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240. How Do I Know If I’m Obsessing Right Now?

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

In this episode, Carrie helps you distinguish between everyday uncertainty and OCD by exploring obsessional doubts, compulsions, rumination, faith-related OCD, and the ways ICBT can help identify when OCD is turning uncertainty into a crisis.

Episode Highlights:

  • How to recognize when an everyday uncertainty may be turning into an OCD obsession
  • Why OCD often targets the people, beliefs, and values that matter most to you
  • How urgency, internet research, rumination, and reassurance-seeking can signal OCD
  • What ICBT teaches about the difference between everyday doubts and obsessional doubts
  • How Christians can respond to uncertainty without trying to force absolute certainty

Episode Summary:

How Can You Tell If You’re Experiencing Everyday Uncertainty or OCD?

This is one of the questions I hear most. Waiting on medical results, getting to know someone new, worrying about someone you love, these are all normal parts of life. You genuinely don’t know how they’ll turn out. OCD shows up when that not-knowing suddenly needs to be solved right now. I break down how to spot that moment.

Why Does OCD Go After the Things You Care About Most?

OCD rarely bothers with things you don’t care about. It goes straight for your health, your marriage, your kids, your faith. For Christians, this can be confusing, because a normal question about prayer or sin turns into an urgent spiritual crisis. I explain why OCD works this way, and what it doesn’t mean about you.

What’s the Real Difference Between an Everyday Doubt and an Obsessional One?

I use an idea from ICBT that changed how I explain this. Everyday doubts land eventually. The test comes back. You make a decision. You land somewhere on a hard question. Obsessional doubts don’t land. Your brain just keeps asking for one more search, one more check, one more round of reassurance.

How Does a Normal Problem Turn Into an OCD Crisis?

Not sure if your boss likes your work? Not sure where a relationship is headed? Both are normal. But OCD can take that uncertainty and build a whole imaginary story around it, jumping straight to the worst case with little evidence behind it. I walk through how that jump happens.

How Do You Live With Uncertainty as a Christian Without Feeding OCD?

Tolerating uncertainty starts with knowing what’s actually yours to carry and what isn’t. There’s a difference between responding to what’s in front of you and trying to control the future through checking or replaying it in your head. Sometimes faith means leaving a question open and trusting God with the next step, not the whole outcome.

If you want to recognize the subtle moment when normal uncertainty turns into an OCD rabbit hole, listen to the full episode.

Transcript

Today on the podcast, we are answering your questions about scrupulosity.

First, I wanna say thank you to everyone who submitted a question, either via email who get our weekly newsletters. I was asking people if they had questions for this series. So we had some email replies and then, of course, our survey that we did a while ago prior to episode 200. Some of you, I just kind of took the comments from those survey responses and utilized those as questions for this episode.

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 Bach, Christ follower, wife, mom, and licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. I pray you are blessed by today’s episode.

For some of these, you wanted to remain anonymous, and we’re respecting that, and for others, you said that we could use your first name in respect to the question. So if you hear a name on the podcast, it’s because that person gave us permission.

Just so you know, our first question is from Sabrina.

Sabrina asks, does anyone else struggle with critical thoughts, especially towards God or his word?

Now, this can be a common intrusive thought, right? You may have a thought, something to the effect of, how do you know the Bible is real? How do you know God’s word is really true?

Some people have other intense, intrusive thoughts that have to do with blasphemy, and of course, these thoughts can be very distressing for someone with scrupulosity because your faith is important to you and you don’t wanna have these particular thoughts about God.

So I would say understand that God knows your brain even better than you do, and the quicker that you’re able to identify these as intrusive thoughts, the easier it’s gonna be to be able to know that you don’t have to respond to them. That it’s not your true inner desire or value to disrespect God, his word, or anything else as a part of your faith system.

One of our podcast listeners, Steve, ask about scripture verses and how different groups or denominations have different interpretations. There may be one that’s stricter than your particular belief, and so how do we deal with these interpretations of scripture?

He said, it doesn’t seem like it’s a hundred percent imaginary because there are people that believe this way in the here and now, even people that don’t have OCD, so of course someone with OCD may think, okay, well now I need to live according to this stricter interpretation of scripture.

What we wanna do is we’re not just automatically looking at sense data with ICBT. I think that’s a misnomer maybe for a lot of people that listen to this podcast even and hear me talk about it. It’s not just about sense data. We also have to look at the obsessional reasoning process.

And so when we look at the obsessional reasoning process, what we’re saying is that we’re distrusting what’s actually in the sensory information in the here and now, which is opening us up to the hypothetical imaginary what ifs, and then applying some logic to those what ifs.

Now we wanna get down to what’s the actual primary obsessional doubt that’s going on, and I would say the primary obsessional doubt is not, What if I’m not interpreting the scripture correctly? At first glance, that may be what you think that doubt is. However, when you look at it a little bit closely and go a layer deep and a layer deep and a layer deep, so what if I misinterpret this scripture and then I say, okay, that means I’m getting something in my relationship with God wrong.

If I’m getting something in my relationship wrong, then the next layer deep would say, well, I don’t have a good relationship with God. You could even start to doubt if you had a relationship with God.

You wanna really get down to that primary obsessional doubt. Is it I’m offending God in some way? Is it I’m going to be disconnected from him in some way? Is it, I’m going to, maybe if you don’t fear losing your salvation, but you fear something else, like being far from God or not following God’s commands for your life, and that’s what you’re really trying to look at.

And then we would say, well, what evidence do we have for that? That you don’t care about God and his commands? We probably don’t have evidence for that as a generality.

If you are a person who is seeking to walk with Christ, we’re not trying to be perfect, but we’re saying, Hey, I am engaging in these spiritual practices to know Christ and to understand him better, like I’m listening to the Holy Spirit. I’m allowing the Holy Spirit to lead and guide me in interpreting the word of God.

To me, that’s part of the Spirit’s job as you’re reading the Bible, to reveal those things to you that you need to pay attention to and understand that people’s belief systems change over time, and sometimes that’s due to living life and personal experience.

I’ve shared about a couple of my things before, but honestly, I was raised that Catholics were not true Christians. Somewhere along the lines, I picked that up. I don’t know if that was parents or other teachers, but I have met some Catholics that are fully devoted to following Jesus, and I believe that they have a relationship with the Lord.

Ultimately, it’s not for me to judge who’s in God’s kingdom or not. That’s up to him.

But I’m just giving you an example of something that I was taught, like, Hey, this entire group of people, they don’t know what they’re talking about and they aren’t saved, versus examining that belief and saying, you know what? These people may practice differently than I do, but I also see that they love Jesus and are trying to follow him.

We had a question about Romans 14:23, but whoever has doubts is condemned if he eats. This is in terms of the food sacrifice to idols, because the eating is not from faith, for whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.

We have to be careful about getting stuck on any one particular scripture passage for a multitude of reasons. We wanna look first at: What is the context of that scripture passage? Who is being spoken to in it? How does that passage or verse apply to the entire chapter? How does it apply to the book? How does it apply to other verses that are similar to it? What are some parallel passages that may speak to some of the same things?

Ultimately, OCD can misapply scripture verses, and you’ll kind of going back to that obsessional reasoning process. Where you’re distrusting, the sense is you are opening up to the imagination and then there’s this logic that’s misapplied, and sometimes scripture verses actually get involved in that misapplied logic, either misunderstanding scripture verses, but not just that. Really just taking them out of context to something that they don’t apply to in the here and now.

Actually, if you look at this, this goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden. Did God really say this?

And you also look at the temptation of Jesus where the devil is using scripture against him saying, Hey, throw yourself down off this building because basically the angels are gonna come and rescue you. And it’s essentially a misapplying, the Psalm to Jesus in that moment.

We know that in essence is something that the enemy does is lie to us about scripture and what it really says. We have to be cautious.

Kind of going back to wanting to get at that primary obsessional doubt is that if OCD has you hung up on one particular scripture or a couple particular scriptures that you need to go back to, what are we actually doubting here and how is that contributing to the story?

How is this logic that I’m believing from the scripture potentially being misapplied to my actual here and now present situation of what’s going on as I’m making decisions, as I’m discerning God’s will, as I am seeking to live out my Christian faith?

We also want to just remember when it comes down to commandments, there are two main commandments and they’re pretty simple. Love God, love people, love your neighbor as yourself, and we can be so hung up on how to do those things that we actually miss the point entirely, that we actually end up not loving God very well, or not loving people very well because we’re so paralyzed on how to actually do it.

That’s not what God wants for you. That’s not God’s heart. He wants you to be able to freely love him and love others to the best of your ability.

In this particular scripture passage, intention is important. What is your intention when you encounter other believers?

A lot of times in modern day, this gets applied to alcohol, although I don’t think that because we don’t necessarily have meat sacrifice to idols, at least not in the US. That may happen in other parts of the world. I don’t know. I know that in Asian countries sometimes they leave food out for spirits and things of that nature.

However, in my particular context, what does it mean to try not to cause another believer to stumble? It might get applied to alcohol. It might get applied maybe to movies or TV shows that you might consume, whereas you might be okay with that, and that may not affect your spiritual life negatively, but somebody else may watch something, listen to something, and it affects them negatively.

God knows where each person is at, and if I know personally that I don’t drink, but if I did drink, I brought alcohol to someone’s house and didn’t know what their stance was on alcohol. As a believer, maybe that’s probably not the best idea. I might wanna ask or be respectful ahead of time, like, Hey, do you have any qualms about this? Are you okay with it or not?

I think that’s just a matter of respecting other people’s beliefs and preferences and practices.

If you know somebody that is fasting chocolate for Lynch, you’re not gonna bring chocolate over to them. I mean, these are kind of some common sense type of examples of just how we respect other people and where they’re at spiritually and not desiring them to stumble.

I think there are so many times that we overcomplicate things. Simple a lot of times is better.

Someone gave us something about giving up on God. That’s a note that I have from my assistant. I’m not sure exactly what that means. I don’t know if they mean they feel like giving up on their faith because they have scrupulosity and they’re really struggling with it.

I find that that doesn’t seem to be helpful or congruent with most people who struggle with Scrupulosity. Sometimes they feel like, well, if I just give up and just don’t believe anymore, then that’s going to resolve this, when really that’s not the case.

And unfortunately, they may have even been told by some therapists, well, you’re taking your faith way too seriously and you may need to just take a step back and not have those particular high values. Of course, that’s, uh, not what I would consider to be an ethical stance. However, because it’s your values that you’re bringing to therapy.

However, I will say that if you just say, okay, well, I’m not going to believe or I’m not going to follow God, then what I’m gonna do is that that’ll resolve things that OCD is just gonna attach itself to something else. Like if you were able to do that. So it’s not actually going to fix the issue.

Plus, it’s not very easy for us to just automatically change our value system. If we’ve had it for a while, eh, that’s not really true. We can change our value system.

So if I didn’t answer your question on giving up on God, I might need a little bit more detail there.

One of our listeners, Leslie, said, I bet lots of other Christians with OCD feel like Pharisees. We get so hung up sometimes on a little rule instead of focusing on loving God and others like ourselves.

And I would agree with that. I think that that’s completely true and really what we were just talking about. So thank you for confirming that, Leslie.

We had a comment, which I really appreciated, from someone who heard our podcast on hearing from God.

Back on episode 208, we had a podcast called, Is It OCD Voice, or God’s Voice, Hearing From God for Healing with Heather O’Brien, and we got some feedback on that episode.

Someone had said, seemed like some of the things that we talked about seemed like good, spiritual things to be aware of, but other things like dreams, a word from another believer praying for open and closed doors or signs seem to be things that they have encouraged their loved one with scrupulosity to stay away from. Some kinds of things that may be heard in church about God leading people with a particular feeling. That can be prevalent is not very helpful for those with scrupulosity.

So what I wanna say to that, and first of all, apologies for any confusion that may have been occurred by that episode, and I’d love to hear other people’s feedback on that because it’s been a very popular episode that many people have listened to.

So definitely would love further feedback if others have it regarding whether some of those things were helpful or harmful in the scrupulosity discussion.

These are things that I plan to kind of explore further in writings and teachings in the future, because I really want people to be able to discern God’s voice and to be able to discern leadings from the Holy Spirit versus is this OCD trying to just train, wreck, everything that’s going on.

And what I would say is that God speaks to people through a variety of different ways. We can see that in scripture where God did speak to people through dreams in scripture.

At times, I don’t think that God necessarily speaks to me through dreams. I haven’t had that as an experience. God will wake me up with a specific thought sometimes on my mind. Of course, sometimes that’s just Carrie stressed out, so I have to discern those things. I have to take them to God in prayer.

I think that confirmation sometimes can be helpful for us, that there may be things that we’re praying about that someone else says, Hey, and they’ll just affirm something that we’ve already been praying about or thinking about. That can happen quite frequently and be very helpful just in terms of is this God or is this not?

And we also see, I believe in scripture, where Paul was prevented from going to Macedonia. That’s in Acts 16. God has the ability to speak to us in a wide variety of ways, and so I really don’t want to limit God.

I also have to say that what we really wanna look at is, is there a lens of fear here? Is there a lens of, I’ve missed something? Is there a lens of this is not resolving? There is no peace as I’m praying through this and processing it.

Because with OCD, it’s a loop. It goes around in a circle, so it’s something that you’re wrestling with over and over and over without any kind of peace or resolution to it.

Oftentimes, God is speaking to us in a way that is not urgent, like you have to do this exact thing right now. It’s something that he has been teaching us and showing us over time. It’s something that repeatedly comes up for us.

It’s not cloaked in an enormous amount of fear because God is loving and kind to us and gracious.

And I know for me, there are times where I totally miss it. I’m just gonna be honest with you guys. I’m like, oh, like that’s what God has been trying to show me. That’s what he’s been trying to tell me, and I just didn’t get it. And God is gracious to speak it to you again.

So just know that. If you are following him and seeking him and praying, sitting in silence, reading the word of God, you are not going to have to worry about missing what it is that he has for you, missing what he’s trying to speak to you.

If there is an intense amount of, it’s all my fault. If I make the wrong decision, God’s gonna be mad at me. I’m incredibly afraid there’s gonna be eternal consequences, even for something that’s not an eternal consequence situation.

Those are just some really good clues for you that that’s OCD. That’s just a different conversation.

And if you’ve been living with OCD for so long, you’re so used to that voice. You’re used to the condemning voice, you’re used to the fear. You’re used to maybe feeling like that voice was directing you or protecting you in some way or keeping you safe.

We want to do is to open you up to the voice of the Holy Spirit, which is calmer, quieter, peaceful, gentle, loving.

And it may be a situation where you are walking out in faith and don’t feel like God is talking to you all the time.

I think we hear people in church say, God is always speaking and we’re just not listening, and I don’t believe that.

Here’s why. I don’t believe that I can sit with people that I really love, that know me really well, and we can have a connection and we don’t have to say anything. We don’t have to constantly be talking to each other. Just enjoy spending time in each other’s presence.

Now, if a loved one has something to say to me and I’m there, and I’m present, and I’m available, then they’re gonna be able to speak to me about it.

And I believe the Lord is the same way. We have to get quiet sometimes so that we can listen and open ourselves up.

I think in a busy society, that’s the hardest part. Just actually taking the time to slow down long enough to listen and to be available and to be reading God’s word because those are the words of God, so that we can know them and receive them and plant them, get them rooted down deep into our soul and spirit so that they come out at the times that they need to, and God can bring those remembrances to mind for us.

How do I teach my children about the Lord when it causes so much fear for me?

I dunno. What about children’s songs? I’ve been thinking about this myself for my daughter. How can I start to teach her some of these truths?

And we’ve started listening to kids Christian worship music on the way to school, and she likes it because it’s kids singing and it’s fun and upbeat while it’s still teaching her spiritual truths.

We talk about what is she learning with the other kids in Sunday school? She used to go to a Christian program, but now she’s in a secular program, so we’re not getting that from there.

But we have kids’ Bibles and devotional books and things of that nature. Sometimes that’s a little bit easier to access the children’s materials if you have scrupulosity than the full-blown adult materials.

And of course, we want to try to simplify things for children anyway.

I think just taking it one step at a time and leaning on other people and other supports in your life.

This came from someone in the one of our survey respondents, but I, I appreciate that question. I think it’s important.

Another one from the survey, how can you feel good about yourself and still feel Christian?

Yeah, this is one that gets very confusing for a lot of people. They think it’s prideful to feel good about myself.

However, being prideful is like if I brag on my accomplishments and I say, oh, they’re my achievements and I’ve done this, and look at what I’ve done and it’s all about me, like that would be a place of pride.

So I could tell you a prideful story about this podcast would be totally laughable. I’m laughing just thinking about it because what I’m about to tell you so not true is ridiculous.

Here’s my prideful podcast story.

I have over 200 episodes and I have worked so hard on this podcast and I have done a lot of training on OCD and I’ve read all the ICBT books and I have really done the hard work to learn how to share this information with you, and I’ve had to learn about podcasting and how to grow a podcast and it’s all been about Carrie and her effort, and that is why we are here today.

Not a true story at all.

Y’all do not even know how many times I have cried and prayed about this thing and just y’all just.

The more true story would be God broke my heart and caused me to want to share this message of hope for the world. That’s the only reason that I’m here.

Whether it has a certain number of downloads or followers or subscribers, whatever, doesn’t really matter to me. Because it’s about whatever God wants to do for it, and I just really need to be here and be obedient and do the best that I can with what God has stewarded me with.

But really, there would be no Christian Faith in OCD. Uh, prior to that, it was Hope for Anxiety and OCD. There never would’ve been any of that had it not been for God.

Had he not put that on my heart, had he not led me to the right people that could help me and support me along this journey, had I not had, I wanna say fan club.

And what I mean by fan club, I mean is like my husband, very supportive of this podcast. My mother, when she was alive, she was like my number one cheerleader of the podcast.

Listen, she was like passing out podcast cards like crazy. Every time she met somebody, she’s like, my daughter is a podcast. She’s like an ambassador for the show. Really, truly.

So I’ve been blessed to have a lot of support along the way when I had like no episodes. I mean, friends got on here and let me interview them. Very blessed. Very thankful.

You look at those two stories are very different.

I feel good about the second story because I feel like all I did was show up and do my best to do what God asked me to do.

It’s not really because of anything that I have done, but only what God has been able to do in and through me, and people are like. Will contact me and be like, oh, thank you for doing this. This is so great. And I’ve just been so encouraged and I’m like, okay, praise God. Like, that’s awesome.

That’s the only reason we’re I’m able to be here. And just so I’m thankful for that. It’s, it’s not about me.

So I think it’s how you interpret your circumstances in terms of yourself, like feeling good about yourself and what you’re doing in the world, but it’s more than that.

Feeling good about yourself to me is recognizing my value and worth because of Christ, not because of me as a person.

The only reason that I have value is because I’m created in the image of God, because he loved me first, because I was still a sinner. Christ died for me. Like that’s the reason that I have value and worth is because I have been forgiven and because God loved me and sent his son to die for me.

That’s feeling how I can feel good about myself and still be a Christian.

There you have it.

This one came from the survey and it’s about prayer.

We have had episodes in the past about prayer, but they were talking about it should be simple, but I find it so hard. And are there different ways that you can pray? Does it need to be certain way? How do you know if you’re just praying or you’re thinking something in your head?

I would say there are many different ways to pray.

You know, we’ve had an episode in the past on breath prayers. That was back on episode 75 with Jennifer Tucker.

And essentially what a breather is, is it’s where you take, uh, pieces of scripture and when you inhale, you say part of that scripture in your head.

So it could be like Psalm 46. The Lord is my refuge and strength. You would inhale and then exhale and ever present help in times of trouble.

There’s a Psalm 23. You could inhale the Lord is my shepherd, and then as you exhale, I shall not want, or I have what I need. Kind of depending on what translation you are looking at there.

That’s just one example of how to pray.

When we did prayer and fasting at our church earlier this year, our pastor put together a booklet of different ways to pray.

One of them is praying through the Lord’s Prayer, and not just praying through exactly as it’s written in scripture, but using that as a starting point.

So praising God, recognizing his name and his holiness. Recognizing him as your father, praying about God’s kingdom, advancing God’s will, being done, presenting your requests and your needs before God, submitting your will over to him, et cetera.

So that’s one way to pray.

There are, there’s praying scripture. You can pick specific scriptures and pray through them, putting your name in there. Many different ways to pray.

I know that some traditions have specific like liturgical prayers that they pray, maybe specific times or specific seasons.

There’s many different ways to pray, or you don’t have to have a very rigid, specific structure.

Sometimes your prayer can just be, I need help right now, or I feel overwhelmed, or, God, I need you.

That is a prayer in itself. God, I need you today, or I need you right now.

I think that we don’t need to overthink it or over structure it, or it’s just talking to God and finding a way to connect with him.

Another thing this individual said, which I feel like is a really good point to talk about, is, is that I don’t feel like I can feel my feelings. Because I’ve prayed about it. If it’s surrendered over to God, I’m supposed to be at peace when I’m done praying.

And the reality is that’s the ideal, but it’s not always what we experience.

Sometimes we pray about something and our feelings have not fully caught up, and that’s okay. Sometimes we still may feel distressed about something because we’re still in uncertainty. The situation hasn’t been resolved at this point, and we have to sit with that and trust.

Trust can be really hard. It can be hard to trust God, especially if you’ve been hurt by a lot of people in your past, or even spiritual leaders.

Maybe you feel like God didn’t handle it the way that you wanted him to with the situation in the past. So you feel like, well, God, you allowed this negative thing into my life. So it’s hard to trust you with this piece right here.

We can pray that our feelings align with our faith, and sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t.

And so we still have to find ways to process our feelings, whether that’s sadness, grief, anger, frustration, guilt, shame, like all of those things, we have to learn how to cope with them in a healthy way.

Praying doesn’t mean that I don’t need any coping skills or that prayer should be like my only way of coping with my emotions.

I think it’s a great way, don’t get me wrong, being able to pour your heart out to the Lord and bring things to him and wrestle through issues that you might be facing. That’s really great for your mind, your body, and your emotions.

But sometimes you may still be in distress, and you know what? You may need to go for a walk or you may need to take some deep breaths, or you may need to call a friend, or you may need to enlist some other healthy, godly coping skills as well.

We had some questions about receiving support for OCD from a spouse or from other people that you might be in ministry with working with.

Now, back on episode 142, we did have, How Do I Tell Someone I Have OCD? That episode may be particularly helpful for some of you if that’s something you’re wrestling with.

Now, I do want to have like a marriage and family, more relationship type expert on to talk with us about involving spouses in treatment processes and what that would look like.

So that will be coming in the future when I find the right person to connect with and we’re able to record that. I think that that would be a very helpful episode for the audience, ’cause I know that that’s something that comes up a lot.

We have other things that I’m still trying to curate guests for.

We are gonna do an interview at some point on OCD and autism overlap, hopefully one more with family situations and marriages this summer peripherally. If it all comes together, we’re going to have another personal stories, theories of people who have struggled with OCD.

I’d love to have an episode on Christian neuroplasticity, being a parent with OCD. I think there are so many great topic suggestions, and some of these I would really feel more comfortable addressing with guests that know more about it, certain aspects than I do, especially since I don’t work with children with OCD.

That hasn’t been my experience and haven’t really done a whole lot of family therapy or couples counseling in that realm.

We had someone reach out recently who had experienced trauma. They had been in remission from OCD symptoms and then experienced a trauma, which seemed to open up and exacerbate. I don’t know if it was a new theme or a prior theme that had come back up from their past.

And so, know that intersection of trauma and OCD, it’s something that I feel very passionate about in dealing with some of those, whether it’s childhood traumas or adult traumas, things that seem to be really stuck.

I’ve just found in my experience, that can exacerbate OCD symptoms or cause this high level of hypervigilance in the body.

We also know that about 25% of people with an OCD diagnosis also qualify for A-P-T-S-D diagnosis, and many other people that don’t necessarily qualify for a full-blown PTSD diagnosis have been impacted by some type of difficult life experience that has ingrained and affected how they view themselves or how they view God or the world around them in terms of safety.

So if you feel like the trauma piece is really loud, I would say don’t be afraid to talk to a trauma therapist that knows about OCD.

Even if they would say, I really focus more on trauma than I focus on OCD, how much of that are they able to understand or are they able to work with an OCD specialist to help you kind of get pair and get the treatment that you need?

You know, that may look different for different people.

It may mean that you go to a trauma therapist for a little while and then you go to an OCD specialist for a little while. It may be that you go to the OCD specialist and then go to the trauma therapist.

Just kind of depending on how your symptoms are, what feels the loudest right now? What feels the most urgent that you need to attend to?

And usually professionals can help you tease out those pieces if they aren’t able to deal with both.

In an ideal world, you would have somebody have a therapist that had an understanding of trauma and an understanding of OCD to be able to craft a good, solid treatment plan for you moving forward.

We had a question about obsessional concerns regarding Mark of the bees type situations.

I’m not an expert on end-times theology by any means, but my understanding is that that’s not something we can just do accidentally, but that this is something that during the time of tribulation that people are going to voluntarily get in order to be able to buy and sell goods, and that’s gonna be a decision that has to be made.

I don’t know that believers are gonna be able to get that. I don’t know how all of that works, but I do know that it is not something that we have to be concerned about in the here and now according to how I am reading scripture.

Other people may look at that differently or examine times of tribulations. Some people believe we’re in it right now. Other people believe it hasn’t started yet. We haven’t gone through it, and that is of course up for debate and interpretation.

What we do know is if you’re so wrapped up in that, any type of these type of theological issues, if you’re super wrapped up or stuck on it and it’s getting in the way of you living your life, it would make sense. That’s OCD, distracting you from the things that are most important to you, that you really value, whether that’s getting up, going to work, connecting with your family and friends and ministry partners, and that’s what we want to be able to do to help you function in those realms so that you can keep moving forward in your walk with Christ.

Thank you so much for listening today, and I hope that this Q&A episode was helpful for you.

If it was, maybe we’ll do one every once in a while. We’ll kind of keep it around.

I am hopeful that maybe we’ll be able to do a relationship series at some point or another. And I would love to kind of have some different guests and talk about OCD in the context of various relationships.

As always, we love suggestions and questions, even if it takes us a little while to be able to get people on the podcast who can speak to some of those issues.

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

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

239. Discerning God’s Call in a New Season with Mandy Horne

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

In this episode, Carrie sits down with Mandy Horne, a registered nurse, board-certified holistic nurse, and nurse coach, to explore how to discern God’s call in a new season, recognize His guidance through uncertainty, and take faithful steps forward when the full path is not yet clear.

Episode Highlights:

  • How to discern whether God may be calling you into a new season
  • Why God may give you one step instead of the entire plan
  • How prayer, Scripture, community, and wise counsel can help confirm a decision
  • Why grief and joy can exist together during major life transitions
  • How abiding in Christ can help you recognize His voice when fear and uncertainty get loud

Episode Summary

How Do You Know If a Decision Is Actually God’s Timing or Just Your Own Impatience?

We want a clear sign, a checklist, something that removes all the guesswork before we commit to anything. But that’s rarely how God works, and learning to sit in that tension is its own kind of spiritual discipline.

This week’s guest on the Christian Faith and OCD podcast, Mandy Horne, is a registered nurse, board certified holistic nurse, and nurse coach who spent 25 years working in hospitals, most of it on postpartum units with moms and babies, before God moved her into nurse coaching. She tells me what it was like when everyone around her kept pointing to the same “logical” next step, a nurse practitioner degree, while her stomach turned every time it came up. That gap between what looks smart on paper and what actually brings peace is worth paying attention to.

What Does Obedience Look Like When You Don’t Know What Comes Next?

Sometimes faith means taking a step before you have the whole picture. Mandy shares how she learned to move forward without having every detail, trusting that God would provide what she needed as she continued to follow Him.

For anyone facing a decision, transition, or season of waiting, this raises an important question: What if you don’t need the entire map before taking the next step?

How Can You Tell If God Is Really Confirming a Direction?

When we’re trying to discern God’s will, we may look for one unmistakable answer. Mandy describes how prayer, Scripture, wise counsel, and unexpected encouragement from other believers became part of recognizing God’s direction.

The challenge is learning to seek confirmation without turning discernment into a search for absolute certainty. Staying close to Christ can help us become more familiar with His voice and more attentive when He leads us.

Why Can a New Season Feel Both Exciting and Difficult?

Transitions don’t always feel the way we expect them to. Mandy experienced both joy and grief as her daughter left for college and as she began moving toward a different professional season.

Whether you’re facing an empty nest, career change, shifting family responsibilities, or another major transition, you may find yourself holding excitement and loss at the same time. Learning to make room for both can be an important part of moving forward.

What If You Feel Like You Need More Certainty Before You Move Forward?

It’s tempting to believe we need to know more, prepare more, or have everything figured out before we’re ready to follow God’s direction.

But sometimes the desire for certainty can keep us stuck. Instead of demanding the whole plan, what might change if we focused on staying close to Christ and being faithful with the next step in front of us?

How Do You Trust God When You Can’t See What Comes Next?

When you’re in a season of uncertainty, it’s easy to feel like you need to know how everything will work out before you can move forward. But trusting God doesn’t mean having all the answers. It means remembering His faithfulness, staying close to Him, and trusting Him with the parts of your future you cannot see yet.

Mandy’s experience of following God’s direction through multiple seasons shows how past moments of His faithfulness can become anchors when the future feels uncertain. Remembering what God has already done can give you the courage to trust Him with what comes next.

Tune in to hear Mandy Horne’s story and find encouragement for trusting God’s timing when you’re facing uncertainty, change, or a new season.

Get Mandy’s Sacred Season Starter Kit… for the Midlife Christian Woman

https://gift.wellspringoflifecoaches.com/wellspringssskit

Connect with Mandy:

www.wellspringoflifecoaches.com/

TikTok: www.tiktok.com/@wellspring.rn

Skool Community: https://www.skool.com/wellspringrn/about

Transcript

Carrie: I love today’s episode because there’s a lot of personal testimony here that I think you can learn from about how to know if God is calling you into a new season. 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 joined today by Mandy Horn, registered nurse, board-certified holistic nurse and nurse coach, founder of Wellspring of Life Coaches. With more than 25 years of nursing experience, her own personal health journeys, Mandy really helps midlife women navigate burnout, hormonal changes, caregiving, empty nest, and seasons of transition.

This episode isn’t just for women, though. It’s for anyone who’s navigating transition or change or who is wanting to hear God’s voice. Mandy, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Mandy: I have been married for 25 years, so my husband and I, we’ve been together 28 years altogether. But throughout our 25 years of marriage, we have been interwoven through multiple different ministries from missionaries with The Navigators, college students, then he was a pastor at a church, and now he’s a chaplain.

Mandy: That’s not something I can go to work with him necessarily. It’s a little bit different ministry for our family for the first time. But yes, we have two kiddos. We have one 22-year-old, will be a senior in college, so it’s crazy, and a 19-year-old with special needs. He has Asperger’s and ADHD, OCD, all sorts of things, and he took the last year off and is going to be starting at a technical school.

Mandy: I can’t think what they’re called, trade school type things. My personal kinda path in between all that, I’ve been a nurse for 25 years. Majority of that period of my nursing career was on postpartum with moms and babies. So loved that time, and then the Lord called me out to coaching just a few years ago.

Mandy: So that is where I am now. That was a really quick run-through.

Carrie: Yeah, I mean, that was one of the things that we wanted to dive into a little bit more because you help people who are moving into different seasons of life. I think a lot of times our listeners with OCD really struggle even if they don’t have OCD.

Carrie: Is this something from God? Is it not? I don’t know if this is true for you. It feels like when we’re trying to make these big decisions, it’s like God moves slowly and then quickly sometimes. It’s like slowly, like little things get dropped to us, and then all of a sudden it’s like, “Oh, it’s time.” Like, “I need to move.

Carrie: I need to do the thing.” I don’t know if that’s true for you or not. That’s just something that I’ve seen. But like tell us a little bit about like some of these circumstances that caused you to shift from nursing, that’s a long time in a nursing career, to then nurse coaching.

Mandy: Yeah, definitely. I feel like there were multiple things that kinda led to this, but my own kinda health journey Myself personally, I had three open heart surgeries when I was 19, both genetic things both my grandma and mom had, but not anything that we knew was genetic at that point.

Mandy: Watching my mom and grandma and their health journey That was not very good. I knew that like, okay, is that the path I wanna go down, or is there something I can do to, to prevent this, to change the outcome necessarily? So when the Lord moved us from Texas to Indiana back in 2011, I was just suddenly exposed to a good portion of the people at our church who were doing just things that were different, holistic, preventative healthcare, things like that.

Mandy: And that was just a huge turning point for me because I was curious, I should say. I had always been taught in the medical field and nursing that conventional medicine, traditional nursing, all that stuff were all that there was, and that any holistic practices or things like that were questionable or even kind of ridiculous.

Mandy: It was often like a mock thing, a laughter, a not very cool thing. But as I look back even now, like, I don’t blame any of those people ’cause that’s just what they were taught. They didn’t know any different. There’s lots of stuff out there on the … They play in it, they do it. No, I don’t think … That’s not the heart of

Mandy: Most people is not to cause harm, especially anyone who is called to something in the medical field. That was a little sidescript, but I just really started researching myself. Like, that has just been something that I love doing. I love researching, and I started paying attention to those families, and just noticing that there were more intentional choices when it came to food for their family, environments that they were exposed to.

Mandy: So you kind of have like physical, mental, emotional, all that, how they dealt with stress, and just their overall health, and there were less illnesses. I really can’t even think of anybody who had any chronic health struggles. I wanted to understand why, so that’s why I started really researching it myself.

Mandy: Many of them were part of, like, some MLM companies, you know, oils or different things like that, which made me a little more skeptical, for sure. As I watched and researched myself, I started changing some of those things for our family, like things that we ate, or getting rid of chemicals and toxins that are in our home, and just paying more attention to what we did physically as far as what we put in our bodies, how we took care of our bodies, and that’s including, like, mental, emotional part, and of course, spiritual.

Mandy: Like, that’s the foundation of all of it, our walk with Christ. So I just really dove into it deep. It started out with little things here and there to where there was just a total transformation in our home, and it was just crazy, the results that we saw. And then as I continued working, being a nurse in the hospital, I couldn’t help but not notice how many people came in with things that could’ve been prevented, or most likely could’ve been prevented, by all means.

Mandy: It broke my heart, honestly, just knowing that there was another option, and I couldn’t say anything. You know, you can’t talk about it in the hospital setting or most medical places. I shared with a lot of nurses. Actually, quite a few of us on our unit started doing some things together and just seeing some real changes in their health and their families, and I did get to integrate a few alternative therapies in my hospital.

Mandy: That was a-

Carrie: Wow …

Mandy: crazy experience, but yeah, that- Took almost four years, but it did happen, and it has now gone over to all of the same, the entire system. Like, they have eight locations, so it’s, like, transpired through all of them. So that’s been pretty cool to see, ’cause that was just something the Lord laid on my heart, and I thought, like, that would be it.

Mandy: I thought that was that pivotal moment. The Lord used me to get that into some of the hospitals, but then I just didn’t feel a peace or, like, that was the end. Felt like that was more the starting point, kind of like what you just said a minute ago, the starting point of that transition for me, where He just was like, “Okay, you obeyed me in this one little thing, and now I have something else for you to do.”

Carrie: Tell us about, like, what kind of small changes were you seeing? I’m curious about specifically with your special needs son. What did you notice kind of as you changed some maybe food or environmental things? Was it just less stress on the body made it easier to manage, like, symptoms?

Mandy: Yeah, gut health is one of the biggest things.

Mandy: So when you’re eating real natural food, not getting foods that have hormones or added antibiotics and all these other things that they add to our foods, the dyes that are added, all those kind of things, um, those just cause more inflammation. And there’s that gut-brain connection that is just absolutely amazing, that connection there.

Mandy: So by healing his gut, and not just him, but our whole family. My daughter really struggled with a lot of anxiety. My husband, pain and different things. I always had real bad reflux and migraines. And making those transitions just changed everything. I would love to be able to say that, you know, my son is no longer autistic or

Mandy: He still had those tendencies, but actually a total different side thing. Just a couple years ago, I dove into homeopathy. Um, I don’t teach. I’m not a homeopath, so I don’t teach that. But had never heard of it. It was just another one of those just random holistic options. And I always thought, “Okay, well, that, I’ll try everything, but not that, ’cause that’s really weird.

Mandy: I don’t understand it.” But we did. I finally did, and that has made the biggest transformation for my son, which was absolutely crazy. Anyhow, but I can get deeper on that, but I’m not a homeopath. I don’t wanna speak incorrectly on it.

Carrie: Gotcha. So interesting just that the change in environment really caused you to do some more research, caused you to try a few things, and you saw some changes in your family.

Carrie: That bled over into work. This is really interesting, too, because I think when God moves us, there’s a certain level of unsettled. Like you were saying, it’s like, “Oh, this is cool, but oh, that wasn’t all there was. So this wasn’t, like, the end point of what God wanted me to do. Like, there’s something a little, like, stirring in my spirit.

Carrie: Maybe there’s something more here.” So tell us about that, kind of like as you were maybe wrestling or praying through that. What came up for you?

Mandy: I was unsettled. I didn’t feel competent. I think I’ve kind of said that before. I feel like as the enemy starts to bring just constant self-doubt to us, and we can either grab hold of that and take that thought captive and turn to the Lord and seek His truth and that possible lie that we’re speaking to ourselves.

Mandy: I felt like I really had to have all the answers to, like, be an expert in everything before the Lord could use me. So I feel like for several years, I was just researching, digging more, trying to get all these different certifications, trying to become just the expert, but then realizing that I didn’t need that.

Mandy: Like, God, He doesn’t call the ones who are already knowledgeable and have all the answers, know everything, but He calls you, and then He provides. He prepares, He provides for us. He gives us the word. Invite the Holy Spirit, and He will walk with you through that It’s really that one step at a time is what I’ve seen really is taking one obedient step at a time.

Mandy: And you’re not gonna have the whole picture out front. Like, He doesn’t give us the whole map or blueprint or anything, but He’s that light for that one step to take the next step, and then just kind of build on that. There was a period of time when I first started seeking what exactly the Lord was calling me to do next, where He showed me, uh, coaching.

Mandy: I had actually never heard of coaching. And then He said, “Yes,” but He said, “But wait.” And that was confusing for me, I think. But as I look back and reflect, that was the time it was my daughter’s senior year in high school. There was just a lot going on in our family. We actually moved my parents here from Texas and built a home together, so we were all learning to adjust to that in one space.

Mandy: But I know that what was nice was having just that peace of knowing, okay, this isn’t the right time. When it is, He’ll show me. And just continuing to seek His truth, be in the Word, pray through it, ask for a wise counsel of friends, family, church members to kind of confirm that. And when I say that, I always wanna say, I didn’t say, “Hey, can you confirm to me that I’m in God’s will?”

Mandy: It was more just like, yeah, it was praying that, “Lord, would you bring that confirmation if I’m in your will, if this is the direction?” And it was probably the coolest thing I’ve experienced in my years of walking with the Lord, was just how randomly it was, how He would send another believer to just say something to me that maybe they didn’t have any idea necessarily what it meant, but it was that confirmation that the Lord sent.

Mandy: And, and I like to encourage people with that. If the Lord lays something on your heart for someone else, share it. Like, that’s an act of obedience there, you sharing that because you have no idea what that is gonna mean for that person. So I think I got off the trail there.

Carrie: No, I think that’s good. I’m on this book-writing journey that the Lord has brought me to, and it’s been a very long journey of thinking about writing a book, of thinking about different topics, of really feeling like it wasn’t the right time.

Carrie: Like you said, yeah, maybe that’s for me someday, but I’m just gonna lay that to the side and just trust God with that. And different people have said things like, “You should write a book,” or, “I would love more information about this,” et cetera. And so it’s just interesting. And I don’t know exactly where that journey is gonna go fully, but it’s, uh, quite a messy process.

Carrie: But I can definitely see how it’s been a long time coming. It’s not been a rushed process. And I think sometimes we’re so much in a rush. Like, “I gotta know right now, and I gotta know how it’s all gonna turn out and make sure it’s okay,” and God doesn’t give you that. Like you were saying, it’s more like, no, God gives you the peace.

Carrie: You’re on the right track. This is just put one step in front of the other, the road that you’re going down. And I think really having the time to devote to it, where you knew, like, your family was gonna be more settled, your daughter was gonna be graduated, and all of that, that makes sense. How did you have that assurance that it was time when those things settled?

Mandy: Yeah. I feel like the assurance didn’t come from, like, having one big dramatic sign or knowing, like, every detail of exactly what I should do. So that’s for sure. I feel like he, like I mentioned before, he doesn’t give us that whole blueprint up front. So I was kind of praying through, this is pre-finding, like, the coaching option.

Mandy: Everyone kept saying, “You need to become a nurse practitioner. You need to do this or that.” And I had just no peace about becoming a nurse practitioner. In fact, it kind of made me sick to my stomach every time that it came up. But I experienced, like, a deep peace And just recognition when I did discover the nurse coaching thing.

Mandy: God, like, repeatedly confirmed that direction through prayer and scripture and other believers, like I mentioned. I sensed a clear instruction to remain focused during that time on my family for that season, and then when that timing finally changed, that calling was still there, and I was more prepared to receive it.

Mandy: And I, I can tell you the moment, like, that the Lord just brought me this peace. Honestly, it just was in a moment of grieving my daughter being off at college. Have you experienced the emptiness in your kids off yet? No. Okay.

Carrie: I am qu- quite far from that.

Mandy: Yeah, I didn’t think you had yet, but just prepare your heart for that.

Mandy: It was a lot harder than I expected. I think we long– We see our kids succeeding, doing these things. We think it’s just gonna be all peace and joy and wonderful, and it is for some people. But for my husband and I, it was kind of devastating. Like, we were happy and sad all at once. There was joy and grief all together.

Mandy: It was just a mix of emotions we didn’t anticipate having. And as I was literally just crying and crying to the Lord for her protection, for her experience there, for the people she would encounter on campus as they would continue to pour into her and her walk, the Lord literally just laid on my heart, “Okay, now it’s your turn.

Mandy: Now you can go and pursue that.” It was just a moment where I just– Did I hear you right? Are you sure? I don’t think so. I’m a hot mess right now. And the Lord just gave me such a peace, and my time with Him through the Word, confirmation after confirmation, and that’s when I was saying that the Lord brought several people from church who just came up and randomly said things that I knew without a doubt was from the Lord, just that confirmation.

Mandy: That was just sweetness of how much our Heavenly Father loves us and cares and how He pursues us.

Carrie: Yeah. I mean, just the whole structure of your day because you had been homeschooling as well, that now you had a lot more time to dedicate to things. The happy/sad with that. I’m sad that I’m not– and still investing in this way, and the happy of, like, she’s launching out into the world, and you have done the beginning part of the parenting, right?

Carrie: And now there’s some letting go. Not that the parenting ends. I think we’ve brought this up before, and I really, I guess, wanna stress to people that in our Christian life, we don’t wanna just go to God when we feel like we need something or we feel like we need an answer. Here I am, God, I need this answer, or I have this uncertainty, and I need you to kinda, like, fill this gap.

Carrie: How do you feel like that time of, like, abiding in Christ, of whatever that looks like, the worship, the prayer, being in community On a day-to-day basis, how do you feel like that connects with when people are making these big transitions of decisions, like for a new season?

Mandy: Honestly, I really can’t fathom, like, trying to navigate life, especially big transitions, without that walk with Christ, bringing that hope, like the light in the dark world.

Mandy: I mean, you know all this crazy stuff going on in our world today, but, like, living in the dark, and we hear so many voices, I feel like, coming out of so many opinions and responsibilities of all these things that we’ve gotta take care of, and fears and uncertainties and all that, and it’s just constantly consuming.

Mandy: But when we abide in Christ alone, that’s a reminder that we don’t have to understand the entire story, because we trust the one who’s writing that story for us. One of the verses that I go to often, I’m trying to think right now where. I think it’s John 15:4, the, “Abide in me, and I in you. And apart from me, you can do nothing.”

Mandy: To me, that abiding means remaining closely connected to Christ, and that can be, you know, prayer, scripture, time alone with Him. Worship is a huge one that I feel like is so empowering for me That daily dependence on him that keeps us close to him so we can recognize his voice and when he tells us.

Mandy: You’ve probably heard multiple times, if you aren’t spending time with your spouse, you know you’re not gonna know them. But the more time you spend with them, you know their voice, you know their sneeze, their cough, all the little sounds that they make. And it’s the same thing in our relationship with the Lord, that being close to him, we can recognize his voice.

Mandy: And when he does clearly call us or tell us to maybe take that next step or whatever it is. And we have a lot of just really cool testimonies, I feel like over the years, of where the Lord has come in and intervened and told us to do something that seemed absolutely crazy. And in fact, we had one before moving from Texas to Indiana, where it was kind of like the joke of the community because we were like, “The Lord is telling us to move, to leave, to go somewhere.”

Mandy: We didn’t know where at that point yet, but we knew clearly the Lord said what to do. The Lord literally told me, “Start packing things and sell all of this.” Like, we sold all of our furniture, everything, and we had not taken on a new position or anything but the Lord clearly told my husband that, “You’re leaving this ministry,” that was leaving Navigators, “and I have somewhere else for you.”

Mandy: And so when my daughter was in public school at that point, she was in kindergarten. She was in first grade at that point. Yeah, they were like, “Where are you going?” We’re like, “We don’t know yet, but we trust the Lord. He told us to pack.” And literally when we sold our stuff, all of our stuff sold in one weekend, and I’m talking multiple people.

Mandy: It wasn’t like one person came and bought it all, like everything. Anyhow, that’s just a small little just testimony. If you start to know what it feels like when he tells you to do something and to act in obedience.

Carrie: Yeah. And then the opportunity, like the door opened there really fast or something? Was it like one of those situations?

Mandy: Yeah.

Carrie: Yeah.

Mandy: Literally, I can share. It was Easter Sunday of 2011. We had been packed for a couple months at that point, and a church in Indiana called us. And just to know a little backstory before that, when God was telling us to pursue family and children’s ministry, we were like, “Okay, great.” So my husband put out applications all over Texas and, like, there were no bites, no bites, no bites.

Mandy: Or, like, we’d have interviews and it was like, “That is not where God’s calling us.” And the Lord brought us to a point where he was like, “Do you trust me? Why are you limiting my boundaries, like, on a global map?” And we’re like, “Well, okay, maybe we’ll trust you with that part. Where are you thinking that you wanna send us?”

Carrie: Yeah.

Mandy: There was, like, a church in Kansas. I was trying to think where it was, and then there were, like, five in Indiana, and literally I was like, “Okay, where’s Indiana again? I don’t really remember where that state is. Who in the world goes to Indiana?” Yeah. Like Indiana.

Carrie: That’s

Mandy: funny. But Easter Sunday, yeah, a church from Indiana called us, and we started talking to them.

Mandy: We had to sit on my son’s bed because we had kept our kids’ furniture. That was it. Everything else had already been sold. My husband and I were sleeping on a blow-up mattress. We didn’t have a kitchen table. Our couches were gone. Everything was gone, and they didn’t know that. They flew us out for an interview.

Mandy: We were here for, like, five days, and then when we got back home, they wanted us to have a video call, which was very rare back then to have video calls, of course, in 2011. And it was with all the elders so they could do, like, their final interview, and they were like, “Well, we just want you to know we’ve already made a decision.

Mandy: We love you. We want you guys here. Like, how soon do you think you guys can be here?” We’re like, “Next week.” And they’re like, “Well, don’t you need to, like, pack or sell your hou-” We’re like, “No.” We were renting. We were like, we had already released the rent and our whole house is packed and ready, ’cause God told us to be ready.

Mandy: That’s a very short end of that story, but it was just an amazing– And we always reflect back to that. There was a time my husband left that church that God moved us to Indiana for just a couple years ago to become a chaplain. And we were just like, “Man, did you really bring us here, like, for him to not stay there?”

Mandy: I mean, he was there for seven years. We can’t deny the testimony of the Lord bringing us here. And then we thought we would move back to Texas for sure. We’re gonna move back to Texas. You know, we homeschool. We don’t have to stay here. The Lord said, “No, this is where I want you. I want you here in Indiana.”

Mandy: We’re like, “Okay.” And then we moved my parents here, so now we’re here for life, I guess.

Carrie: Man, I love those stories because I do think they provide what I’d call, like, an anchor point. In Joshua, when they were crossing the Jordan River, he’s like, “Take a stone. You’re gonna remember that day that God, oh, parted the Jordan River so that we could walk across and go to the Promised Land.”

Carrie: And I think that God gives us those stones kind of in our own life, and we have to be willing to not forget them, to make some type of, like, write it down, put it in our brain, make a piece of art so that we remember to look back and say, like, “Yeah, God did that. And if God did that, then God can do this over here.

Carrie: God can lead me into this next season. If God got me through the last season, He’s gonna lead me forward into the next one.” You talked about a little bit of grief and loss in terms of going from homeschool mom and, like, launching your daughter out to college to the transition, the grief and loss that occurred there.

Carrie: Was there some grief and loss from leaving the hospital, from leaving, like, postpartum work that you wrestled with?

Mandy: Yeah. I’m not completely gone from the hospital. I actually still work part-time, so I like to-

Carrie: Oh, okay …

Mandy: still say that. But yeah, there was tremendous … I feel like there was absolutely grief in that.

Mandy: Let me kind of backtrack a little, see. So it was something that was on my heart for so long. So there were one point, as far as the nursing part, there was tremendous joy and anticipation of being able to just leave at that point because I felt like, surely God doesn’t want me here anymore. He’s transitioning me to this other place.

Mandy: And right now, just living in that middle transition rather than standing, like, on that side where I had been for so long. I’d been at the hospital for so long, just longing for getting to the other side. Now I’m in that balancing, trying to balance between when is time to let go of more hours, those kind of things.

Mandy: But being here is just surreal To know that it had been on my heart and the Lord had been calling me to this for so long, I’m not saying there’s not days that are hard, because almost every day is hard, for sure, but I know this is the Lord, what He has called me to. There’s definitely a difference in knowing, like, what He’s calling you to, when to take that first step of obedience, and to be faithful in pursuing what He’s called you to.

Mandy: I feel like coaching brings me such a joy, and being able to pour into the women in a way that I never felt like I had the opportunity before. When I did nursing on the floor for so long, I prayed every day on my way to the hospital. I prayed that He would give me the right patient, the right person at the right time, and it was amazing to see the interaction and how

Mandy: I don’t know if you know how the hospital world works, but you have, like, say, 50 patients, and you have 10 nurses, and then everyone’s just randomly assigned five patients or something like that. It was so awesome to see how the Lord put His hand even on that during that season. That was my calling during that season, um, without a doubt.

Mandy: And to see how the patients that He gave me, the interactions, being able to plant seeds or maybe confirm, it was so crazy how often I had other maybe moms that were having babies and who preferred a more holistic side, whereas some of the other nurses would have been very negative and given them grief in that situation, if you know what I mean.

Mandy: Seeing His hand on me during that time, and even the days that I still work for the hospital, how He still intercedes and He’s still using me in that time, compared to the nursing, where I just feel total freedom to be myself, to be able to share what has just empowered me and given me just hope for people.

Mandy: And one of the things I coach through is not just physical health, but the main foundation is that spiritual foundation of where they are in their walk with Christ. Because without that foundation, nothing else matters. That is something that I love being able to share that, ’cause I can’t do that at the hospital.

Mandy: I cannot speak. Unless someone speaks Jesus or something first, I cannot say anything. So being able to have that freedom now, and for clients that come to me, majority, in fact, all of them are believers typically. I’ve had a couple who weren’t, but I trusted that the Lord brought those people so I could plant seeds in their lives.

Mandy: There’s been grief about leaving that one side, but then joy. There’s been grief about not being able to be fully into coaching yet. So it’s kind of that mixture, that mixture of that joy and grief, and I feel like they kind of come hand-in-hand. Kind of like when we look at when your child goes off to college and you have joy and grief there.

Mandy: You have joy that they’re doing what you have prepared them for, but then grief that’s gonna change kind of your life and relationship almost forever at that point.

Carrie: Let’s talk a little bit about what is it that you do through Nurse Coaching, like how do you help people with transitions, and you kinda spoke to looking at several different aspects of health.

Mandy: I help women who are in midlife seasons, so that 40 and up age range just kind differs. I have quite a few, like, in their 60s and even a couple in their 70s. I mean, if you look back, you went from being a teenager to maybe a newlywed, then all of a sudden becoming a parent. All these different stages and transitions.

And for so long I feel like it’s just a natural, easy flow of transition that we kind of anticipate and expect to come with life. All of a sudden midlife comes. I think most of us look forward to midlife of my kids are grown, you know, I don’t have that responsibility as much anymore, depending on where you’re at.

And then maybe you’re at a pivotal point in your career. Many of the women I talk to are at a point where they’re really successful and finally reached, like, that, that kind of main point that they’ve been trying for for so long. Sometimes it’s really unexpected to have these shifts and that empty nest, that stirring on your heart that you didn’t anticipate.

You finally got to where you thought you were gonna be, and it’s not quite what you thought it was gonna look like. A lot of the women I speak with are just kind of really on the pivotal edge. They’ve poured so much into their family and their careers and all these things for so many years, that their walk with Christ isn’t exactly where they thought it would be at this point either.

So there’s just, like, a million transitions, a million things happening all at once from physical, mental, emotional changes that hit us, aren’t necessarily always what we thought it was gonna be at this point. I really help women to slow down and reconnect in their identity with Christ, to recognize, like, where The peace might be leaking out and paying attention to the desires and gifts that God has repeatedly placed on their hearts.

Midlife, it’s more than a change in circumstance, whatever that is, empty nest or anything, but there’s just a real identity transition. Each woman comes to me with a different place, so there might be some physical things, maybe hormone changes is the biggest one for sure that we talk about and go through.

A lot of people are dealing with insulin imbalance and gut health that’s a mess or fear, grief, trauma is huge right now. I see a lot of women that are dealing with something from years back they’ve pushed down for so long because they’ve been so busy as a mom or in their careers that so many of these things just got pushed down, and not realizing how it just can often start festering back up and really messing us up.

It all connects, the spiritual, mental, emotional, physical, all of that connects. When you don’t have one of those things in alignment, it can often throw other things out of balance. That’s where I really try to help the ladies pour into where they’re at physically, where they’re at spiritually, mentally, emotionally.

Carrie: And there’s a level, too, where what took to get you maybe to that pivotal point or whatever you wanna say, or the success, it’s like you can no longer run 100 miles per hour on the treadmill. And so if people got used to that way of life and now their body is telling them, like we don’t have the physical energy or the emotional energy or sometimes the relational energy that we used to have for certain relationships that are draining.

Carrie: Like you said, the peace is leaking out all over the place. I like that phrase. I’m gonna have to ponder that a little bit more.

Mandy: And you bring up the relationships. The boundaries is a huge one. I feel like for women just, I think we feel like we need to be there immediately for everyone, and so it’s so much harder in midlife.

Like we can only handle so much, I think, and that’s part of that physical, mental, emotional. So learning how to have healthy boundaries with different people, even your grown kids and grandkids and those kind of things where you think that, “I’ve gotta say yes to everything,” but learning to have, like, boundaries to take care of yourself still in there.

Carrie: Yeah. That is really huge, and I know that sometimes it’s like saying no to one thing means you get to say yes to something else. And I’ve found for myself it’s much easier to say, “This is what I’m able to do right now,” versus just giving out like a flat no. “Here’s what I’m able to do or not able to do.”

Mandy: Exactly. But you have to know that ahead of time. Yeah.

Carrie: Yeah, you have to know that. Like be connected to yourself to know what you’re able to say yes to even. I think this is just incredibly timely conversation, and I think it’s gonna be helpful for many of our listeners, so I appreciate you coming and sharing your wisdom with us.

Mandy: Absolutely. Happy to do that.

Carrie: We’ll put your link to your website in the show notes and where people can find you.

Mandy: All right. Thank you for having me.

Carrie: Hey, if you love the podcast, I know you’re gonna love our email newsletter. It is sent out once a week on Wednesdays when we have new episodes come out.

Carrie: It’s an opportunity for me to share little devotional thoughts with you about what God is teaching me, and those on our email list are the first to know about things happening with the podcast. So if you’d like to be an email insider, all you have to do is go to carriebock.com and sign up for our email list.

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.

238. Is God Asking Me to Give This Up?

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

In this episode, Carrie shares a personal story about how God led her to let go of something she had enjoyed for years, using that experience to help Christians with OCD recognize the difference between the Holy Spirit’s gentle conviction and fear.

You’ll Learn

  • How to recognize the difference between the Holy Spirit’s conviction and OCD’s urgency.
  • Why enjoying something doesn’t automatically make it an idol.
  • Biblical questions to ask when evaluating the entertainment you consume.
  • Why lasting spiritual transformation begins in the heart, not through fear or pressure.
  • How to respond to personal convictions without falling into condemnation or legalism.

How Do You Know When God Is Leading You to Let Something Go?

Recently, I made the decision to stop watching a certain type of TV show that I had enjoyed for years. It wasn’t something I felt pressured to do, and it wasn’t a decision I made overnight. As I reflected on that experience, I realized it shed light on a question I hear often from Christians with OCD.

How Can I Tell if God Is Convicting Me or If It’s Just OCD?

As a therapist, one of the questions I hear most often is, “How do I know if this is God speaking or if it’s just my OCD?” Those moments can feel confusing, especially when fear and conviction seem to overlap. In this episode, I share what my own experience taught me and why that distinction matters.

Does Enjoying Something Mean It Has Become an Idol?

I’ve worked with many Christians who become anxious because they enjoy something. They wonder if that enjoyment means they’ve put it ahead of God. This episode explores a different way of thinking through that question and the biblical principles that helped me evaluate my own situation.

How Should Christians Think About the Entertainment They Consume?

Not every decision about entertainment has a simple answer. Rather than looking for a list of rules, I found myself asking a different set of questions. Those questions helped me think more carefully about what was shaping my heart and my relationship with God.

What Does God’s Gentle Work in Our Lives Look Like?

One of the things that stood out to me most about this experience was what happened after I made my decision. It reminded me that God often works in our hearts in ways we don’t immediately recognize. I hope this conversation encourages you to be open to His leading without being driven by fear.

If you’ve ever wrestled with whether God is asking you to let go of something, or you’ve struggled to tell the difference between His conviction and fear, I hope you’ll listen to the full episode.

Transcript

Hi, I’m Carrie with Christian Faith and OCD. One thing that I see a lot of Christians struggle with, with OCD is this thought that, “Well, maybe if I really like something, that must mean that it’s an idol or it’s bad in some way, and God wants me to give it up.” I thought I would share a personal story for you of something that I gave up recently 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 Bach, Christ follower, wife, mom, and licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. I pray you are blessed by today’s episode I’m not going to go into massive detail about it, but I will tell you that it was a TV show, and it wasn’t really just about this TV show, it was more about the genre of TV shows that this one in particular represented.

So it wasn’t just that I gave up necessarily that TV show, but other TV shows that were similar to it. And the whole entire process was actually really peaceful, and it got me thinking about how different it is than the OCD spiral operates. So the OCD comes in with a panic and says, “Hey, you really, really like this thing.

Maybe God doesn’t want you to do it,” or, “You don’t wanna do that thing. Well, therefore, maybe it means God wants you to do it.” Uses, like, this weird reverse logic against you. But in my own personal story, I was watching this TV show for many years, consuming this type of content for many years. The reason I’m not gonna go into depth is because I don’t want you to spiral out if you happen to watch these type of shows.

But what came to mind one day, I had finished the episode and I realized, you know what? I’m not in a good head space mentally, emotionally, and just something about this just really doesn’t jive with my spirit internally. And I thought, “Is this actually really benefiting me, or is it doing the exact opposite?

Is this something that’s tearing me down spiritually?” And like I said, it wasn’t a panic or a rush of anything that I had to do right away. It was more just a moment of contemplation that I believe came from the Holy Spirit of what is actually the fruit of this experience that you’re dealing with. And I wanted to bring up this verse for you.

This is 1 Corinthians 6:12, and Paul says, “All things are lawful for me, but not all things are helpful. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be dominated by anything.” That’s the ESV. Paul goes on to talk about food, but then he also goes on to talk about sexual immorality, so the context of the verse is really about sexual immorality and some freedoms that people were taking in the Corinthian church that they shouldn’t have been.

However, this verse got me thinking, and then there’s also another verse that talks about being innocent of evil, and I didn’t look that up ahead of time. But this comes up in Romans 16:19. The second part of the verse says, “I want you to be wise as to what is good and innocent as to what is evil.” That was another thing that came to mind was, am I consuming something that has some sense of evil in it?

Now, I’m not saying, like, the entire TV show was evil. I think there obviously are positive and negative aspects to many different things in our lives that we may come across on the internet or on TV. However, for me personally, after I had this evaluation moment after watching the TV show one day, I thought, “You know what?

I think I’m gonna stop watching this.” There wasn’t any grief over it. I wasn’t upset about it. I wasn’t panicked about it. I wasn’t worried about it. I just said, “You know what? Let me just see how I feel about disengaging, about not consuming this type of material anymore.” In the context really of what God has been doing in my life, I really feel like I’ve been in a place of refinement where God has been rooting out things that don’t need to be there, where God has been cutting off things that aren’t producing healthy fruit, where He has been just really refining different areas of my life, whether that’s relationships or activities I’m engaging in, the way I’m taking care of my health, et cetera.

And kinda knew already in the context, like, that’s what God has been working with me on, and part of that refinement process is just being able to be here and show up for all of you in a really healthy way, and that’s obviously something that I am desiring to do and desiring to honor God with my whole life and love Him with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength Several months ago, I didn’t exactly write down the date of when this occurred.

I’m not even sure how I would go about finding that out, but I know that it’s been several months now, and I can honestly say that I don’t miss it. So this was another important piece I wanted to share with all of you, is that I really feel like the Holy Spirit led me towards cutting something out of my life, and it doesn’t feel like a loss.

I don’t miss it. I’m not yearning for that. I’m not saying, “Oh, man, I remember when I used to watch that and it was really great.” I just don’t want to have anything to do with it anymore. And that was the part that actually surprised me the most. I found it, like, really bizarre. I was like, “Wait a minute.

What do you mean?” Like, this is something that I look forward to, like, new episodes coming out. Like, “Oh, there’s a new episode. I should go listen to it. What day does it come out on streaming that I’m gonna go stream it and watch it and consume this content?” I used to be, like, really excited about it. Now, I genuinely don’t care.

I’m not looking for it. I’m not interested. I genuinely believe that this has been a change from the inside out, that as God has been working on my heart, that He has removed a desire for something that I used to have and used to really enjoy. So a lot of times with OCD, what I see is that people get really works focused and get very externally focused and forget that we’re in a relationship with God on a day-to-day basis.

It’s a daily walk. It’s over the period of our life, however long that is. It’s not a sprint. It’s not a, we have to do all the things right now. There’s not a sense of, I’m not gonna be completely transformed by God tomorrow. And take it one step at a time. Like, as you spend time in the Word, and the closer that you are abiding in Christ, the more that you are spending time with Him, the more that you are getting to know Him.

Like, this transformation happens at a heart level, and then it extends out to what you do and how you live. So if there is something that you’re panicking over about whether or not God wants you to give that up, I wanted to send out this short encouragement to say that God does not bring this intense level of fear upon you to change.

It’s the kindness of the Lord that leads us to repentance. So if you’re in an immense amount of anxiety, that’s not being produced by the Holy Spirit. It is probably being produced by OCD. And so just take some time. Now, what I will say is just be open. If you’re consuming some type of content online, or if you are– have been following along with something and you do feel convicted, just leave that openness and that willingness to lay it down and say, “Okay, let me try to lay this down.”

Give it over to the Lord, disengage, and not continue to consume that. I know that TV shows are really interesting, especially if you’re following along with certain series. Sometimes they can start out kind of benign, they can be okay, and then they can dip into some really dark territories, and my husband and I have watched certain TV shows like that where all of a sudden it was going down this really dark road theme where it didn’t start out that way at all, and started out more as a lighthearted type of show.

So just be conscious of what your spirit is telling you and really being able to examine what’s the fruit of this experience. But to make these types of decisions, OCD can get super hyper-focused on specific decisions like this. Should I watch this TV show? Should I not? Is it a sin if I watch this? Is it not?

And I think that for me, I wouldn’t say to someone, you know, “Hey, if you watch this particular TV show, that’s a sin,” unless you’re just watching something that is about the abuse of children or females or et cetera, things that we know that are very clearly against our faith. But pornography-type stuff.

But if you are just watching television, I think that God deals with each of us individually, and certainly this is probably something that I could have given up a long time ago, and I think probably had wrestled with that at different points in my life, at different seasons. And I’m glad and thankful that God didn’t give up on me and didn’t shame me and didn’t condemn me for the period of time that I did hold onto it.

But I’m also very thankful to be on the other side to say that as a result of letting this go, like, that I can definitely see there’s more peace in my life, and the fruit has been that I’m not constantly getting sad when I watch this or anxious or being aware of certain things that I just don’t need to have any knowledge or awareness.

I know that this is a little bit of a shorter episode today, but I hope that it helps you as you’re thinking through or if you’ve run across this specific obsession for yourself of, is God asking me to give this thing up? I hope that this provides you some sense of grounding and encouraging that the Holy Spirit is loving, patient, gentle, caring towards you and wants your absolute best in your connection with Jesus Christ.

And so we don’t have to be afraid of conviction, because it’s conviction from the Holy Spirit. It’s not condemnation. Keep striving. Keep abiding in Christ. I love all of you, and we’ll be back next week. 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

237. Natural Support for Your Hormones with Celisha Gerber, LAc, ND

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

In this episode, Carrie sits down with naturopathic doctor and acupuncturist Celisha Gerber to explore how natural hormone support can help women understand the connection between hormonal changes, CCD, anxiety, and emotional resilience, while offering practical, faith-centered strategies for working with the body instead of against it. 

Episode Highlights:

  • Why hormonal changes can intensify OCD, anxiety, and intrusive thoughts
  • How perimenopause, stress, and nervous system regulation are deeply connected
  • Simple lifestyle habits that naturally support hormone balance and emotional health
  • The surprising role of nutrition, sleep, movement, and relationships in calming your brain
  • How to recognize what your body is communicating instead of assuming something is wrong

Episode Summary:

Why Do Hormonal Changes Make OCD and Anxiety Feel So Much Worse?

Many women notice their anxiety, OCD, or intrusive thoughts become more intense before their period, around ovulation, or during perimenopause. These shifts can feel confusing, especially when nothing else in life seems to have changed. In this conversation, Celisha explains how hormones influence the brain, nervous system, and stress response. Understanding these connections can help us respond with greater compassion instead of fear and recognize that our bodies may be communicating a need for support.

What Are Natural Ways to Support Hormone Balance?

There isn’t one simple solution for supporting hormone health. Instead, we discuss practical, sustainable habits that work together over time. Nutrition, quality sleep, regular movement, stress management, and nervous system regulation all play an important role in helping our bodies function well. Small, consistent changes often create a stronger foundation than chasing the latest health trend.

How Are Stress, Hormones, and Mental Health Connected?

Chronic stress can affect hormone balance, making anxiety and OCD symptoms feel even more overwhelming. As we care for our nervous system, we’re also supporting the systems God designed to help our bodies adapt, heal, and become more resilient through every season.

Which Daily Habits Can Support Better Hormone Health?

Healthy hormones aren’t built by one supplement or one perfect meal. We talk about simple habits like eating enough protein, supporting blood sugar, prioritizing sleep, moving your body, and cultivating healthy relationships. These everyday choices can strengthen both physical and emotional health without adding unnecessary pressure or perfectionism.

How Can Faith Shape the Way We Care for Our Bodies?

Caring for our bodies is part of faithfully stewarding the gift God has given us. We don’t have to fear every symptom or strive for perfect health. Instead, we can approach our bodies with curiosity, grace, and wisdom while trusting that God walks with us through every step of the healing journey.

I hope this conversation encourages you to care for your body with compassion and gives you practical tools to support both your hormones and your mental health.

Connect with Celisha: www.nd-care.com

Transcript

Carrie: Welcome everyone. Glad that you are tuning in to the podcast with us today. I’m very excited about today’s episode. We’re talking about hormones, specifically with women. Now, if you’re a guy who’s listening, maybe you wanna understand your wife better or another female in your life, we’re happy that you’re here as well.

But we’re talking about balancing hormones naturally to help with OCD and anxiety.

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.

This is an episode that I’ve wanted to do for a couple different reasons. One is that so many women have told me, “Hey, when I’m around the time of my period or right before, I’ve just noticed my obsessions are way worse and I’m really struggling a lot more with OCD.”

It could be maybe during ovulation when there’s some shifts and changes, too. I’m also in the very early stages of perimenopause, trying to navigate and figure that whole thing out, and I’m noticing even within myself, I consider myself a reasonably regulated person, but I definitely can feel some of these hormonal shifts and how they’re affecting me mentally, emotionally, and physically.

I just think it’s an important thing for us to talk about. A lot of more people are becoming more aware and more astute and looking for resources online to navigate hormones in our life. So today, I am inviting Salicia Gerber here to talk with us. And tell us a little bit about yourself and the type of work that you do and the people you work with.

Celisha: Well, I am a friend, mother, daughter, sister, wife. I also going through different things, and I see around me loved ones. As a naturopathic doctor and acupuncturist, I help people understand what their bodies are trying to tell them through symptoms. While I work with a variety of health concerns, many of my patients are overwhelmed women struggling with anxiety, hormone imbalances, exhaustion, chronic stress.

The way I approach it is with functional wellness, nervous system regulation, and lifestyle medicine mainly. I believe the body was designed to heal, and when we give it the right environment, support, we remove those obstacles to heal, it does. One of the things I’m most passionate about is helping women realize that they’re not broken.

Their body’s not working against them. It is trying to compensate. So symptoms are often the communication from our body that something needs support, so it’s understanding that and helping them work with them, see what their body needs.

Carrie: Yeah. And I find for myself, too, like I always think of like pain as communication So if something’s hurting, it’s like, okay, what is my body telling me that this area of my body needs that is in pain?

I’ve been through just kind of like a variety of different things that way, so I like that. It’s like you can look at it as communicate with yourself however you want to about your body and your symptoms and say like, “Oh, no, I’m falling apart,” or, “Everything’s broken,” but instead saying, “What is my body actually trying to communicate that I need right now?”

What do you find is the correlation between hormone imbalances and anxiety and OCD just that you’ve seen in your patients that you work with?

Celisha: One of the biggest misconception is that hormones only affect reproduction, and it doesn’t. Hormones are deeply connected to the nervous system and the brain.

The nervous system is constantly wanting to find out, am I safe? So if it perceives safety, we’re able to think clearly, we’re able to rest well, sleep, digest, connect with others, things work well. But when the brain perceives threat, it activates the stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. Many of the reproductive years, estrogen and progesterone, uh, will buffer that nervous system function against stress, so you don’t feel it as much perhaps.

But I often compare that to shock absorbers in a car. The bumps are still there. You’re still going through the stress, but the ride is a bit smoother with those hormones. And then as women enter the perimenopause, those change in hormones, even on a cyclic basis like you were saying at ovulation and just before the period, there’s significant changes naturally.

But when perimenopause starts, progesterone declines first, and estrogen, while it’s also declining, becomes erratic, so it’s going up and down, up and down in a downward motion. Women suddenly notice more anxiety, more intrusive thoughts, OCD tendencies, sleep disturbances, emotionally overwhelm. And that’s typically because progesterone is an important part of the brain’s calming pathway, specifically GABA signaling if you’ve heard of GABA.

As progesterone declines or becomes erratic, women lose that natural buffering system that help them stay calm and resilient. And at the same time, this fluctuating estrogen that happens affects blood sugar regulation, the sleep quality, serotonin production, and stress resilience. So if you’ve had a history of trauma, anxiety, or OCD, these hormonal shifts, they amplify those symptoms that were already present beneath the surface.

Carrie: And I just wanna say in relationship to that with people, another thing that I hear is, “Well, yeah, I’ve kinda sorta had this OCD for a while, but it’s been manageable. Like, it’s been okay.” And then what will happen is a couple of different things. Either one, there’ll be some type of trauma or major life shift that happens to them.

They lose a loved one, and that kinda rocks their whole world, or they go through a traumatic experience. They become a caregiver. Like, then all of a sudden, there’s extra abusive stress which always makes our mental health symptoms worse. They’re wondering, like, “What in the world happened?” I just feel almost like you’ve gotten knocked off your horse.

Like, you were riding through life, everything was okay. Yeah, okay, I had a little OCD, and then bam. So I could definitely see how that could happen to women in perimenopause because there are also just so many different life changes that happen during that time, depending on ages and stages of children and parents.

I have a weird situation in my life just in the sense that I have a young child in my 40s, whereas a lot of people have teenagers in their 40s that they’re trying to launch out into the world. So I have that stress. Parents, a lot of people’s parents are getting older. I’m weird ’cause my parents have already passed away, but that whole sandwich generation.

Is that something that you see a lot showing up in your patients as well? Just the time period of perimenopause can be unusually stressful as well.

Celisha: Most definitely. Life is not consistent typically. So this time you’re usually straddling caring for parents and caring for children. Maybe work is not stable, so you’re thinking about financial stressors.

Yeah, life always has its challenges, and the change in hormones does impact it. One of the things that is important to understand too is that hormones, they don’t work in isolation. They interact with what we do on a lifestyle basis, how we sleep, our nutrition, how we’re moving, just overall nervous system health.

While we can’t stop aging, there are things that we can do to improve the resilience. So as that buffering declines, there are other systems that actually become even more important than estrogen and progesterone, and we can talk about that if you’re interested.

Carrie: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s really helpful for people to know.

Kind of getting into some lifestyle things that you’re talking about, like getting sunlight. Is that what you’re meaning? Like, those types of things are more important. Movement.

Celisha: Yes. There is a system that works to producing oxytocin, which is a hormone and neurotransmitter. It’s often called the love hormone, and oxytocin’s associated with that trust, connection, gratitude, feelings of safety.

When we are imbalanced and having that question, “Am I safe?” Progesterone, it’s gonna go down over time. It’s not gonna go up. It goes down over time. What we can do is we can take advantage of this hormone, oxytocin, and cultivate that. That actually calms and counteracts the cortisol. Many of things that you can do that increase oxytocin, helping that nervous system to feel safe, is healthy relationships, community, gratitude, service, prayer.

Carrie: That’s really good. I think we underestimate the power, like, of our social relationships and, and interconnectedness. And so it’s like if you feel yourself withdrawing from relationships or you’re not as close to your spouse, or you’re not as close to friendships, like, it might be a good, like you said, warning signal to try to start reconnecting there.

Or if you’ve gotten out of church, and you really need that community and need that support, like, it’s a good time to think about leaning in and what does that look like. Maybe I do need to get more involved in service or in a small group or something like that. And I think some of these, like, proactive approaches that you’re talking about help us feel less victimized by our hormones, because I think a lot of women, and I’ve probably felt that way at different point too, like, “Oh my, I just have this surge of anxiety happening right now, and it feels completely outside of my control.”

What are some other things that people can do to not feel like, “Hey, I’m just totally out of control over maybe mood swings that are happening with them”?

Celisha: Yeah. I teach what’s called the eight laws of health. They correlate with the days of creation in Genesis. If we look at the days of creation, we can gather insight into how we were designed to function, and if we cooperate with that design, we can better live out our purpose to love and be loved.

1 John 4:16 says, “God is love, and he that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God, and God in him.” Like the law of gravity, there are just basic needs the system has to function properly. And for the body to adapt gracefully to hormonal transitions, these eight laws are fantastic So they’re basically sunlight, rest, which was day one, air and water, nutrition, exercise, temperance, and trust in God, connection, relationships, all those.

Just incorporating those is going to help regulate the stress hormones, inflammation, metabolism, nervous system function. The goal isn’t to fight your hormones, it’s to build a body and nervous system that can adapt to change. That’s the biggest. Simple things, but going back to how were we created.

Carrie: Yeah, and as far as the stress happening, I know a lot of women struggle with maybe weight gain or struggle with not being able to lose weight at different points.

Can you tell us a little bit about that connection to hormones?

Celisha: That weight gain usually is just because of that change in hormones that’s happening, so as estrogen drops, we actually get more blood sugar instability, and when blood sugar drops, we create a response of stress. Cortisol increases, adrenaline increases, and what does that do?

It tells us that we are hungry and we want carbs, and the insulin sensitivity gets worse. If we can focus on eating protein, fiber, healthy fat at every meal, but especially at that first meal of the day, whenever that is, and then once we start eating, making sure we’re eating at predictable times, ’cause the nervous system is observing that, and it can start producing those stomach contents to protect the stomach, to start digestion.

The liver, the pancreas, all those w- can start their process, and if it can predict it, our nervous system is gonna be much more stable. So I encourage women to prioritize definitely a variety of colorful vegetables which are rich in vitamins and minerals, especially magnesium, vitamin B6, having protein at every meal, but especially plant-based proteins.

Why? Because they’re alkaline. They promote an alkaline pH. And then healthy fats, because we need those fats to make our hormones. That’s the base. All of our hormones come from cholesterol.

Carrie: So don’t be afraid of fat. It just has to be healthy fat.

Celisha: Exactly, not inflammatory fats, ’cause inflammation does also become worse with the decreasing or erratic estrogens.

It will actually stimulate things to kick off like autoimmune disease or inflammatory processes, so that’ll be happening as well. But let’s talk about some, a couple things we can do to specifically support estrogen and progesterone. Our cycle starts day one as the start of a period, right? Your start of a bleeding.

And that phase is where you really wanna support estrogen balance. It’s the heavy estrogen time of our cycle. So from that day one to ovulation. And a couple things you can add diet-wise is flaxseed and pumpkin seeds. There’s also things in nature that God gave us that are considered phytoestrogens. So what is that?

Acts like an estrogen in a weaker way, attaching to those receptors in our body. And a few of those are red clover, hops, non-genetically modified soy, and alfalfa, stimulating, promoting the healthy estrogens, and then detoxing of those xenoestrogens. Xenoestrogens are toxins that also bind to those estrogen receptors, and then they make you feel like you are in excess of that estrogen stimulation, and therefore, even further imbalance into the progesterone balance.

What you can do to detox would be sour, bitter foods in nature. So that’s like lemon, lime, grapefruit, dandelion, artichokes, bitter endives, lots of leafy greens. And then going to the second half of the cycle, you wanna promote more of the progesterone. So that’s from ovulation to when you’re gonna start your period again.

You can add things like sunflower seeds and sesame seeds, evening primrose oil, borage oil. Some of the herbs that are phyto progesterones that attach to those receptors on the progesterone receptors are vitex and wild yam Usually the body likes more sweeter type, starchier vegetables during that time, so like sweet potatoes, squash, berries, those are good things.

You don’t wanna overly restrict your calories during that half of the cycle ’cause you will blunt progesterone, and you’re already dealing with that decreasing progesterone during perimenopause.

Carrie: Yeah. So instead of just definitely don’t wanna do any, like, starvation-type stuff on your body, but balancing out the protein and the healthy fat is gonna help you be fuller.

And of course, the vegetables, things of that nature, are already lower in calories is a good way to balance things out, you feel like?

Celisha: Yes, most definitely. And then avoiding things that are inflammatory like alcohol and caffeine, processed foods. That’s gonna increase inflammation and pull more of our resources, our anti-inflammatory resources, from what our body would prefer to make progesterone and the calming-type hormones.

Carrie: Yeah. I think people can get in this really bad cycle with caffeine and sleep, or it’s like they’re using a lot of caffeine during the day, and then they can’t sleep at night, and it’s like, “Well, I didn’t sleep, and so I… Now I need caffeine,” and trying to get that rhythm back can be really challenging for people.

There’s a lot of chatter, of course, about supplements on the Internet and social media. Why do you feel like diet and lifestyle is more of a primary solution than supplements?

Celisha: Yeah. Supplements are great when they’re needed, but they should never be expected to do the work of lifestyle The body runs on inputs.

It responds to what we give it or we expose to it. So food becomes hormones, it becomes neurotransmitters. Sleep regulates cortisol, sunlight regulates circadian rhythms. If someone is sleeping five hours a night, skipping meals, relying on caffeine, living under chronic stress, there’s not a supplement powerful enough to consistently overcome those factors.

Carrie: Yeah. And this is something that I see a lot, where once you kind of peel back some of these layers and you find out maybe, like, how much caffeine someone is intaking, or you find out that they’re not eating at regular intervals, like you said, they’re not eating all day and then they’re eating at 2:00, or they’re eating at 5:00 is, like, when they’re having their main meal of the day, I’m like, “Of course you don’t feel good.

Of course your mental health is really struggling,” because kind of I would say on the mental health piece too, if your physical health isn’t at least somewhat regulated, we’re not gonna be able to make massive changes to your mental health through therapy. And I think that’s why it’s so important for people to have just some, like, baseline physical health stuff going on.

I know we have a lot of people out there that I meet in the Christian community specifically that don’t want to be on medication for OCD, and I always say, like, “Okay, well, if you’re not gonna be on OCD medication, like this is my opinion, you’ve got to exercise. That is not optional because that is so healthy and so important for your brain.

You can’t just not do anything. Like that’s not gonna be good.”

Celisha: It’s so hard to separate ’cause we think, “Okay” exercise is only for our muscles, but in reality, it works just like all the other hormone systems together. They all interact with one another, so you need the whole picture. Just like each of our body parts are necessary, each of our pieces in our body are important for balance and for us to have that spiritual, mental, physical health.

Carrie: Yeah. In the modern age, we’re not getting the level of movement that humans used to get in days past. We were more agrarian, and farming, and out in the fields, and milking cows, and I mean, there’s certain movements that are having to happen to make all of those things work. I think about my grandparents and the kind of movement that they got, very different than today’s desk job situations.

Being able to even recognize that God created our bodies to move, I really do believe that, and figuring out how we can add little movement breaks in throughout the day is helpful, on your lunch break, using the stairs, those types of things. So I’m sure there are women listening maybe who say, “I feel like my hormones are involved in what I’m experiencing mentally and emotionally,” and I think sometimes whenever people feel like there’s some type of mental health diagnosis on their record and that it’s always excused as mental health, and maybe some of the physical health hasn’t been dug into, but if there’s women listening who feel like, hey, their doctors dismiss them, or they’ve said, “Yeah, all your labs are normal, everything’s fine, you’re in normal range,” but they still feel off, they’re like, “Something’s not right here,” what can they do?

Celisha: So this is very common. I hear, “All my labs are normal,” but a normal lab result does not necessarily mean it’s optimal.

Carrie: That’s good.

Celisha: Labs are good for ruling out disease, but it doesn’t explain why people feel exhausted, anxious, overwhelmed. I look at labs from a functional point of view, and that can give me a clue as to what systems are stressed, but I also encourage women to listen to their symptoms.

They are not crazy. What they are feeling is important. Many women, especially during this change in hormones, they’re functioning at a constant state of low-grade stress activation. So even though their labs are normal, they’re dealing with poor sleep, and so that’s upsetting their nervous system, that elevated stress, that blood sugar instability, perhaps some unresolved trauma and inflammation just by way of that declining hormones.

All of those affect the nervous system, and what we learn is that the nervous system has two settings, so an alerting pathway, which keeps us awake, motivated, able to start and finish tasks, and then calming pathways, which helps us feel safe. So when we are consistently cultivating sleep, sunlight, healthy relationships, movement, gratitude, prayer, rest, we’re gonna strengthen the body’s ability to return to that state of safety.

And that’s what’s most important. Healing often begins when we stop asking, “What’s wrong with me?” And we actually start asking, “What is the body trying to tell me?” We wanna look at how we can best cooperate with the vessel that the Lord gave us to steward. 1 Thessalonians 4:4 says that, “Every one of you should know how to possess his vessel in sanctification and honor.”

And then in 9, 4:9, “For ye yourselves are taught of God to love one another.” And we know that we were created to love and be loved.

Carrie: That’s really good. I like that. I think that this is a valuable conversation for so many reasons. I hope that people kind of picked up on, like, a little nugget here and there.

What I’ll say from the mental health side too is I think that people underestimate what chronic stress does to your body, and they may hear you use a word like trauma, and they may be like, “Yeah, I haven’t really been through anything traumatic.” But when you look at what they’re dealing with on a day-to-day basis, like we talked about before, caring for a child with special needs, caring for a loved one with a disability, caring for multiple children over the course of your lifespan and trying to maybe dealing with some stressful situations that your teenagers have encountered where you didn’t know if they were being safe or not in various situations.

That can add up and cause a, an effect on your body that can put you in a state of hypervigilance, of the fight, flight, or freeze. Or maybe you had something that you thought was buried that happened a long time ago, and it didn’t get awoken until maybe your kid got to a certain age where you experienced the trauma.

That can also happen. So if you had a traumatic experience at 16, for example, you were trucking along, everything was okay, you felt like it was buried and done with. Your daughter turns 16, all of a sudden you’re re-triggered all over again. You’re afraid bad things are gonna happen to her, whatever that situation is.

Um, just for people to kind of be aware, ’cause I think sometimes people don’t even recognize or they’re not in awareness of how much stress they’re under or that their body has experienced. Are those some things that you’ve encountered, people that just have chronic stress that’s not even on their radar that they have chronic stress?

Celisha: Stress is quite common, and that also impacts the hormones. So you’ll see that with higher stress, you’re gonna have a weaker ovulation. Compound that on top of perimenopause, and then it will affect your lifestyle, it’ll affect your sleep, it will affect how your adrenals are producing the cortisol and those, that adrenaline.

Carrie: Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming on here and sharing your wisdom today. I know that people are gonna learn new things and just appreciate what you’ve been able to share.

A couple follow-up thoughts on this episode. I feel like the older I get, the slightly more crunchier I get. So I find these types of topics really fascinating to me.

I have been reading The Menopause Reset by Dr. Mindy Pelz. There’s so many things in that book, and so I’m really just trying to focus on a couple small key changes that I’m making in my life to handle my 40s in a slightly healthier way. They definitely have been hitting me kind of hard the last six months.

So if you’re there in this stage of life, I definitely feel you. We’re gonna make it. For our next couple episodes, we’re switching topics over into some spiritual discernment. Next week we’re gonna be talking about, is God asking me to give this up? Where I’m gonna be sharing with you something that I gave up recently, what I learned from that experience, and then I’m applying that over to what OCD usually asks of people in regards to giving things up.

And then we have a special guest coming to talk about discerning God’s call in a new season and just her personal testimony. I think you guys are gonna get a lot out of these episodes.

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

Carrie: 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.

236. When Autism and OCD Overlap with Nikole Krueger, LMSW

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

In this episode, Carrie welcomes back licensed clinical social worker Nikole Kruger to explore the overlap between autism and OCD, why many adults are identified later in life, and how understanding neurodivergence can reduce shame and improve treatment.

Episode Highlights:

  • How autism and OCD can overlap and why the two are sometimes difficult to distinguish
  • Why many adults don’t realize they’re autistic until later in life, even if they’ve always felt different
  • How masking can lead to exhaustion, burnout, and challenges with identity and relationships
  • Why understanding the function behind a behavior is essential when treating OCD and autism together
  • Practical ways therapists, churches, families, and individuals can create more supportive environments for autistic people

Episode Summary:

Could Autism Be the Missing Piece Behind Your OCD Symptoms?

As awareness of neurodivergence continues to grow, more people are asking whether autism could be part of their story alongside OCD. If you’ve ever wondered why certain struggles never seemed to fit neatly into one diagnosis, or why social situations, sensory experiences, and relationships have always felt more difficult than they seem for others, this conversation offers a thoughtful place to begin exploring those questions.

I’ve seen more conversations about the overlap between OCD and autism, especially when people feel like traditional explanations haven’t fully answered their questions. As Nikole explains, autism affects much more than social interaction. It influences how someone experiences sensations, relationships, and everyday life, which can sometimes make OCD look very different than people expect.

Why Are So Many Adults Only Realizing They’re Autistic Later in Life?

Not everyone fits the picture of autism that many of us grew up hearing about. Nikole shares why years of masking, strong intelligence, and learning to compensate can allow someone to go unnoticed well into adulthood. For many people, the questions don’t begin until they recognize similar traits in their own child or finally have language for experiences they’ve carried their entire lives.

How Can You Tell the Difference Between Autism Traits and OCD Compulsions?

Two people can have the same outward behavior for completely different reasons. I’ve learned that understanding the purpose behind a behavior matters just as much as the behavior itself. That distinction can completely change how someone approaches treatment and recovery.

Why Do Sensory Sensitivities Matter in OCD Recovery?

Sensory sensitivities are often overlooked, yet they can influence everything from daily routines to OCD symptoms. I’ve found it fascinating how something as simple as a smell, texture, or bright light can increase distress and even become intertwined with compulsive behaviors. Looking at the whole picture often leads to a different understanding of what’s really happening.

How Can Churches Better Support Christians With Autism?

Church should be a place where people experience belonging, but sensory overload and unspoken social expectations can make that difficult for someone with autism. I hope this conversation encourages us to look beyond what we can see and consider how greater kindness, direct communication, and simple accommodations can help people feel welcomed, understood, and connected to the body of Christ.

If you’ve ever wondered whether autism and OCD might overlap, or you’re trying to better understand yourself, a loved one, or someone you serve, I hope you’ll listen to the full episode. 

Transcript

Carrie: Welcome back, everyone. We are here with Nicole Krueger again. You may remember her from our episode that we did on the overlap of ADHD and OCD, and today she’s back to talk with us about the intersection of autism and OCD, so I’m very excited about this conversation as well

Nikole: Welcome, OCD warriors, to the Christian Faith

Carrie: 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 Bach, Christ follower, wife, mom, and licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. I pray you are blessed by today’s episode And Nicole is a LMSW who practices online and in Grand Rapids, Michigan. So if you’re in Michigan, you can find her at Nicole Kruger Counseling. We’ll put her website in the show notes.

Nicole, welcome back. Glad to have you here.

Nikole: Yeah, thanks for having me again.

Carrie: How would you define autism for someone?

Nikole: Autism is really neurological difference or a difference in the person’s nervous system. Estimates are that it is, that over 2% of the world’s population is autistic, so that’s a lot bigger number than we previously really thought of in terms of having autism.

It’s very much a genetic disorder, a genetic difference, I will say. It’s not a psychological disorder, so similar to ADHD, it’s something that you’re born with that persists throughout life, and that really impacts how you experience and process and respond to the world and to the different inputs to your nervous system.

It can impact how people experience different external and internal sensations, so like think hunger, thirst, pain, noise, texture, light. It can impact movement patterns. A lot of people are familiar with the concept of stimming, um, or self-stimulation. It can impact communication styles. Autistic people generally-

Carrie: Yeah, things like flapping hands or, like, what kind of stimming behaviors might you see with someone?

Like, what might they look like?

Nikole: Yeah. Stimming can take the form of flapping. A lot of, like, lower support need autistic people won’t necessarily do that publicly, maybe in private, but a lot of people are aware that’s not really a socially preferred type of behavior, and so they’ll mask that. They might do more acceptable types of behaviors that might even just be, like, fiddling back and forth with an object.

It might be kind of like mild rocking back and forth. A lot of autistic people that I know love, like, swinging.

Carrie: Okay.

Nikole: Even backyard swings. Again, that’s not something that you’re necessarily gonna see when you’re out in public, but in private, finding those ways to self-soothe. It can even be sometimes, like, skin picking or scratching or rubbing fingers together.

Carrie: Okay.

Nikole: So different things like that.

Carrie: Yeah. How is this, the different views of autism in terms of it as a medical disorder versus this idea of neurodivergence?

Nikole: Historically, they’ve kind of looked at autism more from a medical model of a disability or a defect within a person, and so looking at it in terms of there’s a normal way of being, and then anything that’s significantly outside of that is seen as a flaw that requires correction, right?

Now, we’ve moved more towards a neurodiversity paradigm, which is much more humanizing for people who are autistic, and looking at seeing autism more as a natural form of human variation. Not a genetic mistake, but just that brains come in a lot of different varieties, and that the disability Really comes from the mismatch between the person and their environment, and that when that fit is poor, that creates these difficulties in compensation that cause kind of the outward impacts of autism that people struggle with, and that can cause a lot of misunderstanding or overwhelm in social situations or causing anxiety and such.

Carrie: I think this is an important distinction when we talk about intelligence, right? Because there are people who deal with autism who are quite intelligent, whereas if you look at it as a disability, like, that doesn’t seem to line up with what we know about other intellectual disabilities, for example.

Nikole: Yeah.

And with autism, we do see higher than in the neurotypical population percentage of people who have neurodiversity as also having, like, learning disabilities or intellectual impairment, but that’s not the whole spectrum. And so many years ago used to be where we had the autism diagnosis, and then there was Asperger’s, which was considered kind of that, like, lower support needs end of the autism spectrum, and now it’s all considered autism spectrum disorder, which there’s even debate over that.

A lot of autistic people don’t like that phrasing either.

Carrie: Right.

Nikole: But looking at it as a spectrum, and one end of the spectrum we have more of the intellectual impairment and disability overlap, but those are two separate things.

Carrie: Sure.

Nikole: Autism does not encapsulate the intellectual impairment aspect within its diagnosis.

That’s a separate diagnosis that does often overlap on that end of the spectrum. But then we also have the other end of the spectrum. Of course, it’s, it’s continuous, but on the other kind of end of it, we can see very high intelligence in fact, and even sometimes people who are considered, like, savant level, highly intelligent, and have incredible abilities in certain areas.

But that is a big way that I think many people have been missed in the autism diagnostic process because we were for so long only looking at people that had outwardly visible Characteristics of like arm flapping and intellectual disability and things like that, where it was evident from a very young age or under that there were significant differences in their social functioning, versus all the kids that have grown up and have found ways to get by and to lead relatively successful lives or struggle, but have made it to adulthood without being detected through masking and through just lack of information and awareness out there of what autism actually is.

And that can lead to also a lot of just shame and discouragement from not understanding your brain and how it functions, and taking a perspective that this is something wrong with you rather than just that you have a different type of nervous system that needs to be accommodated differently.

Carrie: I think one of the challenges is determining maybe what’s the difference between someone who, or a child or an adult who’s dealing with some type of social anxiety, like they’re really struggling to make social connections because they’re anxious, versus they’re dealing with being on the autism spectrum.

Nikole: Yeah. That’s a great question, and I think there is a big overlap between those two. So social anxiety can certainly exist on its own, but a lot of people who are autistic are also socially anxious Really what we have to look at when differentiating those two things is, are there the diagnostic criteria of autism also at play, or is this just solely an anxiety disorder?

In that sense, we really have to look at how is this person intuitively understanding what the social expectations are. Are they able to understand non-verbal communication? Are they able to have relationships perhaps with people that they do feel comfortable with, that they’re able to maintain over time, or are they struggling to make any relationship at all last for any duration of time?

So we really have to dig into then what is the criteria for each and are they met or not.

Carrie: Yeah, I think that’s a good distinction about relationship longevity. You talked a little bit about masking and about people struggling throughout the lifespan, but kind of getting by. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Nikole: Yeah, for sure. Masking is really when someone adapts their behavior to match the social expectations around them. Obviously, we all do this to some extent. It’s a normal part of socialization throughout your growing up years, and even in adulthood in different social contexts, like I’m not gonna go and talk to my boss the same way I’m gonna talk to my spouse or my kids or my friend.

So we all adapt how we present ourselves in different situations, but typically, when someone does not have autism, this is experienced more as kind of just an intuitive thing that they know how to do naturally, not something that they have to think about and prepare for and practice and worry about.

Versus when you’re autistic, people are masking for much longer periods of time, much more frequently, and it’s experienced as being very effortful and exhausting. Typically, after masking for a long period of time, these people can feel very tired, fatigued, need a lot of time to recover afterward because their nervous system is literally just exhausted.

And when you do that over a lifetime, it makes it harder to understand who you are and you develop your own self-identity. It makes it harder to develop and maintain relationships because if you’re just trying to fit in and look at what everyone else is doing to determine what’s expected of you and then match that, then it’s hard to develop those deeper lasting relationships because who are you?

Like, where’s the you in that? And so it can ultimately lead to a state of burnout for autistic people, which there’s three elements of burnout. So that includes loss of skills that they previously were able to do, excessive fatigue- And then heightened sensory sensitivities. So sensory sensitivities is one of the criteria in autism, but in burnout, those are extremely even more heightened.

Carrie: Okay. And is this typically like when you might see an adult come into therapy, “I’m not exactly sure what’s going on, but I’m having struggles in my relationships and I’m exhausted all the time trying to fit in or trying to make friends. I’m very anxious,” these types of situations?

Nikole: Absolutely. Those would all be red flags for that to look into that more.

The thing about compensation strategies, you can compensate for a challenge, but that’s not the same thing as not having that challenge in the first place. If you had a broken leg, you could compensate by going in a wheelchair or lugging yourself up the stairs to get up, but that’s not the same thing as being able to walk up the stairs with two good legs.

So if you kind of make that equivalency with autism, you can find ways to study and copy how other people behave, or you can follow scripts in conversation, or you can remind yourself to make eye contact or train yourself to, like, look at someone’s forehead or between their eyes if it’s too uncomfortable for you to make eye contact.

You can hide your stimming behaviors. You can ignore your sensory needs. But all of that takes mental and emotional effort and intentionality, and that’s gonna drain you the more frequently you’re doing that and the more contexts you’re doing that. It’s just gonna leave you feeling really dry and exhausted, and we actually do see in the research that people who are autistic seek therapy at much higher rates than non-autistic people, and that therapists very often feel ill-equipped to serve them because they don’t feel like they have enough training in autism and knowing how to help these type of people.

But obviously, it’s very important that we get better trained because they’re seeking care at higher rates, and they need to better understand how their brain works so that they can create an environment that is conducive to their flourishing instead of just constantly trying to mask and fit in to what the rest of the world expects.

Carrie: Right. Sometimes in certain situations, it may not come upon a person’s awareness until they have a child that is really struggling with school or really struggling in social environments to make friends, and they get assessed. And then the parent says, “Wait a minute. All the questions you’re asking, I dealt with those things as a child,” or, “I still deal with some of those issues.”

And that’s an interesting parallel that can happen for people.

Nikole: Absolutely. Yeah, I see that quite frequently. And then there’s a lot of just discouragement of, “Why didn’t anyone see this for me? Why did it take this long for someone to notice this or to say something?”

Carrie: Like the grief and loss piece of it all.

Like you were well-behaved, so you flew under the radar, and nobody noticed that there were other things going on.

Nikole: Right. Exactly. And how much effort it took to reach the goals that you’ve been able to reach. Why didn’t anyone notice how hard I was working and how it was different?

Carrie: Let’s talk about this overlap of OCD and autism because this is certainly something that I’ve seen more of in addition to like the ADHD.

Sometimes they all are occurring together. That’s a lot to try to untangle, but how do you approach therapy in a way that really like respects their neurodivergence while still addressing the OCD? What kind of adaptations might they need in therapy?

Nikole: I think this really starts out from the very beginning.

If you’re a therapist, I really encourage you to think through like what do you have on your website? What directions do you give people to your office? What do you tell them to expect during that first appointment? Autistic people generally feel more anxious in new environments because they rely heavily on past experience to guide their understanding of what to expect.

So if you don’t have that information, it can be very anxiety-invoking to meet someone new or go to an unfamiliar place alone. And so I really encourage clinicians to be clear and direct when they’re providing directions to their office. Even like having pictures of your office on your website, having like an outline of what you’re gonna cover in the first session.

Is this like a standardized assessment? Is it just an open-ended get to know you? They’ll probably be uncomfortable with that. Or like what should you expect? And then during therapy itself, just being kind and flexible and noticing what seems to make the person uncomfortable, inquiring about their needs, just being sensitive to the fact that like if it’s like the overhead fluorescent lighting, like that might be really sensory overwhelming.

If there’s– everyone’s sensory systems has different needs. So we see a lot of overlap in sensory sensitivities between ADHD, autism, also like even kids with learning disabilities. Finding out what works for them, and does your office meet that? I discourage strong scents of cologne or perfume. Anything that’s strong or overwhelming may not go over well.

It might be fine, but just being sensitive to those things. And then particularly if someone is not making eye contact or struggling to put into practice the things you’re asking them to do, instead of framing that as being oppositional or rigid, really looking at like what’s the function of that? Like digging a little deeper and tell me a little bit more.

How does it feel for you to make eye contact? Feels really overwhelming and effortful, and it’s distracting them from being able to process what you’re doing. I tell clients all the time, “You don’t have to make eye contact. It doesn’t bother me.” So just not taking things like that personally, but understanding that it might come from a different nervous system profile and needs, and that that’s not anything personal.

And then I think for developing a treatment plan, it’s important to look at what’s the function of the behavior, and then is that something that is adaptive or maladaptive in the person’s life? An example might be stimming. You might have a client who’s stimming because it’s sensory soothing for them.

And then you might have… That would be more of an autistic presentation. That’s– you could have a different client that is doing a repetitive behavior, like flicking a light switch a certain number of times because they’re worried that if they don’t, then their mom’s gonna die in a car accident That would be more of an OCD presentation.

So in the first case, we wouldn’t wanna target that as an area for intervention because it’s regulating their nervous system. In the second case, we would want to challenge and target that as a point of intervention because it’s a compulsive behavior that’s reinforcing the OCD cycle. So you really have to look at what is the function of that behavior, where is that coming from?

And it’s tricky when there’s both, ’cause sometimes it’s hard to figure that out. But really asking that question of the client, “Is this something that is soothing to you? Is this something that is because of anxiety?” And making a treatment plan from there.

Carrie: I think what you’re saying, curiosity is really key, is a great thing in our field.

Obviously, we’re taught to make evaluations, and so you have to be careful not to make your evaluations too quickly, and to just be curious about like, “Oh, I wonder what this is about,” and, “Hey, I’ve noticed this pattern with you. I’ve noticed like it’s really hard to make eye contact. What do you think is going on with that?”

And just being more curious about, like you said, why they’re engaging in certain behaviors. What’s the reasoning behind it or the function behind it?

Nikole: Absolutely. And I always find that personally, I like just being direct as well, but you can be direct and kind. But most of my autistic clients really appreciate and would prefer that people are very direct with them.

And if they have a question, just ask that.

Carrie: It’s good to know.

Nikole: If you want someone to follow through on this, explain, “This is exactly what I want you to do and why I think it will be helpful.” Just be direct versus beating around the bush or trying to, like, explain it in a sideways direction. Like, that doesn’t usually work very well because there’s a lot of that non-verbal communication and social emotional, like, reciprocity that gets missed sometimes in that kind of communication.

Versus if you’re direct and straightforward, it’s a lot easier to stay on the same page.

Carrie: Okay. Good. What encouragement would you give to someone who kind of like in a spiritual way they’re feeling like, “Okay, my brain works differently. I don’t feel like I’m relating to God maybe the way that other people are.”

And maybe there’s some shame around that or some discouragement, like it’s impacting their faith in a negative way. How would you address that with someone?

Nikole: God is our creator, and He knows how our life is going to be before even created in our mother’s womb. While I certainly understand and can empathize with the frustration of feeling different or feeling people don’t understand you or that you have to work a lot harder than neurotypical people do to get the same results or make the same progress.

I don’t think he makes mistakes, and I also don’t think he wastes their pain. So I would encourage them to pray and bring that to the Lord, and also to learn more about autism and how it impacts people, because I think a lot of times some of the internalized messages that people have about is where that shame comes from is because of misunderstanding how their nervous system works, ’cause they never had an explanation.

And so it just became a character flaw or a fault that got internalized. And when they have a proper understanding of how their brain works, then it’s no longer a character flaw. It’s just A reality of life. And then there’s something they can do about it. If you’re highly sensitive to certain sounds or lights, you can put different light bulbs in your house, or you can wear noise-canceling headphones, or you can plan your social life so that you have recovery time after a big social outing.

Or you don’t have to go to public concerts where there’s tons of people and noise and smells and overwhelming things. So it just allows you to have more control over your environment in a way that lets you engage with people and have those close relationships in a more comfortable and consistent way with how you experience the world.

Carrie: Right. It’s really about navigating some of these compensatory-type strategies as far as, like, therapy goes, trying to figure out what’s gonna work to have your nervous system be at a less heightened level. Is that a good way to say it?

Nikole: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I don’t think there’s any reason why someone who’s autistic can’t be just as close to the Lord as someone with some other struggle or with no mental health or developmental struggles.

Again, I think it’s understandable why people feel anxious and frustrated and all of those things. But having a better understanding of how their brain works, again, I think will help eliminate some of that internalized shame, and hopefully give them some new handholds to move forward. And just like with anything else, we have to depend on the Lord for our strength, regardless of whatever difficulties we face in life.

Carrie: Yeah, I mean, I was just thinking too, as you were talking about that, like, how we really have an opportunity in the church to be more neurodivergent-friendly, that I think a lot of times we don’t take the opportunity to do that. If you go into a lot of churches, it’s loud. There’s bright lights. That’s kind of the thing nowadays in some contemporary worship settings.

So I could see how that would be really challenging for someone that’s dealing with these sensory sensitivities to just even go into church like that, and they may have to find someplace maybe that’s a little bit smaller or a little bit more low-key or make some of those accommodations like you were talking about, wear earplugs during worship or something.

Nikole: Yeah, and I think it’s definitely a call to action for churches because they’re a wonderful place of connection and hopefully a family of faith and love. But a lot of times, we still have our little, like, cliques at, at church and our friend groups and our small groups and things like that, and then we don’t always notice the people on the outside or that are struggling to make connection or to share or who maybe have a little bit different way of relating that seems a little quirky to us.

That can also make it really hard for people who are autistic to feel a sense of community and connection in those spaces, and there can be a lot of misunderstanding that can come from that. That direct communication style can be interpreted as rude or blunt, or difficulty seeing a situation or a comment from someone else’s point of view can again be misinterpreted.

Even things like body positioning, personal space, eye contact, facial expressions, being able to un-infer meaning from other peoples and how you’re presenting yourself impacts them. Like context matters, and it changes when you’re one-on-one versus in a group, church versus at work. And so even when you have compensatory strategies to mask or to try to accommodate the environment, like those aren’t gonna work in every situation.

And so if you go to a new church, and there’s a different culture there, or you’re new to church in the first place, and you don’t know what’s expected, that’s not gonna necessarily work. And so it can be really frustrating and hard to find community in a situation like that.

Carrie: Yeah, I can definitely see that.

In terms of what you’ve seen, I wanna go back a little bit to the OCD piece. Are there particular themes that OCD latches onto more? Are the OCD themes more relational, I guess, is what I’m asking.

Nikole: Yeah, I think they can be. I’ve seen a lot of that, which makes sense in the context of if you think about ICBT and OCD logic of past experiences when you have been rejected, when you have lost friends and not known why or what you did wrong, it’s really easy to then have a narrative form around, “Well, that could happen again.”

I’ve also seen themes around contamination, particularly when someone has those hypersensitivity to certain textures or feelings or smells where they can have those contamination themes around needing to wash, needing to get rid of anything that feels off or different.

Carrie: My favorite T-shirt doesn’t feel right because I got some kind of smell on it, and now I went somewhere and it was smoky maybe, and now I can’t– it smells like a barbecue joint, and now I can’t- Yeah

get it out of there.

Nikole: Anything like that, or just touch– your hands touch all kinds of stuff like rubber bands and food and needing to feel like you need to wash frequently to get rid of those smell, where most people might not even notice a smell. But if you have a heightened awareness to smell And that’s tricky because it’s not really imaginary.

Like, you are smelling it, you just have a heightened awareness, and so then we’re looking at what are your values? Do you want to have, like, chapped, bleeding hands? Okay, that’s probably not gonna be best for you, so how do we address this from that?

Carrie: So almost hand washing may develop from a texture sensitivity at times.

Is that what you’re saying?

Nikole: Yeah, or olfactory sensitivity, yeah.

Carrie: Mm-hmm. Hmm. That makes a lot of sense, actually. Those overlaps makes a lot of sense. I think this is really great for our listeners, but I know we also have some therapists that listen too that are trying to understand their neurodivergent clients better too, so this…

I’m definitely learning some things here. If someone’s been diagnosed with OCD, and maybe they’ve had some treatment, and they feel like what you’re saying, “Okay, some of this stuff is really resonating with me. I do have some of these sensory sensitivities. I’ve had struggles in my social relationship. I think I might have autism, too,” what is their first step towards, like, getting that diagnosis?

Nikole: I would say it really depends on, just like with ADHD, it really depends on what’s your purpose. Is getting a diagnosis, is it very important to you to have a professional assess you and give you a stamp on a paper that says, “Yes, you are autistic,” or is it more just something you want to explore to have greater self-awareness about yourself and how you understand the world?

Official diagnosis can provide a lot of relief for people, and I’ve known people that really just like, “No, I need to know from a professional.” Can eliminate those labels that might be inaccurate or judgmental. It can give you legal rights for accommodations or support. It can give you more of that gift of non-judgmental self-understanding so that you can kind of view past experiences through a new lens of, rather than self-blame and shame, through this lens of why this might have been more challenging for you throughout your life.

And all those things can be really helpful for understanding yourself, for feeling less emotional distress, and just for giving yourself permission to care and advocate for your sensory needs. But I would say seeking a diagnosis is really a personal decision, and a lot of people choose to just self-identify as autistic, learn about it as much as they can.

They don’t feel like they need an official diagnosis stamped on paper, and I think that’s perfectly appropriate, too. Different clinicians differ on this, but it’s not like there’s medication for autism or something that you can only get access to if you have an official diagnosis. It’s really more about accommodating and meeting those needs and learning how to teach those that you love why you need these things and how to best help.

So I don’t know that a diagnosis is always necessary. I do love the book, Is This Autism?

Carrie: Okay, great.

Nikole: So you can link that in the show notes, but it goes through all the different criteria for autism and how it presents in people who are on that lower support needs end of the spectrum, where they’re– they don’t have intellectual disability, for the most part fairly successful in life, but wondering if they might be autistic.

Maybe they’ve had a child diagnosed, like you mentioned, and just trying to understand what could that look like if there isn’t that intellectual impairment also. It’s a great book. It is not from a Christian perspective. I will say, fair warning, in the autistic community, there’s a lot of overlap with just gender spectrum questions in that whole community, so and I think that’s another area where I would love to see more Christians engaging with and helping people to wrestle through those questions.

Because pretty much anything you find on autism out there from this perspective, and I have not found much from a Christian perspective, will have LGBTQ gender type content as well along with it. So there is some of that in the book, but I think it still has a lot of really, really helpful resources and information that people will find helpful.

Carrie: Yeah. It’s a lot to think about. Even if you’re just listening to this episode, and maybe you have a loved one that you’re trying to understand better or kind of listening because you’re really interested in this overlap, I think there’s a lesson here for all of us to say, “It’s okay for us to have needs.”

And I think sometimes we don’t think it’s okay for us to have needs, especially in our relationships. We think we always have to be kind of the one to sacrifice, or we always have to just go with the flow, don’t make any waves. And I think it’s fine to say… I used to go to these trainings and– or I was involved as helping out with some EMDR trainings, and one of the things that they would say, they would give everyone ahead of time was say, “Please don’t wear strong perfume.”

I think that’s a reasonable request, because if you’re sitting in a training all day and you’re becoming overwhelmed because someone got really happy with the body spray, then that’s a deterrent. I don’t wanna be here smelling that all day. Just small little requests like that I feel like can make a big difference, and we can’t always, obviously, control what other people do.

But just to know, like, it’s okay to say, like, “I need to just stay at home today and not be social because my nervous system is very tired, and I’ve done a lot,” or, “I’ve been around other people a lot.” And to give yourself the freedom to really partner with God in knowing yourself and knowing what you need and knowing how to advocate for your needs in a really healthy way.

I just wanna land the plane and say I think that’s a message for everybody, whether you’re on the autism spectrum or whether you have OCD or whether you have anxiety in social settings. Whatever you’re dealing with, that’s a good thing to note.

Nikole: Yeah. And I think it’s very interesting because I think a lot of the things I’ve said and even, like, encouragement for clinicians, like, all those things are also really helpful for anyone who’s neurotypical.

Carrie: Yes.

Nikole: Be patient, be kind, assume good intentions. If someone is doing something that seems odd to you, there’s probably a reason for it. There’s wonderful clinicians out there, but I think too often we can almost jump on this like, well, anything that seems different to us is bad. And I think that comes from a place of just wanting to have clear boundaries to feel safe.

And I think sometimes we need to push back on that a little bit and go, “No, same does not equal safe.” We can allow differences, and that can make our community that much more vibrant and beautiful. And if we don’t allow for that, then we’re missing the beauty of so many people that could be really wonderful members of our churches and communities if they were given a chance and then given a space where they felt safe enough to contribute and to not feel like they have to just try to blend in.

I think if we can all learn a little more kindness and just allowing that space to exist for people, that would go a long way.

Carrie: Yeah. Huge.

235. Learning to Trust When Everything is Uncertain: Part 2 of my Testimony 

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

In this episode, Carrie continues with Part 2 of her testimony, sharing how God sustained her through a high-risk pregnancy, her husband’s rare neurological diagnosis, profound grief, and the ongoing journey of trusting Him through life’s greatest uncertainties.

Episode Highlights

  • Why trusting God often begins where control comes to an end.
  • How surrender became a turning point that strengthened her faith.
  • What helped Carrie navigate grief, uncertainty, and unanswered questions.
  • Why remembering God’s past faithfulness builds confidence for today’s challenges.
  • How living one day at a time creates space for peace and hope.

How Do You Trust God When Life Keeps Falling Apart?

In Part 2 of my testimony, I share one of the hardest seasons my family has ever walked through. Within a short period of time, I was navigating a difficult pregnancy while my husband was searching for answers to mysterious health symptoms that would eventually lead to a rare neurological diagnosis.

At the time, I couldn’t see how God was working. Looking back now, I realize He was building a deeper trust in Him than I had ever experienced before.

Why Does God Allow Unanswered Prayers Even When They Seem Good?

There were prayers I desperately wanted God to answer the way I had imagined. I pleaded with Him for things that seemed good, reasonable, and even life-giving. When those prayers unfolded differently, I wrestled honestly with disappointment and surrender.

That painful season taught me something about God’s character that I couldn’t have learned any other way, and it continues to shape how I approach uncertainty today.

How Can You Keep Your Faith During Grief, Illness, and Major Life Changes?

As my husband’s diagnosis became clearer, our family was also facing the devastating loss of my mother to pancreatic cancer. Those overlapping waves of grief, uncertainty, and responsibility stretched me in ways I never expected.

Rather than providing simple answers, God met me with His presence. Some of the greatest lessons came not from understanding everything, but from learning to depend on Him one day at a time.

Why Is Remembering God’s Faithfulness So Important During Hard Seasons?

When life feels overwhelming, it’s easy to focus on what hasn’t happened or what might happen next. I’ve discovered that one of the greatest ways to strengthen my faith is to intentionally remember where God has already carried me.

Those moments of remembering became spiritual markers that reminded me His faithfulness hadn’t changed, even when my circumstances had.

Can God Still Write a Beautiful Story Through Ongoing Suffering?

Our story isn’t finished. My husband continues living with spinocerebellar ataxia, yet we’ve also witnessed incredible evidence of God’s grace along the way. His journey has not followed the path we once feared, and every step reminds me that God is still writing our story.

I don’t pretend to understand every chapter, but I have learned that trusting the Author brings far more peace than trying to predict the ending.

I pray this conversation encourages you to trust God with your own unfinished story. Listen now, and if this episode encourages you, share it with someone who needs hope today.

Transcript

 It is early in the morning, five AM, at the Bock household, and I am currently the only one up upstairs recording, which is good for no child noise, but the cats are a little bit on the prowl. So we’re gonna see how this goes. Last week, I went through part one of my testimony. So if you didn’t get a chance to listen to that about clinging on to God’s promises during a very difficult time and season in my life, encourage you to go back and listen to that one because everything that I went through in part one of my testimony, I recognize now how God used that to build my faith and used that to build my trust in Him 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 Even though I was a Christian for a long time before this point that I’m gonna share today, I don’t think I really trusted God very well. I was definitely more on the control freak side, which I know a lot of you can relate to.

It’s like I kinda want things my way, and I think that even bled over into my spiritual life because it’s like, “Hey, God, I have this good idea, and I would like this, and it’s not a bad thing.” I talked about that last week. “Can you just fulfill this prayer request, please?” What I’ve had to learn through spiritual maturity over the years is that God knows way better what I need than I actually do at the time, and ultimately, He’s weaving a story that I can’t see.

I’m in the middle of the story. God knows the beginning, the middle, and the end, and I only know the beginning and the middle of where I am right now. I don’t know how things are going to play out. As you know from any good story, whether it’s a TV show, a movie, or a book that you’ve read, things can get really dicey in the middle.

Because it’s a story, you’re like, “Okay, I’m expecting there to be some happy ending.” Now, they may or may not write the happy ending in there for you. Sometimes your favorite character dies, and that really stinks, and you get annoyed that they got booted off the show. But the point is that we, in our own lives, somehow we don’t hope for that positive ending.

We’re like, “Oh, no, it’s forever gonna be terrible. I’m gonna be miserable.” I would just like to remind you that God is the author of all good things and stories, and He’s the one that gave us creative abilities to even create those types of stories and movies and TV. God is the ultimate author, and if you’re in the middle of your story, just know God’s got a plan here.

I left off last week with marrying my husband, Steve. That was just a beautiful story. We had a COVID love story. We got together and started dating, like, right before the COVID-19 pandemic and just kind of made a decision that we were gonna continue dating through that and decided that that’s what we wanted to do.

If you’re super interested in our love story, you can go back and listen to episode 10 where I talk about anxiety through the dating process. We also have episodes on our first and second year of marriage that might be interesting to you as well. We can link all of that in the show notes. I try to drag Steve on around our anniversary every year, and we do some type of, like, marriage episode together.

Even if you’ve been around and you’ve heard some of those episodes- There’s still gonna be new information in this episode because of the way that I’m laying out the story, and when you’re going through some things, there are specific edits that you make and maybe don’t wanna share right away. Now that we’ve had some distance, it’s a little easier to share the coherent narrative.

Steve and I get married in October of 2020, and we make a decision that we’re not gonna start trying for children right away. We don’t quite want the honeymoon baby, so we’re gonna wait a few months. In June of ’21, he goes to the eye doctor. It’s supposed to be just kind of a routine appointment for him to get an update on glasses prescription The doctor tells him that she wants to see him back because she’s concerned about him running his finger along the wall.

At this point, we know that Steve has some issues with colorblindness and that he doesn’t have great peripheral vision, and that there are some issues with depth perception. The interesting thing about all of this is that my mother said, “This doesn’t quite make sense. Do you have some type of syndrome?”

And my mother was coming from a place of working at an eye clinic for years, like 30 years by the time she retired. Because of the specificity of the types of patients that she saw, I’m not sure that she had seen a case quite like Steve’s before. So Steve always says, “Your mother knew at first. She knew there was something more going on.”

This one eye appointment leads to a cascade of specialist visits over the next year. But we find out approximately a month later, “Hey, I’m pregnant. Here we go.” So I’m newly married, pregnant, and my husband is taking off work to get MRIs on his brain, on his eyes, to go through six hours of testing at Vanderbilt Neuro-Ophthalmology.

For the most part, we’ve had really good providers through Vanderbilt, except for the very first one at Neuro-Ophthalmology. It was an absolutely awful experience, and when you’re in a specialty field, you don’t exactly have a whole lot of options. I do really feel like they dropped the ball as well because the eye symptoms that my husband has, some of them are very classic to his disease.

After the six hours of testing, all they could really tell us was that he had lost vision and that he had optic atrophy on his right eye. I had to essentially Google all the words I didn’t know in the medical record after the fact to really get any information out of this doctor about what he knew that was going on.

Steve is working at this time, but he’s having a lot of troubles. He is dealing with double vision, where he’s trying to read insurance cards at a medical office, and he’s having a hard time. He’s taking a nap every day at lunch. He’s coming home with massive migraines from staring at a screen all day, and I’m just trying to survive pregnancy, which wasn’t that great in my experience After dealing with the morning sickness that really is an all-day sickness that nobody tells you is all-day sickness, and then dealing with back pain after that, I woke up in the middle of the night with my hands and my feet itching really badly, which is a strange symptom.

The only reason I knew to bring that up to my OB was due to a Facebook group I was on for pregnant women over 35. Someone else had the same symptoms, and people were telling them, “You have to tell your OB. That’s a symptom of ICP,” which is intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy. We’ll call it cholestasis for short.

Basically, it’s a liver condition that has to be monitored pretty closely because it can cause miscarriage or stillbirth. While Steve and I are elated about having our first child, there’s also an enormous amount of stress at this time. One thing I almost forgot to mention is that we ended up having to leave our church in November before Faith was born, so November of ’21, we end up leaving our church that we had been at because they chose to move couple cities away from where we were at.

We really felt strongly that this wasn’t a good move for us, even if the church felt like it was a good move for them to get a more permanent space. There were a whole lot of pieces that we didn’t share at the time that went into that. However, what I will say is that we lost our small group, our support system, at a really critical time as we were going through these health struggles and as I’m going through these pregnancy struggles.

I really don’t have the level of support that I need. One thing that I really wanted from God, and I was praying strongly about, was wanting to go into labor naturally. I didn’t want to have to be induced. I wanted to have a natural labor. That was a big desire of mine, and I was working with a doula on all the strategies as far as that goes.

I did an episode way back when on my labor, if you wanna go listen to that story. However, that was a very critical point of surrender in terms of learning to trust God with this uncertainty. It was either 35 or 36 weeks that I was diagnosed with preeclampsia on top of the cholestasis. My OB said, “You’ve got these two high-risk pregnancy conditions.”

I’m dealing with high blood pressure, where they had to send me over to the hospital for one of the visits, and then they ended up sending me home. But she said, “You know, I really recommend that we go ahead and induce you because I don’t want anything to happen to you or the baby.” I left that appointment.

I went straight over to a prayer chapel of a church that we had been attending for a little while. We didn’t end up staying there or landing, but it was a bit of a respite while we were trying to figure things out. I got in the prayer chapel and just lost it. I mean, I was crying at God. I was mad at God.

I was like, “This was one thing I wanted, Lord. I really wanted to go into labor naturally. I did not want to have to be induced.” It makes it harder to have a natural labor due to the medications they use. I was so mad at God. Like, “Why can’t you just give me this one thing? Our whole world is a mess right now.

There’s so much going on. Can you just allow my daughter to come into the world on her own terms and not have to be evicted?” Steve and I are faced with this huge decision together of do we go ahead and have the induction for the safety of our child and myself, or do we hold off? What do we do there?

Because certainly, even though the doctors were making recommendations, it was still our choice. I was praying through that process. I’m mad at God, and I’m crying, and I’m just so naughty, and it’s a mess. I’m the only one in there because it’s the middle of the day, and everybody else is working. At some point, I just surrender and say, “Okay, that’s it.

Your will be done.” I don’t know what’s gonna happen here. I really just want to make sure that my baby lives and that everything is okay, and I’m choosing to trust you that if you’ve brought us this far, that we’re gonna come out with things going okay. Now, up to this point, she had always done fine as far as, like, the ultrasounds and things like that.

I wasn’t super worried, but I was a little bit worried taking her out at 37 weeks. I was concerned that she wouldn’t be able to breathe and would have to go in the NICU. To condense a very long story, we end up making the decision to go for the induction at 37 weeks to still go for the natural labor, and I made it.

I survived. Faith survived. She came out really well. She didn’t have to go to the NICU. Everything was great, except for maybe the contractions. Those weren’t so great. But anyway, this whole episode that I was mad at God for allowing me to go through ended up being a huge milestone of faith in my life, and I can look back and see that now to say, “Okay, I surrendered and I trusted God that things were gonna be okay in this situation, that we were gonna make it through, and that Faith was going to come out ultimately okay in the end.”

It was like, if God can get us through that piece, then whatever’s happening with Steve’s health that we still don’t have answers for, He can get us through that piece, too. Due to a variety of factors, we had such a hard time trying to find childcare for Faith as I was getting ready to go back to work, and I had started pretty early on in my pregnancy, was on a bunch of waiting lists, but nothing was coming through.

I remember sitting in the bed one evening, and I was holding Faith. Steve was next to me. And I just looked at him and I said, “Will you stay home with her?” I don’t know that he agreed to it that night. I think he said that would be hard, but he would think about it. I was essentially fully telehealth at this time, so I was still gonna be at home in another room seeing clients.

I will tell you that Steve was a five-star stay-at-home dad. It was also a blessing for him because he wasn’t having those massive migraines from staring at a computer screen all day. We knew that this would buy us a little bit of time to make a determination about whether or not Steve would be able to go back to work, or if he would need to go on disability.

But we also didn’t feel like we had a strong disability claim at this time. Meanwhile, we have our follow-up with the awful neuro-ophthalmologist, and I noted, “Hey, Steve is having some balance challenges, like when lights get turned off in a room, that’s really disorienting to him. If we go into a place where there’s really low light, that causes problems and makes it a lot harder for him to be steady, and he’s holding onto my shoulder.”

The doctor looks at me in his crude way of communicating and says, “Well, even blind people can balance.” Because before this point, we’re both really concerned that Steve is going blind. He’s lost vision. They can’t tell us why. They can’t tell us the process, the when. Did it happen gradually? Did he have some kind of eye stroke, but because it was peripheral, he didn’t notice?

We still to this day don’t know the answer to that. However, the original ophthalmologist said, “You need to go see a specialist because I think you have Leber’s disease.” It was super scary because people with Leber’s disease do go blind, most of them by the time they’re fifty, and my husband is in his late forties at the time.

At this juncture, we realize that Steve really needs to be in regular neurology, not just neuro-ophthalmology. Regular neurology led to specialty neurology, and by the time he got to specialty neurology, they knew exactly what he was dealing with. Fortunately, Dr. G at Vanderbilt is an incredibly compassionate human, so the delivery of Steve’s diagnosis, I think, was much different.

It was really scary. I remember being in the room, and they’re performing all of these tests on him, and one of the things they asked him to do was to walk heel to toe. And this is not something that you see anybody do in a normal day-to-day activity. Unless they’re getting pulled over for drunk driving or something like that, which had not occurred.

I’m watching my husband really struggle to put his heel to his toe, and then his other heel to his other toe, and I’m going, “Oh, no.” I don’t know what this means, but I just know it’s not good. There were other things they had him do that he was struggling with, like touch his nose and then touch their finger.

They watched him walk down the hallway. So Dr. G says, “Well, you have something called spinocerebellar ataxia, or SCA for short.” And I think we were both like, “What?” Like, what even is that? Like, we’ve literally never heard those words in our entire life. Like, what are you talking about? And I think this is one of the hardest things about having a rare condition, is that nobody knows when you say, “I have SCA.”

It’s actually very rare when you tell a medical professional that they know what that is. Now, occasionally, they will have run into it before. So it’s not like someone saying, “Oh, I have Parkinson’s,” or I have MS. People know what those things are. There’s a context in their brain for those conditions, and maybe I’ve known someone with this condition, or at least I know what the symptoms are.

I’ve seen a documentary about it on TV, et cetera. I know a famous person with it. I mean, I think that’s a huge one. This actually happened the day that Faith turned six months old. We have a six-month-old, and we’re being told, “Hey, you have this really rare diagnosis. Oh, and by the way, there’s no treatment and there’s no cure.

We just kind of like manage the symptoms.” What in the world? When you get a diagnosis like this, it sends you into all of the grief and loss feelings. Like there’s the initial shock, the denial, the anger, the sadness, the loss. What does this mean for us? We had landed in a church where people were incredibly gracious to us as we walked through this because shortly after Steve got his diagnosis, my mother passed away from pancreatic cancer.

All the grief in my experience internally got super confused. It’s like I didn’t have time to process the grief of the diagnosis because I had to process the grief of my mother. So I processed that grief and then like had to move backwards and process the grief of the diagnosis and what that meant for our marriage and family moving forward.

The loss of my mother was pretty sudden and very huge. She had gotten sick around the time that Faith was born, and when Faith was about four months old, she went into the hospital. We had gone down to Florida to see her. Unfortunately, she was mostly in the hospital for the three weeks that we were there staying with my parents.

And I told my mom I wanted to come down before things got really bad. I, I didn’t want to wait until you were dying to tell you how much I loved you and to really be here for you. And I’m glad that I had that time with her. The timing was really important for me, but it was just such a crazy time of having a four-month-old who’s being cared for by my husband while I’m trying to go in a room in my parents’ house, lock the door and see clients via telehealth and really be there for other people with stuff that they had going on, while at the same time I have all this craziness that I’m going on in my own life.

I was also trying to pick up extra work because my private practice hadn’t fully rebuilt after maternity leave. So we had some financial challenges, of course, because I’m trying to build back up. My husband’s not working. I look back and I don’t even know like how I got through that time. I mean, just the grace of God sustained us.

That’s the only thing that I can say because with all the stress that was happening, all of the unknowns One thing that stands out to me, though, and this might choke me up a little bit, is that I went to go visit my mom in the hospital, and she was like: “Will you get me my phone?” That she had plugged in.

And so I picked it up, and I noticed that she had been listening to a Mother’s Day episode that I did. This was before I had faith. I did a episode on hope for the not yet mothers, I think was what we called it, and it was just different people’s stories of infertility or adoption and just really beautiful stories that different people had shared.

Back when we were Hope for Anxiety and OCD, I would ask people to share stories of hope, and my mom was listening to this episode and I thought, “Well, that’s kinda weird.” But then I realized that in that episode I had given, like, this tribute to my mom in the beginning about how she was essentially the biggest fan of this podcast, and I don’t say that lightly.

We have little podcast cards and things, and Mom was always talking to people and saying, “Hey, do you listen to podcasts? My daughter has this podcast.” And she would hand out those little cards, like on the plane and other places. I can honestly say that my mom would be so happy at where things have gone with this podcast and the people that have been reached.

And Hebrews talks about how we have this great cloud of witnesses that has gone before us that’s passed through the heavens. And when I read that, I just think about my mom, because Mom just loved the Lord, and she was not shy about telling people about it, either. When she was in the hospital, I mean, she was talking to the nurses about Jesus.

And I thought this hospital was in God’s sovereign plan. That was my mom’s final mission field. My mom had gone to seminary in hopes of being an overseas missionary, and she didn’t ever do that. She married a pastor, stayed in the US, but my mom was very much a missionary in two ways, because she raised a daughter that started a podcast that reaches people in seventy-plus countries.

I haven’t looked at that stat recently. So if you’re a mom, just know that’s the highest calling that you could ever have. I really believe that, just raising disciples for the next generation for the Lord. And my mom was very much a missionary while she was here on Earth and in her final days in the hospital.

And talk about things that you don’t understand. Why? I don’t know. I don’t have an answer for that. I just know that God has given me peace and that my mom is no longer in pain. Pancreatic cancer is a horrible thing to watch somebody go through. And if you know, you know, they basically just waste away, and it’s very hard to see.

And my mom, of course, went through a lot of emotional struggles regarding, like, “Do I have enough faith for God to heal me?” There were very much things that she wanted to do and wanted to see still. I know that there were dreams that were unfulfilled for her. My daughter was actually, because of the induction, she was actually born on my mom’s birthday.

We did not plan it that way. That’s just kinda the way the calendar fell on her coming out at thirty-seven weeks. And so we had really just hoped and looked forward when that happened that, hey, you’re gonna be able to celebrate your birthday with Faith, and that’s so awesome. But unfortunately, that wasn’t in God’s plan.

She ended up passing away when Faith was about six months old. After Steve had gotten that diagnosis of SCA, around the same time, his balance really started to fail. He went from walking with a cane to then us having to get this stand-up walker contraption. He went for weeks of vestibular therapy, essentially to relearn how to walk, for his brain and his foot to connect together.

What he has is a nervous system condition. He had to stop driving. Once we got the diagnosis, we applied for disability. It was just such a hard road not knowing what was gonna happen. The therapist had told us at that time, “It’s not an if your husband ends up in a wheelchair, it’s a when he ends up in a wheelchair.”

Which was super scary. We did not live in a house that we could even remotely make accessible. And I remember just getting up at that time in the morning and walking the house before anybody was up and just saying like, “I trust you, God. I trust you. If I could trust you with bringing my daughter into the world, if I could trust you with the financial provision, with us being able to get disability incredibly fast,” which rarely ever happens if you know anything about applying for disability.

If I can trust God with bringing me a husband when things look very hopeless as a single person, then I can trust God with this. And that’s the point that I want to make with you is oftentimes we forget there’s so much in scripture that tells us, “Just remember what the Lord has done for you.” When the River Jordan stopped and the people walked across the river, Joshua told them, “Pick up a stone, and we’re gonna tell our children, we’re gonna remember that the Lord stopped the Jordan so that we could walk across and get into this land that God gave us.”

And I think that this is so crucial for us to be telling stories to our children, not just that, but to remember for ourselves, like how far has God brought you from where you started? If you’re in the middle of a storm, can you look back and see what God has done in your life and how He sustained you through some hard times?

That really helps us in the next hard season and is incredible in helping you deal with uncertainty and knowing that you can trust God. And I’m not here saying that I understand everything that’s happened to me. I don’t, especially with the mom stuff. We did not see that one coming. My mom had been incredibly healthy person.

She was the walker. She didn’t drink. She didn’t even drink soda. I mean, she was the vegetable eater of the family. We have no idea how she got pancreatic cancer and why she had to go so soon. So there are some things that we just have to surrender and say, “Okay, I don’t understand it. I’m not gonna understand it.”

But that doesn’t mean that God’s not good, and it doesn’t mean that He’s not sovereign. He is still in control, and He has a plan. Remember, He’s the author of the story. So we’re now almost four years past my husband’s initial diagnosis of SCA. All I can tell you is that prayer works, and we just believe that God has been incredibly good and gracious to us through the midst of this diagnosis.

Because there are so many different forms of SCA, it’s really hard for them to predict how things are going to go. We tried to get some genetic testing earlier this year to figure out if they could type what type he has, and nothing came back conclusive. There’s some more invasive, more expensive genetic testing that we just kinda opted to not follow through with right now.

What I can tell you is that Steve is walking better today than he was two years ago, definitely better than he was four years ago. He was wearing ankle braces, and he’s no longer having to wear those. He was using this huge standup walker because he didn’t have, like, the grip strength to use a regular walker and also was– really couldn’t quite use a cane all the time.

It was making him very fatigued. He’s now at a place where he’s been able to just walk on a regular basis, which is the best thing that you can do for SCA. And due to his walking and how he’s, like, slowly pushed himself over time, he now is just using the cane. We give all credit and praise and honor to glory to God for that, that he has what is considered a degenerative condition, but he’s doing really well and has actually somehow improved.

I can’t explain that to you other than the Lord is good. He still definitely has the vision loss and vision challenges for sure and deals with fatigue And other things as a result of his diagnosis, he’s started to deal with some memory issues as well that have become a little bit more prominent in the last year or so.

We just take things one day at a time. That’s just how we’ve had to live around here. We don’t catastrophize about the future. Steve actually has just an incredible outlook. I interviewed him about uncertainty on a past podcast episode. He just has to focus on what he’s able to do today. At the time of this recording, he came back from a trip to Germany with our church.

I was really nervous about him going on the trip to Germany only because our pastor hadn’t been before. This was a little bit of a scouting trip for them to figure out what would it be like to take a mission team back the next year, what kind of ministries could they help support the church in Germany with.

So I’m asking questions like, “How many stairs are there around? Do they have elevators? How much walking is going to be involved,” et cetera. They did end up walking more than they had anticipated, but it wasn’t actually the walking that Steve had the most problems with, it was the escalators. Apparently, Germany, where he went, they have a lot of escalators, and they don’t always paint the lines on them like they do in the US so that you can know kinda where to step on and step off if you have some vision mobility challenges.

There were a couple times pastor or someone else on the team had to grab a hold of him on the escalator, but overall, we’re just very thankful that he’s still able to go on mission trips, which he’s very passionate about. And I just believe that God will sustain him to do whatever work he has called Steve to do.

I can honestly say that the whole experience has helped me in terms of working with the clients that I work with that are dealing with OCD or dealing with trauma, dealing with other uncertainties, health challenges, relationship issues, to really teach people what I’ve had to learn of how to live in the present day by day, trusting in God that He’s gonna see us through whatever we go through in life.

I know that this isn’t gonna be the last hard season that we go through. Thankfully, we’ve been in a really good season for a while in our life. God has really richly blessed us.

With a beautiful church community that we’ve been at about a year. Our daughter is doing really well and just thriving in a small preschool environment. God is opening up doors for me to write a book for all of you about discerning between OCD and the voice of God. I am so excited about this. I can barely contain it.

I just see such a huge need for this book to be out in the world, and it’s coming from a place of love and burden that God has given me for the Christian OCD community. I think that you guys are just tough stuff, um, and that’s why I call you the OCD warriors, ’cause you’re fighting battles internally every day, and you deserve more resources for going through these times.

I hope and pray that this future book is another resource for all of you out there struggling. Please pray for me, as this project is nothing like anything else that I’ve ever done. But I did start a podcast, and I had no idea what I was doing there either, so it’s all okay. God bless you all. Thank you so much for being here.

We’ve got a couple exciting episodes coming up that I want to tell you about. This is the official end of our personal story summer series, but we are gonna be hearing next week about when autism and OCD overlap from Nicole Kruger. She’s been on the show before, so she is coming back to talk about autism and OCD, so that should be a great episode.

Then we’re also gonna talk about supporting your hormones naturally. This is for all the ladies. Ended up being a super interesting interview, so I’m excited to bring that one to you as well. 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.

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

Written by Carrie Bock on . 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 . 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 . 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 . 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