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150. Five Reasons You’re Not Progressing in Your OCD Recovery

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

In this episode, Carrie dives into why you might feel stuck in your OCD recovery and shares powerful strategies to help you break through those barriers and make real progress. 

Episode Highlights:

  • How past experiences and mental health challenges can affect your progress.
  • The role of hopelessness in hindering progress and how to overcome it.
  • How stress management plays a crucial role in OCD recovery.
  • Why trauma can be a major obstacle in your OCD journey.
  • The importance of having the right tools to manage obsessions and compulsions.

Episode Summary:

I’m Carrie Bock, your host, a Christ-follower, wife, mother, and licensed professional counselor who helps Christians navigating OCD find healing and peace.

Have you ever found yourself thinking, Why does it feel like I’m stuck in my OCD recovery? Maybe you’re feeling like you just can’t get ahead, like things should be progressing, but they aren’t. Well, I’ve got you covered.

Today, we’re talking about five reasons why you might be feeling this way.

Reason 1: Hopelessness is Blocking Your Progress.
You might be feeling like there’s no way out, like it’s all too much, and that maybe nothing will work for you. I’ve seen this come up so often in my intensive therapy sessions. It’s normal to feel skeptical if you’ve tried a bunch of things that haven’t worked. But I want you to know something: you can get better. The work we’re doing today is advancing, and we have better tools than ever to help people manage OCD in a more Christ-centered way. The healing God has for you might look different than what you expect, but it’s still available.

Sometimes, the healing you’re asking for might not be what God is offering. Maybe you’re hoping for complete freedom from OCD, but what God wants for you is healing in your heart, teaching you how to trust, persevere, and grow stronger in Him. Don’t give up. Healing can come in many forms.

Reason 2: Stress is Unmanaged.
Let’s face it—life is stressful. Work, relationships, kids, family… It can all feel like a lot. And if you don’t have the right tools to manage that stress, it can fuel your OCD. I’ve talked about this before, and it’s so true: Stress makes OCD worse. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, you have to prioritize taking care of yourself—physically, mentally, and spiritually. Stress management might look like saying “no” to some things, setting healthy boundaries, and making time for self-care.

To hear the rest of the reasons and how to overcome them, be sure to tune in to the full episode!

Let’s keep moving forward together. And as always, I’m here to walk with you on this journey of healing and restoration in Christ.

Explore Related Episode:

124. What to do When Compulsions Become Habits and Routines

Transcript

Episode 150. Have you ever wondered why you feel stuck? You feel like you can’t get ahead in your OCD recovery and you’re sitting there thinking to yourself, what is the problem? So I’m going to give you five reasons why today.

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. Just so you know, we are going to be off for Thanksgiving next week. So we hope that you have an amazing Thanksgiving with your family. You won’t see an episode come out from us. What you will see is an amazing flash sale coming out via email. If you want to be a part of that and get the biggest discount you’re going to see on our January launch of Christians Learning ICBT, you can do that by signing up for our email list, carriebock.com/ocd. One thing that we know about OCD is that it’s a chronic condition that waxes and wanes, typically due to stress. People will tell me, I had years where I wasn’t severely bothered by OCD, or at least it was at some type of manageable level where I could handle it. Then, something hit me, I got triggered one day, next thing you know, I’m down the rabbit hole, and now it’s really hard for me to manage my symptoms.

Obviously, this is very frustrating, because you’re thinking, how did I go through this period of my life and I was doing okay, and then I get to this period and things feel completely unmanageable, and you may feel like, well, I should be able to handle this. If that’s you, just know you’re not the only person who’s felt that way.

Sometimes you need different tools for different seasons of your life. That’s reality. Maybe you’ve done a round of ERP before, and things were flowing really well. And then when you started to have more mental compulsions, you found that some of the things you were doing before with ERP, you weren’t able to apply to your present situation, or you’re struggling with knowing how to apply what you learned in the past to your current symptoms.

One reason you may not be progressing with OCD recovery is you feel hopeless. You may feel like, there’s no way I’m going to get any better. And when we tell ourselves that, it blocks our progress, it blocks our ability to open up our mind and think about potentials. Think about creativity with small ways we could make changes, different types of help or treatment that we could get if we are completely closed off saying, no, I’m just probably going to be this way my whole life.

I’m never going to get better. I’m just going to continue to suffer. And I guess I’ll just have to deal with it and figure it out. I would say if you are experiencing this, I don’t blame you because you probably have tried many different things in the past. It’s interesting since I’ve been doing these intensive therapy sessions, one thing that usually shows up in the very beginning of a multi-day intensive is hopelessness.

Even a one day intensive people will say, I am coming in. I’m nervous because I don’t know how this is gonna go, and I don’t know if it’s actually gonna work for me or not. I can almost predict that people are going to say something similar to that and I’ve just started letting people know that’s completely normal.

If you feel like you’ve tried a lot of things that haven’t worked and then I’m asking you to try something new, of course you’re going to be skeptical and maybe feeling hopeless that it might not work. The reality is that we are learning new ways of helping people and growing in clinical skills every day.

We have different options. You can get better. You can have a better relationship with your OCD than you do right now. Will it go away completely? I don’t know. Only God knows that. It may not go away completely, but you can learn tools to manage it differently. And I really hope that you will join me in January on that journey.

I’m a firm believer that if you are not dead, that God is not done working in your life. God is the author of all healing. Sometimes we look for complete healing and our idea of healing is not necessarily the same healing that God wants to give us. Let me explain. You may want to be healed of the disorder when God wants to remove the shame.

You may want to never have an intrusive thought again when what God wants for you is to learn perseverance and strength under trial. You may want to never have to wrestle with a compulsion again, and God may be calling you to a place of greater dependence and trust in Him. Through learning the twelve modules of ICBT, I would love to have you there as a student just soaking in information, working on homework worksheets, and applying those principles to your life.

The second reason you may not be progressing in your OCD recovery is that your stress isn’t managed well. Maybe you just have a lot going on, a lot of moving pieces, whether that’s work stress, whether that’s home or relationship stress. Whether that’s stress with your children, I don’t know what your particular stress is, but if you don’t have the tools or the boundaries or the ability to calm yourself down, to be able to relax and be able to decompress when you need to, you’re going to continue to struggle with OCD.

I had An entire episode on this talking about how your stress is going to make OCD worse every single time. Stress is important to manage regardless of what mental health issue you’re dealing with, but especially with OCD, you have to have skills and tools and a plan and boundaries and self care to manage your stress.

Otherwise, your symptoms are going to continue to be out of control. And look. Some things are completely outside of our control, related to our stress, there may be other people in your life that are making certain choices that are causing you stress, whether that’s a boss or whether that’s a sibling or whether that’s a coworker or a friend.

And the reality is we have to, in these situations, look at, evaluate, what’s actually in my control about this situation? What can I actually do? Can I evaluate my schedule and determine if I have too much on my plate and see if something needs to come off? Not everything is for this season, so it’s okay to say no, have boundaries, to say, hey, you know what?

I would love to help you in the church nursery, but I just know that I’m having to travel a lot of weekends for work, and so when I’m home, I would like to just be worshipping with my family. I am so sorry that I am not able to help you out in this season, but that may change in a different season. Part of stress management and healthy self care is taking care of your physical body.

You have to be able to make sure that you’re working on things like sleep, eating, exercise, movement. We cannot expect our mental health to be in a good space when our physical health isn’t in a good space. If you were eating junk food all the time or constantly running through the drive thru, that’s gonna affect your gut health, that’s where your serotonin is produced in your gut.

And even though I don’t have specific research to support it, because I’ve looked for that research related to diet and OCD, I have had several clients tell me that their diet makes an impact on their symptoms. Oops. I know when I don’t eat well, I feel lethargic, run down, lacking in energy. When I don’t feel well, that means I’m more impatient with my loved ones.

I’m more quick to anger. I’m not the person that I want to be when I don’t take care of myself. We want to make sure that we’re being good stewards of the body that God has given us. And if you have a lot to work on in this area, it’s okay. Start small. Take it one step at a time. One healthy change is going to lead to another healthy change, to another healthy change, and it’ll just be this beautiful ripple effect.

The third reason you might not be progressing in your OCD recovery is that trauma is in the way. Here’s the deal with trauma and OCD. I mean, I’ve talked about this before on the podcast. If OCD is fire, then trauma is the gasoline. When you take away the gasoline, there still may be some fire, but it’s not going to be raging as intently as it was before.

There are two modules that we look at in ICBT where trauma really shows up. One is the obsessional story of module three, where people will cite personal experience as being relevant to why their obsession is relevant. The second is module four, it’s what we call the feared self. It’s who OCD is telling you that you’re going to become if you don’t engage in these compulsions.

If it doesn’t come out at intake, a lot of times what I see with my clients when we go through modules three and four is that there’s something from the past that they’re stuck on. They may not identify it as like a major traumatic event, But it may have been an intense emotional experience that affected them or something that somebody said.

That really got stuck in their head that they can’t seem to get out. As we unpack those past experiences, it really helps people to have clarity, to be able to move forward. Even something as simple as recognizing I’m not stuck in that past time anymore. I can move forward. I am in a different space in my life.

I’m a different person than who I was in the past. Even just some of those simple things can help people. For situations where there was chronic childhood trauma or a traumatic event that seemed to trigger, OCD symptoms, that is where I will utilize EMDR with individuals to help them clear out that trauma and come to a place of resolution so that they can then jump back in and continue the ICBT work.

This is one of my major criticisms with ERP is that it’s not always trauma informed. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it’s completely not. Where I’ve seen situations where individuals have been been through ERP and had reported trauma that was never processed or dealt with in any specific way in treatment.

And sometimes going through ERP when people have not dealt with the trauma tends to exacerbate their trauma PTSD symptoms. Remember, we talked about this before, 25 percent of people who qualify for an OCD diagnosis also qualify for a PTSD diagnosis. That’s 1 in 4 people in OCD recovery. If we as the clinicians are not looking at trauma as part of this picture, we are doing you a serious disservice.

I also did a show a while back on being highly sensitive and how that impacts treatment. If you are highly sensitive, you are going to view more things as traumatic than the average person. That’s just the reality, because you’re more sensitive to your emotional experience and empathizing with others, taking things in.

That also has to be taken into consideration. Depending on your situation, if you have a lot of trauma, you may want to pursue trauma treatment prior to pursuing OCD treatment if the person that you’re seeing isn’t able to do both or incorporate those for you. I have to make clinical considerations about this all the time and usually I’ll talk with my clients and help them and we’ll talk through, hey, does this make sense as far as if we go down this pathway and we start with some EMDR, start with some trauma processing.

And then shift over into ICBT, how does that sound to you, or does it sound better to start some ICBT, get some skills under your belt, and then go into some trauma processing, like I said, when we get into modules three and four, it depends on each person’s, like, individual situations. Sometimes if you haven’t had a certain level of OCD treatment, it can get in the way of your ability to process trauma because you’re just going into your head and you don’t have those skills to really be able to sit with your emotional experiences.

If you’re not in touch with your body, you’re not going to be able to process the trauma fully. You may be able to process it from a mental cognitive level, but trauma processing needs to really be a whole body experience. Look at the book The Body Keeps the Score for more information about that. Trauma is really stored in the body.

Number four, you haven’t learned the right tools to manage obsessions and compulsions. This is for my friends who have been in talk therapy, really getting a lot of just reassurance seeking from their therapist, or maybe they’ve had some Christian counseling with someone who has given them the typical Christian tools, like, hey, you’ve got to take every thought captive, or you’ve got to pray about this, you’ve got to learn to let it go and give it to God, These might be some things that would be helpful for if someone doesn’t have OCD, but if you have OCD, you need a specific set of tools to be able to know how to manage obsessions and compulsions as they come up, how to respond to them instead of reacting in that same loop, same cycle over and over and over again.

Some people have tried therapy in the past and felt like it hasn’t worked for them, or Unfortunately, I’ve talked with people that have had negative experiences with therapy. And when you’ve had negative experiences, I feel like it’s about two times as hard to go back and get up and try again. I really want to encourage you, find a therapist you can have a consultation with, whether that’s a short phone call or email exchange or learning what you can about them online.

Reading a blog post, something that they’ve written. That’s one of the beautiful things about this podcast, is that so many people have felt more comfortable about being able to come and see me because they’ve heard my voice, they know how I talk, they know my style and approaches to treatment. I definitely can tell a difference when I’m sitting down with somebody who has listened to the podcast versus just someone that doesn’t have that context or doesn’t know that much about me.

If you don’t feel like you’ve learned the right tools to manage your obsessions and compulsions, please join us in January for Christians Learning ICBT. ICBT is an incredible tool that allows you to see your compulsions as irrelevant. It helps you to slow down your thinking and get in touch with your true identity, not who OCD is telling you you’re going to become.

And that’s the beautiful thing for Christians is that it integrates really well with Christianity. And the fifth reason that you may not be progressing in your OCD recovery is that you’re resistant to trying medication. This is true for many Christians that I’ve talked to, and look, I hear you. I know so many of you want to take a holistic route with your health and not have to be on medication.

I know so many of you feel like you don’t want to be on medication for long term, or you fear becoming dependent on it. I would say that over the past year, I have massively changed my approach to medication when it comes to OCD treatment. Whereas I used to just say, Oh, okay, it’s all right if you don’t want to take medication, let’s try therapy first, see how things go, and then you can reevaluate and determine if you want to get on medication or not.

And now what I’m doing is talking to people in the very first session. about what is your openness or willingness to try medication. Research shows us that people tend to have the best outcomes when they are utilizing medication and therapy together. Oftentimes I will see people who either have one part of the equation but not the other.

They’re willing to do therapy but they’re not sure about medication or they’ve been on medication for a while but they haven’t done therapy and so you need those pieces really to work together. Not to be a pill pusher or cause people to feel like they’re forced to do something, but I do really encourage people that it is so helpful when someone is more at a medically stable, medicated state to learn these skills, to grow, to utilize them, than if they’re constantly having to fight obsessions and compulsions.

And it somewhat depends on the severity, obviously, that someone is dealing with. As I started to see more and more people who were dealing with higher levels of severity, I started to having more conversations initially about medication. If someone comes in and they have more OCD tendencies or they have a mild case of OCD, maybe they’re only dealing with one theme and it’s not affecting their functioning level, then we can say, okay, maybe that person doesn’t necessarily need medication.

But if you’re spending hours a day on your OCD, it’s time to consider medication if you haven’t already, especially if you haven’t made progress in therapy. So keep that in mind. Certainly, talk to a medical provider, get all of your questions answered. Look into the medications that are specifically FDA approved for OCD.

Express your concerns, ask about side effects. It’s important to know that information if you are going to take something. But you also don’t want to let OCD or anxiety about taking medication to keep you from potentially feeling better. We did an episode much earlier on medication. You can always go to our website and search for specific episodes if you go to karybach.

com and under the podcast breakdown page there’s a search bar at the top so if you want to search for specific types of therapy Or you want to search for medication, you want to search sleep, you can pull up episodes via different topics that you search for. I’d love to have you guys utilize that because it’s a great feature that we have.

But just for a quick review, we’re going to go through the five reasons you’re not progressing in your OCD recovery. You feel hopeless, your stress isn’t managed well, trauma is in the way, You haven’t learned the right tools to manage obsessions and compulsions, or you’re resistant to trying medication.

Have an amazing Thanksgiving, and I’ll be back the first week in December to talk about three ways to be mindful this Christmas season. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you. Were you blessed by today’s episode? If so, I’d really appreciate it if you would go over to your iTunes account or Apple Podcasts app on your computer if you’re an Android person and leave us a review.

This really helps other OCD be able to find our show. Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By The Well Counseling. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area.

149. Writing an Alternative Story to OCD’s Default Narrative with ICBT

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

In this episode, Carrie gives you an exclusive sneak peek into the upcoming Christians Learning ICBT live training launching in January. She takes you behind the scenes as she explores the process of writing alternative stories, sharing a personal experience that illustrates how she crafted an obsessional narrative and transformed it into a healthier perspective.

Episode Highlights:

  • How to rewrite your obsessional stories by crafting alternative narratives that empower you to see situations from a different perspective.
  • Practical tools to stay grounded in reality and navigate the uncertainty that OCD often magnifies.
  • Examples of stories including Carrie’s personal experience with a car accident and how she used alternative story to reshape OCD’s narrative. 
  • A sneak peek into the ICBT (Integrative Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) training modules, including a breakdown of how they can help you or someone you know struggling with OCD from a Christian perspective.

Episode Summary:

Are you tired of battling OCD? Maybe you’ve tried exposure therapy or sought help from a Christian counselor who didn’t fully understand your struggles. If that’s you, know that I’m here to support you. 

I’m thrilled to announce that starting in January, I’ll be teaching through the 12 modules of ICBT, diving into one module each week until the end of March. Can’t make the live sessions? Don’t worry! Everything will be recorded and available in an online course. If you’re even slightly interested, join the waiting list at carriebock.com/ocd.

Now, let’s talk about alternative stories. Often, the narratives we tell ourselves about our obsessions can become our default. The more we dwell on them, the more ingrained they become. But remember, your brain can change! We can rewire those patterns and explore new possibilities instead of just following the old, anxiety-ridden trails.

I’ll be sharing my own obsessional story related to a car accident Steve and I had shortly after buying a new car. While the actual event is true, my initial thoughts were full of obsessional doubts. I questioned whether I was being greedy for buying the car or if it was a sign from God. But after reflecting, I realized these thoughts were rooted in anxiety rather than reality. My faith reminds me that sometimes things happen for reasons we might not understand right away.

Through this training, we’ll learn to identify and replace those obsessional stories with healthier narratives. It’s important to understand that we’re not arguing with OCD but rather acknowledging the uncertainties in life and leaning into our faith.

I’d love for you to join us on this journey of healing and discovery. Let’s create new stories that lead us to peace and freedom from OCD.  Sign up for the waitlist today!

Explore Related Episodes:

148. Your Obsessional Story: Christians Learning ICBT coming Jan 2025! 
133. Looking for an Alternative to ERP? Find out if ICBT is Right for You

Transcript

Episode 149. Last week, I gave you a behind the scenes sneak peek into my self teaching Module 3 for our group this fall, where I taught all 12 modules of ICBT. This is happening again in January, and I want you to get on board. But today, we’re talking about Module 9, which is writing an alternative story to OCD. I can’t wait for you to hear a snippet of this training.

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 in to today’s episode. Brothers and sisters in Christ, OCD warriors. Are you sick and tired of fighting with OCD? Have you tried exposure therapy or tried finding counseling from a Christian perspective and just have come up short? I know so many people have told me that they have a Christian counselor, but that person doesn’t know about OCD or they’ve gone to OCD counseling and something just didn’t feel right because the person didn’t understand their faith.

I want you to know that I’m here for you, and that’s why I’m excited to announce that in January, we’re going to be teaching through the 12 modules of ICBT. We’ve talked about ICBT in more depth in episode 119 and episode 133. I will be teaching one module per week from mid January to the end of March.

If you can’t make the live trainings, everything’s recorded and put in an online course platform for you to access. If you think you might even slightly be interested, or you’re interested in being interested in finding out more information. Please join our waiting list at kerrybach. com slash OCD. About three fourths of the way down the page, there’s an option for you to put in your name and email address.

The obsessional story does not have to be your default narrative, and you can consider an alternative story. These stories that you’ve been telling yourself have been rolling around in your brain, and like, the more that we focus on them, like, the more that they’ve grown, the more that they’ve solidified, the more that they’ve become a automatic, right?

Your brain can fire very quickly, like with all those neurons kind of wired together related to your OCD. And so much of this process has been slowing down your thought process, really slowing things down to get into like, what is the obsessional story. And so now what we’re trying to do really is rewire that pattern.

And recognize, like, okay, my brain’s default is to go down trail A. And I’m starting to retrain it to go, well, I could go down trail A, and I know where that’s going to lead. That’s going to lead to more compulsions. That’s going to lead to more anxiety. That’s going to lead to being stuck. Or I could, like, go down trail B or C, even.

And recognize, like, maybe this story that I’ve been telling myself isn’t valid. And maybe there’s an alternative story. You’re drawn in with this really believable story. It’s sensational and OCD is causing you to fear you’re going to become this version. You don’t want to be. I don’t want to be that person.

So then I do these compulsions and that obsessional doubt. It comes from the imagination and that makes it irrelevant. Not actually based on sense data of what’s happening right now. And once you cross over into that OCD bubble, remember our little bridge, it’s difficult to get out. It doesn’t feel good in there, but it doesn’t feel good outside of there, and kind of the more like you get sucked in further and further, the harder it is to get out of there.

But we can use that sensory information in the here and now to stay grounded in reality, stay on that, that different side of the bridge or to get out of the OCD bubble. Important things that we need to know that the alternative story is not the following. We’re not trying to argue with your OCD. We’re not trying to say things like, Oh, well, you know, it doesn’t look like I’m going to die because I went to the doctor last week and I got a clean bill of health and they said all my any health conditions are like managed in a healthy way, blah, blah, blah.

We’re not trying to argue back with it. It’s not to be used as a compulsion, so it’s not like, Oh, okay, OCD is telling me this story, and I’m repeating, like, compulsively the alternative story in my head. Not what we want to do there, either. It’s not really a true versus a false story, because sometimes there are uncertainties of life that we have to accept.

We don’t know, sometimes. It’s not a, oh, this is the right story and the OCD is the wrong story, or this is, like, the true narrative and the OCD is completely, like, false. We know OCD, like, the obsessional doubt, right, is based in the imagination. And so in that sense, the obsessional doubt is false and is not relevant.

Here’s what we are trying to do with the obsessional story. We’re trying to dislodge it as a default narrative, just like I was talking about before, where it’s the thing that kind of has made the loop, it’s made the rounds in the brain and like it’s become that well worn neural pathway. So we’re trying to introduce a different neural pathway into the brain so that we can say, You know, like it could be this over here.

What do we think about that? And if we’re talking about possibilities, you know, we also have to talk about if we’re going to say that that’s a possibility, then we have to open up our minds and our ideas to other potential possibilities. It’s a possibility that I could get in a car accident on the way home.

It’s also possible that I could have a normal, everyday life, you know, drive home that happens on a regular basis. You know, takes me about 15 minutes to get home. Could be just completely normal. It could be that there’s an accident on the interstate and it takes me an hour to get home. Like, there’s many different possibilities here.

When you’re writing your alternative story, as you’re going through this process, it’s a tangible OCD thing, it might feel a little bit easier to do that one, but if it feels like, okay, it’s something spiritual, or it’s something more existential, it might be, if you can write like a potentially different alternative of that story, if there’s multiple alternatives, that might be a good process for you.

For this next snippet of the training, I’m going to be going through an obsessional story that I wrote about a car accident that Steve and I got into. You may have noticed last week that when we write obsessional stories, they have reasons for the obsessional doubt. There’s a variety of those in ICBT.

rules, hearsay, personal experience, and all the way down to it’s possible, which is a pretty much catch all category because OCD tells you that anything is possible. We then spend some time examining the obsessional story and then going into the alternative story. Here’s my story about the car accident.

This first part of the story is completely true, and I wrote an obsessional piece about the next part of the story. Steve and I received some money from my parents passing away, and after some consideration, we decided to buy a newer used car. After two years of squeezing a walker, stroller, and other things into a sedan, we decided to look at a Honda CR V.

Everything went smoothly through the selection and buying process until we went out, went to pull out of the dealership lot. A man driving a truck was in a hurry. He thought I had pulled off when I had only slowly moved up to survey the traffic. He accelerated and hit us in the back. This is a now kind of a funny story about being hit on the way out of the dealership, which who does that happen to except for my crazy life.

All right. Here’s my potential obsessional story related to the accident. This part is made up. Surely, this is a sign from God that I was not supposed to buy this vehicle. Maybe I was being greedy in doing so. What if this was a sin, or God is angry at me, or punishing me in some way? There’s a whole lot of things that we could potentially break down there, but I’m going to call that the obsessional doubt.

My treasure should be in heaven according to the Bible rules. I could have spent this money on feeding starving children in Africa. That is a fact. I watched this YouTube video warning against greed and how the wrath of God is going to come on down to Americans. That’s completely made up, but we’ll call that hearsay.

And I shouldn’t have been greedy last week when I ate that piece of pie instead of offering it to my husband. Personal experience, I’m going to repeatedly repent and confess the sin of buying the car and then ruminate about whether I should sell it or not as a sign of true repentance. That’s the compulsions there.

We had gone through the potential obsessional story. These were some things that came out of it. Like felt positive about buying the car. Maybe this was some kind of like vulnerable self, like maybe it was my fault, distrust, a connection with God. And so this was what we had originally wrote, like, something bad happened.

I don’t have any evidence in the present to support this obsessional doubt that I’m a greedy person who shouldn’t have bought this car. I don’t have any spiritual sense data to support that God is upset with me. Like, I’m not sensing anything from the Holy Spirit. In fact, this decision was made prayerfully and carefully.

My recent personal experience of being greedy and the YouTube video is irrelevant to this present moment experience with the car. This is actually this last paragraph here that I’m going to share with you. The next paragraph is actually something, my genuine feelings about the car accident. And. It’s interesting because it’s very vague of like, why does God allow certain things to happen in our life?

Like, I don’t really know, you know, sometimes we don’t always have a clear answer. Sometimes we have the answer when we look backwards like, oh, like, it makes sense that I went through this because then I met that person or like, yeah, why God led me here and then here makes sense. But some things don’t always make sense like that, or we can’t always see it at the time.

I got into a car accident, I’m not really sure why God allowed it to happen right after I bought the car. I wonder if the accident was a wake up call to the guy driving the truck to be more careful. He saw our car seat and recognized that our daughter could have been in the car. This seemed to bother him.

We’re very thankful to God that no one was hurt. In faith, my daughter was not in the car. Maybe it was a reminder to me that my family is much more important than things. Maybe it was an opportunity to show grace to the other driver instead of freaking out on him as he expected us to do. I understand that i’m not going to have all the answers and this gives me the opportunity to trust god in face day by day.

And obviously, you know, this was not a huge issue. Everything got fixed, you know resolved and it’s fine And we didn’t have to pay for it because it wasn’t our fault. But you know when we go through situations in life Um, you may have been through something a lot bigger where you might be questioning like some of these things like why Is God allowing this to happen or you could even be having this thought process maybe about your OCD?

You want to think through like going back to that acceptance piece that we were talking about earlier The piece that I’m having to accept in the uncertainty is I’m not going to have all the answers or I’m not going to understand everything that happens in my life. And that may be something in a mindful space that’s really hard to sit with.

Just like if you’re having an obsession about death, it may be really hard to sit with not knowing when that’s coming. Or if you’re having an obsession about Something spiritual and maybe there are some things that people get stuck on spiritually start obsessing about like Calvinism versus Arminianism is one of them that people can get really stuck on or how do we explain some of these things that happened in the Old Testament where the Israelites were told to wipe other people out?

Like how do we reconcile with our faith and who God is? When you look at all those things, like, there has to be this level of acceptance of faith, and that faith, I like to say, faith requires faith. So, it means that there is some element of trusting God outside of yourself, and that you’re not going to have all of the answers, or understand everything.

I wanted you to hear the connection between the obsessional story, and the alternative story. However, in ICBT, these two are taught weeks apart as the obsessional story is module three and the alternative narrative is module nine. In between, we’re learning a lot more information about how to stay grounded in reality instead of moving towards the imaginary outcomes that OCD is telling you will happen.

I would love, love, love for you to come and join us. There is going to be a huge Black Friday sale on these trainings happening in January from mid January through the end of March. Please go to karybach. com slash OCD to get on the waiting list and you’ll receive all the information about ICBT, these trainings, and the sale.

Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you. Were you blessed by today’s episode? If so, I’d really appreciate it if you would go over to your iTunes account or Apple Podcasts app on your computer if you’re an Android person and leave us a review. This really helps other Christians who are struggling with OCD be able to find our show.

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

148. Your Obsessional Story: Christians Learning ICBT coming Jan 2025! 

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

In this episode, Carrie takes you behind the scenes of one of her ICBT training sessions, which she designed specifically for Christians dealing with OCD. She shares a snippet of Module Three, exploring how OCD weaves compelling narratives that can draw you in and offers guidance on rewriting those narratives to gain a deeper understanding of OCD’s mechanisms.

Episode Highlights:

  • The power of stories: How OCD creates vivid, relatable narratives that captivate our attention.
  • The importance of self-awareness in recognizing and rewriting your obsessional story.
  • Common pitfalls of telling ourselves negative stories and the role of shame in our experiences with OCD.
  • Exploring the concept of obsessional doubt through relatable examples.
  • Writing alternative stories as a method for reframing experiences and perceptions.
  • And more about what’s inside the Christians Learning ICBT live training, including practical tools and resources to deepen your understanding and application of these concepts.

Episode Summary:

I’m Carrie Bock—a counselor, Christ follower, wife, and mom. I’m here to help Christians facing OCD find healing through faith. Today, I want to share a bit about my ICBT (Intensive Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) training, focusing on Module 3, where we learn to recognize and rewrite those pesky obsessional stories that OCD throws at us.

Feeling Stuck with OCD?

If you’re tired of battling OCD on your own or have tried exposure therapy without much success, I understand! Starting in January, I’m launching a 12-week course where we’ll go through each ICBT module together, wrapping up in March. If you can’t join live, don’t worry—you’ll get access to all the recordings!

Join the Waiting List!

Interested? Sign up for our waiting list at carriebockcom/OCD. Together, we can transform your relationship with OCD in 2025!

Let’s Talk About Stories

We all have narratives that shape our lives, influenced by our past and our beliefs about God. It’s important to ask: Are these stories coming from God or from our fears?

OCD is great at creating emotional stories that can feel very real. Think about how a gripping movie can make you feel intense emotions, even if it’s just a story. That’s how OCD works—it hijacks our thoughts and feelings.

For example, if I tell you about an “amazing” pen found in a sketchy place, your feelings about that pen would change based on the story. This shows how changing our narratives can change our perceptions.

Rewriting Your Obsessional Stories

Today, I’ll help you recognize and reframe those obsessional stories. Instead of getting stuck in doubt, we can challenge those thoughts and find clarity.

Tune in to the full episode to learn practical tips for identifying your obsessional narratives and rewriting them in a way that aligns with the abundant life God wants for you. Let’s start this journey of healing together!

Explore Related Episode:

133. Looking for an Alternative to ERP? Find out if ICBT is Right for You

Transcript

Hello, do you love going behind the scenes? Well, today I am taking you behind the scenes to one of the ICBT training sessions that I did this fall on module three. Module three is all about how OCD draws you in with a really good story and then teaches you how to write your obsessional story to become more aware Of how OCD works and gets you drawn in.

Hello and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD with Carrie Bach. I’m a Christ follower wife and mother licensed professional counselor who helps Christian struggling with OCD get to a deeper level of healing. 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. Brothers and sisters in Christ, OCD warriors. Are you sick and tired of fighting with OCD? Have you tried exposure therapy or tried finding counseling from a Christian perspective and just have come up short? I know so many people have told me that they have a Christian counselor but that person doesn’t know about OCD or they’ve gone to OCD counseling and something just didn’t feel right because the person didn’t understand their faith.

I want you to know that I’m here for you, and that’s why I’m excited to announce that in January, we’re going to be teaching through the 12 modules of ICBT. We talked about ICBT in more depth in episode 119 and episode 133. I will be teaching one module per week from mid January to the end of March. If you can’t make the live trainings, everything’s recorded and put in an online course platform for you to access.

If you think you might even slightly be interested, or you’re interested in being interested in finding out more information. Please join our waiting list at kerrybach. com slash OCD. About three fourths of the way down the page, there’s an option for you to put in your name and email address. Let me help you have a different relationship with OCD in 2025.

Today we’re talking about stories, the obsessional story. As I started to think about this obsessional story process, I thought, we tell ourselves stories all the time, right? And it’s not always an OCD story. We go through life, we have experiences, and we interpret them, and we tell ourself a story based on our past experience, based on other things that we’ve heard, based on what we know about God and scripture.

It’s not just about OCD. It is, that’s what we’re here to talk about and have a better relationship with, but just noticing, like, When you have experiences, what are you telling yourself? Are you telling yourself the shoulds? I should have done better, known better, been better, whatever. Are you telling yourself, yeah, you know, you should have expected that to happen because it happened in the past?

Uh, you know, a trauma story of, yep, you know, there you go again, experiencing this. Just kind of be aware of that. So, you are, as a Christian, tasked with not trusting everything that you see or hear, but really testing and seeing, is this coming from God or is this from falsehood? So, our main ideas are that OCD draws you in with a good storyline.

And that awareness of that storyline is the first step to changing it. I like to say that OCD has like these lifetime movie versions that they tell you. It’s so vivid. Sometimes you can see it happening. There’s a lot of intense emotions that goes along with it. Just thinking about stories in general, I put this little Incredible Hulk guy on here.

They draw us in with a certain level of emotion. Stories are believable or relatable. Even though we’ve never seen a guy turn into this giant green man and start destroying something. We feel related to this story because we’ve all had anger in our lives. Maybe we’ve been destructive at different points and he doesn’t want this to happen.

It just is something that kind of takes over him and happens. So even though you look at Marvel comics and things, there’s lots of stuff happening or people being able to control time or see all of the outcomes, right? That’s one of the characters, I guess, can see all the potential outcomes that could happen and people are flying and different things happening, but they’re, it.

Some of the core storylines, the characters, we really relate to them, we feel for them. I wasn’t really into a whole lot of these movies, and I went with one of my friends, and people were just, like, wanting to go see Endgame, and people were just crying in the theater, right? Like, these are characters, you know, they’re not real, but we are drawn in and we feel something, and that’s what makes a good story, right?

Like, that’s a really good story that draws you in. There’s some kind of outcome or ending to them. So there are some factual elements that can be woven in even to OCD stories. All right, now for a story about my pen. This is a pen that I have in my office. It’s a purple pen. I like the color purple. So let’s say that if you were in the office and I was like, Hey, do you want to write with this pen?

You probably would say, Sure, why not? Like, I don’t know, it looks like a good pen, it clicks, it works, you know, I’ll tell you, yeah, it writes really well, I like it. So you probably would feel okay with this pen, unless you like had major contamination and you were like, no, I don’t touch other people’s stuff, that type of stuff, and then you might be like, I’m not sure about that.

But if I could tell you a story about this pen, where And I said, yeah, this is a really great pen and I want to tell you the story of how I got this pen. I mean, I didn’t just get this pen at the store. I was out in, you know, the park and there was a pile of dog poop and I noticed this pin sticking out and I thought, oh, that pen looks like it would write really good if I cleaned it up or hey, my favorite color is purple.

I think i’ll take that pen and I took it out of the dog poop and I washed it off and I Clorox wiped. It’s fine. Everything’s good. It’s all right. Like I mean, what’s the problem? Do you notice feeling any differently about wanting to hold the pen now versus when I first started talking to you about it?

Most people, when I tell them the story, are then like, Oh, that’s gross. Like I’m not touching that pen. You know, who does that? But the point is, what changed? Did the pen actually change, or did we just change the story about the pen? And then when we changed the story about the pen, that caused us to feel differently about it.

Not only your five senses, which do get distrusted at times in OCD, but internal sense data. What do you really want? And how do you know that? Like, I can say, just random example, like, I really want pizza for dinner. Like, how do I know that? I’ve been just craving pizza, I like pizza, whatever. I’m just making stuff up as we go along, right?

But really being able to tune into your own emotional experience or your own desires is really important. I’ve talked to people before OCD will make you feel like you have an urge to do something but an internal like urge or pull towards something is not the same thing as a desire is actually wanting to do that.

So that may be something that you have to tease out in your own story and then what you actually value or believe. Jenny’s obsessional story goes like this. My husband didn’t kiss me this morning before he left for work. That is a true statement. That did really happen to her. But now this obsessional doubt injures then, what if he has fallen out of love with me?

I mean, Sally is going through a divorce right now and her husband just left her out of nowhere. That’s the hearsay evidence. Just because it happened to Sally doesn’t mean it’ll happen to Jenny. But that’s what OCD wants her to believe that it will. My ex boyfriend did something similar. Personal experience.

OCD feels like it’s really like, hey, I’ve really got some evidence here for you. I read an article about how if your man doesn’t kiss you before you leave the house, that is one sign he’s out the door. He could be cheating on me. It’s possible. Now we’ve got like, you know, almost like another obsessional doubt coming in there, right?

Like, oh, what if he’s cheating? People leave and get divorces all the time. Yeah, I really can’t argue with that fact. Um, What if I’m next? I couldn’t handle it. Consequences of obsessional doubt. This piece, like, of not being able to handle it, that kind of dips the toe into the water of the feared self theme.

You may be saying, like, Oh, well, that’s a nice story carry. Now what do I do with it? Just remember that you’re still in the phases of building awareness. We’re not necessarily intervening right now, but if you can intervene, or you may pick up on like, oh, now that I pick up on that OCD, I’m not gonna give into it as much as I would have before.

I’m not gonna entertain it like I would have in the past. So just kind of be aware of that piece coming down the pike. All right, talking about having a shameful thought, maybe it’s a sexual or blasphemy thought, and then like, oh, that goes into, I shouldn’t be having this as a Christian. What does this mean?

What if this means I’m not a good Christian or don’t love God? And I think I stuck with the don’t love God, because obviously some of these could be going a lot of different directions, right? And then these are some of the things that I’m, the potential consequences that I’m calling myself. What if I don’t love God?

Well, not everyone does. That’s a fact. Rules, you know, take your thoughts captive. Watch the things that come into your mind that you think about. Lots of information on that in various places. Spiritual guidance, pastors, teachers, authors, podcasts, so much, so much information out there now. Personal experience of maybe what a former church taught and then anything possible according to OCD.

So let’s look at this obsessional story. So I have these intrusive sexual thoughts. It’s a fact. I can’t change that. What if I don’t really love God and that’s why I have these thoughts? So that would be our obsessional doubt that we stuck with for this example, but it could have gone, as you see, there were other obsessional doubts.

And so whichever one you choose, that probably is going to take the story a little bit different in a direction. That’s okay. That’s what my previous church said. hearsay. I have to rebuke this thought in the name of Jesus. That’s a compulsion. I have to take every thought captive and make it obedient to Christ.

That is true according to the Bible. When I was addicted to pornography, I was dwelling on thoughts I shouldn’t. That would be a personal experience. And if I don’t win the battle of my mind, I’m giving the enemy a foothold. The consequences of the doubt. So some of you may be, um, a little bit overwhelmed too on, okay, Carrie, I have a lot of different obsessions.

What do I write my obsessional story on? I’m going to give you some guidance. Sometimes, very occasionally, the anxiety about writing the obsessional story or seeing it out like Just out there can be super super high for certain themes So I would say if that’s the case We’re really in the interest of you learning the process right now, right?

If that’s the case if it is too anxiety provoking I mean like gonna give you a panic attack is what i’m trying to say Not to say that writing obsessional stories shouldn’t cause you any anxiety But if you’re like panicking trying to write your obsessional story You Maybe try working on something that is either a past experience, like it’s not bothering you now, but it did in the past, just so that you can learn and process it and sit with it, or picking something that is still an obsession, but it’s a lower level, like not going to send you into a panic.

And then once you feel like you have the flow of what you’re writing and the process of putting those pieces together, then that is going to help you be able to. probably sit with the harder one. Even if we have multiple stories, the feared self or vulnerable self theme is going to run between those stories.

So they’re going to be similar. A lot of times there is a common thread and that’s going to be your common thread. So if you do end up like writing a couple stories, if you feel inclined to do that. I wouldn’t literally like write more than two. I mean, remember, we’re not wanting to like obsess about treatment.

So if you wrote a couple stories and kind of compared them, I was like, Oh, okay. Like there should be some type of overlap or pattern that you’re seeing. Rely, whether it’s, hey, I’m seeing in both of these stories that I’m really relying on hearsay evidence, or I’m seeing in both of these stories that I’m really relying on past personal experience that may be related to my trauma, or I’m noticing it’s like the same exact personal experience, even though the themes may be different for you.

And you would want to look at like, okay, what can I glean from this? What’s the pattern here? Because obviously you’re not wanting, like I said, if you have a lot of different themes, you’re not wanting to run the gamut for every single thing in your life. You don’t want to have to do this, I guess, is what I’m trying to say for every single thing.

And usually information like this will generalize. So, recognize that you only got about 12 minutes of a 50 minute training. Obviously this was not intended to be comprehensive, but just to give you a snippet and a sneak peek inside the training and the examples that I use to help people understand the concept.

mindfulness, a prayer. There’s a scripture verse for every week. And we dive into the lesson, and all of that is so intentional so that we can put our mind, heart, and spirit in alignment and in the right place. We’ve had some amazing question and answer times in the beginning and end, so know that you completely have the freedom to ask questions.

People will type them in the chat or they will email me privately and I can answer it publicly. So there, even if you aren’t able to attend live, there’s still opportunities to ask questions so that you can really get in there and apply these materials. Next week we’re going behind the scenes again to talk through writing alternative stories and I’m going to share a true experience that happened to me, how I wrote an obsessional story about it, I did make up that part, and then what a potential alternative story would be.

Definitely tune in for part two next week. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you. Were you blessed by today’s episode? If so, I’d really appreciate it if you would go over to your iTunes account or Apple Podcasts app on your computer if you’re an Android person and leave us a review.

This really helps other Christians who are struggling with OCD be able to find our show. Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By The Well Counseling. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area.

147. Does Talking About OCD Make It Worse?: 3 Reasons Why

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

In this episode, Carrie delves into the reasons why talking about OCD can sometimes exacerbate the condition. She discusses how reassurance-seeking, co-rumination, and the urge to “go deep” can create unhealthy cycles that hinder healing. 

Episode Highlights:

  • The harmful cycle where temporary relief from anxiety can lead to increased obsessive thoughts and compulsions.
  • Why traditional talk therapies may be ineffective for OCD and can sometimes reinforce compulsive behaviors.
  • How to identify when OCD is influencing your thoughts and behaviors, enabling you to take proactive steps towards healing.
  • Discover practical strategies for staying grounded in the present moment, which is essential for overcoming OCD and resisting its narratives.

Episode Summary:

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD! I’m Carrie Bock, a Christ follower, wife, mother, and licensed professional counselor dedicated to helping Christians struggling with OCD find deeper healing.

In today’s episode, I’m exploring whether talking about OCD can actually make it worse, sharing three key reasons why it might. As a therapist, I naturally see value in discussing problems, but when it comes to OCD, traditional talk therapies often fall short. Many people mistake their symptoms for general anxiety, spending sessions sharing worries without finding lasting relief. Here’s why this approach may not work and what we can do instead..

Here are three reasons why:

  • Reassurance Seeking: Repeatedly asking for validation to ease anxiety may offer temporary relief, but it reinforces the OCD cycle, causing obsessions to resurface.
  • Co-Rumination: Constantly discussing worries, especially about unsolvable issues, can deepen distress and worsen OCD symptoms.
  • Going Deep: Trying to understand issues at a deeper level often leads to obsessive thinking instead of grounding you in the present.

Tune in to learn more about these traps and how to avoid them. For additional support, head to carriebock.com/OCD

Explore Related Resources:

5 Ways Therapy Can Make OCD Worse

Transcript

Episode 147. Does talking about OCD make it worse? Let’s find out. I’m going to give you three reasons why.

Hello, and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD with Keri Bach. 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 in to today’s episode.

If you are like me, you like talking through problems. I mean, hello, I’m a therapist, obviously I do this on a regular basis. I’m However, not just with clients talking through their problems, but if I have my own problems, a lot of times I’m going to friends or family members or other people to really try to sort through things, talk it out, and figure things out.

Here’s where we run into problems with OCD though, and this is why traditional talk type therapies don’t work with OCD. There are lots of people who don’t realize they have OCD, think they have anxiety. Go to a therapist to talk about all the things they’re anxious about. And next thing you know, they’re in therapy, they feel a little bit better, they leave, they don’t feel any better.

And they repeat this cycle week after week after week, like, hey, here’s what’s going on with me this week, this is what I’m worried about, it’s what’s bothering me. The therapist provides them some type of solution based or thought challenging or reassurance, and then it doesn’t ever seem to help. That’s why this topic is so important.

The first reason talking about OCD can make it worse is Reassurance seeking. This is a really common one with OCD, right? You have a question, you really want to ask your therapist, or your spouse, or your friend, do you think that I’m a horrible person, or did I offend you, or is this object clean, what do you think?

Reassurance seeking is a compulsion. I know it is super hard to not ask for reassurance sometimes, but it’s important to try to hold off if you can, because the reassurance seeking only continues and reinforces that OCD cycle in your brain, where you have an obsession, then there’s some anxiety. There’s a compulsion, and there’s temporary relief.

People seek reassurance because it works, they do get some relief from it, but then the next thing you know, they are becoming anxious again because the obsession just goes right back. And sometimes you may feel like the obsession comes back even stronger. I feel like we could do an entire episode on reassurance seeking, but I’m going to spare you that for right now.

If you think you might be reassurance seeking, you can ask yourself to evaluate, Am I feeling this urge to get this information? And do I feel like if I get that information, there’s going to be some internal calm or slight relief from this anxiety? That’s a good indicator because you may have gotten really sneaky about how you’re asking for reassurance.

It doesn’t always sound as direct as, is this object clean, or have I offended you or upset you in some way. The second reason talking about OCD can make it worse is that you may be participating in co rumination. I have a confession to make. I was working with a client who had some scrupulosity obsessions about a variety of different issues related to Christianity and the Bible.

I was receiving some supervision, so I was talking with another OCD counselor about how can I help this client better? What are we doing? It just doesn’t seem to be working. And she completely called me out on it in a very nice and loving way and said, you are co ruminating with this client because these issues are so important to you and you see that and so you want to talk about these things.

And I was like, oh my goodness, you know, sometimes you don’t even see what you’re doing and you need someone else to point it out to you. You might be co ruminating with someone if you were trying to solve a level of uncertainty. that we have to sit with. So I’ll give you an example. If you’re really stuck on whether or not God created the earth in seven literal days or periods of time, and you’re scouring over all this evidence for the seven day creation versus the, hey, the word for day means period of time, and so I don’t know, was it, how do we have a literal day when we don’t have the planets yet?

All very interesting and philosophical questions, certainly things that Steve and I have talked about, have talked about with other people, but in those conversations, we don’t have a high level of distress over this. We’re just saying, this is an interesting topic and there’s different views on it, obviously.

If you are spending a large amount of time trying to figure something like that out that’s not solvable, Because it requires a certain level of faith, you might be co ruminating with someone. If you have talked someone to death about the same topic and haven’t come to a resolution about it, you might be co ruminating with that person, or another person’s response might be like, I have no idea why you’re stuck on this, it really doesn’t matter that much to them, but to you, it feels like I have to resolve this, or otherwise that means I don’t know, whatever you’re saying that it means, that you don’t have enough faith or you’re not sure if you can love God unless you understand all of these different nuances of things that occurred in the Old Testament.

Reassurance seeking, co ruminating can be very sneaky. You may not realize you’re doing it, your friends and family may not realize you’re doing it. You can see how reassurance seeking and co ruminating can become really problematic in therapy Obviously, we’re here to talk with you about things, but there also has to be some kind of strategy behind it, and often redirection, for you to notice when you’re in the OCD bubble.

I’ve had clients where I’ve spent a lot of time helping them recognize that what they were dealing with was OCD. Because there may have been a level of lack of insight, just feeling like they’re ruminating about these things all the time and thinking, like, this is my own thought process versus OCD has gotten you completely down an unhealthy rabbit hole.

The third reason why talking about OCD can make it work is a trick that OCD will play on you called going deep. Going deep is where you feel like you just have to understand something more at a deeper level. This may cause a lot of research, but it may also be connected to these other two that we talked about, reassurance seeking and corruminating, because you may be talking to other people trying to gain more understanding. Like, “if I just understand everything there is to know about germs, then I will be able to keep myself safe and not get sick. If I really understand these deep theological issues then that means I will feel more secure in my salvation or relationship with God.” Going deep doesn’t work because it actually just moves you farther and farther into the OCD instead of grounding you back in reality.

This is what we’re trying to do in ICBT is keep you connected to the present moment experience instead of the narrative that OCD is telling you is happening right now or what OCD is telling you is going to happen in the future. There’s a distinct difference, and the more that you understand what we call the tricks and cheats of OCD, the The more that you understand your own obsessional story that OCD is crafting for you, the better that you can do in staying in reality and trusting your sensory experience.

If you want to know more about that, our next ICBT Learning Sessions for Christians will be starting in January. Getting on our email list is the absolute best way to do that, and you can also join the waiting list at karybach. com slash OCD. Can I tell you a secret about our next learning sessions?

They’re going on sale in November. Okay, it’s not a secret. The cat’s out of the bag now. But in all seriousness, the only way to find out about the November sale for the January Learning Sessions is to get on the waitlist. So there will be information to our email subscribers about that and you can go to carriebock.com/OCD.

Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you. Were you blessed by today’s episode? If so, I’d really appreciate it if you would go over to your iTunes account or Apple Podcasts app on your computer if you’re an Android person and leave us a review. This really helps other OCD be able to find our show.

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

146. One Step to Make a Change

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

In this episode, Carrie discusses the importance of making manageable changes in life, especially for those struggling with OCD and anxiety. Learn how starting small can lead to significant transformations as she shares personal stories and practical tips.

Episode Highlights:

  • The power of starting small and setting manageable goals for transformation.
  • How seeking God’s guidance can help clarify your path and provide direction in times of uncertainty.
  • How slowing down can help you recognize those OCD thoughts before they spiral out of control.
  • Practical tips for incorporating mindfulness and self-reflection into your routine.
  • Insights on how small changes can create a ripple effect in various areas of life.
  • Strategies for overcoming feelings of overwhelm and stagnation.

Episode Summary:

I’m Carrie Bock, a Christ follower, wife, mother, and licensed professional counselor dedicated to helping Christians struggling with OCD find deeper healing. 

It’s easy to fall into the trap of believing we must overhaul our lives overnight. I’ve been there—feeling overwhelmed and stuck, particularly when trying to make health changes. The key is to start small.

As I thought about the small changes I’ve asked my clients to make over the years, I wanted to share some ideas that might inspire you. I had a client years ago who was super stressed and driven at work. They had so much responsibility and anxiety, and I taught them some breathing strategies to help them relax. When I suggested they take time to breathe deeply, they responded, “I don’t have time for this!”

I said, “Okay, here’s what I want you to do. Can you commit to taking three deep breaths before getting out of the car?”

I also faced challenges organizing my home office. With a coach’s help, I broke the task into manageable steps and realized the importance of starting small. This approach not only eases anxiety but also creates momentum for further change, which is crucial for those dealing with OCD.

We need to learn to break things down into smaller steps and understand the ripple effect of doing so. You take one step, and then you realize you can take another, and then another. I’m reminded of how God’s word says that His word is a lamp to our feet and a light to our path, guiding us without revealing the entire route.

More Episodes to Listen to:

112. Finding Motivation to Finish with Carrie Bock, LPC-MHSP

Transcript

Episode 146. What is your one step to making a change in your life?

Hello and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD with Carrie Bock. I’m a Christ follower, wife and mother, a 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. Happy October. I hope that you are enjoying all the fun things that fall has to bring. Here on the podcast we are doing a very special giveaway in October. We are going to be giving away a 100 gift card to Amazon for anyone who is an email subscriber to the list and who rates and reviews our show on iTunes.

There will be full instructions for entering the giveaway in our show notes, because I don’t want to take up too much time here. You can always reach us for further information at kerrybach. com slash podcast. Let’s talk about how people usually approach changes, making changes in their life. Typically goes with some all or nothing thinking, and you know we’ve all been guilty of this. Like, I have to do all the things all at once, I have to change everything, have a completely new life by Friday, I’m gonna reach for my entire schedule, I’m actually gonna get up early and I’m gonna eat right, exercise, throw out all the carbs. Have no sugar in the house, run a mile, read that entire book that I’ve been wanting to read, and spend five straight hours organizing my house.

Does that sound completely unrealistic when I say it back to you, but any of you find that familiar? I know that I’ve been in that space before where I want to do so much, and I want to accomplish so much in such a short amount of time. When we’re looking at making changes in our lives, we have to start small.

What happens when we see a huge task or huge area that we need to change, like our physical health or our mental health, the tendency is to feel overwhelmed and then frozen when it comes to making changes, so we end up doing nothing. Honestly, this has just happened to me recently in a couple areas, which partially was why I thought about doing this episode.

I was feeling really stuck trying to lose weight and had made some dietary changes. I was doing walking workouts, Pilates, different YouTube workouts that I found on a regular basis and I was like, okay, well, I’m in this rhythm of working out, I’m trying to watch what I eat, trying to eat more protein, less carbs, but not be super strict or religious about it.

And I went to the doctor and said, this weight loss thing is just really not going anywhere. I’m trying. I’m making the efforts. Here’s what I’m doing. And she said, I think you need to change your workouts. I was like, duh, why didn’t I think of that? I mean, I’ve been working out for years. Like, I understand the concepts of how this works, but it was something that I needed somebody else to say to me, like, make things a little bit harder on yourself because you’ve gotten used to what you’re doing and it’s a little too easy for you and your body’s not being stretched as much. So I decided, how am I going to motivate myself to work out, first of all, with something a little harder? And the best that I could come up with was let’s make it fun.

Let’s make it something that I want to do. So I got a miniature trampoline, partially because I’ve been watching my daughter jump on hers, and that looks super fun. But hers is a kid’s size, so I would break it if I got on it. I got a miniature trampoline. And I also thought back to what were some of the workouts that I really enjoyed when I was going to group exercise classes.

Now, it’s been quite a while, like pre COVID, since I’ve been to any group exercise classes. But there was a step class that I did when I lived in Colorado. And the gym I went to had, like, over a hundred classes a week. It was amazing. Never found anywhere else quite like that. But they had this step class on Monday nights that they got rid of because there were only about five of us in there and replaced it with some horrid boot camp class where the guy literally wore an army hat and yelled at people.

I thought, that looks terrible, I don’t want to do that. Side note. Back when I was in my twenties at this time and I was doing this step workout, which makes me sound just like an old person, old soul, I guess, but I thought, you know what? I’m going to get a step. I’m going to buy a step and I am going to do some step workouts at home.

So I found some online. I really enjoy it. It’s may not be everybody’s thing, but I enjoy it because it actually makes me have to think while I’m working out. And the thinking part makes me forget how much I’m actually sweating and feeling like I’m gonna die because it’s hard and I’m not as agile and I don’t move quite as fast as I did when I was in my 20s.

But the point is, I was stuck. I was feeling discouraged, and I don’t know what to do. And someone else said, Hey, here’s how you can make a change. Try something different. Well, the other thing I found out about the trampoline workouts is that if you jump for 20 minutes on a trampoline, it is equivalent of running for 60 minutes.

And I thought, Hey! More bang for your buck there. I like that 20 minutes versus 60 sounds good to me now If you ever jumped on a trampoline for 20 minutes, I cannot do that much right away. It is a lot Working my way up on that but the trampoline workouts They have you jump a little bit and then sometimes you do other things like get off and do abs or lift weights or other things Like that, so they’re good.

They’re fun And the only reason that I have a regular workout routine is because I have decided to take time to get up before my family members get up. Fortunately, they are both pretty heavy sleepers, so when I’m, like, stepping up and down or bouncing around on the trampoline, they’re not waking up.

Just super nice. The only reason I am able to get up before the rest of my family and have this time early in the morning is because I made a decision to go to bed earlier. What I’m trying to show you is that each of these little changes built on each other, the going to bed earlier, if I am typically asleep by 10 p.m. at night, I’m at least in the bed by 10 p. m. at night for sure, would love to be asleep by then, and I get up somewhere around 5, 5. 30. And that gives me time to work out and get a shower and a few days a week before the family gets up. And then other days I do more meditative activities in the morning and read and things like that.

It has definitely been a process. I did not become a morning person overnight. I did not just decide to stay up till whenever and then set my alarm for 5 a. m. The process of going to bed earlier then started naturally waking up earlier and I don’t have to set an alarm. Usually my body will just be done sleeping and wake me up and that feels really, really good to me.

So I never thought that I would be that morning type of person. I’ve always liked sleep and like to just lay in the bed. But lately, it’s been just a real gift to get up before everybody else and take that time for self care and for spiritual renewal, time to pray and connect with God as well. Another area of my life I was feeling literally frozen in.

I was organizing my bonus space upstairs. I have my little office space. I did organize quite a bit of that to get it to a functional level. But I have things that I took from the attic of the old house that I never had time really to go through and sort. And a lot of it was things I needed to get rid of, trash, give away and purge declutter and I got going on that process but got to a point where it just felt so big and I was getting down to more organizational pieces of I don’t know if you’re like this at all but I have bins and I have containers and I have little like drawer divide I have all these like organizational Things, a file organizer, and I don’t always know how to get the stuff in the bins or the organizing like in a way that makes functional sense.

So realizing that since we have a much smaller attic here and I can’t put all of this stuff in the attic. I have room for it for storage in the bonus space, but just figuring out how I’m even storing it was a challenge. And I was like, I don’t think that I have the right furniture, shelving, space, organizational materials that I need, even though I have all this stuff.

And I got together with someone else who I’m going through some business and personal life coaching with. It’s like a little bit about managing your personal home life, time, and managing your business, and how those two intersect, for sure, for moms. So I went to her and said, Here’s my problem with my bonus room, and I’m pretty stuck.

And she was able to get me unstuck and say, Hey, I want you to organize everything. Just put it in piles. All the like items. I want to have part of this as my workout space up here, but I’ve been working out downstairs. She said, okay, put all of your workout stuff in one area. Put all of the things that you need to store in another area.

Make sure all of your office stuff is in the office. And I was like, okay. I can do that. I feel like that is a much more doable way to break things down for myself into smaller steps. I ended up working on it on a rainy weekend that we had where I couldn’t really go anywhere and do anything. We stayed indoors and Faith came upstairs with me to hang out, play with her stuff that’s up here.

I was able to find two more bags of items to donate and threw away one and a half bags worth of trash. It’s not 100 percent yet, but it’s getting there. At least there’s movement. There’s progress. We have to learn how to break things down into smaller steps for ourselves and then understand that the ripple effect happens after that.

So you do one thing and then you’re like, Oh, I can do that. And then you do the next thing and then you do the next step. And I just think about how God’s word says that his word is a lamp to our feet and a light to our path. It’s so that we can see where we’re going. God guides us. But he doesn’t always give us the whole path.

Sometimes he does give us visions of the future. And it’s interesting because sometimes God will show you something like, okay, I believe the Lord wants me to do this. And I’m wrestling with one of those things right now. I’m like, okay, God, I believe that there’s some calling to do this, but I’m not really sure the middle part, like, I don’t really know how I’m going to get there, but all I really need to know is the next step.

God gives you that next step, and as you follow him in obedience, then he will give you the next step. Like the light will still be in front of you. It’s like this in movement towards behavior changes in our life. You’re not going to be able to wake up tomorrow and run a marathon. You have to figure out how to not even run your first mile, I mean, your first quarter of a mile, if you’re not a runner at all, and then your first half a mile, and then you can run three quarters of a mile, and then maybe you can run a mile, and learning that process and rhythm, I’m not a marathon runner, so I wouldn’t know, but I imagine it takes some time to become a marathon runner.

You don’t just do that. We live in such a microwave society that we want it all right now. I can flip through a bunch of videos on my phone and just swipe up if I don’t like part of it. And that’s not how change happens in our life. It’s not that quick, fast dopamine hit. Sometimes things take time to grow and nourish and develop.

I started to think about the small changes. that my clients have made or that I’ve asked clients to make in the past. And it’s been super interesting for me to go back and make this list for you, but I thought it might give some of you some ideas about what is your one step towards change. So I had a client, this was many years ago, Super high stressed, I’m very driven at work, had a lot of responsibilities, and I was trying to help this person relax because they had a lot of anxiety, and I was teaching some breathing strategies, like, okay, let’s really do some deep breathing together, focus on calming down your body, and he says to me, I don’t have time.

I don’t have time for this. I don’t have time to deep breathe. I’ve got too much going on and I said, okay, okay, here’s what I want you to do. Do you think that you could just make a commitment to yourself to take three deep breaths before you get out of the car and go to work? Is that manageable for you?

Do you think you could do that? Yeah, I think I can do that. And I don’t know what he thought I was asking him to do. Maybe he thought I was asking him to deep breathe for ten minutes or something like that originally. Maybe that was why there was some pushback. But what was interesting, the ripple effect of this starting point of taking three deep breaths before going into work eventually became You know what?

I decided yesterday that I was going to leave work and go take a lunch break and I went and took my lunch break and I didn’t think about work or get caught up in any work responsibilities. Wow! That’s incredible. And then slowly starting to develop more and more work life balance and work life boundaries.

Leaving work at work. Being able to have a personal life being able to enjoy time outside of work. It took a while It was a process, but what I want you guys to know is it started with those three deep breaths before work That’s where it started. It was small. It was incremental. It was manageable It was something that he felt like he could commit to Oftentimes we try to make commitments initially that are too big And then we get frustrated when we fail, or it doesn’t go as smoothly as we wanted it to, and then we give up.

Versus saying, let me set myself up for success and pick something small and manageable that I know I can do. I’ve had several clients that my first OCD treatment was, you need to stop Googling. Some of them were very new to the OCD diagnosis and didn’t realize how the Googling was a compulsion, how that impacted them, and if they were able to not Google, or if they recognized, Hey, I didn’t Google yesterday and I ended up feeling a whole lot better versus I noticed the day that I did.

I spent a lot of time on it and really got sucked down this rabbit hole to an unhealthy place. Clients who have a really hard time being in the present moment, either because they’re disconnecting due to trauma, dissociation. Maybe they’re having a really hard time sitting with their emotions or body sensations in the moment.

I said, Hey, why don’t you just try a mindful moment? One minute of mindfulness doesn’t have to be a super long 20 minutes of meditating on something. Just give yourself one minute and see how that goes and you can always build on that but starting small Once I told someone to do five minutes of something and apparently that was too much I didn’t realize at the time.

I thought it was a manageable or workable goal for them They came back and just felt really bad like being in this place of shame. Carrie. I couldn’t do the five minutes I’m like, it’s okay. It’s not a big deal Can you do it for two minutes or three minutes? It’s okay if you can’t do five, just use that as data and back yourself up a little bit.

And then once you feel really comfortable with what you’re doing, you can stretch yourself a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more. And oftentimes that ripple effect can just happen gradually and naturally as you become more comfortable with changes that are happening. have encouraged clients to make all different kinds of health changes, to cut back on caffeine to reduce overall anxiety, if they’re feeling nauseous in the morning, to eat some protein for breakfast.

If clients aren’t exercising at all, I’ll often encourage them to see what they can do for a short amount of time, whether it’s a short walk or some stretching, yoga exercises, and see how they feel afterwards. In working with clients with OCD, I often see that people may be working really hard to, quote, fix their OCD.

I need to know everything right now, give me all of the coping strategies, tell me exactly what to do. I’m going to binge all your episodes, Carrie, and figure it all out and fix myself. What I’m telling my students who are in our fall ICBT learning sessions is that sometimes we have to slow down to speed up.

This is very true in terms of learning ICBT. Learning to slow down your thought process, what is actually there, getting deep dive into the obsessional story. As they slow down and they start to recognize like, Oh, this is where this obsessional doubt is coming from. Oh, this is what OCD is using as justification, but it’s really irrelevant to everything that’s going on.

As they slow down is allowing them to make momentum to make change. to recognize OCD at the first go. If you can recognize it very early before it sucks you into the story and what we call the OCD bubble, then you’re going to be able to shift a lot more easily. And if you get way down, like, and engaging in a lot of compulsions, then it’s a lot harder to get out of.

I like to use a potato chip analogy. There was a potato chip. You can’t eat just one. But, and then the more potato chips you eat, the more potato chips you want. Like with compulsions. Instead, if you’re able to catch that first potato chip and say, oh, okay, whoa, I ate the potato chip. I don’t need to eat anymore.

I’m just going to put these down and instead get a better snack for me. That’s going to be a whole lot easier than if you just sit there mindlessly eating the potato chips and next thing you know, half the bag is gone. So it’s about learning to be intentional. It’s about learning to be present and mindful.

So my question is, what’s your one step? What are you going to do today to move towards positive change in your life? I would love to hear about it. You can email me at podcast at kiribach. com. That email will be in the show notes for you. Remember to enter our review giveaway. A lot of people are not going to follow these steps, so you’ve got a good chance of winning and you’ve still got a few more days to do it.

Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you. Were you blessed by today’s episode? If so, I’d really appreciate it if you would go over to your iTunes account or Apple Podcasts app on your computer if you’re an Android person and leave us a review. This really helps other Christians who are struggling with OCD be able to find our show.

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

144. God Loves Me, But I Don’t: 5 Ways to Increase Self-Compassion

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

In this episode, Carrie dives deep into the importance of self-compassion and how it is essential in overcoming perfectionism, OCD, and healing from past trauma.

Episode Highlight:

  • How self-compassion is rooted in faith and mirrors the love and grace of Jesus.
  • Why self-criticism often leads to increased feelings of guilt and shame.
  • How to recognize and counteract negative self-talk.
  • The importance of nurturing your inner child to cultivate more compassionate self-talk.

Episode Summary:

Welcome to Episode 144 of Christian Faith and OCD! In today’s episode, we’ll explore the transformative power of self-compassion, a crucial element for those facing the challenges of OCD and perfectionism. Many of us struggle to reconcile God’s love for us with how we view ourselves, often leading to feelings of shame and self-criticism.

Join me as I explore how to cultivate self-compassion through a Christ-centered lens. We’ll discuss practical strategies for letting go of self-criticism, embracing imperfection, and viewing ourselves with the kindness that Jesus offers. I also share insights on how to engage authentically in Christian community and live a fulfilling life, free from the burdens of shame and judgment.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by trauma, OCD, or anxiety symptoms, I invite you to explore therapeutic retreats or multi-day intensive sessions designed to provide healing and hope. I would love to sit down with you for a consultation to discuss these options further. Remember, there is hope and healing on the other side of what you’re dealing with right now. For more information, visit my website at carriebock.

Transcript

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.

Happy October. I hope that you are enjoying all the fun things that fall has to bring. Here on the podcast, we are doing a very special giveaway in October. We are going to be giving away a 100 gift card to Amazon for anyone who is an email subscriber to the list and who rates and reviews our show on iTunes.

There will be full instructions for entering the giveaway in our show notes, because I don’t want to take up too much time here. You can always reach us for further information at karybach. com slash podcast. Hey, if we’re going to develop more self compassion, first, let’s define what self compassion is.

I believe that’s responding to ourselves in a way that Jesus would respond to us. Jesus knows there are going to be times where we mess things up, where we make mistakes, where we sin, where we have areas of our life where we need to grow, that we have things we need to work through in our relationships.

And we need to be able to connect with that love that God has towards us and be able to point that towards ourself in our own flaws. Otherwise, we get stuck. We get paralyzed. We end up not doing things for the kingdom of God. We end up not taking risks because we say, God can’t use me. We disqualify ourselves from ministry and putting ourselves down can also keep us from connecting authentically in Christian community.

As Christ wants us to do when we look at the greatest commandment of love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. And also love your neighbor as yourself. If you do not like yourself, it’s going to be really hard to put yourself in situations where you’re around other people trying to authentically connect in community, because you’re going to say, nobody wants to be my friend, or I’m unworthy, or I’m not enough to be in this particular circle.

They don’t know what I’ve done in the past. I want to be really clear that we’re not talking about some kind of woo woo, I love myself and I’m giving myself all kinds of positive affirmations about how wonderful I am. We’re not trying to bend towards this direction of pride. We’re trying to say, how can I have a balanced.

View of myself, love myself and others the way that the Lord loves me. Speak kindly to myself as Jesus would speak kindly to me. Even if it was in correction, I can still speak kindly to myself. So if you have a lot of self criticism in your life, and you’re trying to grow self compassion, step one, let’s be curious and find the function of this self criticism.

It didn’t just show up there out of nowhere. There’s some reason it got built into your system. And I find that we often criticize ourselves. To avoid criticism from others, so just take a moment for yourself and reflect on where did I start doing that? Where did I start holding back and saying, Oh, no, I can’t do that here.

That’s too much to avoid other people from criticizing me. When did I pour over what I was doing? In an unhealthy way, just so that in an effort to keep someone else from putting me down, whether that was a friend, mentor, a teacher, a parent, pastor, whoever that was. Usually we internalize a critical spirit from someone else who was constantly critical of us.

That’s not always the case. I have had clients that have just always been critical of themselves, and I think it can come somewhat from personality subtypes that are harder on themselves, and maybe their parents weren’t necessarily harder on them or weren’t particularly strict, but you can think about this even in terms of if you were raised in a very strict religious environment, you were that you may have felt the need to be perfect or be a certain way in order to please God.

So finding the function of that self criticism and then realizing that the function is actually working against what you’re trying to accomplish. People say, well, if I wasn’t so hard on myself, then I wouldn’t be pushing myself to do certain things. But then you find out that they’re so critical of themselves, they don’t end up doing the things that they want to do.

I want you to think about this. You’ve all had different types of employers. If you’ve been in the working world, now which boss would you rather work for? Boss A is always pointing out everything that you do wrong. He or she doesn’t see anything that you do well. Just says, okay, you need to go and you need to fix that.

Don’t do this. Don’t do that. Don’t say that. You look stupid over there. What are you thinking? Would you rather work for that boss or would you rather work for boss B who says, Hey, you did a great job on this area over here. You’ve got some needs improvements in these areas. How can I support you in that?

Let’s work together. Let’s develop a plan to help you get to a different place in your work. But hey, I just want to also say that area C over here, you’re doing amazing with that. You’ve got great working relationships with your co workers, always supportive, always encouraging. How can I help you? How can I come alongside you?

Of course you would want to work for Boss B. I don’t know that I’ve ever met anybody who said, Oh yeah, sign me up for that horribly critical micromanaging boss that points out everything I do wrong. You may have had a boss like that. It’s not very comfortable working for them. Why do we do this with ourselves then?

Why do we think that having boss A with ourselves and pointing out everything we do wrong? Why do we think that that’s helpful for us? It’s not. Instead, we can take a much more balanced approach when we’re evaluating our own behavior and say, Okay, here are some things that seem to be going well in my life.

I have set aside time with God in the mornings. I have developed a healthy rhythm. I have made changes to pray for specific people or at specific times of my day, but I know I’m lacking in this area of my life. I know that I have some forgiveness prayers that I need to pray and work through and some resentments I need to let go of.

I have too quick to anger at times. Whatever the situation is in your life that you’re dealing with, it’s healthy for us to examine ourselves. There are, self examination is scriptural. Search me, oh God, and know my heart. I think it was Paul that said, test yourself to see if you’re in the faith. So this sense of self examination is not bad.

Now you can overdo it if you have OCD, so don’t go down a huge rabbit hole where you’re self examining forever. Step two is to expect imperfection. One thing I used to do to myself all the time was I would create these really long to do lists and I never sat down and thought Actually, how long are these tasks going to take me?

I would just think okay I need to get all of this stuff done today because these are important things and they need to be done And I’m sure I would get distracted in the process, whatever But then I would just beat myself up if I didn’t accomplish enough things off the list And I’ve had to realize that I have to have more realistic expectations for myself, that I can plan out my day, but that life happens, crises occur, unexpected things happen.

My husband woke up sick one day and that meant that I had to get my daughter ready and it meant that there was a lot more TV time in the morning because things were just shuffled around. And it’s okay because it’s life, but I also know too that I can be really hard on myself if I feel like I didn’t make a good decision about something and maybe you struggle with this too.

We have to be able to not only expect the unexpected, but to expect that we’re not always going to get it right. And that can be very difficult if you have perfectionistic tendencies because you would like to get it right every time and you would like to make good decisions and you would like to make sure that things work out well for you because you’ve made a good decision.

All very good goals, excellent goals, however sometimes we make the decisions based off of the information that we have and when we have later information, we go, oh man, now that I have later information, I would never have made that decision back there. This happened to me so recently, guys, I know I will tell you about it more in detail on the podcast sometime, but I was sitting in shame for days about a business decision that I had made and a group of people I had decided to work with.

And I told myself I should have known better than to get involved in this situation with these people. That was a really unfair judgment on myself because there was a lot of information that I didn’t know and I was acting on the information that I did know. The positive reviews this company had, how many years they had been in business, the information, the meeting that I had with the head of the organization.

All of these different pieces, but then later on down the road, other things transpired and other information was received and other things happened without going into all the details or throwing anybody under the bus. And I sat there and I was so upset that I had made the decision to work with these individuals.

That was It’s really, really hard for me to sit with and acknowledge. And what I came to a place of peace about today is that God knew that this was going to happen, number one, and that I can use this as a learning experience. I’ve had a lot of hard learning experiences, which happen when you do new things in your business that you’ve never done before.

New things in your life, you learn, you grow, sometimes you learn by making mistakes, and even though those decisions were made cautiously, prayerfully, with consideration, I did not see the outcome coming out the way that it did, and there was no way for me to predict that. So I can’t judge the present information that I know and that I have right now.

I can’t judge my past self based on that information that I know now. This is point three that I wanted to give to you. I’ll have clients that are processing through trauma, things that they did when they were in active addiction, things that they did when they were far from God. They may have been a Christian, but they ran away from God.

Things that they did before they were Christian and they’re like, man, I cannot believe that I did that. And I’m like, okay, but where are you now? Bring yourself back into the present. Would you do those things now? Well, no, of course not. You’ve grown and you’ve learned from them and you’re in a different place spiritually.

So you can’t judge your past self based on your present self of where you are today. If you are stuck in a place of shame, and I was just stuck in some recently, so I know how bad that feels, stop judging your past self on your present self. You’re not doing those things anymore. And you have different information, and you’ve grown, and you’ve learned from your experiences.

Transcribed As far as the east is from the west is how far God has removed our transgressions from us. Scripture says there’s a reason for that. God is not living in the past bringing up your past. The only ones that do that are us and our enemy. Those are the only ones that bring up the past and hold it against us.

Your past is under the blood of Jesus Christ if you are a Christian. My fourth tip is to picture your inner child. Now this may sound a little far fetched for some of you who have never done this type of work, but if you’re having a really hard time speaking kindly to yourself, if you’re overly critical, would you imagine saying some of the things that you say to yourself to a child?

The dialogue that goes, you’re stupid, or you’re worthless, anything negative. How would you kindly guide and direct a child as they’re going through life? You know, we are to come to God as children. And we need to learn to retrain our inner self talk, to be kinder and to speak to ourself in a way that’s more patient, and to be kinder and to speak to ourselves in a way that’s more patient.

and gentle in that process. So if you can picture your inner child, if you’re struggling with having self compassion towards yourself, can you love on that inner child who is lost, Wounded, sometimes lonely and broken, and hurting at times. Can you love on that inner child? Can you sit with some sense of care or reassurance?

If you can’t think of your inner child or that seems a little weird for you, you can also think about, would I talk to my best friend like this? Would I put someone else down this harshly? No, you probably wouldn’t. You’d probably have a lot more grace or compassion for your best friend. My fifth tip is to meditate on a time where you felt a positive, healthy connection with God.

If you can bring that up from a sensory level experience, where were you, what were you doing, or what was going on around you? What were you feeling? What was that sense of being connected with God like in a healthy way? And from there, really looking at what does the Bible say about God’s love for you?

Maybe you take some of those verses and meditate on those. You can also meditate on verses that talk about God being a good father that may be hard for you to connect with, but allowing God to restore this view of who you are in a healthy and balanced way so that you can respond to yourself in the way that God would respond to you.

What I’ve seen time and time again is that many people have difficulties with self compassion due to past trauma and wounding relationships in their life, broken attachment relationships with parents or other caregivers. If that’s something you’re dealing with, I do therapeutic retreats or multi day intensive sessions with individuals who have a lot of trauma and OCD symptoms or lots of trauma and anxiety symptoms.

I would love to sit down with you over a consultation when you talk about those options further for you. Know that there is hope and healing on the other side of what you’re dealing with right now. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you. Were you blessed by today’s episode? If so, I’d really appreciate it if you would go over to your iTunes account or Apple podcasts App on your computer if you’re an Android person and leave us a review.

This really helps other Christians who are struggling with OCD be able to find our show. Christian Faith in OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area.

143. What if OCD is Telling Me I Don’t Have OCD?

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

In this episode, Carrie explores the common obsession of doubting whether you actually have OCD. She discusses how this uncertainty can impact your sense of self and shares strategies to help you embrace your diagnosis and find peace.

Episode Highlights:

  • How to identify and address doubts about your OCD diagnosis.
  • Strategies to confront and manage the anxiety that accompanies these doubts.
  • Ways to differentiate between genuine symptoms and self-identity concerns.
  • Techniques for dealing with the shame and stigma surrounding OCD.
  • How to process grief and sadness related to accepting an OCD diagnosis.

Don’t miss our October giveaway! We’re offering a $100 Amazon gift card to one lucky winner.

To join, follow these instructions:

  1. Subscribe to our email list. 
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  3. Screenshot your review and email it to us at podcast@carriebock.com.

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Join the fun and good luck! 

Episode Summary:

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD!

OCD can be tricky, feeding doubts and making you question your reality. This is a common experience, especially when OCD leads you to obsess about whether you’re truly a bad person or if your intrusive thoughts reflect your true self.

In this episode, we’re addressing the common struggle of accepting an OCD diagnosis and the shame or uncertainty that often accompanies it. 

OCD thrives on creating a story that draws you in, often through avoidance or excessive reassurance-seeking. Accepting that your symptoms might not always fit the “typical” OCD mold, like obsessive thoughts about spirituality or relationships, is part of the journey.

If your OCD leads to severe anxiety or doubts about your functionality, professional support, such as intensive outpatient treatment, may be necessary. This doesn’t mean you’re losing your mind—it’s simply a step toward stability and healing.

Join me as we explore how to navigate the emotions tied to an OCD diagnosis and find support through faith. 

For more support and information, visit carriebock.com. 

More episodes to Listen to:

139. Is There a Test for OCD?

Transcript

Have you ever had that experience where maybe you’ve been diagnosed with OCD but then you go back and you start to actually doubt? Is that actually accurate? What if I don’t have OCD? What if I really am this horrible person with deep, dark desires to harm someone?

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 in to today’s episode.

Happy October. I hope that you are enjoying all the fun things that fall has to bring. Here on the podcast, we are doing a very special giveaway in October. We are going to be giving away a 100 gift card to Amazon for anyone who is an email subscriber to the list and who rates and reviews our show on iTunes.

There will be full instructions for entering the giveaway in our show notes because I don’t want to take up too much time here. You can always reach us for further information at karybach. com slash podcast. There’s one thing I know about OCD, and you probably do too, is that it is super sneaky, and an inference based cognitive behavioral therapy, or ICBT that we talk about on the show, We say that OCD is really good at drawing you in with a story.

Everyone loves stories and we can get just really sucked into the imagination of the story. If you’re denying the existence of OCD, potentially it could be a way of avoiding it. Avoidance is super common with OCD. It’s kind of like, if I don’t have to acknowledge it, I don’t have to deal with it, or the need for treatment.

If I don’t go to that restaurant that I find triggering, I’m fine. I won’t have any triggers, and I’ll be okay. Or if I don’t try to do the really hard, scary thing that OCD is telling me not to do, then I give in to that avoidance, but I actually feel okay. And it can be hard to accept this diagnosis. It doesn’t always look the way that people think it should look, right?

So it doesn’t always look like cleaning or checking. Sometimes it can look like a lot of ruminating about spiritual things or getting stuck on relationship obsessions, lots of reassurance seeking. Things that people don’t typically associate with OCD. Hopefully we’re changing that and we’re letting people know more and more, Hey, OCD looks like a variety of different things.

So accepting the diagnosis, there can be this element, for sure, of grief and loss. It’s scary, it’s unknown, and a lot of times it’s just easier in the general populace to tell people, like, oh, I’m dealing with anxiety, I have some anxieties about driving. Because a lot of people have anxiety and people feel like they can relate to it.

Unfortunately, in our society, it’s a little bit become a badge of honor, like, Oh, I have anxiety, somehow means that you’re, I don’t know, really striving or succeeding or pushing yourself really hard. That’s not always a good thing. That’s just a side note. What I want you to know is that OCD telling you, You don’t have OCD is actually a really common obsession.

I’ve had several clients come back to me saying that they’ve doubted the diagnosis, or maybe that they’ve tried to find evidence in their life that they didn’t have OCD. And they can get really stuck on this, like maybe what if I’m making excuses for a sin in my life, like I’m saying that this sexual thought is an intrusive thought, but maybe it’s just really me lusting after this person.

What if I really am going to harm someone and you’re telling me it’s actually OCD and I’m using that OCD as an excuse. Or, what if this obsession is not really OCD, but it’s part of my identity, it’s who I am, like in sexual orientation OCD. What if I really am gay, and then I’m using OCD as some type of excuse to deny my inner feelings?

If you are dealing with this particular obsession about whether or not you have OCD, the first thing to do is identify that this is OCD. That’s your first step, always, is being able to identify when OCD is knocking on the door to say, Okay, I know what this is. I know this is OCD coming to call. The reason I know it’s OCD a lot of times is because it is connected to a very specific anxiety that shows up in your brain, in your body.

It can feel like you want to crawl out of your skin. It can cause your heart to race. It can cause you some mild panic symptoms. And a lot of times these things can happen very fast and you can get sucked into that imaginal story very quickly. Your second step is to identify the emotions that come up for you surrounding the diagnosis of OCD.

Is there shame for having this diagnosis? You need to know that you didn’t cause this. Lots of other Christians struggle too. This is how we can have an entire podcast called Christian Faith and OCD where we get hundreds of downloads every week for people just like you who are also dealing with some of these same struggles.

Doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. Doesn’t mean you’re a bad Christian. Didn’t cause it. It’s just something that happens to people. Is there sadness connected to this diagnosis? It’s okay to grieve that. Don’t. I remember my husband getting his health diagnosis around the time that my mother died. And I thought I was sad because my mother had died, obviously I was certainly sad over that.

But the piece that was missing was that I never really got to grieve that the person that I married was not going to be able to do some of the things that I had envisioned us doing, or being able to travel as freely as we hoped to be able to travel. When you have someone with balance issues, certainly you’re not going to be hiking up to waterfalls like we were doing when we were dating.

I had to grieve those things. I had to grieve the fact that no one understands this. We go to doctors and we’re literally like explaining stuff to them. Or we’ve had medical professionals say, I’ve never heard of that before. And that is really a challenging place to be in. And I know some of you with OCD can relate to that.

Because your OCD doesn’t look like textbook, typical OCD of what people identify with. And it’s okay to grieve that you feel strange or have to constantly explain things to people all the time. It’s something that we’ve just kind of learned to open up about with relatively quickly with people in our scenario because they can see it, it’s a little bit different than with OCD, and it’s gotten easier to deal with over time, but at first it was super awkward and uncomfortable.

And not something that we wanted to talk about all the time, because we were still trying to wrap our minds around it ourselves, you know, and you get all kinds of different responses when you share this type of information, you have the people that are trying to fix you, you have the people that are just really sad or feel sorry for you, you have the people that just don’t know how to respond or aren’t sure what to say.

If you’re sad about your diagnosis, just know that that’s okay, and like, you can process that emotion. Give yourself time to grieve it, and to really work through it, that you have challenges that other people don’t have. You have challenges that other people aren’t going to understand, even if you try to explain it to them.

Maybe the diagnosis for you feels really anxious or overwhelming. It can be pretty common for people struggling with OCD to fear becoming non functional, go into a hospital, or quote, going crazy, like developing schizophrenia that is not the same as OCD, but it can become an obsession for people. I feel like I’m going to lose my mind, is what they will say, which of course is a very vague term.

When you’re having those obsessions, it’s important to bring yourself to the present of what is actually going on right now. I’m not experiencing that. I am functioning in my day life. I do have supports around me and people that can help me through my process. I can also add additional professional supports to that at any point in time.

So if you are at a really low place in your OCD, where you’re constantly obsessing and compulsing, You might need to go to an intensive outpatient treatment, or you might need to be hospitalized until you can get to a place of medical stability, and that is okay. That does not mean that you are not going to be able to be functional again.

It does not mean that you’re losing your mind or going crazy. We all have different needs at different points in our life, and that’s not anything to be ashamed of either, so I want you to hear that as well. Just knowing that you can feel these variety of different feelings, whether it’s the anxiety, the sadness, the shame, and you can work through them to get you to a place of acceptance.

You may be angry about your diagnosis. I know some people are mad at God. Why is he allowing me to go through this? Why won’t he heal me? What’s going on? Anger is a common emotion connected to grief and loss. So feeling those feelings, working through them, talking through them with somebody else, like your therapist or your loved ones, will help you get to a place of acceptance.

And then when you’re in that place of acceptance, then you can really move forward and know what to do. If I’m really, really stuck on the fact that I’ve lost my mom, I can’t move forward and figure out how to live without her. And essentially, that’s what I’ve had to do in this process, is I’ve had to figure out I think that’s a big task of grief that people miss.

Now I have a missing person in my life. I have a missing piece that was there my whole entire life. Your parents are there your whole life until they pass away. And then you have to figure out, like, how to live without them. You’re not ever going to replace them. There’s nothing, like, magically that shows up there.

But it’s almost like things get rearranged and reconfigured in your life. And that’s okay. I want you to see what happens when you say to yourself, I am struggling with OCD. What is it like to sit with that? Some of you may have had a visceral reaction to that when I said it, like, ugh, that doesn’t feel good at all.

But I like to tell this story because I think it makes a lot of sense in these situations where I volunteered for a short period of time and I went through massive amounts of training to be a victim advocate with the police department in Colorado, and they said, if you’re going to go out and give a death notification, which I never actually had to do, but if you’re going to tell someone that their loved one died, you have to actually say the word died, dead, death, You can’t say, so and so, I’m really sorry that your brother is no longer with us.

What does that mean? Where did he go? You have to say, so and so died. I’m sorry your brother died. Because that sinks into that person’s brain. It starts to help them realize this is real. If we start to use all these euphemisms and other things, they’re not getting the full message. And so that’s what we have to do sometimes within ourselves, is sit with hard truths that we don’t like.

I remember going through the divorce process. I was reading this loss book, and there were different things that they wanted you to kind of write on your mirror. And one of the things that I got actually not out of that loss book, but it was out of divorce care. And it was something to the effect of like, I can’t have plan A for my life, which was a huge deal because life had kind of been, you plan out your life in your twenties.

So having that acceptance of now being like a young 30 something saying I can’t have plan A, but I can do the best that I can with plan B. So maybe your plan A of life. Involved not having OCD or not having to deal with the suffering that you’re dealing with right now, and you can’t have plan A, that’s okay, but you can have plan B, and plan B can look really, really amazing and beautiful.

And you know what? God is in the midst of when life throws us a curveball. He is still there and He is still walking with you on that journey. He loves you incredibly. What’s so interesting was I started out this episode Wanting to just come on here and tell you, hey, it’s a really common obsession to have an obsession about having OCD.

And I realized how much of this whole episode has become about grief and loss and getting our way to acceptance, which is so important. So thanks for tuning in for that. You may be struggling. And when we had our monthly gathering, someone said, I’ve shared several of your podcasts with other people in church so that they can understand what I’m going through better.

I just loved that. I thought it was so beautiful. And so if you need someone else in your life who is close to you to really understand what you’re going through, and if these podcasts help you are a good vehicle to do that, then I am so happy for you to share it with someone else who can help you and support you along in your process.

Be blessed as you go today. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you. Were you blessed by today’s episode? If so, I’d really appreciate it if you would go over to your iTunes account or Apple Podcasts app on your computer if you’re an Android person and leave us a review. This really helps other Christians who are struggling with OCD be able to find our show.

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

142. How Do I Tell Someone I Have OCD?

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

In this episode, Carrie dives into the challenges of sharing your OCD diagnosis with others, offering practical guidance on how to navigate this delicate conversation. 

Episode Highlights:

  • Key traits to assess if someone is reliable enough to share your OCD diagnosis with.
  • Understand how much detail to provide based on your relationship with the person and the context of the conversation.
  • Effective ways to inform others about OCD beyond common stereotypes, using resources and examples.
  • Insights on how to respond to different reactions, whether supportive or not.

Episode Summary:

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD! In today’s episode, we’re tackling the question: How do I tell someone I have OCD? Whether it’s a coworker, friend, or romantic partner, this conversation can be daunting. But I’m here to help break down how you can approach it with wisdom and care.

Let’s start by considering who you want to tell. Is this person trustworthy? Sharing personal information like your OCD diagnosis requires discernment. Remember, different people require different layers of information. You don’t need to dive into every detail with everyone. 

It’s also crucial to educate those around you about how OCD impacts you personally. People often have misconceptions, like thinking OCD is just about being overly clean or organized. To help them understand better, you could direct them to resources like our podcast or share helpful educational material.

Vulnerability can feel scary, but it’s often healing. You may be surprised at how sharing your struggles opens the door for others to share theirs.

Instead of focusing on worst-case scenarios, try imagining a positive outcome. Pray through the process, asking for God’s guidance in your words and in how you approach the conversation.

Thank you for joining today’s episode. If you want to connect with me further, be sure to sign up for our email list at carriebock.com

More Episodes to Listen to:

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

Transcript

Welcome to episode 142. We are talking today about how do I tell someone that I have OCD? This may seem intimidating. Maybe you’re wanting to tell a coworker that you’ve become close to. Maybe you’re wanting to tell a friend or maybe you’re dating someone. You feel like things are getting more serious and you think, you know, it’s time to let them in on my secret.

That’s what we’re talking about today. Hello and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD with Carrie Bock. I’m a Christ follower, wife and mother licensed professional counselor who helps Christian 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, 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.

We had a good time at our Zoom Q& A meeting earlier this month. I think I’m going to try this out for about six months and just see how it goes, how many people show up, what the engagement level is like. So if you want to get in on these meetings where you can ask a question, where you can show up on Zoom and get to know me a little bit better, or.

Have a greater understanding of OCD. The only way to do this is to get on our email list. Super simple. You go to karybach. com. Link will be in the show notes. You scroll all the way down on the homepage, like right before you get to the footer, and there will be a place for you to subscribe to the email list.

When you get that first email, you’ve got to click on it and confirm that you want to be a subscriber that protects us from spam. So join the email list, get on our Q& A sometime. We’d I’d love to see you face to face and meet you over zoom and it’d be awesome. I want you to think of a couple different considerations when you’re looking at telling someone that you have OCD.

Obviously, this is personal information. Some people are more open about their mental health than others, so it just depends on where you are at on that continuum, but most people that I meet, this is not something that they necessarily want everyone to know. Partially because it’s so misunderstood and people will be making comments like, I need to have you over to clean my house or organize my closet.

As we know, that’s not everybody with OCD. So why do you want to tell this person that you’re thinking about telling? Is this person worthy of the information? Do they have the ability to keep a confidence? Are they trustworthy? I had an experience recently that was It’s kind of funny where someone was sharing some information with some of my other friends.

And first of all, the information was actually wrong and inaccurate. So my other friends came to me and said, yeah, so and so said such and such was like, no. And then I realized I’m probably not going to be telling this person other things if they’re like going and sharing this information with other people just for gossipy purposes.

You know that friend that’s always gossiping about somebody else? I guarantee they’re gossiping about you, too. It took me a long time to figure this out. I’m a pretty smart person, and I don’t know why that didn’t click for me, but it has clicked for me, for sure. I’m just more careful about who I talk to regarding certain things.

I am incredibly thankful as well that I do have trustworthy people in my life that I can talk to about very personal things without it going anywhere. So let’s say that the person you want to tell is a trustworthy person, and you know they’re not going to be spreading this around for gossip, and Maybe you’re wanting to tell them because you want this person to understand you a little bit better and why you’re acting the way that you do in certain situations.

Maybe you want to tell this person to include them as part of your support system. This would be really huge if you’re dating someone and you believe that the relationship is moving in the direction of marriage. It still may be. A little too early to know that, but it’s kind of at that tipping point where we need to have more vulnerable conversations to continue to make sure that we’re moving in the right direction.

Another question I would want you to ask yourself is what exactly do you want to tell this person? You can think about explaining things in layers of information. Some people just need the glossy top overview layer. Let me give you an example. Let’s say that you have certain ways that you like to do things at work, and it may cross the line over into perfectionism or just right OCD.

You may have some concerns about your boss being upset if things aren’t done a certain way. So you may say something to your boss like, Hey, I just want you to know that I struggle sometimes with perfectionism. And I’m okay if you need to tell me to move on to another task that I’m taking too long to try to make this one perfect.

That would be kind of a high layer glossy overview. You’re not going into the details of Just Write OCD and how it affects you. Probably your boss doesn’t necessarily need to know all that information. But they may need to know that there are some levels of this that’s affecting your work, just so that you don’t get stuck.

Or they don’t ask you, well, why did this project not get done? And it’s because you didn’t feel confident that the boss was okay for you to move on from the first project. Maybe you had it in your mind, like, oh, they’re not going to be okay with this. They’re going to be upset with me if it’s not exactly perfect or exactly done a certain way.

My point is that what you tell a boss probably is going to be completely different or a different layer of information than what you would tell someone you’re dating. How much you tell might also depend on the severity of how this is impacting your work. or your relationship. Let’s say that you have a friendship where you’re always concerned.

There’s some relationship obsessions about whether or not you’ve offended other people and you keep asking that person and now the person is kind of withdrawing a little bit or they’re frustrated with you. Might be helpful to give them a little bit more of an explanation of what’s going on from your end.

This is going to give them a little bit more compassion for how you’re struggling, as well as if you can tell them certain things of how they can best support you. Often people in your life probably need to know that when you’re reassurance seeking, them reassuring you is only going to help very temporarily in the moment.

It’s going to help for a little bit. There’s going to be that slight relief, and then it’s going to toss back into that obsessional cycle, and next thing you know, you’re going to be asking for reassurance all over again. So it’s important for your support systems to know. What’s going to benefit your OCD and what can actually harm your recovery process?

If you are late every day to work because you can’t stop checking things before you leave the house, that might warrant a conversation with your boss regarding this being a mental health issue versus your boss just thinking, oh, you’re lazy, can’t get up on time, or you can’t manage yourself in the morning to get here on time.

Obviously, if someone understands what you’re going through, then they may be able to help problem solve it with you. Like, what can I do to support you in this? Do we need to make sure that you’re getting off of work early or during lunch so you can go to a therapy appointment so you can get help for this?

What are you going to need so that the needs of your work are met as well as your mental health needs are met? If you have relationship OCD or scrupulosity or other themes, you plan on getting married to someone someday, you think you’re in a positive, supportive, helpful relationship, You want to share with this person, Hey, this may show up in our relationship.

I may have doubts about whether or not I love you. I may have doubts surrounding whether or not God loves me. And this may cause difficulties for me in our interactions or in my interactions with the church. Here are some things that you can do to help support me. Here are some things that I’m working on within myself or with my therapist.

How that person responds is going to tell you quite a bit about the relationship and the level of safety that you have. We’re hoping that this person is going to be supportive and say, okay, let me learn more. Or how can I help you? Or how can I support you? When this gets bad, what do you need me to do?

It’s important to let those close to you know that during times of high stress, even positive stress like planning a wedding or having a baby, there is a tendency for OCD symptoms to go up because the higher your stress level, the more that can cause you to get triggered and get derailed by OCD, even if you’re in a manageable state.

You’re most likely going to have to do a lot of education. of this other person regarding what actually OCD is because the average person thinks of monk and that’s their picture of what OCD is. It’s really a shame if any of you work in TV or movies. We need a different representation. We need someone who’s having some type of relationship obsession or scrupulosity obsession or sexual obsessions of some kind so that other people can understand how vastly different these subtypes present within OCD.

You’re going to probably want to give the person that you’re telling some educational information either from a website or you can point them to some of our podcast episodes, the ones that you feel are most relevant to you. We have a great FAQ episode on OCD. We don’t talk as much about treatment on there specifically, but I just kind of go through these different themes and how OCD shows up and so forth.

Regardless of what your story is, learning to be vulnerable and learning to share your story with other people is so important. When we get vulnerable in safe relationships, it can be so therapeutic and so healing because we grow closer. to that other person as we share with them, and oftentimes it allows them to open up about themselves and say, you know what, I really appreciate you telling me that, and I want to share this piece with you so that you know that this is something that I struggle with, or this is something that I’m going through right now.

If you’re concerned about how that person might respond, I encourage you to grab a resource, and it’s going to sound a little strange for this episode. But it’s called Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus. It’s a marriage book. However, the best part of this book really is not 100 percent about marriage.

It’s about confrontation and relationships and sharing what he calls the four healing emotions. There’s a chapter, uh, I think, I believe it’s chapter 13, where he goes through these different emotions and writing what he calls a love letter to your spouse, but he also talks about writing a response letter.

Maybe that person doesn’t know how to respond to you, or they’re not exactly sure, like, what you’re needing. You can write a response letter of, these are some things that I really feel like, after I share this with you, that I need to hear from you. So, And it could be like, I support you, I love you, it just depends on the relationship, obviously, what the response letter might be.

It’s really valuable for you to think through what you want to say to someone else, maybe even jotting down on a post it note a few major bullet points so that you can express yourself well. This is something that I’ve had to learn over time when you have hard conversations, sometimes your brain, you know, isn’t fully online because that anxiety puts you into the whole fight, flight, or freeze situation, or maybe it triggers some like fear of rejection coming up for you or feeling unworthy.

If you have your little post it note with like the three main points maybe that you want to convey, that’s a good start and just say, Hey, I jotted a few things down and I just wanted to make sure that I didn’t forget to tell you these specific pieces. I realize that OCD may throw some worst case scenarios at you about how this person is going to respond.

Our brains have a natural inclination to veer towards the negative in efforts to keep us safe. So what we have to do consciously to combat that is ask ourselves, what if this went well? What would that look like? What would the situation look like if it went really well and was really positive? Focusing on that outcome, praying through that process.

While it may not go exactly the way that you want it to, communicating to your brain how you would like it to go is so powerful. Ultimately, spiritually, we then lay these things before the Lord and say, this is what I sense is the next step in the relationship. You know, give me guidance and wisdom on what to say, how to say it, and that I can be an acceptance of whatever the result of the conversation is.

That’s all for today. I want to read one of our recent reviews that says, I just started to listen to this podcast and Carrie Bach does a great job with multiple topics and great questions. I really appreciate the hard work she puts in and intend to support further. This is from Rob. Thank you, Rob, for saying that.

Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you. Were you blessed by today’s episode? If so, I’d really appreciate it if you would go over to your iTunes account or Apple Podcasts app on your computer if you’re an Android person and leave us a review. This really helps other Christians who are struggling with OCD be able to find our show.

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


141. Is OCD Keeping You From Reading the Bible?

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

In this episode, Carrie explores how OCD can disrupt regular Bible reading, leading to either obsessive or avoidant behaviors. She offers practical advice for engaging with scripture in a healthier way.

Episode Highlights:

  • How obsessively engaging with the Bible can feed the OCD cycle and strategies to manage this behavior.
  • How past experiences or distorted beliefs might influence your OCD symptoms and relationship with God.
  • Techniques for limiting your Bible reading to prevent it from becoming a compulsion while still engaging with spiritual practice.

Episode Summary:

I know how much you want to make Bible reading a regular part of your life, recognizing its importance as a spiritual discipline. Yet, OCD often gets in the way, complicating this sincere desire. Let’s dive into this issue together.

In episode 78, we touched on moving from “should” to “want” in Bible study. Today, we’ll look deeper into the struggle when OCD disrupts your Bible reading.

OCD often manifests in one of two ways for Christians: overdoing or avoiding. Some feel the need to read the Bible for hours, obsessively studying and over-analyzing every word, driven by anxiety and the fear that they’re not doing enough to please God. On the flip side, others avoid Bible reading altogether, overwhelmed by anxiety and intrusive thoughts when they try.

For those who find themselves overdoing it, it’s crucial to set limits on your Bible study time. While it may feel uncomfortable, this is necessary to break the OCD cycle of compulsive activity. Remember, your relationship with God is not about how much you do, but about resting in His grace.

For those avoiding Bible reading due to anxiety, start small. Engage with scripture in ways that feel safe, perhaps focusing on specific verses about God’s love or peace. Gradually, as you feel more comfortable, you can expand your reading.

Whether you’re overdoing or avoiding, it’s important to examine the underlying story you’re telling yourself about God and your relationship with Him. Are your thoughts rooted in grace and the truth of Christ’s work, or in performance-based theology?

Remember, healing is possible, and I’m here to help. Reach out to me through carriebock.com, and let’s work together to find a healthier approach to your Bible reading and spiritual growth.

Explore Related Episode:

78. Bible Study from “Should” to “Want” with Keith Ferrin

140. Help! I Don’t Feel Close to God

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

In this episode, Carrie explores the feelings of spiritual distance and how to navigate those times when you don’t feel close to God.

Episode Highlights:

  • Understanding the connection between OCD and feelings of spiritual distance.
  • Insights from Elijah’s story and how it relates to modern struggles with faith.
  • Practical steps for reconnecting with God during times of doubt and anxiety.
  • Encouragement and biblical wisdom for Christians dealing with OCD and spiritual uncertainty.

Episode Summary:

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD! I’m Carrie Bock, a Christ follower and licensed professional counselor committed to helping Christians struggling with OCD find healing and peace. 

Today, we’re diving into those difficult seasons when you don’t feel close to God—when life feels chaotic, and you’re left questioning His presence in your struggles. Many of us, especially those battling OCD, have been there, wondering if our faith is faltering because we don’t feel that initial “on fire” connection with God anymore.

I discuss how sin can create a sense of distance between us and God—not in our standing with Him, but in our relational closeness. Yet, through confession and repentance, we can restore that intimacy. The story of Elijah, who, after a significant victory, found himself in despair and needed God’s gentle care, serves as a powerful reminder of how God meets us in our lowest moments.

I also share some personal reflections on times when I believed lies during difficult seasons—whether it was thinking my life was over after a divorce or feeling the deep sense of loss after my father’s passing. In each of these moments, God gently reminded me that He sees the bigger picture, even when I can’t. These experiences have taught me that our feelings, no matter how strong, don’t define our faith.

If you’re struggling today, I hope this episode brings you comfort and reminds you that God is with you, even in your confusion and pain. You’re not alone, and your current feelings don’t determine your relationship with God.

 For more resources and to stay connected, visit my website at carriebock.com.

More Episodes to Listen To:

2. Unanswered Prayers for Healing with Pastor Troy Powell

Transcript

What do you do when you don’t feel close to God? Maybe you just feel like you’re praying and your prayers are bouncing off the ceiling. We’re going to look at one character from the Bible and try to apply some biblical principles to our own lives when we feel this way.

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.

If you have not checked out our new website, carriebock.com, I am so So proud of this thing. It has been such a big process combining my By the Well counseling website and the podcasting website into one after we went through this rebrand from Hope for Anxiety to OCD into Christian Faith and OCD. For those of you who maybe haven’t been around that while or are just now tuning in, that’s where you can find all things about my counseling, the Christian Faith and OCD podcast.

Click on the podcast page for more information. You can also leave comments there and let me know that you’ve been listening and what you think about the show. Any guest suggestions or topics you want me to cover. I love to hear from you guys. One of my favorite things. I’ve definitely had times like this in my life, I don’t know if you’ve had times like this in your life, and if you’ve been a Christian for any length of time, you probably have.

You probably have said, I’m going through a season and I just don’t feel close to God right now. I don’t know where he is, I don’t know what he’s doing, everything seems chaotic or a mess. Maybe you’re feeling lost, going through a grief and loss process. So if you’re feeling that way right now, I just want you to know you’re not alone.

Anybody that’s been a Christian for a while has probably experienced this. And also sometimes we just feel this in general in our long term relationships, right? OCD is going to use that as evidence, like, oh, well, you’re not a Christian because you don’t feel close to God, or you don’t feel connected to Him, or you don’t feel the same way you did when you became a Christian.

This is something I hear from a lot of Christians who struggle with OCD. Well, I don’t feel as on fire. As I did when I first became a Christian. Well, that’s an emotional high time in your life. Just like when you get married, that’s an emotional high time in your life. You ask anyone who’s been married for five years, do you feel the same exact way that you did on your wedding?

They’re going to tell you, no, I mean, your love grows and it shifts and changes and that’s not always a negative thing. Sometimes that can be a really positive thing. We may not get the butterflies in our stomach over our spouse. But we can be very committed and devoted and caring and show concern for them.

So hopefully that parallel helps give you a little bit more of a glimpse or make sense to you that our feelings can change over time. That doesn’t mean that they’ve gone away or have dulled or that we don’t really love God anymore because we don’t feel the same way that we did before. I’m going to say just a short piece about sin, but this is not the main focus of this particular podcast in general.

We know that sin separates us from God in a relational sense, not in a positional sense. So you can still sin and you’re still going to be God’s child. You’re still going to be in the family. Now, OCD may tell you otherwise, OCD may say, Oh, well, because you messed up over here, God doesn’t love you, you failed, you’re going to hell, that type of scenario.

That’s not the case. What sin does is it does create a level of separation, just like if you hurt someone’s feelings like family member or friend, there’s going to be some relational distance possibly between you and that person until you come back together, reconcile, talk it out, forgiveness, and so forth.

This is how it is in our relationship with God. Sin separates us from Him. Isaiah 59 1 says, Behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened that it cannot save, or his ear dull that it cannot hear, but your iniquities, that’s sin, have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden his face from you so that he does not hear.

We also know that 1 John 1, 9 tells us that if we confess our sin, He’s faithful and just to forgive our sin and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. So just as sin has that ability to separate us from God in a relational sense, that confession of sin brings us back into right relationship with God.

Today, I want to talk to you more about those times where you’re in the midst of your sanctification process. You’re doing your best to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, as it talks about in Philippians 2. 12. You don’t feel like God is there. Maybe it’s a confusing time in your life, maybe you’ve been going through suffering.

Why is God allowing this situation? You might be really struggling with your OCD right now. Like, why in the world is God allowing me to go through this process right now? Why is he allowing this to torment me? And sometimes in life situations, we understand things better on the other side of the suffering or on the other side of the situation.

But sometimes we don’t. Sometimes there are things that we may never understand until we get to heaven. And that’s okay. We’ve got to live in that wrestling. Paul talks about, we look through the glass dimly, but one day we’re going to see face to face. We’re not going to understand everything from our position here on earth.

But how do we get through these situations where we don’t feel close to God? We don’t know where he is and what he’s doing. We’ve We pray, but it feels empty, or our spiritual practices, we’re just going through the motions. I want to talk to you about Elijah, who’s an Old Testament hero of our faith, and how he made it through a similar situation.

So Elijah was a prophet during a time where Israel had a wicked king and queen. And his story starts out in 1st Kings 17, if you want to look that up later. God calls Elijah to prophesy about a drought that’s going to come on the land. And this really makes Ahab and Jezebel, that wicked king and queen, quite mad.

He ends up having a showdown in 1st Kings 18, amazing chapter. with the prophets of Baal to prove to Israel that God’s real and this false god that you’ve been serving, Baal, he’s fake. He’s not real. God prevails, sends down fire from heaven on the altar, and Elijah goes and slaughters the false prophets.

Jezebel’s not happy about the prophets of Baal being slaughtered, because remember, she’s not following Israel’s god, she’s following these false gods. So she threatens to kill Elijah, and Elijah ends up fleeing for his life. So in 1 Kings 19. 4 it says, But he himself went on a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a broom tree.

And he asked that he might die, saying, It is enough now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my father’s. He was serving God, but he felt like he couldn’t go on, and so if you’ve ever had a time where you felt like you couldn’t make it anymore, I mean we did an episode a while back on suicide, there were people that struggled with this in the Bible, there were people that cursed the day of their birth.

I think Jeremiah did that. I know Job cursed the day of his birth. I mean, look at this. The people in the Bible were just like us. They had struggles. They had human emotions. We need to stop acting like they didn’t have struggles, or they were somehow superhuman people. They were wrestling with some of the same stuff that we’re wrestling with today.

It’s how we handle it and what we do and how we bring it to God. So interestingly, here’s how God handles it. Elijah ate and drank and slept, basically was fed by an angel in the wilderness, which shows us that God cares about our physical needs. And that our physical needs are connected to our emotional experience.

If Elijah was eating, drinking, and sleeping, and he goes through a process in verses five through eight, and this happens about three times, to me that says that there was something in his physical body that was lacking. He needed physical nourishment, he needed water, he needed food, and he needed sleep.

Some of y’all would be feeling a whole lot better if you could just get some sleep. I have been sleep deprived. I know what that feels like. It’s horrible. I know what it feels like not to be able to fall asleep because you got emotional stuff going on. It’s not fun. And I also know that when I’ve been relieved at points, that when I’ve been able to get that sleep, it has impacted my mood profoundly.

So keep that in mind as well. Going down to verses 9 14, God corrects Elijah’s thinking. This is the next piece. So he meets his physical needs, and then he corrects his thinking. And the word of the Lord came to him, What are you doing here, Elijah? He replied, I have been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty.

The Israelites have rejected your covenant, torn down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword, and I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too. Elijah says, I’m the only one left God, I’m the only one here serving you, they’ve killed everybody else, and the people that are still around are the people that are not following you, and they’re killing the people that are trying to follow you.

And interestingly, down in verse 18, God says, Yet I reserve seven thousand in Israel, all whose knees have not bowed down to Baal, and whose mouths have not kissed him. So God says, Elijah, you’re wrong. You’re stuck on this thought that you were the alone in serving me, that you have worked so hard and you’ve done all the things I’ve asked you to do, and now it’s over.

But Elijah’s mission was not over yet. So my question is, are you thinking something right now that’s not true? Are you stuck in a lie? I wrote down just a few times in my life where I believed a lie. I’m sure there are more than these. But these were times where I was really low and I was convinced during these times that something was true when it wasn’t.

So back in 2015 when I went through a pretty rough divorce, I remember having the thought, My life is over. And I was just so fully convinced of that. I was like, this is it for me, Lord. I now have this scarlet letter on me. Divorce gal in the church. I’m not gonna have children. I’m not gonna be able to get remarried.

Nobody’s gonna want me. I mean, the whole multitude of thoughts that went past just that thought of my life is over were not true. Not one of those things was true, but I was so down and I was discouraged and felt like, Hey, I have tried to do the right thing here. God, I tried to marry somebody in the church.

I’ve tried to serve you. I’ve tried to read my Bible and pray and do the Christian thing. Right. And it just didn’t work out the way that I wanted it to, or the way that I hoped it would. I remember being a single woman for several years and saying, Lord, there are no good Christian men left in this world.

I don’t see them. They’re not on the pews of the church. Nola, we have photos. I should pull one up. Where we had like a row of single women at my church is like, where were the guys? And there were maybe a few, a handful, but it was mostly single women who were there, who were devoted, who were trying to serve God.

And I thought, where are the men? Where are the good Christian men? I don’t see them around. And I think about this time in my life and how I’m telling God, right? God knows the future and he knows his plans for me. And I’m telling him. Lord, you’re not going to be able to find me, a Christian man, I don’t think you can do it.

And there isn’t one around here. And God’s like, hee hee hee hee. I don’t know, God’s just like chuckling over there going, Carrie, you have no idea, I got one saved right up for you. You just don’t know yet. He hasn’t been brought into your life, because it’s not the right season for you. I remember when my dad died just really thinking I am alone in this world.

I’m just alone. I’m an orphan. I have no parents left. Losing my mom was hard for sure, but when I lost my dad six months later, there’s something about losing that second parent that nobody prepared me for this, probably because most of the people I’m around hadn’t lost both parents. When you lose that second parent, you go through this, like, lost moment where you’re like, Who am I?

Like, I know who I am. It’s very strange. I don’t know that I’m doing it justice, but you do feel like an orphan and like, I don’t know, someone pulled up your roots or something and you have to kind of re find them. It’s like, you go through a little bit of an identity crisis, I think, almost. Even if you have a good sense of who you are, it’s just like, Man, I don’t have any parents anymore.

Like, I had parents my whole life and now I don’t have any parents. It was a strange thing. I felt very isolated and alone because even a lot of my grandmother on my mom’s side is still living. Well, I was like, my aunts haven’t even lost both of their parents. I was like, this is a really weird phenomena situation here.

Like, who do I talk to about this? It did feel very isolating alone, but God got me out of that pretty quickly because he brought just supportive people around me to let me know, like, I’m not alone. I don’t have to go through this alone. But I do remember feeling very isolated and alone during that time, even though I was married, even though I was in church community, I was just felt very lost when we’re going through hardships, tragedies, traumas, whatever it is.

We can’t always think clearly. Elijah fled for his life. I’m sure that that was a tough experience to go through. Having this evil, wicked woman who’s in charge of the country tell you, I’m gonna send somebody to kill you. Obviously, that’s scary. He ran from Jezebel. He’s not thinking clearly. He’s saying, I’m the only one left.

And sometimes God needs to come in during these times and correct our thinking. We have to be open though. We have to be willing to say, God, am I believing a lie right now? Can you show me in my life what I am believing and let me know, is that the truth about my situation or do you have something that you want to speak into this situation that is the truth?

Sometimes, we can’t sense God or know what he’s up to because he’s not where we think he is. I’m going to show you. In 1 Kings 19. 11, the Lord said, Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by. This is after Elijah stated his complaint initially. Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind.

And after the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of a cave. God is not always where we think he is.

We want to look for God in the big moments of life. Sometimes people will even say, I want to see a big move of God, but you don’t realize all the small little pieces, the tiny interactions. If you are having an interaction with another human being, that can be incredibly powerful. You don’t know if you’re the only person that is going to smile at that person today, or maybe they’re in a difficult customer service role and you have a way to just bless them or speak kindness to them.

You might be the only one that handles it that way. You don’t know. And we can’t miss these opportunities that God gives us, but also in the hard times when you’re in the valley, look for the flowers because there are usually some type of small bright spots that God gives you. I’ll give you a little bit of example.

I don’t know if I’ve shared this before, but It was during that single season where I was struggling, I was having a hard time because of just the lack of touch in my life, for lack of a better way to say it, but I think physical touch is just an important human need that people have, and when you don’t have a built in husband at home, it’s hard to get those needs met, right?

So I was just talking to my friends about buying this. Pillow. It was almost like a pregnancy pillow that like wraps all the way around you or something. I was like, maybe I should buy this pillow. Maybe that will help me. And was just talking about some discouragement over still being single and not being able to find anybody.

They were like, yeah, maybe you should get pillow, whatever. You got to figure out ways to get your needs met in a healthy way, right? And I went into the grocery store. This is going to sound so weird, but I’m going to say it anyway, because somebody is here. So I went in the grocery store and there were like the first pomegranates of the season, and I was like, Oh, this is just so great because pomegranates have just a short season that you can get them in the winter, and it’s like they’re really good.

And I love pomegranates. It’s hard to find a good one sometimes, but I was just so happy, like, that I had found these pomegranates, and it was this little flower in the midst of my desert, or like, a flower in the midst of the valley. It was something beautiful, and I was just like, thank you, God. Thank you, God, the pomegranates are back.

It just kind of made my day in such a small way, and it was just this glimmer of God’s love for me and God’s grace. So I would encourage you to look for God in the small pieces. If you can’t see him in the big puzzle pieces of your life, know he’s working behind the scenes. But look for him in the small, good pieces.

There was a period of time where I wrote down one good thing about my day. And let me tell you, if you practice that exercise, it’s not always an easy one. Like some days, it’s easy. Oh, wow, this thing happened, it was so great. There’s other days that are rough, and you have to really search, like you have to really put your magnifying glasses on to find something good about the day.

But if you’ll do that, what it does is it creates more thankfulness in your life, but it does, it causes you to start to look for those small things. That are God’s goodness all around you that oftentimes we don’t recognize. That’s another exercise for you that you can do if you think it might help you.

One good thing about your day, jot it on the calendar somewhere, or one area that you saw God that day. Back to the story of Elisha in verses 15 through 17, God gives Elijah directions and next steps about where to go. So if you’re feeling a little lost, maybe you’re praying about wisdom, about a decision, you don’t feel like God is pulling you one way or the other, just know that God will give you directions and next steps about what to do.

And in that way, God was saying, once again, your life’s not over. I’m not done with you. Keep moving forward. So, what do we learn from this? What do you do if you don’t feel God in your life? Is there a blatant sin? This episode is not mainly on sin, but what if there is? I’m not talking about OCD telling you that you didn’t confess that you stole your third grade teacher’s pen.

Okay? That’s not what I’m talking about. Are you living in a pattern of sin where, that you have not repented from, that you are not working on getting right? Get that right first. See if there are any physical needs you need to pay attention to, like sleep or eating or exercise. Diet. Continue to spend time with God.

Look for God in the places where you might least expect Him. Talk to Him about how you feel. Be submissive to God in correcting your thinking. Sometimes when we’re going through hard things, we’re just not thinking clearly. You may need to go to counseling to bounce some ideas about what’s going on in your head with somebody else.

Or you may say, I know I’m not thinking right about this, but I don’t know how to shift it. It’s okay to get help for that. Reflect on the past things that God has done for you. So important. Just remember, remember, remember areas where you’ve seen God show up for you. If He’s shown up for you in the past, He’s going to show up for you again.

He’s going to do that again. And keep moving until God steers you in a different direction. Elijah had done the specific things God called him to do, but he didn’t know quite yet what his next direction was. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you. Were you blessed by today’s episode?

If so, I’d really appreciate it if you would go over to your iTunes account or Apple Podcasts app on your computer if you’re an Android person and leave us a review. Thank you. This really helps other Christians who are struggling with OCD be able to find our show. Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling.

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