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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.

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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.

27. Sending Hope and Love to the Not Yet Mothers

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Counseling, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 27. Sending Hope and Love to the Not Yet Mothers

This episode is for all the women out there who are hoping and praying for a child, for couples who are experiencing fertility issues and for those who are healing from heartbreak over childlessness. 

This is a compilation of stories of hope of my friends and different amazing women whom  I interviewed on the podcast.

Episode Highlights:

My best friend, Christin Jasmin Wilson, shares her heartfelt journey—navigating dating, giving her heart to the wrong person, and feeling distant from God before finding her way back to Him. She opens up about receiving God’s kindness, meeting her God-chosen partner, and welcoming her precious baby, Ellis.

We also reflect on inspiring testimonies from previous episodes:

  • (20:32) Summer McKinney finds joy in her blended family while waiting for God’s perfect plan.
  • (24:12) Holley Gerth and her husband celebrate grandparenthood through their adoptive daughter’s children.
  • (25:03) After experiencing multiple pregnancy losses, God blessed Dr. Kraegel with a beautiful child.
  • (25:30) My dear friend Michelle shares her emotional journey through infertility, foster care, and adoption—walking through deep depression after years of unsuccessful fertility treatments before witnessing God’s faithfulness.
  • (30:48) My own personal testimony and the powerful statement God gave me about having children.
  • (35:40) Lindsey Castleman and her husband’s incredible adoption story.

Episode Summary:

This episode is a little different—it’s not a solo episode, and it’s not exactly an interview either. Instead, I’ve compiled powerful stories of hope from women who have walked the journey of waiting, praying, and longing for motherhood. Some of these stories may be familiar, while others are new, but they all reflect the beauty of God’s timing and faithfulness.

For those who have followed my journey, you know that while I was once a foster parent with the hope of adopting, I am not a mother myself. Over time, I found myself repeatedly interviewing women who shared their own paths to becoming a family—whether through biological children, adoption, or other means. It made me wonder: Were these stories meant for me, or for my listeners? The answer, I believe, is both.

This episode is dedicated to every woman who is still waiting—who is praying, hoping, and trusting in God’s plan. You are not alone. You are seen, loved, and part of a greater story.

Before we dive into these inspiring testimonies, I want to take a moment to thank two incredible moms—my own mother and my mother-in-law, “Mom Bock”—for their unwavering support. Their encouragement has helped this podcast reach more people, and I’m endlessly grateful.

If you’ve ever struggled with the timing of God’s plan for your life, this episode is for you.

Transcript

This episode is going to be a little bit different because it’s not a solo episode and it’s not exactly an interview episode. It’s really a compilation of some different stories of hope. Some that we’ve heard before and some that we haven’t yet. For those who have been following along with my story or listened to our first episode know that while I have a history of being a foster parent and had hoped to adopt, I myself am not a mother. As I started to do these podcasts interviews, there was a string of a period of time where we were getting a lot of stories about people’s process in terms of becoming a family, whether that was praying, and then having a biological child, whether that was adding to their family through adoption or other means there was a lot of discussion about timing. And it really got me to thinking God are those stories for me or are those stories for my listeners? As so many times, I believe it’s both that as we minister to other people that God finds a way to turn around and minister back to us.

In this episode, I want to send love to the other women out there who may be are waiting or praying or hoping for a family who are not yet mothers. So I compiled some stories of hope from different women that have been on the podcast and discussed this journey. I also compiled some stories from just other women in my personal life who I know who God brought them on that similar journey.

Before we get into those stories of hope though, there are two moms that I do want to take time to say thank you to. One of those is my mom who’s a big supporter of the podcast. I know that she listens every week. She looks for the episodes to come out and she’ll send me emails if she sees Christian articles or hears of people who are talking about mental health and she’ll say, “Hey, have you heard of this person? It might be somebody that’s good for you to interview.” My mom was flying a couple of weeks ago. She asked a woman on the plane, “Hey, do you listen to a podcast?” And a woman said, “Yes, I do. So then my mom says, “Hey, would you be interested in a podcast about anxiety and OCD?” And the woman says, “Yes, I would.” My mom gives her a little podcast promo card that I had made up. That’s some amazing grassroots marketing right there. And so, thank you mom for all of your love and support in this podcasting journey. And the other mom, I want to think is who I call mom Bock, which is my mother-in-law. Mom Bock is also a supporter of the podcast and she listens to the episodes and oftentimes God will put people on her heart who need that encouragement or support from a particular episode.

And she will send it to them and has received some positive feedback about episodes that she’s shared. So I appreciate her supporting and sharing the podcast with other people as well. I joke with Steve that our moms are brand ambassadors for the show.

And now you know why our first story of hope for the not yet mothers comes from my best friend, Kristin.

How did I become a mother? That’s a loaded question. Hi, my name is Kristin Jasmine Wilson. And this is my story to motherhood. I am 39 years old. This is important because maybe like some of you, I wasn’t sure I would ever become a mother. I can remember from the earliest time always loving and being around kids around babies.

I grew up babysitting started at a very young age, probably too young if you asked me, but I started babysitting as early as 11 for my next-door neighbor. She had two beautiful kids that I used to watch on occasion. And I can even remember Connie and my mother serving with me at the nursery during the second service at church just because I loved kids that much.

You can say that this might be a God-given desire. I would say that I had this idea in my mind that I would always be a mom, but in my mind, by age 25, I have met the love of my life in college, fallen madly deeply in love, become a psychologist. I even found a letter that I wrote to Ms. Love in high school. I wanted to be a psychologist and have three kids of my own by 2011 or something crazy like that. However, sometimes life just takes you on a journey and that’s not necessarily how things go for me. I went to high school and had two boyfriends maybe, and all of which lasted two weeks. My singleness was a really, really hard thing.

I struggled being single for a very long time. I went to college. While I was in college, I decided to get involved in the church that was right across the street from our school. I again loved kids so much that I started volunteering as a college student in the middle school ministry. Yes, working with middle schoolers.

I know I’m a rare breed but I loved the naivety and the gullibility and just the welcoming nature of that age. In working in the middle school ministry though, remember college, I always thought I would meet the love of my life in college. I never did. And in fact, after college I started working for a ministry and for a nonprofit that really just worked with middle school kids all the while, knowing that I wanted kids of my own all the while, really wanting to be married and not ever wanting to have kids without a partner in life. I know I have had a lot of friends that have adopted or wanting to foster, and they’ve done that single handedly and by themselves and my hat goes off to them. However, I knew for me, this was not a journey I wanted to enter alone. Just knowing my own personality. I knew I would need a partner and a friend.

And so I prayed to God many nights that he would bring me not only a man of God but somebody who I could have children with and that we could raise children together. And I will say that came, but it came not without tears and not without many, many years of doubting God of asking hard questions of crying out to the Lord have yet one more guy who I was attracted to and had feelings for.

Not return those feelings, not return that love. I can remember during college and a little after I spent some years, are those college times in west Palm beach. And one of my places that I would really kind of have heart-to-heart conversations with Jesus was on the beach. And I can remember there was this one guy, and I really just had fallen head over heels in love with him. And he had no clue and I was good friends with his sister and I knew she could tell that. I just remember like really asking the Lord. Why just, why, why? I just remember asking, am I oblivious to guys? What is it that allowed me to not be seen by guys?

And really, I look back now and I see that had those guys looked at me and seen me, I would have fallen head over heels with the wrong guy. And really my heart is so honestly flip it and I fall in love at the drop of a hat. So it’s only the Lord’s grace and mercy that has allowed me in this that really kept me for my husband of today.

So, again, college thought I would be married by 25. That was my cutoff date in my head, that did not happen. In fact, I remember at 25 I actually freaked out and was like, “Oh my gosh” I remember my mom had me at 25 and I’m really like far behind the timeline here because I wanted to have kids and I thought by that time I would have them.

However, that was not always in the cards for me. And in fact, it took me a long time to even work through what it looked like to actually be in a relationship and what it looked like to actually start to date, which then led to motherhood. All the while though, working with kids, all the while though, taking care of other people’s kids. All the while, knowing that I wanted to be a mother. I remember turning 30 and still being single.

Actually, 29 going almost 30, grieving that year of the journey of being single and turning 30. And I almost wish that whole year of 30 away, I think it was 32 or 33. When I was 32 or 33, I finally was like, if I ever want to have kids, that I need to actually seriously start dating, started dating some guys on, through a few apps.

And at first, had really a hard time even wrapping my mind around if that was acceptable, how would I believe? And so, again, just really challenged my own thinking, but kind of came to the conclusion that if I was ever going to get married, I needed to be around guys and talk to them and have conversations.

And so I went on a journey of just having dates and chronically and all of those dates, some were really fun and some are really, really bad. And I could probably tell you stories, but I don’t want to embarrass any of the guys that I went on dates with, but let’s just say there’s a few that really still have me kind of chuckling today.

Fast forward to 2016, I was talking to a guy who happened to live in California and actually had a daughter. I knew that was going to be a little tricky, but I had been laid off from the organization I was working for. It closed down and I didn’t have anything keeping me at my current location.

So I decided to move to California and see if things would work out. I honestly remember really just sacrificing a lot of my ethics and a lot of my morals for something that was only temporary and somebody that wasn’t real on something, and for somebody that wasn’t authentic. And I really think in some of those, in that particular instance, I had really become so sick of being single and just was trying to do things my own way and in my own timing. Honestly, at 35, I was feeling like I was the only 35-year-old woman who had never been married. I was feeling it was the only 35-year-old woman who didn’t have kids. By this time I had high school friends that have had babies.

I’ve had college friends get married and have babies. I had friends adopting babies. And I was just for a long time, felt like my life was on this pause track, where I just had no control. And so many people kept saying, well, why aren’t you married? Or you’re a catch, why are you still single? When are you going to start having babies of your own?

And I really hated those questions because I felt like it was my own fault that I was unable to be a mother at that time. So at 35, I got in this relationship and I just decided to try to make things happen of my own accord and was completely devastated when this guy really only wanted to use me for certain things and then spit me back out. So with that, I packed up my bags and I moved back to my home in Chicago and kind of worded off dating for a while. Actually, it was like, I’m done. This guy is stupid. And really my heart was broken into a million pieces and it was really partially my own fault for giving it to him without putting up boundaries to really safeguard my own heart.

And of course, during that time, my relationship with the Lord was non-existent because at that point, I felt like I didn’t trust him and I was angry. I didn’t want anything to do with it. That he didn’t love me enough to give me a husband and children. By the time I was 35, knowing that most women go through menopause and are unable to bear children in their forties.

So, that was hard. Sometimes, the life that I’ve lived is great. I’ve gotten to do so many things as a single woman. I’ve gotten to explore. I had gotten to travel and have had so many different experiences that I would not have had if I had been married and had kids. Maybe I would have, I don’t know. But at that point, I was just done with being a good girl and following the rules and thinking that, you know, God blesses you and honors you. I think if I were to put it into different words, I was trying to make myself follow this God in order to get the blessing. And so, in other words, it wasn’t really about knowing God or trusting him.

It was about I’m going to do this. So in the end I get this and ultimately that work. So for a small little time, I said I’m not dating anyone else. At the time I did have a dating coach, just because I was like, if I’m going to be dating and dating on an app, I might need some extra advice.

I was actually visiting her at the time and staying with her that weekend and this guy popped up on my app and I was super wary and super kind of, not even sure I wanted to talk to him. She encouraged me. I showed him, you showed him, showed her like our conversation and, and she encouraged me just to start a conversation.

And so we did, and he was actually from Chicago. I was already planning to move back there after having my heartbroken. Wasn’t about to stay in California. And from there fell in love and met my husband, my current husband. We dated, that was in 2017. We dated for a couple of years, got engaged February 22nd, 2019.

We’re married by June 22nd, 2019. I have also had a lot of friends that have gotten late married later on in life as well. So I’ve had a lot of friends, but like some of the ones that have gotten married, like late in their late thirties, they really struggled with infertility and struggled with having babies.

And I was not even sure that I would be able to conceive right away without some sort of help. And so we decided that when we got married and went on our honeymoon, we would not prevent, but not also not like put a lot of pressure, not try. And behold, we got pregnant within the first couple of months without even trying.

And I remember laying in bed after finding out and after like looking at the pregnancy test and really coming to terms with it and just hearing the song In Christ Alone play through my head. As like my song of coming really back to Christ and back to a relationship with Jesus like that was what had sealed and kind of redeemed and, you know, kind of brought me back and brought forgiveness to who’ve had was I think. I was slowly coming back there with just the introduction of meeting my husband. And there’s a lot of emotions and hurt that had happened. Because of my own decisions and my own choices that I think with me becoming pregnant.

That was my aha moment. It’s been a journey too. I’ll tell you that. Becoming a mom, especially at this age was not easy, at 38. When I got pregnant with him at 38. It was probably a lot harder than most people. I dunno. I can’t say I was never married at 25. But I did have a cousin who got pregnant around the same time and she was in her twenties.

And there’s a drastic difference of energy between a 20-year-old mom and an almost 40-year-old soon-to-be mom, but the gratefulness and the humility that I feel like the Lord offered actually allowed us to name our son Ellis Jason, which just means the kindness of God.

Ellis means kindness. I just really felt the Lord was kind and allowing me after all these years of struggling, I wanted to become a mom and just to have his kindness and giving us a son is truly a gift. So if you were like me, maybe you have dreams of becoming a mom and having children. I would say it’s not too late.

I would say that the Lord is good. He is kind. He gives life and brings us through things that only teach us lessons to then share and bring hope to others that might be in those same situations. We are not without hope. We are not without life. 

Carrie: It was really sweet to have Kristin share because I’ve seen her through this whole journey and the spiritual growth process that she’s been on.

I know her story is going to be encouraging for those of you maybe who are still single or have been through a long period of singleness.

Summer McKinney story from episode 15 also ties in with the same theme of waiting to be married. 

Summer: I have to look at my own marriage. I was single until 28, got married at 29, I came from a very large family and always wanted many children.

And of course, the older I got, I mean, I could do the math in my head. Okay, Lord, you know, this is it. It’s going to happen. Of course, that was before like, you know, people in their forties started having kids and stuff, but there’s like, “Okay, wait.” My large families are going to happen, but God was in the details. My husband and I knew each other from way back but just went our own separate ways and whatnot but we reconnected and I inherited three amazing children in our marriage. And one of my deal breakers was I wanted a child. And so my husband, we’re going to get married and he would have to agree that we could have a child together.

And he said, “okay.” So again, “Okay, Lord.” I have three children and I want that comradery. I want them to grow up with a younger sibling. And so my timing was shortly after. Let’s settle into married life and blended family life, but few years were going by and it’s like, “Okay, Lord. Is this going to happen?”

You know, just a lot of questions. And my husband kinda gave up like, okay, it’s just not going to happen. And it took us a few years. God knew. Again, being in the details and perfect timing. The bonding that I was worried about. The boys were in high school whenever we had our son and through college, one of the boys stayed home and commuted, and then the bonding was just amazing.

And it was just all of those fears and all of those concerns or those questions. It wasn’t my timing but the timing was just perfect. You know, it wasn’t always my way but it was God, God knew what he was doing and just being in the details. And so that to me was just the hope of a large family, the hope of the bonding and that unity among the family. And God just blessed it. And so when those doubts or fears or things come into play, whether you’re single or whether you’re in an empty marriage, or divorced, and you still have that desire, I think that God is in the details and his timing is amazing. It’s not always our time. That’s kind of, when I think about, big thing in my life where desire and hope and blessing come together. I would say it’s definitely my family unit. 

Carrie: Yeah, it’s amazing how God will give us those desires like for you, it was for to have a large family. And God totally filled that in a way that you couldn’t have imagined at that point in time like you were thinking that all of those children would be completely biologically yours and you ended up with a beautiful family picture and it’s amazing how God’s dreams are much better than things that we could dream on our own. And when we try to do it our ways or in our timing, it just never quite shakes out and we can become disappointed.

________

While Summer’s story didn’t look how she had envisioned, Holley Gerth’s story from episode 19 didn’t turn out how she anticipated either. 

Holley: My story of hope is my family story. I went through about a decade of infertility. My husband and I couldn’t have our own kiddos. So we ended up adopting a 20-year old who basically aged out of the foster system. And so she’s now 27. She got married and we are nanna and poppy to Eula and Clement.

And so I literally wore a ring on my finger that said hope for all those years. And the ending to our story is not at all what I would have imagined.

__________________ 

Our last few stories are stories about infertility. On episode 16, Dr. Irene Kraegel shared about her pregnancy losses. 

Dr. Kraegel: They were years for example where I had multiple pregnancy losses. I write about this in my book as well, too. And not really knowing how that would resolve and God brought us a child. And we have this beautiful nine-year-old boy that we love. And that’s something that brings me hope. 

_________

The next story is from a dear friend of mine that I have known since about 2014.

Michelle: Hi guys. My name is Michelle. I’m here with you today to share my testimony as well as my infertility foster care and adoption journey.

So I was married and divorced at a young age to my first husband. We did not have children together. And that was not something we had really tried to do, but when I met what would eventually be my second husband, I knew that I did want to have children. We were a little bit older when we got married, my second husband and I. I was 35. And so immediately after we got married, we did start trying to have our own child. Unfortunately, that was not happening for us. So we went to a fertility doctor and over the course of I’d say about a three-year span, we had approximately non-procedures done and close to $12,000 spent. That did not bear any fruit at the end of that three years, I think we were both emotionally, I was physically spent and both somewhat spiritually spent as well because we both prayed and prayed over this journey. And really, desperately wanted to have our own child. And at that time, we could not understand why the Lord was not providing that for us.

The way I was looking at it is there are so many people that have children that don’t even want them, but God, why are you not providing us with a baby of our own? And it made me feel unworthy of having a child. I was looking at it is God, if you could let this person who is abusive to their child or neglectful or abandoned their child if you can let them have one, what does that say about me? What does that say about the parenting you think that I would do God? And I really went into a deep, dark depression at the end of that three years. I began to resent my husband because I felt that I was the only one going through the emotional struggle, the physical, especially the physical struggle because all these procedures were happening to me.

And some of them were very painful and I felt like he was doing a small fraction of the work. And over time through scripture and prayer, I did grow to see that that was very unfair of me to think that way, but I’m human. And I felt that I had been abandoned by the Lord during that period of time. I was also very resentful of other women who during this phase were discovering they were pregnant and having healthy pregnancies and having these beautiful children. And what makes it probably even worse is my career was in early childhood education. So my career was children and especially babies and toddlers and those early stages of life.

That was my career. So day in and day out, I was seeing and working with these babies. It really brought me to a low place. So my husband and I eventually decided that we would go through the foster care program through the path classes, but I told him that he would have to do all the legwork of getting a set up for the classes that basically he would just tell me the time and place and I would just show up. And so that’s what he did. We went through the path classes. In three of those classes, I met other women who were in a very similar situation who felt almost identical to how I felt. They felt worthless and useless. And the way I felt during that period of time during that dark period is that I basically had one job to do.

The Lord made me a female, which meant I was supposed to have children and I couldn’t do the one job that God had given me to do. And I just felt just so inadequate and so useless that some days I didn’t want to get out of bed. Luckily, through prayer, through scripture, through family and friends who rallied around me, around us, my husband and I both and supported us and a God who never gives up.

He never fails us. I began seeing how, even though those were the things that I wanted, I wanted to have my own child, my own biological child. I wanted to know the joys of being able to tell family and friends that were expecting a child, to feel a life growing inside of me and seeing this beautiful baby when it was first born and caressing them against my chest, having all those moments through time and through prayer God very gently showed me that he had a different plan for me. Even though I kept questioning God, what is this? What plan is this do you have for me? I don’t understand. I don’t see it yet, God. He was just really patient with me and just showed me that I need to stay the course. So we finished the path classes.

We sold our small house and bought a bigger house so that we could accommodate children. And we knew we probably wanted to have multiple. It was 2015, we got our first sibling set. It was a brother and a sister and we actually got them on my daughter’s sixth birthday and my son Larry, he was seven about to turn eight. So we went from zero to 60 in 2.8 seconds. We had no kids and then we had two kids and it was the youngest child’s sixth birthday. So we scrambled to throw a little party. And our lives changed from that day like we could have never imagined.

We have been blessed beyond measure. Even in the rough times, we have been blessed because the Lord has stretched us. He has grown us. My husband and I have grown closer together. We have grown closer to the Lord and God revealed to me pretty quickly into the foster care process that his plan for us was to adopt children who needed a family. It took us three and a half years to be able to legally adopt our children. Then finally on January 30th, 2019, we were able to legally adopt Kimberly and Larry. And now our journey has not always been an easy one. There has been days where I have wanted to pull my hair out and say, God, what have I done? And then immediately I’m filled with all the love and joy that the Lord has put into our heart when he brought us these kids. They are amazing and we knew pretty instantly that we were meant to be their parents, that these kids were going to be with us forever. And it has been such a journey. It is such a blessing.

And my husband and I both feel that we just stayed the course with the Lord. He’s always sovereign. He’s always faithful to us. He never leaves a season. He never abandons us. He shows us what we need eventually in his time and not our own. So I just hope this fills you with some peace and some hope and knowing you’re not alone.

If you’ve been in a similar situation and that God does have a plan for you you may not see it at this moment, but he will reveal it to you. Just be faithful. I hope you have a wonderful day and I just push blessings upon you. God bless you all.

_______

Carrie: I really appreciated the vulnerability and the spiritual wrestling that Michelle shared in her story, because I believe that someone who’s listening is really going to be able to relate to those thoughts and questionings that she had and rustled with God.

On episode 22, Lindsey Castleman shared her amazing story of adoption with us.

Lindsey: During this time and being in this community group, my husband and I found out that we were not able to have children. And then there were six couples, four out of the six couples found out that they could not have children, which was crazy. I didn’t know it before we came. We weren’t like, “Hey, let’s do an infertility community group.” It just happened. And then we all discovered these things. Hopefully, it wasn’t something we all drank. So we were in this together. We started going through this adoption process for us, my husband and I. One day, one of the girls in the community group texted me and she was like, “Lindsey, my mom is in a Bible study with this woman who’s asking the whole Bible study to pray for an adoptive family for her nephew’s son like it’s kind of a big goal. And she was like, “My mom remembered you guys and community group, and would you be interested?” And I’m like, “What?!” It was kind of wild because I was actually at this church.

When I got the text message, I was literally in church and they were about to do this worship and they do this forever long worship. So I’m like, all right, some do I’m worshiping and I’m asking God, I’m like, God, is this our son? Is this what we’re supposed to do? And I heard a very clear yes.

And I don’t hear that kind of stuff all the time. A very clear yes. And so I said, all right, God, well, you’re going to have to tell my husband that you said yes. He’s a little bit more of my risk-averse kind of guy. I’m a little bit more of a risk-taker. So anyways, I called my husband because I was on a trip.

So he was back at home and I was in California and I called my husband and I said, “Hey, in our community group said that.. What do you think? And he was like, “I’m open.” And I was like, “oh my gosh.” That’s not usually the response I get. I usually get all the worry questions. And if you’re in the Enneagram world, he’s an Enneagram six.

So that makes a lot of sense. To make a long story short, even though I’ve already made it long we ended up meeting with that family. And then on a Tuesday, they told us that they chose us. And then we brought our son home that Saturday. We kind of look back and we go, “oh my goodness.”

Even just us being kind of obedient to want to serve, and not obedient and like little begrudging, but just like, “Hey, we really would like to serve.” Just how God placed us with all of these people that then placed us with our son who could not have been a better fit. And if I go into the emotion of it, I will cry right now but I’m not going to be staying in my head about it.

But just in that sense of we couldn’t imagine our lives without them. And so in this place of feeling so hopeless and infertility, God was already working behind the scenes and bringing us hope just through these things, we could have never orchestrated for us to be able to be parents to our son.

So that for us is like any time it’s like, “Oh, is God working on us? Heck, yes. He is. He is and he’s working today, like working today not just in biblical times. He’s working today. He is a God of hope and he is a relational God that loves us and wants to be so close to us. And that’s beautiful in that way.

_______

Carrie: I started out this episode by talking with you about how I am not yet a mother, either. I wanted to share with you where I am on my own personal journey in case that provides any extra support or encouragement to you. Steve and I pray about having a family. We’re very open to what does that look like for us since we are older. The most amazing thing though, is that one of the times I was praying about this, I feel like the Lord spoke to me, “Carrie, I’ve already given you many children.” I have to say I didn’t receive that in a sense of God’s not going to give me children. However, it made me actually so grateful and thankful because that statement is true.

I was looking back at some old pictures that I had under the bed before we were in the digital era. So they’re actual physical pictures that I have from times where I did VBS with children. Times where I worked at an afterschool program with children in the inner city. Times where I was involved in helping with youth ministry and middle school ministry.

Many of those kids obviously are not kids anymore. They’re grown up and some of them have children of their own. But when I received that word to my spirit and prayer, it gave me so much joy and encouragement that I’ve worked with children almost my whole life in some capacity. I know that God has used me to minister to the next generation even though that may not look like having children in a nuclear family.

So if that’s you, if you’re that person that’s maybe single and serving in the children’s ministry church, or you’re in college working at the afterschool program and investing in kids know that even though they’re not your kids they’re God’s kids and you are providing just a valuable service by loving on them, encouraging them, supporting them in their growth journey process, physically, emotionally, spiritually, whatever that looks like for you. 

Sometimes mother’s day can be a hard day or an emotional day for women who aren’t mothers. I’ve had people tell me that they don’t attend church on mother’s day due to this. If that’s you and you’re hurting on that day, I would encourage you to find something that you do enjoy doing and plan to do it on that day. Definitely take good care of yourself and you know what you can handle emotionally. Whenever your journey is whether you’re a mother, whether you’re not a mother, whether you’re not a mother yet, know that God loves you very much, that he has an amazing plan for your life, and things never work out exactly how we plan them out in our mind. However, we know that God is good. We know that God is loving. We know that God is pro-family and whatever that looks like for you. I just pray that this podcast encourages you in your journey wherever you are right now. 

Some of you may have listened to this episode because you’re in this season. For those of you who listened to this episode, and you’re not in this season, maybe you already have children and you’re just a regular listener to the podcast, there’s a good chance that God has put someone in your circle who is either struggling with fertility or questioning how can they be single for so long and have children, or they can relate to some of these other stories. Will you please just share this episode and allow it to be a vehicle of encouragement to the people that you know who may need to hear this. And if this episode has impacted you positively, please let me know. You can always reach out at www.hopeforanxietyandocd.com. Head on over to the contact page as always.

Thank you so much for listening. Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By The Well counseling in Smyrna, Tennessee.

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

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

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in OCD, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 26. A Personal OCD Story of Experiencing God’s Presence and Grace with Peyton Garland

In this episode, Carrie sits down with Peyton Garland, an author and advocate, to discuss her powerful journey with OCD and how it has shaped her faith.

Episode Highlights:

  • The impact of growing up in a conservative environment and the stigma around seeking therapy.
  • How Peyton became the first in her family to seek therapy and break generational barriers.
  • The role therapy played in helping Peyton manage anxiety and intrusive thoughts.
  • How Peyton learned to separate OCD from God’s unconditional love and grace.
  • The power of embracing faith and therapy in overcoming mental health challenges.
  • How Peyton’s journey led her to write Not So By Myself, offering hope and encouragement to others facing similar struggles.

Episode Summary:

Some of our most impactful episodes feature personal stories, and today, we bring you an inspiring one. Peyton Garland joins us to share her journey with OCD—how it has shaped her faith, her experiences with therapy, and the challenges she has overcome.

Peyton, an author and wife from Alpharetta, Georgia, opens up about her struggles with anxiety and OCD, particularly when her husband was stationed away for work, leaving her to deal with overwhelming thoughts on her own.

Peyton’s journey was difficult, especially as she grew up in a small, conservative town where seeking therapy was seen as a weakness. Despite the stigma, she courageously sought help and became the first in her family to do so. Her decision not only changed her life but also inspired others in her family, including her father, to confront their own struggles.

A significant part of Peyton’s experience is her battle with religious OCD (scrupulosity). Raised in a legalistic church environment, she feared God and struggled with obsessive thoughts. Through therapy and faith, Peyton learned to separate her OCD from God’s grace, embracing a loving and compassionate understanding of Him.

Now, Peyton shares her story through her book, Not So By Myself, encouraging others that even in their loneliest, most anxious moments, God’s love remains constant. Her story is a reminder that seeking help is an act of strength and courage.

🎧 Listen to the full episode for an inspiring conversation. If Peyton’s journey resonates with you, remember you are not alone.


Related Links and Resources:

 @peytonmgarlandwrites
Not so by Myself: A safe space where God doesn’t fix the loneliness, but sits with you instead

Transcript

Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD. Episode 26. Our most popular episodes thus far have been personal experience stories. Peyton Garland shares her experience of struggling with OCD. How that’s impacted her faith, her journey of going to therapy. It’s really good stuff in here, guys. I hope that you enjoy the show today.

Carrie: Thank you for coming on the show, Peyton. 

Peyton: Happy to be here. 

Carrie: I’d love you to just tell us a little bit about yourself. 

Peyton: Sure. I am Peyton Garland. My husband’s name is Josh. He and I live north of Atlanta in Alpharetta, Georgia. We have two of the most obnoxious but sweet puppies in the world, Alfie and Daisy. So we are dog parents and proud of it. My husband is a pilot and I’m an author. So we’re both finding the careers that we love and thriving in them. 

Carrie: That’s awesome. Why did you want to be on the podcast and tell a little bit about your story today?

Peyton: I think mental health in this day and age is almost a buzzword. I think it’s something where people are finally willing to talk about it. They’re finally willing to listen, but I also think that the voices that need to be at the forefront of these conversations are people who do struggle with anxiety, who do struggle with OCD, who know what it’s like to be in a therapist’s office.

So this podcast just seemed to embody that ability to have real conversations with people who truly go through this stuff.

Carrie: At what point in your life did you start to notice like I’m starting to struggle here with my thought life?

Peyton: I had always been a worrier and I knew that, but the older I got the worst that got the more irrational the worrying became.

So like I said, my husband, is a pilot. When he first finished flight school, which was about two years ago, the only airport where he could get a job was in Indiana. So states away, hours away. He and I had just moved to a new town in Georgia for a new job for me. So new town, new job. I’m not near my family.

I’m not near my friends. Two weeks after we moved there, he moves to Indiana. I’m being by myself and being by yourself leaves lots of room for your headspace to just go crazy. And at that point, maybe two or three months into him being gone that’s when I said this worrying is not only irrational. It’s starting to impact me physically, too like I’m losing weight. I can’t put back on. I’m not sleeping. I eventually went to a therapist which in my small country town was not a welcomed thing. Therapy is almost seen as defeat like you couldn’t take it, you couldn’t handle it. Your faith in God wasn’t strong enough. I went to a therapist’s office, found out I have intrusive thought OCD.

And what I’ve learned with OCD is that often anxiety and depression are kind of buddies. They sit right beside OCD and they take turns. So I’m just on a big journey. Now I share a lot about that in my new book, Not So By Myself. Just how you’re not really by yourself in the quiet space, even when your brain is super loud.

Carrie: That’s so good. So it was a, you had a big stigma hurdle to even get in the therapy office coming from a small town, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Be the tough girl. 

Peyton: Oh yeah. Well, I’m so glad you said that. In my book one of the chapters, I talk about how all three of my great uncles and my grandfather were drafted into the Vietnam war. All four gone at the same time and when they came home, they quickly learned that in order to not talk about everything they’d seen, they were just to keep quiet. That silence was strength. Those two just seem to parallel and they passed that idea down from generation to generation to generation.

So my generation about the third or fourth generation, we’re sitting in a culture now that saying, “Hey, it’s okay to say I’m not okay. It’s okay to go get help.” And I think I actually was the first person in my family to go to a therapist. And the beautiful thing is I had a parent to follow after that. [00:04:37] I had a grandmother follow after that, and that was a very beautiful thing to kind of see loved ones, say, “Hey, you know what? There’s some things I haven’t been okay with. I have a dad who has PTSD and traumatic brain injury from serving in the military. So lots of people now getting help for hard things they’ve been dealing with for decades.

Carrie: I love that ripple effect in your story. It’s like one person starts in the family starts to experience some relief and change and hope, and then other people say, “oh, hey, that sounds really good. I want to get on board with that and maybe I’ll try therapy out as well.”

Peyton: Absolutely.

Carrie: Do you remember that experience of just being so nerve-racked and were you super scared to start talking?

How was your therapist able to help you feel comfortable even sharing some of these things that you had? You’d really just rattled around in your head and maybe talked to your husband about.

Peyton: Sure. This is crazy. You’re literally outlining my book chapter by chapter. 

Carrie: I haven’t read it either.

Peyton: One of the chapters is called green tea and therapy and it’s about my first time in a therapist’s office. Like I said I come from a good old country town. I walk in this therapist’s office and there’s like this spa music in the background. There’s bright but soft colors everywhere. I’m way out of my element.

I was not a yoga kind of girl. But my therapist just asks me a simple question. She’s like, “Hey, is there anything I can offer you to drink?” And I’m a green tea kind of girl. So I said, green tea, just give me some green tea. And I remember death gripping that green tea coffee the whole time.

I don’t even think I drank it. I just death gripped it because one thing I knew and this whole room of nothing I knew. My therapist started with the big question. She had to tell me about yourself like I got to know what goes on in your head. What’s going on in your heart and your spirit and your family.

When I left I had no mascara left on my face. I mean, I did, but it was like down to my chin on my neck. I still hadn’t touched the green tea. It was just an hour of me unearthing everything that had been there for over a decade, honestly. So it was a wild, uncomfortable, but relieving experience all at once. It was a whirlwind for sure. 

Carrie: Was that when you got the diagnosis of OCD? 

Peyton: Yes. So I have a dear friend, her name’s Wendy Nunnery. She’s an author too. She has it. And I had met her for coffee one day and we hadn’t been friends for long and she was just vulnerable enough to say, “Yeah, you know I struggle with intrusive thought OCD.

And she was telling me all the things she worries about. And I went, “oh my goodness.” Number one, I’m not by myself because I have been thinking some off-the-wall things and I can’t talk myself down from them. I’m always afraid of running people off the road. I overthink being near knives. I overthink changing a child’s diaper.

All of these things that I just thought I was literally psychotic, like there was some serious problem. This wonderful woman of faith is sitting in front of me, a mother, a thriving wife and she just lists everything that’s been rattling in my head for years. And so I sat back still wasn’t sure about therapy, but kind of a pin that had to be what I had. And once Josh left it was very, very unhealthy.

Like I was just in a place where I wasn’t functioning. I said we gotta get help and that’s exactly the diagnosis I received. 

Carrie: So in some ways that was probably a little bit relieving to know what you were dealing with because when people don’t know what they’re dealing with, then they throw all kinds of vernacular labels on themselves. 

Peyton: Right. My dad, you know, has PTSD and he had that when I was growing up. So I was around it. But PTSD almost stems from something very traumatic, which is what happened with him in the military in his line of work. But for me, nothing traumatic had actually happened to me and I couldn’t figure out why I was having a hard time.

As a good kid with good grades and a good family. I mean we had struggles with what my dad went through, but I must have been a bad person if I couldn’t control what was going on in my head. The level of relief and the pressure that just fell off me, that was a God thing. There was no way around that.

Carrie: Did you struggle spiritually during that time? Like why has God allowed me to struggle with this? And those kinds of questions, maybe that people with OCD face. 

Peyton: Yeah, I’m just going to send you my book when this is over. My fourth chapter is called church games. And so again, I grew up and not hating by any means on denomination, on religion, but I went to a very small brick and mortar countryside church. Women were told not to speak. I was told it was King James, or it was literally not the Bible and how dare you touch it. Women cannot lead worship. I grew up in such a rigid church culture that when you combine that with OCD, you’re quite terrified of God.

I got a credit card in the mail or a debit card a few months ago and my security code, well, I guess I can’t say it, but it had lots of the apocalyptic kind of numbers going on and I literally almost sent that back in the mail. I was like, “no, we can’t use that like, I can’t touch that.”  Wild, irrational thoughts OCD we’re paired with this very rigid church culture.

And I was afraid of God for years like he was just somebody that I was told to love, but I was scared of loving him because I was just scared of who he was or at least who he seemed to be. So yeah, I struggled spiritually for a long time. 

Carrie: Like maybe tying into some of the obsessions, like is God mad at me or am I going to go to hell.

Peyton: Exactly. Very perfection-oriented. But like I said not just a perfectionist or perfectionist with OCD which can take on a completely different level of fear, anxiety, and all the like.

Carrie: So what you’re saying is that you have intrusive thoughts, but you don’t actually have any compulsions. Is that so?

Peyton: It’s funny. So there’s several different branches of OCD like intrusive thought OCD there’s harm OCD, contamination OCD. With me, I do have a form of contamination OCD. I always had. I washed my hands a lot as a child If I spilled anything on me like a chemical. Cleaning panics me. I was afraid to be near chemicals.

So when COVID hit, my contamination OCD, the compulsion went through the roof like I had always been a hand washer. I’d always been a clean person. I started keeping a chart of how often I washed my hands. When the world shut down and we went home, I washed my hands an average of 57 times a day and I spent two-plus hours a day following through on compulsions with cleaning, with mopping, with wiping everything down with wiping my hands down my phone down. Just putting Josh in a Clorox fog as soon as he came through the door.

So there are definitely compulsions, but I see them most with the contamination OCD. 

Carrie: How has that affected your, your marriage, and your relationship there? Have you had to kind of train him on how to help you at times? 

Peyton: He is very gracious and I’ve been very blessed with someone who’s willing to listen.

He has been mentally a very strong man which is fantastic. Obviously, he worries about things. There’s hard things for him, but he is very mentally stable, which is what I need. I’ll be honest when we first got married is when it really started kicking up. I’ve learned change kind of messes with my OCD like getting married, buying a house.

I had just gotten a new job. Just all the things. And bless his heart he just thought it was birth control. He thought maybe it was him. I thought it might’ve been him. We didn’t know. Maybe only a few months later is when the piloting thing happened and he was gone and I got help. So for us it’s funny, but for him it was a breath of relief when I found out I had OCD. He went, “oh, okay. It’s not me. It’s something else.” Not that we can fix OCD but we now have something we can work with. We have a name and a face to it and he has been so good. What I love about him is he respects when I’m having anxiety.

He respects when there’s a compulsion where I’m just like, I have to follow through with it. There’s no way around it. But he also calls me to work through compulsions. He calls me to say, “Hey, let’s take a step back and rationally talk yourself down from this like we don’t have to wash your hands five times in a row. We can do four and walk away.

It’s okay. So there’s been a little bit of training on his part, but he’s really been gracious and I’ve been very thankful for that. 

Carrie: That’s awesome. We talked about kind of how to support your anxious spouse on a previous episode. So I’m curious about your experience on that. 

What was that process like of finding tools and strategies and things to help you in therapy?

Was that really hard and what kind of therapy did you utilize? 

Peyton: Yeah, so my therapist and I, we do brain spotting. I don’t know who all knows, but literally, I find a spot in the room where my brain just kind of seems to be at peace and attune. I like natural light, my brain and my eyes always go to a window where there’s natural light and my therapist just says, “Hey, let’s just start walking through what you’re feeling. Why you’re feeling this way.”

And every time brainspotting walks me back to what started a trigger, what started a compulsion, what started the anxiety that’s just built up and is now bottling over. So I love brainspotting because often my compulsion or my thought has nothing to do with what’s really bothering me. OCD is just really good at twisting stuff.

So I love brainspotting. It earths my head. It just brings it back to earth. But also we just learned really healthy techniques. Even things like social media can spike my OCD. Just because OCD can thrive off of just about anything it wants. I do 45 minutes of social media a day. I have a timer on my phone. That’s something she and I worked through. 45 minutes was a healthy number for me. When the timer goes off, I’m done with social media. Josh and I have what we call a contamination zone in my house. If there’s something that I just feel is completely contaminated and I don’t want to touch it. He puts it in a corner, in a room and we let it air out because in my brain letting it air out is safe. Just little things like that have made a huge difference for us. 

Carrie: That’s awesome. I’m going to get somebody on the show to talk about brainspotting now. I think that that would be an interesting episode, too. 

Peyton: That would be fantastic. I love it. I love brainspotting.

Carrie:  Yeah. We have talked a little bit about EMDR on the show and it’s similar.

There’s some similarities in terms of just kind of like really tapping into that brain level response and the nervous system. And like you said, when you trace OCD back, it doesn’t make sense. You’re like, “wait a minute, this goes back to that time when I was this age and this experience happened.”

I love that it really gets down deep underneath the presenting issue. Because it’s not actually about the stuff or the cleanliness. It’s about that piece underneath it, whether it’s a lot of times like dealing with uncertainty or loss of control or those types of triggers can be really prominent

Peyton: Well, that’s what wild is. Every time we brain spot and we work it back, it is either a very harsh church experience I had, or it’s just growing up in a household with a dad with PTSD that was undiagnosed for years. Every time, my brain has trillions of off-the-wall thoughts, but every one of them works its way back to one of those two things.

Carrie: Wow. Do you feel like you were a particularly sensitive kid growing up, more sensitive to people’s emotions or kind of absorbing everything?

Peyton: I’ve taken a bunch of Christian spiritual gift tests and discernment comes back every time no matter which one I take. But my mom did say as a child, I tended to know without actually knowing, like if there was a relative who was going through a hard divorce or someone just lost someone.

My mom said as a child, I gravitated to them. She said I’d walk up and sit in their lap. I would sit and talk to them. I mean, maybe that had to have been just God. Just knowing who needed some extra love. My mom swears as a child I could just walk in a room and I just knew who needed even just a “hey” or a hug.

Carrie: That’s good. We had Mitzi Van Cleave on the show before, and she talked really about how OCD was a part of her sanctification process. That there was this process of growth through affliction is what she talked about it. Can you talk about a little bit about that in terms of your spiritual journey?

Do you feel like you have some similarities there? 

Peyton: Sure. I’m so glad you asked that question. It’s one of those things where I think Paul mentions in the new testament that he had a thorn in his side. I think that’s a favorite thing to debate is what was the thorn in the side. But I think regardless, the reality is we each have a thorn in the side. I think on this side of heaven, we will eternally fight or struggle over, wrestle with and I think OCD is mine. There’s no magic pill for OCD. I’m not going to wake up one day and my brain is just going to be super chill.

The bittersweet thing that I love about this thorn in the side is it constantly calls me back to a place of grace. As a perfectionist with OCD, I’ve had to come to grips with the fact I cannot be perfect. The church is saying is you’re a human. You’re not perfect.

I always knew that, but that always wasn’t good enough. I was like, “no, I’m going to prove the church wrong. I’ve got this. I can do this.” OCD literally said “ha, no” like here’s something very irrational and very imperfect for you to imperfectly worry about. You know, go have fun, good luck. And so OCD quite forced me to accept that I’m not perfect. And because of that, growing up in a really harsh church culture and stepping away from it and wrestling with OCD, I can now look at God and say, “Hey, you know what not only am I not perfect, but you are.” And as churchy as that sounds, there’s so much grace in that because God has not put the standard of perfection on me.

And I know I can’t meet it, especially with the OCD. And so now it’s just grace and I had not lived under grace. I had not lived by grace. It was just a catchy phrase that at one point I thought would be a good tattoo on my wrist. But OCD has been the gateway to God and grace for me. And so for that I am always grateful.

Carrie: How did you make that perspective shift in terms of your view of God? Did that come through getting around like a healthier church environment? 

Peyton: Sure. When I was about 16 or 17, I just told my family, I said look I’m out. Not out, like I’m not piecing Jesus out, but I’m not here. I finally started studying the Bible and the Bible and the guy behind the pulpit were not lining up.

[00:20:43] So I said, look, I can either believe a man who’s like everybody else or worse, or I can believe God. And so I’m just going to go with God. That sounds like a smart decision. That’s the Sunday school answer, but it’s one that I’m going to adopt for myself. And so I stepped away from that church. I found a much, much healthier church which made so much of a difference. Within that church, I found women my age who were also not afraid to mention that they struggled with mental health and that right there was probably the ultimate game-changer. I was being around women my age who had been perfectionists. I don’t know if you know the Enneagram, but I am in an Enneagram one on the personality chart.

We are reformers. We are the spearheads for all that is just and good and right. But I was blessed to find women just like that, who turned around and said that I’m not always good. And just and right. I do struggle with mental health. And even through all of that God still sees me as good because he loves me and because he’s good.

And so that was the revolution in my spiritual journey. 

Carrie: I think finding the character of God. And I’m really connecting with the character of God who he says he is in the Bible and experiencing that in your life as absolutely a game-changer. I’m curious. This is a question for you from the trends of the podcast. Our podcast is for people with anxiety and OCD. But the most popular episodes that have been downloaded have been personal stories about people with OCD who have experienced that. Even more popular than our very first episode just like, Hey, this is the podcast. This is who Carrie is and all of that. What do you think? That’s because people just aren’t talking about OCD and the church.

Peyton: Oh, absolutely. When I wrote my book, not said by myself, my editor called me and she said, Hey, sweetheart, you got to lighten up on the church, just a smidge. You gotta pull back just a littlest. So I’ve talked about that with much more grace. Thanks to my editor. And my book, I think we talk about the soul in the church, but I also think if God created the soul, he created the body and he created the mind.

And we are called to honor all three of those. We are called to keep all three of those healthy to keep them in check. Iron sharpens iron, I think mind, body, and spirit. And I don’t know where the disconnect happened with the church and that aspect. I don’t have a clue, but nobody talks about your mind and your physical health either.

And if those two aren’t in check often the spirit’s not in check. And so we’re walking around almost wobbly like one-third of us is functioning like it’s supposed to in the church and we wonder why things still feel like they’re falling apart.

Carrie: And they’re not working. And this concept, which I’m still just wrapping my mind around is like the holy spirit lives in me like in my body that just really blows my mind.

So I’m like, does how I treat my body that has to interact with my spirit? I know it doesn’t change the holy spirit. I’m not saying that, but I mean how I interact with my body changes my spiritual health. It affects my spiritual health as well as my emotional health and physical health.

It’s just all interconnected. And I think you’re right, I think we do try to look at those things separately and don’t interact with each other. And if we want to be more healthy spiritually, we also have to be more healthy emotionally and physically. It just makes sense. I love that.

Talk with us about this concept in your book of not being alone that seems to be a big thing for you. Why did you title the book the way that you did and how does that incorporate with what you wrote about? 

Peyton: I think OCD was probably one of the most isolating things in my life. Like I said, even growing up, I was a worrier. My friends called me the worrier.

I was the mom friend like I was always 45. I was always isolated because I was the mom. I was the worrying one. I was the one who can not just ever let loose and have fun now, not in the name of sinful pleasure, but I was just never relaxed. I can never breathe and that was one of the most isolating things for me.

And so as I got older, life got harder, stuff got more serious intrusive thoughts just have a field day with that. I mean, because there’s just so much more stake. Once I got married like sexual OCD stuff went through the roof because never had I ever had sex. And now I have, and my brain is like, “Oh, here’s 5 million things we can take and run with.”

So I continue to get lonelier and lonelier because all of these thoughts made me take a step back, take a step back. I was not like everyone else. Something was wrong with me. Should I call the sheriff on myself like what is going on? And so when Josh physically left and I was physically by myself, that was probably one of the darkest places in my life because I had always been mentally and even spiritually isolated just from the church I grew up in and struggling with OCD. And here I am not physically alone and it took therapy. It took God’s grace. It took two or three very dear friends that made you realize you literally cannot be alone. And it sounds so churchy. It sounds so cliche.

But like you said, if the holy spirit is truly embodying you then I am called to believe that he is embodying every lonely space I’m walking through. So he is quite literally paving the way and telling loneliness to just step aside like it doesn’t have a place here, not in my heart, not in my spirit, not in my physical body, not in my mind. And so that’s how I chose the title, Not So By Myself. 

Carrie: So huge. I hope that as people hear this podcast and these stories that they recognize that within themselves too like I’m not alone. I’m not alone in my struggles and that God’s here with me and God can break into those lonely spaces. And I love that he just meets us where we’re at, you know, all of our mess.

Peyton: That’s what I say. He works best in the mess. That is where he thrives. 

Carrie: So cool. Towards the end of the podcast, I like to ask our guests to share a story of hope, which is the time where you received hope from God or another person.

Peyton: Oh, that is such a good one. OCD is just so wild. So harm OCD for me, I’m always afraid of running people off the road. I’m always turning my car around to make sure I haven’t run anybody off the road. There was one day I was in my little black Chevy car that I had gotten in high school and I was driving home and I just had one of those intrusive thoughts of I tried to pick up my phone because someone was calling me and I thought, “oh my gosh.”

[00:28:00] like for those five split seconds, you have no idea if you were looking at the road, what could have happened? So I just hit the brakes. It’s a quiet country town, but I still hit the brakes in the middle of the road. And I went to go whip my car around and somebody sideswipes me because I’m irrationally flipping my car in the middle of the street.

And I thought, “oh, my word. I have just caused a wreck. I have no clue if this person is okay. I don’t know how I’m gonna tell a cop I have intrusive thought OCD and that’s why I’ve had a wreck. So I pull off on the side of the road and this woman pulls off and I see her and she’s older and I think she’s 85.

I have partially killed her. She’s going to need a hip replacement. This woman gets out of her car. I’ve damaged her car like this was on me. She comes over and she grabs my hand and she looks at me and, and even in a small town, this was one of those random chances where I didn’t know who this was.

She said, “I just want you to know that this is God’s providential hand, that you’re safe and I’m safe.” And she prayed over me and just left. And I’m sitting here going, ”my insurance is going to go through the roof.” I definitely just clipped the back end of her car. So no insurance going up. I didn’t pay anything for this woman’s car.

I swear she was an angel. So that was just hope because that was a hard thing. Mentally, I was in a bad place. I made a bad decision as a driver and this woman just prays over me, gives me grace, and just drives off. And I will never forget that day. I will never forget her face, the street name, any of it as long as I live. That was some serious hope that I will not forget.

Carrie: Wow. What a testimony of God’s grace. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story. I think this has been great to talk about all the different things that you talked about and I’m sure it’ll be an encouragement to somebody.

————-

I enjoy getting to have these guests on because it really reduces the stigma and shame surrounding being a Christian and struggling with OCD. Maybe you or someone you know have had an experience such as overcoming a phobia or working through social anxiety, I would love to feature some of those types of stories on the podcast.

If that’s you or someone you know, you don’t have to be an author to be on the show or a public speaker or a therapist. None of those are requirements. Just reach out to me via our contact form on the website. I look forward to hearing from you and being able to share more stories of hope with you in the future.

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 grace love for you.

eat love for you.

19. Thriving as an Introvert in an Extrovert World with Holley Gerth

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Counseling, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 19. Thriving as an Introvert in an Extrovert World with Holley Gerth

On this episode, I had the privilege of interviewing Holley Gerth, author of The Powerful Purpose of Introverts to discuss her own experience of burnout from trying to be an extrovert after becoming a published author.

Episode Highlights:

  • How the introvert brain processes information differently than the extrovert brain
  • Why introverts are more susceptible to anxiety and depression
  • How to communicate to an extrovert who is asking for your opinion on the spot
  • Why you should show up to a party if you are an introvert 
  • What you might need as an introvert on vacation, during the holidays, or at a conference

Resources and Links:
Book: Quiet
Book: The Introvert Advantage 

Episode Summary:

If you’ve ever felt drained after social gatherings, needed time to process conversations, or struggled with small talk, you’re not alone. In this episode, I sit down with author Holley Gerth to explore the deep connection between introversion, anxiety, and depression—and how to thrive as an introvert in a fast-paced, extrovert-centric world.

Holley shares eye-opening insights from her book, The Powerful Purpose of Introverts, explaining that introverts naturally have a more sensitive nervous system. This means we take in more stimuli, process conversations on a deeper level, and sometimes need extra time to recharge. While this sensitivity can make us more susceptible to anxiety and overthinking, it’s also the root of our greatest strengths—empathy, perceptiveness, and deep thinking.

Holley and I discuss practical strategies for introverts, from bringing a “designated extrovert” to social events to allowing ourselves time to process before responding in meetings. One key takeaway? It’s okay to say, “I need time to think about that,” rather than feeling pressured to answer on the spot. In fact, this thoughtful approach can lead to deeper insights and better decisions.

We talk about how embracing your natural wiring can actually reduce anxiety and improve your overall well-being. God designed both introverts and extroverts to complement each other, and when we stop fighting who we are, we can truly thrive.

Listen to the full episode for more insights!

Transcript

Today’s show is all about introversion. And if you’re wondering what in the world does that have to do with anxiety, we’re going to explain that in the show that there’s a connection between introverts being more likely to struggle with anxiety or depression.

Sometime back, I had picked up a book, The Powerful Purpose of Introverts and found this book to be so validating of my own experience and also provided some practical tips on how to thrive as an introvert. So I knew that I wanted to ask Holley to be on the show and she so graciously agreed. So here is my interview with author Holley Gerth.

Carrie: So Holley, I wanted to start by telling you a story that I think will help us dive into this conversation about introverts. I was sitting in my friend’s living room and I’ve known this couple for probably about 10 years now. And we were talking about theme parks and they said, “Oh, Hey, you know, what do you think about going to this theme park?”  And I said, well, I said, do you know, that’s a lot of people to be around and it’s outdoors and it’s hot. And I said, if I have kids it might be a different story because I would suffer through it for the kids, but I said it as an introvert with all that activity going on around me, going to a theme park does not sound very fun. And my friend looks at me, the husband’s super serious and says, “You’re an introvert? “Yes, I’m an introvert” but it was just so funny to me because we have all these misconceptions about what it means to be an introvert. And here’s somebody that knew me for 10 years and wouldn’t have pegged me as an introvert.

Holley: Yeah, I think that’s a great story that happens so often. And the example you gave of a theme park is such a good illustration of the brain differences between introverts and extroverts. So they feel best when there’s a lot coming at them because it releases more dopamine in their system, which is their preferred neurotransmitter. And for us, it’s just a little too much sometimes. 

Carrie: Right. The external stimulation of having to process everything that goes on around you and picking up even on little minute experiences, even conversations, sometimes really good conversations with friends that are maybe more rich and deep, I’ll go home and I’ll be thinking about that for a half an hour to an hour, whereas I think other people just kind of they’re like go home and go to sleep. And Carrie has to have like processing time, which is just different. 

Holley: Yes, we do. Our nervous systems are more sensitive. And so we take in more. They’re like nuts with small holes and that’s why introverts reach, they’re done points pasture. And then we need to do that processing, like you described where we empty our net a little by thinking through things, and then we’re ready for more. 

Carrie: Yeah. I know that in your book, you talk about how introverts are more prone towards anxiety and depression. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Holley: Yeah, it’s actually related. It seems they’re still studying it, but it seems related again to that more sensitive nervous system. So we’re just more impacted by the things that we experience and some of our brain wiring. It’s just a vulnerability and that’s part of my story. And for a long time, I wanted to get rid of that part of me completely. I was like, “God must have messed up” and I want to get rid of it completely. But over time I realized it’s actually tied to my strengths. So if you picture the core characteristics of who you are is like being on a continuum and in the middle would be that nervous system that introverts have. And on the left side of the continuum would be anxiety and that could be labeled struggle.  But on the right side of the continuum, there would be a label that says strength. And that’s where things like you described that perceptiveness and empathy and ability to notice things is. So I think for introverts, when it comes to overcoming anxiety, depression, really saying this is tied to some of my strengths, and it’s not about changing who I am, but moving toward the strength sides of those core parts of who we are that can go in either direction.

Carrie: Yeah. Those strength parts a lot of times are often overlooked in a society maybe that caters a little bit more towards extroverts. 

Holley: Yeah. I think so but it’s surprising that actually about half the population is made up of introverts. We’ve just learned to act like extroverts when we’re in public, because like you said, our culture is more extrovert centric, but I think that introverts and extroverts are actually an intentional, complimentary pairing on God’s part that he made both and we’re better together. So I think that when introverts dare to be who they are and extroverts do the same, then we’re all a lot better off. 

Carrie: I love that because I have had similar experiences I think to what you just shared of I feel awkward in social settings, or maybe I don’t know what to say. I struggled at one period in my young adulthood, really of making conversations with people, not knowing how to do kind of the small talk thing. [00:06:03] I’d love the one-on-one deep conversations but I didn’t know how really to interact in a group of people. I actually went through a period where I made myself talk to strangers which sounds really funny, but it was my way of practicing small talk. And I knew that I wasn’t going to necessarily run into or see these people ever again. [00:06:28] So that made it a little bit easier to kind of like practice some of that stuff. 

One of the things I liked that you said in the book was that you try to bring an extrovert with you to a party but they also appreciate having an introvert, which I thought was really cool too. 

Holley: Yeah. I usually bring, I call them my designated extroverts.

[00:06:52] So if I’m at a conference or somewhere like that, then I look for an extrovert and it does work out well because they want to kind of flip from conversation to conversation and talk to as many people as possible a lot of this times. And then if there’s one person that wants to go really in depth and tell me a long story and talk, maybe and cry for an hour, then they’re like, “you got this one.”

[00:07:16] We both have our strong points. And again, those are stereotypes. Of course, introverts can learn to network, like you said, and extroverts are of course caring people too. I do think that when we come team up and help each other out that that can be really useful. And the reason why we prefer those conversation types for extroverts, they use a brain pathway for processing that shorter, faster, more focused on the present [00:07:46] So they really easily do that quick, small talk. It’s also why they like talking on the phone more than introverts and introverts use a pathway that’s longer, more complex. It takes into account the past, present and future. So we need a bit of time to respond, but often when we do, it adds depth and insight context to what we’re saying in that conversation [00:08:10] So again, it’s something that can be frustrating at times, but it’s also strength. It’s what makes you a great counselor that you have the ability to use that longer pathway and go to those deeper places with your clients. 

Carrie: I absolutely believe that because there will be times where I’m outside of session and I’m thinking about a client and their situation in a little bit more depth, and I’m able to have some mental clarity. [00:08:37] And the nice part about my job is I don’t always have to think on the fly. I can come back and say, “Hey, I was thinking about this thing, and I think it might fall in this area, or I think it might be helpful if we shifted direction over here a little bit.” It’s super frustrating when you’re in a corporate environment or even sometimes in church, you’re in meetings and people are spitting out ideas and sometimes that processing speed is a lot faster.

[00:09:06] And so for the introverts to know, it’s okay I think to come back and say, “I thought about this a little bit more” and to not feel guilty for not being able to think on the fly, like maybe we see other people doing. 

Holley: Yeah, that’s a great tip. One thing that I’ve learned through the process of writing this book is that extroverts just want a response. [00:09:30] They don’t necessarily need the response. And as an introvert, I tend to think I have to have my fully formed as close to perfect as possible response before I say anything at all. But actually extroverts just want to know that we’re engaged in listening. And so I’ve found It’s okay to say I need some time to think about it because it really matters to me [00:09:53] or I want you to know I’m listening to you and I hear you. I just need a little bit of time to work through that. And then let’s set up a time to get back together. And so that was freeing for me. I have a daughter who’s an extrovert. And so I’ve learned to say to her, things like that, “I hear you. I am listening.

[00:10:12] Let me have this a little bit, and then I will get back to you. I promise.” So that is one strategy. Also preparing ahead of time can help us. As little in the moment processing that we have to do that can be helpful. I’m sure you prepare for your sessions with clients. And then, like you said, you think about them afterwards. [00:10:33] That idea of saying especially in a meeting, “Hey, I’m going to get back to you by 8:00 AM tomorrow. I want to dig into this a little more.” So preparation, and then knowing you can just use a response. You don’t have to have the response and then asking for time for followup. Those are three good strategies to help with that.

Carrie: [00:10:51] That’s so good. I like having the practical things to say with other people, and that can help in a variety of different relationships that we’re talking about whether it’s your boss or your spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend, best friend, your child like you named.  This is just applicable in so many different areas.

[00:11:13] I’m curious for you what that process was of really embracing your introversion in a different way other than looking at it as a deficit, going from that to looking at it as a strength or as a God-given blessing. 

Holley: Yeah. Well, I did it by pushing myself into burnout. [00:11:39] So, especially when I first started publishing books, I started getting a lot of speaking invitations and I literally told myself I just have to be more of an extrovert now like that’s the job. And I said yes to everything to everyone without being very strategic about it. And at the end of one year where I traveled like 20 times, I was a keynote at a conference and the next morning in the worship service, I just couldn’t stop crying. [00:12:05] And I felt like God saying, “Go home.” And I knew he meant like go home and taking a nap because you are tired, but also go home to who I created you to be. And I realized that each of us are perfectly designed for God’s purpose for our lives not for anyone else’s, but for ours, we have what we need. And so I went home and I went to counseling. [00:12:29] That was part of my healing journey. I told my close people, “Hey, I’m not okay. I need to make some changes. I spent time with God” and just asking, what have I taken on that you never asked me to. And started saying “no” more strategically and started saying “yes” more strategically and realized that I didn’t have to do all those things in order to fulfill God’s purpose for me that I could be an introvert and still make an impact. [00:12:59] It was more than okay to just say this is who I am and I’m going to build my life around that. So it was a long journey and I wouldn’t recommend anyone do it that way but that’s how it worked for me. 

Carrie: I love that. I love that sense of, yes, I can fulfill God’s call on my life. Whoever’s hearing this, no matter what your personality is, no matter whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert, you can still fulfill God’s calling and it’s going to look like

what he intends it to look like for your life instead of trying to follow the pattern of other people. It’s so tempting in the days of social media to look on a profile or a public figure and say that person has it together, or I want to be like them but really we should be striving to be who God created us to be unique and individual. And there’s just everyone, I believe has a gift that they give to the world, that God has given us things to be able to give out to others. And that was just really beautiful how you shared that. 

Holley: Yeah, I agree. And even when we look at those around us, a lot of times we assume they’re extroverts and often they’re not. Some well-known introverts include Oprah, Jerry Seinfeld, Joanna Gaines, Abraham Lincoln, Max Lucado, Michael Jordan, Michael Phelps. The list goes on and on. And because we live in a more extrovert centric culture, we do assume, “Oh, they’re in public. They must be an extrovert,” but there are actually a whole lot of introverts doing really remarkable things. And so I think that is something I’ve learned too, that when I see someone that I think, “Oh, they’re an extrovert” to pause and be like, “maybe not”. [00:14:59] Maybe they’re in their zone of what I call brilliance and belonging, where there’s this thing that they do that brings them into a different place but maybe they’re an introvert just like me. 

Carrie: Do you feel at times, like God’s calling on, on you to do specific things has been totally scary?

Holley: Yeah.

Carrie: [00:15:27] I feel like that too. I wanted to ask you that because even like putting out this podcast, it’s terrifying. The only reason I continued doing it is because, well, one, I believe it’s got what God wants me to do. And two, I’m having enormous amounts of fun with it, talking to people and interviewing them, but it is scary to do new things or to put ourselves out there. [00:15:53] And I think sometimes as Christians, we may be have been fed this lie that if I’m doing something for the Lord or if I’m following God’s calling on my life somehow I’m supposed to have a hundred percent confidence in that, and I’m not going to experience anxiety and I’m not going to experience fear. [00:16:14] I just wanted to just dispel that myth because it’s a myth. 

Holley: Yeah. It is. I once looked at all the verses that say, “do not fear” in scripture and there are almost always to someone who’s already afraid. So it’s not like a command don’t ever feel fear, it’s God saying to us in a reassuring way, you don’t have to stay in that fear because I’m with you. [00:16:40] I realized that we are afraid when something matters to us. We don’t get scared about things we don’t care about, you know? I don’t get scared that I’m never going to get to be an accountant or an engineer. And probably folks who love their jobs are like, they’re not scared.

[00:16:58] They’re never going to get to be a writer or a podcaster. It’s the things that matter most to us that scare us most. So in that sense, the fear is never going away or in a way we don’t want it to, because that probably means that the passion is also going away. And so just recognizing that fear as. As proof that we’re doing work that matters. [00:17:23] And then I would say the day I stopped being afraid is the day I should probably walk away because it’s the day I think I can do it on my own without God’s help like fear keeps us dependent and saying, “okay, God, this is bigger than me. I don’t think I can do it, but I’m going to trust you.” He and through me.

[00:17:41] And then we take the next step forward. But I think fear is just with us when we do things that are worth doing. 

Carrie: Right. That connection between fear and passion is so huge because the passion is the thing that God gives you I believe to help you push through the fear. There’s something in your heart that you feel like you have to speak up about, or you have to share, or you have to do. Sometimes that anxiety is something that’s almost a confirmation for me of like, okay, like you said, this is something that God’s put on my heart and put in my life for a reason and a purpose, but I can also, with his help, move through that and move beyond that to the other side and do things that I couldn’t do on my own.

Holley: [00:18:42] Yeah. And it’s really interesting that from a brain perspective, fear and excitement use the same circuitry. It’s just about how we frame it to ourselves. Whether we tell ourselves like if we’re getting ready to speak. If we’re telling ourselves I’m scared out of my mind, or I’m excited. There’ve been studies that show, if you tell yourself I’m excited that it helps, even if you feel like you’re faking it, you may.  You know what am I saying?

[00:19:11] I’m not excited, I’m terrified but if we just learn even to change some of that language and link it more to that passion and excitement, because it is the same kind of circuitry in our minds that can help also. 

Carrie: I think some people should try that next time before going to a party, “I am so excited to be with my friends,” because that is true. [00:19:32] You’re excited to be with people, hopefully that you love and enjoy. Let’s talk about maybe some practical things that if people are struggling with anxiety in social settings or when they meet new people, those types of things. Are there any tips that you’ve found helpful for you or through your research?

Holley:  [00:19:57] Susan Cain wrote a book called “Quiet” about introverts and also one for kids. And she uses the metaphor of extroverts are like helicopters. Introverts are like airplanes. And so extroverts in social settings kind of immediately lift off. They’re just jumped right in and introverts need a runway.

[00:20:17] So to ease into it a bit more and so if you’re an introvert, it can actually help to get to places a little bit early so that you have time to get familiar with your surroundings, to feel comfortable there. See people come in one at a time instead of walking into a crowded room because it’s tempting right as an introvert to come late because we think that will help. But that any kind of preparation you can do ahead of time even if it’s just researching online the restaurant or the venue, or looking at the people’s Facebook profiles not in a stalkery way. I’m getting familiar with these people then that is helping yourself have a runway. [00:21:03] And so I think that’s one thing or even doing research ahead of time, like saying,” okay, what are some questions I want to ask people tonight,” having some things. So when you’re put on the spot, there’s something in your toolkit for using, and then just honoring your done point.  Knowing that because we process deeply and we take in a whole lot that it’s okay if we’re just done before other people that it’s okay If we’re just like “I’ve had enough, I’m ready to go home.” For socializing to be more about quality than quantity, I think is a helpful shift. And then finding ways to make bigger groups feel smaller.

[00:21:47] So in a group saying, how can I talk to one person at a time or taking on a role or responsibility, like at the holidays saying “I’m gonna wash dishes” because that means I get to stand by at the sink and catch my breath for a few minutes. Or I’m going to take the dog for a walk or I’ll be the one to run to the store often when introverts have a role or responsibility, social settings become more comfortable.

[00:22:15] It’s that unstructured time where it’s just about like the back and forth conversations that aren’t always our favorite, that can be challenging. So give yourself a runway or look for a role or responsibility when you’re in the setting.

Carrie:  One of the things that you mentioned that I’ve found super helpful for me.

[00:22:37] And it seems really silly, but I will become overwhelmed if I don’t look at the menu beforehand. If I’m going to a new restaurant, it’s like there are too many choices and too many options. And I feel like I have to read this whole thing and investigate it. And maybe other people don’t look at menus that way, but when you’re highly sensitive and that’s how you process the information, it’s just easier for me to.

[00:23:05] almost decide before I go to the restaurant, what I’m going to eat, or at least narrow it down to a few choices versus just having to do that all at once. And then usually people are trying to communicate with you as well like “Oh, Hey, how are you doing?” It’s like, okay, I can’t talk and read and think and everything all at the same time.

[00:23:25] I’ve found it helpful at parties. I think I read this in a book a long time ago. I had read a book as part of my process called the Introvert Advantage. I don’t even know if that’s still out but that book really helped me understand myself. And I think one of the things they said was don’t be afraid to sit down and let people come talk to you.

[00:23:48] I had an interesting experience at a networking event one time where everyone was mixing and mingling, and I just needed a break from meeting new people. So I sat down on the sofa and this extrovert woman came over and she started talking to me and I was thinking, Oh gosh, I came over here. So I could like just sit down.

[00:24:08] And she interpreted that as like,” Oh, you’re not having a good time. You’re not mixing and mingling.” And somehow like, “It’s my role in this networking event to come over and rope you back in.” So that was just a little, kind of funny misunderstanding, but I think it’s okay too kind of take a break or observe for a little while. [00:24:30] And sometimes people don’t understand that that that’s what you’re doing. They just think that you’re disengaged or not having a good time. 

Holley: Yeah, and I think that’s a common misconception. I think one reason why is that brain and nervous system wiring differences means that introverts and extroverts experience happiness differently. [00:24:52] And so for extroverts, happiness looks like enthusiasm and excitement and for introverts calm and contentment. And so that extrovert assumed because you were over there being calm and content that you must not be happy at the party. And so our loved ones can do the same.  If you’re in an introvert expert, marriage or friendship, or kids and parents. And so understanding that difference can be helpful. And also as introverts communicating, saying, I’m really enjoying, just watching everyone or just making it overt that we’re in our happy place. It just looks different than it does for extroverts. But a lot of times that’s what’s going on and I love your strategy of menus. [00:25:38] I do the same thing, and I’d never thought about it as an introvert HSP thing, but that makes so much sense. And I think I’m going to do that in broader ways too. Like if I’m going to a conference, I’m going to say this conference is a menu. I don’t have to eat everything on it. What do I most want to consume while I’m here and what will be the right amount for me that I get what I need, but I don’t over indulge in a way that makes me not feel good by the time I’m going home.

[00:26:11] And I think you could do the same with a vacation, with a lot of different things. So I love that strategy. 

Carrie: That’s so true of conferences because they will literally have like, okay, and here’s the breakfast for the new people. And then here’s all of your conference schedule and the special lunch. And then the dinner evening thing. [00:26:32] And I look at that and I’m like, “No, I don’t want to go all all to all of that.” It’s like when you’re having your evening 8:00 PM thing, I want to be in my PJ’s reading and decompressing because I’ve been around people all day long. What are you thinking?” So that’s really funny too, that you mentioned conferences because that’s been my experience of looking at them. [00:26:54] We have way too much stuff on this menu. I’m not going to go to all of that. 

Holley: And so to saying, I’m going to pick and choose. What’s going to add the most value and not worry about the risks. Again, it’s that quality over quantity, such an important strategy, especially for introverts. 

Carrie: I know that things like. [00:27:13] Trips or being around family for long periods, even people that you love and value my spouse. And we have introvert time.  There’s times where we just kind of want to go to a separate space in the house and just read or relax. And we just kind of check in with each other about that. Like, “Hey, are you cool if I go here and read” :Oh yeah.  That’s fine.”

[00:27:37] I just kind of need to decompress. And we don’t always have to be around each other all the time. And there’s a peace and a communication about that. I’ve had vacations with friends where like, I can think my best friend and  we kind of had an understanding of just like, we need time alone at the end of the day, we’re going to be around each other all day, doing fun things, going places and seeing people.

[00:28:05] And then there needs to be some kind of decompression time at the end where we’re not having to be fully engaged or talking to each other or doing an activity every second of the day. I think that’s it. That’s important in terms of when introverts are planning things like vacations, to really take that time and be gentle with themselves. You don’t have to absorb every single moment. You can have some happiness in your peace and contentment and relaxation at the end of the day. 

Holley: Yeah. And I think it can be helpful to ask each other, what will help you enjoy this vacation, the holidays? whatever it is that you’re going into with another person. [00:28:52] And so that gives introverts opportunity to say, “I’m going to need a nap, or I’m going to need an hour to read every day.” And the extroverts will say, “I’m going to need to have a little adventure every day,” whatever it is. And so a lot of times we just assume that other people are wired like us. And so we are afraid to ask for what we need or are we missing what someone else needs. [00:29:16] And so I think just having those conversations can be helpful. 

Carrie: There’s so much about this, as you start to develop an awareness of yourself, your own body even how you feel physically and emotionally, when you’re around other people, how you feel physically and emotionally doing certain tasks. Some may feel more draining to you than others. How you rejuvenate that mental and emotional energy. And if you can develop some awareness over those things, then it allows you to know what you need. And if you know what you need, then you can advocate for what you need. And there’s so many pieces I think that go together with that.

[00:30:06] I hope that some of this conversation helps spark like self reflection in our listeners just of how do I really feel in these situations. With anxiety, there’s a tendency to just avoid and just say, “It makes me feel uncomfortable. I’m not doing it” Party with 20 people and I only know one person, “I’m not going.” And I would just encourage people really to say instead of tapping out and avoiding to say, how can I Set myself up for success in this situation instead like some of the tips that we talked about a little bit earlier. How can I engage socially in a way that’s going to be most comfortable for me understanding that it’s not, it may not necessarily be a hundred percent comfortable.

Holley: [00:31:00] Yeah, that was a big aha for me was my anxiety is realizing that avoidance actually reinforces anxiety because we never learned that will we actually can do it, that we can make it through the party or the speech or whatever it is that’s making us anxious. And so the more we go through things that trigger anxiety and come out, okay [00:31:23] On the other side, that’s what actually decreases it. And so that has been a big aha for me personally, it’s just saying, like he said, okay, this is making me anxious. But I’m going to get some strategies and call for backup if I need it and I’m going to live through it. Usually on the other side, I say “that wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.” What I come up with in my head is usually so much worse than what actually happens. I think that’s great insight for your listeners that you’re sharing that. Lean into it when it’s tempting to pull away.

Carrie:  Are there things that you tell yourself or to get through some of those situations. What kind of like what the tipping point is? [00:32:12] How do I know that this is too going to be too much for my system or it’s something that I can manage and kind of get through with a little self encouragement?

Holley: Yeah, I think asking, “Am I making this decision out of fear? or out of intentionally taking care of who I am as an introvert?” because those are two different things. [00:32:38] If there’s an event that would probably be beneficial and I know that, but I’m just like, I’m scared. So I’m not going, then I try not to let myself off the hook, but if I’m saying, “I’m exhausted.” And I know the close people in my life need some things for me, and I’ve got to prioritize my energy and this event is just not making the cut because it’s a “want to” not a “need to” then that’s a different thing.

[00:33:09] And just saying it’s okay to prioritize what I spend my emotion and energy on especially as an introvert. And so just asking, where is this coming from? Is it from a fearful place or is it from a proactive place? I think can be helpful. 

Carrie: That’s really, really good. So before we end here at the end of every podcast, I like to ask the guests to share a story of hope, which is a time in which you received hope from God or another person.

Holley: [00:33:41] Okay. So my story of hope is my family story. I went through about a decade of infertility, my husband and I couldn’t have her own kiddos. And so we ended up adopting a 20 year old who basically aged out of the foster system. And so she’s now 27. And so she got married and we are Nana and Papi to Ula and Clement. [00:34:10] And so I literally wore a ring on my finger that said hope for all those years. And the ending to our story is not at all what I would have imagined, but it is now one that I would not trade for anything. So I think about that still when I’m in a situation where I’m waiting or I’m uncertain of the outcome, just knowing that God’s working out something probably better than I could have imagined on my own.

Carrie: [00:34:38] That’s awesome. Thank you so much for sharing that. So Holley, tell us a little bit about your book. 

Holley: It’s called the “Powerful Purpose of Introverts. Why The World Needs You to Be You.” I spent years doing the research behind it. It has tons of information, but I also did a survey of my blog subscribers about their biggest challenges as introverts.

[00:35:02] And I used that. I got thousands of responses. And so digging into that, I noticed patterns, patterns of struggles, but also patterns of strengths. And so the book really unpacks, what are the gifts and strengths the world has to receive from introverts and how can you individually recognize those strengths in yourself and maximize them and overcome the struggles that might get in your way. [00:35:30] And so I hope that it’s both encouraging but also very practical. There’s a lot of interactive tools in it. There’s questions for reflection. There’s all kinds of things like that. And if you’re an extrovert, I’ve heard from several extroverts now that reading it has helped their relationships with an introvert in their life. So if you’re married to an introvert or you’re parenting one, or if you just have a lot of friends that you love who are introverts, I think it can be beneficial for extroverts too. It has been a best seller and resonated more than I even imagined. So I hope everyone can get this message because I think it is something I wish I’d had 20 years ago. [00:36:14] It would have changed the trajectory of my life. It would have protected me from going to that place of burnout. And so I want everybody else to have it so that they do not have to go through what I did. You can let me be your warning. 

Carrie: Absolutely. I’ve really enjoyed it. It felt so validating for me to read.

[00:36:38] And I knew some about introverts from reading that I had done in the past and kind of my own journey of self discovery, but reading the book this time with all of the interweaves that you talked about of the research that you did, and the brain science has been like, “Oh, yeah. That makes so much sense.” And there are little checklists and different things and it’s just been, it’s been a good read. So thank you for writing it and sharing that with us and thank you for being on the show today and just sharing your wisdom there. 

Holley: Thanks for having me. 

_____________________________________________________________

I hope you enjoy listening to this interview with Holly. If there’s nothing else that you take away, I hope that you know that you were created uniquely by God with a purpose and intention in mind. He did not make a mistake by making you an introvert. If you are an introvert and he did not make a mistake by making you an extrovert, if you’re an extrovert, so go and embrace and be all that God has called you to be.

[00:37:47] At hope for anxiety and OCD, we talk about how we are here to reduce shame, increase hope, and develop healthier connections with God and others. If you know somebody that needs this message, I would encourage you to share the show with them. You can also share your support for the show by writing us a review on iTunes.

Thanks 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 grace.

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

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

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in OCD, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 13. 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
  • Experiences of mental health stigma from Christians 
  • Learning about panic attacks from a magazine article
  • Mitzi’s experience with scrupulosity OCD
  • Acting as if
  • How she used used imaginal exposure to help treat her OCD
  • How she made the decision to take mental health medication as a Christian 
  • Wrestling with God about having OCD
  • How church leaders can support individuals experiencing OCD

Verses discussed: Psalm 13, 2 Cor 1:4-5, 2 Cor 12

Resources and links:
Strivings Within- The OCD Christian
In Your Dreams 
OCD Online
Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners
ERP (Exposure and Response Prevention) 
ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy)

By The Well Counseling

More Podcast Episodes

Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD Episode 13. Today, I’m sharing an interview with author Mitzi VanCleve. She shares her own personal journey of diagnosis, treatment and interactions with the church in regards to dealing with panic attacks, anxiety and OCD. I’ve found her story to be incredibly hopeful in terms of how we can grow closer to God through struggles in our lives. So let’s dive in. 

Transcript Of Episode 13

Carrie: When did you start to have symptoms of OCD? 

Mitzi: Well, that really started even as far back as when I was a toddler. I know that sounds surprising. The only thing I can say about that is in my childhood right up until I was quite old, I never understood a lot of what I was experiencing was actually OCD. The first thing that I can go back and look at is really long-held obsessional fears and themes. The very first one was it was sort of unusual as OCD things are. It was a fear of being flushed down the toilet and the sphere was so intense that I would not use the big toilet until I was five years old and I was forced to go to kindergarten.

Even as a small child, three years old, four years old, I could sit there and watch a toilet being flushed, look at the hole in the bath and the toilet and say, “well, I can’t fit through there,” but it didn’t make any difference. My brain had just decided this was the thing to be afraid of and from there, once I got past that one, there was health obsessions. I remember, a really long period of time where I heard about the idea of swallowing your tongue and that just drove me nuts. I worried about it, wondered how that can happen. I ask my parents about it. I would forget about it while I was playing then when I go to bed at night it would come back and that’s when I would really struggle like the times when I didn’t have anything to do. So there was a lot of weird themes and health obsessions. 

By the age of 10 is when I first developed some obsessions related to self-harm. That just started with hearing about a form of not self-harm, but just a form of harm that could happen to a person. I don’t want to really go into the details. Sometimes it’s a little bit hard to explain specifically obsessions in details because it can get a little graphic and upsetting that people who don’t have OCD don’t really understand.

Why would you think that? And so this morphed from my fear of this thing happening to me to actually doing it to myself, like losing control and harming myself. That just went on and on and on for the longest time. There was something in me that knew these things weren’t at all logical and so they scared me so much.

I wouldn’t really tell my parents. I would exhibit symptoms of anxiety. I would have nausea. I would get up in the night shaking and feeling like I needed to vomit and things like that. I was afraid to, especially about the harming thing, I was afraid to verbalize that as a kid, but that’s where it started.

It became more debilitating after the birth of my children. After the birth of my second child, I developed panic disorder. Not knowing what that was I always struggled with social anxiety and just your basic kinds of anxiety disorders as a kid, but I didn’t know such a thing existed.

I never heard about OCD, anxiety disorders, panic disorder. Those words were foreign to me. I only heard about crazy people. There’s a thing where there’s a stigma and even as a child, the stigma was there. That idea that I might be crazy was terrifying to me and so when the panic attacks started, that felt like I was going crazy.

My first one was not nocturnal. I was falling asleep and I woke up with a panic attack and that happened to me a lot. It still does sometimes. I just know what it is now. That combined with that old harming obsession, the panic attack, the feeling of I’m losing my mind. I’m losing control. The derealization, that deep personal personalization that you feel at that moment makes you feel like you aren’t going to be able to control yourself. That combined with the harming themes. After the birth of my children, the harming thing switched from me, hurting me, going crazy, and possibly hurting one of my children in a really awful way and that was just so debilitating. I can’t even begin to describe how awful it was.

Carrie: The hard thing about OCD thing is that the themes do shift. As you get older or go through different developmental stages in life. It seems like once you have a handle on one theme, sometimes another theme will then pop up.

Mitzi:  Oh, yes, it’s very true about OCD. That’s why it’s important to understand how the disorder operates, how to get on top of a theme before it gets on top of you.

And then it grows too big and large. It gets kind of stuck in your head. I do try to tell people that there’s physical symptoms with this too when you’re going through this. For me, some of the things I experienced during that really bad season, which was a very long season of unharmosity was an inability to eat.

I struggled to get calories down. I’m five foot eight. I dropped to 114 pounds. People thought I was anorexic. It had nothing to do with anorexia. I just was nauseous. The anxiety was so bad. I couldn’t sleep. And of course, if you have an anxiety disorder and you’re not eating and you’re not sleeping, that makes things even worse because that level of physical stress on your body is going to make a disorder worse. So that was what it was like and how it was like for me before I knew it was wrong. 

Carrie: I’m curious about what your parents thought. Did your parents just think like, “Oh, she’s really nervous a lot, or she’s kind of an anxious child” or they had no idea everything that was going on in your head?

They didn’t. There were some people in my family, distant relatives who had struggles which caused them to even not want to leave their house and things like that. My mom would talk about that and she would say, “You know, you’re going to end up like that” but she didn’t really know what was going on.

 I know my mom, there were like reassurances, which is a usual reaction for a parent to do that. A lot of times it manifested just as me being sickly. When I was struggling with certain health obsessions, I would get very, just like I described

sick to my stomach and I would lose weight. And so they were taking me to the doctor and try to figure out what was wrong but it was being approached like it was a physical issue. A lot of this just due to the fact that I didn’t verbalize a lot of the OCD themes, but even if I had, I’m not sure there would have been enough knowledge back then for my parents to know what was going on because that was in the 60’s when I was growing up. I think the information and knowledge and understanding about what OCD is and how it operates has come a long way since then.

Carrie: Right and hopefully also our physicians and pediatricians are also able to recognize a little bit better when they’re seeing some symptoms that potentially could be anxiety in a child, which often presents more as physical ailments.

Mitzi: I will share that when I got really, really bad with the harming OCD and the panic attacks, they were just relentless. I lost count. I have no idea how many I would have in a day or in the evening. At that point, I did open up to my mom. I began to know, “okay, this obviously is something to do with a mental health issue.” And so all I can think of was I probably need to see a psychiatrist and so I needed to share that with him, somebody. I had talked to my husband very little about it, just a little bit and I opened up with my mom. Growing up as a Christian and in a lot of Christians, there was that stigma [00:10:30] especially back then that Christians don’t have mental health issues. And so as I was sharing with her, I thought it might be a good idea for me to see a psychiatrist. She was really upset about it and she talked about faith and then she said something that was really hard, “that’s just for weak people.”

It was hard because it put the brakes on my pursuing that at the time, and I did pursue it still, but I didn’t get a diagnosis. The person I saw didn’t have any clue and he was relating things to stress and it, again, faith and, and it just I got nowhere. 

Carrie: Okay. So you did see a psychiatrist, but they weren’t able to help you with that?

Mitzi: No, he just and of course, some of the scary obsessional themes, I didn’t verbalize them. I talked about anxiety and I talked about the panic attacks. I didn’t hit that word though. Just this is what’s happening and tried to describe it. So it wasn’t a good experience and it didn’t help me, sadly.

Carrie: Yeah, that’s unfortunate when people do reach out for help and then they find somebody that isn’t familiar maybe with OCD, or doesn’t quite know how to help them navigate through that process. 

So what was that process of getting the help that you needed? 

Mitzie: The first help that I got was really for the panic disorder and that was interesting.

I, I believe that during the time of my praying through this and asking God for help and just feeling so desperate that God came through. At that time I was still struggling. I was pregnant again, that tells you how long I was still struggling tremendously and I had become pregnant again.

I was about four months pregnant. I was at my aunt and uncle’s cottage, my husband and my brothers, my family, and my aunts and uncles they were watching a TV show which I did not need to watch at that time. It was called “Alien” which you’ve heard of. It’s the perfect show if you’re struggling. I was trying to avoid watching it.

So I picked up a reader’s digest magazine and the words on the front of the magazine where they show the stories, one of them said panic disorder. It said it might not be what you think it is. Just the word panic struck a chord with me. I opened up this magazine and started reading the story of this woman who had panic disorder and it was me. I was reading about myself and they listed all the symptoms of a panic attack and I had all of them. I finally had an answer for that. And so at the time, I was pregnant and I really couldn’t implement meds and things like that. I just started working on things like breathing techniques.

After I delivered, I started doing really intensive aerobic exercise. I was jogging four and five miles a day, and I gradually getting healthier which eventually took me into a period where the disorder waned. It wasn’t as bad as it had been, but that’s when I learned just about panic disorder. I didn’t have any idea about OCD and so that kind of wax and wane on and off throughout the rest of my life up until the age of 50.

Carrie: So I think your story is very similar to other people’s in terms of a lot of times there’s a big gap between when people start to have symptoms and when they even find out this is actually OCD they’re experiencing because they feel ashamed of the symptoms. They feel ashamed of the thoughts, or they feel like, “okay, this sounds really crazy and nobody’s going to understand it or believe it, or they’re going to lock me up somewhere if I tell someone that I’m having these thoughts especially related to harm.”

Mitzi: Yes. What you say about they’re gonna lock me up somewhere was a genuine fear of mine because I couldn’t understand why I was having the thoughts to start with. For me to share that with somebody, they’re going to be like, “You really are dangerous.” Sometimes I would think maybe that would be good because then my kids will be safe. That’s how awful it is. You feel like your brain is telling you this is something that you should be afraid of this thought. I say it’s almost like you have a phobic response to the thoughts that you’re having and you’re having to live with them in your head.

If it’s a spider or something, you can just run away from it. Once it’s a thought in your head, it’s there. All that you’re doing to try to get rid of it makes it worse. Of course it did with me because I didn’t know it was OCD and I didn’t know what to do about it. It was at the age of fifty.

Carrie: So at the age of 50, what happened?

Mitzi: I had already been struggling. I was going back through a flare of anxiety and panic attacks because there’d been a lot of stress in our life. I’m not going to go into all the details, there were a lot of changes, big life changes. One on disability moves, just lots of changes, lots of uncertainty.

And so I didn’t notice it for a while, but it was kind of too late by the time I did start to say, Oh no, you know, I’m going back through this again. I was having panic attacks. I was starting to have obsessions about my health again, related to stuff that normally I would just brush off. 

That’s how OCD is It’s always looking for a target, something to be upset about. During that time, I was praying again, reading my Bible, doing all the things I normally do as a Christian to try to receive information from God about what I can do about this. How can I help myself, but also just gain comfort. And I got a lot of comfort from the songs, even back when I was in my twenties, because I saw in there things that described how I was feeling. 

My son also gave me some sermons on tape and he said, “These are really good, Mom.” We always share things like this. So I put one of those sermons in. It was actually on it on a CD. I was doing dishes, I was trying to stay very busy and distracted. This particular pastor was talking about our struggles with sin. As Christians and I understood. It wasn’t new to me that as Christians, we will still be fighting sin our whole life. It’s not something that we’re cured of. It’s something we’re aware of. We’re made aware of when we become a Christian and we have a desire to please our Savior. So we work continually towards pleasing him through obedience. He finally says this one statement, which I don’t even know why he said it in the middle of the sermon. He says, “If you call yourself a Christian but you’re still all the time struggling and sinning as strongly with sin, you really might want to think, are you really a Christian? In the past I would have been like, “yeah, of course.” This time my brain just latched onto that. It was like, wait a minute. What if he’s right? What if all this time, all these years, I thought I was a Christian I’m not. And what if the reason I struggle with this thing, whatever it is is because of that. It just was like a dam broke open and the intrusive thoughts related to that, just pour it out just one after another.

I just began this war with it. It was a mental 24/7, every minute I was awake, I couldn’t sleep and that was the new OCD thing, but I didn’t know it was OCD.

Carrie: No one’s ever had that before. It was a new theme. 

Mitzi: Yeah. Until I was engaging with my compulsion. So by then, at this point in my life, of course, we had the internet and I was doing what’s called research, lots of Googling, researching around the topic of,  “Am I still saved?,” doubting your salvation. I was reading all these articles about how we can know we are Christians and I would read them. It didn’t help. It didn’t make it go away.Suddenly one day I stumbled across a Christian forum that said doubting salvation and then it said, OCD. I was like, ”what?” That’s what I’m going through. Out of curiosity, I opened it and I started reading the posts from the people in this group

and it was amazing. It was just like the Reader’s Digest thing. I was reading my story. They were telling exactly what I had been going through. I was stunned and as I read more and more in this forum, and then I started going further out about OCD, what it is, how it manifests, what causes it. I had it and I had it since I was a kid and I never knew, and that opened up the door for me to finally have a way to manage this beast called OCD.

From there I began learning and learning more about ERP, about medications, about therapies like ACT. All the ways that this thing that I called “it”, this ugly “it,” for all these years, it had a name. I get tearful sometimes talking about it because God did answer my prayer.

He just didn’t answer in the way I was wanting. The way I was wanting was just take this thing away, whatever it is. He was pointing me to, “This is what it is, and this is what you can do.” It was just astonishing to me that I could live my whole life, basically until I was 50 years old and never have been able to get help.

There were so many long seasons of just debilitating, crippling suffering, and it was hard for me to believe, but just the relief, so overwhelming. 

Carrie: We talked about that in an earlier episode with someone about how diagnosis itself can be a relief when you get a proper diagnosis. And then you can say, “okay, now that we know what we’re dealing with, what can we do about it?” “What’s our next step forward?

Mitzi: Exactly. Even after you get a diagnosis because OCD is OCD, it’s going to make you doubt but as you begin to bravely risk working with things like Exposure Response Prevention (ERP) therapy for me, it was brave when I was told, I probably needed to try some medications, but that was hard for me. Some of that was pride. Some of it was just because I have never taken anything like that before. What will it do to me? All the fears and that was a big struggle, but it’s so worth it because the alternative is staying stuck and doing the same thing over and over and not getting better and feeling worse. 

I was determined just like with a panic disorder, I was like, “What can I do about this?” And I found out these things are effective. It was hard. It’s not like you began ERP and the next day, I’m all better. It’s a process. The longer you’ve been struggling with the theme, I think it’s a longer process. Your brain’s got this practice cycle of intrusive thought, anxiety response, compulsion, more intrusive thoughts, more anxiety, more compulsions. It’s a habit that needs to be undone and that takes time. 

Carrie: Right. Did you get into therapy at that point? 

Mitzi: I started going to a therapist and I think this is the hardest thing about OCD is being able to find a competent therapist. My therapist was good for dealing with basic anxiety disorders, like panic disorder, generalized anxiety, social anxiety, but when it came to OCD, she was asking me to apply basic cognitive behavioral therapy like you would for depression which would be to challenge the thoughts, to counter the thoughts into right logical reassurances.

Carrie: Which is exactly what you don’t want to do with OCD.

Mitzi: I started doing that and I got worse and I was like you know what, but there was one thing she offered up that was great and I still say it today, it’s act as if, and that’s part of the choice

part of OCD. OCD thoughts may be telling me this and telling me that, but I’m going to act as if these things aren’t true. And in the realm of Christianity and scrupulosity, even though my brain was telling me, “I think you might becoming an atheist.” I could say I’m going to act as if I’m a Christ follower. I’m going to do all the things that a Christ follower does even if my emotions will not validate that choice. That is my choice. So that aspect helped, the other was worse. So I pretty much learned on my own, I did visit some really good websites like ocdonline.com. Dr. Philippson. A lot of his work was just phenomenal to help me understand.

I learned about imaginal scripting, imaginal exposures, and I wrote them and did them and recorded them. I was able to learn that on my own, but a lot of people really do need a competent therapist because it takes a lot of grit and determination and courage to do ERP. I just think having a competent psychologist who’s trained to do these things and understands the disorder is something, unfortunately there just aren’t that many and a lot of it has to do with network, with insurance too, which was one of my biggest hurdles. I could not afford the counselors and the therapists that I needed to see. I had to go to the ones in network and even later on when I was going through a bumpy time with my OCD, after I knew what it was, I was just going through a really bumpy time.

I thought I could sure use someone right now and my therapist had passed and I called around and I would ask, or I would write. I know I communicated through email. I would say, “what do you know about ERP and ACT as far as treating OCD?” And they would say,” I don’t know what that is but I can help you with your OCD.” I’d be like, “Probably not.”  So that’s a hard thing. That’s a really hard thing.

Carrie: It is hard because really, therapists would have to pursue training after their degree to specialize in OCD. And a lot of people don’t do that unless they have some type of personal connection or in my situation, I was working with a lot of people who just thought they had anxiety and then I was starting to see more OCD as I was starting to hear more about what they were actually worried about and struggling with. So that’s kind of how I got branched off into it, but I think a lot of therapists have not received further training on it.

I want to get in with you on the spiritual aspects, really of struggling with OCD. I know a lot of people who are struggling out there probably are praying prayers just like you pray, “God, this is awful. I feel terrible. I’m all tore up inside. Will you please just like touch my body and touch my mind and take this all away.” How did you work through some of that wrestling with God?

Mitzi: When I didn’t know I had OCD, I did a lot of that and it was a wrestling time. I thought during that time, maybe this was due to pass. Maybe there was something I needed to confess. So I would pour over everything I could think of and current things and confess for the OCD and the anxiety I would go through. I knew these verses, every verse related to worry, anxiety, all of those things. 

I had most of that memorized. Anyway, I did understand what those things meant. What I didn’t understand was the difference. The Bible talks a lot about anxiety and worry, but if you look at those passages of scripture, you will see these are situational.

Worries and concerns, they’re about real-life trials and afflictions. It isn’t this always there’s a free-floating sense of dread and physical symptoms and everything of anxiety that can even be there when you aren’t even worried about anything. It’s like panic attacks, for instance. So that was confusing to me, but there was also a feeling because God wasn’t taking it away just miraculously. Maybe he’d abandoned me. 

There’s a particular Psalm, Psalm 13, I think it says “How long, Oh Lord, will you forget me forever? How long will you keep hiding your face? Please answer me.” 

Just the desperation there of the feeling when we’re going through painful suffering and trials of “where’s God in all of this?” It took a while for me to understand growth through affliction and that came gradually. There’s several aspects of this. There’s my own, not understanding the difference between commonplace, worry that everyone experiences, and a disorder like anxiety or a real mental health issue.

That was the biggest hurdle for me to get over was to learn. So when I learned that I had OCD and I learned I have panic disorder, I was able to shift over into, “well, maybe this is how God’s answering my prayer.” I was able to see just like if  because I do have hypertension, the answer to that, God gave me wasn’t you just miraculously heal my hypertension, it was for me to go on medication, treat my hypertension. And so that helped me to understand that these are very real disorders and to learn about how they develop, why they develop, how they’re genetic. I see that in my family that’s definitely genetic and that it’s not a sin to treat a disorder and affliction and seek professional help for it.

That was something I had to work through, but when you try to talk about it to other Christians, actually, if you don’t know what’s going on, but you know it’s a mental health issue. You may not know, like we’ve talked about how you can have OCD and not know it. So you might be going to a pastor or Christian friend, and you might talk a little bit about your anxiety disorder.

They come at you with what I call “mini-sermons.” They start telling they start quoting you all the verses about anxiety as if you’d never heard them before. It was especially when they know you’re Christian. They know you study the Bible. They know that you followed Christ to the best of your ability.

It’s very condescending because they water it down too. “You just don’t know how to not worry because you don’t trust God.” This is a faith issue. If you had more faith, it’s even gone so far, and this is the one that drives me the most nuts is if you have a mental health issue or anxiety disorder, people will say things to you like you have a theme? That sort of thing. That’s bad. This is awful especially for a person with scrupulosity, religious OCD themes. I mean, that’s horrifying. It just makes it 10 times worse. There’s this lack of knowledge out there when it comes to understanding these disorders.

I really think anxiety disorders are probably the least understood because of Bible verses about worry being equated with an anxiety disorder and they’re not at all the same. And if you’re a sufferer you definitely know the difference, but people who don’t have experience or a loved one who they know and see going through this, they just automatically assume, unfortunately, that this is what it is.

Carrie: Right. It’s hard for pastors and ministry leaders to understand. They don’t necessarily have that type of training or clinical background. And sometimes they’re dipping toes in the water that they need to kind of stay out of and just say, “Definitely we will support you and love you and pray for you but we also want you to get professional help because that’s important and God can use those things in your life. God can use therapy and medication.” These negative experiences that you had with maybe pastors or other people in the church who were well-meaning, let’s say, and trying to help you, did that cause you to want to go public with your story and write a book?

Mizi: Yeah. Yes, it really did. It wasn’t just that though but that was a big part of it. What you just said about they really don’t have the training or the ability to recognize these disorders. Scrupulosity, for instance. If a person is struggling with doubts about their salvation and maybe this pastor has known this person for most of their life and they’re suddenly in their office and they’re going through all these thoughts with them, then the pastor gives them the reassurance from scripture and they’re like, “okay” and then they come back again.

They start saying the same thing over again and even the pastor there’s a level of frustration that can develop and they’re not equipped and they aren’t knowledgeable about OCD and how it manifests itself in a person who’s suffering. So I found that it was really important to share my story about living with anxiety disorders as a Christian and a Christ-follower, but in particular about OCD because it’s so misunderstood. And in particular about scrupulosity OCD because when you go that direction, people are even more inclined to think it’s a spiritual issue even the sufferers themselves really struggle.

They can even know they have OCD and they accepted about all the other kinds of themes and obsessions that they struggle with. For some reason, when it switches over to their relationship to Christ then it’s a spiritual issue. So the book explains why it’s not, and that OCD is OCD no matter what the theme, the treatment approach is the same. If there are things you don’t understand, which is very possible about your walk with God that you can learn through the Bible true, valid, real questions in OCD that can even happen because we’re all at different places in our walk with Christ. [00:37:05] You can still learn that thing, but you don’t have to learn it 50 times. That’s when you know, what’s OCD. It’s like if the answers don’t suffice, if the anxiety isn’t satiated, and laid to rest with answers that are logical reasoned arguments, it’s OCD. Especially if you have OCD, you can pretty much be sure. And so I wanted to lay that all out my own journey because I felt that there’s probably a lot of people with this struggle. If a Christian, a believer, a follower of Christ has OCD, there’s a good chance that it’s going to go that direction and they’re in their life at some point, because OCD always goes after what’s most precious to you.

And for the Christian, their walk with Christ is the most precious thing of their entire existence. So it’s going to go there and I wanted people to understand they weren’t alone, but I also knew there were a lot of people like me who got all the way to 50 or 25 or 30, 40, whatever and didn’t even know that that’s what it was. I thought by sharing my story they could discover that the way I did and, and get directed towards the help they needed and that was important to me. The other aspect of it is the growth in it through that. Before I go there, I did want to add to what you said about ways that the church can support people with these issues, these different kinds of anxiety, all mental health issues as far as that goes. 

I think the number one thing they do is listen and then validate the experience as a real affliction not merely a spiritual issue that can be fixed by more prayer, more Bible study, more faith but to literally be willing to support people and say, “Hey, this is a real medical or mental health issue for which you can get help. We want to encourage you towards going to your doctor and starting that process. We want to encourage you that if they say you should see the specialist to go ahead and do that.

We want to encourage you that if they suggest medication might be helpful to you, by all means, please, please do that because it’s so harmful to say things, like it’s a lack of faith and taking medication, means that you aren’t trusting in God and all the things that you can.

And it’s so harmful and I don’t even know how to describe what I’m trying to say. It puts up such a roadblock.

Carrie: It just makes the problem worse. 

Mitzi: Yeah and it hurts people. It’s important for churches to be able to be compassionate, pray for the person with a mental health issue, and the same exact way you pray for anybody who has any other type of health issue. Treat them the same, validate instead of turning it into a spiritual issue. I wanted to say that this is what the church needs to do. 

Carrie: Yeah. I think that that’s so important and so helpful because we have this ability to rally around people who have just had a baby in the church. We’re really good at that. We can bring you a casserole and we’re really good at rallying around somebody that’s going through cancer or has lost a loved one but then when it comes to something that’s invisible, like an anxiety disorder or OCD, almost like people don’t know what to do with that.

Mitzi: Yes. They either don’t know what to do with it or they’ve kind of bought into the stigma and I’ve tried to kind of sort that out. I don’t know all the reasons people don’t believe in the validity of mental health issues but I suspect that part of the reason might be just a fear of my total health issues because of when I was really young and I was first starting to experience these mental health issues to the point where they were debilitating, all I could think of was I’m going to get locked up in asylum. So there’s these visions and pictures that people have of what it’s like or what people are who are crazy, that sort of thing.

So there’s fear around stigma of what it is to struggle with any kind of mental health issue and it said because there’s so much help out there. There’s so many people in the churches that are sitting in the pews who have mental health issues and you won’t even do that. 

Carrie: Absolutely, that’s huge. So as we’re getting towards the end here at the end of every show, I like to ask the guests to share a story of hope since this is called Hope for Anxiety and OCD. So this is the time that you’ve received hope from God or another person. 

Mitzi: Okay, there’s lots of stories I could tell. There’s been so many things and I get notes from people all the time about how the book has led to them for the first time discovering this is what’s wrong and finally getting the help they needed. So that’s how God’s used my experience where you comfort one another with the same comfort you yourself have received from God, which has been very humbling to me. For me, I don’t even remember how I knew to read this book, but I picked up a book by a person called John Bunyan that he wrote in 1666 and it’s called “Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners.” Mr. Bunyan’s story resonated with mine in ways I could not have believed. As I read this book about his experiences, really what he had was OCD scrupulosity. When you read this book, it is just absolutely eye-opening and the struggles that back and forth.

That’s how it debilitated him, how it crippled him, how he would be trying to even preach later on a sermon and the intrusive thoughts would just be blaring in his head and he was so terrified they were going to come out of his mouth right while he was preaching and it just crippled him. He tells this whole thing and it’s so interesting to read because it’s like that’s what it was like for me. At the end of his account, in this book, he says, he admits that this thing was an affliction that God had allowed in his life. It was an affliction. The very next thing he says is God, I’ll use his language, “God Duff order it for my good” and then he gives this list of all the ways God had used this to grow him and his faith. Even his account of how he learned to just accept the uncertainty of the thoughts and to press on in his choice to venture all for the sake of Jesus Christ was ACT basically.

This is amazing. I’m thinking God knew that I was going to read that book. He wrote it in 1666. God knew when I read that book, John Bunyan’s story was going to encourage me and it would show me something. It would show me that this affliction has a purpose. The last chapter of my book, I share the purpose in my own life.

That chapter is called Purposeful Affliction. One of the biggest ways I’ve changed in how I talk about my anxiety disorders and in my OCD in particular, as I used to kind of go along and say, “well, I have OCD, but God can still use me in spite of it.” That’s kind of how I worded it. Now I say, I have OCD and God is able to use me because of it. That’s because of the ways He’s grown me through this experience of affliction. That’s not uncommon. God, Paul talked about it, talked about a storm in the flesh. God said to me, my grace is sufficient for you. My strength is perfected in your weakness.

Paul ends up saying, I’m going to glory in this affliction because of this because when I’m weak, I’m depending on God’s strength and not my own. God uses these things in ways, perseverance, and empathy. The things that I learned through my OCD in particular, in my OCD scrupulosity is just amazing but reading that book that was just literally a godsend. And you think about it, they didn’t even know what OCD was back then, but God laid it on John Bunyan’s heart to write about it and so 1666, 150 years old. Here we are and I’m like reading this book and I’m like, “this is amazing.”

It just shows that OCD has been around for a really long time. It’s not a new thing. It’s just that we now understand you know what it is and there’s help and there’s hope, and everyone who is struggling with this, I just want them to have the chance to understand what it is and how to get help especially for my brothers and sisters in Christ. 

Carrie: Right. Your story and what you’re doing and just being vocal and open about being a very strong Christian who has also had a struggle in an affliction, I think it’s so hopeful to other people. Hopefully, who will hear this podcast, but what we’re talking about with church leaders that such my passion and desire is that people would just get however they get it, whether they’re getting it through listening to a podcast or reading your blog or talking to somebody with a personal struggle. I just want people to be able to sit with people in pain and say, “We’re here for you.”

Mitzi:  Yes. It’s so huge. It is so important and it’s important to understand that it’s painful. Like you called it invisible and it is. I would still get up every day, go through the motions like a robot. Sometimes I would fix my hair. I would put on my makeup. It was difficult to go out when I was really, really sick, but I still did it. I would sit in church and be tortured because of my OCD, but I would sit there and sometimes I’d want to run out, but you can’t see it. It is really debilitating.

The only way you could see it on me was I would get really skinny. I would get quieter. I would withdraw. I probably didn’t smile and laugh much. Those kinds of things but it’s very painful. For me definitely has been the thing that caused the most pain in my life and the most long-lasting because it can just hang on and hang on. I went through one whole pregnancy with it and then in between, and then another whole pregnancy. I still had the same thing going on. That’s how long it can hang up. 

Carrie: If people want to dive in and read your whole story, will you tell us the name of the book? I will put a link to it in the show notes as well. 

Mitzi: Sure. The name of the book is “Strivings Within-The OCD Christian” and you can find it on Amazon. If you just write that in and even my name, you can look at my name, it’s VAnCleve. That’s the main book I have out there. I do have another book.  We’ve talked about as far as OCD today necessarily, but it’s a direction, another direction up and going, and it’s a fictional book with a little bit of my experience mixed in as a teen. That was about what it was like to have social anxiety and it’s written in a fictional form and that one’s called, “That’s in Your Dreams. That’s the name of that one. That’s all also on Amazon, but it’s kind of a nice book for teens who struggle with that type of anxiety, social anxiety. It might be relatable to them in a story form. It’s just a story about a girl trying to go to high school and trying to fit in, be normal and the social anxiety is always shoving her back down. And so I want to try to work on those kinds of things too for teens, but I haven’t been very dedicated with that.

Carrie: Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story.

Mitzi: Thank you, Carrie. I appreciate the opportunity, anytime. I can share not because of what it does for me, but what I hope it might do for someone else who’s looking for answers, looking for hope, looking for someone who can relate to what they’re going through. And also like you said, for the church and for pastors and people in leadership positions to understand better what these disorders are, what they’re like, and how they can help. So thank you. 

Carrie: Ever since I did this interview with Mitzi, I have been really pondering this idea of growth through affliction in our lives. I hope that you chew on that one for a little bit too because there are so many different things that God uses that are hard to go through and yet they grow us closer to him. They grow us closer to other people and they shape our character in ways that we might never have received had we not gone through those difficulties.

I hope that this podcast has encouraged you. If it has, will you do me a big favor and tell a friend. There’s probably someone in your circle of influence who needs messages that will help them reduce shame and increase hope and that’s what we’re all about on the show. Thank you so much for taking the time to listen 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 completed by Benjamin Bynam.  Until next time.  May you be comforted by God’s great love for you.

10 Ways to Have a Calmer Mind and Body in 5 Minutes or Less

12. 10 Ways to Have a Calmer Mind and Body in 5 Minutes or Less

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 12. 10 Ways to Have a Calmer Mind and Body in 5 Minutes or Less

Are you looking for simple ways to relax and calm down? Often people use things like taking a bath to relax. That’s great, but you don’t always have that much time. Here are some go to strategies that you can use no matter where you are. No extra items or props needed! 

  1. Acknowledge the presence of God or Jesus
  2. Gratitude
  3. Spend time with an animal or at least think about them
  4. Connect with your breath
  5. Sing a song- For more info, see episode 6 with Tim Ringold.
  6. Think about the most loving and supportive person in your life right now
  7. Think about the absolute worst case scenario 
  8. Find the calmest part of your body
  9. Connect with the present moment
  10. Find your happy place

More Podcast Episodes

Transcript of Episode 12

Welcome to Hope for Anxiety And OCD Episode 12. We are all about reducing shame, increasing hope, and developing healthier connections with God and others. 

I am so glad that you are listening today. We’re going to be talking about 10 ways to have a calmer mind and body in five minutes or less. Yes, this is possible. Sometimes people feel like they need a long time in order to calm down like I need to go take an hour bubble bath. That’s awesome. Sometimes you’re able to do things like that, but sometimes you have five minutes before you walk into your dentist appointment and you’re super nervous about your tooth extraction. 

You don’t always have a lot of time to relax. So I want to teach you some quick, relatively easy-to-implement ideas also that you can do anywhere.

You don’t need any special equipment for these. I also know that these exercises work. They’ve been tested, they’re tried, and true. I use them with clients on a regular basis. What I will say is that all of these may not resonate with you, and that’s totally okay. If you can find one or two that you really resonate with and feel confident in being able to utilize, practice those. The more that you’re able to utilize these strategies when you don’t need them the more likely you’re able to have that in mind or online when you actually do need them. You’re going to want to connect with these exercises in a whole-body experience type of way. What I mean by that is mentally, emotionally, and physically. 

Too many times, we just try to change how we think about something. We do this in the church all the time and it drives me a little bit batty because people are like, “okay, well you believe God doesn’t love you.” I mean, the scripture says he does. So just change that in your brain and move forward. It’s a lot more complicated than that. We’re not just one-dimensional. If we just try to change our thinking, we haven’t tapped into the other God-given aspects of our self. Occasionally one of these activities may take you to a negative place. So if for any reason it does, just tap out and use a different one.

The 10 ways to have a calmer mind and body in five minutes or less.

Number one. Acknowledging the presence of God or Jesus.

This may or may not be helpful for you depending on your view of God right now, and how you feel about him, or you may be experiencing obsessions that get in the way with this activity. 

Oftentimes, if people have a hard time connecting to God, they can connect to Jesus. I believe the reason for this is because we know that Jesus experienced the same struggles on earth in relationships that we experience, things like rejection, betrayal, temptation.

He had all access and authority in the spiritual realm. At the same time, He fully understood what it was like to be human. We know from a logical place that God is always with us in Matthew 28, 20 Jesus said, “And surely I am with you always to the very end of the age.” What does that mean for you right now? As you’re getting ready in the morning, driving to work, or sitting in the pickup line at your kid’s school. 

What does it feel like to notice that you’re not alone and that God, Jesus is with you? Right now, is there a positive feeling or a physical sensation that you would connect with that? Just sit with that and notice that for a moment.

Number two. Gratitude. What are you thankful for today? I want you to stay away from generics. Don’t just say I’m thankful for my spouse or I’m thankful for my parents or my kids. See if you can make that specific. 

So today I’m thankful that my spouse jumps in and helps around the house as needed. You might say I’m thankful that I get to watch my kids excel in a particular area like music or sports.

What is something that you’re thankful for that happened today? 

Maybe you’d say I’m thankful that I didn’t get stuck in traffic when I had to make a long drive or I’m thankful that I got to have a conversation with a good friend.

Developing a regular gratitude practice will change your life even if you take a few minutes a day to jot on a calendar something very specific that you’re thankful for that day. I did this during a very sad and dark period of my life, and it really helped me get a different perspective. 

Number three. Spending time with an animal or if you can’t do that, at least thinking about them. Of course, if you have an animal at home, you can interact with them.

I talk to my cats all the time, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

If you don’t have animals, you can watch baby animal videos on YouTube or funny animal videos, and that can get you in a different headspace as well. 

I’ve found that even when clients don’t have an animal in session, they can bring up how their animal makes them feel. So think about what it’s like when your dog is right next to you.

What does it feel to stroke his fur? What kind of funny things does your dog do that really make you laugh? And as you think about your dog, how do you feel, and how does that make your body feel?

Number four. Connect with your breath. This may cause some distress if you have a hard time tuning in internally to yourself. Just start by noticing your breath without feeling any pressure to change it. After a little bit of time, see if you can make a shift in how you’re breathing. Maybe breathing out a little bit longer on your exhales, kind of slowly releasing the air. Trying to breathe from your diaphragm and not your chest.

Some people find it helps them to count every inhale or exhale so they have something to focus their mind on while they’re breathing. 

Number five. Sing a song. Notice I said, sing a song, not passively put music on in the background. 

As we learned from Tim Ringgold in episode 6, he talked about using music to help manage anxiety.

It’s better if you engage with the music in some way, such as singing along, tapping to the beat, or even singing in your head works as well. So if you’re in a crowd, you could just sing the lyrics in your head instead of out loud. This brings you into the present moment as you’re focusing and engaging with that music.  

Find a favorite song that puts you in a good mood every time that you listen to it.

Number six. Think about the most loving and supportive person in your life. 

You want to pick someone that you’re not in conflict with currently. Think about something they’ve done recently to show you that they loved you. 

How do they make you feel when you’re around them? What is it like to be in their presence?

Just see if you can receive some love from them as you bring them to mind.

Number seven. Think about the absolute worst-case scenario. 

I know this sounds counterintuitive because you may think that you think about the worst-case scenario all the time. But now I want you to play it all the way out to the end.

Let me give you an example. I’ve had several people be concerned about losing their job. So I will say something like, “okay, so if you lose your job, then what?” “Well, then I’d be unemployed.” “Okay. And then what? “Well, I’d have to go out and send out a lot of resumes and look for another job.” “And what if I don’t get a job right away?” “I might not be able to pay my bills.”

“Okay. And what would happen if you couldn’t pay your bills?” “Well, I would end up moving in with my mother who I have a hard time getting along with.” 

“And then what?” “Well, mom would just drive me absolutely insane, and I couldn’t live with her anymore. And I don’t know. I might end up on the streets.” 

As that scenario gets played out, either one of two things will happen. Either it will start to sound really ridiculous, like something that may have a very low likelihood of happening, or you may get to the end and say, “well, if that did happen, it’s pretty rough. I wouldn’t like it at all, but I think I could make it. I could manage it and get through.”

Number eight. Find the calmest part of your body. 

Usually, when I ask people to do this, they look at me really strangely because people aren’t used to finding the calmest part of their body. They’re used to finding the most distressed part of their body. So it may take you a little bit longer to figure out where that is, but it’s a good exercise for your brain.

The calmest part of your body does not have to be a large area. It can be as small as your pinky toe. As you start to focus on that calm area, sometimes it will reduce the distress in the other areas of your body that don’t feel as calm.

Number nine. Connect with the present moment. Oftentimes the present moment is not actually where the distress is. Distress with anxiety often comes from an imagined future outcome that’s negative. Therefore, when you’re anxious, you may be living in the future. 

When you bring yourself back to what’s actually happening right now, you’re typically okay. 

Let me give you an example, going back to the job example, let’s say that you’re anxious because you have a meeting with your boss in two days, and you are absolutely convinced that this meeting is where your boss is going to tell you that you’re being reprimanded or that you’re going to be fired. When you bring yourself back to the present moment, you notice that you’re sitting in your living room with your cat and everything is actually okay. 

Oftentimes, living in the future creates anxiety whereas living in the past creates shame or sadness, or other uncomfortable emotions. By learning to be in the present, this can reduce your overall distress. 

You may also look at “what do I know” and now you know that you’re employed now. You know that you’re doing the best that you can at your job. You know that God is going to take care of you and provide for your needs. You know that if you did get fired, it may take you a little while, but you’re going to eventually be able to get another job.

You can only control your behavior in this present moment. You can’t go back and change anything you did in the past, and you can’t control the future.

You can’t control other people’s behavior or what they’re going to do. Sometimes acknowledging that in itself can bring a certain level of relief.

Number 10.  Find your happy place. 

This can be a place that you go to all the time or can be a place that you enjoyed on vacation. The place itself doesn’t really matter as long as you can connect positive sensory experiences to it. 

I’m going to tell you about my happy place and describe it based on my senses as I experience it. My happy place is a park that’s in Nashville. There are beautiful trees along this wooded area. There’s a beautiful lake trail. You can go out on a pier and see the lake. It’s very quiet and peaceful out there. You may see birds flying. It smells like trees, grass, fresh air. There’s a cool breeze coming off the Lake and I think about walking with Steve there. Just enjoying his company. 

When you get really good at going to this place in your mind and bringing up the positive body sensations that you have associated with it, you can actually attach what we would call a cue word to it. This word is going to help prompt you to think of this place. The cue word could be anything associated with that place or how it makes you feel. I may decide that because the park causes me to feel peaceful when I’m there, then the word I’m associating with it is peace.

I hope that you’ve found the 10 ways to have a calmer mind and body in five minutes or less helpful to you.

I wanted to give you a secret on how you can get number 11. If you go to hopeforanxietyandocd.com and subscribe to our newsletter, I try to send out about one email a week, so it will not bombard you. I have a free relaxation audio that you can connect with. It’s another activity that I’ve used with clients that they’ve really enjoyed. I’ve even had people tell me that this relaxation activity helps them calm down when they started to experience a panic attack. You can also find other free and paid resources on our website to help you with anxiety and OCD.

I want to tell you about some of our future episodes that I am so excited about. We are going to be talking with a marriage and family therapist about how to help your anxious spouse.

I’m also going to be interviewing an author who’s a Christian to talk with her about her book on mindfulness. I have another solo episode which talks about how to find a therapist who is the right fit for you. 

I hope that you will hang in there with us and tune in for these episodes. Thank you so much for listening.

Hope for anxiety and OCD is a production of well counseling in Smyrna, Tennessee. Our original music is by Brandon Mangrum and audio editing is completed by Benjamin Bynam.  

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