Podcast Episode – Carrie Bock – By The Well Counseling

234. Clinging to God’s Promises When Life is Hard: Part 1 of My Testimony

Written by Carrie Bock on July 20, 2026. Posted in Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode.

In this episode, Carrie shares Part 1 of her personal testimony, revealing the truths God taught her during one of the darkest seasons of her life and why those lessons still shape her faith today.

Episode Highlights:

Why God’s promises became my anchor through divorce, grief, and unanswered prayers
How suffering exposed beliefs I didn’t realize I had about God’s character
What helped me keep trusting God when life didn’t unfold the way I expected
How counseling, community, and Scripture became part of God’s provision during heartbreak
Why God may be doing far more behind the scenes than you can see today

Episode Summary:

How Do You Hold Onto God’s Promises When Everything Around You Is Falling Apart?

There was a season when it felt like everything I had prayed and planned for was slipping through my fingers. My marriage was ending, the future I had imagined was disappearing, and I was left asking God questions I never thought I’d have to ask.

What carried me through wasn’t having all the answers. It was learning to anchor myself in God’s promises when my circumstances gave me every reason to doubt. Looking back, I can see how that season transformed not only my faith, but also the way I help others walk through suffering today.

Why Would God Allow Heartbreak After You’ve Tried to Follow Him Faithfully?

One of my biggest struggles wasn’t simply the pain. It was trying to understand how life could fall apart after I had sincerely tried to follow God. I had done what I believed He wanted me to do, yet I still found myself grieving a marriage, lost dreams, and prayers that seemed to go unanswered.

As painful as that season was, it uncovered beliefs I didn’t even realize I was holding about God’s goodness, His sovereignty, and what it really means to trust Him. Those lessons didn’t come quickly, but they changed my relationship with God in ways I never expected.

How Can You See God’s Provision When All You Notice Are Closed Doors?

In the middle of loss, it was easy to focus on everything that wasn’t happening. Foster care placements ended. Opportunities I desperately wanted never came together. Even simple decisions about my future felt overwhelming.

Years later, I can see that God was faithfully weaving together details I couldn’t recognize at the time. Some of the very things I questioned most became evidence of His protection, provision, and preparation for what was still ahead.

Where Does God Meet You When Grief Feels Too Heavy to Carry?

God didn’t meet me through one dramatic moment. He met me through counseling, faithful friends, Scripture that spoke to my heart in a new way, and countless reminders that He had not abandoned me.

Those ordinary moments became sacred. They reminded me that even when I couldn’t see what God was doing, He was still present, still working, and still inviting me to trust Him one day at a time.

Can God Redeem the Years That Feel Like They’ve Been Lost Forever?

There were seasons when I wondered if too much had already been lost. I questioned whether the years of heartbreak, waiting, disappointment, and uncertainty could ever have purpose.

Over time, God gently showed me that His story was far bigger than the one I had written for myself. Some of the promises I clung to in desperation eventually became reminders that He had been faithful all along, even when I couldn’t yet see where He was leading.

I hope you’ll listen to the full episode and hear how God met me in the middle of suffering, because my prayer is that you’ll be encouraged to keep trusting Him in the middle of your own story.

Transcript

Welcome, OCD warriors, to the Christian Faith and OCD podcast, where we are all about reducing shame and stigma of struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories and replacing uncertainty with faith as you develop practical tools for greater peace. I’m Carrie Bock, Christ follower, wife, mom, and licensed professional counselor in Tennessee.

I pray you are blessed by today’s episode. I’m gonna let you guys in on a little secret. The top fear of anyone wanting to start a podcast is running out of things to talk about. Certainly, when you’ve had over two hundred episodes, like I have, you think, “I’ve probably covered everything by now,” which, of course, is not true.

There are many things to talk about, but also many things that maybe have been covered that could be talked about again in a different way. And that’s a little bit of what today’s episode is about. I decided I’ve been interviewing so many amazing people discussing their OCD testimonies, and I thought, “You know what?

Why not create an episode of where I’m at right now and what God has brought me through?” Revelation twelve eleven says that we overcome by the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony. So this is my testimony to you today. I thought, “What is one thing that I could share with people that has made perhaps the biggest impact in my life when I was going through hard times?”

And one of those things has been really clinging to God’s promises. Many years ago, I was listening to sermons on the radio by Pastor James McDonald. He had a sermon series based on his book called Always True. I remember in the very early period in between when my first husband decided that he was gonna leave and when we actually got divorced, obviously, that was a very challenging time, and there was a lot of uncertainty about how things were gonna progress.

I was definitely praying really hard that he would come back to the marriage, that he would be willing to put in the work and for us to be able to work together towards redemption. But I remember listening to the sermon series about God’s promises, and I got ahold of the book, Always True. At that point in time, I made a decision to say, “I am going to put my faith into action.”

I’m not just gonna say, “Hey, I believe these things about God.” Now all of my weight is going into these promises. In order to make it, I had to believe that God had not left me. I had to believe that God was not done working in my life. I had to believe that He was gonna work all things together for good As Romans 8:28 promises, when I was going through the divorce process, I had an immense amount of spiritual confusion because in my mind, with my logic, I said, “God, I wasn’t perfect, but I did some of the right things.

I hit the right check boxes. I married a Christian man I met at church. I saved myself for marriage. I was praying, reading my Bible, attending church regularly, serving in the church, going to small group, going to the church marriage events, reading books on how to become a better spouse.” I felt like, “How could I have done all of these things and it still go so horribly wrong?”

I followed the formula that everybody told me to follow. I did the things. We became foster parents. We were looking to adopt, believing that was what God wanted us to do in order to build our family. Now, I can look back and really see God’s hand and God’s providence in a way that I didn’t at the time.

When we were in the process of trying to adopt from foster care, we would keep getting these placements where DCS believed this one isn’t gonna go back, or their parents aren’t gonna do what they need to do, or they’re probably gonna end up needing to be adopted at some point or another, and that’s why they would place those particular children in our house.

And repeatedly, something would happen. DCS would lose in court. That actually happened on more than one occasion that I can think of, or the case would just not go the way that they had anticipated. Initially, when we lost our first foster placement of two girls, that one still to this day bothers me to think about and talk about.

I’ve done a lot of healing. I’ve done a lot of therapy around this. It was just tough because I thought, “You know, God, I’m not gonna understand this. I’m not gonna understand why you would bring these children into our lives to be able to love them as our own children, and then for them to be ripped away on a technicality and potentially go back into an environment where it wasn’t known if they were gonna be taken care of well or not.”

At the time, it felt like God was cruel. Really, I think I had that belief, and I just wanna say that very honestly. Like, all of our friends around us, they’re getting foster care placements, and they’re adopting their first placement. That happened to multiple friends that we knew, and for us, it just seems like they keep going back and keep going back.

And I thought, “Why in the world, God, are you allowing this? And now Of course, when I look back, I’m, like, thankful, and I see God’s mercy in that, that He foresaw and knew ahead of time the decisions that my first husband was gonna make, and was really saved from further heartache. Unfortunately, we did have two children at the time that he made the decision to leave, and there was no way that I could support them financially, physically, emotionally on my own.

My work schedule at the time was not conducive to single parenting at all. So I literally went from being– living as a family of four to now I have a house by myself, having to figure out, “How do I pay this mortgage, and how do I make life work?” Clearly, I wasn’t in a emotionally healthy headspace to make decisions at all, but they had to be made.

And one of the major decisions was, do I stay in Tennessee? Do I try to move home to Florida? Do I hang out with my parents for a while and see if I can get a job down there? What do I do? Do I sell my house and move into an apartment? Do I get roommates? God was just so gracious to me during that time that as I was looking at apartment options, I felt very strongly that it didn’t make any sense for me to sell the house and go into an apartment.

If I could just get a roommate or two, if I could do some refinancing, which I had to do anyway to get it in my name, that I could figure out a way to keep the house. When I prayed about it, I remember asking God, “Is it greedy for me to want to keep this house? And if it is, if I’m only keeping it out of greed, I don’t wanna do that.

I wanna be willing to lay it down and to let it go.” But I had already lost so much, and what God showed me in the process of praying about my heart and just the condition there was God showed me that I wanted to stay there because I felt safe there. I kinda knew what I was getting into ’cause I had lived in the neighborhood for several years at that point, and that was just a beautiful thing for me to feel peace about keeping the house, to say, “Yeah, if I move into an apartment, I don’t know if it will be safe or not.

I’ve haven’t lived there before. But here, I know the neighborhood, and I know the people next to me, and it’s a safe place to be.” As a single woman, I think it’s obviously very huge to feel safe in your own home, and I just so appreciate God guiding me and leading me in that direction to keep the house.

And also, just providing me with some roommates, even though I didn’t have the best experience ever with roommates, I also didn’t have the worst experience ever. Could’ve been a lot worse. I learned a ton from it. Definitely, if I had to have a roommate again, I would probably do some things differently, but like I said, God was just faithful, and I just see His provision through that whole process, that He blessed me by providing other people to live in my house.

But it was also, hopefully, a blessing to them as well to be in a safe neighborhood, to not have to be in apartment, to be able to go outside and hang on the back deck if they wanted to. God provided me with an incredible support system to get through this very hard time. God, I was already seeing a counselor.

I knew that things were not great in the marriage, although I didn’t know that he was interested in leaving I did know that he wasn’t interested in going to counseling with me, so I had gone myself and thought, “Well, maybe if I can work on me and work on communication from my end, maybe things will improve.”

So I went to counseling that first time after he told me he wanted to leave, and I know that the counselor just read it all over my face that things were not well at all. But I was thankful to God that I had that support system already in place, and I didn’t have to, on top of very stressful experience, now go try out counselors or find somebody that was gonna be the right fit to help walk me through that.

And I went to counseling weekly for probably two years at least. Was so beneficial to me through that period just to have a sounding board, to have somebody else who could help me navigate all of the different things that I was navigating and the emotional impact of some things that I hadn’t processed yet that had happened to me through that period.

I had had a very stressful, toxic work environment where they were, for whatever reason, vacillating between they loved me one week, and then next week they were writing me up and threatening to fire me, and I mean, it was literally that drastic, and that was just awful and toxic. I think it had a effect on my physical body, and it’s actually disgusting that those types of work conditions occur in the mental health field.

But unfortunately, I have heard from many other counselors about toxic work environments. There were certain criteria and things that we had to do and had to meet, some of which was completely outside of my control. I’d never worked in an, any type of work environment like that. There were so– There was processing of that happened in counseling, processing the grief of losing my foster children, losing my marriage.

Basically dreams that I felt like somebody might as well have lit a match and burned down the forest of my dreams, like it was just gone. Here I am, I’m like, “Okay.” My fertility is, like, clicking away day by day here. In my 30s, I’m not getting any younger, and I just share that ’cause I know so many people that I’ve talked to feel very similar, whether you had a broken engagement or a breakup, or you just have really struggled in dating.

Like, just know God still loves you and still sees you and cares about you, and He’s fully aware of your fertility, like, more than you are. There was a song on the radio at the time, and it was played a lot, called I Am Not Alone by Kari Jobe. It basically says, “You will go before me, and you will never leave me,” and that was really clinging to that promise of God has not left me.

Like, my husband that was here on earth, he’s left me, but God never left me, even though I didn’t understand how all of this could have happened to me. There was one time in counseling where my counselor said, “Do you think that your husband left you first or left God first?” And I was very easily able to say, like, “No, he walked away from God first,” and that’s how we ended up separated.

I think that provided me with a certain level of comfort. This period of time, God really showed me how sovereign He was because I had to come to terms with understanding that God’s sovereignty covers other people’s sins, that even if someone sins against you, whether that’s a parent, a spouse, a friend, whoever that is, that’s not gonna derail God’s plan for your life.

God still has good plans for you. He still cares about you. And also, that even, like, our own screw-ups and mess-ups and regrets, God is still sovereign over the sins of other people as well as our own sins. It’s really complicated. We can’t understand it on a human level. Don’t try to fully wrap your mind around that one But I know that I had to deal with a lot of regrets that I felt were things that I felt I should have done differently in the marriage.

I would lay up at night and be like, “Okay, well, maybe I should have asked to go to marriage counseling earlier,” or, “Maybe I should have done this differently. Maybe I never should have done that.” Or it could have been just the littlest things, and I questioned everything, like, where was the exact point that this went wrong?

If only I had done this, then maybe I could have saved my marriage. The reality is I just had to trust that God was in control and that He knew, that this didn’t catch Him by surprise. I got into a DivorceCare support group, and there were emails that you could receive from the DivorceCare folks. You would get an email a day for an entire year, and those were just sources of encouragement.

I needed people who had been there before I needed people who were devastated by divorce and felt like they couldn’t make their way back, but had survived and made it. I needed somebody that had the guide, and unfortunately, I had a lot of people in my life that had experienced divorce before, and it was like, “Oh, it was a good thing for them,” you know, was the message.

Like, I remember somebody at work being like, “Oh, that was just your starter marriage,” and I was like, “What in the world?” Like, we don’t have the same views on marriage. And even some other Christians that I knew, they were like, “Oh yeah, my ex-husband this or that,” and they were like, “Well, I married the wrong person,” or, “It didn’t work out,” and they didn’t have the same level of devastation that I had.

But when I got in this DivorceCare support group, there were a few other women that were in the exact same boat that I was in. They had not had children, but wanted to have children. Most of them had been left by their partner. They weren’t the ones that initiated the divorce. They didn’t want the divorce.

They felt like a lot of their dreams had died in that process. These were the people that I was like, “They get it.” Like, they understand. The leaders of that DivorceCare group were really helpful because they had some time and space away from their divorce and were actually able to see how God worked in a positive way through it coming out in the end.

It was helpful to hear some of their stories and their encouragement and knowing, like, how much they cared about us. One thing that was interesting about going through DivorceCare was I was so ashamed of my divorce that I was like, “Oh, gosh, this is a scarlet letter on me for the rest of my life. I’m a bad Christian because I got divorced.

Here I am, I’m a pastor’s kid with a divorce on my record.” I mean, just so much shame. I couldn’t even go to DivorceCare at my own church. My church had DivorceCare, and I went somewhere else. I went to another church where nobody would know me because I just needed to pop in there and be anonymous. And I think even that decision, like, I thought, “Oh, I’m making this decision,” but I can just see how God even directed those steps so that I would meet the people that I met that I might not have met at my church, even though I could have had a positive experience there.

Oftentimes, when you’re going through something and you’re in the middle of it and you’re in the thick of it, you’re really blinded to God’s goodness in your life. And so if you’re going through a hard time right now, I just want you to stop and look around and find anything that’s good that you can cling and hold onto.

There was a day where I read James 1:17, and it said, “Every good and perfect gift is from above.” And that changed my life, that verse, recognizing that. And I was going through some depression ’cause of everything that was happening. I got on Prozac for the first time in my life and just made the decision that I needed to function, and that it didn’t mean I had to be on an antidepressant forever, but that I was going to take The help that was available to me, and that was something that was recommended by my counselor, but I had already been thinking about it ahead of time.

And I just looked out and I was like, “Okay, what’s good about today? It’s sunny. It hasn’t been sunny in a few days. That’s good. That’s a gift from God. Thank you, God. I am driving a car that I have to get to and from work. Thank you, God.” It didn’t matter that the car was barely past emissions. I’m like praying, “Dear God, please let the check engine light go off this car so that it will pass emissions.”

I don’t know what happened, but God answered that prayer. I think it may have had to do with some weather changes, but thank you, Lord, my car passed emissions. We don’t have that anymore in, in Middle Tennessee, but my car passed, so I didn’t have to get further repairs on it. It was some glitch with the light anyway.

I can look back now and see God’s grace. The year that my divorce was finalized, I got out of the toxic job. God opened up a door just very randomly. I did not know this guy. I saw an ad that he placed that he was looking for counselors to join his group practice. I stayed with him a couple years before starting my own practice.

That was just a gift from God at that time, and I don’t even know that I fully recognized it because I was working so hard since I was starting out and I didn’t have a full caseload of clients or anything of that nature. It takes you time to get on insurance. There’s all these things that had to happen for me to get set up and established.

I had the most random income streams ever. I was combing lice out of kids’ hair. I was grocery shopping for people. This was way before COVID, before Walmart had delivery and Kroger had delivery and all that. You didn’t have all that. It was Shipt, that was it, and you had Shipt that you could get for Publix orders initially.

That was, I think, all you could get was Publix. And so I learned how to fly through Publix pretty quickly, put a bunch of groceries in the cart that people wanted, and deliver them to their house. And everybody was like, “What is this Shipt thing?” ‘Cause they would see me in a store with my shirt, like, “What is that about?”

Of course, no one knew at the time that COVID was gonna happen several years later and the whole thing was gonna explode and a slew of people would be getting their groceries delivered. One day very early on, I was wrestling with this fact that I was leaving a job, a W2 job, where I had paid time off, I had benefits.

It was scary because I had the consistent income and now I was gonna be fully self-employed. I went to do the grocery delivery and I was– I delivered like 12 orders that day. Ended up just at the end of the day going to a mall. I was in a department store and there was… Looking at jewelry. I don’t even know why I was in here doing this.

I think it was just one of those things where you don’t quite wanna go home yet because you know home’s gonna be empty and nobody’s gonna be there. Except for you and the cats. And I found this ring, and on the ring, this was not a Christian store by any means, it was like a normal department store, and it said, “If God brings you to it, He will see you through it.”

Every time I would look at that ring, whether I was combing lice out of kids’ hair, whether I was delivering groceries, whether I was getting ready to sit down and meet with a client, I was reminded that God is with me in this hard season. He’s gonna get me through this. Philippians 1:6 is an incredible verse because it says, “He who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete it.”

If you’re going through a hard time right now, even if it’s a hard time that you feel like you caused because of your own sin or your own mistakes, just know that God is not done with you yet. I know that some of you are wrestling with things like, is God good? Can I trust Him? Does He really love me?

Does He see me? Does He care about my plight? Does He wanna heal me? Does He want to restore me? These were all things that I had to learn through the hard season of suffering. It was there that God met me in a deep and powerful way and ministered to my soul in ways that I couldn’t even explain.

Suffering will– really has the potential to change your theology for the good. Another verse that I clung onto was Joel two twenty-five, which says, “I will restore the years the locusts have eaten.” I felt like years had been stolen from me, years where I could have had a child or had been parenting children, years where I wish that my career path had gone differently at the time.

When I was in this toxic job, I just couldn’t understand why God was not releasing me from that, why He would not open up other doors for me. What I can tell you now is that God was preparing me. God was preparing me for working with really challenging individuals that had a lot of complex issues going on.

I wouldn’t feel the confidence and the comfort that I do in handling certain client situations had I not had all of that experience of working with really challenging children and adolescents. As hard as it was, it was the best school for me. I also had access to some incredible trainings during that time.

I was able to get trained in EMDR for pretty cheap. I think that my work may have paid part of it for one thing that I went to. I can’t remember. But I know that I did not pay the full amount. I may have gotten some type of scholarship or something to go. So while it was incredibly hard, there were blessings on the other side of it.

There have been so many times in prayer where I’ve gone to the Lord and just been like, “I don’t understand, God. Why can’t you just give me this one thing that I want?” Whatever that thing is, it’s not a bad thing. It’s not bad for me to wanna be out of a toxic job environment. It’s not bad for me to want to be a mom.

It’s not bad for me to want to no longer be a single person and find someone to join my life with who’s gonna understand where I’ve been. Like, I don’t get it. Why won’t you just give me the thing? What I’ve learned over time and experience is that God cares enough about us to give us what we need, not always what we want, ’cause those are two different things.

My daughter will come to me sometimes, and the thing that she wants at that moment, whether it’s to stay up later, whether it’s to eat pure sugar instead of her dinner, whether it’s to skip out on a bath that she desperately needs ’cause she’s dirty Like what she wants isn’t always what’s best for her.

There are times where I just need her to trust that I know what’s best for her and that I love her, and that I’m not withholding any good thing from her, that if I’m not allowing her to have something, that there is a reason for it. I can see that now with God so much more than I could when I was a younger Christian.

I just didn’t get it. I believed a lot of lies of the enemy, just to be honest with you. I believed lies that maybe God was unhappy with me, maybe I wasn’t living up to His standards, and that’s why these things were going wrong in my life, or that’s why I was experiencing this suffering. I thought, “Yeah, I know that God loves me,” but I didn’t always trust that He had good for me or that He had my best interests at heart Four years later, I met my husband now, Steve.

I can honestly say God knew exactly what I needed. He did restore the years the locust had eaten. We got married in late 2020, got pregnant in ’21, and had our daughter, Faith, in 2022. I’m going to take some more time next week to share part two of my testimony. That’s probably the part of the testimony that more of you are familiar with.

Next week, I will start you off with some pregnancy complications and then probably the craziest year of our lives with so many different things happening right after Faith was born. I don’t know where you are on your OCD journey. If you feel like you are in a mess right now and don’t feel like you’re ever gonna be able to get out of it.

When you’re in the middle of a really hard season, you feel like it’s always gonna be this way, and you just wonder if there’s ever a light coming at the end of the tunnel. And part of the reason we do this podcast is just to give people hope. That’s just a huge mission behind the show. I also want you to know that the devil is a really good liar.

That’s about the only thing he’s really good at, and we are here to promote the truth of God’s character in scripture, that the devil causes people with OCD to doubt. Even people obviously don’t have OCD still struggle with lies, as I shared just throughout my testimony of different times where I felt like God didn’t care deeply about what I was going through or God seemed to be putting me through things that were cruel.

I wanna wrap this up by just letting you know that you can trust the promises of God, that He’s never gonna leave you or forsake you, that He loves you regardless of your past or present, what’s going on, regardless of your sins. He’s faithful to forgive. God has not given up on you. He’s gonna finish the good work that He started to make you more like Jesus.

If you are a follower of Christ Whatever suffering you’re experiencing right now, God promises that He’s gonna use that for good. I know it looks bad. You’re thinking there’s no way anything possibly good could come out of this, but I am living proof to tell you that God has used my sufferings for good.

And so I know that if He has used these things for good, that He can use them for good in your life. It doesn’t mean that you have to go on tour with your testimony of OCD recovery. But what it does mean is that God may be using this in your life right now to shape your character, to cause you to be a more compassionate person, to cause you to be more dependent on Him, to shift your life in a direction that maybe it wouldn’t have gone before had you not had OCD.

I don’t know. Maybe there’s people that you’re supposed to encounter. I don’t know for your particular story. I just know that God is working behind the scenes, and He’s weaving something good and beautiful, even if you can’t see it right now. So stay hopeful, be encouraged. God loves you, and I’m so glad that you’ve hopped on to listen to this podcast today.

If you enjoyed hearing some of these personal stories, definitely sign up for our newsletter because they get first dibs on all the stuff that’s happening in the Bock world, just little insights and devotional pieces that I feel like things that God is showing me and that I wanna pass along to you guys.

So definitely go to carriebock.com and sign up for our weekly newsletter. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you. Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area.

233. When Health Issues, OCD, and Faith Collide: A Personal Story with Whitney Paige

Written by Carrie Bock on July 15, 2026. Posted in OCD, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode.

In this episode, Carrie sits down with Whitney Paige to share how her journey through OCD, scrupulosity, chronic illness, and spiritual struggle reshaped her understanding of God’s love and faithfulness.

Episode Highlights:

Why chasing certainty often keeps Christians stuck in the OCD cycle.
The connection between chronic illness and mental health.
Practical ways to anchor your faith when your feelings tell a different story.
What scrupulosity can distort about God’s character and His love for you.
The role of community, treatment, and biblical truth in finding lasting hope.
Whitney’s award-winning book, By His Stripes, and how her testimony is encouraging Christians to trust God through OCD, chronic illness, and seasons of suffering.

Episode Summary:

How Can One Story Bring Hope to Christians Struggling With OCD?

I’m so excited for you to hear Whitney Paige’s story. Whitney is an author, OCD advocate, and the recipient of the 2026 Georgia Independent Author of the Year award for her book, By His Stripes. She joins me to share her personal journey through OCD, scrupulosity, chronic illness, and the spiritual questions that shaped her faith. If you’ve ever wondered whether God is still with you in the middle of suffering, I believe Whitney’s testimony will encourage you to keep holding on to hope.

Why Do So Many Christians With OCD Feel Like God Is Punishing Them?

One of the biggest struggles Whitney faced was believing her suffering meant God was disappointed in her. No matter how much she prayed, read Scripture, or worshiped, she never felt like she was right with Him. As we talk through her story, you’ll hear how scrupulosity distorted her view of God’s character and what began to change as she learned to trust His truth instead of her feelings.

How Are Chronic Illness and OCD Connected?

Whitney openly shares how living with chronic illness affected her OCD and anxiety, creating an exhausting cycle of physical pain, fear, and emotional fatigue. Our conversation explores how physical and mental health often influence one another, while offering encouragement for anyone carrying both burdens. Even when healing feels slow, there is still hope for the journey ahead.

What Happens When You Stop Chasing Certainty and Start Trusting God?

One of the themes that runs throughout Whitney’s story is the search for certainty. Like so many people with OCD, she wanted answers that simply weren’t available. We talk about what began to change when she stopped trying to solve every unanswered question and started placing her trust in the unchanging character of God instead.

How Can God Use OCD and Suffering to Encourage Someone Else?

Whitney didn’t wait until she had everything figured out before sharing her story. She wrote By His Stripes while still walking through her own healing journey because she wanted others to know they weren’t alone. Her testimony is a beautiful reminder that God often uses our greatest struggles to strengthen someone else’s faith and point them toward His hope.

Connect with Whitney Paige:

www.whitneypaigeco.com

Check out Whitney Paige’s book By His Stripes:

www.whitneypaigeco.com/author

Transcript

Christian Faith and OCD Episode 233

Carrie: Welcome, OCD warriors, to the Christian Faith and OCD podcast, where we are all about reducing shame and stigma of struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories and replacing uncertainty with faith as you develop practical tools for greater peace.

I’m Carrie Bock, Christ follower, wife, mom, and licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. I pray you are blessed by today’s episode. Welcome back, everyone, to our personal story summer series. Today, we have a special guest. Whitney Paige is an author. She is a graphic designer and an outdoor enthusiast.

She is here to talk about her book, By His Stripes: Navigating Life With Mental And Physical Suffering. I have it right here. Whitney just found out that she has been honored as the Georgia Independent Author of the Year in twenty twenty-six. Congratulations. That’s exciting.

Whitney: And thank you so much for having me.

Carrie: Yeah. And you’re also an advocate with the International OCD Foundation. Is that correct?

Whitney: Yes. And I’m on the OCD Georgia board as well.

Carrie: Oh, awesome. Why did you decide to write a book about your experience, this navigation of mental and physical suffering?

Whitney: Yeah. I kinda just wrote the book that I wish I had when I was in the deep pit.

I really longed to hear from somebody that experienced something that I was experiencing. I genuinely thought I was the only one going through what I was going through with such torment. So a really simple goal, I wrote this book just to help one person feel less alone, then it would be worth it. It was a hard process, but sharing my story was a way to offer hope and give, like, a purpose to my pain.

Carrie: Yeah. That’s huge. You talk in your book about, like, the physical health struggles that you were dealing with, IBS. You also had some chronic pain issues that– that were very intense. Like, how did those two things play off of each other, like, the physical health affecting the mental health and the mental health affecting the physical health?

Whitney: That’s a great question. I feel like it’s kind of like an endless loop a little bit.

Carrie: Yeah. I

Whitney: also happen to have both physical and mental health challenges that connect the brain gut. I really feel like that significant connection, and I feel like I’m kind of a brick wall sometimes because my OCD, anxiety and depression, that often worsens my stomach pain, my fatigue.

I often found that when I’m in a OCD spiral or a depressive episode being super fatigued, that it really is a struggle to fight the OCD and fight depression and just because you’re just so mentally fatigued that you just don’t have anything. You can’t really recall all your toolboxes that you have and all that kind of stuff.

And that’s, again, why I’m thankful for my book ’cause I have a physical resource I could look back on when I’m having those episodes. But it makes it hard to manage the symptoms when you’re super fatigued and you have all All these health issues, and I think that it’s very challenging to determine what is causing what, and that’s a hole that I know now not to go down because I wanna figure it out, and I wanna know, is it my physical symptoms that are acting up, or is it my mental symptoms that are acting up?

But really, I’ve had to kind of lay that down and surrender and just not try to find any of the answers, just move forward anyway.

Carrie: What kind of OCD themes have you struggled with?

Whitney: That’s a long list. But I will say, kinda sums it up, and most of my OCD is invisible, and I’ll talk about that. Really, a lot of mental compulsions on a lot of various topics.

Scrupulosity is one main one, attacks my faith. Just constantly analyzing how I feel, if I’m not saved, not being right with the Lord. That’s kind of a big one. Another one is my brain anticipates and replays, like, violent accidents or events that haven’t happened, but I think that they are gonna happen to my loved ones.

Often, that’s referred to as harm OCD. I have kind of another one that I really deal with a lot, but I don’t really talk about it a lot, is existential OCD. It’s really like I’m just trapped in my brain about just distressing questions about what’s the meaning of life, what’s the meaning of this existence, kind of thing like that.

And then health OCD is really a big one for me. I think it might have come from all the things that I’ve dealt with, but again, I can’t go down that road and figure that out. But I do know that I struggled with a lot of health issues in the past, and I do have that consumed fear of when every symptom hits or what if this headache is a brain tumor, or what if the doctor’s missing something, or just kind of constant kinda health stuff for me.

Carrie: I can see how that would be easy to go down based on your own personal experience, where the doctors would run these tests and they’re like, “Ugh, I don’t know,” like, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you,” or, “Well, you’re having this symptom, but that’s really rare,” or something like that, or, “It’s not seen in people your age,” that type of stuff.

Tell us, kinda like tie that in a little bit to the zebra theme behind your book. So your book has a zebra on it. Tell us a little bit about that. I enjoyed that piece of the process.

Whitney: Awesome. Thank you. The zebra. I’m not gonna share everything ’cause you gotta read the book. Throughout my book, I kinda relate my story to a zebra.

Each chapter, I kinda bring it back to the zebra’s experience and bringing it back to what I experience and how they’re similar. At the end of the book, I kinda describe why zebras are so important to me and how they’ve kind of shaped my life. I literally– like, the Lord gave me By His Stripes as a title, and one of my dear friends, we were sitting, just talking about a book and just thinking, “Oh, my gosh, I can’t believe God told me to write a book.

This is big.” And we were just sitting and dreaming about it. The zebra, by his stripes, like, we just connected stripes with zebra and- It was kind of a moment like I’ll never forget. We were just like, “I don’t know what the cover’s gonna look like, but I know it’s gonna have a zebra.”

Carrie: Yeah.

Whitney: Yeah. So that was pretty cool.

Carrie: That’s awesome. It’s a nice way, I think, for different stories to come together and for people to kinda see, have a theme there. I wanted to talk with you about this quote from your book, and you brought this up kind of a little bit earlier. You alluded to it, but you said, “Take it from someone who has tried focusing on everything but God in a storm.

I often entertain thoughts focused on figuring out where the storm came from, how it got here, why it was here, where it’s going- What I will lose, how bad it will be, and these unanswered questions are like pouring gasoline on the fire. How have you seen, like, this trying to figure out all these things to be either harmful or at least not helpful to you or others that are on that OCD recovery journey?

I see this a lot.

Whitney: All the unanswered questions and uncertainty is just … It’s a big weight, especially with having OCD and having that just need for that certainty. I know everybody has kind of that in their daily walk, and I’ve just kinda come to what I have to choose what I focus on. And if I focus on the storm, that’s all I see, and I get even deeper into the storm.

I had to s- again, surrender just the act of, like, trying to figure everything out. Instead of that, I’ve kind of leaned more on an act of trust, and I quote in my book, I say, “I don’t have to understand what He is doing because I know what He has already done.”

Carrie: Yeah. That’s good.

Whitney: That quote seems like I have certainty, right?

But in reality, it’s not. It’s just trust. I’m trusting in my faith. You know, faith is about trust, not certainty. So I have to kinda remind myself that all the time, and to not listen to OCD and compare what OCD is telling me to the word of God, and build my life off that truth because God is the only one not changing.

My OCD, my feelings, my anxiety, my situations, everything is changing. And so I can stand on the foundation that doesn’t ever change, and that’s why I always have something to kind of combat the lies with truth. And every time I do that, I feel like being vulnerable, part of me, is another hard thing. It also develops greater resilience and just courage to, “Okay, I did that, and I can get through the next thing.”

It helps me in a way to kind of remember that.

Carrie: I think some Christians with OCD have a really hard time, like, trusting in the goodness of God. Did that come up for you, especially in the midst of suffering? It’s like, “I’m going through this really intense suffering. I wouldn’t wish this on anybody. It’s just really hard to deal with.

I don’t ever know what kind of recovery process I’m gonna be able to get to. Am I ever gonna be able to be in some kind of remission from this?” So there’s all these types of questions. I don’t know. Talk with us about that. Did you wrestle with, “Hey, God’s dumped a lot on my plate. It doesn’t feel like He’s good”?

Whitney: Yes, that’s a great question and a great point. And I’ve struggled with that a lot. That’s actually kinda one of my main struggles, is because I thought that all the pain I was experiencing, I thought God was punishing me because I was a bad Christian. And I kind of somehow down the road connected my pain to my relationship with Him because I never felt right.

Like, I never felt right with the Lord. I never felt like our relationship was okay. No matter what I did or how many times I prayed, how many times I read the Bible, how many times I’ve worshiped, I had that feeling. And so I struggled finding a good church all my life, and I’ve so thankfully found a church local.

It’s been such a blessing to me, and I was in a church service one time, and I still had this belief that God was punishing me. They preached very simple gospel in how, like, when sin entered the world, that wasn’t God’s original plan. God’s original plan was to be in basically paradise with us and to be fellowship with us.

But we had to go and change the rules and the plan by sinning, and I think that my brain just kind of, like, a light bulb went off of, like, that wasn’t his intention. But because that happened, that’s just new story, but the goodness of his graciousness in– like, comes into play of, like, me thinking, “Okay, well, he doesn’t really owe me anything.”

I mean, he’s already done everything for me, and he rewrote that story by dying on the cross for me and saving me. And so I’m kind of in this, like, waiting period right now that I am saved, but I’m still living in this sinful world, and that’s why trial there. It’s not anything that I did or that he’s doing to me.

I’ve had to kinda rewrite that story in saying that the only reason trials exist is because we live in a fallen world, to remind myself that he did not intend it to be that way. But he’s so good that he literally is with me through the trials and in the trials, and he gives me strength to get through them.

I mean, how is that… Like, that’s just the definition of a good God. He doesn’t leave you. He just gives you the strength to get through. I think a big thing in my journey is I’ve kind of come across, like, the saying, “Do the opposite.” Because I will say that nothing my OCD tells me is gonna be good, and I have just kind of come across this thing of, like, just do the opposite of what my OCD says.

It’s usually the opposite of what truth says as well, so it kinda works in that realm. And also, I really believe that there’s an active enemy trying to steal, kill, and destroy us, and I think that the enemy’s not gonna have anything to say as well. Once I realized that God was not punishing me, our relationship began to, like, change slowly and be able to trust Him a little bit more.

And every time that I come across, like, a roadblock, I– “Listen, we’re gonna do the opposite, and we’re gonna move forward.” And even though I still don’t feel right with God, I haven’t ever gotten that certainty. I’m just moving forward in faith. Some days are harder than others.

Carrie: Few key points that you’ve made is, is faith requires belief in something that we can’t see.

I think that’s one point that’s really important. And so we’re leaning into that one day at a time, and we don’t have all the answers. So trying to, like, get absolute certainty is a lost cause, essentially. I love what you said about just kind of like getting involved in a healthy church community. I think that’s so great for anybody out there that needs to hear that.

I wanted to talk a little bit too about what you’re saying with, I don’t know, with OCD, and I think scrupulosity specifically. There’s a lot of lies that people believe, and it’s not as easy as like, okay, find the lie and replace it with truth. But as you’re going through treatment and understanding these processes, you do have to kinda come to examine your own theology and what you actually believe about God.

And I think that can be a missing piece in different forms of OCD therapy if you don’t have somebody to help you navigate, whether that’s a pastor, spiritual mentor, leader, counselor, whoever that person is. Would you agree with that? Like, there just there’s a lot of Christians with OCD just kind of believing a lot of lies about God or about themselves or about the world.

Whitney: Yeah, I agree with that, and I’ve been in that boat, and I’m still trying to kind of fix my view of God because I feel like that really is my foundation. If He really is the Lord of your life, do you trust Him in every area? Do you go to Him for everything, even your OCD and anxiety? I’m not gonna lie, that’s like my number one struggle is fighting that lie and fighting those beliefs and trying to rewrite in my brain that He’s a loving God.

He died for me. What explains love more than that? Just kind of just have to constantly remind myself. I’m a big truth card person. I have truth cards right here. I have them all over my house. I have scriptures written down. I have just reminders that when I’m in the pit, I also have all these things on the wall, like inspirational sayings, all that kinda stuff.

Like, just because when you’re in it, you need those reminders. That’s why I have tattoos. It’s a constant reminder. I look down at my arm, and I remember.

Carrie: Yeah. What does your tattoo remind you?

Whitney: My tattoos are all about Jesus, except for there’s one, and it’s about my dog.

Carrie: Aw.

Whitney: It’s his heartbeat. I’m working on a sleeve.

I’m pretty proud of it, and they all point to Jesus in a different part of my journey.

Carrie: It’s like your testimony written out.

Whitney: Yeah, on my arm.

Carrie: Yeah. There you go. You have several different stories in your book about times where God really came through for you. One of them was, like, about going to New York for school.

That was, like, a very hairy, scary, but, like, you did the scary hard thing. And there were other stories too about animals and different things where what you couldn’t have imagined happened, happened. God totally provided a way for different things. Like, I kinda consider them like spiritual anchors. How did that strengthen your faith kind of as you were going through that process, and did that help you build more trust in God as good and loving?

Whitney: Yes, absolutely. I still to this day repeat to myself when I have to do something hard that I did New York City. I repeat it to myself all the time. Even there’s hard days, and I– it’s hard to go to the grocery store sometimes, and I repeat, “I did New York City. I’m going to the grocery store.” But yeah, spiritual anchor is a great way to explain it.

I think that each time God answers a prayer or a blessing, I remind myself that He owes me nothing, and this is purely out of His love for me. And it really helps me strengthen and grow my relationship with Him. And I think that what baffles me is that He just continues to pour His grace and His mercy in my life, like, and everybody’s story, and it’s just kind of like His act of love, not obligation.

But, like, that’s my greatest defense against OCD, because I have somebody on my side and I have somebody that loves me, and I have somebody that has done something, died on the cross for me, that will one day take my OCD away, and that brings me a lot of hope.

Carrie: Yeah. Just thinking about heaven is like, one day this will not be a struggle anymore, or I won’t have any of these physical digestive issues.

Everything will be new bodies. We’re getting new bodies.

Whitney: I don’t know what it’s gonna look like, but I know that I will be able to eat bread … which I’m highly allergic to. I will be in no pain mentally and physically, and it gives me hope.

Carrie: Yeah. And I think that’s important for people to hold onto. We can get so focused on the here and now and forget that’s not all there is, that God has something prepared, something ahead of time for us.

That’s really beautiful, and that we get to spend eternity with Him. What else do you wanna say just to the Christian OCD community, people really… Love these personal stories, and I think they latch onto them because probably they’re having maybe similar questions or struggles or obsessions that you’ve wrestled with and dealt with.

Tell us a little bit about, like, what going through treatment has been like for you.

Whitney: Yeah, that’s a good question. I’ve been suffering from OCD in silence for 29 years, and when I finally realized it, I remember reading a book that my dear friend helped me realize I had OCD. She gave me this book, and I read it, and it literally took my breath away of, like, that I was reading myself in the book.

It was just so powerful for me. That was kind of the moment that God was like, He gave me that little vision of, like, “You’re gonna do this one day.” I laugh because of where I was at, like, but I think about that memory often and how powerful it was for me to feel not alone and not being the only one. I think that fueled me, and I really wanted to hold onto that and use that as my motivation.

The OCD community has been such a blessing for me. I’ve kind of dove in, doing a lot with the OCD Georgia board and doing a lot with IOCDF and now this book. This book is my way of sharing my testimony. It doesn’t look like a mission trip overseas or something like that, but it looks like it for me, like what God wants me to do.

And I would encourage people to ask the Lord is, like, “What do you want me to do with my story?” I think that God has a purpose for everything, and so ask Him what the purpose is for your OCD, because it might just be to bring hope to others that don’t have it and to be there for others. I kinda encourage you to ask the Lord that.

Carrie: Yeah, I think someone that was going through some immense suffering and had actually, you know, lost his daughter, he had said, “I don’t recommend people ask the question why, like, ‘Why is this happening to me? What’s going on?’ But more to ask, ‘What is God doing?’ Like, what is God going to do through this? How is He going to use this?”

Whether it’s in your life or in someone else’s life, I think that those are definitely, like, very good questions for us to ask.

Whitney: Absolutely.

Carrie: Well, is there anything else that we didn’t touch on that you wanted to talk about?

Whitney: I’m just so thankful that you to have me on this podcast, and so thankful to all the viewers.

I hope you like the book.

Carrie: Yeah, definitely. They can get a copy of that on Amazon.

Whitney: Yes, they can go to Amazon. I also have a website that have a couple more resources on whitneypageco.com.

Carrie: Okay. Yeah, we’ll put that in the show notes for people that might be listening in the car or something like that, they can check back and check out your website.

Sometimes people just wanna contact you and say hello after you’ve been on the podcast and say, “I resonated with your story.” So just know that may happen. But I’m so glad that you came on here and shared your story, and that you wrote it down for people. I mean, I think that this is just a really helpful…

I’m trying to think of that saying where something like, one day your testimony is gonna be somebody’s survival guide.

Whitney: Oh, I think I’ve heard that.

Carrie: Yeah. I feel like that’s a lot of what your book is. These are some truths that we need to remember when we’re going through some hard times, and here are some ways you can navigate some of this OCD stuff moving forward.

Whitney: Thank you for saying that. And it is for me too, ’cause honestly, I’m still in the thick of it. I’m not an expert by any means. Still going through it. I’m going back through my book that I wrote that sometimes, I’m not gonna lie, I’m like, “I wrote that?” It’s crazy how our brains can just erase what we’ve learned and what we know, and so it’s a testament for me, too.

Carrie: It’s so funny that Whitney said that about forgetting what she wrote in her book, because I know there have been times where my assistant has pulled stuff out of episodes for social media, and I’m like, “I said that on there?” So that just kinda made me chuckle a little bit. Uh, Whitney, it’s, it’s not just you.

I have that, too. I haven’t talked about this a ton. There will be more to come, but I’ve just been in this messy process of trying to outline and start writing a book that I want to write for the Christian OCD community. And I will say that going through this process, I now just have mad respect for anyone who has put a book out there into the world, because it’s quite the process, and it’s not easy.

If you’d like to get more updates from me regarding what’s happening around the podcast as well as the upcoming book, whenever that is able to be launched out into the world, please subscribe to our weekly newsletter by going to carriebock.com.

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

Christian Faith and OCD

Carrie: is a production of By the Well Counseling. Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of myself or By the Well Counseling. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area.

232. Postpartum Inpatient Stay to OCD Recovery: A Personal Story with Kathy Young

Written by Carrie Bock on July 7, 2026. Posted in OCD, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode.

In this episode, Carrie sits down with Kathy Young as she shares her journey through postpartum OCD, multiple inpatient psychiatric hospitalizations, a misdiagnosis of postpartum psychosis, and the lessons she learned on the road to recovery.

Episode Highlights:

How to recognize when postpartum OCD symptoms may be mistaken for postpartum psychosis or other mental health conditions.
Why sleep deprivation, hormonal changes, and anxiety can intensify OCD symptoms after childbirth.
How perfectionism and the need for control can quietly fuel obsessive thinking during motherhood.
Practical ways to communicate your needs and build a stronger support system during difficult seasons.
Strategies for navigating intrusive thoughts, embracing uncertainty, and leaning on God throughout the recovery process.

Episode Summary:

What Does Postpartum OCD Really Look Like After Having a Baby?

In this conversation, Kathy Young, a writer, wife, and stay-at-home mom, shares a deeply personal story that began after the birth of her first child. Like many new mothers, she found herself navigating sleepless nights, changing responsibilities, and the pressure to care for her family well. What she didn’t realize at the time was that something more was happening beneath the surface.

One of the reasons I wanted to share Kathy’s story is because postpartum OCD doesn’t always look the way people expect. Her experience shines a light on challenges that can easily be misunderstood during the postpartum season.

How Do Sleep Deprivation and Hormonal Changes Affect Postpartum OCD?

The postpartum period brings significant physical, emotional, and hormonal changes. For some women, those changes can intensify existing mental health struggles or reveal patterns that may have gone unnoticed before.

Kathy shares how several factors converged during a particularly vulnerable season of life, creating challenges she never anticipated. Her story highlights why understanding the connection between postpartum health and OCD symptoms is so important.

What Happens When Motherhood Triggers a Need for More Certainty?

Motherhood often comes with questions, decisions, and responsibilities that don’t have clear answers. While planning and preparation can be helpful, the desire for certainty can sometimes become overwhelming.

As Kathy reflects on her experience, she shares how fear, expectations, and the pressure to get everything right affected the way she approached motherhood. Her story offers an honest look at the tension between wanting control and learning to live with uncertainty.

How Can OCD Affect Your Identity as a Mom?

Many mothers wrestle with questions about whether they’re doing enough, making the right decisions, or meeting everyone’s needs. When OCD enters the picture, those concerns can take on an entirely different weight.

Throughout this episode, Kathy opens up about the challenges of navigating motherhood while struggling with symptoms she didn’t fully understand. Her experience provides insight into how OCD can influence parenting, self-perception, and daily decision-making.

What Does Recovery From Postpartum OCD Actually Look Like?

Recovery is rarely a straight line, and it often looks different than people expect. Kathy’s journey involved learning new ways to respond to intrusive thoughts, navigate uncertainty, and accept support during difficult seasons.

She also shares how this experience reshaped her faith, her relationships, and her understanding of what it means to trust God when life doesn’t go according to plan.

Listen to the full episode to hear how she navigated uncertainty, found the right support, and discovered hope in the midst of one of the most challenging seasons of her life.

Connect with Kathy:

lessnoiselowwhispers.substack.com

Transcript

Carrie: So I hope everyone has enjoyed our summer personal story series so far. And today we’re back at it with another story from Kathy Young. So I’m gonna let Cathy just introduce herself for a little bit here.

Kathy: Hi. I’m so excited to be here. My name’s Kathy Young, and as of now, I am a stay-at-home mom. I do have a background in writing, and I have run a copywriting business for a little bit of time and focused on marketing specifically, and that’s what I went to school for as well.

But right now, in this season of life, I’m just focusing on staying home and connecting online with other writers as well with OCD and who are also believers, and that’s a little bit about me and what I’m doing right now

Carrie: Well, that’s awesome. Sounds like a really good mission in life right now.

Kathy: Yeah, I’m loving it.

Carrie: Yeah. And how old is your daughter?

Kathy: Yes, I have one daughter, and she is… She’ll be two and a half next month. Well, she’ll be two and a half by the time that this comes out.

Carrie: Awesome. That’s a busy and cute age.

Kathy: It is.

Carrie: All right. We’re talking a little bit today about kind of a, a very dark season in your life, and so I just kinda wanna warn people about that.

And also that I think it’s just really important to talk about the things that can happen potentially to people’s mental health during postpartum. So tell us a little bit about the events that led you down this road, essentially to being assessed for postpartum psychosis.

Kathy: Yeah. So I can add a little context, too, with the season of life I’m in right now.

I had no intention to be a stay-at-home mom, and it was postpartum experiences that literally halted me and forced me to stop, reassess, and to kinda take a hiatus to focus on my mental health, and that was something, like I said, I hadn’t planned. It’s something that, as I explain a little bit more, you’ll see how it led to the postpartum psychosis in the first place.

So at the point when I was 12 weeks postpartum, that’s around the time that, at least for me, like hormones start to change. So my milk supply had dropped. I was pumping at the time, and my daughter was three months old, and it was like three to four month age is when they say that babies start to have like a sleep regression.

So that was happening. Because I was a freelancer and I owned a copywriting business, I had set aside maternity leave for myself, and it was around, around 12 week was around the time I had… It was the entire, like it was all that I had set aside, essentially, for my maternity leave. So three months, 12 weeks, I figured, you know, I’ll bounce back, totally easy.

Carrie: Lots of women do it. That’s just the expectation. Like, oh, you stay home for a few months, and then you go back to work.

Kathy: That’s it, and even some moms only have six weeks, and so I’m thinking, “Okay, 12 weeks is a good like buffer,” right? And so all these things were kinda swirling in my head, and I was stressing a lot about my daughter’s ability to like sleep and nap on demand, hyper-fixating and researching on like how to pay attention to her sleepy cues and how to keep her awake for certain wake windows and when to know how many naps she needs, and when she needs to drop a nap or like all the things that go into that and being a first-time mom, too.

So I was putting a lot of pressure on like, okay, if my baby can like sleep on demand, ’cause I was working from home, and I didn’t really have like plans for extensive support. I was like, “Then I can watch my baby, and then I can like work, and then it’ll be totally fine.” And so I was thinking it’s just a, a simple math equation, right?

Like, I’ll just figure it out. And it was on that week leading up to when I was supposed to go back to work, I had spent an afternoon at my in-laws just kind of practicing going out of the house for the first time, trying to navigate naps, and when she napped in the car seat, and when she transitioning naps, and once she wakes up from a nap, what to do after that, blah, blah, blah I didn’t know it at the time, but my family had mentioned to me after the fact that I was, like, starting to show a lot of hyperactivity in the sense of I was talking really fast, I was, like, telling people, “Hey, you need to do this,” or, like, “Make sure you get this.”

And also I was, like, getting really fat as well, and just, like, fatigued. And to me, I was like, “Oh, this is what moms do.” Like, I’m just running on adrenaline. This is normal. But it seemed to be a bit of a concern for my family, but not so much so that it was, they were thinking about postpartum mental health issues yet at that time.

Carrie: Yeah. They were just like, “We’re gonna monitor this and, like, see how it goes. She just seems a little rapid fire right now.”

Kathy: Yeah, exactly. And so after I finished that afternoon with my in-laws, I’m driving home, and I just feel, like, a sudden panic in my nervous system of just, like, I’m not in control anymore.

Like, my brain was, like, going super fast, and my body was just kinda keeping up, and I’m, like, in the car with my baby in the backseat, and the first thing I think of is I call my sister-in-law, ’cause luckily she was, like, in the car behind me. She was gonna come to my house to pick up something. And I call her, and with, like, I don’t even start with pleasantries or anything.

I’m like, “Amanda, I have postpartum depression.” And I start, like, yelling it. And she’s like, “Oh my gosh, are you okay?” Like, “Pull to the side of the road.” I’m like, “Yes, we do.” And so we pull to the side of the road. We’re safe, thank goodness, and that’s kinda when I started to really show a lot of hyperactivity in the sense of I’m saying everything I’m thinking, my subconscious is just, like, spewing out of me.

I’m not focused at all. I’m not really aware. I’m tethered to reality. It’s not like I wasn’t aware of what was going on, but I was, like, so in my head that I was not grounded in reality, if that makes sense.

Carrie: Were you just lacking a ton of sleep at this point? Was your sleep just really erratic because of the baby and when she would sleep and then you felt like you had to get other stuff done or?

Kathy: Oh, for sure, and that was a big part of diagnosis as well. At that time, I was lacking a lot of sleep, and when I had reached that afternoon, it was, like, several hours of me, like, having insomnia, and it was after several hours that my family had made the decision to Baker Act me, which I don’t know how it’s like in other states, but in Florida you’re involuntarily sent to a behavioral center just for your safety, and you can be discharged once you kind of show that you’re a little bit more in a mental frame, like a stable mental state of mind.

That’s essentially what happened. Even when I got to the center itself, like, I had no idea what was going on. Like, I saw these all, all these people in green scrubs, and I’m like, “What is happening? Where am I? Am I in a dream?” Luckily, they give you medication at the behavioral center, and they force you to sleep, and they’re really on top of your mental hygiene and stuff, and your physical hygiene too.

And it was after befriending a patient who said, “Hey, you should talk to a staff member.” Ask them why you’re here, ask if you have a diagnosis, and that’ll get you home. And I was like, “Oh, okay. Yeah, I’d like to go home.” I wasn’t even thinking. You know what I mean? I hadn’t even connected the-

Carrie: So you were just really disoriented and, like, really confused, and your family drove you there, and they were like, “You need to be here,” basically?

Kathy: Yeah, and they didn’t know how long I was gonna stay. Like, there wasn’t so much contact from the behavioral center, like allowing me to get contact with family, unless, like, I showed the initiation that, hey, I feel stable to, like, talk to family right now. But even at the time, I was like, “I don’t know why I’m here.

This is, like, a weird experience overall.” But yes, they were the ones that decided. They drove me to make sure I was safe, and then I was, like, put into a unit with other patients, and I stayed there for about, like, six days.

Carrie: When you figured out what your diagnosis was and why you were there and all of that, was it a surprise to you?

Was it a relief?

Kathy: It was a relief In the sense that I had always this feeling that my brain was just wired differently, and I couldn’t articulate. I did not know how to explain it to other people, and later, this ended up being a misdiagnosis for OCD, which has brought even more answers. But it was almost like a relief to be able to, like, explain to the people around me that I love, “Hey, I’ve been dealing with stuff.”

I did not know how to voice what I needed or how I needed, but this is how badly I needed it. And it was definitely, like, a relief to have just, like, an answer or something to, like, look to so that other people around who were helping could see, like, “Oh, okay, this is what led to it. This is what it involves,” and just understanding me a little bit more, too.

Carrie: Were you having certain intrusions, intrusive thoughts, like, at that point?

Kathy: At the behavioral center?

Carrie: Yeah, like, kind of leading up to going in there. Were a lot of your thoughts just surrounding kind of, like, “I’ve gotta keep this rigid schedule,” or something bad’s gonna happen, or, “I’m not gonna be able to go back to work,” or?

Kathy: Oh, yeah. So I had originally thought that I was pumping, and so that also led to a lot of anxiety and stress as well because I was on a strict pumping schedule. And so at the behavioral center, all of your personal items are kept in storage closet… not closets, but area somewhere. And if you need it, then as the patient, you have to be the one ask for it, and it’s the family that actually packs the bags and packs your essentials since you’re obviously being sent involuntarily.

You don’t know what you need and don’t need. And so they do your best to, like, pack clothes and, at the time, my pump. And so I was like, “Oh, my gosh, I need the pump. I need the pump. I need the pump.” And so I was, like, constantly asking the tech for my pump, and then they were like, “Okay, this is not, like, a medical need.

This is not, like, a physical need. This seems more like a irrational hyperfixation on you needing to pump even though you physically do not need the pump right now.” So that was just, like, one example. There was also a lot of, like, things that I was hyperfixating as well on my physical sensation. So I was thinking that I was soaking at some points and making this connection of, like, if I take care of my body, then my baby will be safe.

Like, I don’t know. It was a lot surrounded by, like… Because especially when you’re pumping, you’re providing nourishment for your kid. And so I took that idea and I ran with it, and I was like, “Okay, I’m really thirsty, so if I’m thirsty, that means my baby’s thirsty. I need to drink right now.” And I would, like, drink so much that I would, like, hurl it back out because obviously I didn’t need that much water.

So it was a lot of, like, really taking notice of, like, the cues of my physical body and assigning meaning to them in ways that obviously did not correspond to reality, if that makes sense.

Carrie: Yeah, it does, and I could see, too, so they misdiagnosed you this as postpartum psychosis, and they said, “Go home, get enough sleep,” prescribed you medication, and they set you up with therapy or anything of that nature?

Kathy: Yeah, they did. So the original therapy that they had set me up with, we had a insurance at the time that was not really best suited for mental health services. It was just very minimal, especially ’cause I was a freelancer. My husband’s an entrepreneur as well, and so we were just very, like, just preventative stuff, low maintenance.

‘Cause we were just… We didn’t really see the need for anything else. I was set up with a, just a generic therapist and a generic psychiatrist who just saw, like, a full range of different people, and not saying anything against them at all. Like, they were very helpful to get my foot in the door. Eventually found out that I did need a little bit more specialized care, ’cause it was six weeks later that I had, like, a relapsed episode, and then ended up back with the behavioral center.

Originally, I forget the medication they had put me on first, but the second time I was discharged, we sought out a little bit more specialized care. We looked for, like, women’s mental health psychiatrists who knew women’s postpartum situations and things like that. And it was with her, with that psychiatrist, that I was screened for OCD, and that it was very likely that I was not dealing with postpartum psychosis.

It’s more likely that I was dealing with aggravated OCD on top of, like, the lack of sleep.

Carrie: The hormonal changes, yeah, can exacerbate some of those OCD symptoms. And so it’s helpful for people to know that. And a lot of people don’t know that if you go without sleep for long periods, that you can even start to hallucinate.

Like, they’ve done studies on these things, and so it makes sense that certain things can look like psychosis that may be lack of sleep, hormonal imbalances, and OCD going on, especially some of the fixations that you had. I could see how people would misdiagnose that. OCD have also been misdiagnosed as being suicidal when they weren’t, or homicidal when they weren’t as well, because they have intrusive thoughts or violent thoughts about themselves or others, and I think the education piece is just really important there.

Obviously, was that a big hit to you mentally, emotionally, spiritually, when you had to go back? Were you like, “Oh, great. Here I am again, doing this all over again”?

Kathy: Yeah, definitely was. It threw me for a loop in the sense that, like, I almost had this chip on my shoulder, and I found that I had this… With all my episodes, ’cause I had three, two where I was involuntarily hospitalized, and then one where I was in the comfort of family’s house, and so I would stay and they would monitor it there.

With all three of my episodes, I had noticed a conflated confidence in just, like, my ability and just, like, my ability to see things. So for example, I would see other patients, like, dealing with their physical and, like, mental needs. And so I thought to myself, “Oh, well, I can heal them. I’m capable of healing them.

Like, I’ll just pray and then they’ll stop.” It was just like that And obviously, like, I would not think that, and I do not think that if, when I’m in a normal state of mind. I’ve never had that thought ever. And so it was definitely this over-inflated confidence of like, “This person just needs this, and then they’re gonna be okay.”

Or like, “Oh, I think that God must be, like, trying to tell me a specific message to tell you,” kind of thing. And I know it gets really tricky because people have different spiritual experiences, and I don’t wanna take away from that. But I know for me, it was coming from a place, like I was lacking sleep. I was not taking care of myself.

OCD was taking the things that I love, which is what it does, like, which is my faith, and, like, misconstruing it and twisting it in a way that made me think reality was something else when it wasn’t. And so that was something that I ended up having to stop when I was stopped the second time, and the third time I had the episode as well, something that I had to wrestle with in terms of I know that I should be depending on God for this thing, and I know this is like a dark valley.

But also, I’m thinking these things that I probably shouldn’t be thinking, that I know are not biblically sound or accurate and not based in the gospel. And so it was just like ping-pong conversations back and forth with myself, trying to engage with my faith at that time.

Carrie: That makes sense, and I’m sure this was probably, like, pretty scary for your family, too, just feeling like the unknowns and what’s gonna happen next.

Were you still trying to work through this period as well after you’d gotten out of the hospital the first time?

Kathy: Oh, after the first time, my husband and I made the call of like, “I just need to not work right now.” It wasn’t really that we had a plan for me to go back to work. It was more of like, “We’re going to just have you not work for now, and then we’ll see in the future if that ever changes.

But for right now, that’s not gonna be the case.” Luckily, I had a savings in my bank account, and so we basically were able to use a lot of those funds to help with, like, the medical bills and kind of transitioning us into, like, me being able to stay home. And I was able to have a lot of support as well, too, before I was able to watch my daughter on my own, and that was so, so, so helpful and crucial for me as well.

It was definitely thrust upon me of like, “Okay, we’re not gonna have you work. We’re not gonna risk it. We’re not gonna try. We’re not gonna play with fire. We’d just rather be safe.” And so I think that was the right call at the time.

Carrie: How do you feel about it when you look back now? How do you reflect on those times, like, differently, being over two years from that?

Kathy: Yeah. I think I just wanna give myself, like, a big hug because it’s just, a lot of it was legitimate concerns and fears that I had, just, like, grappling with my identity as a new mom and what it would be like to work and what kind of mom I’m gonna be and just putting so much pressure on trying to be the mom I’ve always wanted to be, even though I was only less than a year in.

And I look at myself with just such grace and compassion and a little bit of humor because some of the things that I thought I just think are really silly, or the things that I did, at least to me it was. It’s almost like I’m able to look back and see how far the Lord has brought me and how I’m not perfect.

I have a better understanding life and motherhood is not, you figure it out and you’re done, like, you check the box and you move on. Like, as much as I thought it would be- It’s very humbling in the sense that I’m able to look back at that time and think, “Man, I really thought I was God.” I thought that I could just have everything in my control perfectly, and then everything would turn out how I wanted it to.

Like, if my baby would just sleep, if I would just get back to work at a certain time, whatever the case may be.

Carrie: It was like this illusion that I could be in control of all these things. I just wanna point out, I think it’s, like, harder for moms now because we have too many voices in our ears, really. There are so many different influencers on Instagram and other places that, “Oh, you should do this, and you should do that.

This can help with this, and that’ll help with that,” and just almost, like, too much information versus, like, trying to filter that all through and learn your specific child and what they actually need. And I can remember, like, when I was a first-time mom, like, trying to read the books and go, like, I’m reading the book, and I’m like, “Okay,” like, “I think I can do this.”

I’m feeling a little, like, semi-confident. And then you get the kid, and of course, it doesn’t go the way the book tells you it was gonna go. And then you’re like, “Oh, no. What do I do now? Help. Somebody come get me.” I mean, I, I guess I just wanna, you know, normalize that for everybody out there is, like, yeah, there’s a lot of parenting information on the internet.

You could read some good books, and none of that’s bad. But just know that, like, it’s not gonna go textbook according to plan. I’ve known moms where, that have had two different experiences with their kids where, like, one kid was a great napper and slept really well, and then the next one just, like, never slept and was up all the night and had just really rough times.

Each person’s story and situation, and even from kid to kid, is a different experience, and you really have… I mean, it’s an opportunity, I think, to lean on God and to say, like, “Okay, I don’t know what to do about this here. I’m just doing the best I can. Like, please enter in and help me through the craziness that is parenting.”

Kathy: Yeah. Absolutely. And I am so grateful that I have learned that lesson and that I closed the chapter on that book, or I’ve closed that book, and I’m like, “Okay, I’m done. I don’t have to re-learn that again.” I’m sure I will have to re-learn that in the future, but I think it was exactly what I needed in order for me to just start to look up and focus more on the Lord and who He is and trusting in Him rather than trying to figure out the puzzle pieces of, like, what’s going to happen next?

What does this mean? Will I be the mom I want to be? All of these, like, what-ifs and things like that, I’ve been able to learn to just sit with that discomfort a little bit of, like, I don’t know what’s gonna happen. It’s definitely the tender space for me in my heart, like with moms in my community and in my church, and just people online as well, kind of encouraging them.

Oh, it’s okay to not know. You won’t know, and you’re gonna make a plan, and it’s not gonna work out the way you want it to. And even if it does, something else will. But it’s– I’m learning to be more okay with or accepting uncertainty, the unknown, and discomfort, and I think that’s a lot of what OCD, like, struggles with in terms of wanting that control, wanting to know, wanting a vision of, like, security in knowledge or whatever the case may be.

Carrie: Yeah, and I can see where perfectionism can really get attached to parenting and wanting to do things right because, oh, there’s some kind of belief that I’m gonna mess up my kid. And what I’ve learned working with a lot of people, a lot of kids, a lot of families, is you can be a really good parent and still mess up a lot, and learn how to make repairs and learn how to do things differently.

And you don’t have to be perfect, ’cause there is no perfect parent. So that’s an impossible standard. So tell us about your OCD therapy journey and what that’s been like for you. What kind of things have you done?

Kathy: Yeah. So a lot of my OCD therapy has been, I did start a little bit with, like, CBT therapy, like cognitive behavioral therapy, and then I had slowly transitioned into fear exposure.

And I know especially with mental compulsions, a little bit harder to, like, expose yourself, those types of things. Because I’m a writer and therapist knows that I’m a writer, too, it’s just been a lot of journaling and considering and reflecting on the what-ifs give me anxiety, and kinda sitting with that and writing about it and reflecting on it and not trying to…

Just being okay with, again, sitting with that discomfort. That has been really helpful for me. And obviously, I’m still on medication. I’m not sure when I will stop, just because I am still in a season wanting to grow my family, and so I’d like to be on the safe side and just continue to keep the medication for now for when that next season comes.

That’s something that has been helpful as well. And if I do find that I have trouble sleeping or things like that, like, I have methods and things that I do to kinda wind me down, whether it’s, like, physically or mentally. So that has been the majority of, like, what my OCD recovery has looked like.

Carrie: Do you feel like you have a different relationship, I guess, with managing stress?

Did you really have to bring in a lot of tools to help you manage, like, physical, emotional stress?

Kathy: Yeah, a lot of stress came from maybe not having clear communication with my husband about expectations of what parenthood will look like, what my role will be, my responsibilities, his role. Truthfully, a lot of it was just, like, having these conversations of just, like…

‘Cause he had his own experience, too, with taking care of me and becoming a parent for the first time and trying to take care of the daughter while taking care of his wife. And so a lot of the stress that we would harbor, we wouldn’t bring to each other, and we would just kinda keep it to ourselves.

We’ve definitely learned to be more open with our stress, even if it’s, like, small, even if it’s, like, little microaggressions or things like that, things that are just, like, bugging us. We’ve learned to just bring it up rather than just hide it, and that has helped a lot with stress. But also, like, physically with stress, I have learned the things that I normally love to do anyway help me a lot with stress.

So I love to color, I love to walk, listen to music, and read, and just kind of, like, engage in those very quiet activities. Um, and that usually grounds me as well. I find that if I’m in my head, I need to be grounded, and so I need to, like, engage physically with something, whether that’s walking or even exercise.

Exercise has been really helpful for me, too.

Carrie: Yeah. No, I think all of those are good things, and it’s important for people to remember that stress exacerbates OCD symptoms. So being able to have just, like, overall coping skills to lower that stress level a little bit. We can’t completely eliminate stress from our lives, right?

But we can– Like you said, I think there’s too many people trying to run at, like, this really high octane, go, go, go, I can do all the things and be Superman, Superwoman, and it’s just not healthy for us physically and emotionally. God didn’t create our bodies to run at that like a cheetah all the time.

Maybe some short sprints, but then we need to come back down and relax, like, is good for– That balance is important for our nervous system. What encouragement would you maybe provide to some other moms? Or we have a lot of women, I think, on the podcast who listen and they want to become a mom. Maybe they’re not married yet, or maybe they’re married, but really kind of trying to figure out, how does this being a mom fit in with my OCD recovery?

What encouragement or support would you give to them?

Kathy: Yeah. So I kinda mentioned a little bit before, but really being okay with uncertainty. And my husband follows this guy named Jocko Willink, and he is an ex-Navy, retired Navy SEAL. And he has this quote that says, “Have a tight ship and loose plans.” We love that, and so we kinda try to abide by that because sometimes we think, “Oh, if I’m okay with uncertainty, then I’m irresponsible.

Life planning, then I’m not– I’m just, like, going on a whim and not really knowing what I’m doing.” And I don’t think that’s necessarily true. And so obviously, you plan as best as you can, and you leave the outcome open, and that is something that I’m learning as a lesson over and over again with every interaction with my daughter.

And so that is one thing, I guess, just an encouragement being accepting the uncertainty of it and knowing that it’s okay. And then also, I think that with postpartum specifically, we focus a lot on the physical support of postpartum, and there’s a lot of humility, we’re involved with, like, getting help with showers and having people bring you meals and getting out of bed and going to the bathroom.

And I think that the humility that we have to, like, ask and need, we don’t even ask. We need the help, right? We need the physical help. I think we should have that same posture with our spiritual healing and our emotional healing as well in postpartum I don’t know, just learn to be a little bit more radically honest with yourself and, like, how you need support and what that looks like for you and not being afraid to voice it, and knowing that other people are probably dealing with the same things.

Or, like, you might hear stories from your in-laws or from your own parents that, “Hey, we had this experience, too.” And then you would’ve had no idea if you hadn’t voiced it. And so I think that there needs to be more of an awareness of, like, taking the time to just sit and, like, and reflecting and meditating on that transition, because it’s a huge transition, especially the first time.

I know as you grow your family, you have different challenges as well, but I do know after talking with a few moms, it’s really the zero to one that they get sticker shock, I feel like. Taking the time to have a support plan. I guess having a plan for what that emotional support will look like for you and having the humility to accept it.

And then I guess when it comes to, like, practical, ’cause I know I love practical things, ’cause it sounds like, “Oh, it’s so nice. Great. What do I do right now?” It was really helpful for me, at least in hindsight and moving forward now, especially being in toddlerhood, thinking about from pregnancy to, like, that first year, just, like, thinking about the first three months and, like, not thinking about anything else.

Like, just focus on short long-term goals of, what do I need to focus on in these next three months to take care of my body, to take care of my mind, prepare for baby, and when baby gets here, what do I need to do for these next three months? ‘Cause it’s nice that the Lord gives us this huge buffer of time between pregnancy and when we have the baby.

And even when we have the baby, to, as they continue to grow, like, it takes so much time for them to, like, develop these new skills and things. And so it’s helpful to just kind of focus on, like, okay, what is one thing I need to do in this season? And everything else can go to the wayside, that’s fine, but, like, I choose to focus on this.

And that was something that I was taught in behavioral center, too. Like, just focusing on, like, if you really have to get down to it, just like, what do I need to do today?

Carrie: It may look like taking a shower, you know?

Kathy: Yes.

Carrie: I’ve gotta figure out how to get a shower today.

Kathy: And that is such a win. It’s not even a luxury.

And then I guess the last thing is, and you mentioned this, too, is just, like, doing what works for your family and, like, not being influenced by other voices, even if it’s voices in your own family or, like, meaning, like, extended family or people that you may know, like, in work or in faith circles, whatever the case may be.

Like, everyone has a different circumstance with how they need to navigate work and feeding and transitions and all the things. And Everyone will have a different opinion. Everyone will do it differently. You just have to do what works for you and your family, and that sounds so cliché, but it’s something I continue to latch onto and cling to whenever I start to question myself like, “Why are we doing this?”

Oh, yeah, ’cause it brings us peace. Like, even if other people don’t think it makes sense or vice versa, like-

Carrie: Everyone’s gonna have an opinion about what you do, especially when it comes to parenting or having children or other things. So you feel more positive kind of next time around, like, that things will go better for you now that you’ve put some of these things into place to help your physical and mental health, and know what you need and how to advocate for what you need, like the support that you need

Kathy: Yeah, I absolutely do.

I feel hopeful. I feel grateful for how I was able to learn these lessons, like dark as that season was for me and for my family. It’s just the Lord definitely brought beauty from ashes, and he just took care of me and ministered to me in the ways that I didn’t even think I needed. It makes me hopeful for how I want to continue to create that space and create that sense of hope in my own home, like now that I’m a mom and now I am a little past that season of life.

And stepping into potentially growing our family as well, like seeing how much I can just enjoy it instead of worry, meditating on how good God is instead of meditating on the worry of like what if, what if, what if.

Carrie: Right. What does recovery look like for you today? Do you find you’re having to journal and sit with those uncertainties a lot less?

Do you find you’re maybe easier able to dismiss certain intrusive thoughts? What does it look like today for you?

Kathy: Yeah, I think I had this unnecessary– Or I, I had this false narrative that like, oh, after I take medication and I’m in therapy, like these intrusive mental compulsion– or like mental compulsions, intrusive thoughts, they will go away entirely.

And for me, that has not been the case. And so I think it’s been more of a sense of noticing quicker as opposed to it happening less. If I start to hear things in my head, I know whether it’s something that I can actually trust or if it’s based in truth, or if it’s something that OCD is trying to like distract me from.

And so if I do find myself having those thoughts, I’ll know, “Hey, honey, like I need a, a second just to journal a little bit,” or, “I’m gonna go take a walk,” or like, “I’m gonna work out for a little bit.” Like I know how to advocate for when I need to like ground myself a little bit again. So I think a lot of practicing communication for like what I need and how I need to just kinda deal with when those things pop up, and they do, truthfully.

And being okay with knowing that like they won’t necessarily like stop, at least for me. It’s not one of those things. It’s something like being okay with how the Lord made me instead of trying to fight it, but trying to work with it.

Carrie: No, I think that’s great, and I think it just shows like you can have a certain level of peace without having to completely eliminate all these thoughts.

And I think that’s good for people to hear and to know.

Kathy: Yeah, absolutely.

Carrie: Yeah. Thanks so much for being brave and sharing your story today.

Kathy: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me, and I’m just so grateful to-

Carrie: I really appreciate Cathy’s vulnerability in this episode. While no one wants to go to an inpatient treatment center for their mental health, if that’s what you’re needing at the time, there shouldn’t be any shame in getting that type of help.

So I think it’s, uh, really important for us to reduce the stigma and the shame surrounding going to inpatient treatment, whether it’s for OCD or for other mental health conditions. And there may be a time where you don’t need inpatient treatment, but you need some type of more intensive treatment, like an intensive outpatient program where you go for a few hours a day, several days a week, or you attend online, depending on the program.

These types of programs can be really helpful if you’re having a hard time functioning in your day-to-day life. I think there has been some confusion surrounding my intensive therapy services and the type of person that’s for. And sometimes we have people who are reaching out who really need more of a hospital setting or an intensive outpatient setting.

Just know that if I feel like that’s what you’re needing, that’s the services I’m gonna direct you towards. And people who would benefit from, like, an intensive therapy retreat-type setting typically have some type of base-level coping skills. They have some ability to regulate emotions when they come up.

They’ve either been to therapy before or done some significant self-help work on their own. They kind of have a certain level of awareness and motivation towards treatment. So I wanted to say a little bit about that just to provide some distinction for those of you maybe who have seen the intensive services on my website.

They’re not meant to be a replacement for intensive outpatient care, but more so for people who have been in treatment a while and just feel stuck. Maybe you’ve done some workbooks, self-help, done a little bit of individual therapy that maybe wasn’t fully effective. So if that’s you or you’re not sure if it’s you, feel free to check out the intensive therapy retreat services on the website at CarrieBock.com, and you can always send us a contact form as well.

231. When You’re a Christian & Drinking Too Much: A Personal Story with Jon Seidl

Written by Carrie Bock on June 28, 2026. Posted in Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode.

In this episode, Carrie welcomes back Jon Seidl, a returning guest, author, speaker, and founder of Veritas Recovery, to share his personal journey through addiction and recovery while exploring how identity, shame, unresolved pain, and a deeper relationship with Christ can shape the path toward lasting healing and freedom.

Episode Highlights:

How unresolved trauma and emotional pain can influence addictive behaviors later in life.
Why shame often keeps people stuck while godly conviction creates a pathway toward healing.
The role identity plays in both addiction and long-term recovery.
What it means to pursue freedom by addressing the root causes of unhealthy coping mechanisms.
Insights from Jon Seidl’s book Confessions of a Christian Alcoholic and his journey toward recovery through faith, vulnerability, and God’s grace.

Episode Summary:

How Does Alcohol Addiction Develop Even in Committed Christians?

When Jon joined me for a previous episode, we talked about suffering, faith, and finding rest in difficult seasons. In this conversation, he returns to share a much more personal chapter of his story, revealing how a series of life challenges gradually led him into alcohol addiction despite a genuine relationship with Christ and years of involvement in ministry.

As Jon shares his journey, we talk about how stress, anxiety, disappointment, and loss slowly created a pattern of seeking relief in the wrong place. His story is a powerful reminder that addiction rarely begins with a desire to self-destruct. More often, it begins with a desire to escape pain.

Could Unresolved Childhood Trauma Be Fueling Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms?

Many people wonder why they continue repeating the same unhealthy patterns, even when they know better. One of the most eye-opening parts of our conversation explores how unresolved trauma and painful life experiences can shape the ways we respond to stress, fear, and emotional discomfort for years to come.

Jon shares how experiences from his childhood influenced habits of escapism that followed him into adulthood. We discuss why healing often requires us to look beneath the behavior itself and understand the deeper wounds that may still be driving our choices.

Why Isn’t Willpower Enough to Overcome Addiction or Break Bad Habits?

When we’re struggling with something difficult, it’s natural to think the solution is more discipline, more accountability, or simply trying harder. Yet many people discover that lasting freedom remains frustratingly out of reach when they focus only on changing behavior.

One of the most powerful moments in this conversation came when Jon’s wife challenged him to stop focusing solely on alcohol and start asking why he needed it in the first place. That question opened the door to a much deeper process of healing, one that extends far beyond addiction recovery and speaks to the heart of spiritual growth.

What’s the Difference Between Shame, Guilt, and True Christian Healing?

Many Christians carry shame without realizing it. We hide our struggles, convince ourselves we’re the only ones dealing with them, and slowly drift further into isolation. The problem is that shame often keeps us trapped in the very cycles we’re trying to escape.

In this episode, we explore the difference between shame that drives us away from God and godly conviction that leads us back to Him. Jon shares how learning to bring his struggles into the light became a critical part of his recovery journey and why vulnerability is often the first step toward freedom.

How Can Abiding in Christ Lead to Lasting Recovery and Spiritual Growth?

At its core, this conversation is about much more than alcohol addiction. It’s about identity, surrender, and learning what it truly means to abide in Christ. So many of us can fall into the trap of making faith about knowledge, performance, or checking spiritual boxes while neglecting the relationship God desires to have with us.

If you’ve ever struggled with shame, anxiety, addiction, unhealthy coping mechanisms, or the feeling that you’re carrying burdens no one else can see, I hope you’ll listen to the full episode.

Transcript

230. Handling OCD Flare Ups with ICBT: A Personal Story with Rachael Kelley

Written by Carrie Bock on June 24, 2026. Posted in OCD, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode.

In this episode, Carrie sits down with Rachael Kelley, a Christian writer and former Empowered Mind student, to discuss navigating OCD flare-ups, overcoming scrupulosity, and learning to trust God’s love throughout the recovery journey.

Episode Highlights:

How Rachael Kelley learned to navigate OCD flare-ups without viewing them as failures in recovery.
The primary obsessional doubt that was driving many of her scrupulosity fears.
Why OCD often disguises itself as spiritual conviction and how to recognize the difference.
The ICBT strategies that helped her challenge intrusive thoughts and obsessional reasoning.
How learning to tolerate uncertainty strengthened both her recovery and her faith.
Practical tools, support systems, and mindset shifts that continue helping her move forward when OCD resurfaces.

Episode Summary:

The Recovery Truth Most Christians With OCD Don’t Expect

What if one of the biggest signs of growth isn’t the absence of OCD, but how you respond when it comes back? Many Christians begin recovery hoping for a day when intrusive thoughts completely disappear, only to find themselves discouraged when symptoms resurface. In this episode, Rachael Kelley, Christian writer, OCD advocate, and former Empowered Mind: Christian ICBT for OCD student, shares her honest journey through scrupulosity OCD, relationship OCD, and one of the most difficult seasons of her recovery.

Why Do OCD Flare-Ups Happen Even After Significant Progress?

Many people assume that once they’ve found the right treatment or recovery tools, OCD should stop showing up altogether. Rachael shares what happened when intrusive thoughts returned after significant progress and how those moments challenged everything she thought recovery was supposed to look like. Instead of signaling failure, these flare-ups revealed something unexpected about the healing process that continues to shape her journey today.

How Can Christians Tell the Difference Between God’s Voice and OCD?

One of the most painful struggles of scrupulosity OCD is the fear that intrusive thoughts might actually be God trying to get your attention. Rachael opens up about how this fear kept her trapped for years and why learning to recognize the difference became a turning point in her recovery. She shares a framework that helped her begin separating anxiety-driven messages from the character and nature of God.

What Is the Hidden Fear Driving So Many Scrupulosity Obsessions?

On the surface, OCD can appear to be about dozens of different concerns, from theology and morality to relationships and decision-making. But what if those obsessions are all connected by a deeper fear? Rachael shares the primary obsessional doubt she uncovered through ICBT and why identifying that root issue changed the way she approached recovery.

Can Your Brain Really Change After Years of OCD?

When OCD feels relentless, it can be hard to imagine life looking any different. Rachael describes a season when anxiety became so overwhelming that she questioned whether she could continue functioning normally. What happened next wasn’t an overnight transformation, but a series of changes that gradually shifted her relationship with intrusive thoughts and helped her find hope again.

Why Does Uncertainty Feel So Intolerable With OCD?

Whether it’s a major life decision, a theological question, or a new relationship, uncertainty often becomes fertile ground for OCD. Rachael shares why the search for certainty kept pulling her deeper into anxiety and what she learned about moving forward when answers aren’t available. Her perspective may challenge the way many Christians think about faith, trust, and control.

How Can ICBT Help You Break Free From OCD’s Reasoning Traps?

One of the most powerful parts of Rachael’s story is learning how OCD convinced her to distrust what was right in front of her. Through concepts like primary obsessional doubt, sense data, and obsessional reasoning, she began recognizing patterns she had never seen before. These insights didn’t eliminate every struggle, but they completely changed how she responded when OCD tried to pull her back into old cycles.

What Happens When You Stop Chasing Perfect Recovery?

For many people with OCD, perfectionism quietly follows them into the recovery process. Rachael shares how letting go of the expectation of perfect healing opened the door to something far more sustainable.

Rachael also shares the surprising realization that helped her navigate future flare-ups, the practical email inbox analogy she uses to sort intrusive thoughts without getting stuck in them, and the encouragement she wishes someone had given her during her darkest season. If you’ve ever wondered whether recovery is still possible when OCD keeps showing up, this conversation offers hope, perspective, and a powerful reminder that setbacks don’t have the final word.

Connect with Rachael:

www.instagram.com/rachael.anne.writes

rachaelannewrites.substack.com

rachaelannewrites.substack.com/p/the-ultimate-resource-guide-for-christians

Transcript

Carrie: Today we are returning with our summer personal story series, and I have with me today Rachael Kelley, who was one of our Christians Learning ICBT students, that we have rebranded that course to Empowered Mind Christian ICBT for OCD. I’m excited to hear from her since it’s been a little while since she’s taken the course and just kind of has had a little bit of time to practice, and we’re talking about those times where OCD flares up today and how to continue practicing skills that you’ve already learned.

Carrie: I know this is gonna be relevant for many of you as you’re on your recovery journey.

Welcome, OCD warriors, to the Christian Faith and OCD podcast, where we are all about reducing shame and stigma of struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories, and replacing uncertainty with faith as you develop practical tools for greater peace.Carrie: I’m Carrie Bock, Christ follower, wife, mom, and licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. I pray you are blessed by today’s episode

Welcome, Rachael. Glad to have you here today.

Rachael: Thanks. I’m glad to be here.

Carrie: Yeah. How did you discover that you were dealing with scrupulosity OCD? How did that come about?

Rachael: Really, when I look back at my childhood, I can see kind of patterns of OCD popping up, but it wasn’t really until I was in college that it really manifested itself as relationship OCD to start. A couple years after that, I was dealing with a particular string of intrusive thoughts that led me down a research rabbit hole, and eventually to a Reddit forum that made me realize, like, “Oh, this might be OCD that I’m dealing with.”

Rachael: I’ve been a Christian my whole life, but my faith has really become more and more important to me over the past couple years. And as that was growing, the scrupulosity also started growing. It seemed like the more I cared about doing the right thing in a Christian sense, the more my OCD was latching onto that and twisting it.

Carrie: That’s frustrating, right?

Rachael: Yeah, definitely. I had a friend who I met with super early on in the process of, like, learning that I had OCD too. Just that initial dose of empathy was really helpful, like, okay, somebody else gets it. And from there I kinda started doing my own research, which eventually led me to finding this podcast, which was just about four years ago now that I first stumbled upon it.

Carrie: Awesome. You’ve been around a little while then. People have different thoughts about OCD recovery. I think initially they’ll come and say, “Okay, I just never wanna have another intrusive thought ever again,” and we have to educate people. Everyone has intrusive thoughts, even people that don’t have OCD. How has your perspective on, like, healing and OCD recovery changed from maybe where you were in the beginning?

Rachael: That’s a good question. Actually, like a long time ago, probably like a year or two after I had listened to the podcast, I remember, and I don’t know if you remember this, but I had, like, sent you a Facebook message or something, and I was like, “Hey,” like, “thanks so much for just what you’re doing for this community.

Rachael: It’s awesome.” And then you had said something like, “Well, we’re always looking for people to share their story on the podcast if you’re interested.” At the time I was like, “I don’t think I’m at a place where I can go on that podcast and be like, ‘Look at what I’ve learned,'” ’cause I was really just in the thick of it still.

Rachael: And so I kind of over time formulated this goal of like, okay, one day I’m gonna reach this point of healing where I feel good enough and, like, perfect enough to go on the podcast and be like, “All right, guys, you can make it through, like everyone else made it through to this perfect healing state, and now I’m there, too.”

Rachael: So that has definitely adjusted. Over the past, like, six months or so, like there’s been growth throughout the whole journey, but definitely the most healing has happened over the past six months, and that’s thanks in combination to getting on a good medicine And at the same time taking the ICBT course with you.

Rachael: But even since then, I’ve experienced the whole healing is not a linear journey thing that people say. I’ve had plenty of flare-ups along the way, especially if there’s, like, something new happening or a change, or I have to make an important decision. Yeah, things can really flare up for me. But with the new tools I was learning, God has, like, given me The grace to start getting back to this new normal that I now get to live from.

Rachael: Yeah, such a blessing, and probably something I now take for granted. But now when I go through flare-ups, I get frustrated, but I also trust that it’s gonna pass, ’cause, like, if God got me through all those other ones, then He’s gonna get me through this next one, too. Now, coming on the podcast, I don’t feel like I have reached that 100% healed state.

Rachael: I don’t think I’m gonna get there, or any of us will get there until we get to heaven or the new creation. But I think it’s important for people to know that even if they still feel like they’re in the middle of this healing process, which all of us are, that struggling with their OCD doesn’t mean you’re failing.

Rachael: God is really teaching us something different each stage of the journey, and there’s no rush to achieve a certain level of healing by any particular point. We can do what we can, but we just gotta trust His sovereignty. Just trust that there’s still gonna be growth happening, even if we can’t feel it, and we can still pursue our values and still live meaningful lives even when we are struggling with OCD.

Carrie: Yeah. Was that a hard acceptance to come to you of, like, “Okay, sounds like I can still live a good life even though there are gonna be some of these mental health struggles that pop up from time to time”?

Rachael: I think it took me a while to get there, and probably, like, something I would still struggle with, ’cause I feel like a lot of people that have OCD are also either perfectionists or have some control issues in some way.

Rachael: So I definitely spend a lot of time being like, “All right,” like, “it’s not just quite right. Like, if I could just obsess a little bit less, it would be perfect, and then I would be better.” So I still have to check myself in that area sometimes. But I think my overall mindset towards it has shifted, and I’m like, “Okay, like, I’m at a livable level.

Rachael: I can get through the day. I can connect with people.” Not every minute is fun. Sometimes I’m struggling, especially during lunch, for some reason. I don’t know if it’s ’cause I, like, take a break from work, and now my mind is wandering.

Carrie: Free space to think.

Rachael: Yeah. But I think it’s just normal to go through those ebbs and flows.

And kind of releasing the control of, like, it has to be perfect all the time, it’s been helpful.

Carrie: Where were you at before you took the ICBT course? Like, what was going on that you said, “You know what? I need a little bit of extra help or support at this point in my life”?

Rachael: Over those few years after I realized I had OCD and, like, deciding to take the course, I had tried a lot of different things.

I was working, and I still work with a Christian counselor, but she’s not trained in OCD. So we had tried some things like EMDR that didn’t quite touch on the OCD, but it was helping with other things. So I would do a lot of stuff on my own. I would try ERP things on my own. I would do different workbooks.

I had tried getting healing prayer, just, like, asking God, “Heal me, strengthen me.” And I had even tried an ICBT workbook on my own, like, earlier last year. So I took the course in the fall, and sometime in, like, the spring or summer- I had tried, what’s the guy’s name that developed OCD?

Carrie: Dr. Ardema.

Rachael: Yeah, I had his workbooks, and I made it through the first one, and then the second one is very dense and overwhelmed.

Carrie: You were like, “What in the world is he talking about right here?” Yeah. Number two has a lot of meat in there

Rachael: Yeah, during the summer last year, I was hitting really, like, a rock bottom point. My OCD was so flared up that it felt like everything I looked at was just triggering an obsession. That might be a hyperbole, but that’s what it felt like in my brain.

There was a point where I was obsessing a lot about my job, and I was afraid, like, am I gonna be able to, like, keep functioning and keep working, or is this OCD gonna, like, make me so that I can’t even work? And I ended up being able to stay at work, and I didn’t drop out or anything, but it was right around then where I decided to take the course.

I had to prove to myself, like, okay, can I make it through another week of work? And if so, then I will take this course. If not, then do I need to go to, like, get more extreme treatment somewhere? I don’t know.

Carrie: Wow. So you were on the verge of, “I might need to go somewhere and get residential or intensive outpatient-type treatment.”

Rachael: Yeah, there was one day that was especially bad where I was like, “Oh, my gosh, is this where I’m headed?” Luckily, that wasn’t the case. God was able to get me through that day, and then got through the rest of the week, and I feel like that was a turning point where I was really like, “Okay, I cannot keep listening to this voice of OCD.”

Like, I have to be like, “No, I’m not gonna listen to you because it was just destroying me from the inside out.” So that was kind of this turning point, and then when I felt that little bit of strength again, like, okay, I can make it through a work week, I think this course is the next right step. So I decided to take the course, to invest in that.

Rachael: There were so many things that helped me through it. I feel like I recommend it to everybody now because.

Carrie: Aw that’s sweet …

Rachael: yeah, there were just so many, like, aha moments throughout. It really breaks down OCD and helps you understand it a lot better, like how does it work. And I was kinda glad too that I had done some of the resolving OCD workbook beforehand ’cause it felt like, okay, I’m, like, getting a review of these things I was learning now.

But now from having that Christian perspective as well was really helpful, so I felt like that really grounded me. Overall, it was a really good experience. I remember every Monday afternoon, it felt the little safe haven where I was like, okay, now I’m gonna have somebody that understands me, speaking life, and, like, helping me not feel my brain is beyond repair.

Carrie: Yeah. I think the hope piece is so huge. Like, that’s one of the reasons that we’re here. Whether people take the course or not, just them being able to have hope that they can get better, have a different relationship, you know, with their OCD is, is really important and really huge for people to hear, regardless of how bad it feels right now.

Carrie: Tell us about some of the things that you learned that stood out to you in terms of ICBT, learning about primary obsessional doubt, those types of things.

Rachael: Yeah. I feel like, I mean, so many things from it stuck out to me, but the primary obsessional doubt was one of them. Also, the idea of, like, sense data So basically checking if an obsession is based on sense data is, okay, is this obsession grounded in reality or is it coming from the imagination?

And that’s a really good litmus test to see if something is OCD or not. The primary obsessional doubt was really eye-opening. Just like the idea that all of our obsessions, or at least you could have a couple different primary doubts. Is that right?

Carrie: Yeah. I mean, I think you can, but in terms of scrupulosity, you want to really…

Carrie: Like, it can just go in so many different directions and have you stuck on a particular scripture verse or stuck on a particular obsession over here, and you can get lost in the weeds, and you never really actually get to the root of what the doubt actually is, if that makes sense.

Rachael: Once I kind of thought about that with your help, I think we had an email exchange, and you were like, “Hey, don’t get distracted by all these obsessions and where they’re taking you.

Like, look at what is the thing that is connecting them all. What is the root of all this?” And for me, I learned that was the obsession that if I do the wrong thing, God is gonna stop loving me, and this is, like, nowhere in the Bible does it say that. But in my brain, for some reason, that’s what I was afraid of.

So I had a lot of obsessions targeted around, like, okay, is this thing sinful or not? Can I watch this movie? Can I read this book? Can I listen to this certain pastor? Can I be friends with this person? Just really being distressed by the idea of I have to make sure I’m not sinning, or else I’ll lose God’s love.

Rachael: When I’m outside of that OCD head space, and I look at that, I’m like, no, scripture says that God, no one can snatch me out of His hand, and He loved me when I was still His enemy, so, like, why would He stop loving me now? But when you’re in the head space of that, it just seems totally legit that, oh, yeah, what if God doesn’t love me?

Or, like, what if He stops because of something I’ve done?

Carrie: Yeah, and it kinda goes to the obsessional reasoning process that the first step is that you distrust the sense data. I think sometimes that’s distrusting the scriptures, and, like, for Christians, well, I don’t know if that really applies to me ’cause OCD will tell you, like, “Yeah, that’s for other people,” or, “I don’t think that really applies to you or what you’re dealing with.”

Carrie: Yeah, like, feeling disconnected from God’s love or heard that from other people as well. But I think obsessions that you’re talking about, about decision-making and morality and sinning and not sinning are very common for a lot of different Christians. So really targeting that, and then what was it like for you when you went into, like, your alternative narrative, and you were able to utilize some of those scriptures?

Carrie: Did that help you, you know, through that process?

Rachael: Yeah. The alternative narrative was really powerful for me. Basically, and correct me if I’m wrong about any of this, but the alternative narrative is kind of presenting, like it seems, an alternative story that you can tell yourself versus this obsessional story that OCD has been telling you.

Rachael: OCD, like, takes all of these facts, or things or facts, and weaves together this narrative and then tells you this story of, like, “This must be true.” But then the alternative narrative kind of presents this other option of, like, “Hey, but what if this is true?” And so for me, developing the alternative narrative, I really wanted to focus it around that primary obsessional doubt and, like, refute what it was saying.

Rachael: So I wrote this really long thing in my notes app that was, like, basically just a bunch of statements and affirmations, and each one was backed by a verse from scripture. And over the course of one or two months, I would read it every morning, and it would reaffirm truths like, I can’t lose God’s love.

God loves me like a father. My attachment to him is this secure attachment, things like that. It was really helpful, I think, and now I have alternative narrative version two that’s, like, targeted at other things that I’m struggling with right now.

Carrie: Okay.

Rachael: One thing that I think is important to note about the alternative narrative, too, is to not use it when your OCD is really flared up, because then it could just become another reassurance compulsion of like, “Oh man, I’m anxious.

Let me read this thing to convince myself that I’m really okay.” So taking the time to engage with it when your OCD is quieter, like, hopefully you do have a moment like that and can engage with that. I think that can help your brain kind of rewrite those beliefs in a healthier way, rather than, like, the compulsive, “My gosh, I need to think a different way.”

And a kind of example of that change happening, I remember near the end of last summer, there was a month or two where things were– when I was really in the thick of it, every morning I would wake up an hour and a half before my alarm, and the obsession of the day would pop into my head, and I wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep, and I would just be flipping around, thinking about whatever it was, and eventually I’d have to get up and go to work, where I was also obsessing about what I was doing all day.

But over time, as the medication started to kick in, as I was taking the course, as I was reading this alternative narrative to myself, things gradually started to change. I started to notice, like, “Oh, I’m falling back asleep again. I’m not staying up from four to five thirty AM.” Then I had been, like, waking up with this pit in my stomach every day, and then that kinda stopped happening.

And then all of a sudden, I started waking up, and I would lay in bed, and I would just be like, “Wow, I’m really loved by God. That’s so awesome.” It was just, like, this complete reversal of what had been happening, and so much so that I’m like, “Okay, only God can do that.” It hasn’t been, like, all up and to the right since then.

Like, I don’t wake up every morning just, like, overjoyed about my salvation. Sometimes it feels a little more neutral. Like, sometimes I still get worried about things. But it’s just a testament to, like, your brain can change. Even if your OCD is flaring up, even if you’ve been stuck in this pit for a long time, and it feels like it’s gonna last forever, God can change your brain, and He can help you get through that.

Carrie: That’s huge. I think a lot of people look at this as, well, it’s a neurobiological disorder. It has some genetic ties. Maybe some people, they’re like, “Well, you know, my grandmother had it, and my mom had it, and my brother has it,” so forth, and they can look at that and feel hopeless, like, “Oh, well, I’m just kind of, like, destined to have OCD.”

Like, what you’re saying is, like, there is help, and there is treatment. You know, there are medications that can be helpful for people, and there are tools and strategies that you can learn and different ways to interact with the OCD. So I think all of that is really beautiful, and just coming to this understanding of “God loves me,” I mean, that’s huge because so many people with OCD, Christians, just feel bad or sinful, or God doesn’t love them, God’s disappointed in them, God’s angry with them, whatever.

Carrie: Fill in the blank. And these beliefs are shaped by a variety of different things, whether it’s parents, past teachings, OCD, and believing OCD’s voice is God. And that’s kinda one thing that you’ve struggled with in the past. How have you been able to differentiate that this is OCD versus this is God?

Rachael: Yeah. That was one thing that I think kept me trapped for a really long time because I would think that, what if God is speaking to me through my OCD? So I would hear this voice in my mind being like, “Oh, don’t watch that movie. Like, what if it’s sinful?” Or, “What if this pastor is gonna lead me astray?” Something like that.

Of course, like, I wanna be obedient to God, so it puts a lot of pressure on, like, “My gosh, am I supposed to be following this voice now?” Whatever decision I make, it just felt super anxiety-driven, and I can’t mess up. And there were a couple things that really helped me break out from that, and, like, that is still something I struggle with all the time when OCD flares up.

It is just so convincing when you’re in that head space, and you’re just like, “Okay, but what if this time it’s God?” And, like, you have to go through the whole process again, be like, “I know that’s not God.” There’s actually some people, like, that I’ve told in my life that I’m like, “Hey, when I’m in the OCD head space, I might reach out to you and be like, ‘Please tell me not to listen to my brain right now, because it’s just being irrational.'”

So having that support system is really, really helpful. One thing that was helpful, I remember on a podcast, I think, you just saying multiple times, like, God does not speak through OCD. Maybe He’s gonna sovereignly use your OCD to teach you something or, like, I don’t know, build your trust in Him, but the voice of OCD is a voice of confusion and condemnation, and that is not what God sounds like.

Rachael: I don’t know if I’m saying his last name right, but Michael Kear’s book that I was introduced to because of this podcast, that was really helpful, too. He has a really great chapter in his book, Waging War against OCD, that was really helpful, just differentiating between, “Here’s what OCD sounds like.

Here’s what the Spirit sounds like.” So he used verses 1 Corinthians 13:4-8, Galatians 5:22-23, that’s, like, fruit of the Spirit passage, and then James 3:17 to present examples of, like, “Here’s what the Spirit sounds like. He’s loving, He’s kind, He’s full of joy and peace and patience, and He’s reasonable and full of mercy and good fruit.”

So you look at all that, and you can get this picture of, like, “Okay, this is what God sounds like.” And then you look at OCD, and it’s, like, a completely different story. It’s urgent rather than patient. It’s condemning rather than gracious. It’s confusing rather than bringing clarity. So there is a really stark difference between just the mess and the chaos that OCD creates versus when I feel like it’s God convicting me of something, it’s always this gentle nudge that’s very clear, like, “Hey, this might actually be a good way to move in this direction.”

Whereas OCD is like, “What if I need to do it this way?” So I think of in John 10 when Jesus talks about His sheep knowing His voice, I think that is part of our challenge as Christians with OCD is to learn what does His voice sound like versus what do all these other voices, including this really loud voice of OCD, sound like.

And it’s gonna take a lot of mindfulness and patience and practice on our part to learn that difference, but I think that He equips us and helps us get there.

Carrie: Yeah. You mentioned mindfulness. There are some mindfulness, like, integrations into the course, and we’ve kinda added a little bit more in there too.

How was that helpful for you in that process, or did you find it helpful, some of those exercises of just really, like, being still and paying attention to what’s going on right now?

Rachael: Yeah, I think different mindfulness practices have been helpful for me at different times. I think just, like, in general, cultivating this awareness of what’s going on in my head, and sometimes I might be a little too focused on it.

Like, every thought I’m like, “Oh, I’m thinking this. Oh, I’m thinking this.” But just in whatever way helps a person get there, just being aware of– I’ve heard it said, like, “Paying attention to what you’re paying attention to.” What are the thoughts that are coming through your head? And yeah, whether it’s some kind of contemplative prayer practice where you’re sitting there focusing on a word or an image that brings you back to God, and then just noticing when those other thoughts pop up and kind of letting them go to the side.

A lot of times I’ll picture, like, a river in my mind, and I’ll see this thought kind of pop up. Sometimes it’s like this weird, like, cloud kinda shape in my mind. For some reason, when I let my thoughts go away, it always goes to the right. I don’t know why, but I just imagine the thought just kind of floating away to the right, and I imagine that God’s hands are there at the end of the river, like, waiting to catch the thought, kind of giving it over to Him.

That’s been helpful.

Carrie: But it separates I’m having a thought versus I am this thought, which is really huge for OCD too, because people make all kinds of meanings. “Oh, I had this thought and therefore it’s me, and it must mean, like, something bad about me because I had this intrusion. I must really want to do this awful thing that I had an intrusive thought about,” versus what you’re talking about, kind of a, we call it thought diffusion.

Carrie: It’s like just noticing and, like, allowing the thought to kinda go by in whatever. There’s different imagery that people can use for that, like thoughts on a cloud, that type of thing, thoughts on the river. So, you’re letting it go by, and then it, it just creates a little healthy separation I think, which is very helpful.

Carrie: I find that when people have been dealing with OCD for a long time and they’re really getting sucked into that OCD bubble very easily and very quickly, the mindfulness helps them be able to slow down to notice that process so that it doesn’t happen so fast. I also wanted to rewind a little bit and touch on your support systems.

I think that’s great, and I think that we all need people in our life to tell us, like, “Don’t listen to your brain right now.” Like, I think my husband definitely has done that for me in the past. Like, “You’re not thinking clearly. Like, okay? So maybe go to sleep, go take a bubble bath, relax, do something different, because maybe you’ll see this with a different set of eyes later, different clarity.”

I think that we all need that. And so I love how essentially you kinda trained your support system, right, of how to respond to you.

Rachael: Yeah, I think with OCD and, like, really any mental health condition or really anything you’re going through, people don’t always know what you need, or sometimes they have that natural instinct and they know exactly what you need.

Rachael: But most people cannot read minds. And especially if you struggle with reassurance-seeking as a form of a compulsion, you can tell people in your life, like, “Hey, if you notice me coming to you with a bunch of questions that I’ve already asked before, and it seems like I’m just trying to get reassurance, please tell me, ‘Hey, let’s not give into this compulsion.

Like, we can talk about this maybe when your brain is out of this state. But because I love you, I’m not gonna answer this question right now. I’m gonna let you sit in this uncertainty.'” But yeah, kind of guiding people in how to best support you, and then hopefully too, you can learn how to best support them as well, and you can just be that for each other.

Carrie: Yeah. That’s great. So tell us about your email inbox analogy, like when it comes to sorting through your thoughts.

Rachael: So yeah, this is something that I had kind of thought about it, and then during our pre-interview, it really, like, solidified itself. So it’s kind of this idea, so if you picture your brain as this email inbox, there’s thoughts, messages coming in all day, and your job is to effectively sort through them.

Rachael: The first step is building this awareness of what does OCD sound like, what does God sound like? Sometimes you’re not always sure, but it’s a good place to start as you start to build that awareness and almost, like, building this filter that is gonna take any thought that sounds like it could be OCD and put a little flag on it of, like, all right, this sounds like it might be OCD.

Rachael: So step two is figuring out, okay, what do I do with it now? ‘Cause I don’t want it to just sit here in my inbox all day, or, like, it’s just gonna keep sending me the same message over and over. When this new message comes in, it gets flagged with, “This might be OCD.” So I can ask myself then, okay, do I have sense data to support this?

Rachael: Is this a thought that’s grounded in reality, what they call an everyday doubt? So an example would be, like, I’m sitting in my apartment, I smell smoke, and I think, “What if something in the oven is on fire?” That is a thought and a doubt that can be easily resolved by walking over to my oven, opening it- Looking inside, is there food burning?

Rachael: No. Okay, doubt is resolved. But sometimes, if the doubt is something completely different, like, “Oh my gosh, what if my boyfriend isn’t the one for me? Like, how do I know if he’s the right person?” That is not a thought that can be resolved in a matter of checking one time and resolving it. That would be more of an obsessional thought.

Rachael: So if you find out that this thought is based in the imagination rather than on reality, then it goes into either the spam folder or you put a label on it that’s, “Not right now,” or, “I’ll deal with this later.” If it’s OCD and it’s just completely irrelevant to the moment and it’s not anything that you need to resolve at any point, it’s just straight to spam.

Rachael: You just think of it, if you have your little mental river or your sky full of clouds, you just watch that float away. Every time it comes up, you just practice it over and over again. But if it is something, like for example, something I’ve obsessed about a lot is theological ideas or, like, controversial beliefs, that kind of thing, and even if it’s irrelevant in the moment, like say I’m at work and I suddenly think about some controversial topic, it’s not relevant to what I’m doing at that moment, but it is something that maybe I do wanna look at and get a better understanding of.

Rachael: So that’s where I would apply that, “All right, not right now,” tag. It forces my brain to take a pause, to not instantly Google something and get that reassurance. And making yourself wait can be really painful, so that’s another way my support system has come in handy. Like, there was a stretch of time where I just kept wanting to Google things while I was at work, so text my friends and be like, “Hey, this is my accountability text.

Rachael: I’m not gonna Google anything until I get home. Just sending that there.” And then having that extra level of accountability was helpful. When your brain does return to a clear-headed state, you can kind of revisit it and be like, “All right, is this a topic that I want to do a little bit of research on?” Or maybe now I’m like, “Eh, that’s not really important.

Rachael: I’ll just let it go.” And just know, like, if you do end up doing research, setting some kind of time boundary or something like that is helpful, or just being aware if you do start to kind of dip into obsessive territory again, like, just backing up a little bit. But it is important, I think, to, like in the topic of theological issues, like, I don’t know, I could just be like, “Oh yeah, that’s OCD.

Rachael: I’m not gonna worry about it,” and then I never look it up, so I, I have no idea what the different perspectives are or something. I don’t wanna live in ignorance. But I also don’t wanna give into that compulsive research thing, ’cause that’s not healthy and not beneficial for me or anybody.

Carrie: What do some of these things in Revelation mean?

Carrie: Like, that’s what you’re talking about. Like, I would hate to say it’s not important that because it’s in the Bible, like, there’s a reason that it’s there. It’s not that it’s not important. Is it earth-shattering and gonna affect us today? No. Should we probably look at, try to examine the scriptures and examine some different beliefs about what it means?

Carrie: Will we be able to absolutely prove it with 100% certainty? No. Like, those are really challenging areas, what you’re talking about. But I like what you said about the time limit and noticing, like, when it’s becoming obsessional, because I think you could start researching something that’s valid that you wanna have more information about, but then OCD says, “No, you have to resolve this with, like, 100% certainty.”

Carrie: And you have to say, like, “No, there are, like, people that are way smarter than me that have, have, like, theology degrees, and they don’t agree on what this scripture passage means.” And so I am gonna have to wrestle with that and say, “Hey, here’s where I land today,” and move forward or to say, “You know what? I just don’t know, and that’s okay.

Carrie: I don’t know.”

Rachael: Yeah. I was actually talking with somebody yesterday about my OCD, and I described it as a blessing and a curse, but usually a curse of having OCD And they ask me, like, “How is it a blessing?” I feel like having OCD has really challenged me to trust God in those gray areas, in those uncertainties.

Rachael: Like, the passages in scripture that I’m like, “I can’t understand this in this life, in this finite human body. I can’t make my brain understand this.” And we’re not meant to understand everything. Having OCD has forced me to be like, “Okay, I can’t know everything. I can look into things if I want to, but some things I just have to be like, ‘I don’t know.

Rachael: I just have to trust you on this, God.'” And so getting more comfortable with that uncertainty has been a big part of my story, and I think helped me develop more of a reliance on God for the things that I don’t know.

Carrie: We wanted to talk a little bit about the flare-ups that you’ve had since learning the ICBT skills, kind of like how you work through that.

Carrie: Is stress involved? You said there’s some newness or different things. And tell us a little bit about how that’s shown up and how you’ve kind of dealt with that.

Rachael: Yeah, I think flare-ups can happen for a number of reasons. I’ve noticed sometimes it’s just, like, one intrusive thought that I start to consider as, “Oh, what if that is actually God talking?”

And once I consider, like, maybe it’s relevant, it just, like, opens the floodgates for me. So many things I’ve obsessed about in the past suddenly, “Oh, my gosh, what if that, and what if that?” Sometimes it’s just like, okay, there’s that little chink in the armor that it wiggles its way through. But sometimes I think our circumstances can also cause OCD to flare up, or at least have, present the ground on which the weed of OCD can grow more easily.

I think figuring out what that is for you, a lot of times, I think it can be stress. Or for me, like I mentioned, if I have a big decision to make, if there’s a big change happening. With decisions, sometimes I can get really obsessive about, “How do I know I’m making the right choice in God’s eyes? What if He’s telling me to do this?

What if He’s telling me to do that?” Also, situations where there are just a lot of natural uncertainties, like if you’re dating somebody new, you don’t know how it’s gonna work out. There’s a lot of things you don’t know about them, and those aren’t things you can’t know right away, so that’s just the perfect framework for OCD to kinda latch on and be like, “All right, let’s try to figure all of this out without having any information.”

So I think just recognizing, like, when you’re in a season that could cause flare-ups can help you kind of prepare and give yourself a bit of extra grace. And even today, as I was thinking about this podcast, like, I was on my lunch walk. Sometimes with things like this, I’m like, “Okay, I need to make sure my brain is in a perfectly clear state when I’m doing this podcast or when I’m talking to this person or whatever, because I don’t want OCD to interrupt it.”

Rachael: So I knew I’d probably, little obsessions were gonna come in, and they did. And each time I was like, “Okay, yeah, I kinda figured I would obsess about that, but we’re just gonna push it aside.” Kind of being aware, being prepared, not being scared of like, “Oh, my gosh, when is the next obsession gonna come at me?”

Just being okay with being human and being like, “Yeah, God, I’m not perfect. I’m gonna go through these flare-ups.” Like, it’s not gonna be this perfect experience of like, I don’t know, I have fewer and fewer obsessions every day until one day I have none. It’s gonna be like this really bumpy journey most likely.

Carrie: Yeah, and for females too, sometimes hormones can be involved certain times of the month or pregnancy or postpartum, perimenopause. I mean, we just go through so many things as women with our hormones. And so just to kind of, like you said, have grace and self-compassion at times for yourself. There may be times where I’m just like a snotty mess and somebody’s like, “Why are you crying?”

I’m just like, “Just hit me at the wrong time of the month.” If I wanna go there with that person, it’s like I probably wouldn’t react this way at a different time, but right now it’s like really the most depressing thing for whatever reason.

Rachael: Yeah. That’s a really great point. And yeah, something that I think has helped me get through flare-ups a little quicker is just recognizing they’re gonna happen.

I don’t have to beat myself up. Last year, like I used to really just, the self-condemnation was so intense. Like, “Ugh, how could I be here again?” Like, “I should know better.” Instead, I find my brain nowadays being more like, “Okay, we’re here again. God has got me through it before. He’s gonna get me through it again.

God, I need your help again, please.” But not having this picture of God as like… I mean, it’s hard and it goes back to like- How do you view God, and how do you think He views you? Because if you’re viewing God as this very harsh figure, then of course, if you’re struggling again, you’re gonna see Him as like, “Oh, I can’t believe you’re here again.”

But if He’s this loving, compassionate father that is sovereignly, He knows everything we’re gonna go through, He has orchestrated our entire lives, why would He look at me when I’m struggling and be like, “Shame on you”? Like, no, He’s like… Well, I mean, I don’t know what He’s actually thinking, but now lean more towards the way of He wants to help me.

He is looking at me with love. He wants to give me. There’s that verse in Isaiah, I think 41, when he’s talking to the Israelites at this point, I think, but he’s like, “I will strengthen you. I will help you. I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.” I’d like to think that He wants to do the same for us.

He wants to strengthen us and help us. He wants us to rely on Him and depend on Him. He is on our side. He’s for us, and if God is for us, then who can be against us? So just understanding that God’s not our enemy.

Carrie: Yeah. We have the Holy Spirit intercedes for us. We don’t even know how to pray, basically, is what the Bible says.

And when we– when we’re a mess, and we don’t know how to pray, the Holy Spirit intercedes for us. He just kind of translates the mess for what we really need in that moment. And I think just, like you said, God being a loving Father and being for our good and wanting to see us be in a place of where we can go to Him with things, where you’re not scared of God to go to Him for things.

Carrie: Just kinda like I wouldn’t want my kid to be scared to, like, ask me for something or be scared that they’re gonna mess up so that… Or scared all the time of, like, punishment, those types of things. Is there anything else that you wanna share before we wrap up and talk about your Substack?

Rachael: I just kind of wanted to end by saying, like, how grateful I am for this podcast and just the OCD Christian community in general.

I feel like, yeah, Substack has allowed me to connect with a lot of people on there and just empathize, and this podcast has introduced me to a lot of great resources, like the course Being One, and different books. Especially, like, during those times where OCD has been more intense, it just feels like this blanket of comfort to be able to sit down and listen to somebody else talking about their OCD and be like, “Okay, they get my brain.

I’m not alone in this, and there is hope.” What I hope that this episode can be for people, like, I don’t know who all God is gonna lead it to, but I’m just grateful for all the people who have gone before me and shared their story and offered encouragement and hope and done the hard work. I appreciate all the effort that you put into bringing this podcast to life, and just thankful for the people who have inspired me to share as well.

Carrie: Yeah. Well, I’m so thankful that you’re here and that other people have gone before you and been brave and shared their story. And hopefully, your episode will allow somebody else to breathe a sigh of relief and maybe inspire someone else to share their story. You just never know what’s gonna happen. So God is good and has been very faithful in the process.

Check out Rachael on Substack. We’re gonna put a link in the show notes. It’s called Stories for the One. Is that right?

Rachael: I think if you go to substack.com/rachaelannwrites, and that’s Rachael with the extra A, Ann with an E on the end. That will allow you to go from there and either sign up for the, the email alerts for my publication Stories for the One, or if you have a Substack, you can follow me on there, too.

Carrie: Awesome. Yeah. We’ll put the link in there for people to click on it. It just would be nice for them to hear the personal experience when you write about your OCD stuff on there, too, so that’s great.

Rachael: And I also … There’s a certain post I did called The Ultimate Resource Guide for Christians with OCD, and that took, I think there were seven or eight other people from Substack, so either people who have OCD or there was one guy who’s, like, a therapist who specialized in OCD, so a bunch of people.

And it’s just basically a compiled list of resources and links to things that people have either found helpful or they recommend. There’s, like, links to the ICBT course and this podcast, but there’s links to lots of other places. So I would love to point people to that, to be like, “Hey, it might feel…” Like, when I first got involved in this world and was, like, looking for resources, it felt like I couldn’t find stuff.

But there’s actually a lot of stuff out there. It’s just sometimes hard to find. So that was a way of trying to kinda compile things and be like, “Here. Go explore.”

Carrie: Okay. Thank you so much. I hope that Rachel’s story really helped you understand how recovery is a messy process, and there are gonna be ups and downs.

Carrie: It won’t be perfect, but it’s important to stick with it and keep using the skills that you’ve learned. If you wanna find out more about Empowered Mind Christian ICBT for OCD, you can go to keribach.com/training. I’m so thankful that this resource has been able to help people all over the country, and really all over the world.

Carrie: If you’re in Tennessee, I would love to get a more intimate therapy group started here for Christians who are practicing ICBT skills. So if that’s you, please reach out through the website keribach.com/contact.

Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you. Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling.

Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of myself or By the Well Counseling. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area

229. Navigating OCD, ADHD, and Autism: A Personal Story with Erica Hackworth

Written by Carrie Bock on June 17, 2026. Posted in OCD, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode.

In this episode, Carrie welcomes Erica Hackworth to share how discovering the connection between her ADHD, autism, and OCD transformed her relationships, faith, self-understanding, and journey toward recovery.

Episode Highlight:

Discover how ADHD, autism, and OCD can overlap and influence one another in unexpected ways.
Recognize the hidden signs of OCD that extend beyond contamination fears and perfectionism.
Identify the difference between OCD-driven fear and genuine spiritual conviction.
Learn practical ways to communicate neurodivergent needs within relationships and family life.
Apply ICBT principles to break free from shame, intrusive thoughts, and self-condemnation.

Episode Summary:

Why Do So Many Women Reach Adulthood Before Discovering They Have Autism?

For years, Erica knew ADHD was part of her story, but there were pieces that never quite fit. As life became more demanding through marriage, parenting, and everyday responsibilities, the coping strategies that once worked started falling apart in ways that couldn’t be ignored.

What struck me most about Erica’s experience was how easily autism can remain hidden, especially in women who learn to mask their differences from a young age. Her story highlights why so many people spend years believing they’re simply “too sensitive” or “too much” before finding answers that finally make sense.

Could Neurodivergence Be Affecting Your Relationships More Than You Realize?

One of the most powerful parts of our conversation was hearing how Erica’s neurological differences created misunderstandings within her marriage. Things that felt obvious to her internally often looked completely different from the outside.

I’ve seen many people carry deep guilt because loved ones misinterpret forgetfulness, overwhelm, or sensory struggles as lack of care. Erica shares what changed when she stopped viewing herself through a lens of failure and began helping others understand her experience more accurately.

What Hidden OCD Symptoms Are Many Christians Mistaking for Spiritual Sensitivity?

When people think about OCD, they often picture contamination fears, checking locks, or arranging things perfectly. Erica’s experience looked very different.

As she explored her faith, she began noticing patterns of guilt, excessive responsibility, and rigid spiritual routines that felt holy on the surface but were actually keeping her trapped. Her story opens an important conversation about how OCD can disguise itself in ways that are difficult to recognize, especially within faith communities.

How Can You Tell the Difference Between OCD and the Holy Spirit?

For years, Erica interpreted constant feelings of fear, guilt, and urgency as spiritual conviction.

Through treatment and deeper reflection, she began noticing critical differences between condemnation and genuine conviction. What she discovered brought tremendous freedom, and her insights may challenge assumptions many believers have carried for years without realizing it.

Why Does Understanding Autism Change the Way You Care for Yourself?

Receiving an autism diagnosis didn’t change who Erica was, but it completely changed how she understood herself. Instead of viewing sensory overwhelm as a character flaw, she began recognizing it as a real neurological need.

Sometimes the path forward isn’t forcing ourselves to endure more discomfort. Sometimes it’s learning how to honor the way God designed us and responding with compassion instead of criticism.

What Makes ICBT So Effective for Breaking Free from OCD?

Erica describes her experience with Inference-Based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy as life-changing. By learning how OCD creates doubt, fear, and imagined threats, she began seeing patterns that had influenced her thinking for decades.

When people understand how OCD operates, they gain opportunities to respond differently. That shift can open doors to freedom that once felt impossible.

How Do You Stop Living Under the Weight of Constant Shame?

For years, Erica believed something was fundamentally wrong with her, shaping how she viewed herself, her faith, and her relationships. In our conversation, she shares how learning to challenge those beliefs brought greater peace, self-compassion, and freedom from self-condemnation.

Erica’s story offers hope for anyone navigating ADHD, autism, OCD, faith struggles, or chronic shame.

Listen to the full episode to hear the insights and breakthroughs that made a lasting difference in her recovery journey.

Transcript

Carrie: Welcome back everyone to our personal stories series on the podcast for this summer. I know that all of you really enjoy hearing from other people who are struggling with similar best that we’ve gotten on the podcast is to talk a little bit more about intersection of different types of neurodiversity, so intersection between OCD and ADHD, intersection between OCD and autism.

Carrie: So today we have a personal story that really encompasses all of those diagnoses with Erica Hackworth. Welcome to the show. I’m so glad that you’re able to join us today. Thank you so much for having me. Tell us a little bit about kind of like your treatment journey, kinda what caused you to first get into treatment for ADHD, and how did this kinda lead to finding out about other diagnoses?

Erica: Yeah. I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was in elementary school, and I was treated for it all the way up through college, and then I went to a church and participated in biblical counseling where they basically told me it wasn’t real. Wow. I was on other meds too for depression and other things, but I got off all my meds.

Erica: Was actually doing okay for a while.

Carrie: I was coping okay. Do you think that was because you were out of school? Like, when you were in school and you had certain expectations that you had to meet, then having the ADHD medicine kinda helped you meet those expectations, and then getting out of school, maybe you didn’t need it as much, or?

Erica: I think to a point. Maybe in high school it was like that, but then college, like, I actually never graduated because everything fell apart. Like, I couldn’t just rely on my intellect anymore. I had to be able to do the executive functioning, planning, writing papers, doing those things, and I didn’t have the structures I needed.

Erica: Plus, I had a depression, a lot of other things going on that caused my life to fall apart. So yeah, I don’t know about that.

Carrie: This biblical counseling, though, that created a lot of shame then, I would imagine.

Erica: I think confusion too. Initially, it was kind of like, “Oh, well, there’s nothing wrong with me.” I was told for a really long time that I have all these things, like, it’s not real.

Erica: And so I think initially it felt like a blessing and like it was freeing, but then as time went on, I realized I think there’s actually something to all of this. Where I got married, I had my first child, and then my second, and then my third, and the stuff that I used to rely on to cope and keep everything together just totally fell apart.

Erica: Like, I couldn’t just get through the way I was getting through before. About a year ago, I started to kind of revisit the idea that maybe there is something to this ADHD thing. I think particularly because my husband and I were having difficulties. I would forget all manner of things. He kind of felt like it was personal, like I didn’t care.

Erica: I was like, “No, I do care.” And so that’s kind of what caused me to be like, “No, this is real. I’m not just a lazy, forgetful, horrible person. There is something going on neurologically.”

Carrie: I think that’s huge. I just wanna pause there for a moment, because it’s so hard sometimes to communicate to other relationships in our life, like, what our internal experience is like, and it, things can be misperceived.

Erica: It was so hard. The amount of times that I heard him say, and he meant well, but he was like, “I don’t understand you. My experience is nothing like what you’re describing.” For a while, that made me feel pretty alone, but then that was the impetus to be like, “Okay, so let’s help you. How can we help you understand what I’m dealing with?”

Erica: I had gotten some coaching back in my 20s from the ADHD Center of West Michigan. If you’re in ADHD circles, that’s Tamara Rosier’s group. I went back there and decided that relationship coaching was gonna be a good way forward to help my husband kind of understand what was going on. And then kind of in the background, I’m, like, on neurodivergent social media now, kind of, ’cause I’m trying to educate myself.

Erica: There was a video that came up that was like, “You might be AuDHD if blah, blah, blah.” It was like, you think about social interactions for days after they happen, and you feel, like, drained after spending time with people even though you love it, and all of these things. There were more things to it, but I just remember, like, the bottom dropped out.

Erica: I watched that and I was like, “Oh.” So it might not just be ADHD. ‘Cause I felt like ADHD fit who I was, but, like, not 100%, ’cause there was this other part of me that’s pretty routine oriented, pretty regimented, pretty structured, like things just so. I do things the same way every day, that kind of thing. And so that’s where I think the autism kind of

Erica: That was the other thing that kinda clicked into place, like, oh, okay, so it’s not just ADHD. It’s probably AuDHD. I better seek out a diagnosis for these things, just to kind of help me understand myself, help my husband understand me, and chart a way forward.

Carrie: I think with some women getting diagnosed later in life, like, their experience looking different than maybe a male autistic experience, can you talk a little bit about that?

Carrie: Like, oh, I think a lot of times when people think about autism, they think about people who are severely impaired, for example, or-

Erica: Or they’re thinking of someone of what the stereotypical Asperger’s kind of male guy looks like, who’s very high intellect, but just kinda socially awkward. This, I think, it looks different.

Erica: I think as women, we’re kind of socialized early that fitting in is survival. I learned over time, if I’m gonna stim, I’m gonna keep it small. I’m gonna keep it internal. I’ll stim with, like, my tongue around my teeth or, like, my hand in my pocket or things like that. And I learned to work really hard to appear like everybody else.

Erica: I can pretend to make eye contact. I really look at your nose or middle of your forehead or your chin, things like that. Or, like, if I’m in a situation where I really wanna rock, but I know it’s … Other people are gonna look at me and think it’s weird, maybe I’ll resist doing that. But all of that masking builds up, and it gets exhausting.

Erica: And you don’t really ever feel like anybody really knows you.

Carrie: Does it create a lot of internal anxiety and tension, just kind of like trying to almost fit this square peg in a round hole? Like, I don’t really quite fit in here, but I’ve gotta pretend like I do and be just like everybody else. Absolutely.

Erica: It’s pretty painful. And I remember in high school feeling like this just immense sense of loneliness, and it, that carried with me for a long time, just feeling like nobody knows me And if they find out, then they’re gonna realize that I’m crazy or weird, or they’re not gonna love me.

Carrie: Tell us about that process of then when you did get the autism diagnosis, what was that like for you, or how did that shift your self-perception?

Erica: I think it really helped a lot. Initially, it was kind of like, “Okay, what do I do with this?” Like, I’m still the same person. But I think what it really did for me was to realize that the things about me that I felt were too sensitive, too needy, like, “Why am I reacting like this? I should just be okay.” For example, my husband and I just traveled in an airport, and instead of having a big meltdown that was very mysterious to me, ’cause I would always meltdown on travel days, and I didn’t really get it.

Erica: I was like, “I’m just a difficult person. I’m really annoying. My husband shouldn’t have to deal with me,” which is also kind of some OCD thoughts, you know? But, like, instead of doing that, I wore headphones, and I was able to communicate to him and say, “Hey, listen, I’m struggling with all of this. I need a few minutes.

Erica: It’s not that I’m upset with you. This is a lot.” And so I allowed myself to accommodate myself. I wore headphones the whole day, even in the car on the way to our Airbnb, because the overstimulation was too much, and it prevented me from becoming a meltdown-y rage monster.

Carrie: That’s good. They also have these things like sunflower tags or badges, something like that.

Carrie: Have you seen those for airport workers? I’ve seen them.

Erica: I haven’t utilized it, but I’ve seen it. Yeah,

Carrie: for anybody out there that may be struggling, it’s to identify someone who has a invisible disability such as autism, or it could be used for OCD. Maybe airports really spike all of your OCD symptoms or other things.

Carrie: So people can, the airport workers can kinda know to treat you with a little bit more gentleness or understanding that, understanding that people may need more time and so forth when they see the sunflower badge. That was something that I saw last time I traveled in the airport that I thought, “Oh, this is really wonderful to have out there,” because my husband walks with a cane, but for a long time he just had vision issues, and people wouldn’t realize that he couldn’t see them in his side line of vision.

Carrie: And I thought, “Wow, that would’ve been really helpful for us to have some kind of communication like that.” He’s struggling, kinda watch out a little bit. Tell us about now when you have these sensory needs, it sounds like you’re able to accommodate a lot more for them. Like, how have certain things changed for you in your relationships, like within your family or friends, or just kinda day-to-day life?

Carrie: What does it look like differently now that you’re aware of this diagnosis?

Erica: Yeah, I think I have been able to communicate effectively to the people in my life about the diagnosis, and they expect me to have headphones on. They expect me to need to take a minute if I’m feeling overstimulated or overwhelmed.

Erica: I can say the word meltdown, and they know what that means. I think it’s just, like, deepened my ability to trust the people that I love dearly because now they get it. And it’s not that I’m difficult or bad like I believed for so long. It’s that I have a different sensory profile, and I process the world differently, and that’s okay.

Erica: It doesn’t have to mean anything bad about me.

Carrie: Yeah. So how did OCD show up? Like, when did that kind of come onto the scene or into your awareness?

Erica: Yeah. I have always thought I’ve been a very spiritually sensitive person, and conservative Christian circles where I kind of run around, that’s a very good thing, right?

Erica: It’s good to be sensitive spiritually. But as I was kind of uncovering the ADHD and the autism and starting to kind of lean into my special interests and, like, realized, oh, I don’t just get obsessed with things, and it’s not idolatry. It’s a special interest. It’s something that I find regulating, and it’s okay that it’s regulating.

Erica: As I started to kind of do that, I started to feel some immense guilt because I would spend a long time researching certain things for a while. Autism was my special interest, so I was, like, researching, researching, researching, trying to figure everything out. And I would spend hours, and then I started to feel like, oh, but I don’t read my Bible that long, or I don’t pray that long.

Erica: Maybe God’s mad at me for doing this. Maybe I’m sinning. Maybe I’m this, that, and the other. I mentioned that to my ADHD coach. She was kind of like, “Have you ever thought about OCD?” And I was like, “No,” ’cause I’ve had friends with OCD. Mine doesn’t look like theirs necessarily. But after that session, I did a couple self-tests, and I was like, oh, highly likely.

Erica: Great. Okay. Another diagnosis that I need to pursue. Let’s see here. So I went back to the place that I got diagnosed and said, “Hey, can we do OCD testing?” And they did, and it came back positive, and severe, actually. I think realizing that OCD doesn’t always look like symmetry or germaphobe or these other things.

Erica: It can be excessive thinking, excessive apologizing. It can be checking the relationship. Are we okay? It can be, for me, it was also, like, I had to do my devotions in a certain order, and if I didn’t do it in a certain order, it didn’t feel like God would be happy with that. Like, it’s not okay. It’s not done enough.

Erica: Or if I didn’t write down my prayers, then they weren’t real, things like that. All of these things felt very much like a prison for a really long time. And I just didn’t even know that I was living in it. It was kind of like I just thought I was sensitive and a nice person, ’cause I always wanna make sure everybody’s okay.

Carrie: That really, like, inhibits your relationship with God if you feel like I have to write down all of my prayers. I mean, that can be time-consuming, and then it doesn’t give you any kind of freedom to just say, like, “God, I need help right now,” or, “I just need some sense of comfort or peace or reassurance that you’re here.”

Carrie: Yeah, so it’s interesting how these symptoms overlap, right, with the autism of wanting the craving for, like, structure and routine and things being the same, and then the overlap of OCD saying, “No, it has to be this way, or else something bad is gonna happen, like, if you don’t do it.”

Erica: And then I think also with the ADHD in there, too, I have very much, like, flighty thoughts, right?

Erica: They all feel like hot air balloons that just kind of float away. I think sometimes I do crave that concreteness of thought in order to kind of keep a train going, which is not a bad thing, but when it becomes a necessary thing in order to feel like I’m okay,” that’s where I think it becomes more prison-like rather than a tool to help.

Carrie: Right. Tell us about your experience with inference-based cognitive behavioral therapy, ICBT. What was that like for you?

Erica: It was life-changing. I actually just graduated, and we did the Y-BOCS again, and I’m subclinical now, so that’s really cool. Um- That’s awesome.

Carrie: Yay.

Erica: Yeah, I went from severe to subclinical, so I’m praising the Lord every day for it.

Erica: I really appreciated learning about how OCD functioned, how the patterns of thought, what they looked like, what they sounded like, and I realized that so much of my shame and my fear and my sensitivity was actually just this, like, yucky, faulty alarm system in my brain that was telling me I was in trouble all the time, that something bad is gonna happen.

Erica: And understanding the patterns behind the thoughts helped me to realize, like, I don’t have to enter the bubble. I can make a choice now that I know what this is to go the other way and trust what’s around me, trust myself. I think that’s been one of the biggest thing, is that I’ve learned to trust myself.

Carrie: When you say trust myself, like, you’re talking about, like, my true intentions, my true desires spiritually, like, those types of things.

Erica: Who am I as a person, right? Who did God make me to be, especially now that I’m His child? I can trust that I have remaining sin. I don’t have the reigning sin. I don’t have the sin that I’m enslaved to anymore, which is such a freeing thought.

Erica: I think, too, because of the other neurodivergence, I have struggled to socially trust myself. A lot of times when I was younger, something would happen that I was completely bewildered by. Somebody rejected me, and I had no idea why, and so I think I made these rules of like, “Oh, it’s because I’m bad. It’s because I didn’t care enough about them, or they didn’t think I cared enough about them.”

Erica: And so realizing that, like, I can trust myself now in a social setting, I can be myself and it’s okay, and I don’t have to constantly be scanning for renet- relational, like, danger anymore.

Carrie: Right. That’s really good, and I think very helpful ’cause that causes you to be in your head and be disconnected from the people that you’re trying to connect with in that moment.

Erica: Right. And never quite feeling like you can do it right. Pretty isolating. So it sounds

Carrie: like that the feared possible self versus the real self, like modules, those concepts were really helpful for you. The OCD bubble, like if I understand kinda how I get into this OCD reasoning process, then I can know, oh, hey, I don’t have to follow that train of thought, like when that obsession comes up.

Carrie: That feels really good. Yeah. I even

Erica: started to recognize what OCD feels like in my body. I often would have this, like huge knot in my stomach that basically lived in my body for 30 years, and I thought it was a sensitive conscience and the Holy Spirit talking to me, and it’s not. Basically, this nervous system reaction of fight or flight all the time.

Erica: And so once I was able to distinguish the difference between, like the Holy Spirit convicting and OCD condemning, and really make that difference clear in my mind, I could recognize that that bodily sensation was imaginary, too. It’s happening, but it’s not based upon a spiritual reality. It’s not the Holy Spirit convicting me.

Carrie: Was that a hard thing to recognize? I think I’ve talked to different people where they’ve said separating that out, the Holy Spirit- Versus OCD has been challenging for them, as well as going, “Wait a minute, I thought that I was constantly being condemned or corrected, and now I’m having to learn this new way of being with God.”

Carrie: Like, what was that process like for you? It

Erica: was kind of the last domino to fall with the OCD therapy. I suddenly had this realization, ’cause I started engaging again more into my special interests. I’ve been in autistic burnout, and so one of the things that helps with that is really leaning into those special interests.

Erica: Well, as I was doing that, I started to have that gnawing sensation in my stomach, and was like, “Well, maybe this is the Holy Spirit.” And then it, it just kind of occurred to me, like, what does Scripture say about how the Holy Spirit operates? What does condemnation in the life of a believer look like? It’s gone.

Erica: I think it’s been really freeing to have a relationship with God that’s based upon love for Christ, love for His Word, love for truth, and not based upon, “I’m afraid He’s mad at me. I’m afraid that God hates me. I’m afraid that I’m a bad person and not successful as a believer,” those kinds of things.

Carrie: It sounds like just this concept of this verse that talks about perfect love casts out fear, because fear has to do with punishment.

Carrie: And so if you’re able to connect with God is loving, what I see in the Scripture is God speaking to people in a still, small voice, that not a loud, booming, “You have to do this right now,” urgency level of OCD. I think that’s a huge distinguisher for people, right? Like, oh, OCD gets really loud and really urgent, and I have to do it absolutely right now and perfectly.

Carrie: It’s true.

Erica: I think the other thing that I recognized is that OCD often can be very ambiguous, so it’s a lot of like, “You’re bad. Something bad’s gonna happen. You’re a terrible person. You are a bad mom. You’re a bad wife.” When it’s the Holy Spirit, it’s, “I’m convicting you about this thing.” It’s specific, it’s targeted, and it’s not based upon who I’m as a person.

Erica: My personhood isn’t on the line anymore. It’s, “I want to sanctify you. I’m going to grow you. I’m going to make you look more like Christ.” And it’s a beautiful thing, and it’s a gentle thing. Sometimes there’s chastisement and stuff like that, but I feel like in the life of the believer who really loves God, I think it’s gonna be a more molding kind of movement, rather than, like, He’s gonna tear me apart and I’m gonna get struck down.

Carrie: I like that. I like the specificity in terms of, like, this particular sin is the one that you need to handle and deal with and confess and walk away from. You know, what does it look like for me to turn my back on that and to do– act in a way of repentance, something completely different versus, “Oh, no, something vague, bad is going to happen to you because you didn’t read your Bible in the exact manner that I prescribed.”

Carrie: Isn’t

Erica: actually in scripture. Right.

Carrie: These were just rules that either OCD made up or somebody before you said, “Hey, do it this way,” and it didn’t mean that you had to do it that way every single time. It’s just, “Hey, here’s a general guideline,” that maybe OCD hopped on. This is really good. Sounds like for a lot of your life, just a general sense of feeling shame and bad, and I run across a lot of people who listen to our podcast that feel that way.

Carrie: And stepping out of that shame of who you actually are can be really, really challenging. Any other, like, encouragement or advice that you would have for those folks that just feel like they’re stuck in the “I’m bad space”?

Erica: I think for me, in my ICBT, there was an assignment to write an autobiography. I really found that extremely powerful because in those moments when I’m feeling that condemnation, “I’m a bad mom, I’m a bad wife, I’m a bad Christian, I’m not doing anything right,” I can look at the truth of what I actually know about myself and what do I see around me.

Erica: I think a lot of times, again, there’s this ambiguous cloud of bad, but if my OCD is telling me that I’m a bad mom, but I can look around and see that my children are smiling and fed and happy and we love each other, that doesn’t mean I’m a perfect mom, but I don’t have to believe that I’m a bad mom. I can get more specific in my own mind.

Erica: Okay, is there something that I wanna adjust with my kids? Maybe. Then let’s think about that. Let’s not do the condemnation hamster wheel that doesn’t actually get us anywhere. I think, too, the more I’ve allowed myself to do things because I want to and not because I’m afraid what if I don’t, has been life-changing as well.

Erica: It’s like I’m allowed to enjoy my life, you know what I mean? It doesn’t always have to based upon fear.

Carrie: Yeah, I think that’s a good word for parents. We do have a lot of parents that listen to the podcast, and it’s like you’re never gonna be a perfect parent. There is no such thing. You’re gonna do things that don’t land very well with your kids, and sometimes you don’t know until after you do it, and then you’re like, “Wow, that didn’t really go well at all.”

Carrie: And so looking at God understanding, like, your heart and where you’re at and looking at very specific things. “Okay, that didn’t work,” or, “I didn’t handle that situation well. It’s an opportunity for repair with my child. It’s an opportunity to look at how could I handle that differently next time.” But I find that when people are really stuck in this shame, it’s very paralyzing because it doesn’t actually help you make positive change.

Carrie: Like, if you constantly believe that you’re a bad person, you’re gonna continue to engage in behaviors that you feel like are bad so that then you can go back and punish yourself, and it’s not conscious. It’s very, like, under the surface that that happens,

Erica: right? I think for me, the reverse bridging in those moments when I’m feel like I’m getting sucked into that feeling of condemnation, like, okay, notice where I’m at, notice the thought.

Erica: What is the thought? Okay, the thought is that I’m a terrible mom. Okay, look down. What are the feelings that make me feel like I’m not doing enough? And recognizing that they’re imaginary. If it’s imaginary, I don’t have to do anything. I can turn around. I can reenter reality. I can hug my kids. I can notice my life instead of constantly being in my head.

Erica: I think my desire is to be present Yeah. That’s huge. I can do that.

Carrie: Yeah. This is really great. I mean, what you had said before about, like, the– for anybody that doesn’t know that Y-BOCS two assessment, uh, is where you score kind of how much time obsessions are taking and how much time you’re engaging in compulsions, and what happens if you try to resist, and how hard is it, et cetera.

Carrie: So there’s those questions. And so to go from a severe range to a subclinical range, like, that’s incredible. That’s amazing. What does recovery process look like for you nowadays?

Erica: It looks like being okay With having the beginning of an OCD spiral, ’cause they’re gonna happen, and even the middle of an OCD spiral.

Erica: But when I can recognize what’s happening and be like, “Oh, that’s OCD, I don’t wanna do that,” I can make the choice to move along. The other thing that it looks like is I can talk to my husband, or I live with my sister and a friend of mine too, and just be like, “Hey, just so you know, I’m fighting an intrusive thought, and I’m gonna pull myself out of it.”

Erica: And sometimes we’ll talk a little bit about the substance of it, but I have to be really careful not to do a sneaky check or, that’s what I call it, is a sneaky check is like, “I’m having an OCD thought that you’re upset with me.” Like, don’t do that. And I always am clear to be like, “Please don’t reassure me.

Erica: I don’t need that.” But just, like, letting people in can help too sometimes. Sometimes I don’t need to. Sometimes I can just be like, “Oh, I had this thought. I don’t need to engage with it. I can move along.” I think for a while I was having fears about, like, oh, well, if, if I’m in the spiral at all, that means I’m failing, and that’s just not true.

Erica: ‘Cause it’s gonna happen. You can’t make the OCD go away totally, but you don’t always have to listen to the fire alarm or the screaming baby. You can just kind of, like, “Okay, I hear you. We’re concerned about something, but we can move along. It’s okay.”

Carrie: Yeah, and then it’s like, okay, just reengaging with the present moment and what’s actually happening and moving towards my values and what’s most important.

Erica: I think the physical sensation was one of the hardest things for me to get past, because it was like this perpetual feeling of just nervous energy, anxiety, and gnawing at me all the time. And the fact that I have tools now that I can trust, that’s not gonna be around forever. Like, okay, you feel bad.

Erica: That’s okay that you feel bad. You’re not gonna feel bad forever. We can move along.

Carrie: That will die down as I don’t engage with it. If I engage with it, it’s gonna become bigger and worse and scarier, but if I don’t disengage, then that is gonna eventually die down. I think is really good for people to know.

Erica: Yeah, ’cause it’s imaginary

Carrie: too. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for this. I hope that you are enjoying the Personal Story series. I’m so glad that Erica was willing to share her personal story with us. I know we’ve had people ask about OCD and autism occurring together. We had an episode previously on ADHD and OCD.

Carrie: So we will have one of our previous guests, therapists, come back and talk about OCD and autism together in the fall. I’m very excited to bring you that episode. And of course, if you have any guest suggestions, you can always contact us via the podcast, carriebock.com. I’d love, love, love it if you would sign up for our email newsletter.

Carrie: It comes out once a week, and it lets you know just little devotional thoughts about OCD, managing that, as well as things that are going on in my life, podcast direction, upcoming things that are happening. You’re gonna become the first to know, and you can sign up for that on the homepage of carriebock.com.

Carrie: Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you. Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of myself or By the Well Counseling. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area

227. Finding Paternal and Maternal Love in God: A Personal Story with Chris Russo

Written by Carrie Bock on June 2, 2026. Posted in OCD, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode.

In this episode, Carrie sits down with pastor Chris Russo to discuss how religious OCD, intrusive thoughts, childhood trauma, and fears surrounding salvation shaped his relationship with God and how counseling, community, and faith became important parts of his healing journey.

You Will Learn:

How scrupulosity can create intense fears surrounding salvation and judgment
Why childhood trauma and loss can quietly affect your relationship with God
How intrusive thoughts can distort the way Christians interpret scripture
The difference between intellectually understanding God’s love and emotionally receiving it
Why counseling, community, and healthy relationships played a major role in Chris’s healing journey
What practical OCD recovery can look like while continuing to pursue faith, family, and purpose

Christian Faith, OCD, and the Fear of Losing God

What happens when your relationship with God becomes driven more by fear than freedom? In this episode, I sat down with Chris Russo, a pastor, husband, and father of three who has spent years navigating the complicated intersection of faith, intrusive thoughts, childhood loss, and religious OCD. Chris shared how losing his mother at nine years old quietly shaped the way he viewed safety, relationships, and eventually God Himself. After becoming a Christian in college, what should have felt life-giving slowly became overshadowed by intense fears surrounding salvation, judgment, and the possibility of losing his relationship with God. What I appreciated most about this conversation was Chris’s honesty about how exhausting it felt to constantly seek reassurance while secretly believing God might reject him at any moment.

Why Do Christians With Religious OCD Feel Constantly Afraid of God?

Chris described spending years terrified that he could accidentally cross a spiritual line and lose his salvation forever. One scripture in particular around blasphemy against the Holy Spirit became an obsession for him, even after talking with pastors and searching for reassurance. He explained that no matter how many answers he received, the fear never fully settled because OCD kept demanding certainty. I think this is something many Christians dealing with scrupulosity quietly wrestle with but rarely know how to explain to others.

How Does Childhood Trauma Affect Your Relationship With God?

As we talked more deeply, Chris connected his fear of losing God to losing his mother so suddenly as a child. He shared how that experience created this underlying belief that anything meaningful or safe could be taken away without warning. Hearing him make that connection was incredibly powerful because so many people carry similar wounds into adulthood without realizing how much those experiences shape their faith, relationships, and emotional responses. Sometimes what feels like a spiritual struggle is connected to unresolved grief that has never fully been processed.

Why Is It So Hard to Believe God Truly Loves You?

One moment from this episode that stayed with me was when Chris shared that someone once told him, “God adores you,” and it almost sounded unbelievable to him. Even though he knew scripture and had gone through seminary, he still struggled to emotionally believe that God genuinely delighted in him. He talked about how counseling and healing relationships slowly helped him recognize how distorted his view of God had become over time. I think many believers intellectually understand grace while emotionally living as though God is constantly disappointed in them.

What Does Healing From Religious OCD Actually Look Like?

Toward the end of our conversation, Chris shared that he intentionally structures his life in ways that “annoy” his OCD every single day. As a pastor, husband, and father, he refuses to let fear isolate him from the very things God has called him to pursue. Instead of waiting until every intrusive thought disappears, he continues showing up for relationships, community, ministry, and growth anyway. I think that picture of healing is incredibly important because recovery is not always about eliminating fear completely. Sometimes it looks like learning how to keep moving forward while trusting God in the middle of the uncertainty.

If you’ve ever struggled with intrusive thoughts, fear surrounding salvation, or feeling emotionally disconnected from God’s love, I really encourage you to listen to the full episode.

Connect with Pastor Chris here:

www.officialchrisrusso.com

Transcript

Carrie: Okay., Chris, welcome to the podcast today, and just tell, give us a brief overview of who you are.

Chris: Yeah. So,, I’m Chris Russo, and I live in the Charleston, South Carolina area., I’ve been a pastor for about 20 years. I’ve got three sons who are,, one actually just turned 16 today. Okay. So I’ve got a 16-year-old, a 14-year-old, and a 10-year-old, and my wife Abby and I are coming up on 20 years of marriage in January.

Chris: So yeah.,,, I’ve been pastor… I’ve been the lead pastor of a church for about three years, and before that I was on staff at Seacoast Church,, in the Charleston area for about 18 years. So,, yeah, I became a Christian when I was in college, and that was a crazy experience and it’s been a, it’s been a cool journey.

Carrie: Awesome. A wild ride ever since.

Chris: Yes.

Carrie: Yeah. So tell us a little bit about, like, your OCD story in terms of when did you, the symptoms come out and when did you make the connection like, “Oh, hey, this is what’s actually going on,” and

Chris: Yeah, so I think that probably,, it initially started when I lost my mom at age nine to cancer.

Chris:, I, I think it, it was at that point that I subconsciously adopted a script that the world is a really scary place that can take anything from you at any time. But I wouldn’t say I was really… I, I u- throughout middle school and high school, I used so many numbing techniques when it came to any anxiety.

Chris: And on, on top of that, mental health lingo, at least I,, growing up in Connecticut, really wasn’t, like, a popular thing. Like, I don’t even know that I knew about anxiety until later on in life. So even though there may have been some prevalence throughout middle and high school, I would say,, it really started actually when I became a Christian.

Chris:, I, I wouldn’t say it necessarily started, but it really showed up in force because I stopped, I stopped the drugs. I stopped,,,, I stopped the use of pornography. So I stopped a lot of the numbing agents that I was previously using, and then I really didn’t ha- I mean, all of a sudden, I’m starting this walk with God without these crutches that I’d used for so long, and these struggles started coming, what felt like out of nowhere.

Chris: Yeah. And then it wasn’t… And so I became a Christian when I was 18, and, and I wasn’t diagnosed with OCD by a psychiatrist until I was 27. I mean, it wa- it was a hard road.

Carrie: Yeah. I’m sure., what were some of the, like, themes that,, have come out for you that you struggled with?

Chris: So the first one, I mean,, I didn’t grow up…

Chris: Like, I grew up,, going to Catholic church once a year. So I mean, I went to catechism, but I, I was not a practicing Catholic. I had no real relationship with God. I,, I would pray that I would sink a putt on the golf course or win a baseball game., but it was when,… And sorry, repeat the question.

Chris: I just wanna make sure I understand it.

Carrie: Yeah., like what are some of the themes that you dealt with?

Chris: Yeah. So as soon as I became a Christian, I was so filled with life like I had never felt before. But as I was reading the Bible, I had no previous understanding of scripture. So I’m like, I went from a worldview, and I don’t think a l- a lot of people that didn’t grow up in church can really appreciate this.

Chris: I went from an agnostic, like maybe there’s something out there, maybe there’s a God, maybe there’s heaven, that thing- Mm-hmm… to reading this Bible, talking about heaven and hell, and angels and demons, and all this stuff that I really,, didn’t even believe in 20 seconds ago. And then I started coming across scriptures that through, for a variety of reasons, started to feel like, “Wow, there, maybe there’s a possibility that I could lose this wonderful salvation, this wonderful relationship with God that I just received.”

Chris: So the major theme that I felt like would never end was the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. Like, I just, I didn’t understand it really, but to me, I felt like I had stumbled across a crack in the salvation landscape. And it didn’t matter who I talked to. I would talk to as,, I would seek reassurance from pastors and as many people as I could.

Chris: And no matter who I talked to, and no matter what theology text I saw, there was still something that was like you could ste- It felt, it felt like, honestly, as silly as it sounds, it felt like you could step on a crack and break your mother’s back. I felt like I had to tiptoe around God because somehow, and it’s a terrible Trinitarian view, but somehow I’m like, “Okay, the Father is really loving.

Chris: Jesus still creeps me out because all the stained glass windows that I saw growing up, he was never smiling. He never seemed happy.” So I was always, like, a little freaked out about Jesus. But the Holy Spirit, I’m like, “Apparently, he’s, like, the really sensitive member of the Trinity, and if you say the wrong thing to him, he’s gonna peace out and you go to hell forever.”

Chris: So I was terrified of the Holy Spirit.

Carrie: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and, and you can joke about it now, but, like, when you’re in the midst of that, like, storm, it feels, like, so super real. Like, this is, like, this is really, really bad. And, and I think that that’s interesting, that parallel between losing your mother and at a very young age, which,, impacts you profoundly developmentally, and then this sense of,, now I’m afraid that I’m gonna lose God.

Carrie: I’m gonna lose this, like, really positive connection that I have, and, and childhood taught me basically that things could be ripped away from you, and now,, there’s this parallel over here that,, my relationship with God could be ripped away. Like, how do you feel like losing your mom and, and maybe some other things that you went through as a result of that affected your view of God?

Chris: Yeah,, that’s a really interesting insight you brought up that I remember– I’ve been in,, professional counseling now for,, about 10 years, but that insight that you just brought up, I mean, I can’t remember how many counselors have told me, like, “Chris, like, it happened to you.” Like, everything was ripped away so quickly that, — A-and just drawing the connection between that and that fear, like, it,, I, I still– I, I wouldn’t say I’ve worked through that, but I would say that definitely made me feel– I think that sort of, and I really don’t understand it, but I would say that sort of primed me for feeling like, yeah, like, this, this could happen.

Chris: It has happened, and I don’t think I sub– I don’t think I consciously, like, logged as a nine-year-old- Sure… like, everything could be taken away from you, but su-, however subconscious priming works, I think that, that developed,, a mindset or a defense mechanism in me where it’s like, yeah, the most important things in your life can be stripped away regardless of what they are.

Chris: So,, don’t,,, don’t,, don’t get too excited. Don’t allow yourself to enjoy or to really rest in anything because it’s probably not gonna last.

Carrie: Yeah. I think a lot of people,, buy into that, to that lie. Like, don’t, don’t hope too much, don’t get too excited, don’t feel too good because it’s,, just– it’s all gonna be dashed and all gonna be taken away.

Carrie:, so h- tell us about, like, your view of God, like from this really fearful lens, it sounds like,, to a more loving father heart of God view.

Chris: Yeah. So it’s,, it’s definitely been a journey. So I would s– I remember actually being at a worship service one time, and this lady came up to me. And this is when I started to– One of the moments when I started to realize that I had a really,, warped view of God.

Chris: I remember her coming up to me in this service. Her name was Migsy, and she came up to me in service and she said, “God just adores you.” And I, I was probably in my twenties at that point. I’m forty-three right now. And I just remember how ridiculous that idea sounded, like God adoring you. I just felt like,,, like I was at a place right then that- E-even though, like, intellectually I sort of understood the gospel, I was at a place right then where I thought, “God’s definitely frustrated with me.

Chris: Maybe He’s rejected me. At best, He tolerates me, but adores?” Like, that sounded psychotic. And yet there was some deep resonance even when she said that, that felt like that was true, but why can’t I absorb that? And so– And then I,, once I started really seeing a Christian counselor, she told me that through the concoction that we’ve talked about, losing my mom,, not having a super close relationship with my dad growing up, that me receiving the gospel…

Chris: And she wasn’t trying to be mean to me. She was just like saying, “This is what we’re up against, like we’ve gotta drain the swamp.” She said a lot of the theology that I had voraciously taken in through seminary and,, a million books or whatever, it was like pouring water on a rock, that I just couldn’t receive it.

Chris: And so I started to realize that, okay, may… And that’s when I started to think, “Okay, maybe God is way more loving than I, than, than I can, than I can conceive of,” but it still was, like, a long time from that point to really actually believing that He, that He was truly loving. So, like, people would tell me things like, “Quote Matthew three seventeen,” like, “Hey, Chris, like, G-because of the gospel, God sees you as His, as His beloved son with whom He’s well pleased.”

Chris: And there’d be some part of me that, like, the, the ice would chip a little bit.,, I, I think I started to ask the question like, “Okay, God can be a great,…” G- I, I hear all these messages about how God can re-father you and all that stuff, but can God re-mother you? Like, I, like, that, I just didn’t hear that message, but I didn’t have any reason to think otherwise.

Chris: So then a passage like First Peter five seven, like that really, that really stuck to me. Like, “Cast all your anxiety on Him because He cares for you.” And I think that idea of God caring for me was really one that, that hit that maternal point where it was like, “Oh, like, so You’re, like, in the water with me.

Chris: It’s not, You’re not this austere God that sits on the far off side of some chasm or,, sees me drowning from the beach, hopes the best for me, maybe throw out a, a raft, but isn’t gonna come and, isn’t gonna come and get me.”, it’s actually funny. I do remember actually a vivid– I don’t have many memories of my mom, but I do have a vivid memory of I was like, I was probably like, I’ve always been short, but I was really short when I was growing up, and I was like in probably five feet of water, and I might’ve been five one or something like that, and I was like starting to drown, and my mom came into the water in a, in a full sundress and rescued me.

Chris: She’s the only one that saw me. It was a crowded pool. It’s random that, that, that came up. But yeah, so slowly but surely, and I think through some… I’ve had all female counselors, and I think that that’s been,, except for one. I’ve had all female counselors, and that’s been really restorative for God to work through.

Chris: Not,, I don’t think I like deified or idolized any of these women, but the, but God working distinctly through, the, these women to show me more of his caring, maternal qualities has all, ha- has all contributed to me feeling like, okay, God pursues. He’s close. He, He cares., but it’s still a struggle.

Chris: It’s still, like, one of those spots that I need more strengthening in, but I believe it. I’ve at least learned to doubt my doubts a little bit. Like, I know that when- That’s good… I know that when the tube of toothpaste gets squeezed,, when life hits, the storms hit and whatever, and I default to, “God, you probably don’t care,” I can at least flag it in my mind and say, “Wait a minute.

Chris: Hold on. That’s a familiar message. I don’t trust that. God, I know you care.” like a, “Lord, help my unbelief” moment.

Carrie: I think it’s one of the things I wanted to touch on, the seeing a counselor of the opposite sex because,, and I almost recorded an entire podcast episode on this one time and I ki- and I scrapped it.

Carrie: So I may run back to it at some point or another, but I think that in,, certain church circles, it’s very taboo. It’s like, if you’re a man, you need to see a man. If you’re a woman, you need to see a woman. And there are things that we can get from the opposite sex that we can’t get,, from the same sex.

Carrie:, the things that you’re talking about. Like, like, there were some type of, like, unmet needs that God really used these female counselors in a very professional and appropriate way to give, to show you that love and that caring, and I think that that’s so valuable., I know for myself, because of what I’ve just spoken at, I know that there are, are several men that have seen me and they’re like, “You’re my first female counselor,” and they’re just a little bit terrified about that.

Carrie: So I guess I wanna talk,, just throw that out there,, not to derail the conversation, but I think that that’s, that that’s important for people to know, like, it’s okay to see a counselor of the opposite sex as a Christian, and that can still be a really professional place for you to get certain needs met.

Carrie:, I went through, when I was going through trying to date again at,, post-divorce,, I saw a male counselor and it was incredibly helpful because I needed that opposite point of view,, in essence, and I needed him to speak certain things into my life that I don’t think I could have gotten from, from a female counselor.

Carrie: So I think that that’s, that… I, I believe that’s really beautiful that God,, used those people in your life for that purpose.

Chris: Yeah. Yeah. ‘Cause I think I’ve always responded pretty well. Not that, not that I d- haven’t– ’cause I’ve had male mentors before. Sure. Like, I’ve sought them out. So I’ve had,, restorative,…

Chris: And my relationship with my dad has gotten much better since when I was a, a hell-raising teenager., so I’ve had b- between him and a lot of,, male mentors, I’ve had those, those,… I’ve had my dad, I’ve had different father figures. But,, yeah, it– as I think about, it wasn’t like one day I set out and I’m like, “I need to see a female counselor.”

Chris: It was, it felt… I would say when I think back on each female counselor that I did see, it was pretty serendipitous in the way that I connected with them. Like, it was recommended. It was,, it, so I, it really felt provisional. It wasn’t– I don’t think I, there was some part of me that felt like I need to…

Chris: ‘Cause the approach in counseling in general, especially in the beginning, was such a mysterious realm for me. I mean, I’m thankful for– it, it feels like the church has really,, and the mental health community have really formed a closer relationship. But when I first was starting on this journey,, I, it, it felt very mysterious to me.

Chris: So there wasn’t some part of me that was like, that n- I didn’t have any idea what I needed. So I’m really thankful that I feel like God helped lead me to these different female counselors, because now in retrospect, I look back and I’m like, gosh, I really think them being females really helped in that,,, in that nurturing, that,, providing some things that maybe I couldn’t have gotten from a male counselor.

Chris: But that was not really an intentional, calculated decision on my part., that was more a, a provisional thing if it, when I really think about it.

Carrie: Yeah. I was thinking too, as you were talking about these,, female characteristics, how, like, Jesus said about Jerusalem, like, “I long to” something like, “I long to gather you like little chicks,, but you were unwilling,”?

Carrie: And, and just this picture of seeing their,, their need for God and their, their brokenness, and it’s like, “I really wanted to nurture you in that way.” I know in the Old Testament, there are some scriptures about,, comparing,, I’d have to look those up, but talking about, like, nursing and nursing mothers and things like that.

Carrie:, we’ll look those up and we may put that in the outro. But,,, there are, there are these pictures of God. So if your, if your view of God is this harsh, staunch, male, militant figure, it might be helpful for people to meditate on some of those other scriptures and really look into that.

Chris: Yeah, I, I think I would benefit more from that because it is, it’s super easy.

Chris: I mean, especially, I mean, and I won’t even start going through them ’cause I don’t wanna trigger anybody, but there are definitely passages of scripture that I… And I,, I just, my wife and I just read through the New Testament, and right now we’re doing a whole Bible plan, so I really try to, like, go th-, embrace God’s Word for what it is.

Chris: But there are definitely passages where I have to, that, that trigger that fear response of like, oh,. And I’ve just learned to just sorta like,,, allow the emotions to sit and not to just trust that the lens that I’m seeing them through, it must be the way that they are.

Chris: Because there are some times where I’m like, “Jesus, you seemed really harsh.” Like, there have been times where I’ve heard people talk about the Bible as a love letter, and ultimately I believe it is. I really do. But there are times where I hear people say that, and I’m like, “Have you read it?” Like- There’s

Carrie: a lot of people that die in there too, right?

Carrie: Yeah.

Chris: There are moments, there have been plenty of times where I’m like, “God, why did you provide this book that feels so scary?” But I,, as I learn the difference between exegesis and eisegesis, seeing what,, the difference between seeing what scripture actually says versus seeing what,, through my,, brokenness and my, my personality, my dysfunction,, all those different things, I’ve learned to not just take my initial gut reaction as gospel, so that, that, that’s really helpful.

Carrie: Yeah., we’re coming with our own lens that we often don’t realize that we have. And I, I can think of a, this is a non-biblical example, but I think it shows the point., the analogy is I watched a certain movie, and let’s say it was about some women that struggled in a time in America where there was, like, a lot more racism and,, different things that were happening that were clearly not godly.

Carrie: And I watched that movie and it,, it talks about these women’s struggle to overcome. My friend watched the movie and she said, “I couldn’t watch it all the way through.” She said, “I, I had to turn it off.” And I was like, “Why?” And she was like, “It was just, it was just too much,” like what they were going through was too much.

Carrie: And so she missed the, the overcoming piece and the inspiration, I think because of her own lens and her own probably experience with racism- Mm-hmm… and other things, that,, that was her, that was her lens of how horrible it was versus, hey, there were some things that were, that were overcame here, and there was a- actually, like, the whole point of the movie is to be inspirational, like that you can come o- overcome hardships.

Carrie: Yeah. And we, we bring, like, different lenses to, to the Bible, the lens of how our parents raised us, the lens of how,, that, the really harsh teachings that we have heard in the church,, and, like- You gotta, you gotta get it together. And, and unfortunately, I think like Like, I don’t know. I heard a lot of teachings growing up that it was like, it was almost like you gotta pull yourself up by your bootstraps, like the Christian version,?

Carrie: It’s like, get it together, get your spirituality together, stop playing games with God, that type of language. And I– it was like, “Oh, hey, here’s the gospel that saves you, but you get to sanctify yourself.” And I was like, a- as an adult now looking back on that, I’m like, what is that? That makes absolutely zero sense.

Carrie: Like, we have to kill the works-based sanctification and, like, it needs to die. Die. Because we have to be able to say, like, the same God that saved me by grace is purifying me. Like, and leading me to be more like Jesus with that same grace, and that same love, and that same fruit of the Spirit., he’s not sitting there going, “Gosh, Jeri, can’t believe you really messed it up today.”

Carrie: He’s like, “Yep, you need me more today.”? “Here I am.” I’m like, “Yes, I messed up again. Thank you. Like, I need, I need you to, to rescue me once again and tell me what I need to do differently so I don’t fall into the same hole that I keep falling into.” Amen. Cool process.

Chris: Yes. Amen.

Carrie: Yeah., talk with us about, like, just other things that, that…

Carrie: So I think what we’re– Sorry, let me re-say that. I think what we’re learning from your story is, like, there’s been a lot of healing in community, which I think is, is a really beautiful thing. As picture of the church, you’re a pastor. Mm-hmm. We’ve got more people,, not showing up at church than ever before.

Carrie: Look, COVID’s over, y’all. Stop trying to phone it in online, okay? Like, find a local body and get in there. That’s my, that’s my little soapbox. But because we need that, like, face-to-face, like, we need to hug some believers on a Sunday. Like, we need people who are gonna text us a scripture on, like, a Tuesday morning and be like, “Hey, I was thinking about you, and God gave me this verse, so I just wanna share this encouragement with you.”

Carrie:, we need those people that are gonna,,, show up and say, like, “Here’s a meal,” or, “Let me pray for you as you’re going through this hard time.”, and, and even if they don’t understand the OCD piece of your story, they’re just so important for us to have that biblical connection and community.

Carrie: And so I just really encourage people, if you’re not there at that point, like in your, in your walk with God, that you look,, continue that church search, show up, visit,, check, check things out. Yes. Meet some people. Don’t– And don’t just show up and leave and sit in the back row of a mega church and never get in a small group and never serve anything and never,, never get to know anybody.

Carrie: That’s To me, that’s not church either. I’m glad that people are showing up and doing that, and hopefully that’s a step on the front porch to get them all the way into the door.? We would like to, like, keep, like…, I think we just have this distorted view of what, what it means to be, I don’t know, in the church almost.

Carrie: It’s like, it’s not just about being in the building and sitting on the back pew. It’s about really being involved in the community, and that’s where these healing relationships can happen., and, and so I love that about, about your story and this, like, the mental health piece as well was really important for you.

Carrie:, a- anything else that has really helped shift some of the OCD for you? Like, are, are you just more aware of, like, when it comes around now?

Chris: Yeah, there’s been– I mean, gosh, I, one thing I am on is a learner, and so I,, I love…, there are times where I’ve gotten discouraged, and I think in the beginning of my journey, I felt like I had this thing that– and I didn’t know what it was, and even when it was labeled OCD, I,, I can’t tell you the number of men’s hikes or,, prayer sessions that I just thought God’s gonna take it away.

Chris: And once I started to,, embrace that this was gonna be more of a, a road and a journey that I was gonna be delivered through rather than from,, I would say there have been moments and I– that occasionally still resurface where I’ve gotten, I don’t know if jaded’s the right word, but discouraged, felt,, felt moments of despair like, gosh,, life would…

Chris: I can’t even imagine what life would be like without this,, gorilla on my back. But at the,, where I’ve gone in healthier moments and that has been, that has kept me, I, I tend to be a,, I don’t know how many Enneagram followers there are out there. I am a seven and I,, I d-, and hopefully a somewhat healthy seven, so the joyful, the joyful person.

Chris: And, and I do tend to be optimistic and I am, and I am a learner. So,, as I connect to,,, podcasts like yours and,, I’ve, and all kinds of,, different books,, on this,, not just on this subject but,, different apps that help me to slow down,, that help me to,, rest in God’s love.

Chris: I’ve really found that there’s,, a lot of gold to be dug up in this journey and so I’ve found,, like you said, healing relationships and I’ve, I, I don’t know if this is– I don’t know how healthy or prescriptive this is. This is just what I’ve done. I’ve got, like if I told you every… Like I’ve got a spiritual director who’s also, she’s also a licensed counselor but she serves as, as a spiritual director.

Chris: I’ve got a Christian counselor. I’ve got a couple of different men’s groups that I’m in. Like I’ve got so many,, between exercise and worship music and just encouraging voices I have in my life, I feel like I just have tried to turn the volume up so high on,, on the, on positivity, on God’s Word that,, not that it makes the OCD go away and there are still really tough days,, but I just have felt like I just am like, what?

Chris:, I’m, I’m not gonna back down. I’m gonna feel the fear and I’m gonna try to steer into the things that I’m afraid of. Like, honestly, as a pastor, I feel like there, and having kids, like, there’s a lot about my life, like if I were to go along with the OCD, I would sequester myself. If I did what, like just what the OCD wanted me to do, like being a pastor would be the worst idea ever.

Chris: Like, I would sequester myself. I would be alone. I probably wouldn’t have kids. I don’t know that I’d be married, and I would stay away from every environment I couldn’t control. Hmm. So I, I feel like I’ve really structured my life to shortcir- Like the, the OCD, I, I would say I, and I w- I, I don’t think I’ve ever said it like this before, but sort of intentionally, I annoy my OCD every single day.

Chris: I like it. Like my life is structured around annoying my OCD. So,, a- and, and I’m thankful for that. Even though there are days where I’m just like, “I wanna just go along with it, hide alone in a room, stay in a protective bubble, and never interact in any environments I can’t control.” I’m like, my life is structured to,, upset the OCD.

Chris: ‘Cause I fundamentally, I mean, as much as I’ve learned about from the physiological side of neuroplasticity to the emotional, mental side, I’m like,, and even, yeah, I mean, just knowing that Jesus overcame the grave itself, I’m like, there is nothing… And not to be like overly preachy, but I just am like, I fundamentally know that you can overcome this, God.

Chris: And I’m like, “I don’t know how it’s gonna happen, and I don’t know what the process is gonna look like, but I’m not gonna stop putting myself out there.”

Carrie: Yeah. Yeah. That’s so great. I think that’s such a great,, witness for the people who are listening to say, “I’m not gonna let OCD get in the way of my values and pursuing what I know God has for me,” whether that’s parenting or wait, ’cause somebody needs to hear that.

Carrie:, or whether that’s,, sharing the gospel with other people, or whether that’s speaking on a stage. Like, whatever that, that looks like that people know, hey, God’s calling me to this. Just having that sense of,, in righteous, indignant anger of like, “Not today, OCD.” Nope. Like, “It is not happening. We are gonna,, fulfill and walk in, in what God wants us to do.”

Carrie: Well, that’s, that’s awesome., it sounds like,, for you recovery looks like engaging in all these positive things that are gonna be helpful for you, whether that’s,, exercise,, mentorship, and having other people pour into you., being really honest about where you’re at.

Carrie: I think that that’s great.

Chris: Yeah, it’s, it,, it’s, it continues to humble me. Nothing, I, I, I haven’t fully adapted the whole, like, this is the thorn in my side, like,, 2 Corinthians 12. But,, it, nothing draws me to my knees more. And,, I’m not… I wouldn’t say I’m, like, so thankful for that.

Chris:? Like, I wish there were,, I,, but at the same time,, I, it, it is really humbling, and I’m thankful. And I, and I will say, I am thankful for the number of times it’s brought me to the feet of Jesus saying, like,, I think it was C. S. Lewis that said something like, “Some of our questions are like asking God is yellow a circle or a square?”

Chris: Or how many hours are in a mile. And I’m like, sometimes that’s my brain. I’m like, I’m going to God, and I’m like, “I recognize that I am so confused. I’m asking the wrong questions,” and I’m, like, going to the doctor, and I’m like, “I just need you to do whatever it is in my life that you wanna do, and I’ll follow you no matter how ridiculous the road may feel because I fundamentally don’t know what’s wrong with me.

Chris: And so whatever you wanna prescribe, I am open.” And that’s the mentality I try to embrace.

Carrie: Yeah. Awesome, awesome. Well, thanks so much for,, sharing your story with everybody today. I’m glad that you, you found the podcast and- Mm-hmm… got connected., I think it’s gonna be encouraging for others.

Chris: I hope so.

226. Found ICBT after ERP Wasn’t Effective: A Personal Story with Dr. O. Alan Noble

Written by Carrie Bock on May 27, 2026. Posted in OCD, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode.

Carrie sits down with author and professor Dr. O. Alan Noble to share his deeply personal journey through years of OCD treatment, intense suffering, and ultimately finding hope through ICBT.

Episode Highlights:

Why traditional talk therapy and reassurance can unintentionally keep OCD cycles going
How ERP may help some people while still leaving others feeling stuck and exhausted
The key differences between ERP and ICBT in treating OCD
How ICBT helps people recognize the difference between reasonable doubts and obsessive doubts
How faith, community, and hope can sustain people during seasons of deep despair
What real recovery from OCD can look like, even when intrusive thoughts still occur

Episode Summary:

What Happens When ERP for OCD Stops Working?

I never expected to sit across from someone who had done everything right and still felt stuck. Dr. O. Alan Noble is a professor, author of four books, and a contributor to outlets like The Atlantic and Christianity Today. But behind all of that, he spent years battling severe OCD, doing ERP faithfully, and still watching the relief disappear every time. If you have ever wondered whether ERP is truly enough for everyone with OCD, his story will change how you think about treatment.

Can You Spend Six Years in OCD Therapy and Still Not Get Better?

This is something I hear more than I wish I did. A caring therapist. Reassurance given session after session. A client who left feeling okay until the doubts rushed back in before he even got home. Six years of that same cycle. There is something in this pattern that every person with OCD and everyone who loves someone with OCD needs to hear.

What Is ICBT and Why Did It Work When ERP Did Not?

When his ERP therapist finally admitted “this isn’t working,” it cracked open a door. Inference-Based CBT introduced ideas that ERP had never touched, including that not all doubts are created equal and that the content of OCD thoughts actually matters. What Dr. Noble discovered on the other side of that door is something you need to hear him describe himself.

What Does ICBT for OCD Actually Look Like in Real Life?

Dr. Noble still gets intrusive thoughts today. What changed is what happens next. Using tools from ICBT like the bridging exercise, he described working through an intrusive thought that very morning in about three minutes before moving on with his day. Three minutes versus hours of rumination. That shift is what his wife calls miraculous, and after hearing his full story I completely understand why.

How Do You Stay Hopeful During OCD Recovery When Nothing Seems to Work?

There were days Dr. Noble sat on the edge of a bed in tears, convinced nothing would ever change. What kept him going was not a clinical strategy. It was something much deeper. The people, the scriptures, and the perspective that carried him through his darkest moments are all part of this conversation, and honestly this section moved me the most.

Can Christian Faith and OCD Treatment Actually Work Together?

Dr. Noble’s journey started with a biblical counselor who offered scriptures to meditate on. For most people that feels like a lifeline. In his case it became more fuel for rumination. This tension between Christian faith and OCD treatment is one of the most misunderstood areas in mental health, and Dr. Noble speaks into it with honesty that only comes from living through it.

If you have been searching for hope around OCD recovery, wondering whether faith and evidence-based treatment can coexist, or just looking for proof that things can get better, this episode is for you.

Connect with Dr. O. Alan Noble here:

x.com/TheAlanNoble

www.instagram.com/oalannoble/

//substack.com/@oalannoble

To Live Well: Practical Wisdom for Moving Through Chaotic Times

Transcript

I’m Carrie Bock, Christ follower, wife, mom, and licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. I pray you are blessed by today’s episode. If you have been around the podcast a little while, last summer we did a personal story series, which was really great. And always whenever we have personal stories of Christians who have struggled with OCD, we always get really good feedback.

It helps reduce a lot of stigma, and people feel encouraged to keep going and feel like there’s hope for them when they hear someone else’s story. So I’m excited to bring that back to you this summer. And today on the podcast we have Dr. O. Alan Noble. He’s the associate professor of English at Oklahoma Baptist University, a fellow at the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics, and author of four books, including his latest, To Live Well: Practical Wisdom for Moving Through Chaotic Times, On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living- That was a really challenging book for me.

I’ll just throw that out there. Definitely prompted a lot of thoughts and took me back to definitely some times where I felt depressed and didn’t wanna get out of bed. That was rough. You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World, is that also the name of your Substack?

Dr. Alan: Yeah, You Are Not Your Own Substack is the name of it.

Carrie: If you have not read Dr. Noble’s Substack, we’ll put a link in the show notes. You need to get over there and read the posts. They’re good. He’s had also a variety of articles published in different places, The Atlantic, Gospel Coalition, First Things, and Christianity. And you’re also married with three children.

Dr. Alan: That’s correct.

Carrie: We decided kind of talking ahead of time to really focus your interview on your treatment and kind of your shift from talk therapy and ERP, eventually over to iCBT, and that was how I got connected with you, actually, was one of our podcast listeners has a Substack, and she had, I think, linked one of your articles or talked about your book on getting out of bed.

That was how I found out about you, which is a really great connection. So if anybody has any guest suggestions out there, please always share them with us. We enjoy hearing those as well. Tell us a little bit about your journey of what it was like for you trying to find the right treatment for OCD.

Dr. Alan: I started with biblical counselor. That was my first move, was with a biblical counselor, and that was not helpful. This person really tried. He was a very sweet man. He really had a heart for God, and he was very kind and gave me a lot of scriptures to think about. But the scriptures just gave me more to ruminate about, trying to make a decision about what I was ruminating about and trying to figure things out, right?

That’s one of my ruminations, one of my fixations, is trying to figure things out. Those scriptures just gave me more fodder to figure things out. He did tell me one thing, the last thing we said to each other that was helpful and was true, which was that I needed to understand God’s grace for me better and the meaning of the cross.

And I’ve found through my therapy that that piece of truth was true. Even though he couldn’t help me with ERP or iCBT, he did understand that I do struggle with understanding God’s grace. So I went from that. I came from a church background where seeing therapists was not what was done. That’s why that was my first step, and then I went off to grad school, and my next step was after talking to a pastor, I decided I’m gonna take this big leap and I’m gonna see an actual therapist, a quote unquote secular therapist who is actually a Christian, but they studied in secular school, so it didn’t count.

And a secular psychiatrist, and this was a big step, and I prayed about it and I talked to a pastor, and he’s like, “Yes, you should do this.” And so I felt like, okay, I’ve got this blessing. I’m gonna do this. And the psychiatrist was helpful with the medication side, but the therapist, we did some light ERP and didn’t really help too much.

I moved to Oklahoma, was in a small town, and the only therapist I could get was somebody who did talk therapy. And at the time, because I’d only done some light ERP when I was in Texas, I really didn’t know that ERP was the quote unquote gold standard. I didn’t know what I was missing out on, and I just thought therapy was therapy.

And the therapist I got in Oklahoma said, “Yes, I treat OCD. I’ve treated OCD before.” So these were the magic words I was looking for, right? I didn’t know any better. I was expecting– That’s what I was looking for, somebody who says, “I’ve treated this before.” And I went to her for about six years, and she gave me reassurance for about six years.

I would come to her with various fears I had. My doubts have to do with fears about having harmed people and being negligent, and she would be like, “No, you haven’t been negligent. You’re okay.” And I would walk away feeling fine until I started my car and then The doubts would come back, ’cause that’s how OCD works, and I would say, “What if she doesn’t know?

What if she doesn’t understand? What if? What if? What if?” So I kept going back to her because it was almost addictive really. Wow.

Carrie: Did she ever, like, say, “Hey, you’re coming back with some of the same things, and we’ve already talked through this”? Did it create any kind of red flags for her, like my- No … the client isn’t getting better?

That’s really concerning, kinda scary. Uh, however, I will say that your pathway is very familiar to me, that I’ve heard this from a lot of- Yeah … different people that I’ve talked through the podcast or who have sought help from me. It’s like, “Well, I went to this person that was a Christian, and they really understood my faith, but then they didn’t understand the OCD piece or didn’t know- Yeah

how to help me.” Unfortunately, there are therapists out there saying, “Oh, yeah, like, I work with OCD no problem,” but then you get in there, and they’re not providing evidence-based care, which is problematic.

Dr. Alan: Yeah, and again, very kind person, very caring, concerned about me, but was not equipped with the tools to address what needed to be addressed with me.

And then I got connected with somebody who actually treated OCD with ERP. I started actually listening to some podcasts, I think, and that’s what sorta tipped me off. And I saw this person who treated OCD in Oklahoma City, which is 45 minutes away from where I lived at the time, so it was a sacrifice. But I said– I reached out to him and asked, “Maybe you can help me.”

And I explained my symptoms, and he said, “Yeah, you have OCD, and there’s this thing called ERP, and that’s what you need.” I was like, “Okay, let’s try this.” And so I tried that with him, and then I tried it with another therapist, and I tried some intensive ERP. I tried it for at least two years of just intense ERP.

And you introduced me as Dr. Noble, and I do have a PhD. I’m a good student. I would imagine. I’m good at doing my homework. I have four books. I’m good at doing my homework. So when you give me an assignment, I’m doing my homework. And so I did my ERP homework. And I really wanted to beat this because it was severe on the scale.

It was not light OCD. It was taking up long hours of my life and really disrupting my family life. I was serious about beating this because I needed to get my life back. And so here I was practicing the ERP for two years, just doing the exposure scripts. I was listening to exposure scripts. I was doing different exposures that I was assigned, doing everything that I needed.

I would see some relief. I would see some improvement, but then it would just come back again.

Carrie: So it was, like, a little bit of relief, but it seemed to be temporary or short-lived. That

Dr. Alan: was exactly- Yeah … the problem. If my OCD was at an eight out of ten, it would come down to, like, five. And stay there for a little while after practicing ERP just vigorously, and then it would just go back up to an eight again.

It wouldn’t come down. I was applying the tools. I was doing what I was supposed to. Really, applying the tools was my life. Wow, yeah. This was what I was doing.

Carrie: So then it was like recovery was taking all of your time, it seemed like. Did you almost feel– I think sometimes people can get obsessed about their recovery.

Did you feel that way? Like, “I’ve gotta do this, and I’ve gotta do it exactly as prescribed,” and all the things. I

Dr. Alan: didn’t feel obsessive about it, but I did feel obsessed about it. So it wasn’t like a compulsion, but I was obsessed about it in a non-compulsive way. I was like, “This is what I have to do. I’ve gotta beat this.”

It was in the back of my head almost all day. I was either doing a compulsion by ruminating in my mind, ’cause that was my main compulsion, was rumination, or I was practicing ERP or thinking about practicing ERP all day. So it was like my life was OCD. That was it. And it was just so draining, and also so boring.

It’s like, I don’t want OCD to be my life. My life is so much bigger and richer than this. I thought it was, and now it was just this.

Carrie: When you were going through that level of intense suffering with the OCD, how did you remain hopeful to keep going? Yeah. Because I think a lot of people just say, “ERP is the gold standard.

It didn’t work for me. I’m just giving up. I’m tapping out right here.” And there are some people that just say, “Well, I’m just OCD. You gotta live with me. Like, this is all there is to it.” Like, how did you keep pushing or keep going?

Dr. Alan: That’s an excellent question because there were times when despair was tapping at my door when I thought that exact question.

I thought, “Okay, this is the gold standard. This is what I’ve been told. I’ve heard all the podcasts I’ve done. I’ve read all the books. They’ve said this is it. This is how you get better, and I’m practicing this religiously, and I’m not getting better. I’m not seeing these results.” Maybe this is as good as it gets.

Maybe I’m not gonna see any more improvement over this, and I just have to come to peace with this. And a couple of things gave me hope. One is in Romans 8:28, Paul tells us that God works together all things for our good. So just believing that God is somehow working my good through this suffering, and I didn’t know how.

I didn’t know the particulars of what that good looked like. I didn’t know how he was redeeming that good, but I knew that he was working my good through that suffering and just resting in that. Also having a group of friends and family who are cheering me on and telling me, “Don’t give up. Keep going Keep fighting, keep pressing on, keep striving for wellness.

Because God desires our good, because we are given stewardship over our body, which includes our mind- Yeah … it is honoring to God for us to desire recovery. We’re not gonna get perfect bodies and minds until the resurrection, but it’s good for us in this life to fight for, to strive for, to work towards healing.

So I was committed to that, and I would look at my kids, I would look at my wife, and I would say, “I have a duty to do this. I don’t get to roll over and give up.” The other thing is that even though these therapists, these ERP therapists, they were great therapists. They were just wonderful therapists. They weren’t seeing the results that they wanted to see in me, but they were great therapists who were using all the tools that they had, and they didn’t give up on me.

They said, “What is it gonna take to see you get better?” It was the last therapist I was working with who actually introduced me to iCBT- Okay … who said, “Allen, this isn’t working” What we’re doing isn’t giving you the relief and the progress that we need to see, that we want you to see. Why don’t we try something different?

And if I can’t provide that for you, maybe somebody else can, because I don’t want you to give up. I know that you can improve. And hearing that meant a lot because, like I said, I wanted to give up. I did wanna roll over. Maybe I’m still gonna have some intrusive thoughts, but it doesn’t have to take up hours and hours and hours and hours of my day.

That’s what I needed to hear.

Carrie: Therapeutically, I’ll just say from the therapist side, that’s a really hard conversation to look at somebody and say, “I believe in you and I believe in your health, and I am in the way of that now.” Like, “I have-” Yeah “… literally given you every tool I have in the box, and I want you to succeed, and that means that you have to kind of fly on away from me.”

Because sometimes people can take that personally of like, “Oh, you’re giving up on me?” It’s like, “No, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying you need a different toolbox than what I have-” Yeah “… right now. And for your best interest, it’s not good for us to keep on clients for long periods of time that are not making progress.”

That’s not ethical.

Dr. Alan: Yeah. It was a hard transition, and starting iCBT was hard too, but it was what I needed, and that’s what made the difference for me. I still clung onto that hope. I needed that hope, that belief. What I’ve come to realize myself is that desire for recovery, in my opinion, is the most important key to recovery.

It was at least the most important key to my own recovery because all throughout this journey that I just described, the ups and downs, if I gave up desiring to recover at any point, it would’ve stopped. I had to have this drive to recover. I had to have this belief that it’s my responsibility before God and before my family and before my friends, before my church, and before myself.

Like, I owed it to all those individuals and myself to get well, as well as I could get. I had to have a hunger for that. I had to advocate for myself. I had to keep looking for therapists, the right therapist, the right medication, and that took a drive.

Carrie: Yeah. I think the beautiful thing about living in Christian community is there are days where we don’t have it for ourselves, but somebody else can have it for us.

Yeah. And in your book, on getting out of bed, you talked about this guy that you just kept calling him- Yeah … all the time and felt bad, “Sorry, I’m calling you all the time to help me through these dark places,” and he’s like, “That’s what I’m here for.” And we need that inside ourselves, that drive to get better, but we also need other people to hold us up on the days that we just don’t have it.

Dr. Alan: Yes, absolutely. There were definitely many, many days where my desire was not there, and it was other people carrying me. Three or four friends, plus my wife and my children in their own way, and who I would contact when I was in despair or tempted to despair, and they would give me the hope, comfort me with the comfort of Christ when I didn’t have that comfort, as Paul talks about Corinthians, I believe.

Just give me that comfort when I felt like I didn’t have it, and they would share that with me, not to reassure me, but just give me that comfort so that I could move forward.

Carrie: Was there a particular concept in ICBT that stood out for you or that you found particularly helpful?

Dr. Alan: Just the basic premise that there are reasonable doubts and obsessive doubts.

Just that basic premise itself is really powerful for me, I think. So there are a couple things. That one’s really powerful for me, that I can look at my doubts and say Based on my senses, is this a reasonable doubt? Do I have sense information based on, including my common sense, to evaluate this as a reasonable doubt?

Is this relevant to the here and now? And that kind of rocked my world and flipped it upside down and made it seem like, well, okay, this makes a lot more sense, as opposed to just seeing things in terms of, well, just not even thinking in those terms at all. That really helped me, I think especially because I’m somebody who thinks a lot, and so just having that ability to use my mind without getting stuck in the weeds of the content- Yes

was really powerful. Another really important concept is the feared possible self. Just that idea that this is coming from somewhere, that these thoughts aren’t random. That’s another thing that ERP always felt like it was lacking that didn’t make sense to me from ERP, is that the content is totally irrelevant.

Well, is the content totally irrelevant? Because it seems like it has a pattern. It seems like it all stems from somewhere. So like for me, like it all centers around being a negligent self. Well, that tells me something, and that probably points to something, and that probably matters. So why aren’t we talking about that?

That seems worth poking at, and why aren’t we poking at that? And so ICBT does a good job of addressing that, of bringing that elephant into the room. I really appreciated that.

Carrie: Yeah. And I like that spiritually in the context of the- Yeah … real self. If we’re saying the content doesn’t matter at all, then the content is connected to things that you value.

So it’s like, well, so you’re saying my values aren’t important- Right … versus recognizing like, okay, this is a lie, a false self, and then this is who I really am. What are your thoughts about this spiritually, just in terms of like sense data evidence? ‘Cause we have a lot of people that wrestle with things like sin.

Yeah. Did I sin versus not?

Dr. Alan: That’s a great question. I think we can trust our senses. I think that God has given us senses to use as reasonable tools as best we can to make sense out of the world, and I think that our senses can be fallible. I think there are two things to think about. One is that it’s reasonable for us to trust our senses unless we get evidence otherwise, and that’s what ICBT teaches, right?

If you get data that says that the video you watched was AI, then you change your information, right? Mm-hmm. But otherwise, you trust your senses. But for the person with OCD, the analogy I always like to use is they come up to the street corner and instead of crossing the street, looking once, checking for cars, I know for me, I wanna check like a million times before they cross the street, over and over and over again, instead of trusting their senses, right?

Right. Normal person trusts their senses. They look once, they trust their senses, and then they cross the street if there’s no cars coming. It’s reasonable. God has given us good senses. It’s reasonable for us to trust our senses. And the other thing we can do is, and James talks about God giving us wisdom, and I think that we can pray for wisdom and clarity and trust that God gives us those things, and trust that our senses are good, and let it go at that, and not doubt our senses.

I don’t mean that compulsively. I’m not saying compulsively pray for wisdom, but just in general, pray that God gives you wisdom and trust that He does that, and then move forward in confidence, resolute.

Carrie: How have you wrestled at all, like, with the concept of healing and desire for healing and recognizing, like, okay, God allowed this intense suffering as a part of my story?

Dr. Alan: Yeah, that’s hard. There have been a couple of things that I’ve thought about. What’s hard about this, it’s not just my suffering, but it’s affected other people, right? Sure. That’s the reality, is it’s affected my family, it’s affected my friends. It has ripple effects. Even if you’re living alone, it’s gonna affect your coworkers, your neighbors.

Suffering always ripples. That’s what makes it so difficult, is that you can’t say, “Well, my suffering taught me this lesson, and so it’s been redeemed.” You also have to acknowledge that other people were hurt by it. But I’ll say a few things. I’ll say, one, Paul teaches as a truth, in Romans chapter five, I believe, “Through suffering, I’ve been taught perseverance, I’ve been taught endurance.”

And he says, “Endurance builds character, and character builds hope.” And that’s been true for me. When I look back at what I have been through, this just hit me a couple of days ago. I was just walking along or driving or something was happening, and I just thought, “Allen, do you remember how much despair you were in?”

Just sitting on the edge of a bed crying, just hopeless, just the OCD, just absolute control, feeling like you were the worst monster in the world. You made it through that. Isn’t that amazing what God has taken you through? I didn’t mention this, but thanks to iCBT, through the last year and a half or so, my wife calls it miraculous, the change that has happened because of iCBT compared to ERP.

“It’s just been miraculous,” she says, and I agree with her, and I thank God for it. Yeah. But just seeing that change, part of what I’m looking back at is I’m looking back the change that’s happened in me, the hope that I have, knowing that God can do miraculous things, that He can take me through hard times and bring me through them, and I’m not the same person Another thing that’s happened is that I have been able to help a lot of other people through my own suffering, and Paul again talks about this when he talks about comforting others with the comfort of Christ.

It doesn’t mean that my suffering isn’t serious. It doesn’t mean that my suffering didn’t happen. It doesn’t mean that other people didn’t suffer because of me. But it does mean that that suffering has meaning, that it does something. I have been able to walk with other people who have OCD and tell them that they have hope, that they can get help, that they can do something, that they have agency in their lives, that they can advocate for themselves and get the proper therapy, whether it’s ERP or iCBT, whatever it is, get the proper help.

I can pray for them. I can encourage them. I can teach them not to get reassurance. I can do these things because I have been there, and I can love them. The gratitude I’ve received from that is just so powerful. And then finally, again, I just go back to Romans 8:28. Somehow, God is working my good through this suffering, and He’s working the good of my family through their suffering that they experienced through my suffering and my friends and anyone else who was affected by this.

I don’t know how God is weaving that But I know that God is good. I know that He loves us. I know that He’s just, and I know that He’s caring for us, and I know that He’s almighty, and I know that He’s a good God, and I know that He’s gonna work these things out. I have hope that somehow He’s working these things for the good.

And somebody could look at that and say, “Well, it’s just wishful thinking,” but I would say, “No, I’ve seen Him work miracles.” Yeah. I, I have hope.

Carrie: I think that one of the biggest lies that people believe when they’re in the midst of suffering is it’s always gonna be this way.

Dr. Alan: Yeah. It’s

Carrie: always gonna be this bad.

I’m never gonna be able to get out of this. And that’s the lie, and we know that God can use anything and to change and transform people. And I’m glad that you got over that hurdle of getting into, quote, “secular therapy from a Christian person.” Yeah. And you went on that journey and eventually found the right help.

And the idea behind having podcasts like this and people finding your writings is to get people in good treatment faster so that they don’t have to- Yeah … go through that long journey where everything is just- Getting more and more difficult, and think that this is very hopeful for our audience. Yeah. I think sometimes people think the goal is, like, to never have another intrusive thought again.

Mm. And so we just wanna debunk that as well. Yeah. When you think about recovery- Mm … what does it look like for you today?

Dr. Alan: Yes. I mean, even for today, I still have intrusive thoughts. I still have things that come up, and I use my tools, and I apply them. So today, intrusive thought hit me, and I used the bridging tool that it, ICBT teaches, and visualized myself on a bridge, and made a choice not to go into the bubble, and moved on with my day.

For today, it took me about three minutes to make that choice. Now, later on today, I might not make that choice. I might slip up and make the choice to go in the bubble, and that might happen. But overall, my recovery looks like making that choice less and less and making the choice to move towards my family and what I believe is the life that God has given me, has called me to over and over again.

As I said, overall, this change has been miraculous. There have been bad days. There have been bad weeks. Sure. There have been bad months. That is a reality, and a reality that I work on with my therapist still. But the overall trajectory has been so much better that it is still amazing. Thank you for bringing that up.

Yeah, that’s a really important point. It’s not that I don’t get intrusive thoughts. It’s that they don’t run my mind anymore. I have tools that I can use to choose what I’m going to do next, and most of the time now, I can choose to move toward my life.

Carrie: Awesome. I know a lot of people have told me that they found the bridge exercise very empowering.

It’s like, “Oh, I feel like, hey, there’s a pause here.” If I can find that pause, right? And you don’t always find it, but the more that you become aware of how you get there, the more you find it, and then I feel really empowered to know, “Hey, I found the pause. I have a choice right now.” Yep. Yep. I can either go right or I can go left, and I know what the consequences are gonna be depending on what I choose.

Awesome. Tell us a little bit before we go about your latest book that just came out.

Dr. Alan: Yes. It is called To Live Well, and it is a book about the seven virtues, prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude, faith, hope, and love. It’s about how to live well in a chaotic time. I think we live in very chaotic times. I don’t think that’s too debatable.

It feels very confusing to live in the modern world. It feels like everybody’s values are up in the air. It feels like the definition of love and of justice and of what is true is constantly being contested, and that makes it hard to move, hard to act, and very easy to get stuck. And so this is a book about how to move, how to live well, how to act in the modern world, the contemporary world.

And so I move through these classic virtues Grounding them in the Gospels, because it’s a biblical book, and grounding them in Jesus and His actions in the Gospels, and work through what it looks like to be a virtuous person for God. Not to earn God’s favor, because we already have that, but because God loves us, we wanna act virtuously and understand what it looks like to live virtuously in, uh, chaotic times.

Carrie: Yeah. It’s a crazy world out there. There’s a lot that gets thrown at us, and things are changing all the time, so any help for how we can live out Jesus in this environment I think is helpful, for sure. Yeah. Thanks. Thank you for sharing today. I’m really thankful for Dr. Noble for sharing his story, because I think there are many other people out there with this story that feel like they’re doing all the right things that they’re supposed to be doing and just aren’t getting better.

It’s important for people to know that there is hope out there, and to not give up, to keep going. I think for a long time in my own life, I was like, “Yeah, God has a plan for all this craziness,” but I really doubted whether or not it was a good one. And looking back, I can now see, like, God’s goodness in the course of my life, and I’m so thankful for that.

If you’re in the midst of just a really dark place with your OCD, I want to remind you that God hasn’t given up on you, and just encourage you not to give up on Him, to keep leaning in even when things are hard and they don’t make sense. I am currently working my way through to live well, and it’s been a slow go for me because I keep having to stop and think about things.

Definitely challenging in a good way, for sure. I hope that you guys will come back next week and join us as I interview a pastor about his OCD journey.

Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you. Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of myself or By the Well Counseling.

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

225. Is Empowered Mind Right for Me?

Written by Carrie Bock on May 21, 2026. Posted in OCD, Podcast Episode.

In this episode, Carrie shares why so many Christians feel trapped in exhausting OCD cycles and how Empowered Mind: Christian ICBT for OCD offers a different approach to finding peace, clarity, and lasting healing.

Episode Highlights:

What makes inference based cognitive behavioral therapy (ICBT) different from traditional OCD treatment
Why so many Christians struggle silently with scrupulosity and intrusive thoughts
How Empowered Mind helps simplify OCD recovery into practical, faith based steps
Why being “functional” doesn’t always mean you’re truly free from OCD
Who Empowered Mind is designed for and how to know if it’s the right fit for you
Why lasting OCD healing requires consistency, self awareness, and intentional change

Why Are So Many Christians Secretly Struggling With OCD?

I’ve heard from so many believers who feel trapped between their faith and intrusive thoughts, silently wondering if they’ll ever experience real peace. That’s one reason I created Empowered Mind Christian ICBT for OCD, to help Christians finally understand what’s actually happening beneath the fear and shame.

For many Christians, OCD doesn’t just create anxiety. It creates confusion, guilt, and spiritual exhaustion that can feel impossible to explain to others. In this episode, I share why so many people suffer silently for years and what starts to change when shame finally loses its grip.

Could ICBT Change the Way We Approach OCD Recovery?

What drew me to inference based cognitive behavioral therapy (ICBT) is how differently it approaches OCD. Instead of constantly battling anxiety, it teaches you to recognize obsessional reasoning before you get pulled into compulsions. That shift alone can completely change how you respond to intrusive thoughts.

I also talk about why ICBT has been such a game changer for many Christians struggling with scrupulosity and fear based thinking. Once you begin understanding how OCD builds its stories, you start seeing why trying harder or seeking more reassurance never truly brings peace.

What Makes Empowered Mind Different From Other OCD Resources?

Empowered Mind isn’t a quick fix or another overwhelming pile of information. I created it to simplify ICBT into practical, faith based steps that Christians can actually apply in real life. The course walks through the OCD reasoning process in a way that feels understandable, approachable, and deeply connected to faith, especially for those struggling with scrupulosity.

Inside the course, I guide listeners through examples, exercises, and real life applications designed to help them recognize OCD patterns more clearly. I also explain why healing takes consistency and practice, not perfection or instant breakthroughs.

Who Is Empowered Mind Actually Designed For?

I created Empowered Mind for Christians who are tired of OCD running their lives and are ready to start making meaningful changes. It’s especially helpful for people who may not have access to specialized OCD therapy yet or who want a faith based approach that truly understands scrupulosity.

I also share why this course requires self motivation and intentional effort. Healing from OCD isn’t about passively consuming information. It’s about learning new mental patterns, building awareness, and slowly stepping out of the cycles that have kept you stuck for years.

Is Being “Functional” Really the Same as Being Free?

So many people tell me, “I’m functional,” while internally battling intrusive thoughts all day long. But surviving isn’t the same as living abundantly. In this episode, I share why OCD recovery is about more than coping. It’s about finally stepping out of the exhausting mental cycle.

I want listeners to know there is hope beyond constantly fighting mental compulsions in the background of everyday life. Freedom may not happen overnight, but healing becomes possible when we stop accepting exhaustion as normal.

Don’t miss the deeper stories, faith insights, and practical ICBT tools shared in this episode.Tune in now.

Use code MEMORIALDAY25 at check out to receive 25% off Empowered Mind. Sale ends Monday, May 25 at midnight.

224. Remaining Hopeful When Past OCD Treatment Has Failed

Written by Carrie Bock on May 19, 2026. Posted in OCD, Podcast Episode.

In this episode, Carrie shares how to move forward when OCD treatment, ERP, prayer, or recovery programs leave you feeling stuck, discouraged, and questioning whether things can really change.

Episode Highlights:

Why failed OCD treatment can feel emotionally devastating for Christians
The mindset shift that changes how recovery and progress are viewed
What may actually be missing when therapy does not seem effective
Why more people are exploring ICBT after difficult ERP experiences
How faith, resilience, and growth can still emerge from disappointment

Episode Summary:

Why Does OCD Treatment Sometimes Fall Short Even When You’re Committed to Recovery?

I’ve worked with many Christians who invested significant time, money, and emotional energy into OCD treatment, only to feel discouraged when the results did not match their expectations. Opening up about intrusive thoughts, scrupulosity, anxiety, or fear takes tremendous courage, which can make disappointing treatment experiences feel especially painful. But what if those setbacks are not the end of the story?

Could Your OCD Recovery Be Limited by the Way You Measure Progress?

One of the biggest mindset shifts I’ve learned is that healing is rarely linear. Progress does not always look like immediate symptom relief or dramatic transformation. Sometimes the earliest signs of growth are quieter, and if you are only looking for huge breakthroughs, you may miss the deeper changes happening underneath the surface.

What Happens When OCD Treatment Is Not Truly OCD-Informed?

I’ve seen many individuals enter therapy believing they were receiving specialized OCD treatment, only to later realize their therapist lacked a deeper understanding of intrusive thoughts, scrupulosity, or evidence-based OCD care. When faith is involved, that disconnect can feel even more discouraging and confusing than people expect.

Why Are More Christians Exploring ICBT for OCD Recovery?

Many Christians have shared with me that traditional OCD treatment approaches felt emotionally overwhelming or failed to address the deeper reasoning process driving their fears. That is one reason I became passionate about Inference-Based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, because it approaches OCD from a completely different angle that many people have never heard explained before.

Could the Fear of “Never Getting Better” Be Strengthening OCD?

OCD often keeps people trapped in constant analysis about whether treatment is working, whether they chose the wrong path, or whether they are somehow beyond help. I’ve seen people spend years searching for certainty instead of taking the next healthy step forward, and that cycle is more common than most people realize. Sometimes the deeper struggle is not just the OCD itself, but the hopelessness and discouragement that quietly grow alongside it. And when that happens, it can start to feel impossible to believe that things could ever change.

There’s more hope here than OCD wants you to believe. Tune in now.

Transcript

Today we’re talking about how do you remain hopeful when OCD treatment in the past has failed. Welcome, OCD warriors, to the Christian Faith and OCD podcast, where we are all about reducing shame and stigma of struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories, and replacing uncertainty with faith as you develop practical tools for greater peace.

I’m Carrie Bock, Christ follower, wife, mom, and licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. I pray you are blessed by today’s episode. Let’s face it, we’ve all tried something new that hasn’t worked out, whether that was the strategy on how to meal plan, how to organize your home, new fitness or diet program that you tried that you were really excited about, hopeful it was gonna change your life.

Maybe it was a new parenting program you got involved in, and then things just seemed to crash and burn and didn’t work out in the end. It can be really hard to restart a-anew when something has failed. I know for me, in my own personal counseling journey, it took me a while to find a counselor that I really gelled with, somebody that I felt like was empathetic towards me.

I went to a particular counselor at one point, and she was just very cold, very judgmental over my present situation, and I had explained to her that I had had some negative counseling experiences in the past when I tried to seek help, and there wasn’t really empathy for how hard it was for me to try again.

Fortunately, I kept trying until I found a really great therapist that helped me when I was struggling with some work and home things towards the end of my first marriage, and then really walked me– I was glad that I already had her in place, and she helped walk me through my divorce process, which was very traumatic for me, and I talked about that way, way back on the first episode, what God brought me through in that situation.

But I’m glad that I didn’t give up, and I’m glad that I didn’t stop and say, “Well, maybe therapy is…” Obviously, I believe it was a good thing because I was a therapist at the time, but I’m glad I didn’t say, “Well, maybe there’s just not someone out there for me,” or, “Maybe I just can’t get the help that I need.”

When you’re trying to get help for a mental health issue, something not working out is even more devastating because it’s so vulnerable to open yourself up and to try to get that help, and then to essentially have hope feel like it’s just dashed. It’s harder, I feel like, to recover from that. In the OCD space, people are just desperate for answers due to the high amount of suffering, and maybe you’ve even been through something like an intensive outpatient program.

Maybe you’ve gone to a residential program, and you just didn’t feel like you got the full results that you were needing. So how do you remain hopeful after an experience like that? Obviously, you’ve invested a lot of time, mental, emotional energy, money. These things are not cheap that we’re talking about.

Out- intensive outpatient programs, even with insurance, these things are not cheap. And it’s easy for you to get in this space of feeling just totally defeated. And then OCD likes to come in and say, “Well, see, you’re just too broken to get help.” And these things are lies that I want you to be able to identify.

Some other thoughts you might have, that means there’s something really wrong with you. OCD may even tell you, “Well, the OCD program couldn’t fix you, so see, there’s more here than just OCD.” And I don’t know. There may be different disorders that you’re dealing with that haven’t been addressed that might need to be looked at comprehensively.

Maybe there are some medical things going on that haven’t been explored. It’s hard to know sometimes, and it’s hard to tease those different things out about what you might actually be needing. You may start obsessing about treatment or about finding the exact right path. I know I definitely have talked to many people in this scenario.

They’ve spoken with me about the Empowered Mind course and said, “Is this really gonna help someone like me? How do I know?” We’ve been working, and I think I need to update our webpage a little bit, but there is a thirty-day money back guarantee on that program Just so that you know if that’s something that you’re thinking about.

And we put that on there a little while ago because we started to hear such good results from people that were going through it. And I said, “Hey, why not make it a little bit more risk-free for individuals that want to check that out?” So just so you know, there is a 30-day money-back guarantee. We haven’t had to refund anybody as of yet.

Knock on wood, hopefully, we won’t have to do that. There’s so much great information, even just on how OCD works and understanding it in your own experience. It’s a really valuable opportunity and has helped so many people. But it’s understandable when people come to me and they say, “I don’t know if this is gonna work for me because I’ve tried this, this, this, and this.”

So if you’re confused about what the next step is for you in terms of your OCD recovery journey, just know that it’s okay and that you’re not alone, that a lot of people go through this. Progress is not always linear. You may have had stressful life experiences happen, such as a grief and loss experience.

Maybe you had a huge job transition or a move and things were going pretty well, but then whatever happened or the life stressors have really activated OCD more in your life. Just know that that’s very common. And so where maybe you felt like, “Okay, things were pretty functional and I was doing okay before,” what I’ve noticed a lot of times is that people don’t get help until it really starts impacting their functioning and they somewhat hit a wall where they say, “I can’t keep living like this anymore.”

I would encourage you, if you know OCD is part of your story, is to not wait until it gets super bad or super loud. Go ahead and get the skills. Go ahead and learn the things that you need to learn in order to handle it when it’s at a much more manageable level. That’s gonna serve you better if things do get worse later due to stress.

Also, obviously, anything that you can do to help reduce your stress is going to help you in your OCD recovery process, whether that’s exercise, connecting with friends and in community. And obviously, some of these things take time and practice. Getting into some type of like meditative, deep breathing, like being able to relax your body.

All of those skills are really helpful to have to just manage day-to-day life stress that we all have to deal with, regardless of whether or not you have OCD. When something fails, I wanna talk with you about the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. A fixed mindset is more stuck in this all or nothing.

Either I’m good at something or I’m not. Either something worked or it was a complete failure. Whereas a growth mindset says, “You know what? There were some things that didn’t work out. How can I learn from this?” Or, “How can I grow into this? How can I look at where I’m at right now and not just focus on the deficits, but focus on the strengths?”

There may have been things that you picked up through some of these past therapies, whether self-help workbooks, whatever it is that you’ve tried. There may have been some gains that you had. By focusing on those and then moving forward, you can kind of identify, okay, what has worked and what hasn’t worked and why.

Unfortunately, of all the mental health disorders out there that I’ve worked with, I have never seen a population so underserved as the OCD community It’s really heartbreaking because so many have been told by therapists, “Oh, yeah, I can see you for the OCD. Oh, yeah, I can work with you on that.” It’s really important that you dig a little bit deeper and ask for a little bit more information before you proceed.

If you are educating your therapist on what scrupulosity is, and you have scrupulosity, they are not equipped to treat you. You need to find someone who has the tools and skills that you need in order to be able to help you. That is really crucial. So I’d like to give you a four-step process on how to remain hopeful when your past OCD treatment has failed.

You’ve tried talk therapy, you’ve tried biblical therapy, you’ve tried talking to your pastor about it, you’ve tried deliverance or healing prayers, and you still feel stuck. Number one, as we talked about a little bit before in terms of that growth mindset, I want you to look at what have been the gains.

Now, this may be really hard for you to see, but I think it’s an important first step. There’s a book called The Gap and the Gain. This is a great book. It’s really more of a business coaching-type book, but I believe that it can be applied definitely to many areas of our life. This idea that the gap is the distance between where you are and where you actually want to be, kind of this ideal destination that you’re trying to get to.

That’s the gap. The gain is kind of measuring where you are now versus how far you’ve come. Like, how far have you come from in the last five years or in the last 10 years? So what have been the things that, over this OCD recovery journey, what have been the gains? Maybe you have shifted, and you don’t feel so ashamed about your OCD anymore or about talking about it.

Maybe you’ve been able to open up with a few trusted friends or close family members about what you’re dealing with. Maybe there has been some shame reduction through some talk therapy, even though the therapy itself didn’t help with the OCD. Maybe just evaluating your life, you’ve had some gains in relationships.

Maybe there’s been some repairs that have happened or some forgiveness after hard conversations. Maybe you’ve accomplished something really important, like finishing a degree program, for example. Maybe you’ve had children. I don’t know, what is it that– how have you learned and grown over this process?

Maybe you feel like you’ve become more dependent on God through dealing with OCD. So where are the gains at? And this is important because if you know that you’ve experienced these positive gains from some of these things, then you have the encouragement to know that you can continue to move forward and continue to have progress and gains as part of your story.

So by measuring backwards, I’ve talked about this in my email, so if you’re not on our weekly newsletter, please go to carriebock.com and hop on it. I did a whole email on measuring backwards and looking at my own life and how that has shown up for me. But that’s also a concept from The Gap and The Gain, so shout out to that book again.

But this measuring backwards and really looking at where you’ve come from and the progress that you’ve experienced, that encourages you as you move forward to say, “Hey, there’s hope for me here.” If I’ve gotten through this hard thing in my life, I always somewhat go back a little bit to birthing my daughter.

I had my daughter naturally, and some people are like, “Does that win you an award?” Like, no, maybe not, but it does in my own mind, because if I go through physical pain or I had a kidney stone and the whole time is very painful, very uncomfortable, like, I birthed a human. I birthed a child. It’s okay. I can get through this.

It’s really hard, and it’s really painful. The very disappointing part of the kidney stone is, like, there’s no child at the end. At least when you give birth, you know, there’s this gigantic reward of going through all that pain. You have your child. But kidney stone, you’re just like, “Oh, great, that’s out of me now.

I’m so happy I no longer have that in my body.” I hope I don’t ever have to go through that experience again. Thankfully, that was many years ago, and I drink a lot of water, so hopefully will avoid future kidney stones if you know on that one. If you don’t, you just pray you never have to go through it.

But for you, my point is, what is that thing that you go back to and you say, “You know what? I did the hard thing, and so if I did the hard thing here, I can do the next hard thing there.” If you can go back and say, “You know what? God got me through this really stressful life experience that I had. I know He’s gonna get me through this really hard season that I’m going through right now,” and that’s huge.

That’s what faith is, saying, “Hey, I don’t know how all this is gonna work out. I don’t know how I’m gonna get to a better place with my OCD recovery, but, God, you’re bigger, and I know that you can walk with me through it.” Number two, I want you to really look at what’s worked, what hasn’t worked. Was it a lack of training from your therapist in evidence-based practices such as ERP or ICDT?

Did you have a secular therapist, but you didn’t feel like they understood or empathized with your faith struggles? Did you have a Christian therapist that was kind of pointing you back to the Bible but didn’t necessarily have the OCD-specific tools? Was it a situation where you started but just didn’t follow through?

I’m not trying to be hard or, or step on any toes here, but maybe you got going and you went for a few sessions. Maybe you went for five, six sessions, and life got busy. You canceled your appointments. There was some reason that you said, “Hey, I can’t do this right now,” and so you never really got to see that process through.

Maybe you say, “Hey, I tried it,” but you really, like, dipped your toe in the water versus getting all the way into the pool like you needed to. And look, there’s no judgment because it’s really hard to face your stuff. Like, whatever your stuff is that you’re dealing with, regardless of the theme, it’s scary, right?

And we know that. You wanna ask yourself, like, “Am I ready to do this work?” Because I do think that’s a huge piece of it. I think you have to be ready to look at these hard and difficult thoughts. Like, where is this obsessional doubt coming from? What’s really the story that’s interwoven here? Looking at this feared self you’re afraid of becoming.

All these things can be really hard or uncomfortable or scary, vulnerable, whatever that is, to look at, so I get that. But that’s a point of evaluation for yourself to say Hey, did I go into this and I didn’t give it my full effort for whatever reason? It was a busy season at work. I didn’t do my therapy homework my therapist was encouraging me to do.

I was kind of only halfway bought into the process. Whatever it was, hey, maybe it would work if I fully immersed myself into that particular therapy. I know for iCBT it can be somewhat complicated. You’re learning all of these different parts and different pieces, and it takes a while. There’s a lot of awareness building that you get to before you actually get to the intervention stage.

And so a lot of times people will come in and it’s like, “What do I do? What do I do? What do I do?” And it’s like, “Okay, but you have to become aware first.” Well, that’s not very fun. People don’t want that answer. And as you become more aware, you can start to tweak and change, so it’s not like you don’t develop maybe interventions that on the front end that keep you from engaging with OCD, because you start to see it more.

“Oh, that’s OCD. I don’t need to disengage with that. Oh, that’s OCD. I don’t need to engage with that.” But as far as the skill processes of being able to recognize, like when you’re going into the OCD bubble, what specific thoughts are carrying you over there, getting into like more of the deeper alternative narrative writings, things like that, those steps come later in the process, reality sensing.

And a lot of times what I see with iCBT, if it’s not working, it’s because someone is not understanding the obsessional process that got them into that obsessional doubt. Either there’s multiple different things that can go wrong, not identifying the primary obsessional doubt, not really having a good clarity surrounding the obsessional story, not understanding the obsessional reasoning process of how they reasoned their way into OCD and the difference between that and an everyday reasoning process.

If you don’t have those pieces first, those pieces are really critical in iCBT to understand and a lot of times what I see is people saying, “Well, there’s a sensory gap here. How do I know what sensory information to pay attention to?” There’s a lot of confusion because they’re trying to reality sense too early Or they’re trying to write an alternative narrative too early, and they skipped these very important steps.

All of these pieces have to be able to work together. So know that there’s a time investment. Like, if you’re willing to learn ICBT for yourself, the course that I take people through is 12 weeks long. Originally, there were 12 modules to ICBT. Things have been really shaken up by the Resolving OCD books, and they’re just packaged very differently.

Same concepts. A lot of therapists are still utilizing the 12 modules that were in the original treatment manual. However you’re absorbing it, it’s still just a lot of information to really get into your system, sink down deep, and understand and practice. So keep that in mind if you are looking at, at doing ICBT.

I know from talking with people who have gone through exposure and response prevention in the past, one thing that can go wrong there is people feel like any type of exposure just feels like too much. They don’t feel like they can titrate it and gradually ease themselves into what they’re trying to tackle.

So that can be a challenge. Obviously, a lot of people drop out because it is hard, and maybe they can expose themselves to some things on the lower levels, but then not on the upper levels. I’ve also heard other people say, “Hey, I could totally do it with my therapist, but then I wasn’t really able to incorporate it outside of therapy.”

So there has to be a plan or a willingness if you’re gonna do ERP to have that– bridge that gap, right, between what you’re doing in session and what you’re doing outside of session, kind of to continue that journey on. Number three on increasing your hope when things have failed is to choose to believe that God has more for you, that Jesus promised an abundant life for you.

I’ve been really amazed with some of the people that I’ve worked with because their OCD was just so severe, and I’ve asked them, like, “Why did you keep going? Why did you keep pursuing treatment?” And the overwhelming thought process that they’ve given me is, “I just knew there had to be more out here. Like, if Jesus died for me to give me life, not just life forever in heaven with Him, but a life here that’s rich and full and purposeful, I knew that this OCD that I was trapped in, that this is not it.”

And that helped propel them and keep them moving forward. So I would encourage you that even if it’s hard to latch onto right now or it’s hard to believe, Jesus loves you. God loves you. He has an amazing plan for your life. He wants this to be a full and rich experience for you where you are connected with Him and not terrified to engage in your spiritual practices.

God wants you to be able to engage in community, to love God, and to love other people. I mean, those are the two greatest commandments. And if you feel like OCD is getting in the way of you loving God or loving other people, just know that God wants to meet you on your journey and that He has so much more for you.

And that it may be scary to step out and risk do– trying something new, and it may or may not work, and you kinda have to be okay with that. But just knowing that that’s part of your journey, and that’s part of your process. The reality is that we’re all on a character development track if we choose to be on that with God, that He is conforming us to the image of His Son.

That’s His desire for us, and sometimes that means we go through some really tough stuff and go through suffering, and that’s how I conceptualize OCD as suffering. I don’t conceptualize it as sin or something that you’re doing to cause this. It’s not punishment from God. It is human suffering as a result of the Fall, as a result of brains that are imperfect and don’t always function the way that they are supposed to.

My fourth and last point, which probably could be potentially an earlier point, is I want to encourage you to pray To seek God and to really believe in faith that He’s gonna guide you on this OCD recovery process and lead you towards what is the next step for you. And God has the ability to provide and make a way for whatever it is that you are needing.

There have been various different points in the process of my business, in the process of doing the podcast, where I was genuinely in need, and God showed up and provided what I needed, whether it was a contractor to work with, whether it was a business coach, whether it was a physical location. When I started my practice, I had about basically two months to get all of my ducks in a row to get everything straightened out.

I was in a group practice that essentially kind of broke apart a little bit. The owner decided to do– structure his business very differently, and it was kinda like, “Okay, well, okay, God, I guess I’m just jumping off the end of the pool,” because I knew that long term I wanted to be on my own. But I had become very comfortable with where I was at.

I wasn’t really in a state of high risk or anything of that nature. I had taken a couple years. I had built a full caseload. Everything was going smoothly, and then this shook everything up, and I was like, “Oh, man. God, I just wanted to stay here. It was just so comfortable. This is where I need to be.” And God ultimately made me uncomfortable so that I got out of that situation and ended up starting By the Well Counseling in twenty seventeen I can honestly tell you every single office that I’ve had, there’s some type of God story connected to that.

My very first office, I was driving around calling real estate agents, just looking for signs that said available office space in the area that I wanted to be in. And at that point in time, I didn’t want to move too far because of the clients that I was seeing. I was like, “I need to kinda sorta stay in this area.”

And God totally just provided something. The guy was like, “Oh, hey, yeah, I can show you the office.” We went in. It was the right size that I was looking for. It was this little tiny… It had four offices in it, but the total square footage was less than 1,000 square feet. It was maybe 750 square feet. It had this little tiny waiting room.

It had a bathroom. I was like, “Okay, that’s all we need.” God provided the people in there to rent from me to sublet the other offices. I had a couple other therapists in there, and I was able to keep that space full. There’s just so many things that I could tell you that God has done over the years, just providing me with the right people and connections to work with, but it hasn’t always been easy.

I have had to step out in faith. Not everything that I’ve done has worked out. Trust me, there have been a lot of things that never got off the ground. Empowered Mind is actually my fourth course that I’ve ever created, and it’s been definitely the most successful. My very first course was on anxiety and sold zero.

Failure is just a part of the process, but I say that to encourage you wherever you’re at to keep praying and keep asking God. And as we continue to submit to Him and continue to trust Him, He is gonna lead you on the right path at the right time. A lot of these stories and different things that I’m talking about, I love sharing those on our weekly email newsletter, just different things that God is showing me throughout the week.

Sometimes it’s a thing that has to do with parenting. Sometimes it’s a spiritual truth. Sometimes it’s a story about something from my past where God really showed up. I just believe that God wants us to have a sense of healing and wholeness in Jesus Christ. Does that mean that we’re gonna be 100% healed on this side of heaven?

I don’t think that’s always the case. Obviously, there are lovely Christian people that die of all types of different things, and some point or another, we are all going to pass away. But while we are on this earth, we are responsible at some level for stewarding our health physically emotionally, mentally, and partnering with God in that.

And so as you sit down and pray and seek God, just ask him, “What are my next steps?” And if you feel like God is leading you in a direction and the finances aren’t there, then pray for God to provide the financial way for you to be able to make this happen. And I believe that God will open up those doors as well.

There was a podcasting business coaching program that I got into before I rebranded the podcast almost two years ago now to Christian Faith & OCD. When I first found out about the coaching program, I did not have the money to get into it, and God totally provided for that in a very short period of time.

It was like, “Oh, okay, here’s the money.” And what was crazy was I still questioned it. I still went to my husband and I said, “We did get this money, but, I mean, should we spend it on this? Like, is this the right path?” Even though now I can look back on it, it was clearly God’s provision for something that I was already praying through, like, “Do you want me to be in this program?

Should I do this or not?” And that has completely, essentially changed the trajectory of my business and what I’m doing. I’m very thankful. I can look back over the past nine years of my business and tell you that what I started out doing nine years ago is very, very different than what I’m doing now. But I believe that God has me exactly where He wants me to be, and I’m trusting Him with whatever this next chapter is.

Would love to talk with any of you. If you wanna get in touch with us, you can go to keribach.com. And again, just know that as you’re praying through these different options, know that Empowered Mind Christian ICBT for OCD is an option for you. We have a full workbook that goes along with that course, with homework assignments where you can walk through and practice these skills with your particular OCD themes that you’re dealing with.

Thanks so much for listening. I’m gonna talk with you about some important course updates actually next podcast episode. So if you’re thinking about it, we’re gonna talk about that. And hint, hint, there is a Memorial Day sale coming up if you haven’t heard that. So be sure to check that out. In order to do that, you gotta get on our email list, so keribach.com.

Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you. Christian Faith & OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area.