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

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

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

Episode Highlights:

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

Episode Summary:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related Links and Resources:

Amber’s book: Pregnant & Drowning

Explore Related Episodes:

126. What if I Abuse My Child? Postpartum OCD Story with Sarah Brown

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carrie: Did they recognize the OCD at that time?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carrie: Oh my goodness. Thanks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amber: Yes.

Carrie: Did your baby come out just fine?

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

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

Amber: 11 weeks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in OCD, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 90. My Experience with Faith, Church and OCD with Erika McCoy

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

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

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

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

What OCD taught her about life and her faith.

Her advocacy work at International OCD Foundation

Related links and Resources:

Erika McCOy

IOCDF

Transcript

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

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

Welcome.

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

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

Carrie: Wow.

Erika: And yeah, it was a long time.

Carrie: That’s a long time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carrie: They’re still upset about it.

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

Carrie: With your particular experience. Yeah.

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

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

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

Erika: Yes. Just a high-priority thing.

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

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

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

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

Carrie: A lot of rigidity

Finding Help for Her OCD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carrie: Institution or something.

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

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

Carrie: Sure.

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

Church and Community Response to OCD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carrie: Your greatest fear at that point.

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

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

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

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

Carrie: Right

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Erika Learned from Her OCD and Her Life Experiences

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Connecting to God and Going Back to Church

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

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

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

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

Carrie: That’s okay.

Erika: It was an awkward prayer.

Carrie: God understands. It’s alright.

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

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

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

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

Carrie: Healthy curiosity.

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

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

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

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

Erika’s Advocacy Work

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

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

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

Carrie: And that’s online isn’t it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Erika: I’m an introverted extrovert.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carrie: Roll with it.

Erika: Yeah, roll with it.

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

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

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

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

89. Personal Story of Spiritual Abuse and Chronic Pain with K.J. Ramsey, M.A.

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Counseling, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 89. Personal Story of Spiritual Abuse and Chronic Pain with K.J. Ramsey, M.A.

Therapist and author K.J. Ramsey talks to us about her healing journey from spiritual abuse and chronic pain.

-How K.J. realized that she was in a spiritually abusive situation

-Wrestling with questions about why God allowed her suffering

-The importance of emotional safety in a church or community

-Her process of leaving a spiritually toxic environment 

-How connecting to her body helps in her healing

-K.J.’s books, “The Lord is My Courage” and “The Book of Common Courage”

Related links and Resources:

www.kjramsey.com/

Transcript

Carrie: Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD episode 89. I had the absolute privilege of interviewing KJ Ramsey. This was a situation where I didn’t realize before the interview how much we had in common. We both have a background as trauma therapists with more of a somatic lens. We both graduated from the same seminary.

It was very interesting to see her perspectives based on her own experiences and understanding of scripture. Kj, welcome to the podcast.

K.J.: Hey, thank you for having me.

Carrie: I know that with authors, you guys tend to have a lot of podcast interviews. It’s almost like you’re on a virtual book tour nowadays, right?

K.J.: Basically what it is, it’s an extensive virtual book tour. And an introvert.

Carrie: Oh, no. Well, at least you don’t have to meet as many people face-to-face then.

K.J.: I guess in a way, especially during cold and flu season, and there’s still COVID all around. It’s nice to minimize some of that, but it is good. I get to talk to a lot of really interesting people.

Living with a Chronic Illness and Wrestling with God to Understand Her Suffering

Carrie: So my understanding from scoping out your website is that you talk about your personal story on there, and I imagine that is what you write about as well. You’ve written a few books. Is it an autoimmune condition that you have or some issue that causes chronic pain?

K.J.: I have several autoimmune diseases, but I started with one, which is a way that it typically goes if you have one; it kind of blooms into more. I’ve had ankylosing spondylitis for 14 years, and AS is the shortened version of that, which is better on the tongue. Last year, I got COVID-19, which turned into several more diseases I will have for my life under intense treatment. I have a lot.

Carrie: So you ended up with the long haul COVID symptoms?

K.J.: Yes. Because of it, I had long covid and new diseases, which is hard.

Carrie: I’m curious because you also talked in your story about spiritual abuse, and I’m processing, as well, a lot about healing just in general because my husband was just diagnosed last year with a permanent neurological condition, and there’s no cure for it.

I’m curious if you could share some of your thoughts on healing. I think it helps our audience with anxiety and OCD as well because there’s a lot of struggle in wrestling. Why am I having to deal with this? Why won’t God heal me? Why can’t he take this away from me? He’s all-powerful. He has the ability to do that. Can you tell us about maybe some of your wrestlings with that?

K.J.: I was 20 years old when I suddenly got sick and went from being a fully functional young adult to barely walking and could barely hold a pen or drive myself across campus. I was a college student at the time, and that persisted.

I entered adulthood wrestling with this question of why I have this suffering that doesn’t seem to go away. What is the point? And also, what does God care? What is God going to do about this? And really, my better answers are in the book, my first book, this Too Shall Last. I will say that I’m more a writer than anything else, but I’m a trauma therapist learning how to listen to my body and respond to my own sensations with kindness, compassion, and movement.

I really do believe that there is healing in the way that I would say, the capacity to live as fully as we can, even for some things to be reversed. And that’s with me saying that with a person with a lot that’s wrong on my test results.

And a lot of ongoing pain still in my life that I’ve seen things change, and I’ve seen my capacity to show up in my life grow massively as I’ve learned to listen to my body and what she has to say about how safe I feel on any given day or moment. From both a theological and a trauma perspective, I believe there is possible healing in how we face ourselves with compassion and face one another with compassion. And I caveat that by saying how I define healing might be different than sudden spontaneous removal of all of your symptoms. I think that, actually, pain prompts us to pay attention and bear witness to the pain in our lives.

And when I say pain, I mean all of it. Emotional pain too, struggles, the very inconvenient experience of having intrusive thoughts. That’s painful. Pain prompts us to pay attention and can point us to the places where parts of us still need to be unfolded with the care that needs to be held.

And it’s in that process that we experience more fullness, more joy, that’s healing. There’s a difference between healing and curing. The difference is between good removal of all of your problems and experiencing wholeness, and I think we all can experience wholeness even in a body that continues to have a disease continues to have a mental illness.

Finding Emotional Support and Connection

Carrie: That’s incredible. I don’t think that I could have phrased that better because I think that aligns with some of the process of what I’ve been thinking about with my husband. It’s like we haven’t gotten the healing from, or the cure, like you said, from the diagnosis, but we’ve been healed in the sense that we’ve been healed from isolation.

We have support and other people we’re connected to who are going through this. We have a support system outside of those that are going through it. We’ve been healed from the financial stress of paying for medical bills, and God has provided. That’s something that I want to write about a little bit more.

When we started this journey, it was kind; a lot of people were praying for him, and he was having eye issues, and they were praying for him for healing. That in itself is somewhat of a miracle because even though he has a degenerative condition, his eyes haven’t changed in a year, which we are just really celebrating; that, and so thankful that he hasn’t lost any more of his vision, but it’s been a process of, I think his eye doctor’s probably not a Christian and doesn’t know quite how to make sense of that. I thought when we first started going through this, God would take healing in any form that it comes in.

However you want to do this, if you’re going to heal him physically or if you want to heal him emotionally, and there’s the level where he’ll talk about how, even though he likes to be in the background, he has this walker now that puts him in the spotlight. People speak to him, and he’s able to encourage them. Or even people with mobility issues say, “Oh, tell me about this walker.” It’s just a little bit different from your typical walker. How do I get one of those? Those types of things. It’s been very interesting to see how God’s used him differently with this struggle and suffering because it’s definitely changed him a lot. It changed me a lot and drew us closer to God and each other and those things. I’m really thankful for it.

K.J: I love that you started that off office saying God has healed you of; I don’t know if you put it exactly like this, but your individualism. I think that’s one of the core things that we’re all being invited into, whether it’s with struggling with something like OCD or Ankylos Spondylitis or complex trauma, there’s this invitation to be more fully human, which means to be in relationship to others, to be connected. There’s something about our struggles that invites us in a way that is harder to decline, to be connected, and to be supported, to be seen. The way that my body works, I can’t do life on my own.

I can’t. There are many stretches where I can’t take care of myself fully; beyond that, I need the emotional support of the people around me. I don’t love experiencing that, and I love that my body pulls me into a story where I don’t have to be self-sufficient, and nobody else has to, either. And I think that is the healing in which we’re all being bound.

We’re all being invited into. It’s the space between each other. That’s where Joy is. That’s where wonder is through love; our struggles take us to go there.

How K.J. Discovered that She was in a Spiritual Abusive Situation

Carrie: And we’re entirely too isolated and disconnected from each other in our society. I’m really curious about this. It is kind of totally switching topics, but your story regarding how you discovered that you were in a spiritually abusive conversation just gives us a picture of the warning signs of that or when it starts to click like, “Oh, this isn’t healthy.”

K.J.: In my previous book, the Lord is My Courage, I share a lot of my husband and my story of waking up to the fact that we were in a spiritually abusive faith community in this church and choosing to leave it and trying to heal from it. Dealing with the ongoing effects of religious trauma is so hard about spiritual abuse that it’s often quite subtle.

Of course, there are going to be things that are not subtle. But I think the whole, does the fish know what the water is around them? It’s just, you’re in, you’re swimming in the water, and that’s the water. For us, waking up to the fact that the water we were swimming in was toxic was a slow process of paying attention and sensing our pain.

For us, it was noticing how other people were being harmed. My husband was a pastor at this church, and his coworkers would come to him in tears after being yelled at in the pastor’s office. So hearing other people being belittled or overworked, noticing how people are subtly mocked in staff meetings, and being disturbed by that is part of what woke us up.

At first, we weren’t the people being directly attacked because we were doing the stuff that the pastor didn’t want to do himself. My husband was over pastoral care and counseling, and I ran my counseling practice at the church. This pastor wanted to preach, so we were in good graces because we did something that made the church look good and took stuff off his plate.

That favor you can get with a leader can blind you for a while to how they might be treating other people. But as soon as we started to confront, I don’t love how you yelled at that person; that’s when you become the problem, too. I don’t so much to categorize warning signs or red flags.

The most important thing is that we should know, especially in white evangelicalism, that we have been taught to dismiss our own bodies’ signals about how safe we are in our environment. And call it definitely faithfulness that you should serve no matter what, volunteer, and believe the best of your leaders because of so many things.

The inheritance of Nastheism down to the more recent effects of purity culture. We have internalized and ingested a spirituality that says the body is bad and your emotions are untrustworthy. And I’m here to say that’s not scripturally true, theologically true, or physiologically helpful.

Carrie: Yeah, it drives me bonkers.

The Importance of Emotional Safety in Churches and Communities

K.J.: Yes. It’s terrible. And that in itself is, those are the seeds of religious trauma right there. But your emotions and your sensations about being in church and being around other Christians are actually telling you really important things about how safe you are and how safe everybody is in that community, and learning to listen to your own sense of distress and being disturbed by something is actually what helps you move into more safety.

Sometimes, your body has wise things to point out about whether somebody’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Our bodies helped us over time. Very slowly, our bodies begged us to listen. I know it was listening that got us free.

Carrie: This is something that really bothers me, that when people comment in church, and I’ve heard it repeatedly with pastors, you have to choose faith over your feelings.

Those are interacting with each other all the time. God gave us a body and emotions for a reason, and God has a wide range of emotions. That statement, to me, I feel is very unhealthy, but it’s something that I’ve heard repetitively.

K.J.: You can walk around in public and see people wearing shirts that say faith over fear. It’s so prevalent that we don’t even need to understand how it’s been co-opted by certain political movements. But faith over fear is self-harm because fear is your body’s wise response to show you that you don’t feel safe and help you move into safety and connection. And I know this is bold to say on a podcast, especially about OCD.

Fear is not the enemy. Fear is there to move you somewhere. All emotion is energy meant to move you. Emotion, energy, and motion. It’s intended to prompt you to pay attention to yourself as somebody who deserves safety, connection, fear, and faith. Fear drives you to treat yourself as a friend of God. Fear doesn’t have to be something that we fight.

It can be something that wakes us up. Fear makes you quite alert, and often for those of us with mental illness. It might prompt us to be way more observant than we wish we were all the time. The experience of hypervigilance is not necessarily pleasant, but it is a prompt. It is not the problem; I think it’s the space that goes back to talking about healing.

That’s the space I love seeing people get to make a shift because when you start to treat your fear, which is part of your body’s physiological response to danger and the perception of danger. You start treating your fear as a friend with something important to tell you. Your life changes. There’s room for things not to feel as terrible as they do when you’re fighting part of yourself.

Carrie: It’s so rare that I get to have conversations with somebody that’s this mindful because essentially what you’re talking about is mindfulness. This sense of being curious about our emotional state instead of trying to judge it and say, oh, I shouldn’t be afraid. The Bible says, fear not, so I have to cut that piece off and go with God’s given me love and power to sound mind. And it’s this bizarre Christian CBT, is what I call it, where we try to do some thought replacement, and we’re all going to feel better now, and it just doesn’t work.

Healing Through Embodiment

K.J.: I would say, what I’m saying more than mindfulness is that embodiment is the practice of non-judgmentally paying attention to and responding to our sensations.

I take it one step further because I think that even with mindfulness, we can stay detached from our physical experience. What’s happening? I’m making this little movement you can’t see me. You keep making this movement with my hand, like cutting ourselves off at the neck. Basically, what happens when we feel afraid, or when we feel overwhelmed, we feel ashamed?

Any of these activating big feelings that come up is that the way your body works, you’re temporarily cut off from the regulating power of your prefrontal cortex. So your brainstem is very active, your limbic system and your brain is very active, and your body is quickly mobilizing you to seek safety, and you can’t actually access the part of you that’s, well, God is love, and Christ dwells in me. Therefore, I am actually okay. You can’t access that. So we’re talking about a bottom-up approach to belief, which is that response to the sensation happening in your body; that’s what I mean by bottom. So, the lower half of you, starting with your body, responds to this sensation with curiosity and compassion.

That is what brings your body and mind back together so that you can return to that place of faith, of mentally accepting an ascent and receiving that Christ is with you. Embodiment this non-judgmental, which is easier said than done, paying attention to what’s happening inside your body.

Leaving a Spiritually Toxic Environment

Carrie: When you were leaving the spiritually toxic environment because essentially you both had to leave your jobs, it sounds like that’s a significant shift. How did you recover from that trauma to become more embodied? Was that through your therapy process?

K.J.: The recovery began, I would say, I think something that feels in this moment important to point out is part of why we don’t leave is because we are so afraid of losing our livelihood and our sense of belonging; that’s why we took us so long to leave. Truthfully, the fear of how we will pay our bills and how we will afford insurance. That kept us extended our stay in the land of toxicity for years. And a lot of people don’t talk about the practicality of that. Having money to pay for your groceries and pay for your rent is pretty important. And whether you’re working for a church or maybe realizing maybe my community is unhealthy and you don’t work there.

The fear of losing your belongings is massive. Most of these kinds of churches prompt like they are ordered around the church should be your whole life. This is where you go multiple times a week. Your small group is your community. So what happens when you have to leave? You lose everything. And I no longer think your life should be ordered around an institution, but that’s a separate conversation.

Healing was started by leaving, and that was terrifying. And it was a rescue in many ways that God would lead us out into a broader place. And it was once we were out my body got even more vocal. And I was experiencing a lot of anxiety and tremors in my arms. I was falling. I thought I had had so many mysterious health symptoms over the years with my disease, and I’ve been tested for MS before.

I had a lot of tests done. I had at one point this whole brain and spine MRI done and saw this neurologist, and this was such a moment of grace, of God’s kindness. He showed me the pictures of my brain and spine and said, your brain is beautiful. There is no evidence of disease here. “My wife is a complex trauma survivor, and I think what’s happening is he had asked us questions about what’s been going on in your life.

My wife is a complex trauma survivor.” I think what’s happening here is trauma. The further you escape this situation, the better your body will feel; some of these symptoms will disappear. At that point, I was just a therapist. I hadn’t started to specialize in trauma, but to hear somebody named that for me was incredibly helpful because you feel it’s not; what I’m going through is not that bad.

It’s hard to even get to the point of letting yourself call something spiritual abuse. Because we’re so conditioned to be deferential to pastors, to leaders, and we want to be kind. We think that it’s not gracious to say something or use a word like that, but grace and truth go together. The truth is my body reacted with such violent, intense shows and displays of a lack of safety because I had been so gaslit, demeaned, and pushed out because I had been treated less than human.

My body was responding in kind, saying this is not okay. That was my body’s protest. I started there because I think it was my physical experience of such extreme distress of feeling terrible. That prompted me to seek more help to get into therapy again. I believe that, more than anything, put me on a path of studying somatics and beginning as a therapist myself into great somatics into my practice, and that’s now the foundation of everything I do. But I start there; I just gave you the version of if we would have this conversation for three hours. I always trust that you know what; sometimes, in these conversations, there’s always a reason that what comes to my mind first is what there’s an invitation to say. And so that’s where we went.

Carrie: How wise of that neurologist to be admitting. “Hey, there’s some psychological things going on.” But not make it, “Well, it’s all in your head because you’re kind of crazy.: There’s this balance where some have had either of those extremes.

K.J: Yes, I’ve been told it’s psychosomatic. It’s all in your head dismissively, and blames me like I am too broken. And I’m sure so many people listening have experienced this too, and maybe your husband did far before getting his diagnosis. There’s a vast difference between an acknowledgment of how our brains and bodies are connected that says your symptoms are real and they make sense based on what you’ve experienced.

And this is psychosomatic; if you can fix your mental problems, your body will feel better. That’s the sin right there of individualism. That kind of medical model that blames people’s symptomology on their struggle is why they feel these symptoms when our bodies are begging us to hear the truth about the broader systems that we’re a part of, our family systems, our church systems, our society.

I think the point is that these things we feel are such problems or separate us from those who don’t have struggles as much as we do. I say this as a disabled woman. I think there’s some fierce wisdom in the ways that we struggle that our bodies are trying to tell us. You and those around you deserve more love and support than you have received. All of the symptoms of stress that we experience in how they manifest are shouting to tell us we deserve to be seen, held and helped.

K.J’s Book: “The Book of Common Courage: Prayers and Poem to Find Strength in Small Moments

Carrie: Very interesting and definitely brought up some things I haven’t considered. I’m curious for you to tell us about the Book of Common Courage: Prayers and Poem to Find Strength in Small Moments. How this book came about and the importance of it. Why does it need to be out in the world?

K.J: Well, we’ve been talking about trauma and part of what happens when we’re experiencing trauma. Also, when we’re feeling overwhelmed, we talked about how your body is strongly mobilizing. Energy to keep you safe, but that is sinking you further away from your being able to access the language centers of your brain, for example.

The point is when life is hard, it’s hard to have words, and the Book of Common Courage is really my offering of words for the moments in our lives and the seasons in our lives when we feel wordless and when we don’t have words to pray, and we wish we did. When we are struggling to make sense of our lives, when we don’t feel strength, and we don’t feel seen. We want to that it’s an offering of presence, as I think that books are portable presence in so many ways that there’s something about a book that can enter into the private place of your home, your bedside, your living room.

And be with you and make you feel less alone in your life and story. I think we all need the reminder that we are not the only ones with questions and confusion about God. And when it comes to whether our stories are excellent. So this is just my offering to bridge that gap between belief and the body, between your hard day and the hope that’s yours.

I wrote it, not meaning to write a book. When I was writing the Lord as my courage when I was processing my own story of religious trauma. I started to write poetry and prayers for myself. Just to process the intensity of the story and really to help myself. There’s poetry is a really distilled form of language, so to help myself distill down, what am I trying to say in this chapter?

What’s the most important thing and what’s just for me and my spouse, and what needs to be out there for thousands and thousands of people to read? Poetry helped me find my way, and then, over time, I just shared it and shared some pieces on social media, mostly because I was tired while writing a manuscript and needed something easy to share.

People felt seen by the poems and the prayers. It was before I called it poetry because I didn’t even feel I could give myself that label. It was through other people’s responses to the words that I was like; I guess maybe this would be encouraging for people, not just for me. And it became a book.

Carrie: I love it. It’s based on Psalm 23.

K.J: Both The Lord is My Courage and the Book of Common Courage walk through the exact breakdown of phrase by phrase through Psalm 23. The book of Common Courage is an exploration. It’s praying through the Psalm, but it’s also praying through getting to receive, being in dialogue with Christ as the good shepherd.

Who is the person who that Psalm was pointing towards? Most of the prayers in the book are a colic, short form of prayer, which is intentional. It’s my trauma-informed way of doing less is more. We don’t need long prayers and lots and lots of words when we’re struggling. We need small, and we need a little bit of containment.

So they’re structured, and they’re a little bit of containment to help you feel held. But they’re mostly appointed at Christ to dialogue with Christ as the good shepherd who still is seeking you.

Carrie: I love less is more. We did an episode not too long back on breath prayers. That’s something that I’ve just been able to incorporate in my life at different times or seasons, and those are very short but very helpful.

If you could go back in time, what would you tell your younger self who is dealing with chronic pain or spiritual abuse?

K.J: I think that I would tell her your body is not bad. Your body is not betraying you by feeling all this pain and struggling so much. Your body has wise things to say, and I dare you to listen. Please listen to her. I think that’s what I would tell her.

Carrie: That’s definitely good. Your body is not bad. The people hear nothing else from this episode. I hope they receive that piece because, as you said, it’s somewhat so ingrained in our Christian culture to almost be scared. To be embodied, something like you’re getting too new age or something like that is not what we’re doing. And it’s not scriptural to be disconnected from ourselves.

K.J: It’s an expression of faith in God who put on flesh to dwell among us. When I treat my body with reverence, I worship Christ, who decided to become human in a body and still reigns in a body. This is worship.

Carrie: Thank you so much for being on the show today. Share your words of wisdom. I think this is going to be relevant and helpful to a lot of people.

K.J: Thanks for having me.

Carrie: I am currently reading KJ’s first book. I went ahead and picked up a copy after I did the interview, and I’m enjoying it. As always, thank you so much for listening.

Hope for Anxiety and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the use of myself or By the Well Counseling. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum.

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

Related links and Resources:

K.J. Ramsey

88. Relationship OCD and Anxiety with Samara Lane

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, OCD, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 88. Relationship OCD and Anxiety with Samara Lane

On today’s episode, Samara Lane, a relationship and ROCD coach, joins me.

Samara shares her healing journey through relationship OCD. We also talk about how to overcome anxiety and OCD in relationships.

How does OCD manifest in relationships?

How to distinguish OCD from real feelings?

What can cause OCD to develop in relationships?

Some helpful ways to help you cope with anxiety and OCD in your relationship. 

www.samaralane.com

More Episodes on OCD:

87. OCD FAQ

26. A Personal OCD Story of Experiencing God’s Presence and Grace with Peyton Garland

13. Panic Attacks, OCD, and God: A Personal Story with Mitzi VanCleve

8. One Therapist’s Story of Discovering Her Scrupulosity OCD with Rachel Hammons

Transcript

Carrie: Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD episode 88. I didn’t plan it this way, but it just so happens that this episode is coming out around Valentine’s Day, and it’s on anxiety and relationship OCD, so that seemed to gel together well. I have on the show with me today Samara Lane, who is a relationship anxiety and ROCD coach.

Been wanting to, for a little while, have this episode about relationship OCD because it’s a very hot topic. First of all, a lot of people don’t even know that it exists. Am I correct?

Samara: That is very correct, including the people who start experiencing all the symptoms and wondering what’s wrong with them.

Carrie: Right. There’s this very stereotypical view of OCD that it’s somebody like Monk that you see on TV concerned about germs and concerned with order and cleanliness of things, but that’s really only one subtype of OCD. There are several different subtypes, so it’s often that people will believe, “Hey, I have anxiety,” and certainly, anxiety in OCD is very related.

But often, I have people come to me and say, “Hey, I have this anxiety.” They start telling their story, and then I realize, do you know that you’re actually having obsessions? These types of thoughts and, do you know that what you’re doing, intense Googling on the internet that’s actually a compulsion or seeking reassurance from your partner all the time is a compulsion, and they don’t realize that until somebody kind of puts a name and a label to things and it helps so much being able to know kind of how to move forward with that.

Samara’s Personal Relationship Story

You have your own personal relationship story about what led you to become an anxiety and relationship OCD coach. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Samara: Yeah, for sure. I mean, it was my own journey through Helen back, really, because I’ve never experienced suffering as much as I have with really intense spikes of OCD.

I’m sure all of your listeners can relate to that. For me, it comes on differently for everyone. It came on the worst; the biggest initial spike that made me realize something was going on here was right before and during my partner’s proposal. I could tell, I just knew that he was about to propose, and I had this wave of anxiety.

We were at this beautiful, lovely dinner he’d planned for us. Many years ago, I remember being flooded with thoughts like, oh no, I have to decide the rest of my life right now, and what if this is the wrong choice? Or what if I’m settling? There are some things that aren’t perfect in the relationship—so much pressure.

I felt I was hyperventilating, going to have a panic attack, while he pulled out the ring and popped the question, and I said yes at the moment. And I think also because the anxiety was so intense now in hindsight, the OCD thoughts were so intense, I felt really guilty and like I was faking it when I said yes because so many doubts were coming up.

So I felt like I was lying and just saying what he wanted to hear, but I was like, yes, and then I was like, I need to go home and sit down. It really our engagement; our proposal ended with both of us sitting on the kitchen floor, and I was crying and doing all the compulsions without realizing it, seeking reassurance, confessing everything, telling him all of my nitpicking, intrusive thoughts, all of my doubt.

That, of course, didn’t feel good to him. I don’t recommend doing that. And it wasn’t really the romantic engagement experience that either of us had planned on, and up until this point, we’d been together for over two years and lived together. And the relationship was great, right? We wanted to be together, but it felt such; it just whew flooded me with most people.

Yes, it was an unconscious compulsion. I just started Googling. I was like, what the heck is wrong with? Fortunately, at least the one good thing that can come from our initial Googling is finding help and education and realizing that we’re not crazy; we’re not alone. This is a thing. Relationship anxiety and relationship OCD are a thing.

I’m so grateful that relationship OCD is now even a term and is even recognized by so many more people as a subtype because for me, this was 12 or more years ago, I don’t even remember, 13 years ago, maybe now, I didn’t see anything on relationship OCD back then. It was one person was talking about relationship anxiety and had a blog, and that was it.

But yeah, that really started my journey, and I cut a long story short, I felt like I tried everything under the sun to feel better. I read books, and I saw therapy and counseling. I took courses and really was through trial and error because I didn’t have a set system that was proven that I knew would work. And frankly, I didn’t know what resources were available to me, even if there were any back then.

So, just doing my best, I pieced together a system that really freed me. It takes time, of course, and it takes a lot of practice cause we’ve been having these OCD tendencies for so long. But that’s the practice I now teach my clients. I certainly wish that I had known then what I know now, right? It would’ve saved me years of suffering because it was years; it was many years that I suffered without really knowing how to handle it. And now it’s night and day different, of course, but it was really hard.

How Does OCD Show Up in Relationships?

Carrie: I’m curious: before this manifested in terms of your relationship with your fiance, did you have other concerns about other relationships? Like close friends, teachers, or family members?

Samara: Yeah, like anxiety with other types of relationships? Great question, and one that I’ve done a lot of reflection on, and in hindsight, absolutely. I never thought of it this way because I think it stayed mild or moderate enough that I just kind of coped and worked, tried to cope, if that makes sense. But yeah, I look back and see now there have always been tendencies to, like, oh, my best friend gets me really angry.

Well, maybe I don’t want to be her friend anymore. Running away and avoiding the things that are triggering, upsetting, or make me feel bad. And I also did this in many romantic relationships with past partners.

Carrie: Avoidance is definitely a big piece of anxiety and OCD that people have to work through. And it’s hard because the natural tendency when we feel discomfort is to say, “Hey, let me pull away from that.” But it only feeds and heightens anxiety and OCD more to avoid things. I call it the avoidance cycle. It’s like the avoidance confirms that you really do have something to be afraid of versus facing that fear and walking into it, even though you feel uncomfortable, helps you know, I really can do this.

I can handle this situation that I don’t feel I can handle. I’m curious as far as when you’re talking with somebody because it’s normal. Everyone who’s been in a romantic relationship knows that maybe if you’re looking at getting married, it’s normal to have what people cold feet before the wedding and have some trepidation.

It is a big commitment, and we should take that seriously. Now, how does somebody know? Is it at a level where it’s problematic versus this is just kind of normal relationship concerns that everybody goes through?

Samara: Such a good question and one that we really struggle with when we’re trying to discern what’s the anxiety and what are legitimate issues or challenges that we’re having.

I think you’re absolutely correct when making a big life choice, especially for those of us who are prone to OCD tendencies or anxiety. of course we tend to overthink, but even anyone without OCD or anxiety is going to possibly, potentially have a cold feet, like you said there. And all relationships have challenges.

My partner and I have had to work a lot on communication and how to navigate a relationship and a partnership. How do we navigate conflict? So those are really common challenges that aren’t red flags. They’re just part of being in a relationship, and it tends to happen when there’s anxiety triggers us.

It spikes something within us. It could be thoughts without sensations. It could be sensations without thoughts. It could be both together—sensations, meaning facing heart, panic, fear, and things like that. Our body is different in the sense of how we respond to it. It’s not just like, oh yeah, we had an argument earlier.

I think we’ll revisit that soon and maybe continue talking about it and working through it together. The average non-OCD mind might think it’s more common if we’re in the ROCD to go immediately into, oh, it’s a bad sign. Maybe I don’t love them anymore, or maybe we’ll never make it work.

Maybe I’ve made a terrible mistake. Maybe I’ve already wasted the best years of my life trying to be with the wrong person. Maybe we need to break up, even though I don’t want to. There’s a part of me that really doesn’t want to, even though there’s also a part of me that feels that the only answer is to break up.

And so it’s this back and forth, this inner war within ourselves. I hate to use the word red flag because I think that alone can be overused, misconstrued, and highly triggering. The things we would want to take really seriously are untreated addiction, any kind of true abuse, ongoing, repeated dishonesty or cheating or something like that, of course, and anyone would want to take those seriously. But those aren’t the things that relationship anxiety glows onto the minutiae. Another thing I can share about this real quick is that there are two sides to the relationship anxiety to the ROCD coin. One side is the I’m not enough, and that’s how it’s expressed. It’s a little more obvious, in a way, easier to tell. This is a “me” thing. This is about my relationship with myself.

For those who have ever experienced it, my partner hasn’t texted me back. Do they like me? Do they love me? Something changed. For example, on the other side of the relationship, the anxiety coin expresses itself as What if my partner’s not enough? Or what if my relationship isn’t enough? What if this life choice isn’t enough?

And at the root of it, it still actually is an us thing, and it’s very clever how the ROCD is expressing itself, but that’s when we have intrusive thoughts like, am I settling? Is there someone I’d be a better match with? Am I really attracted to them? Do I really love them? I don’t feel the way I thought I should feel courageous enough to keep going within and practicing our mindfulness and our awareness; we’ll see underneath this is really, again, the same, oftentimes the same core issue. Am I enough? Is my choice enough? Am I safe? Is there danger? I must protect myself.

How People with OCD View Conflict in Relationships

Carrie: The need for safety, getting down to the root of the issue, and feeling unsafe. Not necessarily because your relationship is unsafe like you talked about; we’re not talking about abusive and unsafe relationships. We’re talking about safe relationships, but our perception due to intrusive thoughts can get that shaken up and make it feel unsafe when it’s okay. For example, conflict, all relationships have conflict, but if you have this high level of anxiety and intrusive thoughts, conflict can feel 10 times more threatening than it does to the average person. So you have to learn how to deal with those things and how to navigate them.

How long have you been together with your husband now?

Samara: It’s starting to be easy to lose count. We became a couple 13 years ago, almost 12 and a half years ago. We’ve been married for over eight of those years now.

Carrie: Was it a big learning curve for him to learn kind of how to navigate some of these issues?

Samara: Oh yes, absolutely. And bless him. Not everyone has his experience, but he was so confident in us and remained so confident and committed to us that even if I was in the early days of it, seeking reassurance or doubts.

“I don’t know about this. Are you sure he’d? Oh, I’m positive. We’re great. We’re going to do wonderful.” And of course, then my OCD just, instead of feeling grateful, it was just, well, he’s too confident. I don’t really trust his judgment. But he has been such really forgiving.

There have been times when what I expressed was really hurtful and really hurt him deeply and emotionally, and he has just stayed committed. I’ve done a beautiful job of just trying not to take it personally, acknowledging this is a thing, and being honest with me about his feelings and how it affects him, right?

I definitely learned early on not to divulge all the things anymore.

Carrie: I’m curious about your process, and I also have some thoughts about this. How do you feel this develops, or where does it come from, the bent towards relationship OCD specifically and anxiety?

Samara: Totally. Yes. I would say I have a predisposition to OCD. Not all of my clients, but I know for me, as an example, when I was little, in hindsight, I didn’t know what was going on, but I was ruminating and , really worried about moral scrupulosity if I’m saying that term correctly, something wrong, oh, I have to confess to my mom right away, and then I’d get immediate relief from it.

So, I see those tendencies in me from a young age. So, just in general, it can be a predisposition to OCD. In general, oftentimes people have had other OCD themes, and then it switches to ROCD or vice versa, or maybe they just always had social anxiety, and now suddenly it’s expressing as a more severe form of OCD or more noticeable form, other things that it can come from.

So again, just like biology, how are we wired right? Do we have anxiety in our history? Do we have any predisposition to this? I also often see that there is some wounding, some emotional wounding, that could be trauma, big or small, even things that we don’t necessarily think of as trauma. Sometimes, they’re very clear-cut and dry, but it could be when you got teased on the school bus, and that is still this unhealed part of our shadow self, right?

Our inner child really needs that love, compassion, and healing. It can also be wounds in our adulthood if our last relationship or one of our prior relationships ended badly or painfully. That can certainly affect things: attachment styles, anxious attachment, avoidant attachment, disorganized, and any kind of insecure attachment.

We sometimes see it as a factor. Also, just general life stressors, right? If we have a predisposition to OCD, then if we’re in college and it’s really stressful, or we’re moving or switching careers. Life stressors can bring up this feeling of being unsafe, unsettled, or in limbo. And then, often, it just wants to glom onto something outside of ourselves.

Oh, it’s the relationship. I know it is. It must be the relationship. I’ve had a moment of clarity. So there’s a lot of different things. And then, even when we are struggling with our self-esteem, self-trust, or self-worth, I have seen that play a role in it. It could be one, it could be a variety of those things.

Carrie: I’m glad that you brought up a few different things there in terms of working with many people with OCD and a trauma overlap connection. Yes, there is that propensity towards OCD, but then there are also these wounding childhood experiences. Sometimes it’s not as dramatic as abuse, or sometimes it is.

Sometimes, it’s not as big as being physically or emotionally abused or something like that. Sometimes, it’s more what you didn’t get. It’s more the lack of somewhat of emotional neglect or the lack of engagement by caregivers or others when you need it the most. And we’re looking at not just what people received but what they did not receive in relationships.

And there can be a fear of vulnerability of getting too close to somebody. And then, if I have to find a way, my brain’s trying to protect me and find a way that I won’t get hurt again. So I’ve gotta kind of push back against that and, oh, there must be something wrong or must be something nitpicky about this relationship that needs to be fixed or worked on. It also can be a perfectionistic tendency because we think, oh, well, this happened, or they did this small thing to hurt us, and they may hurt us in a really big way. Or maybe it means they’re not faithful in the future because of this one little thing they did to hurt my feelings. That type of thing kind of blows up. So, I think we have to conceptualize that anxiety in any form is trying to keep us safe from hurt. And that’s especially true in the relationship OCD aspect and past romantic relationships, whether it was a divorce. Whether it was a bad breakup or a toxic, narcissistic relationship you got out of. Those deep wounds can last for much longer than we would like them to.

That needs some healing and needs some attention. We can’t just gloss over that and say, well, now I’m with Joe over here, and he’s nothing like Bob. He’s not hurting me, or he’s not abusing me. You can tell your brain that, but your body may still be going haywire. This is unsafe. I know from our conversations before you said I’m not a Christian, but I have a lot of coaching clients who are Christian.

What have you seen in Christian clients, specifically those struggling with this relationship? Anxiety, OCD?

Samara: It can feel; the number one that comes to mind is this fear and this feeling or belief that this is God saying that they’re not the right person. And how do you know? Sometimes, there can also be a lot of guilt.

I seem to have lots of clients that find me, not all, but some of them may be exploring. They’re doing their religion, they’re practicing their faith maybe a little differently than how they were raised. They can also feel this guilt and shame, and is this relationship bad? Or if they have premarital sex.

Then, they can really feel a lot of guilt and shame around that. It can really fuel a lot of the OCD if that’s not something that they believe is right. But the number one that I see is, how do I discern between is this God telling me this isn’t my person, versus this is just anxiety.

Carrie: That’s a really huge one that I run into and hear a lot is people say, is this God, or is this OCD, or is it the devil?

What is this that’s going on in my mind? How do you help people discern some of that?

Samara: I think each of us, it’s really coming to our own discernment and understanding and what resonates with us, what my clients have found most helpful, and what I personally believe is God doesn’t communicate through OCD.

Carrie: That’s not God.

Samara: It is different. And the more we learn about the OCD mind, as I’m sure so many amazing listeners here learn from you all the time and how it works and the signs that we’re having intrusive thoughts, signs that we’re doing compulsions and feeding the cycle, the more easily it’s we’re able to identify this is the pattern, this is the thing, and that’s not God.

I believe that God communicates. God can communicate in a firm way sometimes, but not through riddling us with crippling fear. And I believe that God is a really loving being and forces there to meet us with compassion as we go through these things, not to beat ourselves up. That’s really the mind.

Carrie: Absolutely. I like how you put that. I know you mentioned mindfulness a little bit earlier. Is that something that you practiced as part of your process?

Samara: Absolutely. Yes. It’s such a critical part of it. The way that I love to think about it and describe it is when we’re in active OCD thoughts and panic, it’s we have forgotten that there’s just a story playing in our mind.

It might as well be a movie that we’re watching, but we’ve gotten so sucked in and hooked by it that we feel like we’re a character. We think the movie is real, right? It’s like a bad dream. Like, oh no, all these bad things are true or might be happening or might happen in the future, and we forget that we’ve just fallen into this story that’s totally made up.

It’s just a story, and we have the choice and the ability to step back and really look at the thoughts, watch what the mind is doing, observe the judgments that it’s making, observe the sensations and emotions in our bodies and just let the movie play without hooking into it.

Carrie: Almost like you fall down into this Alice Wonderland world, but everything feels super real when you’re in the midst of the OCD thought storm. That’s definitely relatable, I think, to a lot of our listeners who have experienced that. I think this has been very informative for us because a lot of people may be listening to this and realizing I didn’t realize that those were OCD obsessions that I was actually having about my relationship, and now this will be able to help them kind of find a pathway towards healing as I think is really important.

Samara: Absolutely. I mean, I suppose the good news, if there is any, is ROCD is a subtype of OCD like you said, and so we heal it in a lot of ways, just like we would other types of OCD. It can, and I think one of the trickier parts about it is all the societal conditioning that is so perpetuated and prevalent in movies and media, Hollywood and fairytale stories that we grew up with, and social media memes all over the place.

So weeding through the relationship myths and unlearning and debunking those along with, like you said, any trauma or wounding, whether around relationships or anything that’s coming up around this. Usually, it is related to other people. In my opinion, these are what make ROCD one of the most, if not the most, complex OCD subtypes to weed through because we’re also sent all these messages that no doubt mean don’t you really do have to leave. You should leave. I would leave, right?

And that’s a lot to weed through, but it’s a beautiful invitation and doorway to breaking free, recognizing and breaking free from the OCD cycle, and practicing deeper and greater levels of self-trust because no one knows what’s best for you, better than you do.

Carrie: At the end of the podcast, I like to ask our guests to share a story of hope, which is a time in which you received hope from God or another person since we’re called Hope for Anxiety and OCD.

Samara: I’d be happy to share. I’m sure there are so many that I could, but the one that’s coming to my mind really has to do with my relationship, but not necessarily the ROCD because it happened after I had really come to a level of mastery around the ROCD.

But a while back, my husband was diagnosed with OCD and ADHD. We’re a fun bunch over here sometimes, and he had a really rough mental health year after just a trying time in his life, and his mental health was really struggling. I noticed the toll it was taking on me and our family, and there was a point at which I just felt some hopelessness as a part of me knew.

Of course, we’re going to get through this. Of course, as a resilient human, everything will work out and be okay. But it’s almost it was more of a surrender. I don’t know how to solve this. I’ve tried everything I can. It’s really many ways out of my control. And I wrote a letter to God, and I just journaled and wrote out in present tense words like how I was deciding my life was now, and the ease around it and the joy around it.

Not that it was perfect at all, but there was a lot of connection, and it felt healthy and grounded for me, him, and a kid for everyone. I believe that this wasn’t a coincidence. Literally, two or three weeks later, his prescription had changed. This was a prescription that was really common.

It’s always been known about his psychiatrist already knew about it. And he just got on this prescription that managed it to the extent that it was night and day different. He was then able to, and the tools he used to manage and regulate himself finally worked. I’m not saying medication is for everyone, but I felt my letter had been received and then just kind of forgot I even wrote the letter.

The energy of practicing that surrender and being it’s, I can’t do this alone. I need help. Our family needs help. My husband is in pain and struggling, and just seeing the difference night and day and feeling so much better. It’s been a gift and a blessing.

Carrie: Thank you for sharing that.

Glad that your husband is doing better, too. Well, it was great having you on the show today, sharing your wisdom, and having a dialogue about this. I think it’s an important conversation. And what better time to put it out than around Valentine’s Day?

Samara: Exactly. A triggering time here for many.

Carrie: Yes.

I’m glad we were able to have this episode because relationship OCD doesn’t get talked about enough, and probably more people struggle with it than they actually realize.

Regardless of your relationship status this Valentine’s Day, I want you to know that you are fully and completely loved by God regardless of what you’re struggling with or how you feel about yourself. He’s absolutely crazy in love with you.

As always, thank you so much for listening. If you haven’t received our free download yet, Five Things Every Christian Struggling with OCD Needs to Know, please check it out at hopeforanxietyandocd/free.

Hope for Anxiety and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the use of myself or By the Well Counseling. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum.

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

79. Personal Story of Anxiety with Dr. Sherri Yoder

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 79. Personal Story of Anxiety with Dr. Sherri Yoder

Today on the show, I’m joined by Dr. Sherri Yoder, a former clinical psychologist and the founder and executive director of Thriving Thoughts Global. Dr. Sheri talks about her personal story of anxiety and how it led her to her work now in her non-profit organization.

  • Dr. Yoder’s story of struggling with anxiety 
  • Strategies she used to work through her own anxiety 
  • How she got involved in mental health prevention and education
  • More about her non-profit organization, Thriving Thoughts Global 

Related Resources:

Thriving Thoughts Global

More Personal Stories

Transcript

Carrie: Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD episode 79. Today on the show, we have a little bit of a unique episode. I mean, we’ve done these kinds before, but it’s kind of a combination of personal story and professional, um, inform. So I have Dr. Sherri Yoder, who is a former clinical psychologist and the founder and executive director of Thriving Thoughts Global, which is about mental healthcare prevention.

From Clinician to Patient: My Battle with Anxiety

So I’m really interested in that conversation that we’re gonna have Dr. Sherri.

You wanted to start out by talking about kind of your own personal story of anxiety.

Dr. Sherri: Thank you so much for having me Carrie and giving me the opportunity to share a little bit. I think it’s so important for us to not just normalize anxiety, but normalize how we respond to it.

Thanks for giving me the chance to do that. Years ago when I was practicing as a clinical psychologist. So it’s been almost maybe 10 years now. I had my first, what I would call major episode with anxiety. That was pretty chronic. It was both acute and chronic at the same time. It lasted a long time. It had to do with a lot of things.

It had, my thoughts had to do with some spiritual fears, but also some professional fears. Somewhat related to being an imposter and that sort of thing. But being found out just irrational fear of being found out, what am I gonna be found out about? I keep up with my CE’s. I do the things I do therapy. Like I’m good.

I’m good at my business, you know, all of that, but there were certainly irrational fears that started to develop. And so what happened during that time is it got so bad that the only time that I wasn’t having a spiraling thoughts that would kind of physically take me out at the knees was when I was in therapy when I was doing therapy with other people because I was like, I was zoned in, I was focused on them and it was like a freedom to a degree because I didn’t have to be inside my head.

I could be outside of my head. And so that was really the only relief that I got during that time. And I’d say that that ran about four to five months to the point where I knew it was unsustainable, I knew I had to do something. I had to respond to it differently, or I was gonna have to check myself in somewhere because it was getting that bad.

I say that to say that I was never formally diagnosed. I was a clinical psychologist. I was the one that diagnosed other people. And certainly, I could have met the criteria for a number of different anxiety-related disorders. But what happened during that time is what served as the catalyst for the work that I do now. And it was a deep, intimate understanding of what it’s like to deal with potentially debilitating anxiety. And so what happened is I became a stronger clinician in that regard, but I became a more compassionate human as well. So I’m thankful for that experience. And since then that set me on the path to realize that everything that I go through, no matter how scary or so badly I wanna avoid it or painful, it is. There is a way to use that. Not just to help other people, but to grow me.

Carrie: That’s good. I’m glad you brought up imposter syndrome because I think that’s a thing that a lot of people who are in professional careers have and it’s something that people think well, okay. I’m really educated.

I’m functional. I mean, I go to work every day. Like, not just that, but like I’m my achiever. And they don’t necessarily always recognize that anxiety within themselves or that thought process that is really fueled by anxiety of I’m never quite good enough. I’ve always gotta kind of do better. There’s always more that I could be doing for myself.

Dr. Sherri: Yeah. And as a clinician, I think, you know, this, Carrie. You have a serious responsibility on your hands, right?

Carrie: Sure.

The Importance of Recognizing Vulnerability and Its Connection to Anxiety

Dr. Sherri: You’re dealing with the personal lives of people. And there is a level of, there’s an onus that comes with that to honor that, to be reverent of that. And I think that led to one of the things that I since learned about anxiety for myself and for other people I’ve now, since I left the field, I do some individual work called thought coaching. So I help people with their thoughts. But what I’ve learned is that there’s two things that happen with anxiety. One is that I had to know when I was most vulnerable.

Carrie: Oh, That’s good. Right.

Dr. Sherri: I had to be aware of that. When I was most vulnerable was when I was alone. And that was particularly problematic for me because I was single and didn’t have any children work was like, “Yay. I’m not alone.” And then when I got out of work, that’s all I was, was alone. And so there’s a tendency there to not want to be alone, but I had to be alone in my vulnerability in order to address it because if I avoided that. I was never gonna get to a place where I could address it. And to be clear, I didn’t do that work alone. I employed the help of some friends and things, but to know where your vulnerability is because if you’re gonna respond to it differently, you have to prepare. Yeah, right. And so my vulnerability was in the alone spaces.

So that’s the first thing that I needed to be aware of that helped me through that. And then the second thing was to understand that all anxiety, I don’t care how irrational it is. I don’t care how out of the blue, the thoughts are. They always stem from some nugget of truth. So going back to this, like, oh, you’re gonna be found out. You’re a fake, you’re a fraud. Like what? No, I’m actually a licensed clinical psychologist. Right. I have my doctorate. There’s nothing for me to be found out about. It related back to me to the negative truth of that onus of that responsibility that you have in that role.

And so I think about parents, mothers that I’ve worked with and they have responsibilities for their children. And very much of some of their thought worlds and the anxiety-related thoughts that they have are related to fears of something happening to their children. Right? Well, that is where that little nugget of truth. I have this responsibility here. So, whether that’s in a job or whatever it is, whatever kind of has your attention, has your focus, that’s also your vulnerability and the source of that kind of nugget of truth for the thoughts to spiral into total opposite of truth thoughts,

Carrie: Right? So it’s like teasing out. What is the actual negative truth, which for you was, I do have some responsibility to care for people. However, the fear piece was you’re gonna really screw somebody up. You’re really gonna mess this up, being able to separate those out and tease that out was helpful for you. It sounds like.

Replacing Anxiety with Truth: The Power of Thought Coaching

Dr. Sherri: Oh my goodness. Yeah, because then I was able to. When I gave myself permission to say, okay, this makes sense, but it doesn’t make sense that it’s gone, like so far to the left of where it was, right. So far from the needle of truth. But it makes sense now that is a source of my worry. And so then I could stop berating myself. “What’s wrong with you? You’re just crazy.” No, no, no, no, no. My mind just took this idea and kind of blew it way out of proportion almost without my permission. And so to be able to kind of step outside and see that is really what my saving grace was, because then what I did, I’ll share with you really quickly, what I did, which I didn’t know then would become my life’s work of learning to take the thoughts that we have in our minds and evaluate them for veracity. Are they real? Or are they lies? That’s what I say, are they truth or are they lies? And if they’re lies, okay, then they’re not serving me. Well, how do I replace that with truth? So what I did during that time, a friend of mine had asked me. He said, “Sherri, I want you to write down for me. I’m a woman of faith. I want you to write down all of God’s promises. And so I did, and I didn’t believe half of them at the time because I mean, there was stuff going on in my mind and so I wrote them all down. And so then what I did is I pulled out the language that I used with myself in those moments of anxiety, of heightened anxiety, the phrases that I said, you’re a fraud you’re gonna be found out. You don’t know what you’re doing, whatever the thoughts were.

I wrote all of those down on one side of the paper. And then on the opposite side of the paper, I wrote down the truths of what I knew to be true. Even if I didn’t. Yeah. Then what I did is every moment when I was having these anxiety thoughts instead of letting it spiral out of control, I immediately opened that book and I scanned down to the one that, the thought that came into my head and I looked to the right of it and I said aloud the corresponding truth and why was that important.

I didn’t know at the time that that was important that I did that, but it was important because I understood and came to realize this about anxiety. And depression or anything like that, something that was so liberating for me to know and something that just enlarged my compassion for people was when you’re in that space and people say “it’s all in your head or whatever. ” Yeah, you’re right. It is. And I can’t get out of there.

Carrie: I’m stuck. I’m trapped. Yeah.

Dr. Sherri: Right. And so what I learned was having a physical, external reminder was what I needed because when I was in that space, I couldn’t think of anything else. I needed something written down outside of my head that I could ground me to a degree because if left to my own thoughts, it was just gonna spiral out of control. Having that external reminder was key to fighting that battle of anxiety and that composition notebook fell apart Carrie. I mean, I opened that thing. I must have opened it every, when I was alone, like every minute because it was nonstop.

Open it, read it, open it, read it and then shut it down. Okay. I’m okay. Nope.

Carrie: You would ike carry it around with you?

Dr. Sherri: Everywhere. And I’ve carried that habit. With me to this day for different, like, I have sticky notes. I have everywhere. I have them in my car. I have them in my wallet, in my kitchen, in my desk, wherever of just different things to remind myself of.

I choose to speak kindly to myself. Different things to remind myself of. And I move them around because our brain habituates to the same thing in the same place. Anyway, besides that it took work, there were times when I thought, “oh my gosh, this isn’t working. It’s not stopping,” but I remained faithful to that work to doing something different.

And what I learned is since then, this is 10 years ago. My tension, my tendency towards anxiety that hasn’t gone away. But what’s changed has been my response to it. And I taught myself, I taught my brain a new habit. It’s possible. It takes a heck of a lot of work. And a lot of perseverance, but to me it’s so worth it. And now it’s a lifelong practice that I know not to believe the first thought that comes into my mind to evaluate it and then decide what to do with it. So that’s kind of led to my work now.

Carrie: That’s great. We had another guest on that talked about having kind of like a “911 note” on her phone. She’s a health coach now, but she was trying to lose weight. And so she had various things on her 911 note. Yes. You know, note that she would just pull up and there were scripture verses and positive affirmations and so forth. And so every time she kind of wanted to slip back into all patterned, she got that out and went through it and I think.

I appreciate what you’re saying about it being work because unfortunately, obviously, like we live in a society of instant gratification and to really do something like essentially what you’re talking about is thought replacement. It does. It takes effort and it takes repetition. You know, anytime we’re trying to learn something new like our brain is literally creating new pathways.

Yes. And that’s not gonna happen just overnight or, oh, well, I tried to do that like one or two times, and I just wasn’t feeling it and I don’t think it’s gonna work for me. That kind of lingo is like, I want people to hear, like, it is hard to work through your anxiety, but you can do it. You can, you can work through some of these things and learn new behaviors and new patterns and new coping skills with life to have like a better outcome.

Did you end up going to therapy for yourself? I’m just curious.

The Lifelong Practice: Working Through Anxiety and Building Resilience

Dr. Sherri: I did not. Well, that depends on how you look at it informally sure because I have a lot of colleagues. I did process this with the number of people. And I did not keep it to myself. I think that’s the other thing that’s so important is, and unfortunate in the realm of mental health, I get it. We have HIPAA laws, we have privacy laws. But I think an unfortunate side effect of that is the propagation that I’m not supposed to have these problems. We kind of hide it in these four walls behind closed doors. I can only talk about this with my therapist, or I’m not even gonna go to therapy because if I go to therapy, then I admit there’s something wrong with me. I think it’s about shedding light on the normalization of our human, emotional experiences and understanding that we all have them to varying degrees, to varying intensities, varying propensities and varying seasons. I don’t claim Carrie to be out of the anxiety woods. Right.

I think that’s the other kind of faulty belief is like, I’m over it, but that’s the trick about anxiety and or depression is it comes back when you least expect it, but there are new ways that you can respond to it. And so I, for me, It’s not believing that I’m never gonna be impacted by it again, instead, it’s believing that I’m gonna be able to not only just cope with it, but to use it to be stronger.

I actually have this little sticky note here. I have to read it to you. It says, “A bird sitting in a tree is never afraid of the branch breaking because his trust is not on the branch but in his own wings,

Carrie: I can get up and fly if this branch starts to crack it’s okay.

Dr. Sherri: That’s right.

Carrie: How did you make this shift from, you know, mental health treatment to getting involved in mental health prevention and starting a non- profit.

Dr. Sherri: A  very, very intense story short, which I think was birthed in this season of anxiety that I just described to you. But I started having trouble sleeping at night, quite literally. And I thought, man, I think that people need to know that if they’re having these feelings, there’s nothing wrong with them because I think that’s the other thing that gives.

The feeling more power than it should have is that I’m not supposed to feel this way. Right. And so I said, how can I take this message to people that aren’t gonna go see a shrink? Cause listen, in my line of work, I can tell you how many times I heard people literally say, you don’t go to see a shrink unless you wanna be crazy or right.

That’s what you do. I used to have people walking into my office like this, like hiding their face, cuz they were ashamed of. And so I thought, how can I start a conversation about these common human experiences and emotional experiences and thought experiences that we have to bring a new sense of enlightenment of helping people understand that they have this mental and emotional health t take care of and how they can do that. And so I stopped taking insurance. I said, I’m gonna stop diagnosing, I’m gonna stop treating and I’m gonna start educating people. So I just started speaking for free. Then I kind of made my way through some organizational consulting stuff, cuz those are curated, captive audiences to a degree and speaking at various civic organizations, networking groups, that kind of thing.

And then I did that for about four years and then I ealized mid-pandemic first year of the pandemic in 2020, how do I make this movement? Something bigger than me and how do I make it reach further than what I alone can do? And so then the idea was start a non-profit. I started the nonprofit thriving thoughts, global.

The whole idea is to educate people through conversation and principle and thought strategies and things like that. But to educate women in particular, because I believe they’re the ones who are the influencers that talk to their families, talk to their best friends, talk to their kids, right. So if we can teach women how to do this, then they’re the ones that are gonna have that ripple effect.

How to understand and not be so blown away by the thoughts and feelings that we have, but to use them to their benefit, to use them to their advantage. And so that’s what we’re doing there, and we’re doing that through several different means. We’re creating webinars that we’re offering monthly, we’re creating a new podcast that has like 10 to 15-minute stories of women who have gone through maybe a challenging experience and how they used one of our, what we call thriving thoughts, pillars, to learn how to grow through that, to learn, to respond differently through that, so that it strengthened them mentally and emotionally and relationally as well.

And then starting conversations about just some of the things that in our Western culture. I think our foundational influences in depression and anxiety that started at a very, very young age that have to do with comparison and measuring up and that sort of stuff. So just helping offering and alternative conversation about mental health and teaching people that there’s a way to protect their mental health, to build it and to prevent things like deep experiences of anxiety and depression.

Carrie: I think that’s what you’re talking about is interesting. This concept that everyone has at some point or another, like some type of mental health struggle. And really, if you walk into a counselor’s office, they could slap any kind of diagnosis on you because I mean, if you just read the DSM, you’re like, “oh, I, yeah. I’ve had that symptom” and you’re reading some other symptom. I mean, don’t ever read it because next thing you know, you know, you’re gonna be like, well, I have this

Dr. Sherri: land it’s ike, don’t go to WebMD if you have a headache.

Carrie: That’s interesting. And I think you are right that, I mean, I’m definitely a big proponent of therapy and I’ve had a lot of therapy myself. That’s been super helpful, but I do also recognize there are some people that they’re just not gonna do it. They’re never gonna do that kind of work. And maybe they can be reached a different way. So a lot of education. And what is your podcast gonna be called?

Dr. Sherri: It’s called the Fortified Woman podcast. It’s helping people to understand that it’s possible to look at situations differently. And when you change the way you look at them through your thoughts, your outcome is different. Am I the woman who always expects the worst of a situation? Because if that’s the case, I’m probably gonna experience. There’s all sorts of psychological evidence for this confirmation bias and priming of our cognitions and what we expect and that sort of thing. And so it’s about having these. Let me clarify. Treatment has value and prevention has value and both can coexist and they should. Right now, unfortunately, the predominant narrative around mental health. If you look at, you know, May is mental health awareness month, right? It’s really not mental health awareness month, at least in the way people talk about it. It’s really mental illness awareness month.

Let’s talk about those people who have those challenges. No, no, no, no, no, no. We are all those people. We all have these opportunities to go down a crisis hole. And so let’s start having those conversations. Let’s talk about not how to cope with life, but how to grow through life. And it really is an idea of thriving over surviving.

Carrie: I mean, at some point or another, we’re all gonna hit a difficult challenge in life and you don’t necessarily know what that’s gonna be or when that’s gonna happen. But I think like what you’re saying is you can allow those things to crush and break you, or you can say, okay, how can I work through this and become stronger and become better as a result of that?

Yes. Do you feel like your faith has really impacted you in regards to that. Just, I don’t know, thinking about things in the Bible related to perseverance and going through trials. And did you really look at that stuff when you were going through the heavy anxiety?

Dr. Sherri: I think for me, it was more about God’s design for us. There’s all these promises in the Bible like your promised peace, you’re promised an abundant life. And if we’re promised that, then what are we missing out on if we’re not experiencing that. And a lot of. Really boils down to the way we think. I mean, scripture has a lot of examples with think this, not that right. Think about things above versus things below. And, and when you do that, you can kind of extrapolate and say, oh, this thing below has a purpose.

It can have an eternal purpose or a relational purpose, a discipleship purpose. So, yes, my personal journey has been deeply informed by that, but also deeply informed by my clinical training and expertise and experiences with people that have been so formative that have just allowed me to catch a glimpse of the truth is that we were made in God’s image, every person.

And if we’re made in God’s image, when we have these feelings, there’s nothing wrong with. If you look at the life of Jesus, Jesus had all of these feelings. Well with one exception and that’s anxiety, that’s probably a different spiritual conversation, but there are things we can do. Take every thought captive, right? Evaluate every thought. Is it true? Is it a lie? What am I believing right now? What rabbit hole am I going down right now? And is there another trail for me to follow? So, yeah, my faith has definitely informed my personal growth, but also my professional growth and help giving me insight into what people are facing up here, what women in particular are dealing with in their thought world. It’s been a very deeply humbling and gratifying experience. And I would say that for the thriving thoughts, global movement, it’s certainly faith informed because I’m the founder of it. Mm-hmm but it’s not faith-based. Our desire is to propagate hope with regard to the way that you are naturally designed to be able to take thoughts captive without necessarily speaking Jesus over you.

Carrie:  If you could go back in time, what would you tell your younger self who was dealing with anxiety?

Dr. Sherri: This is probably not the most popular answer, but I really wouldn’t tell her anything. I would say, keep doing what you’re doing. You’re discovering the right path for you. I would just be on the sidelines kind of cheering like “good job. You’ve got this.” You can do this. You can figure this out. I think that comes from the space nobody can tell us exactly what to do. We can give ideas, we can give information, you can offer something, but really, it depends on it’s up to that person to pick it up. And so when they pick it up, then they kind of go, “oh, now I’ve got some interest,” but that really has to be a thing of the self.

I don’t know that anything I know for me, I’m a very stubborn person have been since I was a kid. Reframe that as tenacious, but if you tell me something, I’m not gonna learn by it. I have to do it.

Carrie: I think that’s interesting that if we don’t go through these struggles, it doesn’t get us to where we need to be. You know, that’s just part of the life process. And so maybe that encourages somebody today that like, you’re probably on the path of where you need to be and you just don’t necessarily know it right now. You’re probably like, what am I doing here? And why am I dealing with all this anxiety here? Why am I dealing with this? O C D instead of saying like, okay, well somehow this is all gonna weave together and I’ll look back. Yeah. It makes sense why I had that struggle and something good and something beautiful. Grew out of it in the end.

Dr. Sherri: Yeah. And I would say you don’t even have to wait for the end. One of the things it’s really, it’s about the process. We live in such a culture. You were referring to instant gratification, but we live in such a culture. That’s always looking for the success story. And I think the success story is not on the other side. The success is in the doing it’s in the right here right now like what am I doing right here right now? That’s the win? That’s the success? Am I doing something to learn in this moment? Am I doing something beneficial for myself? Am I doing something to grow right now? Or am I doing something to regress? because this is it. This is all we have is right here right now.

Carrie: And sometimes getting out of bed is a success. Yeah,

Dr. Sherri: Yeah absolutely. It’s what am I doing? Right. And I will say this, that particularly in Western culture, we have this underlying belief that suffering is not supposed to exist.

Carrie: It’s a very unhealthy belief for us to have. But

Dr. Sherri: But it is a cultural narrative. I read once there was a woman from Georgia, an academic from Georgia. I can’t think of her name at the moment, but she said we have an epidemic of people who are unhappy about being unhappy. We’re not supposed to be happy all the time. we can just start to talk about that, have that conversation, then we’re not gonna be so blown away when we’re happy.

Carrie: Thank you for sharing your personal story and as well as your insights, we’ll put the link to your nonprofit in the show notes.

Dr. Sherri: Thank you so much. It was a good conversation today.

Dr. Sherri: Thanks Carrie.

 Carrie: I think there were several great takeaways that came out of this show with Dr. Sherry so I hope that you picked up a nugget that will help you kind of on your journey of progress. If you haven’t checked out our website, yet we have a website hope for anxiety and O C d.com that I just wanna encourage you to look at. We’re trying to do some updates to that and make it more searchable. So more people will be able to find out about our show. On the front page, you can sign up for our email newsletter and get a free audio file of color breathing, which is something that I’ve used with clients and they’ve really enjoyed it. They kind of can help you relax and calm down when you’re utilizing something like deep breathing. Sometimes it helps to have a mental focus. So this gives you that mental focus .

Thank you so much for listening.

Hope for anxiety and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling.

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

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

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 78. Bible Study from “Should” to “Want” with Keith Ferrin

I’m privileged to be interviewing  Keith Ferrin. Keith is a speaker and author, with a passion for helping people read, study, and enjoy the Bible.

  • How Keith developed his passion to help others read and enjoy the bible
  • How to internalize the scripture rather than memorize 
  • Reading the Bible from a relational perspective 
  • How can people fall in love and enjoy reading their Bible? 
  • Keith Ferrin’s Book and Online Courses

Related Resources:

Keith Ferrin

More Podcast Episodes

Transcript

Carrie: Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD, episode 78. I am your host, Carrie Bock. And if you’re new to our show, we are all about reducing shame, increasing hope, and developing healthier connections with God and others. While we’ve had several episodes about prayer on the show. I realized that we really have not talked about reading the Bible and I ran into a guest.

That would be good for that. So today on the show, we have Keith Ferrin who is a public speaker, and author of how to enjoy reading your Bible among other books that he’s written. So welcome to the show.

Keith: Thanks for having me, Carrie. Good to be here.

Carrie: You’re really passionate about not just people reading the Bible because it’s, they should, or because it’s a have to, but you really want people to study the Bible because they want to, and because they enjoy it and it builds their relationship with God.

How did you get on that journey of helping other people?

Keith: It wasn’t quick where I can point to the actual day when it started though, cuz I was one of those kids. I was raised in the church and I found that I was kind of one of those typical people that I run into now, which is for most people who are Christians, they’re reading the Bible is the one aspect of their life with Jesus that is more of a should than.

That we want to gather in community and we want to hear good preaching and we want to sing and worship, and we want to make a difference in the world and the Bible comes up and we go, yeah, I should read that more. And that was me for the first 20 years. I was a Christian and the shift took place over the course of about a year or two.

And it began on April 18th of 93. And it was something that I was a full-time youth and worship pastor at a small church plant in Tacoma, Washington, a few days prior to that, I was having lunch with a buddy of mine who was a youth pastor at another church in town. And my friend mark said, Keith, I don’t know what to make of this.

There’s this guy coming to our church Sunday night, who has memorized the entire gospel of Luke. And he gets up on stage with no sets or props or costumes or anything. And he. Quotes it, and while he quotes it, he kind of acts it out. And I just remember thinking, okay, that is a lot. And are people really gonna listen to that for two hours?

It’s just my idea of memorized quoted scripture transported me back to when I was eight-year-old, a second grader scared in front of a big church, quoting John three 16 as fast as I. So memorized quoted scripture and good drama. Didn’t quite line up for me in my brain. I went honestly, no great kind of spiritual motivation.

I thought it’d be fascinating, but I thought I would kinda sneak out after a little while and because I didn’t think it would be good in engaging. And I tell people what happened for me that night is the living word of God went from being a phrase to a reality that I find as I travel around the world for most people, the living word of God is a phrase that they wish was a reality.

And it has nothing to do with whether we believe it’s true but believing something’s true and believing something’s alive and engaging and fun. Those are two very different things. No, not only did I stay through the whole thing, but I went up to this guy afterwards, his name is Bruce, and I just said, “Hey, they mentioned you were gonna be in the Seattle area for a week doing these presentations at different churches and colleges. What could I take you to lunch tomorrow?” And our lunch turned into picking him up at noon and dropping him back off at 9:00 PM. And we spent the whole day together and he just challenged me to soak in bigger chunks of scripture to sit down.

And he said this, if, what if instead of studying this little piece and this little piece and then memorizing this verse and this verse, he said, what if you just took a book of the Bible and you just soaked in it until you knew it, you just hung out there until you know it. And I had heard my whole life about studying the Bible and memorizing verses.

I’d never heard anybody talk about soaking in it and hanging out with it. So I just decided for the summer of 93, I would. Read Philippians every day, Philippians takes about 15, 16 minutes. If you’re just kind of reading at a normal rate of speed and I had read it, but it had always taken four days because it’s four chapters.

And I was told somewhere along the line, you’re supposed to read a chapter a day, but I realized after about day two or three, that I was finally reading this letter. The way that you would actually read a letter, if you sent me a letter and it was four pages and the first line on page one, I give. Thanks every time I remember I wouldn’t read page one and then go, okay, I’m gonna save page two for tomorrow.

and take

Carrie: four days to read the letter.

Keith: Yeah. And so you’d read it and then you’d read it again. Over the course of that summer, I realized that I was making more connections. I was understanding it better. I was enjoying it more. I was remembering it, it was sticking in my mind and it was just such an engaging process that, that honestly, I got to the end of the summer and that I pretty much knew the whole thing, word for word without ever really trying because I had just read it 45 or 50 times. Think of the number of movie lines, you know, or song lyrics, you know, that you watched the movie or heard the song a bunch of times and you didn’t even try to memorize it. You just know it now.

And so that’s actually when I stopped even using the word memorize and started using the word internalized, cuz it was really knowing it, understanding it and memorization was kind of a small piece. Yeah.

Carrie: Can we camp out on that for a moment? Because I like that internalize versus memorize. Like when you think about memorizing something, you’re essentially regurgitating the material, right?

Like, oh, I memorized this line and then I’m saying it back to somebody talk about like the internalizing. What’s the difference there?

Keith: The essence of it can be summed up in kind of this sentence. Internalizing is about knowing the word and memorizing is about knowing the words. Ah, and so that idea, if you’ve internalized something, then you can probably quote it.

I mean, whether you can kind of perform it like Bruce did. And like, quite honestly, now I do, that’s a different level of work. I mean, to get it something stage ready, but to be able to have it where you can say it, it can come to your God can bring it to your mind. Whenever he wants to that when I’ve internalized something, if I’ve memorized something, then I don’t know that just by the fact of me being able to quote.

I don’t know that that’s transforming me to be more like Jesus or that’s really saturating my mind. But if I have internalized it, then I feel like when I had done that with Philippians and then the next year in 94, I made one new year’s resolution to internalize the gospel of John. I just wanted to read Bible. I wanted the life of Jesus to just saturate my life and mind.

And so I just read the gospel, John over and over again until I had it internalized. And when I did that, oh, and that’s why I say this process kind of took a year or two for. That as I had Philippians kind of both hidden in my heart and my mind, which is really what I think of as internalization and the gospel, John as well.

I understood over the course of the next year or two, what meditating on scripture is all about because you see things throughout scripture, whether it’s Psalm 1:19 or whether it’s Joshua. the do not let this book of the law depart from your mouth meditate. Day and night the word meditation and meditate on and think about and ponder and remember are woven all throughout scripture.

And I realized for the first time in 93 and 94 and into 95, what that was like because I could actually think about scripture. At times other than when I had my Bible open. Right? Yeah. I mean, once I had hidden it in both my heart and my head, I understood it and I knew it kind of word for word knew it, then God could bring it to my mind whenever he wanted, I could be walking down the street, whether it’s I needed a word of correction or comfort or encouragement or inspiration or whatever it is that you know, or whether I was talking to somebody else and they needed that.

I just felt like it was much more. Relational and conversational. And that’s what happened when internalized. And so I just found that all growing up, I tell people it’s just interesting that we, the first verse we typically have kids memorized in Sunday. School is John three 16, man. It’s a good one.

That’s a good place to start. But typically the second one is in Psalm one 19, where it says, I have hidden your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you. And we do that one, but typically when we talk. Actually knowing the word, we’re not talking about hiding it in our heart. We’re talking about hiding it in our head.

And so the second verse we teach kids is really about hiding it in our heart, but we don’t frequently equip them or ourselves to really build that understanding. And that love for God’s word. Into our memorization process. And I think when we combine those two, that’s where internalization happens. Yeah.

Carrie: I’m just kind of processing things from my own childhood. I think, cuz I grew up in the church and there was this element of almost like studying the Bible, like a school textbook mm-hmm but you were just supposed to know that you were supposed to read the Bible and nobody really sat down and said, this is how you read the Bible.

Or if you did, you may have gotten like a devotional book or two, and then it’s like, okay, well, I guess I’m supposed to go out and buy another devotional, or now you can there’s apps, you know? Okay. Well, I guess I’ll go get another devotional on the app. And one of the struggles I always had with those was you had two or three verses and then someone’s life story was really the rest of it.

And there are plenty of devotionals out there like that. And some of them there’s a time and a season for some of those. But it doesn’t really help you get into the word of God, right? Like you’re saying if you’re not actually reading the words of God and getting that in your head. I had a conversation with my husband a while back where I said, I have such a hard time memorizing scripture.

Like I really wanna know what it says, and I wanna be able to quote it. And he just really encouraged me not to get so hung up on saying it word for word, cuz I’m like, there’s these really long sentences in the Bible. And even if you try to break it down by phrase and it’s not how we typically talk or communicate.

And he said, “yeah, but it’s more important that you understand the essence of the scripture of what it is speaking to you rather than just being able to quote it back.” And I was like, “oh yeah, you’re right on that one. Reading the Bible like it was intended to be reading the letters. It was a letter really soaking in and reading some of the same things over and over.

How else can people really fall in love and enjoy reading their Bible?

Keith: That’s what I spend hours writing things and all that, but I’ll give you a couple of kind of nuggets. One is really what I call our position. You can remember these two by thinking of your position and your process. Your position is really your mindset, your approach to scripture.

I think that so often, and you just alluded to this, that so often when we’re 11, 12, 13, 14, we’re supposed to start reading the Bible on our own and having this quiet time or whatever it is, we are almost taught the Bible like a textbook and we’re approaching. Informationally. And I say, if your position is relational, instead of informational, yeah.

It will change everything. So many of us, we breed the Bible to learn what God wants us to know, so we can do what he wants us to do and live a life that honors and glorifies him. And that all sounds well and good, except it’s not the purpose of the Bible. The purpose of the Bible is the only book that’s ever been written with the purpose of drawing you into a relationship with its author.

The purpose of the Bible is relational. And I think let’s say that you and your husband moved here to the Seattle area and became friends with Carrie and me. And we said that we were gonna get together for dinner once a. Over the course of those weeks to come, we would learn things about each other. I’m not saying there’s not information in the Bible.

We would learn information about each other. And how did you and your husband meet and how long have you been married? Do you have kids and where are the different places you’ve lived and what do you do for work? And what do you like to listen to? I mean, we’d learn tons of information about each other, but imagine.

You and your husband coming to our house the first week and my wife and I pull out our notepads and across the top, it says, here are 54 questions. We need to ask Carrie and her husband. So if they’re gonna be our friends. And so how did you meet? Do you have any kids? How long have you been married? When did he brought you to Seattle?

What do you do for fun? What sports do you like? What music do you like? What tech do you like? What blah, blah, blah. You and your husband might be polite, but on the way home, you’re talking about how can we make sure we never have to come.

Carrie: Super awkward dinner.

Keith: I think that so often we go to the Bible and we’re taught, read what it says and figure out what it means and how it’s gonna apply.

And everything is kind of in that mindset. And I’m not saying those are bad questions, but if those are the only questions, I don’t think it leads to enjoying the Bible. Whereas the irony is that the more relational our approach, the more. Information will actually learn. I mean, think of the people that you’ve learned the most from the people that can correct your mindset, your attitude, when it’s off, that can comfort you the best.

I mean, those are also the people that you watch movies with and have a pizza with. And the people that you’re in deepest relationship with are the people who you learn the most from and who comfort you the best. We know that as people. And I think that if God is our heavenly father, why do we think that every day he wants to teach us something and that some days he just doesn’t wanna play with us and just enjoy the relationship.

And so there’s that relational mindset that I think is a huge piece of that. And that’s, that’s what I call. And kind of what’s our position as we come to the Bible. And the second is really the process and some of what I’ve already mentioned about kind of reading a big chunk that certainly falls into the process piece.

But what I realized is I was reading Philippians that, you know, every day for that summer, and then I. Read the gospel of John the next year. And I didn’t read that. Obviously, those two books are different. Philippians takes 15 minutes and John takes a little bit less than two hours. So when I was reading John during 94, that wasn’t something where I was reading the whole gospel every day.

I bet in the year there were probably two or three days outta the whole year where I sat down for two hours and just read the whole thing. Most days I’d read for 30 minutes or something like. But over the course of that 93, 94 timeframes, I kind of accidentally put some things together, which is realizing that when we line up our process of Bible study with how God has wired our brains to naturally and enjoyably learn anything, it changes everything that think of anything that, you know, anybody that’s listening to this podcast, think of something that you know really well and that you.

I don’t care whether it’s sports or music or cooking or technology, whatever it is, I’m guessing that you learned it from the general to the specific. You didn’t learn a detail and then add a little detail and then add a little detail. I love to cook Italian food, but if I’m gonna teach somebody how to cook Italian food, the first lesson is not gonna be all of the uses for basil.

If you’re gonna cook Italian food, you should probably know something about basil, but it’s not the first lesson. Right. And approaching the Bible from the general to the specific is 180 degrees opposite from how most of what I was taught the first 25 years, I was a Christian about how to study the. Yeah, analogy that frequently helps this idea make sense for people is I call it the movie analogy that if you and I, when your husband and you come over and we’re hanging out and we decide, let’s say that the four of us are gonna watch a movie.

I mean, imagine if after seeing one, I paused the movie and said, let’s discuss. And then we watched scene two and I paused it again and said, let’s discuss, wouldn’t be long before you and your husband would be like, just put the remote down. Let’s watch the movie after we’ve watched the movie. If you want to talk about a scene or a character or a plot twist or something like that, we can have a specific conversation, but we kind of wanna watch the movie first.

And I think from a process standpoint, one of the reasons that so many people are confused by the Bible, they’re bored by the Bible. They don’t remember what they read in the morning. By two o’clock in the afternoon is because we’re studying the Bible. Like we’re studying the scenes of a movie. We’ve never watched.

We know what Philippians four 13, I can do everything through him who gives me strength. We know what that means, but if I say what’s Philippians about we go, I don’t know. And I’ve fought the good fight. I’ve finished the race. I’ve kept the faith. We’ve heard sermons on that and we’ve seen it written about, and we’ve seen blog posts on it and all this kind of stuff.

And we don’t even know what book that’s in. Let alone. It’s second Timothy, by the way. So we don’t know what second Timothy’s about. We don’t know what was going on with Paul at the time. Whereas I tell people if you took second Timothy, which is that’s even shorter than Philippians, it’s four chapters, but they’re shorter chapters.

So it’ll take you probably 12 minutes. If you took second Timothy and you read second Timothy in its entirety every day for a month, and then you studied it verse by verse. After that you’d never read. I fought the good fight. I finished the race. I’ve kept the faith the same. Because when you got to that, which is toward halfway through chapter four, you’d have such an understanding of the whole picture.

Kinda like again, going back to the movies that if you’ve ever heard somebody, a speaker, whether it’s your, a pastor or just another speaker, that’s used a movie clip in their speaking and you see the movie clip. If you haven’t seen the movie, that movie clip, you can still kind of be inspired by it, or you might learn something or whatever.

But it’s nowhere near as rich an experience as if you’ve seen the movie that the clip comes from, because then when you see that clip, the whole movie floods back. Right? Right. So from a process standpoint, when we read more of it, when we read bigger chunks and when we then read that again and again, and soak in one, when we devote a month or two months or something like that, to reading the Bible and getting kind of the big picture overview.

And then we naturally move to the next place that we move, which is then looking at smaller pieces, looking at a chapter and then looking at a paragraph or one theme or something like that. And you’ll understand it because then you’re looking at that little detail in the context of the whole, which is how anything that we know deeply never met a musician that learns a song, one measure at a.

Carrie: I think you’re really talking about finding out about the character of God, which can only be found out over time. You can’t just like, I can’t know my husband all at once. I knew his character by watching his actions day by day by day and watching how he interacted with other people and watching how he interacted with me.

The words that he said, did they line up with what he actually did and those types of things. And I feel like that’s what we have to do with the Bible. We can’t know the character of God by one verse or one chapter or even one book. We have to really learn over time as we walk with him. And as we’re approaching the scripture that way, and then you have the surprises along the way.

I was talking one time and somehow we got on the conversation about milking cows mm-hmm and Steve, my husband. Oh, I’ve milked a cow. And I was like, you’ve milked a cow. I was like, I’ve never heard this story. You gotta tell me about that. he was like, well, yeah, I was, I had like ag because we grew up about an hour away from each other, but his area is not that way now, but it was a little bit more rural back then.

And I was in a little bit more of a suburb. So even though my mom milked cows growing up in Tennessee, I had never milked a cow. So I found this story very fascinating. Right. Anyway, I digress, but I think it helps us with situations. As we’re trying to walk on this earth when we can go back and point to not just, like you said, specific words, but, okay. What is the character of God through the Bible? That’s awesome.

Keith: Frequently people say, how do you go about studying the Bible? What do you do? And I don’t have time to kind of teach them my whole process of something. I’d boil things down to. Really asking four questions. And the first that you can take for any passage that you have, and the first question is that character of God, well, you know, what is this passage say about who God is?

And then looking at that, what does this passage say about what God has done? The third is what does this passage say about who I am or what I have or whatever, because of who God is and what he’s done. And then the fourth is really I’ve switched. It used to be kind of that one that I was raised on, which is what are you going to apply?

What’s your application? And I say, I’ve switched it a little bit to say, what is my response? Because I think sometimes that response is to apply something. Sometimes that response is to change your thinking or to correct something or whatever, or get rid of something or. Whatever, but sometimes our response is just to worship.

Sometimes our response is just to sit in silence. Sometimes our response is just to be amazed at how cool the story was. We just read. I think that when our question is, how can I apply this? Then that puts us in an informational mindset. Whereas if we say, what is my response? God may have something to teach you and have something for you to apply.

And if that’s the case, then apply it. But God may also just want to that particular day. Reveal something about just how much he loves you. And your response is to say, thank you. And then to go through the rest of your day. I think that idea of we need to learn something every day is just not bad. It’s just misdirected.

And

Carrie: I think that switching it from the concept of, I need to learn something versus I need to maybe experience the word of God today. I don’t know if that’s a good word to use there. It really takes down some of that intimidation that I think people have about approaching the Bible almost like they think they have to have a degree or something to learn from it.

But a lot of the Bible was written by some people that were educated and some people that were not formally educated. So just kind of going back even to the authors, the fact that you would have to approach it from an academic. Oh, I went to school for it is a little ridiculous for sure.

Keith: Absolutely.

Couldn’t agree.

Carrie: okay. Tell us a little bit about what’s coming up for you as far as books, or I know that you do speaking engagements. How can people find you as well?

Keith: Well the easiest way is keithferrin.com is my blog. Some of the things that we’ve talked about today, I mean, relational Bible study. Got a course on that. If you just search relational Bible study or just go to relational Bible study.com, that will take you. If that kind of how to study the Bible, if that’s something you struggle with or that internalized just last September recorded a brand new online course, teaching people my process of internalization and kind of how to hide it in your head and your heart.

And so keithferrincom/internalize is how to find that. The main thing, as far as books goes, it’s been fun. I have something called the Bible life community, which I started two weeks after the pandemic started for I’d had it in my mind for a couple years, but once all my speaking engagements were canceled and I had a bunch of time on my hands, I finally created this kind of online Bible study community.

I write a new Bible study. Every month. And sometimes it’s one month study. Sometimes it’s two months. Sometimes it’s a book study. Sometimes it’s a topic, things like that. But I guide people through that. We discuss it together in community. We have some live conversations over zoom and all that. That’s been really fun and I’ve taken the last several of these studies and turned them into books that, so it’s been crazy cuz I released six books in 20 years and then four books in the last six.

Just taking these Bible studies. And since they’re right there and I’ve been writing them anyway, I just turned them into these books that I call the scripture journey series. And so two of them have been topical, advent and lent when we walked the first one was advent coming up to Christmas and then lent going up to Easter.

And we did a book study on the book of Ephesians. Book study on the book of first Peter, if you go to Amazon and you search on my name, one of the things you’ll see there and all the covers kind of look similar, but there’s a series of books called the scripture journey series that are kind of these combinations of the utilizing the process that we’ve talked about, but also having a devotional aspect to it.

So a lot of small groups and churches and things like that will take some of those because most of them are 40-day scripture journeys is what I call ’em and those have been really fun to see people walk through those.

Carrie: You did a blog post that I saw on your website about messing up during one of your talks. It was great.

Keith: That was the craziest because as you know, as I kind of, we didn’t talk a ton about, but as I alluded to, I saw Bruce do the gospel of Luke and then started three years later in March of 96, I started performing in quotes, the gospel of John, but then also present different books of the Bible, short books about the way that he did with Luke.

So I did that. I’ve been doing that for 26 years of kind of doing the biblical storytelling. It was last fall. I think that was all the week. It was, I think it was the weekend after Thanksgiving or something like that. And I’d been presenting John for a quarter century. I’ve done a ton and there was a church that’s local here in Seattle.

I’ve spoken at this church probably 20 times friends with the pastor and they’re preaching through John. So they had me take two Sundays in a. Present John one through five as the sermon. Just no preaching. Just get up, present John one through five and just kind of the watching the movie, if you will.

And then the next Sunday, six through 10. And I mean, you talk about having brain freezes as you saw from the clip, the clip that is on my website that you saw. That was from the second service, which went better. The first service was even worse than the clips that you saw, but I thought let’s just throw it out there.

And some of the conversations that led to, and just the transparency were all a mess. Yeah. We all have days that are good and days that are bad. And we have days that we take things that we’ve known and that we’ve done well and everything. And some days, those things that we’re good at that we’ve done well, that we’ve been solid on before.

Some days, even that’s messy. And just realizing that as one of my friends calls it, we’re all a glorious mess. So it’s just be gloriously messy together.

Carrie: Yeah. And just the idea that God can use you, no matter what your mess has been or is in the present. I just, I love that concept. So this piece of the podcast and everything certainly is not perfect, but we strive to get it better.

A little at a. All right. Well, thank you so much for talking with us about this today. Its pleasure. It’s been very interesting for me and eye-opening. Just thinking about my own process and what I would like to do maybe differently in what I can try. It was helpful.

Keith: Thanks for having me.

Carrie: I have to say that since interviewing Keith, I made this decision to read through first Peter over and over again as our pastor is preaching through first Peter right now. So he does one chapter a week and I haven’t necessarily done it every single day, but I’ve read through several times and it’s been interesting to see.

The different themes and the different things that stick out to me on different days, kind of seeing that as a whole entity, instead of just broken down into different chapters or different verses. One thing that we didn’t mention in this episode that I just wanted to throw here in the end is that the Bible has some quite crazy stories in the old Testa.

To put it mildly. If you read those things, you’re like, what in the world just happened right now? It definitely makes for some interesting reading. Granted, there are some kind of boring parts of the old Testament when you get into the genealogies, but some of the stories in there. If you’ve never read, ’em are pretty amazing.

If you like this episode and you want to find out more about what’s going on with the podcast, you can subscribe to our newsletter. It goes out weekly on wednesdays@hopeforanxietyandocd.com.

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

76. Finding Joy in the Midst of the Trial of Cancer with John Bennet.

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 76. Finding Joy in the Midst of the Trial of Cancer with John Bennet.

 I’m privileged to be interviewing John Bennet, author and banker.

John shares with us his journey through a cancer diagnosis and treatment.

  • John’s long treatment process to move through the cancer
  • How John responded after finding out he had a terminal cancer
  • How has cancer been a blessing to John’s life
  • John’s prayer life
  • Submitting to God’s sovereignty 

More Personal Stories

Transcript

Carrie: Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD, episode 76. Today on the show, we’re gonna be talking about joy in the midst of trials. And our guest today is gonna be talking about his journey through a cancer diagnosis and treatment. This is John Bennett. He is a banker, author of the book, Build it right for business owners and a cancer survivor. John, welcome to the show. 

John: Thank you very much. Glad to be here.

Carrie: I also should say, I feel like I inherited you as a friend when I married Steve, is that fair? 

John: Yes. I think that’s very fair. Definitely.

Carrie:  And I just appreciate you and your wife’s friendship and how you encouraged Steve before I even came along that God has somebody for you. And so it’s nice that we have people each in our lives that encouraged us and prayed for our future spouse. So I just think that that’s really sweet. 

John: Definitely. It was an enjoyable part of a friendship, for sure. 

Carrie: This is gonna be really interesting because I don’t know this part of your story. So I’m kind of learning along with the audience a little bit. Tell us about the process of getting diagnosed with cancer. What was that like for you? 

John: Okay. About three and a half years ago, I was totally healthy. Never had any big health issues in my life and started having pain in my lower back. And we thought at first it was maybe. Needed a chiropractic adjustment, different things, check different things out. It kept getting worse. And obviously eventually it was diagnosed as cancer. It’s a blood cancer called multiple myeloma and it’s considered a terminal cancer. Although the treatments have come so far in the last few years that some doctors look at it as potentially a chronic disease and not terminal.

So, it’s still to be determined on that. But I went through a period of time after the diagnosis where I had to go through, started off with chemo. Went through four rounds of that. Actually I started with radiation. They radiated my spine to kill the cancer in my spine. And then I went through chemo and then I had to have three back surgeries because the cancer had gotten into my spine and one of my vertebrae had completely collapsed and another one had partially collapsed. So, they had to go in and fix that. And then I went through a stem cell transplant. And after that I had about 14 more rounds of chemo. So it was a pretty long process there for a while to move through the cancer. 

Carrie: Wow! How long has it been? 

John: It was three and a half years ago. 

Carrie: Wow. 

John: When I was originally diagnosed.

Carrie: That’s a long treatment process.

John: It was long. It built even more tenacity in me. Thankfully, I had a good bit of endurance and tenacity, but it certainly increased that. But yes, it was very much a long process.

Carrie: Going back to thinking about when you were first diagnosed and someone says you have this very serious cancer, we consider it to be a terminal cancer. How did you respond to that emotionally? 

John: You know, I am a Christian and my faith in God is the rock of my life. I knew I had a choice initially with the diagnosis, so I could either surrender that to God and acknowledge that he was totally in control or I could panic. I could do one of two things. And so I chose to embrace it, which is maybe odd, but I chose to embrace it. And I thought for some reason, God has ordained me to have cancer. I didn’t get really depressed or down like a lot of people do. I chose a different route and the way I had to deal with it emotionally and spiritually was to realize that my time might be a lot more limited than I originally thought it would be.

I was planning on living to a ripe old age and had really tried to keep myself in good health. And I had to look at the very real possibility that the timeframe of life might be drastically different. I knew I would have to reprioritize a lot of things in my life. I knew that career aspirations might change dramatically. I knew that my body expectations of what I could do physically would probably have to be adjusted a lot. I would have to really adjust my expectations and accept my limitations. And yet, try to overcome as many of those as I could too. Cause I kind of wanted to look at it from a balance of I’m trusting God a hundred percent. And if he takes me out of this life with this cancer, I wanna be okay with that. 

But it doesn’t mean I’m just gonna sit back and give up either I wanna work. I want to do everything. The doctors are telling me. I want to try to eat as healthy as I can. Exercise, definitely stay on all my medication, stay on top of all the testing, everything possible that could be done. That’s kind of how I looked at it. I guess I’d really just stepped back and looked at it as a challenge that God had put in my life. And I thought somehow he is going to use this in a great way. And I remember sending out an email to all of my coworkers just to let them know what was going on. I thought I would just make it. Really an open situation. So nobody felt weird about asking me or whatever, and I kind of described what was going on. And I remember in the email, I said, “I have no doubt that God is gonna make me a better person and a better leader through this”. And so I’m looking forward to the challenge and I intend to embrace it and, and roll with it.

So that made a huge difference. I think in the way that I was able to walk through the process and did I ever get down? I did have a couple of what I call gut punches in the process. We had a hard time getting me into remission. When I went through the stem cell transplant, I was not in a complete remission. That’s why we went through another 14 rounds of chemo after that, which was probably more than most people have to deal with. That have this cancer. Most people can get into a remission. The first time with less, we got to the point where I was talking to the two specialists I was working with and they were saying, “we may not be able to get you there. You may just be able to get to a partial remission”. And I said, “well, as long as I’m handling the chemo, let’s keep going until we’ve beat this thing as much as we can”. And then determined that I said, “I’m not ready to give up on that yet”. And by the grace of God, we got there, got me into complete stringent remission, which has been fabulous.

I’m glad I kept on, but there was, I would go in and I remember one time I went in and the levels had gone back up. After all this treatment, and that was a gut punch. It was like work so hard and I’m trusting God and I’m moving forward, but it’s going the other way. There were a couple of challenges there where things didn’t go as planned, but overall it was a pretty positive process and God was unbelievably faithful.

Before I forget this part, I’d say the biggest part of my treatment was having. I think, literally hundreds of people praying for me every time somebody would say, “Hey, can I put you on my prayer list for my church or my Sunday school class or life group or Bible study”. I’m like, please do just very, very open about that. And I know I had hundreds of people praying for me on a daily basis and a lot of ’em would text me. Your husband was one of them, Steve. And that I have no doubt. 

God answered so many prayers. And he kept me up. As far as my spirit, my emotions, people ask me, you know, they always have to take you through some questionnaires when you get cancer and you have to meet with a counselor. And they said, “you know, are you down? Are you struggling with depression”? I said, “actually, I’m not. I feel great”. I really feel like this is what God has for me. And so I’m not gonna push back on it. I’m just gonna embrace it. I mean, it’s not what I would’ve chosen, obviously, but if this is his plan, I’m gonna trust him. I haven’t always trusted him. I wish I would have, but I thought this time I’m going to, I just said, “God, whatever you got, if you take me out early with this, or if I make it through, just let me be a witness and use me every way you can”. 

Carrie: I wanna talk about that acceptance piece because even though you’re talking about a physical struggle, this is so vivid.

To our listeners who are struggling with anxiety and OCD. And I talk to people every day who say, “I don’t want the OCD label, or even, I don’t wanna have to be dealing with anxiety because I don’t know if I’m ever gonna be able to get out of this”. This may be somewhat of a lifelong struggle that I deal with.

Sometimes these can be chronic conditions. Sometimes they can wax and wane and get better, but sometimes people have to deal with them for a long time and they have a hard time. I think, accepting you use the words, God ordained me to have cancer. And I think a lot of our listeners would have a hard time saying, like, God ordained me to struggle with OCD or God ordained me to struggle with anxiety. Can you talk a little bit about like that acceptance piece, just in terms of God’s sovereignty and will over our lives.

John: Sure. I guess with anxiety and OCD it’s somewhat similar to cancer and you don’t always work toward getting that and you may try to stay away from that, but sometimes things in your life can happen and cause that some things that are out of our control, I’m sure there’s people that grew up in situations where it cause anxiety. And they’ve had a hard time shaking that. I don’t know what caused my cancer. I was a guy who exercised, kept my weight down, tried to eat healthy, tried to get enough sleep. I mean, all the things you would want to do. And I was laughing one day and I told my wife, I said, “well, I guess I need to start eating cheeseburgers with bacon all over it and smoking and whatever else I wanna do, because it doesn’t matter. Now I got cancer”.  

Anyway, I guess what it showed me was I was definitely not in control. And I know we say that, but cancer kind of really. Puts the mirror up to your face and shows you you’re not in control and no matter what you do, God still is sovereign. And he may allow somebody to have cancer that did everything they could do to be healthy.

Just like I’m sure some people that may be listening. Think why do I have to struggle with anxiety? I’m a Christian, I’m got a prayer life. I’m trying to grow with God. I’m trying to do the right things. Some of those things are just unexplainable. I think, I knew that I couldn’t do anything to change it. 

I remember talking to one of my oncologists and he said, “you know, I definitely want you to eat healthy. I want you to exercise and all that, but be assured that’s not gonna beat cancer”. That’s gonna help you to endure the treatments, but that’s not gonna fix what you’ve got. Just showed me how much I was reliant on guide through this whole process. And I guess when you realize you’re out of control, it’s maybe sometimes easier to relinquish that, what you think is control? Because it, I used to think I had certain control over certain things, I guess, in my life. And cancer just kind of wakes you up to showing you how vulnerable you are. 

Carrie: You talked too, about accepting your limitations while also trying to overcome some of those. Was it hard for you? I imagine in the beginning, when you had to accept maybe that you couldn’t be as active as you were before, or as social as you were before, because you had to not be around people. Talk to us a little bit about what that is like striking that balance between accepting your limitations and trying to overcome ’em.

John: That’s a work in progress process. It’s something that I still work through each day. I, for instance, I like to exercise. I’ve always been the type of person that likes to get better at things. So I want to try to get a little bit in a little bit better shape or do a little bit more exercise. Well, I’ve had to learn that there is a kind of a point of no return for me with exercise. I can do it only so many days a week. I can do it only so many minutes. Or it’s not gonna really help me to get stronger or have more endurance. It’s gonna work the other way and pull me down. Fatigue is something that I have to deal with on a pretty regular basis, because I’m still on a low dose chemo treatment to try to keep the cancer at bay. 

So I take that three weeks a month. And so that causes fatigue. So I have to really balance exercise with rest and I have to do, really moderation, which is not the easiest thing for me. I like to go full steam ahead. I’ve had to realize that less is more in that situation. I do need to be exercising. It’s very important. It helps me to deal with the treatments. It helps me with everything in my battle against cancer in my life. But if I push it too much, it will reverse. And then I’ll have several days to take to recover because it wears me down so much. So accepting that has been hard for me. But as I work through it more, if it gets easier every day, the social part is difficult with COVID. I’ve had to be very protected from being in large group from, with COVID the uptick right now in Nashville, where I live having to be extra cautious with wearing a mask and just really being careful because of my immune system, my weakened immune system, even though I’ve been vaccinated, the doctors don’t know how well I would handle COVID at this point, I’m a person who likes to go to events and be around a lot of people interact with a lot of people. 

I’ve had to be a lot more choosy, with what I do. And just, I’ve had to say no to just countless opportunities for things like a, a big event or a concert or a ball game or things that I would love to go to.  But I just have to say “no” and go to the things that I can. So I’m much more limited than I was. But when you, for a while, after you do a stem cell transplant, you can’t be around anybody. And so when you look at that, and this may be a key too, to the whole process, When you get to that stage, you learn to praise God for the times you can get out. I focus on that. I think this is awesome. I can actually go to an early lunch and sit in a corner booth and things that I can do that I couldn’t do there for a while. I get excited about that rather than get down about. I can’t go to a concert or whatever. 

Carrie: How has cancer been a blessing in your life? I think the joy piece of finding joy in the midst of your trial.

John: I tell you the joy has been overwhelming with it. That’s cancer has been a gift to me. It has helped me to see even closer the finality of my life, that I finite time on this earth. It’s made every interaction, a little more sweet, a little more important. Every friendship, every family relationship, it has helped to focus me even more on growing with the Lord, because I see that when I pass away, it’s gonna be my relationship with God. And those that I love, that’s really gonna matter. Things like career and success and money and pursuit of fame or affirmation, all those kind of things are a lot less important to me now because I see how fleeting they are at this point. And I think I’ve grown a lot wiser. 

People have told me that cancer ages you about 20 years and they were talking about physically. And I think it does sometimes age you physically that much, but I think it also ages you in, or it can age you in wisdom. That much too. And not that I’ve grown 20 years in wisdom, but I’ve definitely grown some because it just really puts things in a different perspective. And I think there have been times when I’ve tried to overdo or do too many things because I wanted to hit check all the boxes and hit all the options. And it’s really helped me to dial down and prioritize. And it’s so much easier for me to say no to good opportunities now, because I’ll say, “that’d be great. I’d love that. 

But you know what? I would rather do this, or this is more important than the other”. And it really has been a blessing in that way too, to prioritize life more. And when you have limited energy and you have limited possibly time on earth and all those kind of things. It really dials it down so that you prioritize. And I think in so many ways, it’s such a blessing that I got cancer because I could have gotten killed in a car wreck, driving home from work three years ago, if that had happened. And that was God’s will, then that would’ve been what was best. But if that had happened, I would not have had the opportunity to work through learning these priorities and having this time to realize that my life may every away quicker than I wanted it. But I’ve got time to make some adjustments, which to me is a great gift.

Carrie: I’m curious, was there anybody, like in your reflection about your life, was there anybody that you really recognize? I need to forgive this person or I need to seek forgiveness from this person. 

John: I have tried to always stay on top of forgiveness cause I knew that could make me better and all I’ll tell you what it has really accentuated is to, let go of any conflict or things that were trivial that may have caused some challenges. I have a blended family, so I have some interactions with some family members that I think, it wasn’t everything I wish it had been. There was some, I guess friction is probably the best way to describe it there. And I think I have embraced them more than I did. And I’ve just realized. Those differences don’t really matter. And I’ve been able to, reach out and love them more because God has given me that strength to do that and maybe judge them less and love them more and to let any friction in the past go. 

So it is for forgiveness in that way, just forgiving on a regular basis and seeing that, I guess this acceptance too, is seeing that everybody that’s in your life. Is there for a reason, even if they, you have some challenges with them, if you have some challenges with family members or friends or people at church they’re in your life for a reason that too, I think is part of submission to God’s sovereignty and saying, “I don’t really understand why these challenges are here or why”. It’s so difficult sometimes to deal with that person, but there’s something you’re teaching me or there’s something you’ve got for me to be some way a blessing to these people. And so I’m gonna embrace that. And I tell you this, embracing this kind of, it gives you such a positive force to go forward with. Whereas resistance can really eat your energy up. And when you have limited energy, it does train you to say let’s don’t cause a lot of extra resistance to see how much we can embrace this. So we can go further with energy that we do have. I think that’s been a real growth point for me.

Carrie: That resistance is something that I see a lot for people in therapy that are dealing, they’re trying to resist. What’s actually going on instead of grieving it. I think sometimes we have to grieve losses of whether it’s losses of time or opportunities or things that we’re not able to do anymore that we used to be able to, but then getting to that place of acceptance of, okay, God, this is where I’m at right now. This is what I’m dealing with in this season. And so how can you use me? How do you wanna use me in this season of my life? Talk with us about your prayer life.

John: Okay. That has been probably the best thing of this whole process. I always wanna have a better and better prayer life. I wanted to spend more time with God every morning before I started my day.

And I would do that to some extent before, but now it is set in stone and it’s nothing happens for me before I spend my time with God. He is, I really believe in that Matthew 6: 33 seek ye first, the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you. So I made a commitment. That I’m gonna get up every morning. And before I do anything else before I speak to anybody or do anything, I’m gonna go and spend a good bit of time and prayer with the Lord. And just in his word that has helped me, has steadied me through this whole process. And what has grown out of this is a I really fairly early on, I moved from a point of praying and asking God to help me with this struggle.

To where he gave me a passion to start praying for other people that were struggling, whether it was with a terminal illness or it was with a health issue or a loss of job or whatever the challenge may be. And I feel like he’s developed me into somewhat of a prayer warrior for other people. And I love to find out about people’s struggles in my church or in my sphere of influence so that I can pray for them specifically on a very regular basis and keep up with them and encourage them. And I’ve certainly become just a magnet drawn to people that are diagnosed with cancer for obvious reasons. Because I know a lot of what they’re dealing with and I wanna pray for them on a regular basis, pray for their health, pray for their walk with the Lord, or if they don’t know God that they would come to know him and also be an encourager.

I try to call and check up on them on a regular basis. You know, I know they’re having a test coming up or they’re having chemo for three weeks or whatever. I’ll put that on my calendar and then I’ll follow up with them and just check on ’em because I know how important that is and how much that means. Having gone through it. God’s given me a ministry that I never had before. And I, I don’t know anybody that’s listening that probably would wanna say, “gosh, I wanna go sign up for a cancer ministry. I wanna get cancer so I can help other people with it”. But when you’re chosen, you roll with it. And I do believe that God knows what’s best.

I know. It’s really ironic, but I’ve got more joy in my life right now than I have ever had in my life. And I attribute so much of that to what God has done through giving me cancer. And my cancer is very up in the air. It’s still considered a terminal cancer. There’s not a quote cure for it at this point, but there’s a lot of good treatments. And I might have a few years left or I might live to be 85. They don’t really know. It normally comes back in about 80 to 90% of the cases. So there’s a really high chance that I’ll have to fight it again and again, and that eventually it’ll probably take me out. We don’t know when that is. So I think in a way maybe God gave me that type of cancer so that I don’t think, well I’m curative cancer. And I can just forget all these things that I’ve learned. 

I think he knows that I need probably that encouragement. And that accountability of knowing that this battle is far from over so that I can continue to keep my focus on him. And I think he allows certain things to happen in our lives, because he knows that we need it. I mean, I didn’t have the discipline to spend the time in prayer with him that I spend now. I didn’t have the focus I needed. And I think really cancer may have been the only way he could get me there. And I’m still growing up. I’m not there yet, but he knows what we specifically need. So I would encourage people if you’ve got a struggle, try to embrace that. And again, not make excuses for it. You still try to overcome it as best you can, but you also realize you’re limitations as a human being and you embrace that. Maybe God could use my anxiety because there is a ton of people out there struggling with that. 

Carrie: Wow.

John: So if I can be real about it, maybe that helps somebody else. And that’s kind of what cancer has been for me. And a lot of people have said, “is it okay if I ask you about your cancer or is it okay if I tell so”? And so I’m like, “yes, I’m not, I don’t have the least bit of hesitation about it”. I, for some reason, this is a ministry God’s call me to, so, I don’t want to cover it up. I want to allow him use it any way he wants to. 

Carrie: That’s awesome. I mean, I think that’s really great. I would imagine that many people in your situation might feel very anxious when you go back and have scans or tests or things done, just knowing that that’s kind of looming in the background and could come back. Is that just something that you’ve. Another piece of the acceptance for you. 

John: Probably with any type of cancer and in particular with the cancer, I have you kind of do you have to look over your shoulder on a regular basis cause you know, it might be coming back and I have to get blood work every single month to see am I still clear and clean there? And so it’s always a celebration when I get that, but you just can’t focus too much on that either. And I, one thing I decided was cancer. Although this is a ministry God’s given me. It’s only a part of my life. There’s a lot of other parts and I refuse to let cancer be who John Bennett is. God’s put that in my life, but so many other, I’m a father, I’m a husband. I’m Christian, I’m a banker. I got hobbies. So many things that I’ve. That are part of me. I think when you have cancer or if you’ve got anxiety or whatever it is that you’re working with, and you’re challenged with, you gotta be careful not to let that become everything to. You know that it’s a part of life.

I don’t sit around and talk about cancer all the time. I don’t bring that up in conversations with people if they know about it, or if I can share an encouragement, encouraging word, because of that, I’ll do it. But there’s a lot of people that know me that don’t even know I have cancer because it’s not everything.

It’s a part of me. And it comes out when it needs to, but I’m more than just a sick person with cancer. And thank God. My health is good right now. I think you have to be careful there. You have to realize that yes, it can. Cancer can come back and take you out pretty quickly. But at the same time, you don’t wanna focus on that or you don’t really have a life, focus so much on your limitations. Then the time that you do have, will be wasted instead of used for the glory of God and for blessing other people. 

Carrie: I think that’s so huge just in terms of not identifying solely with your diagnosis, but really identifying yourself as a whole person and spiritually as a child of God, that is, should be our main identity.

That’s huge too. 

John: Right. And it is all relative too. I mean, when you look at the age you are, or whatever happens to you. I’ve had a couple of friends, one that got killed in his twenties. And so if I die early of cancer, compared to my friend, I’ve had a really long life, I think too, it’s learning to praise God for your blessings. And I remember going to in, when I first started getting chemo and I had really prayed a lot about this, and I was talking to one of the nurses and I said, “I’m gonna be the most excited cancer patient you’ve ever had”. I said, “I’m coming in here and I’m glad to get this chemo.  And I appreciate you guys doing this”. And she said, “Okay, you gotta be joking”. I said, “actually, I’m really not”. I said, “you’re helping to kill my cancer. And so I’m excited about that”. And she said, “well, you’re the first person that’s ever thanked me for giving chemo”. And I said, “well, I’m gonna enjoy this process”. And I said, “that may sound stupid or crazy, but I am not gonna come in here with my head down”. Gosh, I’ve gotta get chemo again. I’m worried about, gosh, what’s gonna happen to me. I wanna come in here and live. And I’m gonna have fun and I’m gonna enjoy it and I’m gonna make the most of it. And not that it’s all pleasant, cause  going through some of those things I can tell you, there was a lot of pain.

I got cut on so many times. It’s not funny. I’ve got so many drugs that have gone into my body to try to kill this cancer. It’s overwhelming. I don’t mean to make light of it. But, I was determined. I was gonna find the good in it and praise God for it. And I’ll tell you, that’s made a huge difference. And I was just, I’d seen other cancer patients in particular that got so down and they were discouraging it themselves and everybody else. And I thought, I’m not doing that by the grace of God. I’m not gonna do that. I’m gonna come in here and I’m gonna make the most of this. And whether my time is long or short, I wanna live it to the fullest.

I think that’s what God wants us to do. And we all have struggles. I remember when my Sunday school class or some people call it life group, when they first found out, I told ’em about the cancer diagnosis and it was pretty grim in there. And people were really upset and they prayed for me as a group, which was awesome. And I said, “well, let me just say this”. I said, “everybody in here has got struggles. Some of you have a wayward child. Some of you are having struggles in your marriage. Some of you just lost a job. Some of you got financial difficulties, some of you have other health issues. Some of you are depressed. I’m not the only one in here that has a challenge. So don’t worry about me and don’t focus just on me”. That’s all realize that we’ve all got these things that are challenging. And my cancer is not any more important than your problem in your marriage. 

Whatever it is that you’re challenged with.

I don’t wanna be singled out and people to feel sorry for me either. Cause I mean, some other struggles that people have are a lot worse than what I have. I think it’s important too, with whatever you’re dealing with to not get on the pity party and not think that, gosh, I’ve just got it so hard. I mean, I think I’m so blessed honestly. And I think we all have to just really focus on that. That to me, that seems, like the antidote for depression is praising God. And thanking God for what you do have. And if you look hard enough, you can find a lot of blessings. I don’t care what’s going on in your life. I have certainly seen that. Just what I’ve been through in the last three and a half years.

Carrie: Absolutely. There’s a verse in James about every good and perfect gift is from the father. And that helped me so much through my divorce that it, it caused me really to look at the good things that were in my life and recognize that they were there, cause God put ’em there. And that like you were saying, I could be thankful. And that helped me through that process become a more thankful person, I think, instead of just focusing on the negative and the hurt and the pain that I was going through at that time, that helped a lot. But if you could go back in time, what would you tell your younger self who was just getting diagnosed? Which I guess you do this, because you talk to people who have just been diagnosed with cancer. What do you tell them? 

John: Real good question. The number one thing is focus on your relationship with God. Trust him and move toward, trusting him more and find out how does he want to use this in your life and ask him for the strength every day to go through?

Because he certainly gave me that cancer is not easy and there’s some suffering that goes on and there is. I guess some uncertainty for sure about what your life’s gonna look like and how long it’s gonna last, what all are you gonna have to go through and all of that kind of things, but really it’s just, it’s putting your focus on Christ. I think that is the key. If somebody’s not a Christian, that’s my first suggestion to them is that they seriously consider a relationship with Jesus Christ. If they are that work to grow closer with him and spend more time with him. Let him use this process. And I guess be flexible. We were talking about, being willing to embrace what he’s brought.

I remember when I, after I had my stem cell transplant, it was a time where, as somebody told me before I had this, they said, “you’re gonna get what we call death bed sick”. And I understand what that means now because they take your  immune system, literally down to zero for a few days. It’s very difficult. When I went through that, I was actually nauseous 24 hours a day for 30 days in a row. And I didn’t want anything to eat. Anytime. Every time we had meal time, I just hated it. I didn’t want anybody to bring anything in, but obviously I had to get food to continue to live through this. The funny thing in, in the hospital, I got to where the one thing I could eat was peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. And that was the only thing I could eat that I even halfway enjoyed. And so they laughed because they would just fix me a peanut butter jelly sandwich for every meal. 

Once I was in there for a while, because the other stuff was just so disgusting to me. And not that peanut butter jelly was amazing, but I could eat it. And I could said halfway enjoy it. And I guess that maybe goes back to, as a kid, I love peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. 

So, I ate those and went through that process. But when I got through all the treatment, I was in the treatment room as we called it or treatment lab for my last time with the stem cell transplant. And then I would be moved out of that and go back to my reg oncologist. I remember looking back and I looked at the people that were laying there on the beds, that where I had been a lot of them, where I was, where I was down to nothing almost as far as strength and energy and, and immune system and, and everything.

I remember, it just felt like God was telling me. Don’t you ever forget where you were and don’t ever forget to praise me and don’t ever forget what I took you through and how I want to use you to encourage other people. Because now that you’ve come through that, remember how low you were. I mean, physically I was as low as you can get without dying. I remember just getting up to go to the bathroom in my hospital room, which was obviously right there beside the bed. It was exhausting. I mean, I was literally exhausted after I got up and walked to the bathroom, which was like, I don’t know, four or five steps going through that. I just felt like God was turn around and look one more time and look at those people and don’t ever forget it, whatever challenges I may have in life. 

If I look back at that, everything looks pretty good. And I think if you can look back at what God has brought you through and not forget about that, it helps you to see. How blessed you are now, even with the challenges that you may have, how much better off you are and how good he has been to you. And you know, at that point, when I was walking through all that, I never knew I would get to the point I’m at now where, I mean, I’m feeling great. I just have to deal with fatigue. I’ve been able by the grace of God, I’ve been able to continue to work full time, which a lot of people have not been able to do that with this cancer. I’ve just been really, really blessed, but I look back and I know what it’s like though, to be knocked all the way down on the ground, where you are laid out flat.

I think looking back at those times and realizing that God was with me every single day that I was going through that there was a time when I really wondered, am I ever gonna get to where I can eat food again? I mean, after 20 something days of being nauseous, you know, I didn’t know that it was gonna end after 30 days, but I really thought, I don’t know if this is ever gonna change. And the doctors couldn’t tell me when or what was gonna happen. Cause I took an enormous amount of chemo to go through the stem cell transplant. And it just really upended my whole body. 

That was one of those things where I didn’t know how it was gonna turn out or if it was gonna turn in a good way anytime soon.

But through that though, I see that God was there every day. I can look back at people that prayed for me. I can look back at people that encourage me. I can look back at things that I read, just so many things. Every day he gave me just what I needed to get through that day. He’s been so incredibly faithful. And I guess those 30 days were times when he carried me as the footprints and the sandpoint talks about. I can look back and see that. He carried me through that, cause I had absolutely nothing to give at that point yet he brought me through that. So he can do that for everybody else’s listening today.

Carrie: This has really been a great interview and I think so, relevant to people and encouraging, not just for people with cancer, but people who are going through any struggle really in their life right now. Thank you for sharing your story.

John: Thank you. What’s been an honor. And I hope that something, I said, blesses somebody and encourages somebody because I definitely know if you have God in your life, there is no reason to give up.

He is too strong and he’s too powerful. He’s too faithful. And he loves us too much. Whatever is knocked somebody down. Our God is a resurrecting God. He can resurrect the dead. He can sure resurrect our lives. And he’s done that with me, with my cancer. And he can do that for somebody emotionally or physically or whatever they’re going through. I just give him all the glory because he deserves it. And it’s been a real honor to be on the program.

Carrie: As I was coming back from maternity leave, I really needed to get some interviews done. And one day, Steve and I were just kind of going back and forth about different episode topics and things. And he said, “well, you know, you should interview John”. I’m really glad that he made that recommendation because I love how this interview turned out. If you ever want to support our show, you can do so. By going to Patreon, we’re also on by me a coffee for one time donations as always, you can find us anytime on Hope for Anxiety and OCD.com. Thank you so much for listening.

Hope for Anxiety and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, licensed professional counselor in Tennessee, opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the use of myself or By the Well Counseling. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum until next time may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.

71. No Longer Plagued by Fear and Depression: A Personal Story with Stormie Omartian

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 71. No Longer Plagued by Fear and Depression: A Personal Story with Stormie Omartian

We are privileged to have Stormie Omartian on the show today.  Stormie is a bestselling author who personally connects with readers by sharing experiences and lessons that beautifully illustrate how God changes lives when we learn to trust in Him.

  • Stormie’s struggle with anxiety and phobias
  • Her horrible experience of growing up with a mother who has mental health disorder
  • Overworking to cope with trauma and depression
  • Finding hope for the first time and surrendering to God
  • What does the process of forgiveness look like for Stormie
  • The power of praying through fear 

Links and Resources:

https://www.stormieomartian.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stormieomartianofficial

More Personal Story Episodes

Transcript

Carrie: Hope for anxiety and OCD episode 71. I’m very excited to bring you this interview with Stormie Omartian. Some of you may be familiar with her books, such as Power of a Praying Wife. She’s also written a book called Power of Praying Through Fear. While I’m sure Stormie and I could have had a long discussion about her book. This episode is more about her personal story of coming to Christ and how Christ delivered her from the intense fear and depression that was over her life, lagging her on a daily basis. 

There’s so much hope and encouragement that can be received from hearing other people’s testimony. So I hope that that is what you get out of this episode. Normally I don’t put trigger warnings on the podcast if you’ve been listening for a while, because there are so many different things that probably that we talk about that could trigger people. However, I do want to make mention that topics of child abuse, mental illness in the family and suicide come up in this episode.

Carrie: Stormie, I knew that you had written books on prayer and I actually received some as, wedding presents. One of the sweetest things that someone did for me was an older lady in my fiance at the time’s church. And because we started going to my church after we got married. There was an older woman from his church who sat down with me and got me coffee. And we just talked about, you know, how marriage can be hard. And she gave me The Power Of A Praying Wife. And she said, “this is something that’s really helped me in my marriage. And I just wanted to give that to you”. And it was just probably one of the best wedding presents that you could get is just some mentorship from someone who’s been there and been in the trenches. And gone through some hard things. So that was really wonderful. And I know that you have several books on The Power of A Praying Husband and Praying For Your Children and so forth.

Stormie: Yes.

Carrie: And I didn’t know until really my assistant brought it to my attention that you struggled with anxiety and phobias earlier in your life. I was curious about hearing that story from you. 

Stormie: Bless the lady who gave you that book. I wish I had had that book when I first got married. You know, it took me a number of years after I was married. To figure that book out. I mean, to learn enough, to be able to write that book. And so it really changed our marriage. When I learned how to pray like that. The Power Of Praying Wife and Power Of Praying Husband tells you how to pray. And I was raised by a mentally ill mother. And sometimes when we think of mentally ill, it’s just some kind of, you know, not a big deal. As far as, I mean, it’s a big deal for the person, but not a big deal for other people, but for her, my mother, she wasn’t just a little mentally ill.

She was like raving crazy. I mean, really she was really abusive. Locked me in a closet much of my early childhood, very erratic the way she behaved. I mean, she would just slap me across the face, outta the blue, and it always shocked me cause I didn’t know what I’d done. And then she would lock me in the closet and I couldn’t cry because then I’d get punished for crying. I couldn’t ask to get out because then I’d get punished for that. It was scary to live with her. We were on a ranch, isolated from the rest of the world, really 30 miles from the nearest lake.

I was really isolated until I started school, but I was really terrified to go to school, probably a 20-mile ride into school and where the school was. And I was just afraid of the children cause I wasn’t around children and they just seemed loud and scary to me. And so it was scary to go home and it was scary to go to school. And I grew up with so much fear and anxiety and feelings of futility and hopelessness. All always afraid of, what was gonna happen. And my dad, we had a ranch and he worked the ranch. When the weather wasn’t good, he’d go to the logging mills and he would stay there to make money in the winter or when it was a bad season, you couldn’t grow crops or you couldn’t, you had to keep your cattle protected and stuff like that. He wasn’t always around.

So I was with her and she just constantly talking to the voices she heard in her head, it just so scary. I mean, she wasn’t just like a normal person who had problems. She was a scary person. You didn’t never know what she was gonna do. And so I grew up with these feelings, so strong fear and anxiety and hopelessness and helplessness. And just all of those things. I was just afraid all the time. I was afraid to do anything. I was afraid to do something wrong and I didn’t know. And when I did get slapped across the face, I didn’t know what I’d done wrong. It was really bad. And so, so much so that by the time I grew up. I still, even though I got out of the closet, we moved to a small place that didn’t have any closets. I mean, the closets were two feet wide. You really couldn’t put someone in there. I wasn’t in the closet anymore, but she was still nuttier than ever and more abusive. And she talked about me in degrading, profanity, always things about me. Most of them are unrepeatable, and being described in those terms is really hurtful. 

I just felt she was just always mean and always nasty and always abusive, always violent and crazy, always crazy talking to all these voices that she heard and showed out, people were out to kill her. And it was nutty. You never felt any normality. And so what I carried with me from all that was by the time I was out of the house, supporting myself and I was still locked in a closet. It was an emotional closet as opposed to a physical closet. I mean, it was, went with me everywhere. I tried everything when I was growing up to get rid of that pain. I had that pain all the time and always feeling, always feeling like crying, always feeling like I would never be accepted anywhere.

Nothing was ever gonna go right. Nothing was ever gonna be good in my life. And I just wanted to get away from the pain. And so what I did when I was 14, I just swallowed all the pills I could find in my house, cause I didn’t wanna wake up anymore. Cause it was so painful. I felt out of place every place I went, she was nutty enough that she mixed all the medicine up.

So I don’t even know what I took, but I was very sick, I know that. So, once I lived through that, I thought I’m just gonna try as my best to do the best I can to get good grades to develop any talents or gifts. I felt like it could do carry off and hoping that I could become a workaholic and just get out of my mess, graduate from high school and then went to UCLA.

I put myself through school. I was working in the evenings and on the weekends. I don’t even know how I did it, but I had to do it, we didn’t have any money. We were very poor and rats used to run across my bed at night. Often I went to bed hungry and that’s when I was with my parents. So they couldn’t provide any help at all. And so I was trying, putting myself through UCLA and I thought, wow! I don’t know if I can make this, but I started getting work in Hollywood. And the TV shows, there were a lot of musical TV shows. So I was singing on them and dancing and, and little acting with comedy skits and things like that. So I was working a lot.

I was working seven days a week. I’d work as much as I possibly could, two jobs, which is really hard to do. I had two shows that I was working on: the Glen Camel Show and then another local show called Loman and Barkley which was LA. So I worked seven days a week and I was really killing myself because I knew I couldn’t rest. I was so insecure that going to bed hungry really affected you as a child. And you’re always afraid you’re gonna end up homeless or, you know, and I wasn’t going back to live with my mother. I was gonna make this work, but I, I could never shake the depression and the anxiety. And if I got insecure on one of the sets, I would just go into one of the bathroom stalls and just cry and cry and cry. And so no one could hear me, but I just, it was so depressed and so anxious and so hopeless.

Carrie: And was staying busy, kind of one of those ways that you just coped with that anxiety. If I just stay on this hamster wheel and keep going and going, going, maybe. 

Stormie: Exactly. Exactly. That’s exactly it.

And I was too insecure to turn down any work and the work, like that comes in seems like in seasons, in season, outta season. But I worked all the time, all the time. I was always auditioning, always getting jobs, always getting another show and I was getting worse and worse and worse. As far as the depression goes, it wasn’t getting better beause that’s kind of an insecure kind of job. Anyway, you just feel like you’re only as good as the last day you worked. You know what I mean?

Carrie: Wow!

Stormie: You were judged every day. What you did do and how did you come through, was this good or was it not? And, I always judge myself so harshly that it was you. If I had a good filming thing where we did a great taping of a show or whatever, then the next morning I was really depressed, cause I didn’t know if I was ever gonna work again and then I’m going on to the next job and the next and it just, I never got better.

I just, it got worse. It got worse and worse and worse. I always thought that I, you know, if I got out of the situation with my mother got out of that, worked really hard. Then I could be free of all that, that didn’t happen. It just got worse. I think the older I got and not that I was getting old, but I was in my twenties. And at that time, if you got in your late twenties, you were, like pretty much washed up. You know what I mean? So that was always bothering me too. You know, that I was getting older. Didn’t seem to get any better. It wasn’t until everything in my life just collapsed. All of a sudden my health was bad. My mental health was bad.

I was just depressed so badly that I could hardly function. And I just, and emotionally just, it was awful. And I just felt like I, I couldn’t go on anymore. And that’s when one of the girls I was singing with in the TV studio and the recording studios too. Cause I did a lot of background singing for other artists and stuff like that. And that lady, Terry, she was a little younger than I was. She took me to meet her pastor at the church. That was not far from where we were doing all this work and all the studios and everything. And she introduced me to the pastor and he just described Jesus in a way I could understand. He said, “God has a purpose for your life and He has plans for you”. I never heard such stuff, really never that I had a purpose. Wow! I thought I was just scratching, clawing for a purpose, you know, but God had a purpose for me and if I would receive him, He would change me from the inside out. And I thought, wow! it just seemed too good to be true. And so I did receive the Lord in his office and my friend Terry was with us too. And I felt hope for the first time.

I don’t remember feeling hope before. And then I thought I was, it was really big. And I thought I have a purpose. And there’s hope for my life. It’s almost like I saw a light at the end of the long dark tunnel of my life. And I just started coming with Terry would pick me up every week to take me to church. And I mean, for months and months, she did that cause I was too depressed. Depressions I had, I could hardly get out of bed. And so if there was a day, I didn’t have to get outta bed, but she would come over and get me out and I’d throw something on and she’d take me to church. And as I went to church and started hearing the truth, being told of how God gives us a sound mind of how He has a purpose for us. He has plans for a great plan for our life. He’s the God of the impossible. And He can do things that you feel are impossible. 

The hope began to grow. And I met my husband. I had been on a recording session with him, and Terry had introduced me to him when, after I got into this church, he came to the church for the first time when I did in this particular church.

And so we meet again there. I met him on a record session that Terry had contracted us to do. And when I met him the year before, I didn’t feel good in my own self. To be able to have a relationship with someone who was a really nice person. And, you know, you don’t wanna just give someone a, a beat-up kind of damaged emotionally person.

But so, when I saw him again in church, I thought, wow! I wish I’d been going to this church for longer than just a week. We started dating, and we got married within that year. I was so surprised to have the Lord and a faithful husband who loved me, but I still had depression. I still had it. I can believe it. I thought that would solve everything. 

Carrie: Right. 

Stormie: But it didn’t. I still had it. I still had the depression.

Carrie: When you get in a healthy relationship after being in such an unhealthy relationship for so long, it’s almost like it’s hard to allow people to love you. And it seems kind of foreign.

Stormie: It does. That’s exactly right. That’s a way to describe it, cause you’ve not had that before and you think, well, they are, they’re all together and everything. And I know that I am not, you know, even though I’m not telling people that I’m not, I knew, but I was surprised to find myself so depressed. And so I couldn’t believe it. And I thought, oh my gosh, what is the matter with me? Why am I still depressed? You know, I thought these things would fix it and it didn’t. And so my husband would say, “why don’t you go to the church”? He knew that the church had Christian counselors there. They were, actually the pastor’s wives and these wives are really why they knew the scripture.

They knew what God has for us in the way of wholeness. They knew how to pray. They knew how to pass and pray. And you know how to teach the scripture in a way that would really help you hang on to the truth. And so when I went there, this lady, one pastor’s wife, Maryanne, talked to me for an hour and I told her everything. I never told anybody everything. I had told my husband everything about my past, but I never told anybody else. And she said, you know what? We really need to fast and pray. And she said she would fast and pray with me. And she said for three days, and this was really shocking because, you know, I had gone to, with too many times, hungry. I’m very hungry. I was hungry. 

Carrie: Sure.

Stormie: And then deliberately go to bed hungry for three days. I thought was insane, but I really wanted what God had for me. And I really trusted her cause she was really intuitive and really understood. Just understood everything. And so I did, she said you can fast for three days and then come back and then I’m gonna pray with you and we’re gonna get rid of this depression. I thought, wow! I didn’t know what to think of that. And really, I never heard anything like that and I didn’t know what the possibilities were, but I thought it would be nice it. He prayed for it, you know? So I did that, went home when she said, write out a list of all of your sins that you haven’t confessed. I thought, whoa!

I don’t, you know, so, so I did, I wrote, I just had a list and I just was writing everything that came to my mind. And I was really afraid of what was gonna happen when she read it, but she didn’t wanna read it. She just laid her hand on that paper. And when we started to pray, I, first of all, had to confess my unforgiveness toward my mother. I’ve been trying to forgive her and what I knew was a done deal yet. I knew that I had such bitterness and all those years that she was brutal toward me and I had to confess all my cult involvement. I had been searching in the cult, you know, trying to find a way to God, I couldn’t get it. I just couldn’t. I tried all these things.

I tried hypnosis and astral projection and all these new age and cult things that I was in. And so I had to confess all of that and say, “Lord, I, I wanna serve you. I don’t wanna serve anything else that’s not of you”. So, she said, “The sooner you get rid of the things that are not of God, the sooner you can move on with God to become all He created you to be”. The third thing was see, forgiving my mother, and getting rid of the cult involvement. And I can’t remember what the other third thing was. Wow! I was, I’ll think of it. Anyway, gosh, I’ve been talking about this for a hundred years. So when I did those three things, she put her hands on my shoulders and my head and she prayed for me.

She had invited another pastor’s wife when I made those confessions. It was like God just lifted that depression off of my shoulders. It was a wildest thing. I tried medicine. It wasn’t my, like, I hadn’t taken medicine for it. I’d tried drugs and alcohol and just anything. I didn’t do that when I was working. It’s not like I was an addict or anything like that. I just was trying to kill the pain in whatever way. 

Carrie: Sure.

Stormie: When she prayed for me, I felt the depression lift. And now that’s a physical manifestation of just heavy things on my shoulders and my head and my chest. And my heart felt it lift, lifted off. I thought, wow! I mean, I was amazed. I didn’t even know that was possible when that lifted. I kind of expected it to come back the next day. You know what I mean? When I get depressed again, I am coming back here every time I get depressed, but it doesn’t come back. It’s not like I was never depressed again, you know, or never anxious again, but it never controlled me.

I had before it was controlling my entire life, the depression and I couldn’t function. I couldn’t hardly be a good friend, but I always got myself out of bed to go to work. That was a necessity, but I, when that thing lifted and it didn’t come back, wow! If God would do that for me, what else does he wanna do for me? And then I started thinking of other people and saying, “what else does he wanna do for other people”? There’s power in prayer in Jesus’ name, there is power. And to see it manifest is just really mind-blowing. Because I tried a medicine as well, is all these other things, I was trying to medicate it and it didn’t help.

It didn’t help. It just made me feel drugged. Didn’t make me delivered or free. And so I, I saw that you can be free and I’d tried everything to get free before I’d gone to psychiatrists and psychologists and counselors secular, and they kind of helped. They’re probably what kept me alive for so long, but it just, they weren’t the answer and I’m not putting it down for anybody taking medicine at all.

Believe me, I feel that that’s a gift from God in itself. To have that to relieve the pain or the symptoms that you have, but God is the one who can really make you whole, and it’s his spirit in you that changes you from the inside out? That was really an amazing thing to understand that there’s really power in prayer. And again, I don’t wanna discourage anyone from seeing a doctor or a counselor or anything, or take the medicine you need or whatever, whatever works for you. Let you know that there’s a deeper freedom you can have where you can really be set free from it. 

Carrie: I think it really makes sense to me from a psychological perspective about people will say, sometimes that depression is anger turned inward and so we’re really angry still at your mother, understanding.

So for everything that happened there, and that was a stronghold in your life, there was some bitterness there. And then you had all of those insecurities about yourself. 

Stormie: Yes.

Carrie: And so there may have been some of that anger towards yourself there that was stuck. 

Stormie: That’s so true. And after I had that freedom from the controlling aspect of depression and anxiety, I had my first child, was born. All those feelings toward my mother, which I thought I’d work through. Forgiving my mother was an ongoing process. It would, wasn’t like one and done, forget it. It was every time you thought of something else that she did or you talked to her again and she would just attack you on the phone or, you know, that’s the way she was.

She was just, it wasn’t a normal person. She was just really lonely all of that came back when I brought my first child home and thinking, “What could a mother treat her child that way?” I couldn’t believe it. That’s the last thing I thought I would do anything like that. But then I began to see that there was stuff in me when I couldn’t get the baby to stop crying, it would feel like a rejection of me as a mother. I just felt like there was a monster in me that this, all this anger and hurt and everything’s coming back up again. And I couldn’t understand why I thought I was done with that, but it’s a process. And so I, I learned that I had to, when I started to get those feelings in me, I just had to put the baby down in the crib and just go into my room and get on my knees before the Lord and say, “God, just take this away”.

Take this horrible thing in me away that just rises to the surface in just almost a rage of anger and just, just all these horrible feelings you don’t wanna have. So that was a gradual thing. I I called the counselor, I finally told my husband what was going on. We talked to Maryanne the counselor and she said, “Just as long as the baby’s not in any danger”, he said, “Just keep doing that. Just keep asking God to set you free of it”. So certain things like unforgiveness is like a process,

Carrie: It is, it really is. 

Stormie: You have to forgive something else would come up and you go, I just feel, I felt such a resentment for so long for her. Cause I felt like I, I started way behind everybody else cause everybody else taught and, and loved, you know, and, and taught things and, and taught how to live and how to be with people and stuff like that. And I did, I wasn’t, you know, and so I just felt resentful about that for so long, but I just kept forgiving her and forgiving her over and over and over. And because she was such a source of my depression and anxiety and hurt and sadness and grief and all of that. It’s just a those kind of things are a process. 

You know, sometimes you can just get a deliverance that’s just instant, like set free from that, from that depression that day, which just, it just lifted like, wow! that’s amazing. But then the thing where all this stuff would come up when I was with my child and then I’m resenting her even more thinking I wouldn’t do, like anything like this to my child. Why would you do that to me? It was, it was ongoing. I’m telling you it was ongoing forgiveness until I thought it was free of it. 

Carrie: I don’t really believe that healing comes in layers. Sometimes we’re only able to do that top layer and God knows that, you know, he allows us other things to come up. 

Stormie: They do. And, and then the thing is to not get discouraged when that happens, when you think you’re free of something and all of a sudden you feel like it’s coming back, like it never, you know, you were never healed and not to get deceived by that or misled by that because he let you go down deeper. In your memory and your experience, you know, whatever is surfacing, it’s what you deal with. 

Carrie: Right.

Stormie: You can’t do the whole thing, cause it’s so deep, but not to think that you’re going backwards, if that happens because it’s just a new level of freedom that God wants to lead you into. It’s gradual.

Carrie: And sanctification itself is a process.

Stormie: It is. It’s, you’re not totally 100% perfect. Right? From the first time you receive the award, not at all, it’s just where you’ve got you. Now you have the tools and you have a God who loves you and, and who wants you to get totally whole, and it, it is definitely a process. So I just didn’t want anybody to get discouraged when they think, oh no, it’s coming back.

So nothing happened. I, you know, I’ve never been set free and it’s not true. It’s a deeper level that God wants to set you free from. 

Carrie: Absolutely. What would you say to someone who’s really praying and seeking to release their fears over to God, but still feel afraid and anxious? This sometimes can be a lifelong struggle for some people.

Stormie: I know. And I, the thing I found was that having some prayer power, having someone pray with you, it’s really powerful. Someone who has great knowledge of the Lord who understands what God has for us, who understands that He wants us whole, He doesn’t want us to carry fear. That’s paralyzing in my book, I have a book called The Power of Praying Through Fear and a lot of, you know, our depression and anxiety like you said, is caused my fear.

I mean, just the fear, of the unknown. The fear of something else happening. That’s like what has happened to you already? The fear of the memories coming back of some horrible thing that that’s gone on or something someone’s done to you or, or you’ve done to yourself or whatever, and just carries this guilt with those things.

For example, when you take a lot of drugs that really hurt your body and you think, wow! I’ve really ruin myself like, wasted my health and things like that. You can carry such guilt over that, but you can pick up right there and start right there to live in a way that blesses you and blesses your body and blesses your mental health and all of these things. And so that’s one of the most important things I think is remembering that even though you can struggle with fear in your life or like phobias, that which fear taken to the extreme. God says He doesn’t want us to have fear. He says, He’s given us love power and a sound mind, His love, His power and the sound mind He has for us.

And I remember having to say that over and over, God has not given me a spirit of fear. 

Now, the spirit of fear controls your life. It’s not, I mean, everybody’s afraid of something, but when you, the fear controls your life, you know, it, you know, it, you feel like you’re almost paralyzed by it. It’s, it’s a horrible thing. And I had to keep saying over, over and over to myself, that God has not given me a spirit of fear. He’s given me his love, his power and the sound mind He has for me. I had to say that over and over and over until I got free of that. And the thing is I explained in my book that there’s good fear and bad fear.

Carrie: That’s true. 

Stormie: God allows fear that leads you to Him. If it’s a good fear, it will draw you closer to Him. And if it’s a bad fear, it’ll separate you from God. It will cause you to try to handle things your own way or to not go to God, but to try to find help in, within yourself or within like I did with alcohol and drugs and Eastern religions and cult practices and things like that. So really important to know that God does not have fear for you. He doesn’t want you to be paralyzed by fear or controlled by fear. But if it’s fear that he’s allowing to get you on the right path or to keep you from going the wrong way, that’s a good thing. That’s a good thing. So you gotta ask the Lord, what is this fear? Is this a good thing? Is this gonna protect me? Or is this something I, that you want to deliver me from? And that’s really important to make that distinction between the two it takes asking him, saying, Lord, show me, show me. 

Carrie: And sometimes we have a certain level of anxiety and we’ve talked about this in previous episodes where it’s like, you feel like God wants to do something big and it’s beyond you.

Stormie: Yes.

Carrie: And you feel a certain level of anxiety about it. I don’t think that I can fulfil my calling.

Stormie: Yes. 

Carrie: What you asking me to do, but like you said, that leads you right back to him to say.

Stormie: Yes.

Carrie: Okay, if this is of you, then I need you to help me out with this because it feels really big.

Stormie: That is so right on. Absolutely right on hundred percent, because that’s where I felt. I felt I’ve been in way over my head for the past 50 years, because he’s always calling me to do something and I go, I can’t do that. I can’t do that. Get someone else, you know. And, and you’re right. Well, it causes you to be on your knees before the Lord saying, I can’t do this. You gotta fill me with your spirit, your love, your power, you all of these things that you are, God, you have to do this. I, I don’t even know where to start. And, and he does, its amazing. And, and the more dependent you are on the Lord, the greater He can do great things through you. I mean, the more he can do great things through you. So that’s, you’re absolutely right on with that.

Carrie: I’m curious if you could go back in time, what encouragement or hope would you provide to your younger self? 

Stormie: Wow! I wish I could. Wow! it was so serious being with my mother. I could not see a way out. That’s why I tried to kill myself when I was 14. I couldn’t see a way out. I didn’t see how it could ever be any different. I would talk about the Lord and say, look, God’s got a purpose for your life. He’s put gifts in you and He will develop them if you surrender your life to the Lord. And, I just to be able to know that. There was a way out of this that it will get better.

I just didn’t see any hope at all, tried to make it work myself and I couldn’t do it. And so just to, to tell me myself that look, it’s gonna get better. You’re gonna find a way out of this. I’ve got a way out for you. And that would be the biggest thing. And just, to know about the Lord earlier, I never did. I mean, I never did until my friend Terry in the studio, talked to me about the Lord. I mean, she talked about, and from the standpoint, point of what he had done in her life, she wasn’t saying you need to do this. She was not like that. She was just showing me what her church was like.

I mean, just telling me, and when we have breaks, you know, on the record sessions and stuff, she’d just tell me, this is what we did in our church last night or yesterday. And, and it’s really powerful. You’ve gotta come sometime and just see how the Lord moves. And I kept saying well thinking, well, that’s really nice for her, but I’ve tried everything and nothing works knowing the Lord earlier, would’ve been great, but I’m so glad I did. I did that. She let you know, led me to her pastor and he helped me to understand who God was and who Jesus is and all of that.

Carrie: That’s the greatest gift that we could ever give to somebody. 

Stormie: Yes, it really is. It really is the lady who led me to the Lord. She just died a couple of weeks ago and it was so sad. She had cancer, had found healing from it and then it all came back. You know how we hear that story? 

Carrie: Sure.

Stormie: So if I hadn’t known her, I don’t know what would’ve happened to me beause I was planning a second attempt at suicide this time I was gonna make it. It was gonna work. You know, I was gonna take enough pills and to do the job right. And the fact that she intervened, she said, “I’m not, you can see you’re not doing well. Could just come with me to meet my pastor? What have you got to lose?” You know, she said, and I thought, well, you know, I’m not ready to get enough sleeping pills to end it. I might as well just go see what he has to say. And if she hadn’t done that, and if she hadn’t come, pick me up every week, every Sunday, every time for, I mean, for so long, I wouldn’t meet her today. Really, she was so selfless and so kind, and I was just so great that I’m so glad I knew her. And, she’s gonna be greatly missed by so many people. She saved my life, so grateful. , I told her before she died, I really hope that my mansion in heaven is close to yours.

Carrie: That’s really sweet.

Stormie: It was really touching. I was so glad I knew her for 44 years. She was a really close friend. 

Carrie: Well, thank you so much for taking some time out today to talk with us. I think this is gonna be really encouraging and hopeful for our listeners who are struggling. 

Stormie: I hope so. To anyone who’s listening right now, who’s struggling just with emotional pain and hurt and the things that happened to people and how they’re mistreated and or how they were abused either as a child or later on or whatever my heart goes out to them beause I know how hard it is, but I just wanna say there’s hope. There is hope to be free of it. It can happen, and it will just don’t give up.

Carrie: By the time this episode airs, I hope to be doing some more podcast interviews. I had done several during my pregnancy to stock up for when I was gonna be out on maternity leave. And now that I am back to work in the action, I hope to be interviewing more individuals. So if you have guest suggestions, you can always go to our website, @hopeforanxietyandocd.com. Fill out the contact form. And let me know who you would like to hear from, or maybe you are the one who has a story to share. You do not have to be a public speaker or author to be on the show. That’s not a requirement.

If you want to keep up to date with what’s going on with the podcast, make sure that you follow us on Facebook or Instagram. You can also sign up for our newsletter on the website as well. All the links you need will be in the show notes. And thank you so much for listening.

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

63. Trauma, Forgiveness, and Emotional Eating Recovery with Coach Jon McLernon

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 63. Trauma, Forgiveness, and Emotional Eating Recovery with Coach Jon McLernon

Joining the show today is Jon McLernon, a fitness coach and emotional eating expert. Jon shares with us his traumatic experience that changed his life and shaped him to be the person he is now. 

  •  What happened to Jon while he was on a humanitarian mission in South Africa 
  • Impact of the traumatic incident on Jon’s mental health
  • Using food as a coping mechanism
  • Making the decision to forgive
  • How did Jon forgive and move into a place of compassion? 
  • How Jon started to become a weight loss coach 
  • How Jon helps his clients create life-changing transformations. 


Links and Resources:

Jon McLernon

More Podcast Episodes

Transcript

Carrie: Hope for anxiety and OCD episode 63. Today on the show, I have a special interview for you with coach Jon Mclernon. I’ve been holding onto this episode for a little while and honestly thought about not publishing it due to some background noise interference that comes up at different points. However, when I went back and listened to the interview recently, I felt like coach Jon’s story of how he got to a place of forgiveness was so powerful that I wanted you guys to hear it because he went through something that, no one should ever have to go through and it was traumatic and he talks about how he coped with that in a negative way. And then how he came to forgiveness, how he got back on track. It’s just a really great personal story. 

The reality is, is that if you’ve been living and breathing for any amount of time on this earth, there’s been someone that’s hurt you, that you’ve needed to forgive. And hopefully, this episode will help you with that process. Jon, you had a traumatic experience and that really changed the trajectory of your life. Told us about that. 

Jon: My wife and I sort of embarked on a global cold trotting adventure, I guess you could say. And we spent about three years of our life just traveling around the world. And one of the places that we landed in was, so with Africa, we, we’d met some South Africans in our travels and they invited us to come down to South Africa to help them work on a particular, it was a government program. It was an NGO or a government-funded but privately run. It was called Hospitality Youth Internship. And so what we were doing is we were working with underprivileged, young people, kind of teaching them life skills and helping them to be more employable and then placing them in internships before basically with potential employers to give them a chance to grow themselves.

At that time we were living on a nature reserve. Eastern Cape and South Africa, and one night I had went back to our cabin, kind of the layer of the reserve was the buildings were kind of lined up in a bit of an L shape. So you had, like a dining hall on one end and there was the dormitories for the students. And then there was, like the washroom facilities and tucked into the woods. A little bit was off to the side. Was the instructor’s cabin.  And so I’d been walking back there. Everyone else was in the dining hall, you know, enjoying dinner and whatnot. It should have clicked, but it didn’t, because when I was out there everything’s peaceful and quiet that something that was missed by the door was ajar the cabinet. And when I opened it, there was three men in there, that were actually sitting down and eating food or table and, and it didn’t really register with me that some of it was a mess. There was a fourth guy outside of the cabinet, and see who hit me over the head with a rock and it stunned me and so on.

So essentially their intention was to try to beat me to death, basically. That was quite a really traumatic thing to go through and kind of skipping over some of the details probably for the sake of brevity as well, but in an incident like that, like, I don’t think anything in life really properly prepares you to experience something like that. Some of the things that stick out in my mind were like they were smiling and laughing and that, you know, while they’re inflicting this on me.

Carrie: And these were people that you didn’t know and they didn’t know you and all of a sudden they’re trying to kill you basically. 

Jon: I sort of stumbled across some, I believe they were bid ransacked or cabin and whatnot, but it turns out the night before they’d they had to actually be in your death, a farmer that they’d robbed.

And so they were kind of on this spree of doing this. And so it was nothing personal, but me and the individual, it just so happened to be where they were. Then there’s also kind of a reason why they do things the way they do, in trustingly in a sense. And that is that they could’ve just said, “shop me or stab me or something like that”. But in a sense, being that I was white, I am a representation of something that they feel that historically oppressed them. And so in an interesting twist, it’s kind of like they’re trying to take back something they feel is taken from them. 

They want to inflict, a kind of punishment and demonstrate their power over you and really like, make you suffer in the experience. It kind of speaks to sort of the place that they might be at psychologically that made that, that worked to my advantage because I, I was able to sort of, I was stunned in concussed and widen, bruise and so on, but I was able to kind of fight my way to my feet. And at least escape to where the others were. The aftermath of that was nothing that I was really prepared for. You know, I come from Canada, we have our ups and downs and our issues, but we’re pretty open, friendly country. 

I had a lot of things, a lot of, kind of intrusive thoughts, like entering my mind, a lot of unprovoked or unexpected emotions that would come on very, very strongly thoughts of doing harm or violence, other people. And so on, that’s not who I am as a human being. That in itself was incredibly troubling and difficult for me to deal with. Because the part of the logical part of my brain says, “this is not who I am”. And yet here, these thoughts are coming into my head. I’m being triggered by things that would never have in the past triggered me. And so it really felt quite unequipped to deal with that. And one of my ways of coping was actually to use food to kind of, I would say, I call it, change the channel in my head. I shouldn’t say kind of, I became a binge-eating food addict essentially. And that was one of my coping mechanisms.

Carrie: Okay. So there was just a lot of intense anger after this trauma. And part of that was just your mind, like trying to make sense of everything that happened to you. It was like this double whammy of, here I am essentially sacrificing some time and energy to help people in this humanitarian organization. And then I’m seen as, like this, racial enemy that gets beating. And, you’re not a racist person. 

Jon: So it felt like a huge injustice. Everything about the situation felt unfair. It was four on one, it was a surprise attack. I was jumped at night, you know, I was by myself, that kind of thing. I was in flip-flops and sweatpants and a t-shirt just in a very good mood because we’d had wonderful interactions with our students. And to be clear, none of our students were involved in these. They were victims of this, but then none of them were involved in this. 

This was separate to what they were doing. And so just a lot of it felt incredibly unjust. And I think I have a strong sense of fairness and justice. And so having this happen to me, really angered me in the sense that, you know, it wasn’t fair. In a nutshell, it really went against my sense of fairness. And of course they knew nothing about me, but the fact that yes, we were essentially volunteers with a stipend working for this organization in a sense, the goodness of our heart, because we felt inspired by the mission that they were trying to do. Maybe it happened only two weeks after we’d arrived in South Africa as well. Just a lot, everything about it felt like, very frustrating.

Carrie: All right, that makes a lot of sense. Just not knowing how to deal with all those emotions that came up, all those thoughts that would come up, you know, as intrusions. And you were like, I don’t like this. I don’t know what to do with it. And so then this avoidance, which is really, really common and trauma took over and you filled that space with food? 

Jon: It’s, I’m ex-military as well, but I spent six years in the Canadian military and the navy. And as an engineer. But we’re also obviously trained as soldiers too. We’re soldiers, you know, first sailor, second or trade was third. I only share that because I am trained in terms of, of combat and things like that. And so there were definitely thoughts in my head about even things like setting traps. Because kind of what happens down there is also like, clearly we stand out because we are a visible minority, but like, you know, we were broken into many times as well and it just compounds it, it feels like you’re constantly under attack or under assault when you’re living down there for nothing that you’ve ever done. And so, you know, I had thoughts of, like setting traps and really trying to even, like encourage people to break into our hosts so that I could inflict harm on them and try and exact, maybe revenge or vengeance for what had happened to me. 

But there always be this voice in my head that goes, this isn’t who you are. This is not who you are. This is not what you would do. So I really felt this tension between like the sense of identity and who I am as a human being and these things, these thoughts and ideas that were coming into my head. But looking back, I believe they were an attempt to try and reconcile something that was taken from me. You know, they really took away my power. They took away, you know, they victimized me and so on. It was almost like my attempt to take back what was taken from me. 

Carrie: When did you recognize, okay, this way of coping with this trauma is not working for me anymore?

Jon: Truthfully, it was probably a couple of years after the fact. Because some of the other, what would I say, mitigating factors? I had a sense of an idea of what masculinity was and what it meant to be a man and so on. So that also came into play really in influencing how it felt about everything, including how I felt about myself, looking back. I realized like my whole life I’ve actually been an empath. I have a very big heart for people, a very big heart of caring and love, but for most of my life that actually kind of hidden and suppressed these things because I felt like, if people saw, these aspects of my nature, my identity, that they would see me as a weak man, not realizing that. Of course, that’s, that’s a completely flawed idea about it. 

So that came into it as well. So again, this idea, these huge emotions coming up, and I was seeing myself as an emotionally irrational person. When, you know, prior to this, I’d kind of been, my wife used to tease me and even call me the 10 men a little bit. And so to have all of this and have it outside of my control felt very, very disempowering as well. It was probably and why is in the backstories because it didn’t really have any idea of touch she even recognized that I was traumatized in a sense, like it’s, after the minutes, like I’m strong, I can move past this.

They’re not going to win. And so on, because of that, I didn’t necessarily seek out specific help for this. I just kind of used my own coping skills, but I would say it was probably six or seven months after the fact that I first realized that my weight had ballooned up to 328 lbs. So we go back to Australia where my wife is from and realized I can’t, like I can’t keep living like this. At that time, I was 30 years old. This is if I keep on this path. This is gonna be a short life for me, that’s not what I want. So I have to try to make some changes, but I didn’t know what to do to even make changes. And so I started with trying to lose the weight. And prior to that, I’d been an athlete.

I’ve been pretty good shape. Most of my life had never really struggled that much with my weight. And so now that was another compounding factor. Here I was, I had this sense of identity as an athlete who was in pretty good shape. We went to the gym regularly, that kind of thing to now being this obese person who struggled to move. So there was that as well. And along with that came like the self-loathing and the self hatred and, and feelings of unworthiness and being unlovable and so on, all of that sort of came into play as well. And so I started to turn my attention to trying to lose weight, feeling like that would correct some of this stuff that was going on.

Carrie: How did that go? How did the weight loss journey go for you? Did you try a lot of different diets?

Jon: I did. I would say name a diet and I probably tried it now. I imagine like, since that time, cause there’s a period of time where I’ve lost weight and kept it off now for a number of years, I would say that. I tried, like paleo keto. I was even raw vegan for a period of time, low carb, low fat, just a lot of different eating protocols. Flexitarian, Mediterranean and so on. And none really could stick and I couldn’t figure out why. I’m, I’m pretty, well-educated, pretty good handle on this. And it was a struggle to try and understand, why could I know all this stuff?, but I couldn’t seem to make it stick on my own life. 

I can even help other people. I was good at helping other people. I’m a natural coach, but I couldn’t help myself. I went on for a few years of, like yo-yo dieting, losing some weight, regaining it, losing it, regaining it. And even that sort of struggle itself. Again, compounding everything I felt about myself, of being a failure about really just again, being sort of this unlovable loser. Thankfully, my wife is just an amazing human being who was with me and by my side through all of this and never once like, lost hope or faith in me. Which is a real testament to her character. 

Carrie: I think so many people go through that shame cycle that you’re talking about there with, okay, I’m gonna do this diet gung ho and I’m gonna get the food and I’m gonna plan the meals. And then next thing you know, they, we’re working really hard at it. And either they don’t see the results that they were expecting to see or they’re not able to stick with it. And then it creates this, oh gosh, I’m a failure. I’m never gonna lose this weight. I’m just gonna be heavy forever. And they just end up in this spiral of negativity just makes you wanna eat more really.

Jon: Well see the brain had learned the pattern. That when I feel stressed or uncomfortable in anything that I don’t wanna feel. I can just eat food and change that. A lot of people, myself included when we embark on the journey of losing weight and we decide we’re gonna make this change. And transformation is very exciting in the beginning because we’re starting to picture how we’re gonna look, how we’re gonna feel, how life is going to be different.

But I think there’s this idea that somehow, because we’re a virtuous or a good person or something that the universe is gonna conspire to create the perfect conditions for us to lose the weight, because we’re a good person who wants to do a good thing. And the reality is a lot colder than that life doesn’t stop throwing you curveballs and punching your junk when you try to make a change like that.

So you actually have to, and I actually had to navigate this attempted transformation in real life while still sort of carrying around the emotional burdens of these beliefs, the trauma and so on. And then the yo-yo cycle just really perpetuates the cycle of shame, guilt, regret, a sense of failure and so on. I amassed a lot of that with the persona of the jolly fat guy, as well. You know, I was even at one point nicknamed the Garber eater, that’s quite, quite a handle to have.

Carrie: The garber eater?

Jon: Because I can eat a lot of food. I took a sense of pride in my appetite, but also, you know, if there was some good leftovers that somebody had, that they were just to scrape in the garbage, you know, say like a half eaten steak, I’d just cut off the parts where, you know, maybe their fork and knife and touched and be like, why are you throwing away this good food? If it’s gonna waste and miles to go to my waste, that was actually my thinking. And I think it would physically cause, like a pain at my core when I watched food being thrown away, that was like perfectly edible and good.  And maybe some of that was connected to the fact that for me, food really represented a poor solution to dealing with my emotional struggles.

Carrie: How did you find some more positive ways to handle your emotions? What was that process like?

Jon: I go back to a coach who asked me a really impactful question that I see it legitimately changed my life. And it’s interesting to think that one question, when you follow that back, one question can actually change your life. And it started with, he said, if you make a list of all the things you love and value, how far down the list we have to go before I see your name and that one stopped me dead in my tracks. 

Carrie: Wow!

Jon: Because it’s like, I’m not on the list. It wasn’t even that it was near the bottom. That was not on the list. I think I remember, like, I haven’t cried very often in my life pride, you know, when I send my wedding balance, that’s like, that’s the only time in my adult life that I really remember, like for most of my life ever, ever shedding tears, not because I’m ashamed to it just really hadn’t. And that moment, I just like when I was by myself, I just started crying because I couldn’t understand, like it had never entered my conscious that I was allowed to be in the list of things I love and value. Let alone near the top of that list. 

So it really spoke to how I felt about myself. If I look back, I had this historical pattern of like basically setting myself on fire to keep others warm, just giving and giving and giving and constantly giving them myself. And I think it really stemmed from a real core of my being the sense of identity that said, I’m not good enough. And I have to do this. Otherwise people will just in my life will just abandon me. That was yet again, another contributing factor that made like the weight loss such as troubles. That question was like a really, it at least started the wheels turning that I need to find my weight onto this list. And I didn’t even know how to do that because it wasn’t something that ever I had ever thought about before. And maybe even I would have felt, I would have felt like a sense of shame around like being given a compliment.

Carrie: Ok.

Jon: Or being told I was good at something I’d often just want to like brush that off. Even though, like I’m quite capable of quite intelligent, you know, if I could say, like, I’m a good man, a good husband, a good father, a loyal friend, all these things. But if anyone had told me that I would try to brush it off. I didn’t want to receive the compliment graciously because of how I felt about myself. I didn’t feel I was worthy or deserved that.

Carrie: Just make you really uncomfortable.

Jon: I then squirmed in my seat and just really wanted the light to be sort of turned away from me again. One of the things that I, and then my coach had me do was to try to pay myself a genuine compliment, like look at myself in the mirror as the president was and pay myself a genuine heartfelt compliment that was grounded in reality, because in the persona state of the jolly fat guy, for example, it would be something that everything was a little bit exaggerated. You know, it was a larger than life kind of character, both physically. And in my sort of presence, I was loud.

I was vocal that kind of thing. 

It couldn’t be this exaggerated compliment because a lot of that is just rooted in insecurity. It had to be a very genuine one. And that process of saying the compliment and then sitting with all the feelings that came up, not trying to push them away, not trying to shoot them away, but just sitting with them almost like observing them. And so maybe another piece of that puzzle would be when I started practicing meditation. I think it’s now shifted, but you go back like 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 years ago. 

The idea is around meditation, where it’s something for like monks, you know, maybe Buddhist monks in a monastery in the Himalayas or something like that or you have to burn or hippies or you have to burn incense and hum and things like that.

Really, it was just about trying to quiet my mind and have a singular focus. And for me, it was actually just the breathing rhythm box, reading four in four out four, hold, sorry, four and four hold for, out for hold. That was the first one, you know, just something really, really simple to calm the nervous system down, even learning that practice helped me to start to become more mindful of the thoughts that enter my head. And that was one of the ways that I started to deal with the intrusive thoughts actually.

Carrie: I like that so good.

Jon: Just as a side note, as a kid, I didn’t know what I was doing at that time. Let’s see I was laying in bed at night, maybe five, six years old and had sort of scary thoughts of monsters under my bed or whatever. I would actually visualize the hedgehog driving a bulldozer and he would push those thoughts outside of my head. It’s kind of like off the edge of a cliff. So it was funny that was sort of visual tool that I developed as a little child to deal with sort of uncomfortable thoughts in my head. 

Carrie: Okay. That’s interesting. So, how are you able to forgive the people that hurt you?

Jon: That was a process as well, that I made the decision to forgive because I wanted to be free from the experience. Ultimately, I realized that if I was to forgive them, that it was not about absolving them for what they had done. But I was really about setting myself free from what I had experienced. And I got tired of being angry. Rage is exhausting.

Carrie: Yes, yes.

Jon: And it’s not fun. It’s misery so it’s exhausting misery. And I was just so weary because again, it was not who I am as a person. I realized that, okay, I have to forgive them. It was in Istanbul, living with my brother at the time we were, we went back to Turkey for a period of time. My brothers lived over there for more than 12 years and I couldn’t sleep one night and I just got off and I said, “okay, I have to start the process of forgiveness, I didn’t know what it was gonna look like again, but I realized I wanted to forgive them because I want it to be free”.

I think what helped me is, I had to ask the question, “what must have happened in their life or their experience that led them to the place where not only did they think it was appropriate to do what they did”? It was actually there they’re almost like they were doing a good thing. I was the bad guy, because I don’t think first of all, I don’t think that human beings are born racist. And I don’t think that they’re necessarily born like with this idea that they wanna be a violent criminal.

Carrie: Right. 

Jon: And so what happened to them in their life, in their experience that led them to this point in time in their life? I don’t know, but it probably wasn’t good. 

Carrie: It makes sense.

Jon: So I started to develop a sense of compassion for them, which went against my sense of justice at the time. But I realized that again, I had to humanize them. If I was going to forgive them, they couldn’t just be like monsters. They had to be humans if I was gonna forgive them. And so I really started to reflect from their human experience and what would have brought them to this place. And the other thing I had to realize is I’m a Christian and I couldn’t say forgive them, but kind of secretly hold them at heart. And I wish that God would smack them. I have to be absolute forgiveness where I actually asked God to forgive them as well. 

Carrie: Yes.

Jon: And to let go of all thoughts and desires for vengeance. It was one I got to that place and it was probably an there’s a number of months, really getting to that place of one of the steps I would say in terms of healing and moving past it. And I can say we’re actually only a couple of days off the ten-year anniversary of this happening to me. And I’m deeply grateful that I had that experience because of how it has changed me. How I’ve become a more caring, compassionate, empathetic person. So it didn’t turn me into a bitter person. I went through many years of struggles, but because of those struggles, I now have a much deeper understanding of really a people’s humanity and in their experience. And again, it’s not to really, to absolve people of harmful or unhelpful behavior, but it’s to understand why that behavior occurs and understanding that to potentially be an agent for change. Could we see in other people’s lives as well?

Carrie: I’m glad that you talked about that being a process of forgiveness, because I think a lot of times people look at it as it should be some kind of like one and done thing, but really it’s a matter of when that anger comes up, you know, dealing with it in that way of saying, okay, let me get over to the space of compassion for others and for understanding that I’m not the one responsible for justice in the sense that’s God’s department. And it does, it takes time, especially when you have big things happen to you. Sometimes that forgiveness is a process.

Jon: And you’re right about like, I couldn’t just sort of make the decision to forgive and then be free. It’s every time my brain wanted to revisit what happened to me too. You highlighted exactly, really to move into that space of compassion to say, like, I don’t want this anger, you know, and really asking God to help me to let go of it. And also like not feeling necessarily a sense of guilt for the thoughts entered my head. Because I didn’t want them. I didn’t want them there, but there was this period of time where I felt really conflicted, even at least thoughts entering my head because I thought, well, these are, these are sinful thoughts. These are harmful thoughts. They’re not thoughts that a Christian should have entering their head thoughts of carrying out violence and harming other people, even letting go of the guilt that I felt for that realizing that this was kind of my brain’s response to trying to reconcile what had happened to me. And that like in this experience, God, God was taking me through this experience. 

There’s no shortcut. I think sometimes maybe there’s this desire that we try to be a Christian and try to serve God. But there’s this desire that somehow this will allow us to short circuit or shortcut the experience. But if we, if I was to take a shortcut around the experience, I would miss a lot of the value of that experience. And that’s not to say that I wanna go through something like that again, I don’t. But it was because I went through the painful experience. It’s like, almost like we have to get to like the lowest of lows to realize like how deep God’s love for us is. And we can’t really know it or feel it until we get to that place.

Carrie: Wow. That’s a good point. So tell us a little bit about what you do in terms of the nutrition coaching and your work with client.

Jon: So that originally started out about six or seven years ago, one ahead of nutrition and supplement store. So a physical bricks and mortar store. And so people would come in looking for a particular supplement to help them with a particular issue. I said that I started to become a bartender without local. And so people would come into the store and they would just start sharing their struggles. I would ask questions, “hey, you’re looking for this supplement help what’s going on”? Let’s try to understand this a little bit more. And very often that I’m saying, you know what, actually, you’re welcome to buy that if you want to. But like, I just want you to know that that’s probably not gonna help you with what it is you’re trying to get help it. And maybe I pointed direction or there’s something to help them, but ultimately I ended up coaching people. 

So I started, you know, maybe I started out giving people calorie recommendations and meal plans and things, because that is what I thought people need it. But as time went on, I realized that those were really just like band-aid approaches. But really now I do what I call like brain driven, weight loss. And I’d almost like to call it, say like the side effect might include weight loss. In other words, the process that we’re really working on is a one of transformation and it actually needs a permanent shift in identity.

The idea behind a diet is a temporary change to create permanent results. And that’s never gonna be the case. If we’re going to create lasting change, we have to be transformed really it’s about walking people through that process because it’s incredibly the human beings. We don’t really create change on our own. It’s really difficult because we feel lonely and isolated, but why don’t we feel connected to another safe human being? If I could put it that way. But then it’s safe for us because the process of change is vulnerable. It’s moving out of our comfort zone. It’s moving into the discomfort zone. It involves growing. Think about like when a snake goes to shadow skin as an animal kingdom example, it goes to a place where it will be safe and secure because in that time that it’s going through that process, it’s insane so to speak. 

So we can understand that a little bit like, when we go to transform, we’re moving into a vulnerable state and biologically our brain doesn’t like that because we have this hardwired sort of primal survival mechanisms. And so what needs to happen is we need to be in a safe space, so to speak where it feels like it’s safe to transform because we’re connecting to another secure human being. And so really there’s a relational aspect of the coaching that I’m doing is essentially holding space for somebody and then guiding them through that process. Yes, we’re essentially going to reverse engineer. 

So we understand that fundamental principles of a healthy lifestyle. It really hasn’t changed because our biology really hasn’t changed that part of it is relatively simple as the human part that makes it complex. And so we walk people through the process of building out the foundation steps or building out the foundation pieces. And then learning how to implement these skills into their lives. So they actually become a habit or a routine behavior. So in the process of doing so, one of the things we need to do is bring a lot of unconscious habits and behaviors into our conscious awareness, because it’s the place of awareness that we can create change. And I like to add to that and say, it’s, it’s really the place of compassionate awareness. It helps us to create change. 

We almost do two things. We take the unconscious habits that are unhelpful, bring them into our conscious awareness, refine them. And then we transfer them back into sort of our unconscious mind by basically by practicing these behaviors until ultimately we’ve done is we’ve crafted a lifestyle that suits the individual so that not only do they lose their weight. But because it’s become their way of living. And there’s also been a transformation in their identity. They can keep doing this because ultimately that’s what’s required to truly create change.

Carrie: I like that concept of changing from the inside out one and two to make major changes, having to change your identity, how you view yourself. And so many people are looking at themselves in the mirror saying, well, maybe like you like, okay, well I’m the jolly happy fat guy. And that really was your identity. And until you could see yourself differently, your subconscious essentially was like, we have to hold onto this weight. I mean, because we’re the jolly fat guy, like that’s who we are. And so until we, you start to see yourself differently, your body isn’t gonna fall in line with those changes that you’re trying to make that makes so much sense. 

Jon: Well, it’s really interesting because there’s like this, could we say a dynamic tension? So our primal nervous system is really hardwired to seek out comfort and familiarity because that’s where safety lies.

But our soul, the essence of who we are as a human yearns for growth and development and bettering ourselves. There’s just this urge or drive. And so there’s this tension between these kinds of these two forces that are kind of pulling back and forth. Probably heard the phrase that we don’t really change until the discomfort of remaining the same outweighs the discomfort of creating change.

Carrie: Right. Just kind of as a closing question. If you could go back in time, what encouragement or hope would you provide to your younger self? 

Jon: You can get through this. Human beings are immensely resilient. But we have to believe and have faith in the fact that we are, it is incredible what we can endure and move forward in. But the other thing is like, there is an end to this. There is light at the end of the tunnel. It’s going to be a difficult and painful experience, but there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Thing I would say is there is no shame in seeking help.

Carrie: Right. That’s a good one. 

Jon: It’s the most beneficial thing I ever did was to open up and ask others for help. And it’s incredible that kindness that human beings will show you when you open yourself up to receiving help.

Carrie: Coach Jon, thank you so much for being on the podcast and talking about your personal story. I think that the really powerful and something probably a lot of people can relate to. Maybe they didn’t go through the exact trauma that you went through, but they went through something difficult and used food to cope or are emotional eating even currently. And maybe they can kind of pick up some tips from things that you shared of how to start making heading in a new direction. So that’s awesome. 

Jon: Thank you so much for having me into, just to encourage anybody who might be struggling with things it’s okay. That your brain is doing what it’s kind of designed to do. We just need to, to, to work with your brain, the brain is wonderfully plastic. It’s called neuroplasticity. We can essentially rewire our brain. And so even if you feel stuck in these patterns, that can be changed. There is hope for you. 

Carrie: Yes for sure. I wanted to take a moment to give a couple of shout-outs. One is to Betty. Thank you for being our first patron on Patreon. If you like, Betty would like to support the show. You can click on the link in our show notes. I also wanna say a thank you to Emily for writing us an encouraging note and letting us know what the podcast has meant to her. She said that she found the podcast during a difficult time in her life. And now considers us to be one of her top three favorite podcasts. So that’s awesome. It’s so encouraging to hear from our listeners. So thank you for everybody out there who’s listening. 

Hope for anxiety and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, licensed professional counselor in Tennessee opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of myself or by the world counseling or original music is by Brandon Mangrum. Until next time be comforted by God’s great love for you.

56. Finding Joy in Her Husband’s Struggles with Carole Leathem

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 56. Finding Joy in Her Husband’s Struggles with Carole Leathem

I’m joined by Carole Leathem, mom, author and speaker. Carole has been caring for her spouse who has been battling anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts. She shares with us her journey of finding joy in her husband’s struggles. 

  • Carole’s experience with her husband who struggles with mental illness-the most chaotic and dark painful times she ever been through.
  • Factors that contribute to her husband’s mental health condition
  • How their church responded in terms of the mental health crisis faced by her husband
  • How did her husband’s mental health disorder affect her?
  • How to cope when a loved one has a mental health disorder
  • Turning to scriptures for comfort and hope
  • Choosing joy despite her circumstances 

Related Links and Resources:

Carole Leathem
Carole’s Book: Finding Joy In My Messy Life 

More Podcast Episodes

Transcript

Carrie: Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD, Episode 56. If you are new to our show,we are all about reducing shame, increasing hope, and developing healthier connections with God and others. Today’s show is on supporting and coping when your spouse is in crisis. I think this is going to be a great topic. We had another episode much earlier in the podcast where we talked about when your spouse has anxiety or OCD.

And here today, I have Carole Leathem, who is a speaker and author of the book, Finding Joy In My Messy Life. Carole, I have to say, I love that title because. I can relate. I feel like my life has certainly been messy at times and I’m sure other people can relate to that as well.

Carole: Yeah, Matt, I think right now everybody’s life is a mess in one way or another.

Carrie: Yes .

Carole: I’m happy to be here and talk about it.

Carrie. You had an experience ongoing experience with your husband who has struggled with mental health issues. Can you tell us a little bit about that story?

Carole: Well, my husband was a pastor and we’ve, we’re about to celebrate our 44th wedding anniversary in January. Five years ago, he started having some blood pressure issues and the doctor suggested that he retire.

So we did. He was going to do some sort of temporary interim work, and I was still working and about a few months into our retirement, he began to struggle with severe anxiety. By the end of that first year, 2016, the anxiety had moved into depression. By the end of 2016, he had to be hospitalized with suicidal thoughts and wanting to kill himself.

Our whole life just fell apart and I found myself a pastor’s wife, living on the other side of the pew, trying to figure out who I was,” What is this going to look like now? And then how am I going to support him? How am I going to support me? ” It was probably the most chaotic and dark painful times that I had ever been through.

Carrie: Wow! And I would imagine for men kind of going through retirement like sometimes men have such a focus on their career that it’s hard for them to shift gears and, and struggle handling that. Do you feel like that played a role in this as well?

Carole:I think looking back, I can see sort of the fingerprints or sort of the markers let’s say that maybe should have been alarming, but we just kind of lived through them.

So one was, he was very dedicated to his job and when we would go on vacation, he couldn’t check his. There were some control issues that started. I can look back and see now that that really weren’t severe, but they were sort of building, building, building. And then there was also a family dynamic like his family had this in their history and I was not aware of it

Carrie: Oh, wow.

Carole: until this happened to us. So stories started coming out. And so I do think that the job played a lot. The retirement did play a lot. “ How does that look, What does that look like?” You know, he retired earlier than he wanted to, so it hit us financially. We moved in with our daughter. So we lost some of our independence and I think there was just a whole lot of things that kind of gathered into the umbrella of the perfect storm.

Carrie: Okay. So I’m curious about how the church responded in terms of this mental health crisis, because it seems like a lot of times the church does really well with responding to physical health issues and maybe struggles with knowing how to respond to mental health.

I get one of two things. Whenever I talk about our story. And, and especially since my book has come out, one of two things happens when I began to talk. I get people kind of leaning in wanting to know more with, with sort of concern or sometimes a grateful smile. Like, “Hey, I want to hear, you know, you’re helping me here or I get total crickets.

And within the church, I think the church is still struggling to know how to deal with this from pastor to like church or parishioner. And when it happens to somebody within the leadership, it really sort of freaks everybody out, especially when they’re strong, they’re capable, they’re seen as a leader, that it comes out of nowhere and they people start getting, I think, afraid.

“ Well, if it could happen to him, it could happen to me. If it could happen to her husband, it could happen to my husband.” I think that there’s a denial that happens where we’d just prefer to sort of like walk away and not deal with it.And we did find that I found that a lot of people sort of pulled away. Some of them are starting to circle back around because they realize now that I need the love and support, I also think that it was good. For me to sort of have that pulling away in some ways, because some of the people who didn’t pull away said some really stupid things and said really hurtful, painful things, or, you know, trying to help, but not really thinking about what they were saying.

So, I think it’s the same in any type of crisis. We just don’t know how to deal with it. Especially with mental illness, they don’t know how to deal with it. And it’s oh!, running rampant through the church, right now?

Carrie: Absolutely. I was. And that’s why we need to talk about it. We need to have more of these conversations to say, “ Okay, you know, let’s educate the leaders and the pastors and let them know how you can help people in mental health crisis situations.”

Yeah. I think that’s huge. I love what you said there about denial because when you start to talk about mental health, there’s something where people have to kind of self-examine a little bit, and that can be super uncomfortable for folks because at one point or another, most of us have at least had some level of like mild depression or anxiety.

Those are their two most common mental health disorders. And obviously not, everybody’s at a diagnosable level. But everybody’s had a blue period. Everybody’s had a down period. Everybody’s had some anxiousness around a situation in their life. And so, to really be with somebody else who’s going through that, sometimes it can stir up your own stuff and people don’t always want to go there. It’s just much easier to pull back and avoid. And it’s a sad situation, I think.

Carole: When it first hit me. It took me a couple of years to verbally say out loud, “ My husband has mental illness”.

Carrie: Wow.

Carole: Because there’s just this sort of, “ I don’t want to be that person”.“I don’t want that to be my reality”. And then when I started researching, “ What did that mean?”, “I’m a digger, I’m an information person.” So I started like just going through and finding everything I can, which shockingly enough, there’s not as much information out there for the caregiver, for the person who’s not struggling, but loving somebody struggling. And so what I discovered is this, that mental illnesses is an umbrella.

Carole: and this umbrella has underneath it. Things like postpartum depression. We joke and tease about PMs, women having PMs, but that actually falls under the umbrella of mental illness because mental illness is anything that affects the brain when it attacks the brain, whether it’s depression, whether it’s anxiety, whether it’s fear that we can’t control, it controls how we relate to other people.

It controls how we relate to ourselves. It controls how we eat, how we sleep, and how we do everything in our life. And all of a sudden, we don’t want to realize that we can’t control this.

Carrie: Right

Carole: And it’s taken over everything, destroying our lives in a lot of ways.

Carrie: How did it affect you when your husband started showing these signs of anxiety and depression and suicidal thoughts?

Carole:I don’t think I really realized how far it had gone until a Wednesday night. He had been calling a crisis hotline, trying to find help. He was sitting in a chair with a hoodie over his head and, and not really engaging with the grandchildren. And we were in our son’s house. The only time I didn’t go into the room with him, when he went to call the crisis hotline, he came out and handed me the phone. And what happened was he had said the wrong thing to the person on the phone and started in motion what California calls the 51 50. California welfare code, which means he was now deemed a threat to himself, a threat to someone else.

And they’re wanting to send the police are wanting to send an ambulance and I’m standing there in the kitchen looking at my two-year-old grandson thinking, “ Oh my gosh, what has happened?” And I ended up having to finally convince her, the woman on the phone to let me drive him to a facility. And they told me where to take him. When I dropped him at the facility or I got to go in with him.

But when they finally realized that they could not talk him out of or find a way to feel safe, letting him leave, they literally kicked me out. Like I had an armed guard, walked me to the door, say, don’t come back. And when that happened, I remember it was one o’clock in the morning and I’m standing in the parking lot of the hospital, just sort of screaming, literally verbally out loud into the darkness.

“What the heck have happened to my life?”. It continued into the next morning and it wasn’t until the next morning when I sat down in the quiet of the house and I may, I have a strong faith and it wasn’t until that next morning, when I sat down with my coffee in the empty house. And just started crying out to God. like, “how am I going to deal with this?”

I am terrified myself. And really, I think we have to be honest with what we’re feeling at that moment. I was angry. I was afraid. I was confused. I mean, there’s all of these emotions, you know, that I’m trying to wrangle at the same time. I just think that it’s so easy for them, for us, to fall into the same trap because we’re now in the danger zone.

When we’re trying to deal with the understanding, we put ourselves into the danger zone, and there’s a critical point where we have to decide as a caretaker, as a loved one, as the person, who’s the partner of the husband or the wife, where we have to decide, how am I going to respond to this?

Carrie: Yes. That’s true.

Carole: So I think that’s that determines whether we’re going to stay healthy.

It really determines whether we are going to stay healthy ourselves.

Carrie: If someone who’s listening has a spouse who’s struggling, like from your experience, how do they make sure that they get support that they need? And it’s like this balancing act of trying to make sure that like your needs get met while at the same time, trying to support your spouse.

Carole: You have to be really proactive. The first thing I do, if we were on a video camera where I could turn the camera, I would show you that my window is covered in post-it notes. And the post-it notes are quotes. There are Bible verses. They’re statements that I make to myself. One of them says a scripture that I clung to that my book was actually written.

That’s the core bursts that my book was written on. You have to make a choice. Number one, to change your focus and what are you going to look at? It’s very, very, very, I can’t even say how many veries, easy for us to just want to crawl into the bed of life. Pull the covers up over our head and just ignore everything.

Carrie: Yes.

Carole: Thinking that that’s going to make me isolate. Don’t reach out, especially when people are starting to pull away, it makes it easier to isolate. So the very first thing I did was I called my.. well, I actually had connected with a friend right before this all happened and we had been friends for over 20 years.

And I’m telling her the story of not really understanding the behavior. And this was about maybe six weeks before he had to be hospitalized. So we were just going into the very critical sort of emergency part of his journey into the psychiatric hospital. And she told me it was so funny that day. She told me, she said, “ How many years have we been friends?”

And I said,” Oh!, over 20”. And she said, “ You know that I’m a retired”. And I said, “ Yeah, I know you’re a retired nurse.” And she said, “ What you don’t know is, I’m a retired psychiatric nurse.” And this is what I think is going on inside of bill. And so when we are willing to open ourselves up now like I blog about it, I wrote a book about it.

I talk about it everywhere. That’s not what the normal average person is required to do, but you do need to look around you because I found that there were perfectly placed people like my friend, Nancy, who was a psychiatric nurse, and she continues today to be one of my strongest advisers, supporters, encouragers.

And then I myself said, “ I need therapy. I need help because I need to deal with me. I have to take care of me.” And right on my window, I have it written: “ If I don’t take care of me, I can’t take care of anybody else.”

Carrie: Yes

Carole: If I want to stay married, if I want to stay healthy, if I want to keep from getting emotionally unstable, I have to take care of myself.

So I have all kinds of things that I do under the umbrella of self-care. And I say umbrella over and over, because I really do think that, that we are in a storm and I have this picture of this umbrella where God is kind of like the umbrella. And so when I refer to umbrella, it’s just kind of become this idea in my mind that everything you’re not in this alone, you have to have help.

I have all of these different umbrellas in my life. And so you have to get help, get counseling yourself, do physical things, make sure you eat well, make sure you sleep well. Make sure you do something fun. I have seven grandchildren and they give me so much joy. So, I’m always trying to find ways that I can go do something with one of them, because it’s going to take me away from the fear or the pressure or whatever.It helps me stop thinking for a moment.

Carrie: Yeah. That’s great. I, you know, so many of the things that you’re talking about are, are awesome. We have entire episodes on some of those. We have episodes on self-care. We have an episode that’s coming out before this one on sleep and nutrition, so many good things.

And I think a lot of people take that for granted. They don’t realize that there’s a foundation that you have to build healthy mental health on and things like sleep, nutrition, exercise, social support, self-care,. Those are all great, like foundational bricks and building blocks that are going to help you be able to work on the next level of your mental health sometimes, which is whether it’s dealing with past a few, you know, triggers and all of that.

Did you have some of that come up for you? Like when you went to therapy, like things started to kind of unravel that you learned about yourself. Like, “ Oh, this is here. I didn’t realize that.”

Carol: Yeah, well, my dad was an abusive alcoholic, so my younger life was chaotic. Moving into adulthood. I carried all kinds of baggage with me and I had already began to deal with this.

So if I had one hot button, uh, that we would call that, that one thing that would push me over the edge emotionally, every time it would be the word rejection. Because when you are rejected as a child, it’s really hard going into your adult life and not carrying that with you because you just, you always feel why did my father not love me?

Why did this happen to me? This happened right before our 40th wedding anniversary. And I had spent so much time learning to trust. There was an experience that happened in the hospital where the psychiatrist made my husband looked at me and he was yelling at him and he said, “ Look at her.” And he forced him.

Like, he forced my husband to roll over in the bed and look at me. And he said, “Do you want to do this to her? Do you know?” And he’s yelling into this room. Well, yelling is another hot topic for me. All of a sudden, my husband looked at the doctor said, “ Do you really want to do that to her?” And my husband looked at me in the eye, closed his eyes and rolled away , the ultimate rejection.

And I will tell you, Carrie, I still, to this day, I’m recovering from that. And it’s been five years, almost five years. Well, by the time this airs, it will have been five years that I’ve been dealing with this. And I think that our past really plays a part. The beautiful thing is, is that I was, I’ve been able to over the last five years, creates some really practical ways that when his anxiety and control turns into blame and anger towards me, I have found some incredible ways that I can deal with it without it destroying me while, I’m putting myself back together from that rejection, I’ve actually been getting stronger and stronger because I’m using those tools, that foundation that you talked about from years of therapy, getting over that. But I think there’s just some things that never go away. And it was sort of shocking to me to realize how much rejection played a part and still plays a part in how I have to choose every day to find that joy,
to find that commitment to stay on the course that I believe that I’m supposed to stay on, which is to love and care for my husband.

Carrie: Awesome. Do you feel like joy is a choice? Cause I mean, you, you know, your title starts out with finding joy. So, do you feel like that’s something that we have to be really intentional about?

I think a lot of people think about joy is like either have it or you don’t somehow.

Carole: Yeah. And I think that the word joy is, is a very misunderstood word. So the morning, the reason joy is in the title of my book is this, the morning after I left him in the psychiatric hospital, I was sitting on the couch.

I was drinking my coffee and I opened up my scripture because,as a pastor’s wife, as a Christian for all of these years, that’s the first place I would always turn when I’m looking for comfort, when I’m looking for hope, when I’m looking for something that’s going to help me sort of set aside all of these negative emotions and say,” Okay, God, you’re really there. You’re going to take care of me, whatever.” So I flipped up in my scripture to where I was reading at the time in the book of James and the first scripture I look at is James Chapter one, Verse two, where it says, “ Consider it all joy, My brothers, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith is going to produce endurance.”

And I remember reading the words, consider it all joy. My brothers, when you encounter various trials, Lambing the bookshelf and looking up. And I talked to God in a very real way. I get mad and I verbalize it out loud. There are times when I’m walking down the street and people are like, “ Who’s she talking to?”

But I snapped at him. I said, “ Really?” I said, “ Really God, my life is falling apart. And this is the scripture you give me to consider it joy?”. How in the world do you consider? So I looked at it in a different version and it said “ Considered a sheer gift.” Well, that’s even worse because I really don’t want this gift, but then my eyes focused in on one word. And I’m telling you that morning before, really? I didn’t even know where my husband was, but at that moment, two things changed for me, consider it all joy, when It didn’t say consider it all joy which means we need to understand as humans, that that was going to happen. And when it happens, we need to understand that God is not only there, but He’s already provided and is going to continue.

And I have story after story, after story, even down to last week where just crazy things happen, where God shows up. So joy is a choice because my joy is not founded in the circumstances. My joy is founded in that relationship and trust that I have believing that God is in control because right after I saw that word, I slid down into another verse, a couple of verses later, and it says your faith-life is going to be on display for everyone to see.

Now I was already a speaker. I was already a blogger. I was already very sort of traveling around and talking. I worked in Hollywood for many years, so I understood what it meant for your faith life to be on display. And I got this vision of God saying, “ Girl, I got a plan for you and you’re going to help all of these people that don’t know where to find help when they’re in your circumstance and carry that as what has been happening.”

A week doesn’t go by that somebody doesn’t reach out, who’s overwhelmed, who’s searching and I’m able to just lovingly say, “ Okay, here we are. I get it. I know exactly what you’re going through.” Sometimes I cry with them. You know, sometimes I can encourage them. Sometimes they just need to listen and know that there’s somebody out there.

Carrie: That gets it.

Carole: That’s making it work. That’s getting it. Joy is definitely a choice. It’s a daily choice. Sometimes it’s some three-second choice, you know, sometimes I have to say, “ Okay, joy, I’m going to choose joy. Okay. I’m going to choose joy.” And then there are days where I might be laying face down on the carpet, just crying and sobbing. And yet I’m still choosing joy.

Carrie: Yeah.

Carole: I’m still choosing joy.

Carrie: I think people misunderstand joy, you know, and they, they believe it’s like happiness or some kind of like warm, fuzzy feeling. But to me, joy and hope are very similar because in a sense, joy is saying, “ I know something good is gonna come out of this, even though it’s a really bad situation right now.”

And it’s, I don’t see anything good about it, but I’m choosing to delight in God and in what he’s done in my life and what I know he’s going to do. Like, I know that somehow this story has a good ending.

Carole: Yeah. And I think when we choose joy, it opens our eyes to the possibilities of things that are around us.

If I didn’t choose joy, then I would miss those moments with my like tonight, I’m going to go tonight with my 15-year-old grandson, I’m going to serve baked potatoes in the booth at the football game, while he marches in the band, I’m going to go and I’m going to do that. Um, and I’m choosing to do that.

Now, some people will go “ Where’s the joy, where’s the fun in that?” But what you’re doing is it’s a mindset of just living. You’re going to keep living. And so many times when we face crises, especially when we’re loving, like my relationship. I lost my identity as a wife, as a pastor’s wife, and even as a mother for a period of time, it was hard because I had to redefine, what does this look like inside of me?

And yet when we choose joy, then we open ourselves up to the possibilities of what is going to happen because of this. You know, I asked myself sometimes, “ I didn’t sign up for this.” You know, “ Why did this happen to me?” Somebody asked me one time,” Why did, why, why did God do this to me? What did I do to make him so mad?”

I was like, “I don’t even know. That’s not even in my wheel. That’s not even something that ever crosses my mind.” But when I do start saying, “I didn’t sign up for this, I didn’t deserve this. I didn’t ask for this.”, all of a sudden the focus has changed from what’s the possible, “ How am I going to survive this? How am I going to get healthy in spite of this?” is changed to the problem. It’s changed to focusing on the negativity. It’s changed to focusing on the things I can’t change. I can’t change what’s going on in my husband’s brain.

Carrie: Sure.

Carole: I can’t fix it. What I can do, is I can control how I respond to him. I can control how I’m going to deal with it. I can control how, and what my outlook is. And when you say, “ Yeah, something good is going to come out of it” . I really believe that. Well, I’ve already seen so much good come out of it.

Carrie: Yeah. Just that’s a huge mindset shift because I do believe that a lot of people get stuck there. And I don’t think it’s wrong to question God or to say, “ Why I don’t understand this.”

“I’m not getting it”. But we don’t want to get stuck in that place because then we’re missing out on this other piece that you’re talking about. Like, you know, let’s stop focusing on all the things that are negative. The things that I can’t control and okay. “What do you have for me, God, in this season of my life, as I’m going through this struggle, right now?”

Carole: Yeah. I tell a story in the book of, I was standing in my garage one day and I was just mad. I was done. I was mad. I was just standing in the middle of the empty garage. All the cars were gone. It’s the cement and its winter and it’s cold. And I stomp my foot and I just yelled out loud at God, “ What the heck did I ever do to you?”

And in that moment, I realized that I started to giggle because I thought, look at me, I’m like a three year old throwing a tantrum here. So I went over and I picked up a roll of blue painter’s tape and a measuring tape off the tool bench. And I created a three-foot by three-foot square and I measured it out and I taped it off.

And I said, “ I looked up at the ceiling of the garage and I said, “ Okay, God, do you see this square?” And I’m yelling at Him.” Do you see this square?” And I said,” I am stepping into this square and I’m going to let you take care of everything outside of this square.” And when I stepped inside of this square, I all of a sudden the pressure lifted. And I realized that what I was doing is I was trying to take it on all myself.

Carrie: Oh

Carole: And I think that we tend to do that. I’m responsible for making sure he takes his medicine. I’m responsible that he takes the doctor. I’m responsible for this, I’m responsible, I’m responsible. And what made it worse was that the medical professionals at the time were telling me. “ Keep him alive. Just keep him alive until we can find the medication.”

“Just keep him alive until we can figure this out.” “Just keep him alive. And every time they would say,” just keep him alive.” It put more weight into that basket of me being responsible that I’m carrying around. And the most freeing thing was for me that day, when I stepped into that square was I realized I could not keep him alive.

Carrie: Right. Right.

Carol: I could not control his choices. I could not watch him 24/7. I could not make the medication work. And when I realized that ,it was like a deep, like letting a deep breath out. And then I started to breathe normally again, I now can draw a three-foot square with my imagination when I start feeling the pressure and I will step into it.

I will draw it in a grocery store. I’ll drive, I’ve drawn one on an airplane. Whenever that pressure of, of when I’m not giving it up and realizing that I’m not in control, I’ll draw that and step into the square cause that’s me sort of giving up the control.

Carrie: That’s huge. That’s absolutely huge. I think that’s a great practical visual for people to have as well.

One of the things I like to ask guests who have had, you know, a personal story and talk about their own experiences is if you could go back in time, what encouragement or hope would you provide to your younger self?

Carole: That’s an interesting question. I would probably say that “ You don’t need to be so hard on yourself.”

And I would probably say, “You can’t protect them because I’m the oldest of four children.” And another thing I talk about in the book is how I took on the responsibility of those three children. When my parents would fight that I was the mother, I was the protector. I was, I look back now and I think I didn’t have to be that strong.

I think I didn’t have the childhood that I probably could have had because I just sort of poured myself into that. I tried to be the mother. I tried to be the protector and then my mom loved it. Because I took all the responsibility on, then it happened, it was even more required of me to do it. And so I think if I could look back at that younger self, I would say, “ You don’t have, you’re not responsible.

This is not your job. This is not your responsibility. You need to find ways to trust.” And at 16, when I did become a Christian, when I did become a believer of that all shifted because all of a sudden that new relationship that I had with God, all of a sudden, I really feel like I began to understand that, okay, there is something bigger out there in the universe that is controlling and I could never control my parents, or I never could control their choices.

And so that has really, I think if I had learned that earlier, it might have, I don’t know that it would have ever changed the dynamics of what happens now. But I think, I just wonder sometimes if I had known that in the early years of our marriage, how could that have changed it? Not regret, but you know, really looking back and going, okay.

So if I can learn that now, how is that going to change and moving forward? Because I think we can only be where we’re at. When you asked that question about going back and talking to my younger self, I think sometimes that can be a dangerous thing only because we might go, oh, well, you know, if I had learned that I wouldn’t be in this situation.

Carrie: Sure.

Carole: And I think there’s a danger for us as humans to go, oh, well, we’re at the point of no return. And I always liked to say, “ If I’m breathing, then that means my life isn’t over yet. And there’s still something for me to do. There’s still something important for me to be here. No matter how bleak it looks. There is a purpose for me to be here.”

Carrie: Right? Absolutely. Tell us where people can find you. If they’re looking for you or your book, or they want to book you as a speaker, where can they get a hold of you?

Carole: My website is Carol, uh, Carol with an E, C A R O L E caroles journey.com. And my email is carole@carolesjourney.com .And then my book is available through redemptionpress on their website or Amazon, wherever really, uh, books are sold online. All of my social media handles are at carolesjourney. I try to keep it all at caroles journey because I do believe life’s a journey.

Carrie: Yeah

Carole: And then we meet people. I love when we meet people like Carrie now, you and I, our lives are intertwined. And you know, now we’re a part of each other’s journey might be just for one short leg of the journey, but you don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. So carolesjourney is kind of my ministry.

That’s how I brand everything. They, I have a website, I have all my social media and if somebody has questions, I, I love if somebody knows somebody who is struggling, who has a spouse or a loved one, who’s struggling. I love to encourage pray for, just try to, you know, we need each other we’ve desperately need each other.

Carrie: Absolutely. I know that I have had spouses reach out who listened to the podcast and who are trying to support their husband or wife. It could be a boyfriend, girlfriend, daughter, son. Whoever’s in their world is very important to them. That’s really struggling with anxiety and OCD, depression, any of those things under the mental health umbrella that you’re talking about.

I think this episode in particular is going to be so encouraging and helpful for them. And I appreciate your willingness to come on and share your story.

Carole: Thank you. Thank you very much, Carrie, for having me. And as we go into the holiday season, that’s a really hard time, especially if you love someone because you need, I almost feel like we need the extra support and encouragement during the holiday season.

That’s just for me, I still have not decorated for Christmas. I know, it’s so bizarre just because I’m thinking this year might be the year I actually do it. I don’t know. We’ll see. But I think that there’s just, it happened for me right before the holiday season. And so we started going into this season and I start,

Carrie: The reminders.

Carole: I’ll wake up in a funk and I’ll go, “ What’s going on?”

And then I’ll go, “ Oh, I know exactly what’s going on.” I just really encourage everyone. Please just reach out, find somebody to reach out to. Don’t isolate.

Carrie: Yeah. It gets the support that you need for sure.

Carrie: Well, thank you so much.

Carole: Thank you, Carrie

Carrie: I hope that you were inspired by Carole’s story. We love to talk with people who have personal stories about anxiety or OCD.

So, if you or someone, you know, would make a great guest. Definitely fill out the contact form @hopeforanxietyandocd.com. Thank you so much for listening.

Hope for anxiety and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling in Smyrna, Tennessee. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum and audio editing is completed by Benjamin Bynam. Until next time. May you be comforted by God’s great love for you.