you and leading you to that place where he wants you to be. So that’s, I think that’s really encouraging to a lot of people.

Tell us a little bit about your advocacy work with, the International OCD foundation.

Erika’s Advocacy Work

Erika: With the International OCD Foundation. Do most of my work in the special interest group of faith and OCD. That’s where my passion is for sure. We have meetings. It’s been a little crazy right now because we’re leading up to the conference, the Faith and OCD Conference in May 8th. So we’ve been having a couple of extra meetings to plan out each month. So in January the theme was it’s not about faith, it’s OCD and so that’s where my article came out of. And then February, we’re gonna be highlighting having the healthy amount of doubt versus certainty because you know, in faith it’s okay to have doubt. It’s how that can be challenging with people with OCD to understand that healthy amount of doubt versus getting in the loop of uncertainties. That we’re working on that and they’ll be themes every month leading up to May.

And I am really excited about the conference for Faith in OCD. I haven’t gone to one in the past. Here’s the crazy thing, so I’ve technically been an advocate almost eight years. I was in such a bad place. I’ve just been following all these things, but I haven’t really been doing much. One of the other advocates said to me like, so crazy.

You’ve known about all this stuff for eight years and you haven’t gone yet. And I’m like, no, but this year is the year. Okay, I’m gonna do these conferences. I’m gonna go to the.

Carrie: And that’s online isn’t it?

Erika: Yeah, it’s a Zoom, a virtual one. The Faith in OCD website via the International OCD Foundation has a lot of great information on it. It even breaks down per faith tradition. There’s one for Protestants, Judaism, I believe. I don’t know, it just breaks it down for a whole bunch of different faith traditions for people to get information, which I think is great. I don’t know that much about interfaith. I’m a Christian and that’s where I have most of my knowledge in, but their website’s really great. There’s a lot of great resources for Christian. Lots of slides and also really great ways for faith leaders. You can print off different things and if you’re kinda less vocal or more shy, you can just print it off and hand it to your faith leader, which I love that because like not everyone is as vocal or want to have face-to-face conversations so you can just put in their mailbox and go upon your way. They definitely recommend that if anybody wants to spread knowledge to their faith leaders, you can just print that off and sign it under their door or whatever, and then just walk along your way and they might not even know where it came from.

So then what I’m doing for this month and the months coming up to May is that I’m doing a rocking your values, navigating faith and OCD in the community painting workshop. I like to paint rocks.

Carrie: That’s awesome. That’s a lot of fun.

Erika: I like to paint just about anything really, but last OCD week in 2022, I came up with this OCD advocacy initiative where teal is the color for OCD awareness. You paint the base of the rock teal, and then basically you can write OCD facts on it, or you can paint. I mean, I can pretty much see anything in a creative picture type of way, so I paint lots of little pictures, on mine. Some people are more left or right brain. I don’t know which one’s more analytical.

Carrie: Whatever works for people. Do what works for you, whether it’s like writing something on the rock or, I did some of that during the pandemic because let’s face it, we were all at home. I ordered a few supplies on Amazon and see what I can do with some rocks here that’s from a rock place near me.

They were like, “you can just have some of these.” And I was, “Are you serious? That’s great.”

Erika: I know I got 200 rocks donated to me. So I have plenty I can do plenty of these rocks. You paint them, you put your OCD facts on them to make it like an advocacy thing. I mean, you’re more than welcome to keep them if you want to, but I’ve done quite a few of them.

The last time I went on a road trip, every place I stopped, I left the rock. And then on the back it has, it says at International OCD Foundation. So if they Google that, it brings up the International OCD Foundation. It also has my Instagram tag on it, but people, not everyone wants that kind of information out there, but my Instagram tag is specific enough where if you Google that, it’ll bring up screw velocity.

So that brings up knowledge and then it also has the hashtag rocking your values, but also bring up different things. That’s something that I start in, but if more people get into it, it’s a great way to advocate. And you can be kind of introverted about it too. Cause you can just paint your rock and then just drop it somewhere and then a random person can, whether they know about OCD or not, can pick it up and get some knowledge about it.

Carrie: I love options for introverts because a lot of times they feel they’re not out there, they can’t make a difference, but there’s plenty of small ways that they could make a difference by just dropping something off by their pastor or by painting a rock and leaving it somewhere and directing it to some helpful information.

Sure, yes, introverts unite. That’s awesome.

Erika: I’m an introverted extrovert.

Carrie: I would consider myself that a little bit too. Yeah, I can have some extrovert tendencies when I need to, but then I also need to like hold off and recharge sometimes and not see anybody or talk to anybody. This has been a really great conversation.

 I probably feel we could go on for forever and ever, but one thing I like to ask my guests that are sharing a personal story is if you could go back and tell your younger self something, even your teenage self, something who is in the midst of all these difficult situations, what would you want her to know?

Erika: I guess the biggest thing would be that God loves you. Jesus loves you and the expectation to be perfect is not achievable, and just to have some compassion for yourself in the really hard times to come.

Carrie: Jesus was perfect. So we don’t have to be. That’s a nice realization for all of us, I think, that put pressure on ourselves or unrealistic expectations to achieve certain things.

We’ll put links to your article about your story and where people can find you on Instagram and so forth. If they wanna connect and find out more about painting rocks with you. That’s really cool.

Erica: Yes. I love that. Some people are like, “But I’m not a good artist.” Okay, well, one, I’m a firm believer that all art is good art. Okay. Even if you just make a little stick figure, or, I don’t even know what I remember art therapy was one of the big things that, well, it can be ERP I will say that, but art therapy is just so, so much for me when I was younger. And therapy doing collages and all these things. So for me, if you think you’re the worst artist ever, just trust the process, put a brush down on something and just let it go or make a collage, I don’t know. Just try it once. And just see how it feels. Just let it go and just try it once.

Carrie: Roll with it.

Erika: Yeah, roll with it.

Carrie: Erika and I had a short conversation off mic because I didn’t have a lot of time to ask her this when I was interviewing her about the connection between trauma and OCD since she mentioned several different traumatic events in the course of her talk. And it’s interesting to me, the more and more that I work with clients who have this overlap of childhood, also adulthood trauma and OCD symptoms is it seems like the trauma symptoms exacerbate the OCD symptoms which would make sense because when people are under stress, their OCD symptoms tend to flare up more.

So it’s just something to think about. If you’ve noticed in your own life that overlap between trauma and OCD, that getting some help for that trauma may help you as you’re trying to work through the OCD symptoms as well.

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

Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the use of myself or By the Well Counseling. Our original music is by Brandon Maingrum. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.