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

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

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. 

Episode Highlights:

  • 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. 

Jon McLernon

Episode Summary:

In today’s episode, I’m excited to share my interview with coach Jon Mclernon. Jon went through a traumatic experience that no one should ever have to endure. It shook him to his core and, understandably, he initially coped in unhealthy ways. But what’s truly inspiring is how he found his way to forgiveness and got back on track.

In the interview, Jon shares a deeply personal experience. He and his wife were living in South Africa as part of a humanitarian project. While there, Jon was attacked by a group of men. They didn’t know him, and he didn’t know them, yet they tried to kill him. The attack was brutal and traumatic. Jon found himself struggling with emotions and thoughts he couldn’t understand, including a deep anger that manifested in destructive ways.

It took years for Jon to come to terms with the trauma, but through it all, he learned valuable lessons about self-compassion, strength, and the importance of forgiveness. He shares how he eventually found a way to break free from the negative coping mechanisms and began working toward true healing.

If you’ve ever felt the weight of anger, guilt, or self-loathing after being hurt, Jon’s story is a reminder that it’s possible to overcome those feelings, find peace, and start the healing journey. It’s a powerful reminder that no matter how hard it gets, forgiveness is not only possible—it’s a path to freedom.

Transcript

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

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.

47. Why Did God Allow Me to go Through That? with Jennifer Harshman

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

Today, I am privileged to be interviewing Jennifer Harshman, an author and owner of a publishing agency.  Jennifer shares with us her personal story of overcoming trauma, how she wrestled with God and how those awful experiences formed her character. 

Episode Summary:

  • Jennifer’s childhood
  • Hating God for not putting a stop to it
  • Moving away and cutting ties with family members
  • Staying connected with God in the midst of trauma.
  • How Jennifer dealt with her traumatic experience.
  • How God used her story in a positive light. 
  • Jennifer’s Book: Better Days Journal: For anxiety and depression, ADHD and autism

Episode Summary:

Many of my clients struggle with deep-rooted anxiety and OCD, often stemming from past trauma. One of the most challenging questions they wrestle with is, Why does God allow suffering? In this episode of Hope for Anxiety and OCD, I sit down with Jennifer Harshman, a publishing expert with a powerful testimony of resilience and faith.

Jennifer endured severe abuse throughout her childhood, leading her to question God’s presence and purpose in her pain. Despite facing unimaginable hardships, she clung to faith—even in moments of deep anger and despair. Over time, she discovered how God was working behind the scenes, transforming her suffering into a source of healing for others.

Jennifer’s story reminds us that while we may not always understand why we experience certain hardships, there is hope. God doesn’t waste our pain. Even when we can’t see it in the moment, He is shaping us, strengthening us, and using our stories to touch the lives of others.

If you’ve ever felt abandoned by God in your suffering or struggled to find meaning in your trauma, this episode is for you. It’s a powerful reminder that healing is possible and that God can turn even the most painful parts of our lives into something beautiful.

🎧 Listen now and let Jennifer’s story inspire you to keep trusting, keep healing, and keep believing that your story isn’t over yet.

Harshman Services
Better Days Journal: For anxiety and depression, ADHD and autism

Explore Related Episode:

Transcript

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD Episode 47. So as many of you know, I often work with clients who have experienced a wide variety of traumatic experiences. Often, these traumatic experiences are the layers that are underneath their anxiety and OCD. I thought it would be great to do a show on why does God allow certain things to happen in our life.

And so today we have a personal story of overcoming trauma and working through those spiritual wrestlings of why God allowed her to go through certain things and how He allowed that and used it for good in her life. So today I’m speaking with Jennifer Harshman who owns a small writing and publishing service agency. She helps a wide variety of authors through the publishing process, which I’m sure is quite a process from what I’ve heard from authors. 

Carrie: Jennifer, thank you so much for agreeing to be on the show and tell your story. 

Jennifer: Thank you for having me, Carrie. 

Carrie: So tell us a little bit about why you wanted to come on and share your story on the podcast.

Jennifer: I feel a lot of people who struggle and grapple with the question about how can a good and holy God allow such terrible things to happen in the world. I have been through what I would say is more than my fair share of that terrible stuff and so I think that I have a good handle on how to make some good use out of those things and how the whole experience can be transformative and how it can be a good thing, looking back.

Carrie: Okay. Tell us what was your childhood like.

Jennifer: They can’t put the content into movies because it’s that bad. I was severely abused in every way that you can imagine. From the time I was born to the time I escaped my home just after I had turned 18, if you can think of it, that happened and probably more. So I don’t know how much you want to get into that, because I know that hearing about some things can be very triggering to people.

Carrie: Right. Sure. So I imagine that it’s so double whammy when you’re in that type of environment, because not only are you having awful things happen to you. You’re also not having anyone provide any kind of emotional support or encouragement or needs being met, kind of those trauma wounds and also the attachment wounds.

Jennifer: Well, there was one place where I felt like I could be successful and that I had at least some measure of protection and safety. So that’s where I excelled. 

Carrie: Did anyone suspect what was going on at home? 

Jennifer: Everyone knew because I was one of those people who broke the rule of “don’t tell anyone”, and a lot of narcissistic family systems and in a lot of abuse cases, there’s this intense fear of calling people. Usually, the abuser is the one who instills that fear in us because they say, “if you tell this, bad things will happen”. I didn’t care. It was so bad. I wanted it to stop no matter what. So everyone knew, but my family members were well connected enough that every time it went to court, it was instantly thrown out.

Carrie: Wow. So major things were covered up and excused. Wow. Was that hard for you to get out of? How did you get out and just be on your own at 18? 

Jennifer: I had some skills and I got a job and worked multiple jobs and I just scratched and clawed and finally found people that I could relate to and depend on and I started to build my own family. 

Carrie: Yes. I’ve had many clients who have had to do that because unfortunately, the situations were so severe. They had to cut all ties with their family. That doesn’t happen in all cases, but in some of the more severe abuse cases where people aren’t willing to acknowledge their behavior, then sometimes that’s the only option that people have in order to stay safe.

And to heat all from everything that’s happened in that process, how did you learn about God or become a Christian? 

Jennifer: Well, I hadn’t been raised in the church, but going through all of those things that I went through. I was praying and I was crying out to God constantly. Give me a way out of this, make these people stop, make the police actually do something and it seemed like He just didn’t and just didn’t. It got to the point where I attempted suicide multiple times because I just wanted it to stop and I wanted to hate God. I was so angry with Him for not putting a stop to it. When we’re young and even when we’re older, maybe we are one person with one perspective and we’re from a certain point of view. We can’t see everything that God can see.

And so here I was in my little bubble, seeing only the things that I could see, and I had no idea how any of that could be something good. It seemed awful. How could this possibly be for my good? And I saw scripture verse, “All things work together for good, for those who are, who love God and are called according to His purpose.” And I was like, well, I love God. I think I’m called according to His purpose. Why isn’t He doing something? How can this be good? 

Well, now years and years later, that’s very different and I can see all of the good that can come from things like this, and all I can see is a lot of the good that has come from it. We can’t see everything. There are ripples that we will never know about. I’ve been on a lot of podcast interviews. I don’t know who all listens. I don’t know how it may affect them or help them and I may never know that and that’s okay. 

Carrie: Sure. Absolutely. So there was this sense where you talked about, like, I wanted to hate God. What kept you from hating God? Obviously, you got to a very, very dark place, but there was a part of you that was so connected to Him.

Jennifer: Yes and I don’t know that it was necessarily something in me. I think that’s one of those instances where we say, but for the grace of God, like He kept that connection like I wanted to. I think it’s kind of like a kid, you get mad at mom. You might say, I hate you, but you still have that feeling of connection and that even under all of that mess, your mom still loved you. I think that’s what it was. It was just that constant and then my spiritual health gradually improved from that low point.

Carrie: What was that process like of getting help for dealing with these traumatic experiences? Like did you go to therapy? Did you read self-help books? 

Jennifer: Yes, I did all of that and I also went to college to get a degree in psychology to help me figure out all the mess in my family system. And how can people do those kinds of things and figure out how to heal myself with the help of therapists with the help of books. It was a long road. I don’t want anyone to think that “Oh gosh, okay, you can go through all this horrible stuff, and in a month, snap your fingers and everything’s okay.” It tends to take a long time and I still have what I call baggage. I still have some issues that I’m working on with my current family, my husband and my kids, and people that I have chosen to be kind of like adopted sisters and adopted brothers to me.

Carrie: I think that’s a good point to make because sometimes people say, okay, well, I walked away from that experience. It’s not going on anymore. And so, therefore, it shouldn’t affect me, but those psychological scars most often impact relationships as where those things tend to show up. So it takes time to work through those things.

We all have some level of baggage that we’re working through in our relationship life. If we have people that are close to us, if we’ve walled people off, it’s probably not as affecting us as much, which can happen too. But I think that that’s huge to make that point that you do have to work through those residual effects of trauma.

What was the process like reconciling, okay? I know these horrible experiences happened to me and maybe even asking God, why did you allow such evil to pervade my life for a long time and not rescue me from it? Because you could have, you could have just jumped in or sent somebody that really believed and wanted to do something about it.

I could have been in a just court system, whatever the case was, God could have intervened and He chose not to, like it that’s a hard thing for us to sit with. 

Jennifer: It is. I think for my case, anyway. The big thing was scripture kept coming to mind and other people would point out some things. Now, sometimes people try to be helpful and they give you these pat answers and it’s not helpful. But I had some people who were helpful in things that they said. That scripture that I mentioned kept coming back to mind and I kept saying, okay, I believe that scripture is true. I just have to figure out how it’s true. So I took it as my job to figure out how those things could be good for me or good for the kingdom as a whole. Once I had made that decision that I was going to look for ways that this could be a good thing.

I started to see those things. I was able to spot a family in a fast food restaurant and know that the father was sexually molesting the daughter. I was able to put a stop to it by calling the local police. I worked in a daycare where I was able to spot some abuse taking place and put a stop to that.

So instances like that, where when you have lived it. You know what when you see it. You know what to look for and being able to take action and help someone else. Now, if I had never lived through that, would I have been able to help any of those people? Probably not. So once I took on that attitude and said, it’s my job to find out how these things are good for me or could be good for the kingdom, then it just changed everything.

Carrie: Wow. Were you able to, as you process some of the trauma, go back and find some of the good pieces of your childhood, even if they were small? Like those positive interactions with teachers and things like that? 

Jennifer: Yes. That was another thing too, at the time. I didn’t really notice because of all the big, bad. But looking back in hindsight in 2020, I was able to spot that there were even stranger who would say something in the grocery store or on the street while I was waiting for the bus, just little things that at the time I would kind of like raise an eyebrow, scratch my head, like what? But it was a seed planted or it was the encouragement that I needed to get through that day or that week and there were so many of them. 

That’s what makes it obvious to me that God was there and He was intervening. But He chose not to stop what I wanted him to stop because it formed my character. It turned me into the kind of person who could make a big difference in this world and now I’m grateful for it.

Carrie: Wow. So you had told me when we talked earlier off the microphone, that you wouldn’t change anything that happened to you. I thought that was a huge statement for you to make.

Jennifer: Yes. If I had changed it, a lot of people will think those types of things like, oh gosh, if I could just go back and change time, like erase that part of my history, I would. I would not because of those reasons. Because I don’t even know what kind of person I would be. Maybe I would have been spoiled. Maybe I would’ve been entitled and selfish and oh goodness, I don’t want to be that kind of person. So I think everything that I went through shaped me into who I am into developing the skills that I’ve developed into serving the people that I serve.

If I were to go back and change any of it, then all of my current life and all of the people that I’ve been able to that might be changed and I would not want to do that. 

Carrie: I think that’s a huge statement and definitely it takes a lot of recognition on your part to see, and to identify all the different things, ways that God has used your story in a positive light.

So you talked a little bit earlier about going to therapy, seeking help. What were some other things that you did that helped you along that journey? 

Jennifer: One of the things that I did was I journaled quite a bit. I wrote things out, wrote out my thoughts, and I would be able to look back on that and process and try to put things into perspective. I also was very frank with God. So in my prayer life, I did not pull any punches. I was not afraid that He would be mad at me. I figured He is a big God, He can handle my anger. So I just let Him know how I was feeling and what I was processing through and I’m thankful that He still loves me in spite of my bad attitude, which I have had at times. Those types of things can be very helpful to people. Trying to put your thoughts into perspective. 

Carrie: I know that we’ve all had bad attitudes towards God at one time or another. It can be very frustrating just being on the earth and having a limited viewpoint. God has that vast viewpoint like you’ve talked about earlier and trying to bridge that gap in a way where we can humanly understand things. Sometimes we just, aren’t going to get it. Tell us about this better days journal that you created with your daughter. 

Jennifer: So my daughter just turned 18. She and I together, everyone in my family has had their issues. She has struggled with anxiety and depression. She’s autistic and she has ADHD. And so together, I had started creating some journals, planners, organizers, those types of things, where people can write and organize their day. I got the idea to have her help me pick some images to put into one because I knew that having something would help her. She had been struggling with her anxiety quite a bit.

I walk her through some exercises verbally, but I thought when she’s alone, if she had something where she could write her own things and just process through that on her own, without needing to come to mom, then that would be very helpful to her throughout her life. So I handed her a stack of images for the different sheets that could go into one of these.

And I said, why don’t you pick what you would want, in a journal or planner and she was so excited. She’s like me? Well, what would it be about? I said, well, what do you struggle with? So she listed off the things and I said, let’s do this and so it is now on Amazon. It’s Better Days Journal and the subtitle is for anxiety and depression, ADHD, and autism. So anyone who struggles with any of those types of things who might need to take a thought that’s negative and turn it into something positive. There’s a page that has little clouds where they can write the negative thought and then turn it into a positive thought. There are places where you can put down whatever it is you’re worried about, and then put it into perspective and ask yourself. Then when you get that perspective, it can help you to feel calmer and it can help you to feel like you have a step that you can take to move forward. And boy, that feels so empowering. 

Carrie: It does. So it was a little bit of a therapy journal combined with a planner and organizer.  That’s good. For the closing question, I used to do this question about, tell us the story of hope and then I started having people on to talk about personal stories. So it didn’t really make sense or have alignment because I thought, well, your whole story is hopeful. So I came up with a different question, which is still along with our hope theme. If you could go back in time, what encouragement or hope would you provide to your younger self?

Jennifer: That is a very powerful question. I would tell myself it’s going to be okay and you’re doing all the right things. Just keep that way. If I could just that one little snippet, that’s what I would say. I would and maybe even say, look for the help that is there. You’re not seeing it right now but look for it because it’s there.

Carrie: Sure. Somehow you got a glimpse that there could be a better life for you, and that seems to have propelled you forward. So that’s awesome. Well, Jennifer, thank you so much for being on our show. I know that people are gonna really be blessed by this episode and be able to resonate with some of the things that you’ve talked about.

People that have been through traumatic experiences. Sometimes it’s really hard to reconcile that with faith and, and why questions, but I think that you provided some guidance for people on how to look for how God’s using this for good. So thank you so much for doing that. 

Jennifer: Thank you. 

Carrie: I want to tell you all about an exciting opportunity and something that I’m launching this month that is that we now have a subscription service for the show. The subscription is available for people who may be listening to the show on a regular basis, really believe in this ministry, and want to support what we’re doing. It’s also for people who would like access to exclusive content related to the show. What I’m going to start doing is having a monthly live question and answer format for our subscribers that will be videotaped and put in the subscription service. 

I am also including my thought hush program, which has mindfulness and meditative activities, a workbook that you can follow along with. This is all really just good self-help material to help you along your journey, whether you’re going to counseling or not going counseling. It’s something that will help your process as you’re working through your anxiety or OCD.

Thank you so much for listening to the show today, and we will be talking to you next week.

42. Dealing with Anger in a Godly Way with Ed Snyder

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 42. Dealing with Anger in a Godly Way with Ed Snyder

Today’s special is a pastor and anger management expert, Ed Snyder.  Pastor Ed not only talks about his knowledge and insights about anger but also shares his personal experience with anger that nearly destroyed his marriage.  

Episode Highlights:

  • How Pastor Ed recognized his anger problem and its root cause.
  • The turning point in his marriage that prompted him to find ways to deal with his anger.
  • Using your anger as a force for good and other anger management tips
  • The connection between anger and anxiety

Episode Summary:

Today, on the show, I’m chatting with Ed Snyder, a pastor, author, and anger management expert. He’ll be sharing his personal journey with anger and how he’s used spiritual principles to overcome it. You might wonder why we’re talking about anger on a show about anxiety, but anger is often tied to other emotions, including anxiety. If you or someone you know struggles with anger, this episode could really help.

Ed shares how his experience with anger started in childhood when he was bullied and felt out of control. He explains how his anger later showed up in football and how it became a serious issue after concussions and a brain injury.

He also talks about how, as a young adult, his marriage became the turning point for realizing his anger problem. After a particularly intense moment early in his marriage, Ed decided to get help, eventually going to his pastor for guidance. But it wasn’t just prayer that helped—he had to take action, learn to manage his anger, and allow his wife to help him see when his anger was out of control.

Ed now teaches anger management and emotional intelligence, something that was hard to find resources for when he started his journey. He offers insights on how Christians can develop a healthier, biblical understanding of anger—not as a sin, but as an emotion that can be channeled in a positive direction.

If you’re struggling with anger or know someone who is, this episode could be exactly what you need.

Links and Resources

Ed Snyder

Control The Beast: A Guide To Managing Our Emotions
True North Podcast

Transcript

Christian Faith and OCD, episode 42. I am your host Carrie Bock. And today on our show, we’re talking with Ed Snyder, who is a pastor, author and anger management expert.  I know he has his own experience with anger that he’s going to be sharing with you. And talking about incorporating spiritual principles.

Some people may wonder why are we talking about anger on a show that has to do with anxiety? Well, anger can be a complex emotion and often time runs alongside other emotions. So hang on. And if you deal with anger or know someone who does this content may be really helpful for you. 

Carrie: Ed, thanks for coming on the show and talking with us today.

Ed: Well, thank you, Carrie. It’s an honor to be here with you on your podcast. 

Carrie: When or how did you realize that anger had become a problem in your life? 

Ed: Wow, that’s been a minute ago. Well, let me start here. I was always the overweight kid. That was the bully magnet in school. So I was always getting made fun of. Speed up all that good stuff. I was quiet. You’d never tell that by knowing me now, but I was the quiet, shy type. Again. I knew I was overweight and all that good stuff. So I went through a lot of trauma there that was early on in my elementary school year. I think it was about in junior high. The is when I realized of course back then I took it as, Hey, I got some aggression here because my junior high football coach approached me and said, man, I want you on my team because of my size, you know?

And of course, I had a growth spurt at 12, so I stood six foot at 12 and husky. That’s what my mom always says. You’re just husky. So I think like a good old mom. And so it was then that I joined the football team and realize the aggression that I had pinned up inside of me. In fact, to the point that my coach handed me this weird looking pad, and he said, strap that onto the back of your hand beause I was center or nose guard. So I lined up with the center. Knocked that center out of the way and go sack the quarterbacks. And so I did because, and I was successful at it because I was angry and I didn’t identify the anger at that point so much as I identified the aggression that I had, it wasn’t after four concussions and I played in my seventh grade, my eighth-grade year and in my freshman year, I had made it to the varsity team that I realized this is a little more than just skill and aggression. This is anger because I get up, if I got tackled or knocked out of the way I got up and I was ready to beat somebody down, that’s when identified. And then, of course, after my fourth concussion, I created a brain bleed and ended up in the hospital for three months and was facing some surgery.

That’s a whole another testimony of what God did in my life, but that’s about the timeframe that I noticed the aggression and then realized what it really was, is the years of being bullied and, and the anger buildup. 

Carrie:  And being that you were playing football, was that aggression celebrated or did your coaches feel like, okay, this is a little bit too far, this is a little too much. 

Ed: Well, back then it was celebrated. It was like go after a man. That’s the way to sack them quarterbacks, you know, and all that stuff. Although I earned him a reputation among the other teams, especially locally that you’re going to have to go after Snyder because we can’t allow him to get in there.

And so they, they came a little extra hard against me because of the aggression, but it was celebrated, which didn’t help me. Sure. It kind of endorsed my vibe. Very negative behavior. 

Carrie: Okay. What was that process like later on in life when you did seek out help for the anger spiritually, mentally, emotionally.

Ed: Okay. Great question. And of course going along with my story, I was in high school then I got in my freshman year and of course, like I said, I was in the hospital three months. That  was a major interruption in my life. And that kind of made me realize, okay, you need to settle down. And I knew I had an issue because.

In my uncontrolled anger, there was two things you did not do to me. And that was hang up the phone on me or slam a door in my face. And my own mother was mad at me and, and we were having a heated conversation, but that way it was teenage rebellion that she was trying to deal with. Anyway, she slammed the door in my face and, it angered me.

And I put my fist through the wall beside the door. That’s when I’m like, this is not going well for me. So I just kinda dealt with it the only way I know how, which wasn’t much, but my turning point, Carrie was in, when I got married, I got married. I met my wife when I was. 15 and knew that’s her, that’s the girl I’m going to marry.

And my best friend Burt said, Hey dude, remember you’re only 15.

Carrie: You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. You don’t have to settle down yet. 

Ed: Another neat story, but you know, we’ll stick to the subject. It wasn’t until Gail and I got married and of course I hid it because I didn’t want her to know about this.

You know, I might lose her. She’s the love of my life in our first marriage discussion. And God’s got a real good sense of humor. He put together a hard-headed German descent and Irish descent. I mean it, a red headed Irish woman, just fun. Anyway. So we made a vow when we got married that we’ll never go to bed angry at each other that we’ll get it resolved.

And of course she really didn’t know. She knew I was. Irritated quote unquote, but she didn’t realize I had this issue. And so we agreed to that. We agreed and we valid each other. We’re never going to go to bed or go to sleep angry at each other. And then also she told me, he says, look, when I get upset, Just leave me alone.

Let me go for a while. Let me cool off, which is classic textbook anger management technique is to breathe, go intellectualize the situation, come back, deal with it. You know, I’m, the type. No we’re going to deal with it now. And so for the first 10 years of my marriage, I spent chasing her around the house and stop.

We got to fix this and I’m only fueling her fire, but anyhow, in our first marital discussion, you know, she walked off or tried. And, again, slammed the door in my face and she not only slammed the door, she locked it. And I went into outer space. And of course, in my anger, I put my fist through that door and unlocked it now for your audience.

Clarification. I have never, ever laid a hand on any woman, especially that of my wife. And of course my mother I’ve been raised better than that. So I never laid a hand on her, but I put my fist through the door and we finished the quote unquote conversation. Well, it wasn’t until the next morning that we got up, we were having breakfast and she said, I don’t know if I can do this.

And I’m like, do what, what are you talking about? Because, you know, angry people, once they have their fit, they’re rant, it’s over it’s water under the bridge, move on. And it wasn’t. So her, it shook her to her core that to see my fist come through that door and unlock it.

And then, you know, all the unnecessary shouting and screaming and all of that. So that was a wake up call when she said that I did not want to lose this lady. She’s the love of my life. She’s the one. And I wanted to stay married. And by the way, we’re celebrating this October 41 years. Yeah, I always tease and say, she’s such a blessed woman.

I’m actually the blessed one. So anyway, how did I realize? Or when did I realize that I had the problem? It was the progression and of course the process at that moment, that, again, that was the turning point for me. And I said, look, I don’t know how to do this. I’ve been fighting it for years. My teenage years.

All of that, I’ll get help wherever that is. Carrie, this was 40 years ago. Anger management classes wasn’t even in the universe, it didn’t exist. Printed material was rare, books on anger management, things like that. So I went to my pastor and I said, look, I need to chat. And so I went to him and.

And got an appointment with him. And I said, Hey, I need help. I got an anger issue and his advice was, well, son, get in the altar and pray and you’ll be okay. Let me clarify. I don’t want to ever take away the power of prayer. Sure. Pages things. I started. My journey in the learning is faith without works is dead.

I mean, we can pray all day long and fast until our tongues fall out. But if we don’t put some action, some works to our faith. We’re not going to get very far. So I took his advice. I got in the ultra and I really prayed and, and a man felt better got up in a day or two later. I’m I’m throwing things again, I’m yelling and screaming.

I’m back into the same mode. So Gail and I really just started a journey. Of trial and error when I’d get upset or get crazy, I’d cooled down. And of course we amplified not going to bed angry with each other, and we really worked on letting each other walk away and breathe and intellectualize the situation.

Then come back and talk about it. And I allowed her to tell me what I did wrong. So again, this whole process was started right there on 58. And that was when I was 18. I turned 18 September 10th and got married October 4th. I mean like I’m done. Let’s, let’s get this done. 

Carrie: That was probably hard in the beginning.

You were saying, I let her tell me. What I did wrong, really receiving that feedback of, Hey, even if it was how she perceived the situation and that could have been totally different than how you perceive the situation.

Ed: Yes. And it took a lot of discipline on my part to listen to her because she, even though she was inside the emotional circle, she was outside of my anger circle.

She was able to see what I, how I was reacting to things. What I was reacting to. And was able to help me troubleshoot that and define why did you get angry with when I said mashed potatoes, that’s an example that, but you know, sometimes we get mad over the most ridiculous things. Big, not because mashed potatoes, but it’s the emotional time.

Way back in the subconscious mind. 

Carrie: So there wasn’t a whole lot of help out there for you. Like you really looked for books and materials there weren’t classes. Now you’re actually involved in teaching some of those classes, correct?

Ed: Yes. I’ve. I’ve professionally taught anger management and emotional intelligence. Probably about 17 years give or take. Yeah. And again, back then 40 years ago, again, printed material was just virtually, almost non-existent. I found very level classes, training, teaching on it.

 Non-existent so as soon as stuff started being printed, I kept an eye on the shelves, I’m kind of a book freak anyway, so I know my Barnes and noble days was long and I’d go in there.

And look around and when I found something, I bought it and I read it and I digested it and I tried everything I could to apply to my life to help me. 

Carrie: Good. That’s good. Because anger can be destructive. And you already talked about that, like, putting your hand through a door or. Breaking things.

Christians sometimes try to suppress it or avoid it like we’ve labeled instead of labeling that behavior as sinful, we’ve labeled the emotion of anger itself as sinful and how can Christians develop a healthy, biblical understanding of anger? 

Ed: Well, you really hit a great nerve there that,we, as Christians, we’ve got a criteria to live up to we’re spirit-filled and we’re supposed to be having the fruits of the spirit and to represent Christ on the earth.

And so we’re not supposed to have any flaws or any, setbacks. So I know I did, I suppose. I didn’t want anybody to know. I was an angry person that I was this crazy raging dude that would put my fist through a window or a door or wall or whatever. And that was really part of my problem. I never let anybody know I was in trouble.

And so for years I went through all of this and only to realize that in my journey to manage this. You do not get rid of anger. Anger is an emotion. It’s a part of your psychic. It’s just like love and, and joy and happiness and all of that. It’s identified as a negative emotion, although that could be turned around into a positive direction.

Using your anger to force you to go positive. However, the understanding and in fact, I’m big on the power of understanding when we understand the who, the, why, the what, how come, where they’re coming from, where it’s coming from. It helps us deal with a lot of things. It’s okay to be angry. It’s okay. Jesus was angry when he come into the temple and found the money changed.

Buying and selling. He got angry and drove out those money changers and said, my, my house will be called a house of prayer. So again, it’s okay to be angry. The Bible says be angry, but sin not. And there’s, there’s the key, right? We can get upset. We can be angry with some situation, but here’s where we need to be.

Careful. Don’t send that it don’t start violating. Somebody’s cussing using foul language or whatever. That’s going to bring a reproach on your walk with God. People’s understands that if somebody disrespects you, it can upset you. People understand that whatever happens, it upsets us. It angers us. There’s an injustice going on.

For example, one of my friends on Twitter posted out that this kid, a young man and in Montana, him and his family, his mom and dad are church planters. And they’re trying to plant a new church in Montana. And this is a good kid when school bullied and the group that bullied him. Stabbed him 10 times and put him in there and, you know, I cared, I was angry.

I wanted to fly to Montana and find the bullies, but I, okay. God, I can’t bring bodily harm, although I want to, but you know, it’s okay. That’s what we’ve really got to understand. It’s okay. To be angry. It’s what you do with the anger. That makes all the difference in the world.

Carrie: Absolutely. I think that anger can be very powerful in terms of creating beautiful change in the world. Like what if we never got angry about things like human trafficking or child abuse? I mean, we should be angry about those things that are going on in our society and. I know that there was some anger for me that fueled the start of this podcast.

Cause I got so tired of having people say, well, somebody told me anxiety is a sin or depression’s a sin. That means I don’t have enough joy in my life and I just need to pray. Through it. And, you know, it was just so frustrating that people were getting misinformation that wasn’t biblical from spiritual leaders and it was causing extra distress on the distress that they already had, that they were already bringing into therapy.

Ed:Have you got a minute? Let me tell a little quick little neat story about how anger compelled us to, to do a positive bank like yourself, fired of spiritual leaders, basically not bothering to study out or research. Anxiety. It’s not a sin. Anyway, years ago, I learned this story when I was doing some research of a beautiful family in suburban LA.

Nice suburban LA had a 13 year old daughter and daughter asked mom, can I go to whoever’s there? Her friend had just a few blocks over in a very nice suburban. And of course, sure. Not a problem. So only about two or three hours later, LAPD shows up on this lady story. To tell her that her child, her 13 year old is dead, been killed by a drunken driver in, in the neighborhood, in the suburban area.

Of course, that went through it. They caught the guy and the guy got a little bit of probation and 30 days in jail, it was, wow. This guy killed this girl and got off way too easy. And so this woman in the story that I read had a choice, she was very angry. 

That her daughter walked out the door and she never got a chance to say goodbye.

You know,  she’s never coming back. She was in a very safe, nice neighborhood in suburban LA and her life was taken by a drunken driver, cutting through the subdivision to go somewhere swerved. She was on the sidewalk and the dude swerved up onto the sidewalk and hit her. She had a choice to make, whether she was going to allow that anger to make her bitter probably ruin her marriage and relationships to other children.

However, she chose to allow the anger to drive her to a positive direction and make a difference. Her name is candy and she created mothers against drunk drivers and has literally changed the world. And when it comes to DUIs, the laws have changed the punishment stiffer. They get what they deserve because one woman said, I’m not going to let this destroy me.

I’m going to create something good out of my anchor. 

Carrie: Absolutely.

Ed: Hopefully little encouragement to your audience. 

Carrie: That’s good. Oftentimes we hear people say anger is a secondary emotion, meaning there’s some other emotion underneath it. Tell us about the connection between anger and anxiety. 

Ed: Sure. And, and that is correct.

Anger is always a secondary emotion. It’s a, by-product, there’s always a primary in place, such as loneliness, anxiety in other word, fear, the big kahunas is stress and frustration. When we don’t manage those primaries, then they escalate to anger. Then if it’s not taken care of escalates to rage, rage goes to blind rage.

I had a client years ago that I dealt with that went into blind rage and literally. $5,000 worth of damage to his mother’s kitchen and denied it. He said, I didn’t do that. There’s no way I did that. He was in blind rage. He didn’t even know what he was doing so it can get ugly real fast. But again, let’s back up.

We have anxiety now of course. Anxiety is a lot like, or it has one common thread with the other primaries. We all have stress in our life, the stress of driving in traffic every day to work stress in handling family situations. It’s okay. And we all have frustration in our life. We all have a little bit of anxiety in our life.

A little bit of worry, a little bit of stress. You know, we’ve got something major coming up, whether it’s a certification test or whether it is a presentation that we got to make it work, or we’ve got to deal something with our children, we all have what we would call normal stress, normal frustration, and even normal anxiety.

The challenge comes is when. It doesn’t become normal anymore. We’re stressed out more than we usually are. We’re frustrated more than we usually are. We’re experiencing anxiety more than we usually do. So is the fears and the worries becomes extreme. It becomes excessive. And that right there.

The connection is, is when we don’t deal with frustration or stress or anxiety, we start getting angry because we don’t like the emotion. We don’t like to feel stressed out. We don’t like to feel frustrated. We don’t like to feel the fear, the intense fear, what’s wrong with me? Why am I feeling so afraid?

Why am I worrying so much about this thing? This ain’t that big a deal? And everybody’s saying I’ll just calm down. You’ll be fine.No, I’m not fine. So as you can see, anxiety really kind of ties into the frustration that primary. And of course, if we don’t get something to relieve it, then it’s going to escalate to anger and we’re going to start being mad at ourselves.

We’re going to be angry at other people trying to give us. And they mean, well, they’re trying to help us, but they’re not helping. Then we start getting angry with that. And everything kind of blows up from there. Does that make sense?

Carrie: Yeah. I mean, it’s like a domino reaction, you know, if you don’t back up and deal with the, the initial dominoes that cause the cascade to go, then you’re not going to be able to resolve the issue.

Whereas I think sometimes people in. Anger management situations. We’ll just say, okay, well, I’ve just got to catch myself before I get to that rage point, but they don’t ever deal with those emotions that come before the anger point, which came before the rage.

Ed: Yes. Ma’am. That is exactly right. Again, it’s a.

It’s a cascade. It’s just, it starts falling and you know, we’ve got to stop it somewhere. We’ve got to say, okay, wait a minute. Stop right now. 

Carrie: Yes. 

Ed: Absolutely. 

Carrie: Probably the worst thing that you could do for an anxious or angry person is to tell them to calm down that does not usually help at all. Usually causes more frustration or anxiety.

Ed: Yeah.Do you remember years ago? The movie that came out with Adam Sandler and Jack Nicholson, anger management, 

Carrie: I’m not sure if I saw that one. 

Ed: Go back and dig it up. It’s a great movie. And of course it’s a movie, Adam Sandler. I think he got thrown off a plane because he was angry. I’m not angry.

Nicholson is the therapist that’s going to help him overcome his anger. Everything wrong in getting the character that Adam Sandler is playing a good friend of mine in LA was the consultant for anger management. And it was kind of knowing anger management. And Jack Nicholson was always saying, you need to just calm down.

Okay. Just calm down. And, and then, the character that, um, Adam Sandler’s playing, it just goes through the roof. It was hilarious, but you’re right. When you say to an angry person or to an anxious person, just calm down, you’re throwing fuel on the phone. 

Carrie: Right. So tell us about your book control the beast.

Ed: Oh boy. That was fun. As we’ve gone through this podcast, I’ve totaled bits and pieces of my story. The control of the beast is a book that we have just put out on the market. That is really, for me, it’s 40 plus years in the making because I was, angry kid, young adult, and then Gail and I started when we got married on our journey of trial and error, trying to help me get rid of anger.

We realized I’m not going to get rid of it. I’ve got around a manage. It just like anxiety. You don’t get rid of anxiety, you manage your anxiety. And that’s what you do with anger. As you learn how to manage your anger, how to identify and diffuse. So the book is based on a 17 years of training. I still do training of sharing this because my whole mission and purpose, I felt like God wanted me to give back.

I was this person I managed, I’ve gotten better. And now I need to give back. So, as we talked about earlier, when books and things started coming out, I started ingesting everything. When I did find some kind of training seminar workshop on anger, I took it. And then when certification classes actually came out.

I did it and became certified and then just started teaching. We taught with probation and parole court services. Several chambers of commerce have brought me in for lunch and learns companies, brought me in for identifying and diffusing, angry people, working with their management, et cetera, et cetera.

So control the beast is what is that? 12 chapters. And we’d start out with the power of understanding or discovering the beast. When we understand who we are, what’s going on, what’s our past and everybody around us, again, the power of understanding helps us deal with it. Then chapter two is starve the beast.

We’ve got to clean up our environment, there’s triggers. And I end the book I talked and I also taught it. There’s six main triggers. That exists, that that’s the six popular ones starting out one with pornography, the addiction to pornography, television programming, what we’re listening to music, what we’re reading all could be triggers of anger.

I imagine in your field of dealing with anxiety, that could be, there could be some crossover there. So we talk about the importance of cleaning up our environment. Then it’s not really a book about anger management, as much as it is. Yeah, guide a manual. Uh, how to, I felt like people needed, okay, how do I do this?

Because when I started I’m like, what do I do? How do I handle this? And so I wanted to develop a guide, a manual to say, okay, read this and start following it. And practicing it and you can get your anger under control. So with that, we talk about how the beast works. And of course the beast is our negative emotions and that is emotional mechanics that how does emotions fire, what triggers them?

The biology of emotions. And then Mr. Beasties game, that’s the blame and responsibility we always get in the blame game. Well, I wouldn’t get angry if they would keep their stupid mouth shut, things like that. And so you cannot go into the blame game and blame everybody and everything around you for your bad behavior, you got to own it.

You got to take responsibility. Chapter five is the TMZ of the beast world, and that is the emotion, anger, and emotion unveil. We rip the lid off of it. And we expose the beast for who it is, what it is. And then chapter six is kind of the pinnacle where we don’t play games with the beast and that’s diffusing negative emotions.

That’s the tools, the mechanisms that we can use to help like walk away, breathe, intellectualize the situation, get help, things like that. The beast. Is ambushes and disguises where it hides such as a drug addiction and alcoholism attempts at suicide. People are angry at people around them. Like teenagers will attempt suicide because they’re very angry with their parents and they want to inflict pain upon them.

And so we discover, we talk about the ambushes and the disguises that the beast does time to confront the beast. That’s the answer to the question of self-identity who are. Where are we, it takes a team to control the beast. And that, that is a chapter on vital relationships. I wrote a piece and I taught it and I put it in the book called nine levels of relationships and how to handle toxic relationships.

So many times we get confused with the levels of relationships we have. For example, we have an acquaintance that we don’t really know, but we want to make them a best friend. What can they be trusted with best friend status. Or we have a best friend that violates our trust. We can’t keep them there. They have to move to a different category.

You know, spousal relationship. Of course, the number one relationship that I talk about nine levels is our relationship to God. That’s gotta be strong. That’s gotta be powerful. And then of course, we work our way down to level nine, which is the toxic poisonous relationship. That we’ve got to deal with because the only thing happens when you mess with a toxic relationship is that you get poisoned, you get hurt over and over and over, and you’ve got to get rid of that relationship.

Not to say that it won’t heal not to say that you can’t detox that relationship and put it back up into one of the other levels of relationships. That’s good chapter. I just did two or three podcasts on that chapter alone. Rebuild what the, these destroyed is rebuilding our self-esteem. From our past, the shame that anger brings negative emotions bring.

And of course, then chapter 12, we talk about train the beast and that’s revitalizing the positive inner person. 

Carrie: Okay. Wow. There’s a lot in there. It sounds like. 

Ed: Yeah. Packed it with some meat. 

Carrie: And sounds like very practical information, certainly takeaways that people can implement in their life and step-by-step instructions on how to do that.

I like that. I like practical materials. I don’t philosophical ones are nice, but if you don’t know how to apply it, then sometimes it’s completely worthless. If you can’t put it into practice in your own life, then it’s like, well, what’s the point there? So. 

Ed: That’s right. And of course we want to say to God, be the glory for all of this.

We are getting a lot of great feedback. When people read the book, they’re hitting me on Instagram or Twitter. Hey, I just got your book, man. This is fantastic. And they use the word practical, which I’m like, yes, yes.So that’s good. 

Carrie: Well, I think it’s just beautiful that you have used your.

Difficulties and struggles and challenges to allow God to use those things for good and then to bless other people and help them along their journey. So as we’re kind of wrapping up our time together, I like to ask every guest to share a story of hope, which is a time in which you received hope from God or another person.

Ed: Wow. Let me go. And we’re going to talk about probably a lot of anxiety that I experienced in my life with everything else. That’s going on. Somebody being bullied like I was, or you’ve got somebody in your life that is, they may not physically be bullying. You beating you up physically, but they’re beating you up emotionally and make you feel small, making you feel.

Insufficient. It really messes with my emotions and kind of makes my eyes water a little bit. When I think about the kid ed Snyder, and I knew me, I just love everybody.  I just wanted to get along with everybody and everybody’s making fun of me and tormenting me and all of that stuff. And it literally, Carrie destroyed my,self-esteem.

I couldn’t see my way up. And if it was. For God, putting somebody in my life that I called mother where every day I come home from school, after going through a day of it’s supposed to be a day of learning, which was a day of abuse. She was there telling me, Hey, you don’t need those people. You can do anything you set your mind to do.

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

You’re better than that. You’re a good kid, et cetera, et cetera. And so, as I grew, God just kept putting people in my life. One being my wife we’re together. I mean, we’re, peanut butter and jelly. I mean, we just, and of course she knows. And that’s what I think everybody needs in their life as somebody that knows them inside and out.

And she knows when to back off of me, she knows when to get in my face and wad up that Iris face or hers and get, straight. And I take it because I know she loves me. And so it’s amazing how God puts people in your life. That will help you. They’re there to be a blessing to you to build you up. And of course, again, I don’t want to take anything away from God, but God uses people.

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

I don’t want to be like this anymore. And I get up in a day or two later, I’m back at it again. I had to figure out the work, what do I need to do myself? To partner with God’s power and prayer to make it happen. Maybe that’s what I need to help. So a listener of yours and your audience, whether you’re dealing with anxiety or you’re dealing with stress or frustration, or even anger, God’s putting people in your life, this podcast, perhaps get back to this podcast and get the help that you need so that you can put the work with your faith.

And God’s going to do great things in your life. 

Carrie: That’s great. So we’re going to put links in the show notes to the book and to your website so that people can reach you. And this has been a great conversation and I think really valuable for our audience. I appreciate you being here today. 

Ed: Well, if there’s anything I can do for you or any of your listeners, please reach out to me.

Our emails on the website can hit me up on social media, whatever it is, but thank you again, Carrie, for the opportunity. And the privilege of being on your podcast, I’ve enjoyed being with you. 

Carrie: You can find us online any time@hopeforanxietyandocd.com. I would love to hear from you. You can head on over to the contact page and let me know what you think about these episodes.

Thank you so much for listening.

Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling in Smyrna, Tennessee. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum until next time may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.

41. Writing the Christian Book about Anxiety She Wanted to Read with Tiffany Ciccone

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 41. Writing the Christian Book about Anxiety She Wanted to Read with Tiffany Ciccone

Today on the show,  we are privileged to hear Tiffany Ciccone’s journey through anxiety. Tiffany is an English teacher and a writer.  She has been struggling with an anxiety disorder since she was a child.

Episode Highlights:

  • Symptoms of Tiffany’s anxiety disorder that continued into her adulthood
  • Growing up in a church where she would hear sermons like anxiety and depression are a sin
  • Having a hard time connecting with God and finding a new church where she could freely talk about her disorder
  • Started writing a book as part of her healing process
  • Her husband’s role in seeking professional help for her
  • Encouragement or hope Tiffany would provide to her younger self

Episode Summary:

In episode 41 of Christian Faith and OCD, I’m talking with Tiffany Ciccone, an English teacher who’s also writing a book about her personal journey with anxiety. Tiffany shares her story, how she navigated the challenges of generalized anxiety disorder, and how it eventually inspired her to write a book.

Tiffany was first diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder in 2006. At that time, she struggled to find Christian resources that truly resonated with her experience. While many offered comforting advice like “Trust God,” Tiffany needed more—something that acknowledged the real challenges of living with anxiety.

Tiffany started blogging about her experiences, which eventually led her to work on her book. Now, with over 100 pages, Tiffany hopes her book will provide the support and understanding she didn’t have when she was struggling. She also talks about how her anxiety began in childhood, showing up in the form of overthinking, perfectionism, and constant worry. Even as a child, she worried about things like a bump on her leg or a sore throat, often thinking they were signs of something worse.

Through her journey, Tiffany learned that professional help, combined with faith and family support, was key to managing her anxiety. Her dad’s logical advice helped her discover techniques like cognitive-behavioural therapy, and though she faced misunderstandings in the Christian community, she found healing through therapy.

Tune in to the full episode to hear more of Tiffany’s inspiring story and how she’s using her experiences to help others!

Links and Resources:

Tiffany Ciccone

Transcript

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD, episode 41. On today’s show. I am talking with Tiffany Ciccone who is an English teacher and also working on writing a book about her anxiety.

Carrie: Tiffany, welcome to the show. I’m so glad that you’re going to talk with us about some of your personal experiences and your book writing process.

Tiffany: Thank you, Carrie. I’m happy to be here and have this opportunity. 

Carrie:  We actually met on social media through Instagram because you’re in the process of writing this book about your personal story with anxiety. And so I’m curious what that process has been like for you just like opening up and sharing your story.

Tiffany: Sure. So it started a long time ago, basically, when I was first diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. I did what we would all do. And I went home and Googled. I just Googled it hard. And there was a lot I found about what is generalized anxiety disorder and what are the symptoms, but there’s a whole part of me that wasn’t addressed anywhere online.

I couldn’t find it anywhere. It was back in 2006.  It was kind of early on with the whole mental health awareness thing. And there were no Christians talking about generalized anxiety disorder. There were Christians talking about, “Oh, don’t worry. Trust God. He takes care of the sparrows, he’ll take care of you,’ and all that good stuff. But, you know, I grew up in the church and I already knew that stuff. That wasn’t what my problem was. And I just felt so alone. There was nobody talking about and describing what I was going through. And so that night when I was on my laptop, looking for people I could relate to.

I think that’s the moment the book was conceived because I came across this quote by Tony Morrison and she says, if you can’t find the book you want to read, then you need to write it. 

Carrie: And that’s so good. 

Tiffany: So that was what I had to do. And it was like 10 years until I started writing it because there was a lot I had to go through.

A lot of healing that took place. And I didn’t know in that moment that I was going to write a book. Since then it’s been a ride. So I’m an English teacher and 10 years into teaching my husband and I moved from the bay area to San Diego. And that cleared up some time for me. And I started writing. I just started blogging because, well, if I want to write, I can, nothing’s stopping me. So I started a blog and I noticed that all of my content started to kind of focus around one topic and that was the intersection of anxiety and my faith. So I kind of decided, you know what? this topic is really new one. It’s really deep and it deserves its own book. So I stepped away from the blog and I started outlining a book and it’s been a challenging, worthwhile process. And it’s been a few years now kind of working through it and I have a manuscript now.  It’s over a hundred pages and I met kind of a fun point where it’s like a jigsaw puzzle.

I’m trying to see kind of how these different pieces I wrote fit together. And I’m hoping and praying that it can help people kind of in that moment where I found myself where who can relate to this. Who’s been here before, who can tell me what to do and give me the encouragement that I need. I’m hoping and praying that this book can be that for people in their early diagnosis or maybe long into their diagnosis. And they just want to read someone’s story who read, whose resonates with theirs. 

Carrie: Yeah, I would absolutely agree with you just from my own searches of who is speaking into this space about having a clinical level of anxiety, not just an anxiety that everybody faces on a day-to-day basis. Because everybody goes through some level of anxiety at some point or another in their life, but when you’re talking about things like I don’t know if this is part of your story, but when you’re talking about dealing with things like panic attacks or just intense episodes of anxiety, not being able to shut off the worries, It’s just a whole different level and a lot of times people in the church will kind of approach it like it’s just kind of, oh, it’s every day, like normal anxiety, like I deal with and not really realizing no, it’s really a little bit more complex than that. So some of the things that might be helpful. day-to-day worries. Anxieties fears are not going to be necessarily the same things that are going to be helpful for generalized anxiety disorder.

And I think kind of you, and I probably share some similarities in that we want to get this message out there and haven’t seen people who are talking about it and it’s kind of part of what’s propelled his podcast too. So it’s really great to have you on to talk about this. So tell us a little bit about in terms of your symptoms like when did you first start to experience anxiety, even if you didn’t know that’s what it was called.

Tiffany: I think the first kind of manifestation in my childhood, I had a lot of health anxiety. Back then we called it hypochondria, but I was just writing about it the other day. It would be like the craziest littlest things like a bump on my shin. And I would go crying to my dad that I have a tumor in my shin. When I Found split ends, I was in third grade, I think on a trip with my grandparents and the trip was great until I saw the split in. And I just knew like this is cancer, like, what else could this possibly be? And when I came home, I just felt the weight of the world.

As I had to tell my parents that their oldest daughter’s dying and I wasn’t afraid of the death part. I was like really afraid of ruining my parents’ lives of bringing them all this sorrow and grief and through like a medical nightmare and that kind of incident just repeated itself throughout probably when I was like 20. I kind of like eased up and stopped.

I was really blessed that my dad gave me extra reassurance. And some of the logical things that he talked me through when I would freak out God kind of embedded in me. 

Carrie: So you can start to challenge. 

Tiffany: Yeah. He didn’t know it, but he was teaching me like a part of cognitive-behavioural therapy and giving me good ways to challenge those thoughts.

Also, I recently read on, I think it was the national Institute for mental health that children who are really shy, that can be one indicator later on. Maybe there will be an anxiety disorder. I was a super shy kid. I was put in a study of an experimental playgroup were super shy kids and overly aggressive kids were combined.

Carrie: Oh no, that sounds awful.Who thought of that one.

Tiffany: I know. Great opportunity for bullying. I don’t know if it really worked with me, but it wasn’t horrible. The toys were great. And I don’t remember anyone beating me up. So I don’t think I was healed by it. That’s just like how shy I was.  I remember also some perfectionism like I wouldn’t know the answer to a question or I’d be confused in class and there’s one time a computer class where the teacher kept saying to push return and he’s like, I don’t know what return is. What’s return. Oh my gosh. I ended up bursting out crying, like hysterically crying. I can see moments like that where it’s just like, that’s, doesn’t seem quite normal. I can see anxiety there. And then in my adolescence, a few symptoms took me to my doc. And those are symptoms of anxiety, muscle tension. I had really tight back muscles. He had to give me shots in my back to loosen them up. I went to him because my hands were tingling and I thought I had diabetes because of my health anxiety. And it was because I was hyperventilating and I didn’t believe him. So he had me breathe into a paper bag and I’m like, okOkay. And then I, as a teenager, had perfectionism in the context of relationships. I would be crying late in the day because I said something to someone and I thought it would have hurt them or something. And then in college, I over-thought a lot. And I felt the weight of the world on my shoulders with a lot of things.

So really like I do see a lot of pieces of it growing up. 

Carrie: Yeah. It seems like you were a shy, but also like very conscientious child of like trying to please everyone and making sure they’re happy. And then that pressure that it doesn’t necessarily have to be pressure that other people put on you, you can put it on yourself, like, oh, I’ve got to do a good job, or I’ve got to be perfect at this. And then when it doesn’t happen like you don’t know how to respond in the school scenario that just creates so much anxiety. Makes a lot of sense. How old were you when you were actually diagnosed? 

Tiffany: I was 23. 

Carrie:  Wow. So you had been dealing with it for years, really before you got a formal diagnosis, even with everything you went through with the doctor in high school and stuff, they weren’t able to identify and pinpoint.

That’s interesting. So what was that process for you like of getting help for? 

Tiffany: Well, the awareness was at like zero. I had grown up at a church where it was an evangelical free church with a great youth group, but I never forget the most memorable sermon I’ve sat through our head pastors said that anxiety is a sin.

Depression is a sin. There’s spiritual problems that needs spiritual solutions. You need more faith. That kind of a thing. And I was probably 20 when I heard it and it struck me as wrong then because I knew people who were depressed or who struggled with rage and who had traumatic past.

And I’m sure it was harsh. So I grew up in that kind of context. And at the same time, I had a strong faith myself. I’d been on mission trips. I’ve learned to trust God. I’ve learned to be flexible. I grew up with this understanding the anxiety is for when you’re not trusting God with things that are beyond your control. Whereas my problem was I was freaking out about what was under my control. That was my anxiety, that I was going to screw up what’s on mine.  I couldn’t see it. I actually ran into like one of my best friend’s moms back when just before I was diagnosed and I was losing my functionality, basically I ran into her at a grocery store and we chatted for a moment.

She was actually also a trained biblical counselor at church. So I ran to the supermarket. We chatted, I was super anxious at the time because it was hard for me to choose groceries because of my indecision. And she called me later that evening. She’d never called me before, my friend’s mom and she wanted to check in because she said it seemed like something was off, like what’s going on? Are you okay? And I didn’t have much of an explanation for her. And I think she was probably hoping for some breakthroughs, some spiritual something or other, and, you know, I just kind of told her my life circumstances and, and I didn’t have words for the anxiety part because it hadn’t been addressed yet and she couldn’t identify it.

So that just goes to show the level of unawareness that was present in kind of the Christian culture I was in. So I mentioned I was losing functionality, so my saving grace that brought me to a therapist was my husband at the time we were just dating and he got a front center road look at my life and how I was doing emotionally and mentally. And he saw me break down at target over like what toothpastes to buy. He saw me break down at church and I had no clue why I was hysterically crying and he’s like, honey, what’s wrong? And I’m like, “oh no, what’s wrong with me.” And he just hugged me. And he said I think you should see someone. And I was like, oh, you mean like a therapist?

And he’s like, “yes.” And it gave me permission to seek help.  It gave me a direction to go in it. It wasn’t like, oh, I’m so offended because you’re saying I need professional help. Like, that’s what I needed. And also at that time, I was in my first year of teaching, which is known to be a disaster, like regardless of how mentally healthy you are, that’s supposed to challenge your menta health.

And so I also had this disorder where I overthought every decision I was making in the classroom. So the kid’s behavior was a disaster and I was just getting like psychological beat downs all the time. So it was the hardest year of my life. I also developed a jaw disorder. It goes hand in hand with the muscle tension that we see with generalized anxiety disorder.

So I was like drinking these awful like lukewarm smoothies at lunch in school. Not just like food from clenching, like, 

Carrie: Was that from clenching your jaw, like out of anxiety or? 

Tiffany: Yeah, it was from clenching and they said a malocclusion. So my teeth just didn’t fit together. So I’d have to like shift my jaw to get my teeth ticket fit together right. And my jaw had clicked since I was a senior in high school, but my dentist didn’t really give me any guidance from there. And so basically by the time I graduated college, it was really, really painful. I went to specialists in San Francisco got physical therapy. I still see a physical therapist from time to time.

So it was just kind of this convergence of all of these really stressful things and got to mention, I was also earning my master’s degree, blond distance through my credential program. So all of that, like it just broke me and I actually knew a couple other people in my credential, in my master’s program who also dropped out because they couldn’t handle it. I don’t know if they were having mental breaks like I was, but I just got to the point where I was kind of barely functional. 

Carrie: Yeah. I think that you bring up a good point, cause it’s one thing to be aware of your symptoms. And it’s another thing to then be able to turn around and communicate those.

Like, sometimes all you can say is I just feel like a mess or I don’t feel well or I’m miserable and I don’t know why. Sometimes until you get around a therapist or a doctor,  asked you very specific questions like, what’s your sleep? what you’re eating? How do your muscles field you experienced this or that?

And then you’re better able to tease out and communicate some of those symptoms. I know, just from being a counselor and working with a lot of people with anxiety, sometimes people say things like, I just, I don’t feel well. And I’m anxious. I don’t feel good. I just want to feel better. And it’s really just being able to tease some of those things out to figure out what people’s symptoms are and what they actually need like where’s our starting point here. 

Tiffany: Yeah. That was very much my…that describes what it was like for me. And, I recently heard of the term free floating anxiety and I certainly had that where it just stuck around. Yeah. And I didn’t know what it was or what to do with it. I just knew that my breathing feels funny. I know I can’t concentrate anymore, but I had no idea why. 

Carrie: So you talked a little bit in terms of like how responses were in the church you were just hearing. Okay. Well, pretty much it’s your fault. You’re not trusting God in some way, or this is a spiritual issue that you need help for. How did you resolve some of those messages and turn them from like unhealthy messages, which is what I believe those are into something healthier and kind of make some resolution or peace with your faith.

Tiffany: That’s a great question. And it’s a really complicated, layered answer, I think pencil book. So we’ll see what words I can think of right now. Therapy really helped. And she wasn’t a Christian therapy, but she was a good therapist who knew how to take my religious beliefs and work with them.

And I was warned in a large sense that my church, I was warned against secular therapy. I was warned against medication. You know, like the Bible only is all we need. Why would you let the world. Like help you in the way that God can help you through the Bible. But like, this was different.

It was clinical. Like he said earlier, you know, it’s, it’s not a spiritual issue of trusting God. It had a much more profound, complicated effect on my relationship with God, actually. So my therapist helped me turn that around. I saw her for two years at the end of my first year, I went on medication as well.

She worked with my doctor. So a little bit also if my kind of getting health story, I started with my doctor, I made an appointment and I told him how I was feeling. I was like crying myself to sleep. And part of that was just sheer loneliness, especially before I met my husband. And I shouldn’t say shared loneliness.

It was a convergence of everything. Thankfully he didn’t just write me a prescription. Referred me to three cognitive behavioral therapist. He said, you know, the research shows, this is the most effective treatment. Here’s three good ones I know of. And this is the same doctor that I grew up with actually who didn’t catch the isolated symptoms.

But when I told him I kinda saw the wheels turning in his head, he was like, oh, you always have been pretty hyper.

And we had this thing where my blood pressure was always elevated at the doctor’s office because of my health anxiety. So like, yeah, he, and just the, my mannerisms, I suppose. So he led me to my therapist. So then a year into therapy, I had learned cognitive behavioral journaling, and that was a huge help because I’d always been a journaler.

And that was a huge coping mechanism for me before I was diagnosed. I can look back at my journals, like in high school and I see that I’m coming to my journal to seek what the heck is happening in my head. I’m like, I’m feeling this way. Why God? And then I kind of dialogue with God through prayer in my journal and do some sort of similar thing to cognitive behavioral therapy.

And so when I learned the formal structure that really helped me. And when I learned cognitive distortions and I learned to identify what thought was, what cognitive distortion and then how to deal with those distortions. There was a lot of healing there, but then the triggers kept popping up. So I’d like have an anxious thought deal with it.

30 minutes later, it’s back, but a different topic. And so I deal with that 30 minutes later, I feel it again. And so that’s when my therapist called my doctor. And he started me on medication. And then that medication journey started. I’m still on it today. I’ve been on various ones over time.

It gives me a strong baseline to work from, and it makes the incidents much fewer. I don’t have a pop-up as frequently. So those things. Ironically, the things that my church had warned me against are the things that helped me see more clearly what was happening to me and brought me back to truth because when my anxiety got under control, I was able to see God more clearly along with everything else.

And I was able to concentrate in prayer again and before I was so confused as to why I couldn’t connect with God like I used to, and I thought it was a sin issue. I heard Christian say before that Christians would mention this feeling of I feel convicted of sin and I’d always, I’d always thought like, what is that like” I don’t really feel that. And so then when I had these new feelings of anxiety, I’m like, oh my gosh, this must be conviction of sin. What’s wrong. And I would search my heart. I would do all the right things to try and find answers with God. And I would come up with nothing. I was stuck and then not just exacerbated things and kept the cycle going of this scrupulosity to use a new word that I recently learned. My obsessing over pleasing God, my obsessing over I don’t want to be a failure to God. And I felt like his little failure. I obsessed about what is the will of God. 

And then when I moved to San Diego, I mentioned the move. I started a new church. stopped going to that other church. I didn’t keep going and going.

The other churches in between, you know, we went to my husband’s a little while and you know, they were okay. Nothing major either way, but I didn’t open up about my anxiety because all I had known was that people are not going to understand the church’s definition of anxiety is totally different from my experience of it.

They should have different words in my opinion. So when I moved down to San Diego, this new church. The second sermon I heard there, there was a couple on stage and they’re giving their testimony and it involved infidelity. And my husband and I were sitting there, like with our mouths wide open and I was like, oh my gosh, like, okay, if they can talk about this here from the stage, I can talk about my anxiety.

Carrie: Wow. So freeing.

Tiffany:  And by that time I was 10 years into this journey with anxiety. And I had actually gone into a remission at a point where my anxiety was under control. It was minimal. And I remember one of the things my therapist told me when she graduated me at the end of my two years. She said, don’t be surprised if this comes back during a major life transition.

You know, like if you have a baby, if you move and sure enough, I quit my job of 11 years in the bay area, quit the ministry I was involved with, moved down to San Diego and I was unemployed for awhile. That was my big trigger. And my anxiety came back with new manifestations too.

It was far more physical than before, far less of the thoughts.  It was harder for me to cope because it was harder to find the thoughts underneath the physical symptoms. And I had just like happened. I was like, you know, I’ve done this before. I’ve been here. I’ve been through the therapy. I’ve been through this stigma, whatever, I’m done, I’m talking about it.

And so I started more writing about it more freely. I just put it all on paper. I would talk about it. And my church really embraced that and I could give you great examples of it if we have time for it if you want to take it in that direction. 

Carrie: It seems like hearing somebody else’s story that totally freed you up and reduce shame and stigma to allow you to share your story.

And then I’m sure like you sharing your story has blessed someone else in the church who thought, oh gosh, I just thought I was sitting here. And I was the only one going through anxiety because I do think that that happens a lot in church unfortunately, if we don’t open up and we don’t talk about these things, or we don’t say… I look at my clients who talk about their therapy openly to other people. And oftentimes that will free someone up in their life to get therapy because then their friend or family member, whoever will go, oh, you’re getting therapy. Like, I guess it’s okay. Then, it’s that whole reducing the stigma and just kind of making it more of a normal process that, that it’s okay to go through. That’s awesome. 

And I love what you said too earlier about how it’s almost like anxiety was this cloud in between you and your relationship with God where you had a hard time seeing God clearly or connecting with him because this was in the way. And I really believe that as we’re able to work through some of those things, so we have a clear picture of who God is, of how much he loves us, so that, you know, he’s for us. And it just changes things a lot in terms of that positive connection with God. 

Tiffany: Yeah. I kind of felt in one of those moments, I felt like the prayer where the, I forget who it was, but a man in the Bibles tells Jesus, you know, I believe help my unbelief.  In those moments where the anxiety was heavy. It’s like, God, I, yeah, I know these things deep in my gut, but they’re not true in my, yeah.

I can’t grasp them rationally and I don’t know why or how, and, and God was definitely good and that he did help me brought me to that therapist and brought me on this huge journey since then. 

Carrie: So what I used to do on my show, I’d have guests on and I’d say, okay, now tell me a story of hope, you know, sometime where you receive hope from God.

And then I started doing more of these personal stories and just in a really make sense, because your whole story is hopeful, right? So I decided that this go-around of recordings. I’m going to shift the question, the kind of, some of our closing question a little bit. So your closing question is if you could go back in time, what encouragement or hope would you provide to your younger self?

Tiffany: This is a great question. And I gave her a bit of thought and I kind of came up with like everything I needed, like basically to my younger self. If I’m going to look at this, literally. I wouldn’t give myself any extra encouragement or hope where I went because God gave me what I needed when I needed it through people, through things like this podcast.

And I wouldn’t change that journey painful as it was because God is a beautiful artist, but there are things, I decided what I wanted to share was what I wanted to hear that night when I realized nobody understood, nobody was talking about what I was going through. So if I could, I think I just closed by reading a piece. I have a writing coach and he challenged me if I only had 15 minutes and don’t worry, this isn’t 15 minutes of reading. If I only had 15 minutes with the people who I’m writing for, what would I tell them? So I’m just gonna read that if that’s okay. So this is, I feel like what I needed to hear.

We have been told that as Christians, we shouldn’t be anxious or depressed. This makes us feel like crap because anxiety and depressive disorders don’t really give us. Scriptures like be anxious for nothing and rejoice the Lord always are directed and fired at us by church leaders, Christian authors, and friends and family who like to tack on offhand remarks and platitudes.

When I’m anxious, be anxious for nothing just makes me feel like that much more of a failure. They don’t understand the desperate darkness we’re dealing with or what it stems from. They expect us to be able to remove the very thorns that God alone can remove. Because the experience is limited and because they’d forget to listen, they assume that depressive disorders are the same as their own struggle with discontentment and they assume that anxiety disorders are the same as their own struggle to trust God with the present and future.

Infact, I consider it a misnomer to use the word anxiety for both their spiritual struggles and our visceral psychological disorders. I know it’s cheesy, but it might help a little bit to refer to the clinical stuff is thorny, after the thorn that the apostle Paul was inflicted with. That’s how I think we need to understand our disorders.

See if Paul’sexperience resonates with yours. And then this is second Corinthians 12 seven. A thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited three times. I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me, but he said to me, my grace is sufficient for you.

For my power is made perfect in weakness. Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses so that the power of Christ may rest upon me for the sake of Christ then I am content with weakness, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong like Paul and his thorn, none of us asked for our disorders. They harassed. They keep us from being conceded, from thinking rationally and from being generally functional, they keep us weak and in the presence of tears and the collapsing and the haze and the stigma in the midst of it all, we find that his grace is sufficient.

This is the real gospel, the gospel of weakness. The mistaken American church preaches a gospel of strength self-sufficiency and name it and claim it success in healing. In short, it’s kind of like the pharisees. No wonder it is obsessed with removing thorns with all its books and sermons about overcoming anxiety and depression.

It is forgotten Jesus’s words, “Blessed are the weak in spirit.” It is forgotten that our king was a man of sorrows. Well acquainted with grief. It is forgotten how the heart of God grieves the fall of his beloved mankind is forgotten the, in our very nature, we are all weak. It is distant from the truth and its source. In this ironic sense we are blessed. Our thorns remind us that we need rescue. They keep us tethered to our savior and the source of truth. I need to be rescued regularly from the adrenaline that just shoots on for no reason when my prefrontal cortex shuts down, I need to be rescued when my mind turns on me in a thick fog sets in over the truth.

Over the years, these words of CS Lewis have given me great comfort. They have done the rare thing of understand me as a person of faith with an anxiety disorder. If you are a poor preacher poisoned by a wretched upbringing in some house full of vulgar jealousies and senseless corals saddled by no choice of your own.

With some loads, some sexual perversion, parenthetically I put were bipolar disorders, schizophrenia or panic disorder, or any of those nagged day in and out by an inferiority complex that makes you snap at your best friends. Do not despair. He knows all about it. You are one of the poor whom he blessed. He knows what a wretched machine you were trying to drive. Keep on, do what you can one day, perhaps in another world, but perhaps far sooner than that, he will fling it on the scrap heap and give you a new one. And then you may astonished us all, not least yourself for you have learned. You’re driving in a hard school. The church’s obsession with curing anxiety and depression.

I was controlled. What if Paul came across a book called remove your thorn or pray your thorn away or choose Christ, not your thorn. Would Paul feel like a failure? Would he wonder what am I doing wrong? But he was obsessive, he searched for some horrible sin. That must be preventing his thorn removed. What would it cause him to spiral?

Like I do. I’ll never know the anxiety of guest 70. It’s a good thing that Paul’s thorn wasn’t removed. I have no more ability to cure my anxiety than Paul was able to remove his own thorn. And also like Paul, it doesn’t mean I don’t try. I’m surprised. He only asked God three times.

I’ve asked a bazillion while God is not cured me less I become conceited. He’s done so much healing, especially through means that have been denounced by many in the church like secular therapy, medication, nature, self-care.  Do what you can. Here’s my closing. Do what you can to take care of the body God gave you. I’m still learning how to take care of mine. Ours might be a little janky. But remember God redeems, all things let’s get comfortable with the law we’ve been given, not complacent, not giving up, but doing what we can and then surrendering the rest of Jesus. Perhaps the goal is to trust God with our anxiety disorders, that even if healing doesn’t come, that we may have the posture of the mother of God.

I am willing to be used of the Lord. Let it happen to me as you have said, Luke, that’s from Luke one. That’s my prayer of submission. When I can’t shake my anxiety, that’s the end. And that was way longer than I thought it would be. 

Carrie: Oh, wow. So good, Tiffany, we really need this book out. And so we will definitely let people know, whenever you let me know that it’s going to be out, I will let the people know because I love that.

I feel like we share a similar heartbeat for people in the church who are struggling. So thank you so much for being brave and coming on here and talking about your own struggles. I know this is definitely going to be relatable to our audience and that people are going to be blessed by the encouragement.

Tiffany: Well, thank you so much.

_______________

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

Personal Stories

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, OCD, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode. No Comments on Personal Stories

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

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

From Ashamed to Advocate: A Personal Anxiety Story with Jeff Allen

“I deal with anxiety almost every day at some level. And sometimes it’s worse than, or sometimes it’s better than other times, but anything to help people understand that they’re not alone.”

Jeff Allen, a mental health advocate and host of Simple Mental Health Podcast shares his journey through anxiety, how he overcame shame and stigma around seeking help and taking medication.

  • How Jeff discovered he had an anxiety disorder.
  • Backlash he received from churchgoers for opening up about his mental health condition.
  • Spiritual doubt process that he went through 
  • Prayer, medication and therapy
  • His journey of spiritual deconstruction and reconstruction

 

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

“OCD has been the gateway to God and grace for me.” Peyton Garland author of Not So By Myself shares her story of OCD and her journey of going to therapy.

 After seeing a therapist, her mother and grandmother followed after her and sought professional help for themselves. 

  • Peyton’s experience of contamination OCD 
  • What it was like to go to therapy for the first time
  • Getting help with brainspotting (type of therapy)
  • Growing up in a strict church culture and how her faith changed over the years as she grew to know God.
  • Growing up in home with a parent who has PTSD 
  • Ripple effect on her family after she decided to seek help
  • How Peyton’s husband works with her on compulsions
  • God breaks into lonely places. He works best in the mess. 

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

Author Mitzi VanCleve shares her own personal story of experiencing anxiety, panic attacks, and OCD and ultimately, how God has used these things for good in her own life.

  • Obsessions Mitzi experienced even as a young child
  • Mitzi’s experience with scrupulosity OCD
  • How she made the decision to take mental health medication as a Christian 
  • Experiences of mental health stigma from Christians 
  • Learning about panic attacks from a magazine articl
  • Wrestling with God about having OCD

Carrie’s Story of Anxiety in Dating with Now Husband Steve

Carrie and Steve talk about anxiety during the dating process and Steve involvement in helping Carrie work through it. 

  • Carrie’s Anxiety about putting herself out there to date and how that brought her back to therapy 
  • Challenges of Christian dating after a divorce 
  • Accepting the anxiety and difficulty trusting as part of the process of getting closer
  • Advice to singles in the church

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

  • How Rachel discovered she had been struggling with scrupolisity OCD.
  • How to determine if this is a normal level of spiritual concern or could be OCD
  • What is Scrupulosity OCD?
  • Learning how to sit with discomfort and ambiguity  
  • Getting to know the character of God and filtering information through that lens

39. Grieving with Anxiety and Depression: A Personal Story with Shelly Rainey

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Counseling, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 39. Grieving with Anxiety and Depression: A Personal Story with Shelly Rainey

I had the privilege of interviewing Shelly Rainey, a mom, motivational speaker and author.  Shelly shares with us her journey through anxiety, grief and loss and how she relied on her faith.

Episode Highlights:

  • Going through a deep, dark depression and how God carried Shelly through.
  • Learning to deal with her situation differently.
  • Seeking professional help for her anxiety and depression
  • How God slowly restored her. 
  • Inspiring others through her book, The Fragile Heart. 

Episode Summary:

In Hope for Anxiety and OCD Episode 39, I had the privilege of hearing Shelly Rainey’s incredible story about the deep connection between anxiety, grief, and loss.

Shelly is a wife, mom to a beautiful 16-year-old daughter, and the author of The Fragile Heart. She’s also the host of The Turning Point Podcast and founder of The Inspired Life by SLR, a ministry focused on supporting women navigating pain, grief, and depression. Her mission is to remind women that they’re never alone, offering resources like blogs, eBooks, and podcasts to help during tough times.

Shelly opened up about her personal experience with anxiety and depression, starting back when she was a teenager. But it wasn’t until she lost her first child at 27, a stillbirth at seven and a half months, that she faced deep, overwhelming grief. At that low point, she even considered suicide, just wanting the pain to stop. Raised in a faith-filled family, she turned to God for support, but in the midst of that dark time, it was hard to rely on the foundation she’d grown up with.

But then, Shelly had a powerful moment of prayer, and she felt God’s peace wash over her. Though it didn’t make the grief go away immediately, it gave her the strength to keep going. Over time, with faith, family support, and prayer, Shelly came through the darkness.

Tune in to the full episode and find inspiration for your own journey.

Links And Resources

Shelly Rainey
The Fragile Heart

Transcript

Hope for Anxiety and OCD, episode 39.  On today’s episode, we have a personal story with Shelly Rainey. Shelly has a pretty amazing story about the connection between anxiety and grief and loss. I was blown away by her story and how much she has overcome with the help of the Lord. So without further ado, let’s get into the interview.

Carrie: Shelly, welcome to the show and tell us a little bit about yourself. 

Shelly: Well first, thank you so much, Carrie for having me on your show. I really appreciate it.  Well about me. Let’s see. I am a mom of a beautiful 16-year-old daughter, a wife of a super amazing husband. And I’m also the author of the inspirational book.

The Fragile Heart and hosted The Turning Point Podcast. And recently I launched The Inspired Life by SLR and basically, all that is, is just a ministry that’s geared towards women who are trying to navigate through pain and depression and grief and all of that. And what I do is I offer a resource. And the community to help during those rough times because you know, when you’re going through hard times like that, the worst feeling is the fact that you feel like you’re alone. Right. What I try to do is just basically say you’re not alone. 

We have a whole community here that we’re basically wanting to help in any way we can, whether it’s through an encouraging blog, or some of the free resources that I have through eBooks or the podcast or anything.

And, yeah, it’s great. And I just launched it while maybe three weeks ago. So it’s brand new. 

Carrie: Wow. That is. Yes. Okay. So you wanted to come on and tell us a little bit about your own personal experience with anxiety and depression. Yes. I basically have experienced anxiety and depression at different points in my life. And I can just remember dealing with a little bit of it when I was a teenager around the age of 16. And I don’t know if that was just like a typical thing to just have these depressing moments, but I did. And that was like the first time. But most of the time I can say that feelings of depression and all of that and anxiety was usually attached to for me traumatic situation. And for me, I’ve lost three children. 

I remember I was about 27 when I lost my first daughter. She was still born when I was about seven and a half months pregnant. And I recall that was one of the worst times for me when it comes to dealing with depression because it lasts such a long time.

And it had gotten to the point where I was tired of dealing with the pain and the sadness, and I just wanted it to go away, but I was at a dangerous point. I was at a dangerous point with it where I actually considered suicide. And because I just wanted the pain to stop. Of course, you know, I grew up in a family where we were taught to rely on our faith, you know, and trust God through all of the hard circumstances.

And, you know, watching my parents, they were like the living examples. When hard times hit, you know, you just rely on your faith and God carries you through. But for me, that was just a dark time for me. And I felt like it was kind of difficult to rely on my faith and the foundation that I grew up in because it was just, it felt like I was overwhelmed by the grief, by the sadness, by the depression, the anxiety, all of it.

And it was pretty difficult. And I can recall just getting to that point where I was like I can’t take it anymore, but it’s something how, when you’re in the darkest place and it’s like your foundation that comes back to you. I can recall sitting down in the floor with a bottle of pills and I just stopped and I began to pray and I said, God, please help me.

That’s all I could do. Please help me and let me just tell you instantly, it’s just like I felt overwhelming sense of peace and I’m like, wow. I was like, I was getting a big hug at that moment. I was like, wow, this is a feeling that I haven’t had in a long time.  And I can recall, you know, just going through that and having the support of my family and everything where I was able to come up out of it, of course, but it just took a long time.

And then as time went on, I had a miscarriage maybe two and a half years later, and I felt a little bit of depression coming back. But it wasn’t something that basically overtook me because I was getting married three weeks later. I’m getting married and my life-changing. I think that kind of overshadowed my feelings, where I was able to tuck them away and compartmentalize.

And focused on my wedding, you know what I mean? And  I was good, but of course, every now and again, the sadness will come back up. And with me, I was going through a situation where the doctor said I could not have children, and it wasn’t too long after my husband and I were married.

I found out I was pregnant again, and I was petrified. And I was like I can’t endure that again. I can not go through another loss. I’ve already had two. Have an enemy to do another one. And so we prayed and let me just tell you, it was like, God carried me through that entire pregnancy because even though it was rough and I was on bed rest almost the entire time, but that’s where our miracle daughter. She was born healthy and she’s like I said, she’s 16 now. Yes. Yes. And so it’s just like, everything is going along just great. But I remember back in 2008, I found out we were expecting again, and this time it was a little bit different because although I delivered very early, I think we were about seven and a half months pregnant again.

And our daughter, Victoria, she was one pound four and a half ounces. She was very tiny, but the doctor said she had a strong heart and everything was going great. And I was just so excited because I’m like, yes, another miracle. God did it again. This is just great. 21 days later, she took a turn for the worst and she passed away. And let me just tell you. I’m at a different place in my life when this was going on because I. relied on my faith more. My faith had increased three years, you know what I mean? 

Carrie: So it was different going through that loss than going through the earlier loss things. 

Shelly: Exactly. And I think with God showing me the miracle of my daughter had a lot to do with that.

You know what I mean? And so after this loss, I didn’t feel hopeless,  but sadness was still there, you know, depression didn’t grip me the same way, but it kinda saw that I had my moments and I said, you know what? I’m going to deal with this situation a little bit differently. And that just began to write just because I couldn’t sleep at night. I’d set up with cry a lot and the question came to my mind. It seemed like Lord, you chosen me to endure a lot of pain and I don’t understand why. And I just began to write and write and write and write. And next thing I know, actually finished my first book, which is The Fragile Heart. And I said, you know what I want to do with this situation? And all we know that healing, it’s a process, right?

It doesn’t happen overnight. But I figure if I just continue to move forward with something that I could eventually get to the place of his. And so, you know, after the book was released and everything, I remember God telling me, just share your story. And so I just began speaking at conferences and events, and I had a lot of book signings and it’s just like God just kept me busy for a couple of years with that.

And just sharing my story and just watching the effect that it had on it. A lot of different people, I’m just like, wow. You know, and it’s like, as time went on, I began to understand a little bit of why, just a little bit. And I would get out there Carrie, and I would just speak to large crowds and just get out there and talk about hope and healing and restoration and go back to my hotel room and just collapsed in tears.

Because I’m sharing my story and I’m believing it and I trust God, but that goes to show you it’s a process because I was not fully delivered myself. I was still dealing with those times. And with God showed me something through all that. It’s like my faith increased each time and I found that I had to lean on him more and more, even more so than before.

And with that, if you can imagine just feeling like you’re totally broken, but bit by bit God was slowly but surely restoring me. But in the end, it was just like I was the stronger person with more determination, more substance. It was just like, he made me all over again and that’s the awesome part about it.

And so now when I look back being on the other side of it, I’m like, okay, God, you actually really revealed the why. So I get it. It was bigger than me, basically. It was much bigger than me.

Carrie: How do you deal with going through that publicly. I know there are a lot of women out there that have miscarriages very early. And so they don’t necessarily have to tell anyone and they tend to suffer in silence. I think more and more women are being more open about pregnancy loss, which is a beautiful thing because a lot of women go through it. However, when you’re seven and a half months along, people are already doing things like throwing you showers, probably you have baby stuff in your house. And now all of a sudden you have to tell these people that Hey. Our child is passed away. What was the element of everything going through it publicly hard. 

Shelly: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And with my family, we’re very close-knit family. We have a very large family and it’s like, they have gone through the entire process with me.

And so, you know, with everyone knows my history and everything I had gone through. It’s like they were kind of sold on pins and needles, of course, but with my daughter, Victoria, after she was born, I mean, my great, my grandparents flew in from Texas and different people flew in just to meet her because they knew that I endured so much.

So it was a beautiful time in the beginning, but like you said, having to walk that out publicly. It was hard. And with me, I am the type of person I’ll put on a smile and unless you know me, you would think I’m okay. And so I would have this instant thing where I’m okay. I don’t want you to be sad about it. It’s okay. I’m going to be all right. I will go into that very quickly. 

Carrie: Yeah. The brave face that you put on for everybody. 

Shelly: Absolutely. So that’s how I dealt with it publicly put on the brave face and when they see me, they’re like, okay, she’s all right. She’s going to be fine. But in private I fall in the pieces.

And so, yeah, it was pretty tough, but I think the hardest part for me, especially when we lost Victoria, was my daughter. Hannah was so excited about being a big sister. She’s like, I’m a big sister. And she used to wear this one shirt all every day. She wanted to wear it every day. It’s like, she says I’m going to be a big sister.

And the sad part was coming home and having to tell her. Your baby sister’s in heaven. I was in my brain. I’m trying to figure out how do I word this? How do I explain to a three-year-old? And that’s how I put it to her. I’m like she’s not coming home, but she’s an angel and he’s watching over us now. And of course my daughter asks all of the questions.

Well, why can’t I see her? I just saw her the other day, you know, that type of thing. So that was difficult. However, as time went on, we were able to deal with it better. In the older she had gotten, my daughter, she began to really begin to accept and things like that. 

Carrie: So talk to us about maybe the intersection between like anxiety and grief. Obviously, you talked a little bit about anxiety when you would get pregnant again, it was like how is this going to go? 

Shelly: Yes, the anxiety. I think that’s torture. I’m just going to tell you that, that feeling of just anxiousness, just all of the time.

And it was just horrible for me and grief, you know, that’s the sadness, that’s the heaviness, but the anxiousness and the feeling like you’re going to have a panic attack and your breakout and sweats. And it’s just that whole just uneasy. That portion was very, very difficult for me. 

And I actually experienced it recently and about to 2019, I believe because I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease and I was put on a lot of different medications in this one particular medication was by way of infusion. And everything totally changed for me and the career I worked in for more than 20 years, I had to stop. And it was just so many different changes going on, but one of the side effects that even of the medication was anxiety and depression. And let me just tell you, on top of dealing with my whole scenario changing and sometimes going through excruciating pain, all of these things and to have anxiety on top of all of that, I felt like, oh my gosh, I felt like I’m losing my mind here. I was just always on edge, you know? And I actually began, of course, I prayed about it and you know, God help me deal with this and please give me peace. But I also began to seek professional help because I’m like I need something to bring this thing under control.

Carrie: Yeah, I think that that’s really important part of a lot of people’s journey. And one of the reasons that we have this podcast in the first place is like to reduce shame surrounding getting help because sometimes people in the church think, well, I have God and God is all I need. I can just talk to the pastor about it and I’m good. And I don’t need like therapy therapies for like, you know, the really crazy people or something. 

Shelly: Yeah, exactly. It’s just like the stigma that comes along with it. And I can recall going to the doctor because I told my doctor, I said I can’t deal with this any longer. And she suggested, and she said, I know you’re a woman of faith.

And she had that talk with me like it’s okay. It does not mean that you’re trusting God any less. The doctors are here to help. Just like you go to the doctor, you come see me. It’s okay to get help. And it’s like, okay. And with her actually helping me get through that whole stigma, which was awesome. It helped. Let me just tell you it helped a lot. 

Carrie: That is awesome. I’m so glad that she was able to kind of point you in that direction. Were there specific things that you learned either in therapy or just through this journey that you found helpful and kind of helping your body calm down?

Shelly: Yes, it was a couple of things and of course, spiritually I’ve learned some.

Things and God’s hands even more because with my personality, like to control everything. I like to be in control of my time and control of everything that’s going on around me. But of course, when you’re dealing with life, sometimes it’s difficult to control and it’s hard to maintain control.

And I find myself having to lean on God and having to relax and have the meditation time and my prayer time and just go into that quiet place in as far as going to therapy, they taught me how to, you know, with the breathing exercises and things like that. Just a little relax.

It’s okay to just allow yourself to relax. And for those times where I just felt like I could not get it together. It’s those are the times I really had to pray hard and said, okay, I need your help here. And he would always show up for me. I have to say that because sometimes we feel like we’re in this battle, especially when you’re laying down and your mind’s racing and everything’s going.

And then when you’re at a place where you say, you know what, God, I’m going to release. I gave it to you. I’m going to leave it there. And I’m just going to relax and get some sleep because if you have it under control. I mean, it just had to be a place where I went to in my faith where I had to totally trust God because sometimes we trust them a little bit, but we’ll give him something, but then we’ll grab it back.

And then we put our hands in it and that was me. Let me just tell you, through dealing with anxiety and depression. It taught me how to really lean and depend on God and trust him to work out the circumstances that were going on around me. 

Carrie: That’s really good. I think there is something to be said about that connection between anxiety and us, trying to control all the elements of our lives.

And it’s impossible. It’s absolutely impossible. We can’t control relationships that we’re in. We can’t control our health. We can’t control life tragedies like you were talking about. And so when we learned that, okay, that control stuff is God’s department and I can really just rest.  He’s king of the universe.

He’s got it under control and I can take that step back and just, just breathe. It helps us so much. Yes, it does. It does.

So, how do you feel like specifically, this journey has grown your faith? I know that you’ve talked about it a little bit, but has it affected how you see God? 

Shelly: Yes. And it goes back to what I was just saying about trusting him more. I’ve learned to trust the process. I’ve learned to just kind of go with it.

Because in this life there’s a process and it’s like, God has a plan already predestined. He knew back in 2008, when I lost my daughter that I would be in this place right now at this particular moment, sharing that story and all the while when I was going through it, I’m right in the middle of it, I don’t see anything, but what’s in my immediate surrounding and my immediate view. I can’t see down the line, but he can. And so what I’ve learned is basically trust the process. And I could not say that to you some years ago, because back then I know I was like, okay, I don’t understand what’s going on. I need to figure it out. I desperately need to figure it out, but not so much anymore because again, Through time through going through various situations and God’s showing up each time remaining consistent how he is. It’s just like, I’m learning like, okay. If I put it in his hands, he’s got it. He already knows how it’s going to work out in the end.

I don’t know. But you know, eventually, I’ll get there, but it’s just, again, again, for me, I just learned to lean on God more and just trust the process. 

Carrie: Yeah, I think there’s an element too, of thankfulness of what we do have that grows so much when we’ve been through tragedy and loss. 

Shelly: Absolutely. It’s just like for me, the smaller things, just enjoying life, just enjoying family, just making memories, making the most of things that happen because when my dad passed away a couple years ago, one thing I learned from that was just continue to make memories as opposed to trying to always… because sometimes we have this idea and especially when it comes to our parents like they’re going to be here forever.

You don’t fathom that they would actually leave us, you know? And that was the case with when my dad, you know, it was so unexpected, but after, you know, going through that circumstance, it was like, okay, I need to appreciate the small moments now. Every moment that I spend with my mom or my family or whomever, it’s a moment to make memories.

And so I’m more appreciative of time now. Right? 

Carrie: That’s good. I think that that’s really good. And it’s a good reminder and lesson for all of us. Absolutely. So towards the end of the podcast, I like to ask every guest to share a story of hope, which is a time where you received hope from God or another person.

I feel weird asking you that question because I feel like that was our whole episode today. So I don’t know if you have anything else that you want to share, or maybe you can share about what it’s been like speaking to other people and sharing your story.

Monica: Yeah, absolutely. Because I think about this one in particular moment, and I remember I was doing a conference. And just share my story again, like I was talking about earlier and I can recall, you know, just kind of, so they’re going through everything. And at the end, I had this moment where we had music playing and I had everybody just to write down something they were going through and ball it up in a piece of paper and kind of toss it in the basket, in the front of the room.

So we’ve gone around and the music is going and this young lady came up to me afterwards. And she had tears in our eyes and I will never forget her, but she grabbed my hand and she said, I thought that my circumstance was hard. She said, when I came here, I felt hopeless. I felt like I’m just going because my friend invited me.

She was, and she told me, she said, but listening to your story and listening to, you know, she could hear the pain and different things she said, but talking about how. We’re able to overcome. And she said I’m watching that big smile on your face. Now she said, I feel I’m leaving, feeling lighter. I’m leaving feeling with a sense of hope.

And she hugged me. She said I appreciate you for just getting up here and just do your bravery to share your story and thank you so much. And it just gripped my heart because it wasn’t necessarily about me, but I just felt in that moment that, wow, God used me as a vessel to actually help somebody else. And that was just the most amazing part of everything. And this is what it’s all about. You can just reach one person.  It’s worth it.

Carrie:  That’s awesome. Are you essentially in full-time ministry now?

Shelly:  Basically Yes, basically. I just started the new online ministry with the community of women who basically have gone through pain, whether it’s losing a loved one or divorce or.

I mean, because we endure a lot of different heart situations. And it comes from different areas, but it’s all the same pain. And that’s the area of ministry that God has me in.

Carrie: Awesome. We’ll make sure to put links to where people can find you and find the book if they’re interested. Thank you so much for sharing your story. I think that that’s going to be impactful to people. 

Shelly: Well, thank you so much again, for having me. I really, really enjoyed being able to share my story and just knowing that it just, hopefully prayerfully will be able to help somebody. 

Do you want to stay most up-to-date about what is happening with Hope for Anxiety and OCD? You can follow us on Instagram. We are at Hope for Anxiety and OCD podcast, which I’m pretty sure is like one of the longer Instagram handles I’ve seen. And we’re also on Facebook as well, facebook.com/hopeforanxietyandocd. Thanks for hanging out and listening today.

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

Podcasts Carrie has been on

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Counseling, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode. No Comments on Podcasts Carrie has been on

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Carrie Bock, LPC-MHSP has appeared on several different podcasts to cover a variety of topics and to promote the Hope for Anxiety and OCD podcast.

Ayan Robin Dixon of Circle 31 International Women’s Ministry interviews Carrie about her experience as a former foster mom.

Joe Sanok interviews Carrie about how to start a private practice and transition off insurance.

Adam Kol asks Carrie’s advice on how to use insurance coverage for counseling, how to obtain low-cost or free opportunities for counseling and how to find a therapist that’s right for you.

Tracy Lowery asks all kinds of questions about everything from finding a counselor to understanding suffering as a Christian.

Brian and Carrie discuss prayer and anxiety by using the movie War Room as a jumping off point.

Carrie breaks anxiety down in an easy to understand way in Jeff Allen’s first episode.

Carrie discusses the process she has created for attracting and onboarding the clients she enjoys working with most.

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35. Parenting a Special Needs Child: A Personal Story with Dyana Robbins, M. Ed

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Counseling, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 35. Parenting a Special Needs Child: A Personal Story with Dyana Robbins, M. Ed

Today, we are privileged to have Dyana Robbins, M. Ed as our guest.  She shares with us her personal story of parenting a special needs child.

  • Dyana’s journey of parenting a special needs child
  • How she managed challenging behaviors of her children
  • Emotional triggers that come with parenting a special needs child and how she dealt with them 
  • How dealing with her own anxiety helps communicate calm and steadiness to her children
  • Support system she found and created in her community
  • How her journey  impacted her marriage and faith

Episode Summary:

In today’s episode, I sit down with Diana Robbins, a counselor and special needs mom, to discuss her journey navigating her children’s developmental disabilities. Diana shares her experiences of parenting, how it impacted her marriage, and the role her faith played during these challenging times. Out of respect for her family, we don’t discuss her children’s specific diagnoses, but this episode offers valuable insights for any parent of a child with special needs.

Diana opens up about the initial struggle of receiving her child’s diagnosis after years of uncertainty, the relief mixed with grief, and how it reshaped her approach to parenting. She describes her emotional journey and how advocating for her children became a vital part of her life. Diana’s personal and professional experiences give her a unique perspective, making this conversation relatable to both parents and loved ones who are supporting someone with anxiety or OCD.

Diana emphasizes the importance of creating a safe and supportive home environment while managing the daily challenges of special needs parenting. She shares practical tips on how she balanced giving her son what he needed while maintaining her own mental health. Diana also highlights the significance of teaching children coping mechanisms, explaining the importance of clear and simple instructions to reduce anxiety.

We dive into how Diana’s own anxiety was triggered by her children’s struggles and how she learned to manage it to create a calmer environment for her family.

Tune in to hear Diana’s story and gain wisdom on navigating the complexities of special needs parenting, marriage, and faith.

Links and resources
Dyana Robbins, M. Ed

Accordion Heading

Today on the show, I am interviewing a counselor as well as a special needs Mom. Diana Robbins shares some really great wisdom, on the show today, she asked specifically if we could not share the diagnoses of her children. And so out of respect, we didn’t do that, but I’m sure that regardless of your child’s diagnosis If you are a special needs parent, I know that you will get something out of this episode. We talk about everything from how it impacted her marriage, to how it impacted her faith and relationship with God. So let’s dive right in. 

Carrie: Hi, Diana, will you tell us a little bit about yourself and why you wanted to be on the podcast today to share your story. 

Diana: Yes, Hi Carrie. Thanks for having me on. I am a wife of 26 years to my husband, Chris and a mom to two teenagers, two teenage sons, and we are also blessed to have our 13-year-old niece living with us. So we’re a family of five. We have been living in Singapore for the past three years, but before that, I was a stay-at-home mom and a homeschooling parent in Houston, Texas.

And in Singapore, I’ve resumed my practice as a grief and trauma therapist and have a practice and do a lot of volunteer work with those who are recovering from trauma and loss in their lives. I wanted to share my story because I have to encourage people who are battling anxiety or OCD and that especially the people that love them to the moms, the dads, other family members that are supporting those who struggle with anxiety. I really like to encourage them as well. 

Carrie: Right. And I know that we have people who are struggling that listened to the show, and we also have loved ones that tune in people that have a spouse or boyfriend, girlfriend or child with anxiety or OCD and they’re really trying to understand that individual better because maybe they don’t have the anxiety themselves and can’t necessarily relate personally, but they’re trying to kind of get some more information. So that’s part of a little bit about what we’re doing with the show today. And I think you have the personal, professional and practical information. So it’s a little bit of you’re coming at it from both angles. 

Diana: Well, I’ve certainly been gifted with experience in all of those things. And we’re great.

Carrie: What was it like for you as a parent to find out that your child had a developmental disability? Can you take us a little bit through that process? 

Diana: Absolutely. So when my children were born, my first son was born. We recognized pretty quickly that he was struggling. And no one really knew why. So it took a process of about three years to get accurate diagnosis. And in that time there was a lot of stress, a lot of worry about what was happening and my husband and I were just doing the best that we could to manage, helping him grow and develop. So when the diagnosis finally came and there were several, it was a mix of relief. It was just really helpful to have at least partial answers to what we were dealing with everyday, but there was also this overwhelming grief that set into that, what we were dealing with would be lifelong and not something that we can just fix quickly and the struggles, and there’s some grief for him as well. 

Carrie: I think that makes a lot of sense. You know, there’s kind of multiple emotions as you’re going through that as a parent like, okay, we’re going to be in this for the long haul.

And at the same time, it’s nice to have some kind of idea of what we’re dealing with so that we know how to treat it, or what avenues to pursue professionally. 

Diana: Yeah, absolutely. There were a lot of other emotions mixed in with those two main ones and we have fear. I became just this really fierce advocate.

Immediately I went from being just the mom to being an advocate and a student I had a whole new realm of life and learning that I had to adjust to the diagnoses, how to best support my child and I had a lot to learn. So I became an avid student as well. And, that was really challenging for us.

On a spiritual level as well for both me and my husband to receive the diagnosis. And so I think that I look at that time in our life as one of the key spiritual moments that we are crises that we had to overcome really. 

Carrie: What kind of challenging behaviors and situations did you experience with your children?

Diana: Well, I would say we faced struggles really across, you know, social, emotional and behavioral levels. All of them. The behaviors that were most challenging were the perseveration type behaviors. My son was really fixated on certain things and you would need a lot of order, a lot of routine, and he would also find really odd passions at a very young age. One of the cutest ones, but also most frustrating was in became very interested in vending machines. It makes it not pass a vending machine in town without having to put a quarter in it and watch, you know, something from out. So if there is a vending machine at the grocery store, have a new machine when we were driving on the road that he saw through the window, we had to stop and we had to see the vending machine and purchase something and go through that whole ritual, or he would become very distressed and have a lot of meltdowns or temper tantrums and things. It was just very overwhelming to him to not be able to engage in these behaviors. That was really challenging. It really interrupted our daily life.  As you can imagine, trying to get anywhere and do anything that those kinds of behaviors were maybe the hardest for me as a mother. 

Carrie: How did you manage those things and find the balance of giving your son what he needed while also maintaining your own sanity as a parent?

Diana: That’s a great question. To be honest, I didn’t do that so well, a lot of the time. I tried, I tried to find that balance, but it was a daily struggle and some days I lost that struggle, but overall I learned some really important lessons that I think helped me grow in that over time. My husband and I really believed that it was important to help our children become as involved in a typical developmental trajectory as possible.

We wanted to accept them as they are and help them to integrate into life as best we could. Normal what people consider normal life as best we could. And, and that was always something that we had to balance carefully because we didn’t want to push them too hard or to make too many concessions to the things that they were struggling with.

And I don’t know that you ever feel that you’ve got that balance perfectly at any given time, but we did see that it was helping them grow and become more and more able to engage in the world. So we tried to challenge them only as much as they are supported. I was a principle that we have. I actually learned that in graduate school from one of my mentors and he said that we need to challenge people so that they grow, but we can only do that as far as we have supported them to be able to do that.

So that principle was really important in our home. We really manage their home environment. Home became our secure base. So I can’t control things outside in the world that they’re going to encounter and make it orderly and make it routine. Home became our place to really be able to give them that safe place to engage.

When my second son came along and had some of the same challenges, that became especially important because it was the one place that they could really be themselves and it was safe to do so. And they had all the things that they most needed right at hand. We might home be everything that we could for them. But then when we went out, we would limit our time outside. We would take short outings and eventually grow those into longer, more demanding situations. And then we just taught a lot of coping skills. I did a lot of preparing them at home so that when we went out, we had objects that they could take with them to help them be able to stay focused, to help them be able to manage anxiety and feel safe and secure when they went to church or they went to school. Those kinds of things. 

Carrie: That’s so huge. I think kids knowing what to expect, This is where we’re going, this is what we’re going to be doing. This is kind of a little bit of what it’s going to look like. And here are some tools that you have, like when you do get anxious or when you do get bored, I think so many times we just kind of don’t break it down enough for children.

I don’t know if that’s the right way to say it, but I think that especially any children that are dealing with anxiety or OCD, they need the explanation in simple language, because we may assume that they understand what’s going to happen, but that doesn’t mean that they do. 

Diana: Absolutely. That’s so critical. Giving very explicit and simple instructions was a key part to their success. I had to learn to give maybe one instruction before I gave another. And allow them to process very simply at first to really help manage that anxiety and keep it at a level that I wasn’t adding to the overwhelm. 

Carrie: Right. I know that this is probably something that has come up on the show before or may come up in the future like kids and spouses are really good at stirring up our own stuff internally. And so can you talk a little bit about how some of these behaviors or thought processes triggered you and how you dealt with that?

Diana: Yes. I think that was probably the hardest challenge for me was recognizing. And my kids struggle how much I was struggling myself.  Even before I had children, I hadn’t recognized how much anxiety I had myself until I was trying to help my children who had anxiety. And I could see it so much more plainly and as they struggled, then it would trigger us for a deeper struggle in me, all of those fears, all those worries. My own sense of overwhelm, just trying to get us all through the day was when sometimes just become more than I could handle effectively.

So I think that I learned a lot and learning how to help support my children and how to manage my own anxiety and how to be compassionate with myself just as I was trying to be compassionate with my children and to set them up for success, I needed to do the same thing for me in order to support them well.

Carrie: So in a sense, as you are learning how to manage your own anxiety then you were able to teach them certain things that would help them and kind of, as you’re calmer, they’re probably calmer as well. 

Diana: Yes, that was really important. I learned very quickly that our children respond so much to the way that we show up for them. If I’m calm that helps communicate calm and steadiness to them that they respond to. When I’m anxious, or I allowed their anxiety to trigger my own, then we have a real problem because then we’re all upset and all overwhelmed and it makes it much more difficult to just to complete anything that we’re trying to accomplish.

So I found that it was so important that I was really grounded and really calm when I approached any tasks with my children and that I could manage my own anxiety privately as best as I could before I really engaged with them was very important. 

Carrie: What was the process of finding support like whether that was professional supports or just other parents who could understand what you were going through, spiritual support, all of that.

Diana: Well, it was difficult at first because we live away from our family.  My husband and I have never been able to live close to family. So we built it. And God was so gracious in that he put us in an area where there are wonderful therapists all around us. And we had many. We had developmental therapists, occupational therapists, physical therapists, speech therapists.

Carrie: Wow.

Diana: Yeah. And for both of my sons, they had a very intense schedule therapy, which is part of why we began from schooling just to be able to manage the schedules that we all had. I needed to really be able to educate them from home. And so the homeschooling community also really became a support for our family.

I just made a real effort to get out there and meet other moms and to learn all I could. I looked for support groups in the community and there were some, but they were mostly for older children with the same challenges and adults with anxiety. Those kinds of things. I actually ended up starting a support group so that I could have that support.

It was a wonderful experience. Brought other from spilling parents around that had children with different special needs and tried to talk about the unique challenges of raising kids in home all day with their needs and trying to educate them because that’s a big job. Having that support was really critical to our success.

But I also want to say that I found a neighbor who became a very dear friend to me. She had children the same age, roughly as mine who did not have any developmental challenges, but she was gracious and loving. Actually, I had two neighbors at the time that were that way and loved us well. They brought my children for play dates. They took the time to learn about their behaviors and how to manage them so that I could have a break sometimes while the children played with their children. I don’t know that anything else was more important to me in that period of our life, just to have their support, to be able to connect with moms around things that didn’t have to do with disabilities or the challenges that my kids were facing.

That was just really essential to me. 

Carrie: I hope that provides some encouragement maybe for people who are in a situation where they might be able to support and help another family through the process of helping raise their children because you never know, like what kind of impact you could potentially have in people’s lives. And we all need each other, parents I think in general, just need each other, but especially, so when you’re raising a child that has specific needs. 

Diana: Yes, I feel that it will encourage people. I know my friends if they were speaking with you today would tell you that they felt that the relationship with our family taught them a lot too, but it was beneficial on both sides.

Although it wasn’t a tremendous ministry to my family. And I feel like it certainly probably benefited us more than anyone. They will tell you that it benefited them as well, that they learned a lot from having our children be part of their children’s lives and watching them play together.

And we of course tried to really reciprocate to those families as well, not just to receive from them, but to post them in our home and to show love to them as well. And I think it was just some really beautiful relationships that developed as our children grew up together. 

Carrie: That’s a really beautiful story. Let’s talk a little bit about how this is impacted your marriage because I’ve heard that statistically, people who are raising children with any kind of special needs have a higher divorce rate than average. How did this affect your marriage and how did you and your husband work through some of those bumps in the road?

Diana: Well, that’s a great question. I could probably talk about that the entire time we had today. But I was thinking in general that raising children with special needs and the anxiety and things that came with that for them really challenged our marriage more than anything else that we’ve faced, but it’s also been the way that God has strengthened our marriage probably more than anything else. So it’s been both a really difficult and wonderful thing at the same time.  We’ve learned several survival skills that I’ll share in case they’re helpful to others. But one is how important it is that we actually communicate in a healthy way.

I think when you have typical challenges and marriage and parenting it’s difficult anyway, good communication is important, but when you have children with special needs and the constant demands of that, it becomes even more important because you have so little time together and you need that time together.

Where you’re alone to really have this really clear communication that’s very healthy. We had to accept each other’s limits. That was really important. And to recognize when my anxiety or his anxiety with dealing with the challenges was too high. And to step in not with any judgements, but to just try to step in for one another and say, Hey, you know, I’ve got this situation. I can take it from here for a little bit, you know, go grab a cup of coffee or, you know, go work in the yard a bit. I’ve got this. And to really just understand that there’s only so much we can take. We’re human too. And to make room for us to have our own limits was really important. We make amazing at dividing and conquering tasks.  We developed that pretty early in the marriage to survive. And some, we just took on the task that we each were best at and did that really well and work together as a team. And that was really helpful to me because we weren’t constantly reinventing the wheel to get through every day.

We just knew what we needed to do. And that helped a lot. That reduced my anxiety a lot to know that he had certain areas covered and I didn’t have to think about them and, and then I would handle the others. So, yeah, I think those were some of the main things that we learned as far as tips, but encouraging self-care. My partner was really important too.

Sometimes we have recognized ourselves when we’re really overwhelmed and anxious. We see it for our children that we couldn’t always see it for ourselves. And so my husband and I learned to help one another recognize when we were at that place. And to encourage self-care not just a temporary break, but how has your spiritual life going.

You had to do a hobby that you enjoy or to connect with a friend to call your family does most of the really important things that we did for one another.

Carrie: Right. Good. I think some of that’s good for, for any marriage, some of the principles that you just outlined, just a sense of knowing your strengths, knowing your limitations, learning how to communicate with each other. That’s an ongoing process, I think for married couples. Very good insights there. 

How would you say that this journey with your children has impacted your faith? 

Diana: Well, you hit on probably the first thing I always say about it already, Carrie, you said that recognizing limitations is important. And that was the first thing I think that I had to learn spiritually was that there are limits, I think before having children and these challenges in our home, there really, hadn’t been very much that my husband and I hadn’t been able to tackle together very well the challenges that we hadn’t been able to overcome. And just through hard work and effort, and you can’t fix anxiety, you can’t fix developmental challenges with hard work and effort. You can’t power your way through that.

And so we had to learn that we have limits and our children have limits. And that it was okay. It really humbled us, I think and deepened our need for the Lord in ways that I don’t think we would’ve grown and recognized until the children came into our family. We became very aware that we need a God for everything. And I wish that I had had a deeper sense of that before, but really the Lord used our children and their needs to drive that point home. 

And I’m thankful that he did.

Carrie: It just ended up leading you to like a greater place of dependence on God. 

Diana: Absolutely. And it really caused me to really shrink life down to its basic elements for many years.

Our story is much different now, but in the early years of dealing with all of this, I was really happy to get a shower. If I could everybody say all the toddlers, you know, or we’re doing well. We had gotten through the day, their basic needs are met and my basic needs were met, I was really, really happy.

That was a successful day. That was a triumph. But in doing that and having this very small circle in life, I realized that I can focus more on the Lord too like I have so many fewer distractions and the quiet because life was so basic and it really helped my husband and are both, I think, focused on eternal things more, to become more in touch with the fact that things may not be what we desire or sometimes even feel that we need them to be here, but that we have an eternal hope that we can cling to that even if things don’t get better. Here that we will be okay. That this is not a forever situation. And that hope became very real to me in those years. For sure. 

Carrie: How are your sons doing now? 

Diana: I’m really happy to report that the prognoses and things that we received when they were young has really been blown out of the water.

I guess if to say we’ve gone from home homeschooling lifestyle so that we can just manage behaviors and allow them to learn in a safe environment for them to maybe in our costs the world and going to competitive international schools and you know, all of these things that are anxiety-producing for anyone.

And my son’s been able to manage that extremely well. My oldest is going to university in the fall of this year and. He’s graduated without really much support anymore academically or socially at school or emotionally at school.  He’s really impressed. All of us, I think with the sheer amount of effort and work and perseverance that he’s demonstrated over the years.

And my younger son is right behind him and he’s in 10th grade this year. He’s finishing that up and plans to get a university as well, which are things that we just never dreamed of, you know, really being potentials for them when they were young. And we were getting all of this news. So we have a lot of joy in this season, seeing all that God has done the ways that he has not just helped us overcome that a lot, many of the challenges, although that’s wonderful and we’re thankful for that, but really the people that he shaped us into through these struggles and seeing that character formed in my children as well. And that love for the Lord that they carry with them because they’ve had to depend on him so much is a great encouragement to me, probably the best thing. 

Carrie: Right. I think that’s something that we’ve seen with really all of the personal stories that we’ve of people we’ve had on the show that I’ve struggled with anxiety or OCD is that they’ll say it caused me to know more about God. It caused me to grow closer to him. It was part of my sanctification process of becoming more like Christ. And I think that your story really fits in, with all of that. And when we’re in the middle of it, it’s so easy to get bogged down with the day-to-day trials that we’re facing. And a lot of times we don’t see the bigger picture until maybe sometimes years later. And then we take a step back and we’re like, wow, God really used that situation in my life for good, but when I was in the midst of it, I just couldn’t see anything good about it. And I was just there just going through the motions, just trying to survive like you said.

Diana: Yes, absolutely. And I think that that perspective is so critical. It’s easier to have when you’re looking backwards like I am now. It’s so overwhelming, sometimes that all you can do is just kind of ask the Lord to come to you in that place because you don’t have anything to reach out to him with. That’s such a wonderful thing that he does, that he does come into our mess. He does come into the chaos. He does come into all of the things that we can’t manage on our own. And, and brings his peace when we don’t have it. And when we experienced that, it helps us understand that there is something more than what we’re struggling with.

Carrie: Right. So I feel like your, your whole story has been hopeful, but because I always ask this question to every guest, I’m going to ask it to you. What is the time in your life where you have received hope from God or another person? 

Diana: There have been so many times that the Lord himself has done that and he used other people to do that for us. But I think I’ll share the one where it was one of my darkest moments. I was much older. We were both really young and really struggling, kind of at the crisis point, I guess, for their challenges. I had one of those days where I really couldn’t even have my own thoughts. I was just trying to keep them happy and getting through their day.

And we had a lot of outbursts, a lot of meltdowns and a lot of anxiety that day.  All the way around with both of my sons and with me, myself. And I finally put them in their rooms for quiet time, which was my saving grace that they had by at time every day. And I just kind of collapsed in a heap on the floor.

And I told the Lord really clearly that I needed him to change that situation, or I needed him to change me because I didn’t know how to go forward even one more step. And that feeling, even as I talk about it, it’s still just really present. It was such a moment I had really come to the end of myself and as I was crying and telling him these things, I just felt his presence really powerfully.

And he reminded me that he was with me and that he was, he was going to be enough and he didn’t tell me how he was going to do that. He didn’t impress on my heart, the plan for the next five or 10 years or anything like that. But he just met me in that place. And I just felt his presence.

I was encouraged by scripture and things that I needed so desperately in that moment that reminded me that there was more than that one moment that I was stuck in. And at that point, things really changed in our family. We became a family that wasn’t driven by the challenges and just constantly reacting to them, but a family that was looking beyond them to something more. And that shift made all the difference in being able to cope with the anxiety that we were all feeling and changed us I think. It’s certainly changed me forever to find him there. 

Carrie: Yeah, that’s awesome. I loved what you said earlier about just God really entering into those places with us. You know, the, whether it’s the mess or the loneliness or the heartache or the, I just can’t do this anymore. One more day. I just can’t seem to do this.

That he’ll be right there and that he pursues us in that process. I love that. 

Thank you so much for being on the show and telling your story. I know that it’s going to encourage and inspire some other people. 

Diana: Thank you for having beyond theory. It’s a privilege to get to meet you and to hopefully share our story in a way that will maybe help somebody else keep going too.

__________________________

There are so many amazing special needs parents out there. So shout out to you if you are in that category. And I hope this episode was encouraging to you. If that’s the case, stay tuned for future episodes where we’re going to be talking about everything from brainspotting to self-care to dealing with doubt.

You can find us online anytime at www.thopeforanxietyandocd.com.

Thanks so much for listening.

Christian Fath and OCD is a production of By The Well Counseling in Smyrna, Tennessee.

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

32. From Ashamed to Advocate: A Personal Anxiety Story with Jeff Allen

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 32. From Ashamed to Advocate: A Personal Anxiety Story with Jeff Allen

Jeff Allen, a mental health advocate and host of the Simple Mental Health Podcast, shares his journey through anxiety.

Episode Highlights:

  • How he overcame shame and stigma around seeking help and taking medication.
  • How Jeff discovered he had an anxiety disorder.
  • The backlash he received from churchgoers for opening up about his mental health condition.
  • The spiritual doubt process he went through.
  • The role of prayer, medication, and therapy in his healing.
  • His journey of spiritual deconstruction and reconstruction.

Episode Summary:

Since starting my podcast, I’ve learned that many of you resonate with personal stories about anxiety and OCD. These episodes often become the most downloaded ones, and today, I have another powerful personal story to share from Jeff Allen, a podcaster I met when I appeared on his show. Jeff opens up about the backlash he faced in the church when he began talking about his anxiety, taking medication, and his spiritual journey.

Jeff’s struggle with anxiety dates back to his childhood. He recalls feeling anxious even at five years old, often avoiding social situations and preferring to stay home. It wasn’t until adulthood that he realized his anxiety was more than just a character flaw. After marrying in 2010, his wife helped him recognize that his constant anxiety was something he could get help for. A visit to the doctor led to a diagnosis of social anxiety and generalized anxiety disorder. Jeff started medication and counseling but initially struggled with the stigma of seeking help for mental health in the church.

As Jeff continues to manage his anxiety, he believes in combining faith with professional help, whether that be therapy or medication, as necessary.

This conversation is a reminder that mental health challenges are not something to hide, and seeking help is a sign of strength, not weakness. No one should have to navigate these struggles alone, and by sharing stories like Jeff’s, we can continue to break the stigma surrounding mental health.

Links and Resources

Simple Mental Health Podcast

Transcript

Carrie: One thing I have learned about my listeners since we started the podcast, is that you all love personal stories of individuals who are struggling with anxiety and OCD. Those are often our most popularly downloaded episodes. So today I have another personal story for you. And that’s Jeff Allen.

He’s a podcaster. I had the opportunity to be on his podcast, which was how we met and then decided to have him come on and share his story on this podcast. He talks about some backlash that he received in the church when he started to talk publicly about his experience with anxiety and taking medication, as well as some spiritual doubt processes that he worked through. So I hope that you will enjoy this story. 

Okay, Jeff, so thank you for taking the time to come on today and tell us a little bit about yourself. 

Jeff: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. You said my name, it’s Jeff. I live near St. Louis, Missouri, actually across the Mississippi River in Illinois.

And I’m married for this June will be 11 years and we just had our first son and man life is crazy right now and crazy awesome right now I work at a church and I do a video production among other tech things here in St. Louis. 

Carrie: So you’re the behind the scenes guy making stuff happen. 

Jeff: That’s right, yep. I used to be a worship leader. I kind of needed to step away from that for awhile. So now I’m a behind the scenes guy.

Carrie: Awesome. You are very important just as the scene people. Okay. Why did you want to come and share your personal story about anxiety on the podcast? 

Jeff: Yeah, I love to share it any chance I get, because I feel like it’s an opportunity to smash some stigmas.

I want to take down the stigmas that have been in place by culture, that everyone seems to think that it’s such a bad thing to talk about mental health issues. And I want to get away from that. I want people to find freedom. I want people to know they’re not alone. So for me, it’s important to have any opportunity I have to…

I deal with anxiety almost every day at some level. And sometimes it’s worse than, or sometimes it’s better than other times, but anything to help people understand that they’re not alone and to just smash stigmas. That’s the main reason for me. 

Carrie: I’ll say, I think that’s one of the reasons that the personal stories episodes have been so popular on my podcast is because when people hear someone else talk about.

The story, they go, oh yeah, me too. Like, I deal with that. And it helps me realize, I just thought I was alone and going through all this stuff in my own head and nobody else was dealing with it, but then they hear somebody else talk about it on a podcast. Then they just feel the sense of relief, you know. So when did you first start experiencing symptoms of anxiety, even if you didn’t necessarily know that that’s what it was?

Jeff: Yeah, well I can pinpoint back to as early, as like five years old, I found a picture on Facebook, not too long ago that someone had tagged me in. And it was me as a little kid. They were family friends, this person who posted it. And we were out this like touristy place locally here in St. Louis called Grant’s farm.

And I could see myself standing kind of away from the other group of three kids, they were all hamming it up for the camera. And I was like off to the side, just like always just kind of like staring like out of like in concern, you know? And I’m thinking, man, I remember that feeling that that little boy has right there.

I’m like, I know it, I still know it. And I can remember every time we would do something, I’m an only child, so I don’t have siblings. So we would always go and hang out with other families. And when we did that, I would be around those kids. And I could always remember telling my mom and I really would rather stay home.

I don’t want to go, can I please stay home? And she’d say things like, you’re going to have a good time. You know, you’ll have a lot of fun and she was right, but always ended up being fun. But the journey to that place was just full of anxiety. I didn’t know. That’s what it was, you know, as a kid. 

My mom understood probably that she had an anxious kid, but didn’t know that, it might actually be something that was diagnosable because that would have been like 1990 and I just don’t know that very many people were talking about child mental health. 

Yeah. I mean, I’m sure. I once saw that the word, the term generalized anxiety disorder, GAD, I once saw that they didn’t even start, like, they didn’t have a name for that until 1980.

And, you know, don’t quote me on that, but I’ve read that on the internet, so it’s gotta be true. And if that’s the case, then 10 years later, like why would my mother in the Midwest here know that maybe there’s a diagnosable anxiety disorder with her kid. So it’s been that long. So since 1990, at least, but I can remember up until like the sixth grade or, you know, just before I started having the choice of who I wanted to go hang out with.

It would have been from that point on that I knew that I had anxiety. 

Carrie: Well, what was that process like of coming to a realization of, okay this is a problem that I may need help for and getting a diagnosis. 

Jeff: Sure, it wasn’t until, 2010 was the year I got married that my wife helped me see that, this was more than just a character flaw or something. Thank God, actually. Because I had a few relationships that I think ultimately ended because of my anxiety. Like I made decisions or treated people a certain way or, maybe felt too much. Like I was going to lose someone or didn’t trust the relationship over anxiety.

And my wife is just very tough, you know, so I think she was able to deal with that and see past some of that better than other people. So it was in 2010, I was leading worship at a megachurch in Illinois. I remember being on stage for a rehearsal one week. I thought I was having a heart attack. I’m 25 years old at the time.

I’m like, man, this is crazy, heart palpitations. I go to the doctor or go to the ER and they’re like, no, you’re fine. You know, you’re forced to send me home. So went home not long after that. I’m on stage. And I get off stage for the sermon, our pastors preaching. And I go up to my colleague and I said, I got to go home, I’m sick. I’m going to throw up. He was able to back me up so that I could leave. And my wife at the time, my wife worked at the same church at that time that she was in kids ministry and I texted her. I said I’m going home. And then when she met me at home, I said, I feel fine now. And she said, you know, I’ve been thinking about this because you’ve struggled with this for when we go out to eat with couples, you know, you struggled with feeling sick because what if you have an anxiety disorder?

And so I was kind of embarrassed because of the stigmas that exist. Like damn, that’s tough. So I decided to ask my general practitioner about it. She said, man, that sure does sound like social anxiety and maybe some general generalized general anxiety disorder started on Lexapro right there.

Carrie: What was that like for you when you first heard that? Because you talked about experiencing some stigma but was it this sense of here I am in a church leading worship? Did you feel like, well, I shouldn’t be struggling with anxiety like I’m supposed to be more spiritual than that or something.

Jeff: You know, I did kind of feel that way, but I think it was more like in the back of my mind, really.

I didn’t really want to tell anybody about it at first because I just thought that that was like a private thing. You know, if you’re dealing with some anxiety or depression, I also went to see a counselor at that point. When you go see a counselor, that those are things that you just don’t talk about.

Like that’s private stuff. Those are the dirty laundry, or that’s the stuff you keep in the closet. So, I don’t know that I thought I should’ve been more spiritual necessarily, but I definitely thought it would be looked down upon to come out with it 

Carrie: It’s more like this is embarrassing and I feel ashamed.

Jeff: Yeah, that’s right. 

Carrie: And what happened after that? Like how did that progress? 

Jeff: So, there’s a blogger, now he’s a podcaster. He was a worship leader. His name is Carlos Whittaker. I don’t know if you know that name or not. Carlos is a great dude and he was. This was like in the prime of blogs, nobody, you know, everybody used to have a blog and now everybody has a podcast. 

Carrie: We’re trendy.

Jeff: Like when blogs were a big and one day he just, I was looking at his blog and there was just this picture of a prescription bottle of Paxil. And he’s like, this is the church’s dirty little secret. He said a lot of us, he was a worship leader at the time. He told the story of his almost exact same story as mine.

He was on, on Sunday, although he had actually like gotten dizzy and passed out and had to have a doctor come up and he had had a full-blown anxiety attack on stage. And then he just talked about it, like, man, a lot of us in ministry or a lot of people in general have struggles with this.

And so I rely on, God prayer and Paxil, and I’m like, man, that’s good. And so I decided I’m going to speak out about this a little bit. So I remember taking a Facebook and saying, man, this blog really hit home with me and you know, here’s why, and, and then I got a few nasty emails from churchgoers. So that left a bad taste in my mouth for church, even though I was serving, I still am serving at church just saying, you know, Hey, you’re leading people astray. If you’re saying that you need medicine, it’s bad. And my man people, I think you, for your listeners, you, uh, were on my podcast.

And I think you said it on there. You know, if you have high blood pressure, nobody ever says you shouldn’t take medication for it. You know, if you have this, nobody says, but for some reason, church folk like to say that for mental health issues, you should not be taking medication that doesn’t even make sense.

So I kind of had that same response to the particular person who said, you need to be relying on Jesus. I’m like you think I don’t already do that. You know me better than that. Sure. So it must be enough, to seek help from science and the wonderful things that God created for us to manage.

Carrie: Yeah, I’m a firm believer that you can have Jesus and science, Jesus and therapy, and I don’t understand why that’s such a hard thing sometimes for people to grasp in the church. Because we embrace science in all kinds of other ways and other avenues. And we encourage people to get treatment for a variety of illnesses and diseases.

And we’ll still pray for people too, that are going through cancer, but we also want them to go see their oncologist as well. Like it’s interesting, both and thing, and the same thing for anxiety, you know, we want to pray for you and encourage you and love on you. And also we want you to get professional help, and those two things can work together and…

I just believe God uses everything that’s available to us to meet us right. Where we’re at. And some people, medication is a great option for them. Some people have a hard time with medication or finding one that works with their system really well and just want to pursue counseling. And I’m just kind of like whatever you want to do, I’ll support.

Jeff: Yeah. I have seasons where I need both, like, I need my medication adjusted or whatever. I have seasons where talk therapy is something that I really need. I have seasons where I don’t have much to say. It’s always, the way to manage for me is that combination.


Carrie: Do you eventually made this decision to leave the on-stage worship ministry experience. Was this a part of that process towards health for you? 

Jeff: Actually, it wasn’t a spiritual way. Not necessarily an anxiety way. I was kind of going through a spiritual deconstruction situation and I wasn’t sure where I was in that walk anymore.

And so I really felt uncomfortable leading people. When I wasn’t so sure myself and, you know, a lot of people I’ve talked to have gone through spiritual deconstruction and they never went through reconstruction. And so I was happy that for me, I was able to find the reconstruction aspect and come back and feel like, okay, this is a faith that I am 100% in. Right. So, but no the anxiety portion wasn’t, thankfully wasn’t a part of that decision. At least not directly it’s possible that it was somewhere in there, but for the most part, it was a spiritual decision and just maybe even in sort of an integrity move.

Like I just felt like it wasn’t a good thing to kind of not, almost not believe anymore at that point and still sing and lead people. I just didn’t think it was honest. And so I wanted to be honest at this point, I would feel comfortable going back to it. 

Carrie: Can you tell us a little bit more about what that spiritual deconstruction and reconstruction looked like for you? Because I’m sure that there are other people listening to this that have doubts and questions and are going through their own faith process. I know that I had to process, my faith has evolved over time as I’ve become a part of different churches and different streams and faith systems and having my own experiences with God and the holy spirit has definitely shaped things and change things for me as well. So I’m just curious what that process was like for you. 

Jeff: Well, I mean, it all just kind of started, you know, they always talk about the seed of doubt that’s planted. And I guess it sort of started with a seed of doubt where I just started to think is this all just make-believe. My buddy was like, oh, you’re just going to pray to your invisible sky daddy. He’s not a believer that I’m very good friends with. And, he would say things like that. And I mean, you know, I don’t know. Maybe that is what this is. I need to figure it out. And then there were some things that I don’t want to get too in the weeds about, but there are just some things that I’m like, man, I don’t know about this. This doesn’t seem like a God that would, that just doesn’t feel like the God that I know and that I experienced, there were some early, you know, I grew up in the church, so there was some guilt shame, things like that were there for me that I don’t think were fair. I think they were planted by people and not God. So they were like getting rid of beliefs that were based on those things. And then ultimately it was just saying, I’m going to live in this space of doubt and uncertainty for awhile and see if God meets me. And I did feel that it was almost like I’m not going to say it was prodigal son-like because I didn’t leave to go pursue something that on purpose. That was not of God. I just needed to find, I think I needed to find God again and God needed to find me again is kind of where that was. And now my relationship is just so much different. It just feels more authentic and real and less… How can I put it? It’s just not the culture of Christianity that we, a lot of us… I’m 36 years old. A lot of us grew up in anymore. Not that. You know, no making purple at youth group kind of vibe anymore. It’s not that these are the harsh rules that it’s more of the God loves you just as you are a much more, and I’ll get pushed back for saying something like this, but I’m much more comfortable living in that space.

It’s not always right. That’s why I’m saying the pushback. It’s not always a comfortable place, 

but something feels right about it. And so that’s just kind of where I’m sitting right now with it. 

Carrie: It’s so much easier to have a free-flowing and open relationship with God when it’s based on love and not terror. And unfortunately, so many of us grew up in a Christian society where there are a lot of rules and a lot of religion-based things that man put on us, not what God put on us. And so If you have a relationship based on love, perfect love, casts out fear. It’s just different. The vibe is totally different. So I relate and jive to what you’re saying with that.

The rules have to flow out of the relationship and the guidelines for life have to come. The relationship has to come first, just like you don’t, you have a good relationship with your parents. You don’t want to do things that are going to disappoint them. You don’t want to be afraid of your parents like I’m going to get in trouble all the time. It’s a very different feeling for sure. 

So you went from not wanting to talk about this being ashamed of it, and now you have a mental health podcast. So how did that come about?

Jeff:  Well, I was a part of a podcast with my friend. His name is Chris and he had a podcast called pond offs anonymous because he is a recovering alcoholic.

And his faith is a very interesting one. He is very close to God. He also has a very dirty mouth. So you can listen to any of those episodes. We have to mark them explicit. He’s just a very honest person. He is who he is, and doesn’t really apologize for it. But I started producing this podcast for him, just helping with the technical side and the first podcast, he starts talking to me on the microphone. And I’m like, okay, here we go. I don’t have a microphone. So the next episode we did, I made sure I did. And I sort of became a co-host in a sense where he would talk about sobriety and addiction and sobriety. I would talk a little bit about the mental health part of it because I just experienced anxiety, I experienced depression. We ended up kind of talking about both things. So it was supposed to be more of a podcast about addiction and sobriety and recovery. And it ended up being about that and mental health. And we went on a hiatus. We’re still on hiatus. We’ll probably end up back sometime this year. Just a lot of life changes that need it. I mean, I had a baby, but also he had some major life changes. He had an adoption go through, so he had a kid too. So we’re on a hiatus. So I thought, “man, I miss talking about this.” There were some things that like when I was first diagnosed, I didn’t realize, and maybe this is dumb, but I’ve heard other people agree with me. I didn’t realize that you could go to your general practitioner and they could diagnose you with an anxiety disorder or depression. I just didn’t know that.

So my podcast is called simple mental health and the whole idea is to break it down as simply as possible. Invite people on to share personal stories, but also invite professionals on. I was so glad to have you on there. You broke down anxiety and maybe the clearest way I’ve ever heard it broken down before. It was perfect. I quote you all the time to friends and that’s the whole idea of it. 

I wanted to do a few episodes just to help people. Maybe they’re experiencing, we’re still in the end of a pandemic year, maybe a guess they say it is that we’re still in it.

And so everybody’s feeling anxious. You know, it may not be diagnosable, but everybody’s having anxiety. And so I guess I wanted a place where people could go and hear people like them. And then people who are professionals who would speak very plainly and in layman’s terms about anxiety, depression.  Maybe in some future episodes, maybe we’ll get into some other things, bipolar, OCD, things like that. So that’s really why we started. It was supposed to be five episodes and then I was going to be finished, but we have grown a community online. We have a Facebook group of over 500 people now out of five episodes of the podcast. And they are demanding more. So I’m so happy about that and we’re going to do more.

So I think I’m just going to do a season one, five episodes, season two, five episodes, and go until people stop listening.

Carrie: That’s great. That’s awesome. Just something like so small that has grown big and that just shows you that there’s a need for it. There are so many people out there struggling with anxiety and depression and OCD, and they’re looking for answers. They’re looking for what are other people doing in their day-to-day life with this. How do we manage it together.

Jeff: Yeah, for sure. I really see that for sure. You know, people have had a lot of people reach out. And just say, I didn’t even realize that these might be symptoms of anxiety, just like 20 years of my life had no idea that I had anxiety. So I’ve had people reach out in that way. And I’m really glad.

Carrie:  Towards the end of every podcast, I like to ask the guests to share a story of hope, which is a time in which he received hope from God or another person. 

Jeff: Well, I think for me, the hope that I found in God was through that reconstruction that I was talking about earlier. I really found that I began a deconstruction because of the doubt that was placed in my heart, but also because of my childhood upbringing in the church. I grew up in a very conservative church in a very small town in my understanding there, just made for a lot of duty-guilt obligation style faith.

The weird thing is that when I was starting the reconstruction, a lot of old songs from when I was a kid, things that we would be, you know, these old Christian songs that people would think are kind of like hokey now. So it would start coming into my mind. I’m having a thought about that song in forever.

Some old, like rich Mullins’ songs were popping up in my head.

Carrie: So good.

Jeff: And then I would just find that I would find this immense comfort in that. And so I feel like, I’m a musician and in a way, I had stopped leading people in worship. And so I kind of just put my guitar down and hadn’t picked it up in a while and I feel like God was meeting me back in that place with music again, God knew that he would find me there. And so my hope was in, in that, I would say I was starting to reconnect. I connected with a friend at church here. Another person on staff here who does not do music as part of their job. She is a fantastic singer. And we started during the pandemic. We started to record some videos for our online worship at the time, and we both found our passion for music and in ministry specific again, and maybe like even a calling was coming back. So into the hope from that, I found in that it was almost that like, I called it a reconstruction, but God really reached out and made that happen way more than I did.

I didn’t so much have to work on that as God found me again. I guess I was in a place where I stopped feeling God’s presence or stopped looking for God and God came calling. So that’s my place of hope, I think. 

Carrie: It felt like God pursued you.

Jeff: Yeah, in a way that I had never experienced when all my years of ministry. This is what I did as soon as I got out of high school as I went to college for a semester, but then I ended up on a traveling worship team and immediately started working in churches, My whole life I’m working in ministry and in a way I never have felt God call me.

 I felt God calling me back. 

Carrie: Yeah, that’s so great. What I love about that is a sense of God knows how to speak to each one of us individually like it’s an intimate relationship that we have with him. And so if he was going to meet you, it made sense that he was going to meet you through music.

And that was really cool. It was a beautiful picture. And just a reminder that God’s in the details and. I just, I guess I encourage people that if they’re going through spiritual struggles like that, to be open, to just remain open to God, meeting you where you’re at because God already knows where the condition of our hearts and minds in those dark seasons. I don’t know.

I don’t remember who the author was, but he kind of called it like this dark night of the soul, you know, where you have these spiritual wrestlings and you’re in a place of sometimes it’s sadness or grief or feeling like you’ve been wounded by God in different ways. Thank you for being vulnerable and sharing that.

Jeff: Sure. Yeah. Another thought I was having, you know, with that, with kind of what you just said, and, and I shared this morning in my Facebook group is my background is for most of my life now has been in Western theology, a Methodist. So that’s kind of where John Wesley would have these group meetings. And he would always open up the group meeting with the question, how is it with your soul? And so I asked that question to my group this morning, the Facebook group that I was telling you about. And it was really interesting because it’s not a group. My podcast is not a Christian podcast but people’s worldviews come into play.

So if I have a Christian person on they’ll often bring up God, but I told him, I said, How is it with your soul regardless of your faith? What is it like? You know, I got a lot of not great today. You know, those kinds of responses I got. I’ve had some it as well with my soul kind of response. And so I just, I think about that, I think that that’s a practice, especially as Christians, that we could start utilizing a little more. Maybe wake up every morning and think how is it with my soul today? So that’s just a random freebie for the day because I was thinking about it today. 

Carrie: That’s good. I think just the sense of self-reflection that sometimes we don’t take the time to do, because either we’re super busy or we’re in our heads and we’re not in a. A full-body experience in our faith. 

Jeff: Oh yeah. And that’s one of those questions. It’s like, uh, how are you really question, right? How is it with your soul man? That’s personal, that’s deep, that’s offensive and it’s beautiful. Crazy. 

Carrie: Well, it’s been great having you on to share your story and how this impacted your faith and your faith wrestlings and all of that. It’s been really amazing and check out the simple mental health podcast. And I’m on episode one, if you want to check it. 

Jeff: Yeah. Check it out. She’s amazing. Thank you for having me as always. 

We will put all the links in the show notes for you to Jeff’s podcast, as well as the specific episode that I was on. If you have a personal story of anxiety or OCD that you might like to share, please feel free to contact me anytime through our website.

Thank you so much for listening.

Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By The Well Counseling in Smyrna, Tennessee.

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