All right, welcome to the show. Everyone. We are doing a series on personal experience with OCD, and I’m very excited about this because I know that it’s a popular topic that a lot of you look for. You’re just really wanting to hear from other people who have been in the trenches where you are, who have made the struggle to get the proper diagnosis and help for their OCD,

Hello and welcome to Christian faith and OCD with Carrie Bock, I’m a Christ follower, wife and mother, licensed professional counselor who helps Christians struggling with OCD, get to a deeper level of healing when I couldn’t find resources for my clients with OCD, God called me to bring this podcast to you with practical tools for developing greater peace. We’re here to bust through the shame and stigma surrounding struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories of healing and helping you replace uncertainty with faith. I’m here to help you let go of the past and future to walk in the present abundant life God has for you. So let’s dive right into today’s episode today on the show I have Heather Vignelli. She is a licensed professional counselor in serving New Jersey and New York, primarily working with adult women who are struggling with anxiety, OCD, low self esteem, relationship stress. And she’s able to offer a Christian perspective for clients who are desiring that as part of their counseling process. And she is going to share about her story today. Welcome to the show, Heather.

Heather: Thank you. Excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Carrie: Tell us a little bit about your process of noticing OCD symptoms. Or did it start more as general anxiety? What was that like for you? Yeah,

Heather: Super funny. Kind of how it came about. I always have had sort of an underlying current of anxiety in my life. I don’t think I ever didn’t I definitely noticed that as a trend throughout my life, even as a young girl, and it wasn’t until probably I was just about a year ago. And keep in mind also, I recognize now that there were things before last year that certainly contributed to the diagnosis, but at the time, what kind of triggered it was? My daughter was in her senior year of high school, my one and only and just definitely noticing triggers kind of coming up one after another, and the end of an era I have been, of course, very close with my daughter. When she was born, I was a single mom, she was like my pride and joy. That

Carrie really speaks to OCD symptoms showing up in a time of stress and transition. So you’re preparing for launching her out into the world after you’ve spent all of these years raising her.

Heather  3:03  

Oh, yeah, and I’ve had help. Of course, my mother has definitely been so helpful to me, and I actually met my husband when she was four, so he kind of came into the picture a little bit later, but for all intents and purposes, until we were married and then living together, I was very much the primary caregiver, and kind of doing it, a lot of it on my own, let’s say, when she got into her senior year, it was like, Oh my gosh, right, I’m losing my baby. There were a lot of different things that kind of came up throughout the tail end of the year, September of 2023 I noticed a little bit of an uptick in the anxiety, and I was wondering, Hmm, that’s weird. But then it wasn’t until the beginning of 2024 that I started noticing not just my stress levels going up and my anxiety going up, but also like different symptoms that I hadn’t really necessarily noticed before. One of the things that I noticed was this weird thing that my tongue would do, Huh, interesting. Okay, yeah, super weird tension in my tongue and in my jaw like a tick, not so much like a tick. It felt like my tongue was swollen and almost like it hurt, very weird. So I was doing a lot of biting on my tongue and like, trying to figure out what the heck was going on. Like, maybe I need to go to the doctor. And I knew also that my anxiety was like, kind of ticking up. And so I thought, Geez, I wonder. I’d never thought about it before, even being in the clinical world, I’m like, I wonder if this could be just a somatic symptom of anxiety. So on a whim, I just looked up anxiety and tongue issues or something like that. And it was like, anxiety tongue.

Carrie  4:38  

There’s something called anxiety tongue. You’re educated now. Who

Heather  4:42  

would have thought, right? And so I thought, Okay, this could be related to the anxiety I’m feeling. I certainly have a lot of triggers going on. This is kind of making sense, but it started to get very uncomfortable. Like, really uncomfortable. I felt like, anytime I was talking, I was tripping over my own phone. Felt like, oh, can people. Even understand me. Even though they could, they could totally understand me. But it was just constant as the year progressed again, triggers keep continuing to come up events, while the senior stuff comes up senior sunrise. And, you know, she was a competitive dancer. She’s still doing that, but didn’t know she was gonna continue doing that. We thought it was like her last competitions ever. So we’re like, this is the end of everything. So everything’s kind of coming in, prom, graduation, all these things are coming up. I started examining some of the thoughts that I was having. I feel like the only way that I can explain it is not so much with words, but more like gesture in my face. Like, Huh, wait, these thoughts are weird. Some

Carrie: Some of these thoughts are a little off. How did it show up? Like, what kind of things were you thinking?

Heather: I was always like, I said, very connected with my daughter, but I was noticing that I was extra worried about her safety. Some of the thoughts that I have and still do struggle with, I would not say that I am, like, fully recovered. I definitely still have some polls. I mean, it’s only been a year now since the diagnosis, but once I started recognizing the thoughts that came up. They were more about her safety and just having this feeling of impending doom anytime she left right, she started driving. Her she got her license right. She’s driving, she’s applying to college, all these things that made me feel like she was unsafe in the world. I’m thinking terrible, awful things. I mean, the worst of the worst. Do you think the worst thing? That’s what I thought. And it was constantly riddled with thoughts that something terrible was gonna happen to her, completely unwarranted.

Carrie: Did that cause you to check in on her extra often, or you’re like checking the app to see where she is or not.

Heather: Just one app, three apps, three apps. Okay, three apps. I got very creative and wound up with three apps on my phone. And my kid is great. She understands because she actually had been diagnosed with OCD at a young age. So she does understand the struggle to a degree. Of course, our themes are different, but she does understand the struggle. And so she’s very kind to me, very gracious with me. But yeah, so there were definitely things that I was noticing, not just in my thoughts, but in, like you’re saying, with what I was doing. So for years and years, I’d been checking her window every single night, without fail, like to make sure or locked, or to make sure it was locked, and we live on the ground floor of an apartment building, okay, and so I don’t think it’s out of pocket to be thinking, Oh, well, gee, probably a good thing to lock your doors. But I mean, I have bars on the doors, and it started to occur to me, it is interesting that the only window that I check at night is hers. I trust that the other windows and doors are perfectly secure, but I don’t trust even if it looks exactly the same way that I left it, I know I left it the night before, I still felt compelled to go over and check make sure there was a ritual to it, the way that my hand felt on the blinds as I peeked through to look at a certain area on the other side of the just certain things that I was like, Wow, this seems super selective and super specific. And I thought, well, that’s odd.

Carrie: Did you find yourself devoting the sensory information like icbt talks about, that’s part of the inferential confusion is that distrust to the senses. And so I’m wondering, maybe that’s why you needed three apps on your phone, because it’s like, well, what if this one app is wrong and she’s not really where the app is saying that she’s at was that kind of what it was like, like, I don’t know if I believe this one. I’ll have to pull up another one and just

Heather: Aabsolutely so yeah, with the apps, I have three different ones that check three different things. One is on her phone. One is on her car, the other one is also on her phone, but it allows me to listen to the environment. Opens up her microphone so that I can hear on my end, what’s going on. I know it makes me sound a little cuckoo, I know, but it definitely was something that I felt like I needed to have. There was an urgency to know what was going on around her, even if I knew, for all other reasons, that she was perfectly fine, that if something terrible was happening, that I would somehow know, I would somehow find out. You would hear

Carrie  9:09  

the scary, mad guy on through her phone, and be able to call the police and say, I know where she’s right. She’s right over here. Sure,

Heather  9:16  

even if I had just texted with her 30 minutes prior, that couldn’t just be enough for me to believe that she was okay. Yeah, I started kind of thinking, Gee, I think I need to look into this a little bit more. And it wasn’t until that point that I started really understanding what OCD was and getting a better. Started taking credits in OCD treatment or just understanding it, because I didn’t realize how very different it is from just regular run of the mill anxiety I had no idea, just did not recognize that. Now, a year later, I’ve basically redefined everything that I do, because I definitely feel called to help other people who are struggling in the same ways with OC. D. So it wasn’t until that time, though, that I started getting my own treatment, learning about OCD for myself, because I started recognizing these things in my clients, and I got the diagnosis, which later on would become meta OCD and starts to become OCD. About OCD,

Carrie  10:18  

right? Yeah. Do you really have OCD? And oh gosh, are you sure you’re not just, like, faking it or making it up?

Heather  10:27  

Oh, gosh, yeah. What if you’re lying to people? How awful would you be if you were lying to people? It’s been interesting, because since a year ago when I got the diagnosis, I feel like I’ve actually gone through ebbs and flows. It’s like, kind of like, there have been peaks and valleys with the experience of like, now knowing that that’s what it is, I feel like I definitely get sucked into the bubble from time to time, and it can be pretty troubling when you’re in the bubble.

Carrie  10:53  

Did you find an icbt therapist? Was that something that, as you had kind of done your research, that you were wanting to do or wanting to pursue, like, how did you get to the treatment phase and kind of connect with somebody?

Heather  11:06  

I had started to ponder whether this OCD, I should probably know more about what OCD is, and I took a workshop fundamentals type, okay, yeah. OCD, 101, yeah. OCD, 101, and I’m like, I need to figure out, because I think I might not only just be seeing this in myself, but I think I’m seeing it in other clients. I knew ERP was a gold standard for treatment, but literally, I think on Facebook looking for OCD providers, and I stumbled across the icbt Facebook group, and I started asking questions, and I started seeking out people that might be able to help me figure out if that’s what I’m dealing with. I had a woman reach out to me on Facebook messenger who was so gracious with me and so lovely. She’s like, everything you’re describing sounds like it’s probably an OCD type thing. You’re going to want to get yourself connected with OCD therapist. And since I was already in that group, and for anybody who is a clinician and wanting to know icbt Like that is the group to be in. It’s a wonderful group. Just amazing resource. Oh my gosh, I don’t think I’ve ever been in a Facebook group with other therapists that’s been so positive, unbelievable support. And so I put up a post and I said, Hey, I think I have OCD. I don’t know, but I would really love to meet with someone who might be able to assess and treat and so I heard back from a couple of therapists who were also in network with my insurance. Oh, that’s great, praise God. And I started work right away, did the assessments and started with icbt. And icbt really clicks for me. It’s like, really super logical, and it just kind of aligns with the way I already think,

Carrie  12:44  

yeah. That’s super interesting is, I just heard that feedback from a client this week. This makes so much logical sense to me as I’m learning it, it’s like, yeah, and I’m a very logical person, and so I like that this makes logical sense. So I appreciate you saying that, because I do think that it’s connects and resonates with certain people, definitely.

Heather  13:04  

So that’s how I wound up finding my icbt therapist. Unfortunately, I had to move from her to another one, because then she no longer took my insurance, but still with an icbt therapist, there

Carrie  13:16  

are resources online for people to find an icbt therapist. Icbt dot online, if that’s something they’re interested in. I’m in Tennessee, and so as you’re processing that for yourself, and I think before you teach it to somebody else, you kind of have to understand it yourself. So those kind of grade that you were able to, like, kind of integrate and work without on yourself. Was there a particular like point in the process where you were like, something clicked, and you were like, oh, or it felt like this is a game changer. Because I think in the beginning, people go into the process and they’re kind of like, okay, this is nice. I’m kind of sort of getting some of this, but they’re like, how do I apply it? And there’s this, I said, okay, just hold on. Just hang in there. You got to build the foundation of the house. First you got to know and understand the concepts. You got to wrap your mind around it, then you will know how to intervene. And as you get into the later modules, of course, it gives you what to do, the intervention modules, but initial ones, you’re just assessing, and you’re building awareness. Was there a particular module or somewhere in the process, or something clicked, and you were like, oh, oh, yeah, okay.

Heather  14:16  

I think it was feared possible. Self module four, okay, yeah, I was pretty early on. Everything up to that point made total sense to me. Again, this was a modality that was like, it fit right into the way that I already thought. So it was like, oh, like, That makes so much sense. Sometimes, with other modalities, it can be like, Wait, what are we doing and why? What’s the purpose? Again, where does this How does this work with icbt? I didn’t feel that way. It felt very straightforward. It felt very like easy to grasp. And I think by module four, when we really started to break down the feared possible self, that’s when I started to be like, Whoa. I definitely connect with that feared possible self that we kind of which was carelessness. This negligence. And actually, even going further, my therapist is pretty firm on it just being like bad, because carelessness is bad, negligence is bad, but this theme of carelessness and negligence definitely resonated for me. So I started, I think, at that point, looking through the lens of, oh gosh, is this like me behaving out of my real self, or my feared possible self, which we didn’t get to the real self at that point yet, but the feared self, I started to kind of examine a little bit Oh gosh. Is this coming out of this fear that I could be somebody that’s careless or negligent? And so I think it was from there that it just clicked. It was like, Oh my gosh. This has been the thing. This is why I’ve been so worried about my daughter. What if I miss something? That was always the question, what if I miss that she got into an accident? Or, what if I miss and I’m just gonna say, one of my thoughts was human trafficking. What if there’s a school shooting? Or what if, basically, what if she’s taken away? Yeah, what if I miss that, though? What if I miss something? And if I’m not on top of it and checking all the time, all the time, then I might miss it? Yeah. So that was kind of where I started to

Carrie  16:10  

kind of boils down to, like, bad mom, which is, I think really fits in with that feared possible self of it’s the opposite of who you actually are like you’ve been very attentive and involved in your daughter’s life, it sounds like through school and extracurriculars and all those types of things the whole time. So it’s completely the opposite of what your actual behavior is showing you, right? So in some sense, I don’t know, it’s like this transition. There was this fear of, like, losing her forever, that maybe was a distorted from losing her to, like, launching to college or something like that, like, it’s a loss at a smaller level,

Heather  16:50  

absolutely, yeah, my brain was definitely glitching out, for sure. Wasn’t the way that I was making sense of things, which is so unusual, instead of, like, if she’s not answering me, automatically, she’s dead. Yeah, automatically she must be dead. That was just the thought. I know that sounds terrible. I know that that’s probably maybe shocking for some ears, but

Carrie  17:10  

that’s so OCD, right? Like, not just like, this is a possibility, but this is going to happen. Like, you know, this is the probability of what this means. It couldn’t

Heather  17:21  

be that she was just busy doing a project, or that she was talking to a friend, or like it couldn’t be her phone’s on silent or something, nothing like that. Nothing normal, no normal reasoning with that. It was like

Carrie  17:33  

totally obsessional. Were you able to get through all the 12 modules?

Heather  17:37  

I am working through eight, and still working through them little by little. Done some 10. My therapist now does them a little bit out of order, so that’s okay with me. She also integrates a little bit of the metacognitive treatment too, which is kind of probably good for me considering the presentations. Yeah, yeah. So that’s another thing that she kind of integrates as well.

Carrie  18:02  

Just started doing some metacognitive therapy with clients. It’s been an interesting side note. I’ll update people on the podcast at some point how that is, but it’s very, very different in a lot of ways from other types of therapy that I mean, there’s some integration of different things, but it really just teaches you that, hey, if you can learn to leave your thoughts alone, kind of like a dog that’s going after something and you just say, leave it. Just leave it there. Don’t engage with it, don’t try to solve it, don’t chew on it, don’t ruminate on it, don’t worry about it, let it go. And that is hard to do. And there are different exercises in metacognitive that trains you to really, like, learn how to do that and to they call it lazy mindfulness, which is interesting, but that’s hard for people with OCD, because you’re not used to being lazy, right? You’re like, no, I need to get on this hot right now. I gotta do something that’s urgent. Yeah, it’s urgent. Probably my clients that have had the most success with that, I think, have had some secondary depression along with the OCD. And so if they’re able to let some of those hopeless, worthless, negative self talk cognitions like if they’re able to let some of those go, then it helps them be able to move into more of the icbt process. So everything all if you have a good therapist, they know how to integrate these different things into it. We have people in the icbt community that use ifs parts work, some that use EMDR for trauma when appropriate. That’s another thing I think I love about this therapy, is that it integrates well with other therapies. It’s not like you can only do this one thing. It’s kind of like if somebody’s able to go in and assess and say, Hey, you might need some a little bit of this, or let’s try that and see if this can go as well. So I think that

Heather  19:45  

having that ability to sort of like bob and weave in between modalities, I think if you can do it, great. I’m not trained in all of them. I’m trained in EMDR, and so that’s something that for my clients has been super beneficial, and I haven’t felt as. As inclined to use EMDR with my clients in general, probably because of the OCD that I have right as far as negligence goes, and that’s like, you know, I just want to make sure I’m doing it right. You don’t want to give my clients the best care. But once OCD kind of came onto the scene with icbd treatment, I thought, oh my gosh, this is a great way to interweave EMDR, because I have seen so many clients, myself included, who have the trauma in history that is being used. It’s like OCD hijacking that trauma and then using it as personal experience, right? Like you remember that time. Don’t forget about that time. Be negligent. Now, keep yourself safe, right? Being able to, kind of like, pause in the icbt treatment and then go to clear some memory that is being hijacked by the OCD is super cool to be able to do that with the EMDR. I think

Carrie  20:58  

sometimes, once you get into modules three and four, where you’re talking about the obsessional story and really working on, okay, how do we even get to this particular theme, obsessional sequence? What consequences are we afraid of? And then when you get into that feared possible self, you’re like, Okay, now you can start to see some of that trauma bubbling up potentially, and are able to address it with EMDR. So yeah, like I said, that integration is really helpful, and EMDR is a little bit of a wild card. People have different experiences with it, and I don’t know, sometimes when people have OCD, they have a hard time really like dropping in down into their emotional experience and their body sensations, because they’re so used to problem solving and thinking things in their head, and that can be a barrier sometimes to people doing EMDR, it may take them longer, or the processing may look a little bit different. So if you tried EMDR and you’re like, it failed, for me, there’s probably you didn’t fail. It’s not a pass or fail thing, just maybe that your therapist didn’t know how to kind of tailor things towards you and finding somebody that can help you get there. I’ve had many people who feel like they’ve had failed EMDR experiences be able to process through trauma. That’s why we have other things too, parts work and all kinds of stuff, because sometimes that’s super helpful in those experiences, or helps process through those memories and time periods. I think what you’re saying, and I would echo, is really, you have to look at this holistically in terms of OCD treatment. People are not cookie cutter. They’re very different. I will never get bored specializing in OCD like never, because each person has different nuances. You could have 10 people who are compulsively washing their hands, and they will be compulsively washing their hands for 10 different reasons, and you really have to get in there and figure out what’s going on and what’s the story, and how did we get to this point, in order to figure out how to tailor their treatment plan in such a way that, unfortunately, we have these therapeutic tools and modules to help us be able to have some structure surrounding that. Because I do believe structure is helpful and important, while also knowing how to utilize that for the individual. I think in the past, in my earlier days of therapy, I was much more of like, oh, okay, step one of the therapy says this, like, we need to do step one. And now that I’ve been doing therapy a lot longer, I’m like, okay, and this is what the therapy is saying, and this person’s step one is gonna look like this, and this person’s step one might look a little bit different, and that’s okay, yep, we’re just gonna go with it, kind of depending on what they bring in and how the flow happens, might

Speaker 1  23:41  

have to go back to something else. How would you say this

Carrie  23:45  

has impacted your faith? Or have you struggled with, why can’t I seem to just let go, or why can’t I seem to trust God with this? So did any of those things come up for you?

Heather  23:55  

So funny, once I got the diagnosis, I think again, there was definitely obsessions over obsessions. It wound up starting to attack things that it had never attacked before. One of them was my faith. So there was a scrupulosity piece that definitely showed up on the scene. There was a lot of like, wow, what if you’re not saved? How do you know you’re saved? All these questions of true faith. I mean, right, as Christians, like, I mean, that’s what we stand on. It’s like salvation. The fact that the OECD, again was hijacking something super important to me, was cause for concern and felt really urgent. And I think as Christians, we can all agree that salvation is urgent and important. Yeah, super important. I think that it did kind of cause a little bit of like a toggling back and forth between, like, knowing and then questioning, right? Knowing the truth like you’ve never doubted this before. You’ve been a believer for how many years, and now, all of a sudden, it’s being hijacked. That’s odd, right? Yeah, there was a lot of scrupulosity that started to kind of play in, which then, yeah. It kind of broke down a little bit of my natural ability to sort of just lean into the Lord and trust that he has me don’t have to be overthinking this. It did kind of break that down a little bit right. Since then, I’ve done some work to kind of get out of that bubble, to kind of like bring myself back to reality, on it, and to not be ruminating on it, because I

Carrie  25:25  

think that’s vague for people. Like, how do I sink into the reality of my faith? Because it is unseen. I always say faith requires faith. What does the reality of your faith look like? Like? Did you pinpoint certain times in your life? Like, Oh, I know God was at that time point. Or

Heather  25:40  

I definitely was doing a look back on those kinds of moments when it was like, okay, clearly I don’t have to worry about this, because even at that time, I wasn’t even thinking about how God had me and was securing me, but he did. So those moments definitely helped, and I did lean into my pastor, which my therapist gave me permission to do that. She was like, one time you can go the one conversation you may have. And so I did that was very helpful to me, to just get some reassurance that that I already knew what I knew. So that’s the tricky part about OCD, I feel like, is we forget that we know what we know. We forget to keep our eyes on the things that we know for sure because we’ve seen it. I think that a lot of people that I speak to have had experiences or encounters with the Lord, right? People that are Christians, that are believers, right? They’ve had those experiences or encounters with the Lord, and I think that when they look back at those moments, it’s like it’s undeniable. So we have to remember to look at that as truth. I think there’s

Carrie  26:42  

so much power, and that’s why the Bible talks to us about remembering so much, even in the Old Testament where it went through, I’m the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. You remember these people? Remember these guys, remember these heroes of the faith. You’re a part of that lineage. And I am still here, like I am, still I am, yeah,

Heather  27:00  

so definitely keeping those things in mind, remembering those things, and then, of course, having that conversation with my pastor was certainly help to me. And also just recognizing that God isn’t the author of confusion. I wouldn’t be sitting here confused if this was something that was God ordained, right? Like, that’s not God. So knowing to kind of pull away from that, because I already know that this could not be from God, yeah.

Carrie  27:25  

And so that helped you, almost like, disengage from some of those thoughts, thought processes,

Heather  27:29  

correct, I would say, if anything, though, the one thing that wound up kind of coming from it is that it did strengthen my relationship with the Lord in a big way, just kind of feeling the closeness like he’s like, I’m a year like, I got you. I’m right here. So I think that out of all the nightmarish parts of sort of wrestling with OCD, the one thing that I can say that’s been kind of a blessing out of the muck OCD is just that the relationship with God has been strengthened as

Carrie  28:01  

we kind of wrap things up. Is there anything else that you would want to say to people just who are struggling and they’re Christians with OCD and they just feel like maybe they’re at a really low point or a really bad point, like, what would you want them to know or to take away from this conversation? It

Heather  28:16  

doesn’t have to look like this. Okay? Stay this way, right? You don’t have to be trapped in the OCD bubble all the time. There can be relief from it. And for me, I think that’s always gonna be best with God. So yes, there’s gonna be a mental health component. In my personal opinion, I feel very strongly that, yes, we have spiritual components to who we are. We’re living in a spiritual world, yes, but there’s also a mental health component. Especially when it comes to OCD, there’s a mental health component. And so I would caution anyone like you, don’t have to handle it on your own. This isn’t something that you have to pray about. It absolutely lean into the Lord for help with it, yes, but you can get treatment from a therapist that will help you to actually deal with what is happening in your brain. It is a glitch in the brain. I really do strongly feel like there can be help for that. You know, not just spiritual, but mental health wise.

Carrie  29:11  

Yeah, that’s right, beautiful. Thank you for sharing with us today. I know that this is going to be encouraging and a hopeful story to share with people.