Podcast Episode – Page 2 – Carrie Bock

210. Understanding Grace and Accepting God’s Forgiveness with author Nathan Clarkson

Written by Carrie Bock on February 11, 2026. Posted in OCD, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode.

In this episode, Carrie sits down with Nathan Clarkson, an actor, author, and podcast host, to talk about how scrupulosity, guilt, and contamination fears shaped his faith and how grace slowly rewrote that story.

Episode Highlights:

Nathan’s early experience with OCD and how it shaped his faith
How contamination OCD and scrupulosity often intertwine
Why OCD creates a distorted, harsh view of God
The difference between OCD guilt and true conviction
What it means to accept God’s forgiveness—even when it doesn’t feel true
How healing can grow in small, almost unnoticed steps when you walk with God and safe people
Nathan’s book I’m the Worst

Connect with Nathan Clarkson: www.instagram.com/nathanjclarkson/

Transcript

Welcome back, OCD Warriors. Today on the show I’m talking with Nathan Clarkson. He is a film and TV actor, besting author, indie filmmaker, and podcast philosopher on his award-winning show, The Overthinkers. Nathan is here to talk about his book that just came out towards the end of January called I’m the Worst. A powerful testimony that he shares with us regarding his lived experience with OCD. If you struggle with Scrupulosity at all, you’re really gonna enjoy this episode because we get into some juicy topics regarding grace, sin, God’s forgiveness. I know that you’re gonna be blessed by this episode.

Hello and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD with Carrie Bach. I’m a Christ follower, wife and mother, licensed professional counselor who helps Christians struggling with OCD get to a deeper level of healing. When I couldn’t find resources for my clients with OCD, God called me to bring this podcast to you. With practical tools for developing greater peace, we’re here to bust through the shame and stigma surrounding struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories of healing and helping you replace uncertainty with faith. I’m here to help you let go of the past and future to walk in the present abundant life God has for you. So let’s dive right into today’s episode.

Nathan, welcome to the show. We’re glad to have you here.

Nathan: Well, thank you so much for having me. I’m glad to be here.

Carrie: I understand you’re gonna tell us a little bit about your OCD story. You talk in your book about like just days spent with a lot of compulsions, showering, cleaning rituals, and like what was the process of coming to an understanding of your OCD?

Nathan: Oh yeah. Well, this has been a story since I was very young. My mom, before I even can really even remember, she has a story about me being a very, very little boy, maybe two or three. And she’s putting shoes on me, and she’s tying the little shoes and the laces are uneven, and I start crying and she can’t figure out what’s wrong, and she’s trying to comfort me. My little 2-year-old boy struggling for words, and I’m crying and then fidgeting, and she’s trying everything, and I keep on pointing to my shoes. She straightens, she evens out the little laces of my shoes. I go, oh, thank you. Thank you mom. And it was at that moment she kind of learned something different. OCD of course was had been talked about a little bit, but not quite so ubiquitously as is now. You know, we didn’t know as much and there wasn’t as many resources as there are now. Something in her mom brain said, Hey, there’s something different about my little boy. And she would notice all these little things from very, very early on, like that story in a million different ways.

I’d be lying in bed at night and she would come and kiss me goodnight and five minutes later I’d go and wake her up and say, I need you to come back. I can’t remember it. I would ask her over and over again, compulsively, I need you to come and kiss me goodnight again because I forgot if you did it. Wow. And I would ask her, you know, 15 times a night. I was really lucky to have a mom and a dad who were gracious with me and who were understanding, but they clued them to understanding something in my little brain at that time was different.

And as I grew older and older, those compulsions and rituals kind showed up in a myriad of different ways and then it was kind in my teenage years that it really, really kind of ramped up for me. And luckily there’s a few more resources at that time. And we got a counselor and talked to a psychiatrist who officially diagnosed him with OCD, and I remember that moment. It was so interesting to me kind of sitting in the therapist, the psychiatrist office, and they were telling me what OCD was and that I had it. There was of course this kind of frustration with, oh my goodness, I’m different. I have this label attached.

Carrie: How old were you at that point?

Nathan: I was, I think I was about 13, maybe 14 years old when I got formally diagnosed, and that was right around the time I was also diagnosed with ADHD and a couple of dyslexia. But the OCD was kind of the one that showed up with most life altering, particularly in those kind of early teenage years. And I remember just being so like, wow, I must be broken. There’s something wrong with me, but there’s also this kind of feeling that will go hand in hand with it, which is a weird feeling to relate. Like I can finally put a name and understand. There was both kind of a frustration that like, you know, God, why did you make me like this? And also this, oh. So that’s what it is. I’m not just crazy, I’m not just broken. There’s a thing that I can be understood and it kind of gave me a hope that, you know, I could figure out a way forward.

So that’s kind of the moments that led it up to me understanding that I had OCD, but it was very early on, kind of always knew I had it, my family was aware of it, and then we realized what it was called and what it was in that moment, like that just office.

Here is the continuation with timestamps removed and spacing cleaned up. I have not changed wording — only formatting.

Carrie: When it got really bad in your adult life later on, I’m assuming you probably were on medication or had some type of treatment along the process there if you were seeing psychiatrist, but at some point or another, you said it just consumed your whole day, like what was going on for you spiritually and emotionally, just internally as you’re going through this wrestling of not being able to stop these compulsions.

Nathan: Yeah, it really ramped up come from that moment in the psychiatrist’s office. It definitely ramped up, and that kind of began the journey of trying to figure out how to live with it. And there were good things and good times and hard times, but according to the psychiatrist, diagnosed with a particularly severe case of OCD, and one of the reasons it was severe is because, as you know, there’s kind of different kinds of OCD. There’s guilt OCD, and contamination based OCD and health OCD. And I had like layers of different where it kind of worked its way into all sorts of different ways. So I would have a health OCD that was mixed with contamination OCD that was mixed with guilt OCD. It was kind of permeating all these different areas of my life.

It was a really frustrating thing to deal with. And frustrating isn’t a big enough word to encapsulate the kind of just utter despair or frustration. I need a deeper word to explain what many of us go through who have OCD, but there were times in my life where I look back, I think the closest word I can find is just utter despair that I would experience.

And I wrote a poem many years ago and I put it on YouTube. It went viral, reached a lot of people. But in the poem I described just the frustration of not being able to touch the ones I love and ask for a hug. Not being able to live freely and enjoy life. Not being able to wake up during the day and just have fun without thinking of all the different rituals that I was gonna have to perform to enjoy my day, even in a small amount. And how it was this ever present, nonstop voice that never ended.

I remember just multiple moments in my life where I kind of came to the end of being able to ignore that frustration or just continued fighting it or kind of grin and bear it, and just got to this place where it felt so overwhelming and I felt so kind of drowned underwater from it. I experienced such deep despair, and that despair kind of left me not so much doubting God, but frustration and questions of his goodness. You love me? Why would you let me deal with this? Why would you let me have this? If I’m someone I’m supposed to believe that you care about me, why would you let me every day, every minute of the day live in this kind of agony?

There have been moments which I’ve really, really had to wrestle in my relationship with God as a result of kind of the despair and frustration and agony that OCD has brought in my life. And of course there’s a redemptive and wonderful flip side to that. I’m sure we’ll get to more of that, but I absolutely have experienced those really dark, kind of walking through the night moments multiple times on this journey of OCD.

Carrie: Yeah. What I see sometimes with Christians is like contamination gets somehow mixed in with sin too, like cleanliness and sin and godliness, and I’ve gotta keep myself uncontaminated physically, but it somehow has this spiritual relevance. Did that happen for you?

Nathan: Oh, absolutely. One of my main kind of central ones I still deal with is contamination based OCD. Kind of the dirtiness, right? You have in your mind this idea of how the world should be and kind of physically how it should be in this almost idealistic perfectionism that your clothes should be, your hands should be, or whatever it might be, how the world should be. And whatever your mind has deemed dirty, it’s almost unbearable to try to figure out how to make it clean again.

And that kind of contamination based OCD mechanism absolutely finds its way into kind of the morality aspect or the spirituality aspect of OCD where you are constantly on guard for any perceived sin or slight or failure, and you all of a sudden feel a load of guilt on your back and fear that you are upsetting or disappointing God. So absolutely that’s something that I have dealt with throughout my journey with OCD, that kind of contamination based both on the physical and the spiritual.

Carrie: Yeah, and I think it’s a good example for people of how these themes get intertwined. You spoke to that a little bit earlier. It’s not just one thing. It’s like I start to unravel something and then I end up in some other type of theme. And that can be really confusing. And I find that that happens a lot with Christian spirituality. It’s like we start with contamination or a health OCD, and then we’re over into scrupulosity now, or yeah, we started with something else and now we’re stuck in some type of… How did, like, what shifted for you? What changed? Was there like a breakthrough moment? Was it a process over time?

Nathan: I think there’s, I’m trying to find a word for it. It’s cyclical, but also moving upward. So I found myself in my story through times of deep despair, acceptance, and healing and growth. Back again to that despair. But every time I’ll find a little more healing, a little more growth and a little less despair, kind of this really baby step process over many years.

But as far as kind of the other side of that despair that I talked about earlier, there’s a few things that really, really helped me on my journey towards kind of living more freely in it. One was, I think for whatever reason, my personality is one that I always wanted to be able to be independent and never rely on anyone.

Here is the continuation, with timestamps removed and spacing cleaned up. Wording has not been changed.

Nathan: I think the more in my life that I’ve learned to rely on people. I think many of us with OCD know how embarrassing it is sometimes to explain it to people because you get those funny looks, right? You look crazy. You look really, what you talking about? So a lot of times we keep it in and we don’t tell people around us, and we might just avoid situations and people rather than having to face the embarrassment.

But I have noticed that when I kind of get over that embarrassment or that kind of fear or trepidation of telling — and not to everyone, I don’t think we need to entrust everything to everyone — but when you find someone who’s trustworthy, who’s proven, and who even has shown a desire to walk with you in your frustration or your difficulty of OCD. I have a couple friends who have verbally said, I wanna be a partner with you in this and help you in this. And those words meant so much to me.

And that allowed me to kind of open myself and be vulnerable and tell them, this is really difficult for me and this is hard for me. But when I did, having people walk with me through it and being careful with me and being gentle with me — and that’s something I’m able to offer to others as well — I think it’s been such a helpful thing to have people who actually care enough to walk with you.

And it takes a little bit of bravery of opening yourself up to trustworthy people, obviously, and kind of getting over that embarrassment and say, this is how my mind works. So that’s one thing that has been a huge conduit to healing and living better — surrounding myself with people who are walking with me in it, who both push in ways where I can grow. “Nathan, I think you can grow in this area. I think you can do this. You can be strong in this area. I know it’s overwhelming.” But also who can say, “Hey, that’s really tough. Would it be helpful if I did this or didn’t do that? Or can I wash my hands? Or is there something that I can do right now to make this moment better?”

And that’s been such a blessing for me. A reminder — and they’ve kind of been God’s hands and feet in my life — where I have people walking with me through it. And you know that’s what we offer. Everyone needs, OCD or not, is people who are willing to walk with us through our struggles.

Carrie: Through the messiness that we have going on.

Nathan: Yeah, exactly. Mm-hmm. OCD sometimes convinces us that we’re the only kind of messy people or only ones with obsessions or funny minds. Everyone has a mess they’re walking through. And if we can get over embarrassment and go, “Hey, we’re all messy here. Let’s love each other and walk with each other.” I think that’s one of the ways that it’s been a huge, huge conduit to my health and being able to function in the world in a healthy way.

And of course it’s not perfect. There’s good days, there’s bad days, but having people around me who respect and understand — or try to understand — has been a huge conduit to that. And even my wife… when I went about finding someone who wanted to partner with me, there’s no way when she said, “Of course I’ll marry you,” she could know the full extent of what it meant to live with an OCD person. But her willingness day to day to love in that — that is such a blessing on the journey of that and has enabled me to live a healthier and fuller life.

Carrie: I think that’s really hopeful for a lot of our single people who listen, who just wonder, am I ever gonna find love, have these problems with OCD and will anybody really understand? And so it’s good to know there are people willing to partner with you, like you said, to help you. And everyone has stuff. And so just when you come together as a married couple, it’s like you have to help each other unpack some of this stuff in a different way because you’re not able to do it on your own. It’s actually really beautiful and it’s obviously a picture of the gospel and God’s love for us.

I wanna talk with you about grace, because that seems to have made a big difference in your life in terms of your relationship with God. What was that process of understanding grace for you?

Nathan: Yeah, it’s a great question. I said earlier that I’m someone who kind of wants to be independent and figure it out on my own, but I think early on my OCD was something that was terrible in so many ways. But one of the good things was it forced me to come to terms with kind of some of my messy parts and the broken places of my mind and heart and soul. It forced me to realize I wasn’t perfect and I couldn’t do it on my own at an early age.

Realizing my need for grace, my need for love, my need for God’s willingness to be with me was a really meaningful thing. That’s something that’s carried on into my adult world and life as well. The more I can accept that I need God’s grace, the more that I allow it into my life, the more I get to reap the benefits of it.

I almost feel, in a weird way, lucky that I had to learn to work out that muscle from a young age — that I needed God’s grace and I needed help — because it enables me to more intuitively accept it and look for it in my day-to-day life now as an adult.

Here is the continuation through the end, with timestamps removed and spacing cleaned up. Wording has not been changed beyond light formatting for readability.

Carrie: Yeah. What would you say to somebody that’s really struggling? They just don’t feel like God is forgiving towards them. They feel like God is waiting for them to mess up. God doesn’t necessarily have good things for me. My life is a mess with all this OCD. Like what would you say to somebody that maybe has that viewpoint of God?

Nathan: Well, the first is I have struggled with that, and you’re not alone in those thoughts and those fears. I have had all of those voices in my head. But the thing I’d tell you is, and this is what we tell about any OCD kind of thought, your mind might be telling you one thing, but we know that that’s not necessarily the truth.

And what I would tell you, even in the midst of those cloud and rainstorm of thoughts that can feel so overwhelming, is that there is a truth and that truth can be known. And the truth is found in God. He has told us through scripture that we’re loved, that we are valuable, that there’s nothing we can do to separate us from his love, that in all of our imperfections we’re accepted and invited.

We can find that truth in his words over and over again in scripture. It reminds us of what is true, and that will often come up against and contradict what our mind tells us is true. But at the end of the day, it’s so difficult and I totally understand how hard it is when those thoughts are just pounding our mind. But we need to choose. There is a choice to be made to believe what is true.

And what is true is that God cares about you, loves you. Nothing can separate you from your value or his love for you and his desire for goodness for you.

Carrie: Yeah. I think it’s hard, like what you’re saying, that sometimes things feel really true in OCD that we know scripturally are not true. And so there is that decision point to say, I’m going to feed my mind with the scriptures that I know are true about God’s love for me, true about God’s forgiveness for me. I’m gonna meditate on those things instead of focusing on what feels like this OCD version of God. That’s what I call it. It’s like OCD little g god is really loud and demanding and telling me all these things about the Lord that aren’t true, but I’m gonna choose to listen to the voice of the Spirit and the voice of God.

You talk in your book about admitting like I’m the worst, and this not as a way to beat yourself up like condemning yourself, but just as this opportunity or entrance point for grace. Tell us a little bit more about that piece.

Nathan: I think so many of us long to believe we are loved and valued, and the way we do that is we try to convince ourselves how good we are. And one of the ways we do that is point out everyone else’s badness and faults and failures, right? And that makes us feel better. We convince ourselves we’re good and we’re okay and we’re whole.

And the reality is if you’re a human, you’re broken and you have messy parts and you have fractures. We can run away from those, and that’s something I have many times in my life, and try so hard to convince myself and the world around me of this image that I wanted to hold up of Superman, that I’m good.

And it was to my detriment that I ignored the darkness and the fractured inside. The book title is meant to catch attention, I’m the Worst, but it’s something that Paul says in scripture, “I’m the worst of sinners,” and this is a man who was redeemed, who went on to be the foundation on which a faith is built.

But this man was willing to admit his dark places. And I think so many of us run from those dark places and avoid admitting and coming face to face with our broken parts because we fear that it’s gonna be a wall that we’re gonna crash into. It’s gonna break us, it’s gonna overwhelm us.

What I found is when we’re honest enough to face our darkness and to face the reality of our broken pieces, our mess, and we’re brave enough to do that, it’s not a wall, it’s a bridge. And that bridge leads us to redemption and love and grace.

And it’s a really beautiful thing that I’ve experienced in my life, and I want so badly for others to experience it in their life too. It’s a scary thing and it can be difficult. It can even be painful, like going to the doctor. But when we face our broken places, that’s where we end up finding God’s love and forgiveness. That actually starts the journey towards wholeness for us.

Carrie: Yeah. This is really great because I think you’re talking about wanting to present to the world that I am a good Christian, for example. And I think a lot of people would probably say that whether they have OCD or not. I want to be this person. I’ve shown up at church and I’m serving and I’m doing all the right things and I’m praying and reading my Bible.

But at the end of the day, we all are in need of a savior desperately every single day. We’re living in this tension of wanting to be Christlike while also recognizing that we have a day-to-day sin battle that we’re in.

When I’m radically vulnerable with God and other people, then I’m coming to this place where I can see his grace enter in. But if I just put on this persona of, “Hey, this is who I want you to see me as,” then people don’t really get to know us. We don’t have that deep and true intimacy with God either because we’re hiding in our relationship from God, even though he already knows us. There’s a rupture there.

Nathan: Yeah, I love that. I think acknowledging the difficult parts of our journey and ourselves and inviting both God and other people — who are the hands and feet of God — into that to walk with us is actually the conduit to freedom that we all ultimately long for.

Carrie: Was there a particular scripture or Bible story that you resonated with?

Nathan: I really connected with the story of Gideon as a kid… and also David, and Peter, and Paul. Over and over again, God uses people who don’t fit the image. People who don’t feel like heroes. God loves showing his strength in the midst of our weakness.

Carrie: Yeah. And when Jesus is involved, the story’s not over. We want to encourage people that feel like they’ve screwed things up — God’s not done with you yet. Forgiveness is one of the things you also talk about in your book, and it’s harder sometimes to receive forgiveness than offer it. Tell us more.

Nathan: Particularly for those of us with OCD, believing that God forgives us and accepting it can be difficult because OCD is a series of voices telling us untrue things. They’re relentless. But scripture tells us what is actually true about us — that we’re forgiven when we repent, that we’re his, and we can’t be separated from his goodness and his love.

The more we practice listening to God’s voice of truth, the easier it gets to recognize it.

Carrie: How has accepting God’s forgiveness changed you?

Nathan: It allows me to live life unencumbered by guilt and shame. It also allows me to offer forgiveness to others. There’s a freedom when we let go of our mistakes because God has. That freedom has been really meaningful in my story.

Carrie: What does recovery look like for you today?

Nathan: Recovery looks like getting a little stronger every day. Accepting a little more help every day. Not expecting everything to change instantly, but choosing by faith to walk step by step and get a little stronger every day with people around me and with God.

Carrie: I think that’s why it’s important to document progress… to look back and see how far you’ve come. Things are going to get better.

So tell us the name of your book again.

Nathan: The book is called I’m the Worst: How Freedom is Found in Admitting Your Faults. It’s available wherever books are sold. I’d love for you to grab a copy.

Carrie: Thank you for coming on and sharing your story. Remember, if you want to share your personal story about OCD, you can contact me at carriebock.com/podcast. I think it’s very important to get these stories out into the world and let people know there’s hope and opportunities for healing to have a different relationship with your OCD than you do now.

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

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

209. Three Common Objections to ICBT

Written by Carrie Bock on February 4, 2026. Posted in OCD, Podcast Episode.

Carrie explores three common objections to Inference-Based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (ICBT) and explains why OCD treatment is not one-size-fits-all.

Episode Highlights:

Why OCD treatment is not one-size-fits-all and must be tailored to the whole person
How ICBT addresses the unique reasoning process behind OCD obsessions
Why struggling with OCD does not mean you’ve lost the ability to think or reason well
The difference between obsessional reasoning and everyday, present-moment reasoning
How trusting sensory data can help break free from “what if” thinking
Why ICBT is not about arguing with OCD, but expanding beyond its narrow story
How faith, identity in Christ, and ICBT work together to bring hope—especially for scrupulosity

Episode Summary:

Today’s episode came straight out of real conversations I have with clients and listeners—especially those of you who have been told, “ERP is the gold standard for OCD treatment,” and now you’re wondering what it means if ERP didn’t work for you… or didn’t feel like a good fit.

Maybe you’ve tried Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) and felt overwhelmed, discouraged, or even ashamed when it didn’t bring the relief you hoped for.

Maybe you’ve been curious about ICBT, but you’re thinking, “Is this really legitimate?” or “Am I just avoiding the hard work?”

We talk about all of that in this episode.

I share why OCD treatment is not one-size-fits-all, why ERP can be helpful for many people and still not be the right approach for everyone, and how labeling one method as the only “right” option can quietly leave people feeling broken when they’re not getting better.

We also unpack a big misconception—that ICBT is just “arguing with OCD” or trying to think your way out of a disorder. Instead, we talk about how OCD uses a very specific reasoning process, and how ICBT helps you recognize when you’ve slipped into OCD’s imagined future instead of living from the present moment—where God’s grace actually meets you.

This episode is especially for you if:

You’ve done ERP and are wondering what other options exist
You struggle with scrupulosity or faith-based OCD
You’re asking, “Will anything ever work for me?”

I want you to hear this clearly: ERP not working for you does not mean you’re hopeless. There is still a path forward.

🎧 Tune in to the full episode and let’s walk through these objections together.

Transcript

Welcome back OCD Warriors. Today we’re talking about three common objections to ICBT, so let’s get into it. Hello and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD with Carrie Bock. I’m a Christ follower, wife and mother, licensed professional counselor who helps Christians struggling with OCD get to a deeper level of healing.

When I couldn’t find resources for my clients with OCD, God called me to bring this podcast to you with practical tools for developing greater peace. We’re here to bust through the shame and stigma surrounding struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories of healing and helping you replace uncertainty with faith.

I’m here to help you. Let go of the past and future to walk in the present abundant life God has for you. So let’s dive right into today’s episode. Number one that I often hear is, well, I’ve been told that ERP or Exposure and response prevention is the gold standard of treatment for OCD. Can I just tell you that I’m so tired of hearing that.

I’m so tired. I’m so done. I’m so over it. We’ve gotta stop saying that there is no one size fits all for OCD treatment. I have met many, many people struggling with OCD. Some of them need a little bit of DBT skills woven in because they just have no tolerance for any kind of emotional distress. I’ve met people who have had just very poor relationship skills.

They struggle in their family relationships. They struggle with boundaries, communication, assertiveness. I’ve met with people with trauma. His trauma is feeding into their OCD. We’ve got to stop acting like if OCD is the nail, then ERP is the hammer. I’m done. Now, this has been said many times over and over, and quite frankly, to throw them out on Front Street io.

CDF is responsible for a lot of this language. Now we know that there have been many, many studies done that have shown exposure and response prevention to be effective. We also know on the flip side. That ERP has a high dropout rate. It’s very difficult. I’ve talked with many of you who are looking for alternatives and who have done some ERP and really didn’t feel either that it was effective for you or didn’t feel like that was a road that you wanted to go down because of your spiritual beliefs and how exposing yourself to certain things did not align.

I do think there is a way to do ERP that’s spiritually and religiously sensitive and sound hats off to the many, many clinicians out there who are doing that. What happens when you tell someone that something is the gold standard of treatment? And then it doesn’t work for them or they don’t find it effective.

Creates a lot of hopelessness. It creates a lot of shame. It creates a lot of, what in the world is wrong with me? Because if this is the gold standard and I did the gold standard, then shouldn’t I be better? And so I really wish that they would adjust that language to say that people with OCD. Have complex things going on and they need to find possibly a blend of treatments that will work the best for their unique situation.

They’re coming from a good place because they want people to get evidence-based care, and I understand that and I do appreciate the promotion of evidence-based care, but I also know that people are people, they’re not study participants. Many, many of them are not study participants and many, many of them would not qualify for an OCD study due to the massive other things that they have going on in their life or in their clinical presentation.

I’ve talked about that on the podcast before, so I won’t be labor that point either. ICBT has also been researched. ICBT is being used by many clinicians. Are having great success, and I see this all the time, not only with my own clients and my own students, but from talking with other ICBT clinicians who have been able to help many, many individuals.

There is no one size fits all for OCD treatment, whoever you decide to seek help from, please make sure that they have the training and experience needed in OCD to be able to treat you. If you are going to seek, whether it’s E-R-P-I-C-B-T, or some other form of therapy, ask the questions, ask the hard questions.

Ask your therapist, what percentage of their caseload do they see? Who has OCD? Ask them what kinds of themes they’ve worked with, if that’s something that’s a concern for you, or how they might treat your particular theme. The second objection that I hear pretty frequently is people say, well, wait a minute.

I have a mental health condition and you’re telling me that I need to use my brain. To reason my way out of OCD, well, you have the ability in your everyday reasoning process to reason many different types of things. I have seen people who are struggling with OCD, who are incredibly successful. They’re problem solvers, they’re engineers, they’re in tech.

They’re doing just amazing things, super smart, and they have the ability to reason a variety of different ways. Yes, of course. Your brain has that ability to be able to change and shift the way that you’re thinking about things. That’s the beauty of neuroplasticity. Also, we know that there is a OCD way of thinking.

And an everyday reasoning process way of thinking that we talk about in Icbt. So people will say things to me like, yeah, and I do this and I have to do this compulsion because of this. And I’ll say like, I mean, I know it doesn’t make sense. I’m like, well, it does like in OCD world, it makes complete sense to me what you’re saying because I understand that obsessional reasoning process.

But we also know that we’re in everyday reasoning processes. All day long day where we are determining if situations are safe or not, and we’re not using those same rules that OCD uses. So the key thing is if you can start to recognize when you’re in a non obsessional reasoning process, like what’s the difference?

ICBT says you’re able to really trust your sense data of what’s happening. In the present, in the here and now without going into this land of imagination of all kinds of what if hypotheticals, and you do that on a day-to-day basis. When you get in your car, when you look both ways across the street when you go into a store or you’re kind of like scanning the environment, okay, there’s somebody over there that’s loitering or I’m not really sure what they’re doing, they’re kind of out of place.

Maybe I’ll just kind of walk the other direction. You might have had situations like that, I know I have, where you have to be on a little bit more high alert for your safety based on the location that you’re in or what you’re doing, and you’re able to use your sense data to determine that. There may be times where you’ve looked at packages of food and it was just very clear that for whatever reason it was spoiled.

You didn’t get to it fast enough in the refrigerator. Senses of sight and smell are able to tell you like, Hey, that food is not any good. What OCD does is it’ll read the tag on the package of chicken that says it expires tomorrow. And OCD will say something like, what if it actually expires today? And what if that means that there might be some harmful bacteria in this chicken and we could cook it all the way?

How do I know if it’s really done? It’s still may. Maybe it’s a little pink in the center. I might really need to look at like that’s the obsessional reasoning process versus just really trusting in your senses and not going into the land of futuristic thinking, I’m gonna be sick all of a sudden from this chicken, which is perfectly fine for me to cook in a normal, healthy way.

So yes, you do have the ability, even though this is a disorder that affects your thought process, you have the ability to think differently about it, to look at alternative narratives. The third objection that I hear about I ccbt is that it’s really just arguing with your ocd. That’s all you’re doing.

You’re saying, well. You’re writing some type of alternative narrative, and that’s just engaging with the Ooc D in a way that you shouldn’t, and you should just be disconnecting from that and being able to move towards your values or expose yourself to things that are scary. And we’re not arguing with OCD, we’re not saying that some of these things are not possible.

We are saying that not everything that’s possible is probable. OCD doesn’t really care if it’s a 0.0001% chance it will still convince you that this is going to happen. So we don’t worry as much about probability because many, many different things are probable. What we’re saying is what data do we have to show that is going to happen?

If we don’t have any data to show us that that’s going to happen, our real sensory information, then that’s not something that we need to be concerned about. It’ll almost be like saying that you’re preparing for a rainy day when it’s completely sunny outside and you look at the weather report, it looks like it’s gonna be sunny or maybe partially cloudy, and you say, well, I really need to put on my boots and my raincoat because theoretically it could potentially rain today.

What we’re doing with alternative narratives in I CCB t is we’re not trying to argue with the obsessional story. We’re not trying to say, oh, this alternative narrative, it’s right and the obsessional story, it’s wrong because that is too black and white in itself. There may be some genuine uncertainties that OCD latches onto and that makes things really confusing.

There are some things that you might not be able to know right now. Like for example, should I marry this person? Maybe you haven’t been dating them or knowing them long enough really to make some type of determination about that, but you could make some determinations about what you’ve seen in terms of how they act or their character.

If nothing else, you can make a determination about, yes, I wanna continue getting to know this person, or no, I don’t. But the general, like, where is this gonna go in the future? Might be a true uncertainty that you have to live with. And when we look at that alternative narrative, we’re just trying to like debunk the obsessional story as like the only story in your brain.

Like this is the only possibility of something that could happen. It’s almost a way of just being creative and expanding your mind to say, yeah, that could happen. Things could go terribly horrible, awful, and all of my deepest fears come true, or things actually could be okay. Maybe, I don’t know in this situation, but as Christians, we can rest and we can trust God.

That comes from knowing that God loves us, that God cares about us, that God has our best interests at heart. If you’re struggling with scrupulosity, those things may be really hard to grasp ahold of right now. That’s one of the reasons that I’m really trying to incorporate more and more tools for Christians in my online course Empowered Mind.

We are getting ready to start up on Monday, this kind of last call, if you wanna get in there and be involved, but I would love to have you. So you are all invited. If you’re just done kind of fighting with OCD and you’re unsure of what to do next, but maybe you’ve tried some different things and, and what you’ve tried hasn’t worked, I just encourage you to try ICBT to just go in.

I’ve yet to have a person who dropped out because they were absolutely terrified or just felt like they needed to avoid all the content. There’s a way to practicing with your particular theme, feels too scary or too daunting. You can certainly look at some other examples and practicing with maybe a past theme that you’ve been able to work through that doesn’t bother you anymore.

Or just a complete different story, something maybe that isn’t emotionally charged for you. So that’s one thing that I really love about it. You don’t have to necessarily use your own stuff in the beginning until you feel more comfortable and more confident in being able to apply the skills. One of the things that I really want to shake up, as I talked about in the beginning, is this idea that there is a one size fits all.

Really have to look at people as unique individuals, what their needs are, what they’re most struggling with, how things have worked or haven’t worked over time, and develop a solid plan for that. So I really encourage all of you to look at what your options are, but hopefully this episode helped you. I recognize or work through some objections that maybe you’ve had to engaging with Icbt, whether you are a clinician or a therapist listening.

Ultimately, your big question may be, will this work for me? Will this work for my particular theme? Will this work if other things haven’t worked for me in the past? In other words, is there any hope of me being able to develop some skills to deal with this ocd? As I always say, I believe that there is hope for you regardless of what you have been through or how severe things are looking right now.

This treatment has been shown to work across a variety of different themes. I feel like ICBT is great for scrupulosity because of the emphasis on identity and focusing on your true self versus this feared false self that OCD has convinced you that you are or you’re going to become if you don’t engage in compulsions.

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.

208. Is it OCD Voice or God’s Voice? Hearing from God for Healing with Heather O’Brien

Written by Carrie Bock on January 28, 2026. Posted in OCD, Podcast Episode.

In today’s episode, Carrie sits down with Heather O’Brien—minister, author, speaker, and host of the Heal With God podcast—to discuss how to discern God’s voice when OCD and scrupulosity create fear and confusion.

Episode Highlights:

How Scripture and the Holy Spirit work together to bring clarity and peace
Why you don’t have to be afraid of “missing” God’s will in everyday decisions
What it looks like to break agreement with lies and replace them with God’s truth
Why God’s guidance produces peace, not pressure, urgency, or shame
How Christian community can support healthy spiritual discernment

Episode Summary:

Many people I work with share that they once believed OCD was the voice of God, leaving them overwhelmed by fear, urgency, and constant self-doubt. I hear this especially from those struggling with scrupulosity, people who genuinely love God and want to follow Him, but feel exhausted by constantly questioning their thoughts, motives, and decisions. Over time, that pressure can quietly reshape how we see God, making Him feel demanding, distant, or impossible to please.

In Christian Faith and OCD Episode 208, I sit down with Heather O’Brian, minister, author, speaker, and host of the Heal With God podcast, to talk through how to tell the difference between God’s voice and OCD’s voice in real, everyday life. We discuss decision-making, the fear of “getting it wrong,” and why God’s guidance is not marked by panic, urgency, or threats.

We also explore how Scripture, listening prayer, and trusted Christian community help bring clarity and grounding, and why God’s will isn’t something you’re constantly on the verge of missing.

If you’ve ever felt afraid to move forward, worried that ignoring a thought might be disobedience, or wondered why following God feels more stressful than peaceful, this episode was created with you in mind.

Hit play and join the conversation.

Connect with Heather O’Brien:

calledtopriesthood.com

heatherobrien.net

Transcript

Carrie: I know that this is going to be an exciting episode for some of you to listen to. We’ve been getting more requests on the show to talk about scrupulosity, which if you’re not familiar with that term, is any kind of religious obsession. I’ve also been hearing from several people who have been going through the course, Christians learning ICBT, or that are seeing me for therapy and saying things like, you know, I used to think that OCD was a voice of God, and now I’m realizing the difference between OCDs voice and God’s voice.

So I thought it would be really great to bring on a licensed minister to talk about how to hear from God.

Hello and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD with Carrie Bock. I’m a Christ follower, wife and mother licensed professional counselor who helps Christians struggling with OCD get to a deeper level of healing. When I couldn’t find resources for my clients with OCD, God called me to bring this podcast to you with practical tools for developing greater peace.

We’re here to bust through the shame and stigma surrounding struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories of healing and helping you replace uncertainty with faith. I’m here to help you let go of the past and future to walk in the present abundant life God has for you. So let’s dive right into today’s episode.

Heather O’Brien is here. She even has her own podcast called Heal with God. Heather, welcome to the show.

Heather: Yay. I’m so excited to be here. Carrie, I’m looking forward to this conversation. I know it’s gonna be so good.

Carrie: Yeah. We wanna try to tease out, is it God, me, or OCD? Essentially, tell us a little bit about your story and how you got into helping people hear God’s voice and experience inner feeling.

Heather: It usually starts with ourselves. I needed healing. I was going through a lot of anxiety, depression, panic attacks, and the way that I got free was by hearing God’s voice. And so I got really passionate about it. ’cause I’m like, oh, did you know God wants to speak and I wanna just tell the world about it because it’s the thing that sent me free.

And I didn’t know I could get free. I didn’t know I could be healed. Whatever word you wanna use, I feel better. I didn’t know I could feel better. I wanna kind of scream that out. ’cause I was a Christian, even while I had anxiety. I was a Christian while I had depression, sitting on the church pews every Sunday I started learning how to hear God’s voice.

Through journaling, through interpreting dreams at night, which I had dreams all the time, and I had no idea that was God speaking to me. I started getting really passionate about this, and as I got free other people who would come to me and say, Hey, would you disciple me? Would you teach me? And that’s, it’s just kind of disciples, making disciples.

What’s it? The scripture in Revelation that we get free by the blood of the lamb. The word of our testimony. That’s what it’s,

Carrie: that’s great. I think that’s very hopeful for many Christians that I think you can feel so much better than you do right now. Keep pursuing God and pursuing that healing process with him.

Very important. Many of the listeners wonder, how do I know if I’m really hearing from God? There are some things that are very clear in scripture, do this, don’t do that. But then there are other times where maybe we’re making a big decision. Do I choose this school to go to college to, or do I choose this other school?

What ministry does the Lord want me to be involved in, in church and, and those aren’t moral decisions, but we still have an opportunity to be led by the Holy Spirit in those. How do people know or go about making those types of decisions with God?

Heather: That’s good. Even before you started all your examples, I had an example in my mind about this young lady who had applied to go to veterinary school.

And it wasn’t local. She wanted to go, but also she was questioning, is this God, is this okay? Should I go? I’m not really that much in her life, but I had a dream, just a young lady that went to our church and I mean, I was connected with her. I knew her enough to have her cell phone number, but I had a dream about her at night.

And in that dream, it was kind of her and me. I don’t remember the exact dream, but let’s just pretend for a minute. It was something like she got accepted to the school and also my dreams came true when she got accepted. It was like confirmation for both of us in this. And so I reached out to her because she knew some dreams are metaphors.

They’re not all prophetic really gonna happen. And so I’m still, I’m like sifting through it. I’m praying, God is this real. I contact her and I’m like, is there any chance that you happen to be applying for a school? ’cause I didn’t know her enough to even know that she was going through that. And it turned out to be confirmation for her because she was actually in her prayers asking God, is this right for me?

Is this you? And I did have to take her back a notch when I was talking to her. I said, there is this one scripture that I love and I quote, probably almost every day at this point now, but it says. The footsteps of the Godly are ordered of the Lord. And to me that means you can’t really mess up if you are in line with God.

If you’re praying, you’re reading your Bible, you’re asking God to keep you in line, that means like you might take a step out and he’s gonna just kind of nudge you so gently back into the lines. And it’s not even that you sin, like you said, this isn’t a moral issue. It’s like, I don’t think that you can mess up.

I think that you need to ask God, you need to give God permission to close doors that need to be closed, open doors that need to be open, and that’s what we do in our prayer time, right? When we’re hearing God’s voice. Sometimes it looks like we have this opportunity, we present it to God and we give him permission to close door, but okay, he didn’t.

So that’s being led by the Spirit. Sometimes being led by the spirit doesn’t mean you’re hearing a booming James Earl voice. Sometimes hearing God looks like I prayed for this opportunity. Here’s the opportunity. I also gave permission for him to close it if it needed to be closed. And yeah, sometimes we just have to take a faith step because isn’t that the whole thing about Christianity is that we choose to believe in Jesus by faith.

Sometimes we have to exercise that faith muscle and we’re not gonna get the James Earl voice booming down. I saying, yes, I want you to go to the school.

Carrie: Yes. I think that’s really good. You reminded me of a story. I had somebody come in for intensive and was trying to make a decision and had. Really just received this vision from God as we were working together.

And then had told me, well, I had let my friend know that I was coming to see you. And she said, well, I’m just gonna pray that God gives you a vision that to make this decision. And I just thought that that was so beautiful and just so kind of the Lord. I know that that doesn’t always happen for people, but it was just amazing that this person had faith.

Their friend just had incredible faith and was like, well, I’m just gonna pray that God gives you a vision. And then God answered that prayer. So that was really beautiful. I think sometimes people can really get tripped up with OCD about just, I’ve got to somehow make the right decision because I’m going to like mess this up somehow.

What would you say to them?

Heather: I think that’s goes back to the footsteps of the Godly are ordered at the Lord, and I tell myself that sometimes I have to talk to Heather. Like Heather, hey. Footsteps of the Godly are ordered of the Lord. There’s even little things like I’m late. I hate being late to events, to things that I said I was gonna be late to, and anxiety creeps into that, especially when we’re in a hurry.

We’re basically inviting anxiety. Sometimes we just need to rephrase it. If I’m saying the footsteps of the Godly are ordered of the Lord. Then I’m not late. It’s not possible for me to be late, so sometimes we just need to rephrase it back to ourself. If the footsteps of the Golia order of Lord, then is this thought even possible?

Does it line back up with that? I even think about that when I’m headed somewhere in my car. I’m not getting there. At the time, I would’ve liked to, but what did God save me from? There’s sometimes there’s good things behind that, and so we wanna take the narrative and make sure it’s full of the fruits of the spirit.

Because if it’s of God, it’s full of joy, it’s full of goodness, it’s full of love, and all of those fruits, hurry never feels like that. If I messed up, that feels like I’m full of fear. If I can mess up, that even feels like fear. I’m like, I dunno that we can mess up. I think that we can send, that’s not what I’m saying, but I don’t think that we can make the wrong choices and God redirect us.

He is just. And sometimes we just have to believe that by faith he’s going to fix this. If I wasn’t supposed to do this, he’s gonna close the door. And I have actually had that happen.

Carrie: I have too, for sure.

Heather: I’ve had that happen more than once where I’ve given him permission. I’ve said, okay, God, I’m gonna say that yes to this, but will you close the door if I shouldn’t?

Okay. Even like with podcast interviews, sometimes I’m like, eh, I think that this is a good fit, but I’m not sure. I’ve had it where they signed up, but somehow they just never showed up. And I’m like, thank you, God. That just wasn’t a good fit for my show and I know that that was God doing that, right? So I can’t mess up.

I just have to get into that head space.

Carrie: There was a time where when I was looking for my office that I have now, I was really convinced that I was supposed to be in this one part of town. And I mean to the point where I had picked out a childcare place, I’m like, okay, well if I worked over here. My daughter could go over here and I just have to find an office space in this area.

It’ll be fine. And you know, I was praying about it through the process, God, and help me to find the right space of where I’m supposed to be at for you. And you know, the location that I’m supposed to be for the clients I’m supposed to see. I mean, God closed every door. I could not find any type of office space there at all.

Then I started to think, I don’t know. I’m not sure about this childcare place. Is that really where God wants my daughter to be? I started looking in other areas. I said, okay, Lord, maybe this is not it. Maybe I was wrong on that. Maybe this is not where you want me to be. And ended up with the office that I had now and the assistant, I guess, who was helping the guy.

I needed some work done in order to make it work for counseling space. I said, you know, I kind of need like a wall here and I need the A door here and so forth. And she said he’s not gonna pay for that. He’s not paid for anything. And I said, okay. Just went back and just, okay, God, if you want this to work out for me, work it out for me.

If you don’t, then I’ll know it’s not right. And I ended up meeting with the man that owned the office space and I said, Hey, you know, is there any way you could like put a wall here and put a door here and put a lock on this? He said, yeah, yeah, yeah. No problem. No problem. I’ll do that for you. I didn’t have to pay anything.

It was just very clear. Like you said, that was where God wanted me to be and that He provided, he made the way for me to be able to be there. It was just incredible stories. I think those things that we can remember when we start to doubt or when we start to feel like something, oh, this is not ever gonna work out.

Just continuing to submit things in prayer. God ask us to remember in scripture, remember the things that he has done, and sometimes we have to go back to, I call those anchor points. Go back to the anchor points of. Where you saw God work in your life before and know that he’s the same yesterday, today, and forever, and he’s gonna continue to show you and to lead you and guide you.

You talk about balancing the word and the spirit, and so how can believers stay grounded in scripture while also listening to the Holy Spirit?

Heather: That’s good. I think it’s actually vital. I think that if we just read the word, we’ll end up like Pharisees. We’re legalistic where we have checklists instead of love lists.

I love disciplines. It actually makes me feel so grounded. It feels good to have a structure throughout my day. I read the Bible. I’m worshiping. I’m praying every day, seven days of the week. But this is my love list. I do it because I love God, I love others, and I love myself, and it actually makes me feel good.

All that to say that includes sitting in prayer, asking God some questions and listening. And so if I just did the Bible, okay, I’ve had some people in my line of work, and maybe you have to where they’re like, yes, I read the Bible every day, and they’re struggling with sexual sense. This has been a repetitive thing in my past and I’m like scratching my head like, how can you read your Bible every day and struggle a sexual sense?

Like it didn’t make sense to me. It wasn’t until the Holy Spirit revealed, I mean I had to ask them quite a bit. I’m like, God, what is happening? What am I missing? ’cause I told them, read the Bible and they are. And yet they’re still struggling. The problem was they weren’t actually sitting in prayer too.

They were just reading the word. They weren’t reading with the Holy Spirit. It was a checklist. So sometimes even when we read the Bible, when we say, holy Spirit, will you read with me? Will you show me what I need to to see? Where’s Jesus on this page? Where’s redemption on this page? Where is your love on this page?

How does it apply to my life today? And then the prayer time, it can look like we’re just asking God for things. Just ask, ask, ask. But when I wanna hear God’s voice, I wanna listen, listen, listen. I wanna ask a question and I wanna hear what he has to say. That doesn’t mean I’m not interceding for others, I might have time for interceding for others.

I might have specific time where I’m asking, God, help me with this. But then I wanna say, well God, what do you think? And I love this prompt. I love doing a little prayer prompt. It looks like, God, I’ve talked a lot and now I’m ready to listen. What do you wanna say? Both of those together are so important.

They actually equal hearing God’s voice in fullness and in truth. Because if we just hear the spirit, then you’re gonna question, well, which spirit are you listening to? Because according to the word, if I hear a thought, it could be the Holy Spirit. It could be me, it could be another spirit. And I wanna be really mindful of that.

The word even says that if another spirit contradicts this word, don’t listen to it. In other words, it might not be the Holy Spirit. And so if you don’t know the word, how do you know what you’re hearing in prayer time is God. They just have to go together.

Carrie: That’s so true. I think being able to lead people back to.

Scriptures for the clear moral decisions about what you should do or how we should treat other people in our lives. If we’re praying about a relationship, for example, we know that God wants us to be loving, forgiving the gentle way, a word turns away wrath. We don’t want to come at somebody with anger.

We can pray through that, we will, in those conversations have the fruit of the Holy Spirit come out and minister to that other person. So the Bible is really great at teaching us these broad things about how to treat other people in relationships and how to stay pure. But there are many, many decisions that we make every single day that we have the opportunity to really partner with the Holy Spirit.

And then God does give us. Some sense of free will and choice. I like to say that we are sheep in the pasture. There are clear fences around the pasture, but if we eat this grass over here or that grass over there, God is concerned that we stay in the pasture and that we are fed and we are doing things that we’re supposed to do.

So I think we have to get away from this idea that God’s will is some kind of little dot. It’s a very small dot, and I’ve gotta get on it, and if I don’t get on that, God’s will dot, then I’m outside of it and somehow he’s gonna be upset.

Heather: I think he loves our creativity. I help people with business stuff and business decisions and things, and we have a framework, but also I’m like, there’s not just an exec.

You have permission to be creative. Like this is your business and God’s saying this is your life. You have permission to get creative. And I think he also says, well, what do you like? What would you like to do?

Carrie: When it’s a clear something that God wants us to hear. Do you believe that God will confirm that sometimes in another form like someone else coming and speaking something to you?

Heather: I believe it because I’ve experienced it time and time again. But also I ask for it and it is in his word. So you could looking the story of Gideon, God told him something really plain to do. He had an angel come like chit chat with him. It wasn’t like, oh, I just had a dream. Was that God, no. He had like a visitation and he had a really specific request unto God, and we call those fleeces because he set out a fleece in his request and asked God to do certain things.

I have seen that in my life where I feel like God, I think this is you. Sometimes it takes me far too long for me to recognize, oh, God’s trying to talk to me. He’s trying to get my attention, but also he’ll do it through other people. I have people who have dreams for me, just like I had dreams for that young lady I was telling you about the school.

I remember even some really big decisions in my life. I was like kind of questioning, should I go get license with my church or should I go get licensed with under this other guy that I’ve been doing Jesus stuff with? And I couldn’t quite decide. It wasn’t solidified in my mind. One of my friends had dreams.

I had dreams, and I was like, okay. Finally I just had to say, yes sir, because there was a part of me that was not really unsure, but not wanting to do the thing

Carrie: right, that God was calling you to do.

Heather: God validates his word. He wants to be heard. Let’s just be clear. And dreams sometimes seem muddy and they’re like, I dunno what that means.

Well, listen, I would say if God gave you that dream, he wants you to know what it means. And all you have to do is ask. Sometimes you have to keep on asking. Sometimes you have to ask other people who have the gift of interpreting dreams. I’ve had dreams repetitive that it’s like, okay, God, I’m obviously not getting this.

I thought that you meant this, but I still keep having that dream. And he’s like, ask someone else what they think it means. Sometimes we need people to speak into our life. I think that’s how God talks. He doesn’t just talk through his word and your prayer time. He also talks through the body of Christ.

Carrie: Right? I know that there have been times. Where I’ve just texted somebody and I’ve said, Hey, praying for you, or God brought you to mind. I just wanted to let you know that I’m praying for you. And they’ll tell me, Hey, this spiritual battle is going on right now in my life or in my workplace, and it’s just God works through community and you stress.

That as well, like the importance of us being involved in Christian community. And so I always try to encourage believers if you’re not in a church and you’ll find a church of people who are following Christ and are studying the word that you can get connected with and be involved with. Super important.

You talk about like coming into agreement with wise. What does that mean and how can people break agreements with lies that they may be believing about God and kind of step into the truth?

Heather: It’s so easy to accidentally do it. Okay, so like we mentioned a minute ago, our thoughts are not always our own.

Sometimes our thoughts are our thoughts. Sometimes our thoughts are from the Holy Spirit, and sometimes our thoughts are from another spirit. And I had this example come to me when I was coaching this one client. The Holy Spirit gave me a vision while I was talking to her of another spirit standing beside her and whispering to her some things while she was looking in the mirror.

So while she was looking in the mirror and she was thinking bad thoughts about herself, and sometimes this is Christian things and sometimes it’s body image. I mean, it could be a number of things that we get a whisper. Something and we think, oh yeah, that’s reasonable. Okay, let me give an example. That just makes sense.

Oh, so if I’m looking in the mirror and I think to myself, you’re ugly or your nose is just too big, or, wow, you are really overweight, I might not say it that. Nice. Okay. Just what if for just a minute. Okay. What if another spirit was whispering to you that thought and you come into agreement when you say, yeah, I am.

Yeah, my nose is big. Yeah, my waist is too big. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And we’re like, that’s totally reasonable. ’cause it seems so true. Okay, so we come into agreement with this thought and it’s a lie. It’s not in the word. Okay? So the truth will set you free. So a will keep you bound. Would that be true? The scripture says truth will set you free.

So is there anywhere in the scripture that God says how he made you was not good? No. He says you it perfect. He made you on purpose with a purpose. He crafted you in your mother’s womb. So specifically you’re the potter and he’s the clay. It’s almost like when we say we look a certain way and we don’t like the way we look.

We’re telling Gotti did a bad job. That makes sense. If we’re telling Gotti did a bad job, then we have somehow come into agreement with a lie. Because that can’t be true. God didn’t do a bad job. That’s ridiculous. We would never say that with our mouth, but we say that with our mind. When we agree to these lies, first, we have to recognize that it’s a lie by reading the truth.

Okay, nowhere in here says that I’m bad, or whatever the thought is that you’re rifling through, right? And then once you recognize it, you have to come out of agreement with it. It really just means thinking the opposite. If I could be real with you. Sometimes we have to forcefully break agreement with it, and sometimes I say it out loud like I need to tell myself.

You need to tell yourself what to think. Sometimes. Sometimes I’m like, Heather, knock it off. And okay, here’s something that some people fight. They’ll say, well, the truth is I am overweight. I could lose 20 pounds. Okay, but is that the truth or is that a fact? Because if the truth will set you free, then that’s not the truth.

It’s a fact that you’re living out, it’s an experience that you are living out. I know this isn’t semantics here, but it’s kind of really important to know that if the truth will set you free, if Jesus is the way, the truth and the life, then we kind of need to use these words in alignment with that. I’m just giving you an example with the weight ’cause I really resonate with that.

I’m sure a lot of people can understand that. So if I really need to lose 20 pounds, instead of saying I’m fat, I could say I’m on my way to losing weight or. I am able to lose weight. I have a few extra pounds on me, and with God on my side, I can do anything. You could arm yourself with the scripture. You could start saying the truth that will set you free because he says, through Christ, I can do all things and so I can lose this weight.

Instead of calling myself fat, I might say I’m at a place where I could easily lose 20 pounds with God’s help. I know that’s possible. That feels so empowering.

Carrie: It does. Yeah. It’s a completely different mindset shift and way of looking at it, which is so huge or important, and I might even say to people talking about being in the process of healing from something, okay, I’m in process of healing from this OCD.

It’s not necessarily gonna always be a one and done process for people to be healed. It’s sometimes a journey. God can heal us instantly, but oftentimes he’s using these situations in our life to mold us, the sufferings, to shape us into who he wants us to be and where he wants us to go. And so that character development part, we can’t overlook that.

And we just say, I just wanna be free from this suffering. It’s awful. I did a, a recent survey of our audience and many of them have been struggling for over 15 years. With OCD and that can come and go and look different in different seasons. Sometimes it’ll quiet down and other times it’ll flare up.

Sometimes they’ll deal with one theme and then another theme will crop up. And we don’t always understand why God is allowing these things, but there’s a sense that people may have believed lies that God is not good because I’m going through this suffering. Or they may be believing lies that God loves everybody else but not me.

These are some of the things that I hear get is punishing me for this mistake that I make. And then I’ll say, is that in line with what the gospel tells you about God? And they’ll say, well, no. I’m like, okay, well we want to align what we are saying that we believe with what scripture is telling us. And being grounded, I find that there are a lot of these little beliefs that people are holding onto.

I shouldn’t even say little, because they’re important theological beliefs lies. That people are holding onto that have typically been shaped by their environment or over their past experiences. They haven’t been shaped and aligned with scripture. And so if they can say, I don’t believe that anymore, that’s not true.

I may say, I feel like that’s true. That doesn’t make it true. Our feeling. Are not always fact. They’re feelings.

Heather: That’s exactly right. And as you’re talking, I’m thinking about Romans 12, two. It says, be renewed in the spirit of your mind. It’s almost like it’s gonna be a continual thing. Keep being renewed in the spirit of your mind.

It’s not a one-time thing. And as you get renewed, you’ll know the good and perfect will and pleasing will of God. It’s a continual process that we’re being renewed in the spirit of our mind. It’s not a one and done.

Carrie: This is good. I know that there’s a lot of probably confusion and I grew up very Baptist and have kind of been yo-yo between the Baptist church and the Pentecostal church at different points.

And now I would say I go to a Bicostal church. It’s, it’s a non-denominational, but that’s kind of how I would refer to it. These conversations surrounding spiritual warfare. And deliverance and things like that is a little bit more on the newer side for me. I know different people have had different experiences in the church with deliverance.

Some of them are negative. Some people are really scared about demons or being oppressed. Can you just talk a little bit to our listeners about like, how do we have a healthy understanding of this that’s based on scripture?

Heather: I think God kind of simplified it for me and I would love to share. The thing is that there’s gotta be a good guy and there’s gotta be a bad guy.

Let me just personalize this in my story, when I was needing a lot of healing for anxiety, depression, and all the things, I actually had a bad guy in my story and it wasn’t the devil. He was a human.

Carrie: Okay.

Heather: Okay. And so when we villainize other humans, it doesn’t work out well for us because then we have unforgiveness and bitterness and sin.

Can we call it what it is? But also in part of my story, I was the bad guy. Okay? So I messed up. I sinned. How could I even, I can’t believe I did that. I’m such a failure, right? I villainize myself in whatever scenario there has to be a bad guy. Just you could think of a billion scenarios. There’s gonna be a good guy, there’s gonna be a bad guy, and there’s gonna be a rescuer.

A savior. And I would say to you, if there’s not a devil in your story, then you have villainized other humans or yourself. I love the scripture that says, our war is not with flesh and blood. To me, that means the bad guy cannot have flesh and blood like we do. It can’t like the skin and the blood inside of a human being means that they can’t be the problem.

And we always have a problem. We have a problem to our story. We have a villain to our story. We have a bad guy. And if the bad guy isn’t the devil. We’re missing it. And isn’t it good news that I’m not the bad guy? Isn’t it good news that my personality isn’t the bad guy? Lemme go there for just a minute, because sometimes we say, I was born this way, and I’m like, oh, that’s terrible news because I can’t cast that out.

Carrie: I can’t change that.

Heather: I can’t change that for you if you were born that way. But Jesus does say, get born again. So let’s get excited about that. Let’s get born again. But if you’re born again and you’re saying you were still born that way, oh, maybe you need to get born again, again. Or maybe you need to realize that there is a bad guy in your story and it’s not you.

It’s another human, but it’s the devil. I think that makes it easier.

Carrie: A lot of what you do is help people pray through that to receive healing spiritually. And as we receive spiritual healing, I do believe that translates to other parts of us physically and emotionally. Like all those parts are interconnected to us.

Our mind, body, our spirit are all interconnected.

Heather: They are all interconnected. I mean, the body, soul, and spirit all go together And there’s so many times when people come to me for physical ailments and we deal with a spiritual issue. Both feel better. They literally feel peace. Sometimes they lose weight physically, but they lose weight spiritually.

Right, because I’m getting rid of that spiritual mess that never should have been there. It’s all in prayer. It’s not in my own strength. It’s God. It’s partnering with God and hearing his voice to get to the roots of the issues. A lot of times we don’t know it. We don’t know our own heart. We need God to show us what we believe.

Even sometimes.

Carrie: That’s very true. Yeah. I think sometimes people aren’t even in awareness of what they’re holding onto. Tell us about where people can find you and get to know you more.

Heather: Well, you’re listening to a podcast right now, so I know you love podcasts, so jump over to Heal With God. That’s my podcast.

You can listen to hours of free training over there, and every third Monday of the month, I have a free live workshop where I do prophetic healing. That just means that I’m hearing God’s voice to get to the roots of the issues. I take you through a three step prayer prompt to get down to what’s really ailing you.

And we actually do live prayer. And so you are not gonna get called on on the spot. Let me just say that. You raise your hand beforehand, we talk. You sign up for the workshop, and then you raise your hand and say, Hey, I would love to get the live coaching. And then we go from there. But if you don’t wanna do live coaching, you can watch someone else get coached.

How cool is that, that you can be a fly on the wall and you can see someone else get healed from anxiety and depression from this ooc d repetitive thoughts. And all you have to do is sign up at Heather O’Brien dot net slash workshop. That’s Heather, OBR, ie n net slash workshop, and I would love to see you there.

We come and meet every third Monday of the month.

Carrie: Alright, awesome. Thank you so much for joining us today. I think this has been a great conversation.

Heather: It’s been my pleasure.

207. Increased Confidence in Who God Created Her to be: A Personal story with Ashley Lawrence

Written by Carrie Bock on January 21, 2026. Posted in OCD, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode.

In this episode, Carrie sits down with Ashley Lawrence, a wife, mom, homeschooler, and artist who shares her journey with OCD, and how God met her in the middle of years of fear, doubt, and unanswered questions.

Episode Highlights:

How scrupulosity can mimic a “faith problem” when it is actually OCD
What mental compulsions can look like, including rumination, internal checking, and reassurance seeking
How warning passages in Scripture can become triggers for obsessive doubt and fear
How ICBT helps “disarm” OCD’s reasoning and make intrusive thoughts feel less convincing
How identifying the feared self versus your real identity in Christ can support recovery and peace

Episode Summary:

Have you ever opened your Bible hoping for peace, only to walk away feeling more anxious than comforted, then quietly wondered what that means about your faith?

I sit down with Ashley Lawrence, who shares her personal journey with scrupulosity and OCD and how she spent years believing she had a spiritual problem rather than a mental health one. Like so many Christians, Ashley loved the Lord deeply, yet felt trapped in cycles of doubt, fear, and constant mental checking that never seemed to bring relief.

In this conversation, we talk about how OCD can latch onto Scripture and deeply held beliefs, turning faith into a source of fear instead of rest. Ashley shares how learning about Inference Based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (ICBT) from a Christian perspective helped her begin to understand the OCD reasoning process, separate fear from truth, and loosen the grip of obsessive doubt. We explore how ICBT does not ask you to abandon your faith, but instead helps you live more fully from the truth of who God says you are.

My prayer is that this episode reminds you that struggling with scrupulosity does not mean you are failing God. It means you are human, and God is patient, compassionate, and present with you in the middle of the struggle.

Share this episode with someone who may be silently wrestling with spiritual anxiety or intrusive thoughts.

If you are prayerfully considering next steps, I invite you to learn more about Empowered Mind and see if it may be the support you have been asking God for.

You do not have to walk this journey alone. Healing takes time, grace, and support, and God is with you every step of the way.

Transcript

Carrie: Today we have a special personal story episode from Ashley Lawrence. Ashley made the decision to join the live ICBT training that I was doing about a year ago. For those of you who are new to the show, I run these trainings twice a. We are changing the name to Empowered Mind to really capture the transformation that people are experiencing.

Ashley decided to jump in and learn ICBT when she had difficulties finding a Christian therapist. In her area and really wanted someone who could understand scrupulosity and speak to it from a Christian perspective. Through the process of recording this episode and then further conversations, Ashley ended up actually becoming my virtual operations.

Administrative assistant, and she’s just been in that role since about the beginning of December. In fact, some of you may have conversed with her via email if you had questions about ICBT or setting up a consultation time with me. Ashley’s been instrumental in that process. If you’ve been wondering at all is this opportunity right for me, I really hope that Ashley’s story will help you make that decision prayerfully.

Hello and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD with Carrie Bock. I’m a Christ follower wife and mother. Licensed professional counselor who helps Christians struggling with OCD get to a deeper level of healing. When I couldn’t find resources for my clients with OCD, God called me to bring this podcast to you with practical tools for developing greater peace.

We’re here to bust through the shame and stigma surrounding struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories of healing and helping you replace uncertainty with faith. I’m here to help you. Let go of the past and future to walk in the present abundant life God has for you. So let’s dive right into today’s episode.

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

Ashley: Thank you so much for having me, Carrie. I’m super thankful for this opportunity. I’ll just start off by saying I am follower of Christ. I am a wife and a mother and an artist. I’m also a homeschool mom. I spend a lot of my days just.

Being with my kids and soaking in these years while they’re young and just having fun with that. So that fills a lot of my time.

Carrie: Yeah, for sure. What types of OCD themes have you struggled with kind of through the years?

Ashley: The main theme that I’ll probably hit on most today is scrupulosity. I’ve also struggled at times with contamination OCD and relationship OCD, but definitely not as heavily as pulos, which I feel like sometimes might be a lesser known theme of OCD.

At least it was for me when I first discovered what it was.

Carrie: You understood you had OCD, like when contamination themes were coming up, it’s like, oh, this makes sense. This is what I perceive or have heard about OCD. But then when you started to have spiritual obsessions, did you just think like, oh, I’m just trying to figure some things out spiritually and didn’t really necessarily tie it to the ocd?

Ashley: Yes. And kind of talking about like OCD diagnosis. I was first self-diagnosed and that was just in the beginning of 2024. It was nine years of me kind of struggling, not even knowing it’s what I had. I thought I had just was dealing with a lot of anxiety and I would have this contamination stuff, but I thought, oh, I’m just like a germaphobe.

And yeah, that was definitely more if I were to say, oh, I have OCDI would’ve fallen into, I’m like a germaphobe and stuff. I would’ve never thought it was related to faith. And that’s really what I thought I was dealing with for all those years was faith problem. I never knew that OCD could kind of present itself, like with mental compulsions.

I thought it was a lot of hand washing and light switches and the things I saw on TV when I was younger about OCD. So when I finally learned that OCD can present itself with like these mental compulsions. Ruminating and intrusive thoughts, reassurance seeking and things like that was very freeing for me.

How did you find that out? It’s such a long story, but I’m gonna try to just keep it shorter here for us today, basically in the end of 2023, I hit rock bottom because like I said, I had been dealing with this OCD for years, never knowing what it was, and I think my brain and my body just got to a point where I couldn’t handle it anymore.

And I started dealing with like panic attacks, really bad. So it’s kinda like my body just couldn’t take it anymore. It was a really scary season. It was months of panic attacks and it made it really hard to drive in a car because that’s when they would come up. And then when that began happening, I said, I need to get to the bottom of this.

I need to figure out what the root of this is. So it led me down a path of just, I started kind of learning about panic disorder, but then just getting deeper. And as I was in that process, I stumbled across Ted Whittick on YouTube talking about OCD Scrupulosity, and as he began, it was like a 40 minute YouTube video.

I listened to the whole thing, then I had my husband listen to it and all of the symptoms he was talking about for Scrupulosity, I was checking every box and I was like, oh my gosh, I never heard this ever, like, it was a very positive thing for me. It was a very relieving thing because I was able to finally like identify what was going on.

Carrie: So you had been talking to your husband about these things and like trying to figure out the perceived faith problems and, yes.

Ashley: For years, I guess I should say. So all started in 2015. I’ll kind of briefly just share my background. I grew up in a Christian home and I loved the Lord at a very early age. I experienced just the presence of the Holy Spirit and was taught the gospel from an early age, and so the Lord was always a part of my life, but I basically ended up in a season of backsliding.

It was around the time of 2015. Actually, lemme back up a quickly. When I was 18 years old is when as a more mature, full adult, I really recommitted my life to Jesus and just experienced him in a new way. Um, really began living for him as the Lord of my life. But some things had happened after that, and I ended up in a season of backsliding.

The Lord tells us that he chastens those whom he loves and he will discipline his children when we are going astray. And that’s what had happened to me. I experienced his discipline in my life. That was in 2015 when I kind of hit rock bottom. And along with that though, is when this introduction of the thought of I could have lost my salvation, or did I commit the un parable sin?

After that season of backsliding really entered, and I had never really considered that before. In all the years of knowing the Lord, I didn’t think that was ever a possibility. But in 2015, after that season of backsliding, I was reading the Bible and I came across some warning passages and Hebrews, which I’m sure you might be familiar with, other people I know have struggled with these things, and I read them and I thought that I lost my salvation.

I really thought I did. That began a season of just really, it was the lowest point in my life. It was very scary and there was a lot of anxiety. I had panic attacks. I couldn’t sleep, but the, in that place, I sought the Lord like I never had before. And so, God, like I said, he went after me and he didn’t allow me to continue on that path.

And it caused me to just seek him in a whole new way. And the Lord so graciously helped. To me through that time, through his word, so many passages in the Old Testament about his people being unfaithful and him telling them to return to him and of his forgiveness, especially like the Book of Hosea, all these places he ministered to me so much in that time.

But this fear, this possibility would just always come back. Did I commit the un parable sin? What if just this lack of assurance in my salvation and it would cause such internal distress. Because I didn’t know what I was dealing with and because it kept resurfacing, I thought, surely this is a problem with my faith.

The Lord must be so displeased with me because my faith is so weak. Like I keep becoming so fearful. I keep being so attacked with doubt. It was just like, it would be just an onslaught of doubt over my assurance, and even after the Lord spoke to me in his word and confirmed it through our pastor’s message.

Devotions and things like that just keep coming up. And every time I’d go to my husband and after a while it wore him down too because Sure, you’re his child, like he loves you. Like why is this happening again? So it was a lot of years of that.

Carrie: I think what you’re highlighting here is a couple different things.

One OCD, using personal experience against you saying, oh, well look at what happened back here. And maybe that is an indicator of what’s going on right now when it’s not necessarily connected. And then the other piece was that doubt often follows some level of sensory information or assurance. So you would hear this message in church and be like, oh yeah, that’s God speaking to me, that I’m his and that I belong to him.

And then OCD comes along, it’s like, no, you need to doubt whether or not you’re saved.

Ashley: Yes. And it will attack. What is most valuable, important to you? A lot of times is what I’ve learned about OCD since a child. Jesus was always like my foundation and such an important part of my life, and obviously eternity.

That’s an important thing. It definitely latched onto that and it’s like, well, if that is true, if you really did lose your salvation, my brain was firing off. This is extremely important. We need to worry about this. All these compulsions, which I can get into kind of what it looked like for me. ’cause I know that’s helpful sometimes for other people to hear like, oh, they’ve been through that too.

So it definitely latched onto that. And it was just years, yeah. Of me thinking this was a faith problem on my part. Kind of early into that. It was after I was married, so. It had already been years that I was dealing with that, but I found John Bunyan’s book, grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, I think, and I could barely read it because it kind of like gave me P-T-S-D-A little bit because the things in that book were so similar to the fearful thoughts I had had, whether it was blasphemous thoughts about the Lord.

Doubt, unbelief. John Bunion talked a lot about that, but I found it comforting in a way like, oh wow,

Carrie: but also triggering.

Ashley: He’s very got man, but it was triggering. So I kind of put that down and at that point I didn’t know yet that it was OCD. I just thought, again, issue, I don’t know where I should go here next.

Carrie: What were some of the compulsions that come up for you? Were you doing a lot of research? Were you like, did you have prayer compulsions? Were you like feeling like I’ve gotta pray the center of prayer every night before I go to bed, or,

Ashley: yes, definitely. Rumination would be the first one. I would hear a message on a radio about like Pharaoh hardening his heart or judis or something like that.

And then my brain would just ruminate the whole day, like along with rumination, like internal checking. Do I sense the Holy Spirit in me? Do I sense the fruit of the spirit in me? How do I feel like, do I feel close to the Lord right now? That was a huge one for me, is feeling like, do I feel far from Jesus?

Do I feel like he’s there? We can’t go by feelings. It was a lot of that stuff. And then seeking reassurance. There were times where I did speak to my pastor and I think there’s a level of importance with that. Like I did have a season of backsliding. There are real spiritual things going on. That’s what makes it so hard is ’cause OCD just can intermix with that.

But I would talk to my pastor about it. Reassurance seeking to Googling, just searching the Bible. Tons of commentaries. What did this person think about this verse? More obsessively than the average person I would say. And then I would get intrusive thoughts. I remember one Easter morning at church, the message was so good, but the whole time I was just plagued by these intrusive, blasphemous thoughts.

There was a period where I just could not read the gospels because every time, like I saw Jesus’s word in red. There would just be intrusive thoughts attacking his words, and that was so difficult. It was a lot of that type stuff. And also, yeah, like if I did sin and just confessing that to the Lord, but getting kind of obsessive with it, feeling like, did I pray that right?

Did I confess that right? And just doing it multiple times and way more than an average Christian would do. So it was a lot of that.

Carrie: Once you found out what Scrupulosity was, did you seek out any like therapy or medication help?

Ashley: I started looking around my area for Christian counselors or Christian therapists, and I found one, but she didn’t really treat OCD.

This was actually before I really was self-diagnosed with OCD. I thought maybe it was OCD and I talked to her about it and she kind of brushed it off. So that one didn’t really work out and I just moved on. It would’ve been helpful if I was diagnosed a little bit prior to, but I started Googling more in my area around the time, so this was early 2024 when I really knew I had it, and I just could not find a Christian counselor or therapist that dealt with OCD around where I lived.

So I just kept informing myself with all the resources online at that point, and a lot of Ted Whittick stuff. I think I tried to find some books, and then it was in June of 2024 that I found your podcast. I just searched in Spotify, Christian, OCD. I was pretty desperate at that point because I hadn’t really gotten a ton of help.

I talked to my mom a lot. I’m very close with my mom, so I would tell her about it and then my husband, but I needed a little more so, so then I found your podcast. In the first episodes I started listening to, I remember like perfectly, I was cleaning out the basement and I found your podcasts and. I started listening to the personal stories ’cause I’m like, okay, that’s just where I went first and I started listening.

One of the first ones was Michael K. And it was so helpful for me. It was so encouraging to hear other people walking through and hearing it from themselves, all the things that they had struggled with. So I just started there and I bought, um, Michael K’s book and at that point, that was just last summer.

I would take that book to a coffee shop and I would read it and highlight it. It was kind of like a form of therapy for me, and when I read that book, it felt like someone was speaking my own language, like for the first time. That was a huge help. My mom actually purchased the book too, to read it with me, so I did have some great support, although I didn’t have a counselor or anybody yet in your podcast.

I listened to tons and tons of episodes on it, so I was getting so much information from that and the book and that alone, being able to identify what this thing was. OCD, and then for knowledge. So informing myself how OCD works and just reading and listening to a lot of the personal stories. So much healing for me came from that.

And even my husband was able to tell just a huge difference. And the first thing I noticed is just. The things that once brought me so much internal anxiety and turmoil and would affect me through the whole day. That was lessening. The anxiety levels were beginning to go down, but at that point, this is like kind of getting into the fall last year.

I still notice that even though I know what it is now, it’s still really hard to resist it.

Carrie: Tricky.

Ashley: Even though I know God loves me, he’s confirmed to me. I don’t know how many times Jesus has helped me and helped me to know I belong to him. Yet when this comes up, when I get triggered by my theme, I can’t shake it.

Like it was still really hard to shake it. So that was really frustrating. But that’s when I started. Hearing a little bit through your podcast about the ICBT training, I then decided I think I need to pursue this. I think this next level of just information and therapy, I think this could really help with this portion.

I listened to your podcast with Crystal Probes, I think her name is, and she talked about how ICBT helped her be able to shut off those mental compulsions, and that’s a lot of what I dealt with. So I decided to give it a try. And then fast forward to, I took your 12 week. ICBT training and learned so much about it and it helped me so much.

Carrie: That’s awesome. That’s a really great testimony. I’ll hear from people probably on a weekly basis, like looking for Christian OCD therapist in my state, or I’m in this area and I’m trying to. Reach out and find people, and it’s a challenge just to find OCD specialists, but then it’s an extra challenge to try to find someone who’s a strong believer and you feel like, I can’t go explain this to someone else who’s not a believer, because they’re just not gonna get the level of intensity and severity that I feel about this issue.

Ashley: And also for me, that was the first thing when I found your podcast is I’m like, okay. She says she’s a Christian, so I just wanna listen and see where she’s at. And that’s what made me feel safe. Obviously with someone who struggles with scrupulosity, the Lord is very important to them, so you wanna make sure the source that the information’s coming from.

At least for me, I wanted them to share the same faith that I. And that made me feel very safe and that’s why I also felt safe listening to Ted Wiig because he is a pastor as well. It is very hard to find, I feel like, so I’m very thankful to my dear resources.

Carrie: What modules of ICBT did you find most helpful for you?

Ashley: Yes, there was definitely a lot. Honestly, there’s parts of each one that was so helpful, and I’ll just start off by saying like, overall, just to give someone an idea who doesn’t know much about it, it helped for me to disarm OCDs threats and what made OCD seem so convincing. The ICBT helped me. Disarm all of that, which then makes it much easier to just deflect or ignore when it comes up.

Don’t get me wrong, I still struggle at times. I really believe it’s a journey and a process to retrain your brain to think differently. It was nine years for me of living really in a state of fear and my brain thinking a certain way. So I think it takes a lot of practice to undo all of that, but it’s not like an overnight thing, but it is like a healing process and journey.

There’s 12 modules and they kind of build upon each other, and I haven’t really looked at my notes since the spring when I took the class. I just remembered a lot, but going back to look at all the notes was really helpful just to gimme a refresh again. The one thing though, without even looking at my notes that helped me was from module two, which is just kind of figuring out the reasoning behind and the logic behind OCD.

The course teaches that OCD will use facts, rules. Hearsay past experience and the possibility of things to all kind of get all of this evidence that you really need to be afraid of this thing. So to take one of those possibility piece, the Bible has these warning scriptures about apo from the faith.

That’s a possibility that that could happen to somebody if you read it, if you’re interpreting that way. And then it will just take all of these. Facts and things to make it seem real to you. When I was able to break down what OCD was using or past experience is another one I backslid, and that’s what OCD would latch onto for me.

Oh, well that past experience that you backslid, that means you could have fallen away permanently from the faith for each person. It will take certain things just to try to make it seem real. Once you’re able to identify those. You understand why the OCD feels so convincing to you. So that was a helpful piece for me.

Another helpful piece was from module five when I learned that OCD isn’t 100% imaginary. It’s hard because OCD does take real things that happen in the world. Oh, this person, look at you knew that person and they once were a believer, and look it, they’re not following the Lord that could happen to you.

So it takes all these things that are real situations, but it makes it true for you, which is not.

Carrie: That’s the imaginary piece. I think people get like really offended by that. When they first hear it, they’re like, what do you mean? This is all in my head? It’s like, no, that’s not what we’re saying. We’re not saying that you’re making this up.

It does feel really, really real. But the idea is, like you said, OCD is taking like maybe a present moment, uncertainty, and then blowing it up into all of the futuristic thinking that happens. The imagination pieces of like, oh no, I’m gonna be separated from God. Or, oh no, I’m gonna lose my family ’cause I’m not following Jesus.

I’m gonna be over here. Just can go run the gamut of all kinds of what if stories, and so we’re saying it’s like that’s where OCD really misuses your imagination and kind of just hijacks and takes over and creates all these negative scenarios.

Ashley: Yeah. Once you understand that it is a hundred percent imaginary in my case.

There’s freedom in that because what God says about me is true, and I can live in that place what OCD is saying, and that’s for anybody’s theme. It’s very freeing to not have to live in the bondage of what OCD is saying is true for you, whether that’s fear of contamination, fear of sickness, whatever the fear is for the person.

That was helpful. I don’t have to live by what OCD is saying. It’s not real. I can live in the truth over here, and that’s where freedom is and that’s where freedom from fear is. So that was very helpful.

Carrie: Do you feel like it’s like the Wizard of Oz, it’s like this big scary loud thing and then what we’re doing with I CCB T is like, let me show you the tricks.

Like let me show you the sound effects. Let me show you the lighting. Let me pull back the curtain. Like there’s really just the guy back here like running some levers and all this kind of stuff.

Ashley: And then it’s like all your worst fears of what you think is so scary, it’s not even true. So, yeah, I a hundred percent think that’s a perfect picture of what OCD is like.

And it’s so crazy because people that struggle with the OCD, it is so real to them and it creates such turmoil, but it’s not a real threat in reality. Whatever OCD is trying to lie to you about and say, but it’s so convincing to the person struggling with it. I just so sympathize with anybody dealing with it because it is really hard.

Carrie: Yeah. And honestly, like one news story can just spiral people out. One Bible

Ashley: verse for me, in the past, it was one verse that would just spiral me out, and you’re living and your whole day is ruined, or your whole day is spent ruminating on that thing, and it’s just stealing so much away from the person.

It’s really hard to be present, to have joy, to have peace. When you have that all going on in your mind.

Carrie: This is something that I’m really thinking about a lot and as the more that I teach this, the more I’m trying to incorporate, I Ccbt talks about sense data as believers, like we have the Holy Spirit, we have a connection with God.

I know you did a lot of like internal checking and like searching and things like that before with in a compulsive nature, but what do you feel like you clinging to as. Spiritual sense data. Like I know that this is true, that I have a relationship with Christ and I can stand on this versus like what OCD is telling me

Ashley: the word of God.

It says, thy word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path. So even in those darkest times. And if my feelings weren’t matching what the Bible was telling me, I clung to the Bible. I clung to God’s word in his promises because that is true no matter what we’re feeling. And that’s true for any believer going through any type of suffering.

And that was my rock through all of it, even if I did it in perfectly. Even if the Lord will never leave you nor forsake you. But I had doubt going on because I was experiencing such a storm of fear. And all this OCD, so it was obviously, I could never a hundred percent say I believed, with no doubt, but Jesus says we need fate the size of a mustard seed, and I would just cling to his promises.

And so his word was really what kept me grounded. And there’s so many Bible verses that have meant so much to me through those times about his keeping power for the believer. That really helped me.

Carrie: I like what you said earlier too, about Hosea. If we really read the Old Testament prophets, like we see God’s heart for people, it’s like, Hey, you’re not doing what I told you to do.

I, like, I’m reading through Isaiah right now and he talks about like this vineyard, I planted this vineyard and like I really wanted it to go well and like produce some good grapes, but all the grapes are sour. You know, because they’re not following. The Lord and, oh, you’re doing all these religious activities, you’re throwing these festivals, but your heart’s all wrong.

You’re not caring about poor people in your community and so forth. And it, there’s a very stark contrast because God will say, Hey, you’re not doing these things. But it always goes back to this hopeful message of like, Hey, I’m going to. Redeem you. I’m gonna bring you back in, like you’re gonna be my people.

Almost like it’s just this back and forth, almost like dance of sin and salvation or redemption and it’s just really, really beautiful. I don’t think that we read those or focus on those enough in the American church in my opinion, because they’re really, can be kind of scary, I think sometimes to read some of those things, but then also recognizing like God’s truly heartbroken when we.

Are far from him and Jose is just a really beautiful picture of God’s redemption. So I love that. I think there’s so many stories in the Bible where we can see how God’s hand is in different situations, and it’s like we can see our story and other people’s stories too. When we read those, it’s like, oh, I get that now.

Maybe a little bit deeper. I relate to that, or I’ve had these experiences.

Ashley: For sure, and one of the things I’d like to say is the worst points of the ooc DI told people close to me is like, I wouldn’t wish this upon my worst enemy of how tick it can feel when you’re going through that. But coming out into the light, which the Lord has graciously brought me, there are times I’m like, well, I ever get over this.

And he has brought me out into the light. And I used to think because year after year would go by, like there’s something wrong with this. Sometimes the suffering that we go through or the test that the Lord allows in our lives, they go longer than we think sometimes. And the one really good gift I feel like OCD has taught me is the depths of God’s long suffering for us and his patience and forbearance towards us because there were so many times I felt like I was on the cusp of like, am I about to lose my salvation here?

That battle I went through, the Lord endures with us and he’s so long suffering, and had I never gone through this, I would’ve never seen it in that way. Another verse that really helped me through that time was it talks about Jesus in Isaiah 42 that a bruised read, he will not break and a faintly burning wick, he will not snuff out.

There were so many times going through OCDI felt like barely holding on like that little bruised reed or that burning wick that’s about to go out. But he will not sn that out. That’s not the character of the Lord. And so that helped me in my time of suffering just to know how gracious and gentle the Lord is in that.

It’s interesting ’cause you think of the Old Testament and a lot of people will think of, that’s more of a picture of God’s judgment and there is that in the Old Testament, but when I was going through my hardest time after backsliding, that’s where God brought me. There’s so many instances of his love for his unfaithful people in the Old Testament, and that’s what really helped me get through that time.

And then I gotta, I have to, and then I’ll say really quick, I have to apply it now. So I’m obviously, we all mess up day to day. None of us are perfect. So that’s been a huge struggle. Okay, I got over, I didn’t lose my salvation. But when I fail, when I do sin, I can be really hard on myself. I think still with that tendency, having kind of sensitive conscience, but we need the gospel.

Just the hope of the gospel, like being able to preach the truth to yourself every day, even over the little things. OCD has kind of, actually, another good thing that came out of it is just I can never make up for my sin or any of that. I have to just thrust myself upon what Jesus has done for me. I just have to abandon all of that.

Worry and guilt and compulsive stuff that wants to come up even over the day-to-day stuff when I mess up and I have to just trust Jesus work for me. Of course, we’re to grow in holiness and all these things, but it’s that trust that saved us at first that we keep having to just go back to as a believer as.

Carrie: That’s good. There are faith components to this. It’s like at some level, like I do need to be able to rest and trust. Tell us a little bit about, what did you think about that contrast between like the feared possible self and the real self and like how did you process that as you were going through ICBT?

Ashley: ICBT taught me? About the feared self or surreal self, which I never considered when I was first learning about OCD and OCD lied to me for years trying to get me to believe the feared self was the real version of me. And so that just paused me to act out the compulsions. To make sure I wouldn’t become that person.

And then just being able to see that as a false label that OCD was putting on me and realize that who I am in Christ is the true version. And as Christians we’re given a new identity in Christ. But then to separate that and realize that what OCD was saying about me or anyone else who struggles with it isn’t true was just real light bulb moment for me.

I can now celebrate the gifts that God’s given me with much more confidence knowing who God’s created me to be. Disregard any of the lies that OCD is trying to put on me. So once we learned in Icbt about the different types of the peered self, that was super helpful so that I could identify kind of where I fell into and then just say, no, this is not who God created me to be.

He does have purposes for me and I don’t have to get all caught up and tied up in believing those lies. So that was super helpful for me to learn about.

Carrie: That’s awesome. What does recovery look like for you now?

Ashley: For me, going back sometimes and like looking over my notes took a lot of, just reminding myself.

I feel like, like I said, I feel like after going through ICBT and learning all of this, it’s a lot quicker for me to recover. So if OCD comes and attacks me versus a year ago knowing what I know now, I can like bounce back quicker. It doesn’t mean I don’t still fall at times or get sucked into something.

I have the tools to get me out quicker. That’s kind of what I guess I’d describe right now is looking like for me. And again, it hasn’t been like super long. It hasn’t even been a full year yet. And then just talking about it with people around me that know. And it’s helpful to share what you’ve learned, at least for me in ICBT with someone so they can kind of understand it and then bounce it off of them.

When maybe you’re struggling or when you just need to talk about it with someone. It’s just an ongoing process of just reminding myself of what’s true.

Carrie: Yeah, I think that’s really good. When you’re able to teach something to someone else, it helps you solidify it for yourself as well. So as encourage people, it’s like find somebody else that you can talk to about this to spouse or best friend or whoever, to just say, this is what I’m learning about OCD and how it affects me and how I can say no to it basically.

For sure. Well, thank you for sharing with us today. And I also hope that this gives some hope to the moms out there that are struggling or people wanting to have children. I think a lot of times OCD people can get really wrapped up in, oh, maybe I’m not gonna be able to be a good mom if I have OCD and. I just really want us to debunk that, miss together.

So if there’s anything you wanna say to the moms out there,

Ashley: I would love to. I have three children and there’s a bit of a gap between my second and my third, and that was because I was struggling a lot with OCD and I really wanted to make sure what hindered me for a while was. The OCD. That was really the only, I wanted a third child, but the only thing that was keeping me back from that was my struggle.

And there was a lot of prayer involved, like, should we do this? Should we go ahead and try for another child? But the Lord brought me to a place of healing and hope. To know that yes, I can. God’s put this desire in my heart and I trust him. And the birth of our third child is such a hopeful story of that alone because there were times when I cried and I just didn’t know if I would ever be able to handle it or to have another child.

And God answered, I cried out to God and he answered my prayer and he did bring healing into my life. And hope our third baby is definitely an answer to prayer for that. Another side note of hope. I just wanna give to people struggling with panic attacks. ’cause that was also part of my story and a very difficult time for me.

It was months of being very afraid of driving in a car, which I had never experienced in my life before. And it can be so intense, but God fully healed me, brought me through that. Just a month ago, we took a vacation and we were on a seven hour car trip. Which at the time when I was struggling with panic attacks, I wasn’t sure I could ever do anything like that again.

So on this seven hour car ride a month ago, I was totally at peace, no hint of anything. And I realized like I got a bit emotional because my brain had fully healed from that, that trigger of being in the car. And it was, I think, less than a year that my brain fully a hundred percent healed. And the timeframe is different for everybody, but I just want people to know that is possible to heal from.

Carrie: Yeah. Panic attacks are very treatable and they can get attached to driving if people are afraid of having panic attack in the car, if they did have one in the car, things like that.

Ashley: Lots of hope. And getting to the root of OCDI think is possible. I know sometimes. People aren’t sure I experienced, at least you can get to the root.

You can help where it starts from and live in freedom and the lord’s goodness he has for you. I know I experienced it and I definitely want anyone else out there that’s struggling and suffering to know that there is hope. You can get to the root of it and find healing.

Carrie: If you are finding yourself needing extra help on your OCD journey and it seems like everywhere you turn, you just can’t seem to get it, please come join me in the Empowered Mind live training.

I would love to have you there. I would love to walk alongside you in supporting you with crafting your obsessional story, examining the OCD reasoning process. Looking at your feared self versus your real self, like Ashley discovered. I want 2026 to be the year that you declare that you are going to walk in freedom and the abundant life that God has called you to.

It’s not gonna be easy. There’s probably some times where it’s not gonna be fun, but allow me to walk with you on this journey. I know that it will change your life and we have a risk-free 30 day money back guarantee because I believe so strongly in this. Go to carriebock/training to sign up today, and you can find that link in our show notes 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. Opinions given by our guest are their own and do not necessarilyreflect 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.

206. She Hid the Knives and Prayed She Wouldn’t Die: A Personal OCD Story with Blessing Afolabi-Jombo

Written by Carrie Bock on January 14, 2026. Posted in OCD, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode.

In this episode, Carrie sits down with Blessing Afa Jumbo, a wife, mother, and writer, who shares her courageous journey with OCD—how intrusive thoughts, postpartum struggles, and performance-based faith shaped her view of God, and how grace, proper treatment, and healthier theology have brought healing and hope.

Episode Highlights:

How OCD can disguise itself as spiritual conviction, warfare, or responsibility, placing unbearable pressure on the Christian
The heavy burden of performance-based faith and the fear of failing God as a Christian and a mother
Postpartum OCD and harm-related intrusive thoughts, and the courage it takes to name them for what they are
Finding freedom through proper support, including medication and therapy, alongside faith.
Relearning the heart of God as loving and gracious, not punitive.

Episode Summary:

What if the intrusive thoughts you’re battling don’t mean you’re spiritually failing, but that you’re dealing with OCD?

In this episode of Christian Faith and OCD, I sit down with Blessing Afa Jumbo for a heartfelt and eye-opening conversation about how OCD can quietly weave itself into a Christian’s faith, especially during pregnancy and postpartum.

Blessing shares how fear of death and intrusive thoughts slowly transformed her relationship with God into one driven by pressure, responsibility, and the belief that she had to perform perfectly in order to stay protected.

As we talk, we explore a question I hear often from Christians with OCD: How do I know when something is conviction versus OCD? Blessing opens up about the fear that kept her silent, the shame of believing her thoughts defined her, and the moment she realized that what she was experiencing had a name. We also discuss how learning about OCD began to reshape her theology, helping her see God not as a harsh taskmaster, but as a loving Father who meets us with grace in our suffering.

If you’ve ever felt trapped in your own mind, exhausted from trying to get it right with God, or unsure whether faith and mental health can truly coexist, tune in and listen to Blessing’s story.

And if you’re ready to develop a more empowered way of responding to OCD, one that helps you recognize when OCD pulls you into imagined stories instead of present reality, I encourage you to learn more about Empowered Mind, my Christian ICBT course, at carriebock.com/training.

Transcript

205. You’re Not Alone in Your OCD: Survey Results and Upcoming Episode Plans!

Written by Carrie Bock on January 7, 2026. Posted in OCD, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 205. You’re Not Alone in Your OCD: Survey Results and Upcoming Episode Plans!

In this episode, Carrie reflects on insights from the listener survey and shares how that feedback is shaping the direction of the show in 2026. She also explores what healing can look like for Christians with OCD and how to take meaningful steps forward.

Episode Highlights:

What the listener survey revealed about where listeners are in their OCD journey
How listener feedback is guiding the podcast’s direction in 2026
A preview of upcoming topics
How the podcast is intentionally designed to support your specific questions and struggles
Why evidence-based treatment matters for OCD and what to look for in a therapist

Episode Summary:

What if your voice and your story mattered more to this podcast than you ever realized?

One of the greatest gifts of hosting Christian Faith and OCD has been the opportunity to hear directly from you.

In this episode, I share insights from the listener survey we conducted around the podcast’s 200th episode and explain why your responses meant so much to me. Hearing your stories offered a clearer picture of the real questions, struggles, and experiences so many of you are carrying, often quietly and for a long time.

I also walk through what many of you have tried in the past, what has and hasn’t helped, and why evidence-based treatment for OCD matters.

As we look ahead, I share what’s coming in 2026, including a deeper focus on scrupulosity and other listener-requested topics. I also provide updates on my course, Empowered Mind: Christian ICBT for OCD, created to help you build a healthier relationship with intrusive thoughts and grow in confidence, clarity, and peace.

This episode is also an invitation to pause and consider your own journey. What might your next step be? Whether that step feels big or small, my hope is that you’ll feel encouraged to move forward with intention, prayer, and grace. You don’t have to have everything figured out, and you don’t have to take that step alone.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD with Carrie Bock. I’m a Christ follower, wife and mother, licensed professional counselor who helps Christians struggling with OCD get to a deeper level of healing. When I couldn’t find resources for my clients with OCD, God called me to bring this podcast to you with practical tools for developing greater peace.

Welcome back, everyone in Happy 2026. Today we’re talking about your survey results. If you participated in the Christian Faith and OCD listener survey that was happening around our 200th episode celebration. Thank you so much for participating. If you didn’t participate and you wanna give your input to the podcast, whether that’s show suggestions, topics you’d like me to talk about.

Or if you just wanna tell us a little bit about your OCD journey and story, you can certainly always contact me via my website@carebach.com. I love hearing from all of you and we really take all things into consideration when I’m planning and making episodes. I have several different things that I would love to talk about on the podcast that I don’t necessarily have great guests for, and they’re things that I don’t know as much about.

So we’ve been kind of in the works at different points on trying to get someone on here. To talk about TMS, which I would love to do for OCD. I would love to have somebody come and talk more about family therapy with OCD. That’s not an area that I have a lot of expertise in. So anyway, if you know any of those people, or I know we have some therapists that listen to the show, if you feel like you have something that you wanna contribute to the conversation in 2026.

Please definitely contact me through my website. It might be a little while before things go from idea to get on the air, but do know that we take all these suggestions that you give us into consideration. If you have a pastor that wants to talk about a particular OCD topic or has any type of experience with OCD, would love to have them on.

Just know that we do take. Various guest suggestions. We do talk to different people and see if they would be a good fit. I know that through the survey I learned from many of you that you are interested in kind of some of these other topics co-occurring autism and OCD would love to have a guest on for that.

There’s a process to this. We do some research, we do some outreach. But sometimes if we have someone that builds a bridge for us, or if you know somebody that usually does a better outreach than just a cold ask, and of course sometimes people say no, and we just have to accept that, right? We have to accept no for an answer.

We do the best that we can over here to get you the information that you’re looking for. So just know that a lot of those things certainly are on my mind and am looking for people that know more than I do about some areas. Now, one thing that I will be talking to you more about in 2026 that several of you wanted to hear about was more about scrupulosity.

I think that we definitely can expand and talk about a variety of different. Themes that come up in Scrupulosity where people get stuck on those themes, how to work on getting unstuck from them, and of course, I would love to talk with you about that. Now, when we talk about topics or suggestions, I want you to know about this really valuable tool on our website.

That a lot of you could use and benefit from. If you go to kerry b.com and click under podcast, there’s a page called podcast breakdown with a search feature. Now that may not show up on your phone. You may have to go on a computer to really get ahold of that resource, but you can type in scrupulosity, you can type in personal story.

You can type in just a variety of different things that you might wanna hear about and see if there’s an episode on it already. I know sometimes people will ask me about things and I’m like, oh yeah, I, I have a whole podcast episode on that. That’s great. Go here. So, just wanted to point that out as a resource and reminder for all of you, since we are gonna be diving more into Scrupulosity in 2026, if you do have specific questions or ideas for that.

Please email them to me. We may even do a question and answer episode. Would love to provide that as content for you. Something that you guys might be really interested in. Of course, this podcast is for you. It’s not for me to just kind of run my mouth about randomness. You the listeners, help create and shape what goes on here, and that was the whole point of the survey was so that I could get to know you guys better.

I’ve also been in some telephone conversations. Some of you so appreciate that. To talk with me about the course, about going through it via self-help. I’ve also gotten some feedback from those who have taken it live as well, and all of that has been just incredibly valuable because the more that I get to know you guys and know what kind of things you’re looking for and how I can help serve you better.

That’s really super helpful to me, and that’s what I want to be here to do. When I first started talking into the microphone five years ago, it was like, is anybody listening to this besides my mother? You know? And I was getting these download statistics, but that doesn’t tell you a whole lot. It may tell me whether or not someone is on an Android or an iPhone.

It’ll tell me maybe what podcast app they’re listening through, not you. Each individually. Mind you, this is just like statistical data that’s collected. I’m not getting like personal information. Where people are downloading episodes from, I can see that we have people that are listening all over the world and in various parts of the us, but I’m not getting into the nitty gritty of people’s stories when I’m just looking at download numbers.

That doesn’t really tell me a whole lot about you. I want to know more about you and the individual stories and what you are struggling with. So that was the idea behind, let’s take this survey. Haven’t pulled you guys in a while, haven’t sought to do any type of research lately. This was really important for me as I was prepping to go into 2026.

Now the funny thing about statistics is that in this scenario, it was all voluntary, so I don’t necessarily have a representative sample of who is listening to the podcast. I only know people that decided to join our email list and step up and take the survey and try to win $200. That’s all I know. Now, there were 46 of you that decided to do that, so thank you very much.

But my husband always box at statistics because he says, well, they didn’t ask me. I mean, how do they really know? I wasn’t involved in that. So you may listen to some of this and think, yeah, that doesn’t really apply to me, and that’s okay. You may not fall in line with some of these things. Now our most common age range for people that took the survey interesting were people like me.

And I say that because it was people in their forties, mostly female responses and people who were married. And I thought, well, that’s interesting, but I guess. Maybe some of you can relate to some of my stories or things that I’m going through now, of course, we definitely do have some single people that listen to the show and Steve and I have had our own single dish journey before getting together.

So we love all the single folks and try to talk about things that are gonna be relevant to you as well. We have, I would say, like a good chunk of people who are in the college age range that listen to the podcast, or maybe they’re just really. Starting to uncover their OCD symptoms or see them in a new way.

It may be that all that change of life stuff, that it gets really, really kicked up around that time as well. So know that it’s not all middle aged people around here. We do have some folks that are a little bit older too. More in the retired, well seasoned age range. Okay. You don’t wanna say things like old, doesn’t sound good.

So we’ll call you retired and more seasoned. We have a lot of people who are employed full-time, and we have a lot of stay at home parents, young moms that listen to the podcast. Obviously perinatal, OCD is a thing that happens sometimes. Those symptoms can get really kicked up around that time. Not always.

So we have a variety there in terms. People that are working or stay at home parents, a majority of the people who responded have been formally diagnosed with OCD, but we do have a chunk of people that listen that have not been diagnosed with OCD. And I would say that a lot of clients that I’ve seen in the past would say.

Hey, I know I have OCD just from Googling and the various research that I’ve done, but I’ve never actually been diagnosed by a doctor or by a therapist. I would say that’s pretty common of the OCD experience when looking at the types of things that people have tried in the past in terms of. Dealing with OCD, there were quite a few of you who had tried so many different things, whether that was self-help books or faith-based counseling, ERP talk therapy.

And we just wanna say here too, that if you are gonna seek care for OCD, it’s really important that you seek somebody that has training in an evidence-based practice. And evidence-based practice means that it has been researched and studied and shown to be effective. And that would be true for really any mental health disorder.

There’s a lot of people that are doing come talk and leave therapy is what I call it. It’s where you come into the room, you talk about your week, you talk about what you’re struggling with. You maybe get an idea or two of what to do differently next week, and you come back and you repeat the whole cycle.

I’ve talked about this in podcast episodes in the past on why talk therapy is not effective for OCD. This type of come talk and leave therapy, it ends up being a lot of coating, reassurance seeking, and that just strengthens the OCD over and over. We don’t wanna do that. So make sure that you’re finding your provider who is trained in either ERPI, CCBT is doing some very strong acceptance and commitment therapy.

Something of that nature that’s really gonna help you move the needle forward. A tragedy that I think happens to a lot of people is that they spend a lot of money, time, energy on therapy for OCD or related issues, and they’re just not getting what they’re needing. At the end of the day, it’s an effort to really put in and do this work.

It’s hard to find a therapist. I hear that from you guys all the time. You’re really wanting somebody. That values your faith or is coming from that same Christian faith system and just know that I truly believe that God will bring the right person into your life or lead you to the right therapist that can help you.

I do believe that there’s help out there. Sometimes it’s just hard to find and you really have to call around, do the 15 minute consultations on the phone, like research. It’s a challenge, but I just really encourage you to seek treatment if you need it. That was something else that came out of the survey, and I have heard this from you guys in the past is the podcast has helped people be okay with taking medication for OCD or be okay with seeking out help in therapy.

And that’s just so exciting to me if this, I feel very humbled to be on this journey with you guys. Where you’re kind of like allowing me into this space to talk about hard things and also recognize like, Hey, I probably need to be doing a little bit more than just listening to a podcast. Like what is my next step?

And the next step may look very different for you versus the next person that listens to the podcast. It may really depend on the severity of the OCD that you’re dealing with. If you’re in a very severe situation, you may need some type of inpatient care or intensive outpatient type of care until you can get more stable to be able to do outpatient therapy.

If that’s where you’re at, just know that that’s okay, that it is good for you to get an assessment and try to see what you need moving forward. We have other people that are on the more milder end, or they have caught OCD a little bit earlier and they’re able to go do the self-help course online that I have with I CCB t, learn the skills, learn the tools, and I’ve been able to hear from some people that they’ve been quite successful in being able to do that and that it’s helped them greatly.

And that just really has blessed me as well. And I just want that for more and more of you guys to get some sense of freedom and some relief, but really to be empowered in your OC d journey. And that is why I have decided to change the name of the course. I have had online for a while now from Christians learning ICBT to Empowered Mind, Christian, ICBT for OCD.

Our subtitle gives you a very clear idea of what you’re gonna be getting, but that Empowered Mind piece is really the transformational process. It’s people saying, I learned these skills, and I feel so empowered to be able to have a different relationship with my OCD. A different relationship with these intrusive thoughts.

I’m getting ready on February 9th, I am going to be teaching through Empowered Mind Alive. Know that if you start the self-help now, you can always certainly upgrade to that in the future. If you are on our email list, you’ll be hearing more about this and we’ll be doing more promotions. But I am very excited about this because we’re really in the ICBT community.

We’re moving away from the 12 modules of ICBT to teach these concepts more topically. So that is what I will be doing during that live training and after we do the live trainings. My assistant goes through and does a little bit of cleanup, editing, and then we put it out there into the self-help course and integrate it that way.

Also, working on just additional worksheets to help with things like Scrupulosity to help people really start to understand their OCD or build a little bit more awareness of it. I want to start at the ground level. How do we know this is OCD or not? Sometimes people come in and they have a pretty good awareness of what’s OCD and what’s not, but oftentimes as they go through the course, they start to see OCD in areas that they didn’t see it in before.

They just thought that was their own thought process or way of thinking about things. It may be that they just thought that they were hung up or stuck on something but didn’t recognize. The obsessional reasoning process in there. So back to the survey results. Oftentimes, even if you didn’t know it was OCD people indicated that they learned that these symptoms started in early childhood or adolescence.

So that means that most of you out there, probably if you’re have been dealing with this with over 10 years, many people over 15 or 20 years if they’re older. And that’s tough. Two things can happen there when you’ve been dealing with symptoms for a long time. One is you can develop a sense of hopelessness, and I just wanna talk about this for a moment.

You may feel like I’m just never gonna get better. This is just the way life is gonna be. Uh, there are certain rituals that I’m gonna have to do in the morning. There may be certain rituals that I have to do at night. There are certain rituals I have to do in the bathroom. There are certain things that I have to do in church to try to manage all my thought processes about communion or other things that may be distracting you.

Maybe it’s certain songs or certain words that are used in church, certain topics. Things that you have a hard time reading the Bible and you may just feel some sense of resignation with this hopelessness of like, well, I’ve been dealing with this for so long. I’ve tried A, B, C, D. I tried therapy in the past.

I tried talking to the pastor. I tried reading this self-help book, and maybe it helped some, maybe some of those things help you a little bit. But you still feel stuck and you still feel like OCD is impacting your life in a big way and you don’t want it to anymore. I would just say that I have dealt with people with varying levels of severity, and I want you to know that there’s hope for you to have a different relationship with your OCD than you do now, even if it’s something that feels really ingrained or stuck.

I have watched people change patterns that have been years and years and years. It takes more time, it takes more intentionality. Sometimes it takes doing some more intensive level work, and that is something obviously that I’m hoping to do more of in the new year. So if you wanna come see me for an intensive open invitation.

Check that out on my website and definitely do some longer retreat style type therapy. And because you’ve been thinking this way for so long doesn’t mean that you can’t change. We know so much about the brain now and neuroplasticity. People can change the connections in their brain, and it’s absolutely incredible to be able to see this and know this, but it starts with a day by day by day choice to look at something differently.

To say, this is a story that I have always told myself. Do I actually believe that? Is that actually true? Am I going to continue to listen to the same OCD story that’s telling me? That I’m not saved or that I’m dirty, or that I’m not forgiven, whatever that story is. We spend a lot of time in inference based cognitive behavioral therapy.

I CCB t dismantling those stories, pulling them apart, seeing what evidence OCD is using and helping you write an alternative narrative. When I tell you that those alternative narratives are life changing. When people can actually sink into them and say, yes, this is the truth, and I believe it about God, I believe it about myself.

That is transformational. To be able to recognize I’ve been believing all these lies. And now I’m looking at my relationship with God differently. I’m looking at myself differently. What was so cool about this last round of the ICBT training was that people sent me their alternative narratives, or they had told me, Hey, I use scripture in my alternative narrative.

I thought that was absolutely a beautiful integration basically of Christianity and of the secular therapy that’s considered value free to be able to say. Wow. This is the truth that I believe that I’m going to stand on, and I’m actually gonna write it into this alternative narrative, guys. Beautiful. I think sometimes this can be an obsession as well that people have is like, well, my theme is too difficult and no one is gonna be able to help me with this theme.

And what’s interesting about that is I’ve had people say, oh, I wish I had contamination. That would be easy. I’m like, well, talk to somebody with contamination and they’ll tell you. Why it’s not easy and how germs can live everywhere. And they may have been really sick in the past and that influenced their obsessional story, or they may know a relative who’s gotten some kind of rare disease in the past or has died from something.

It’s not any easier to have one theme than the other theme. So if you’re telling yourself that your theme is not treatable. Or it’s too hard, or you wish you had a different one, then that’s a lie. People get really, really stuck up on their theme and whether or not I can help them with their theme, which I find really interesting.

’cause here’s what happens. They all get treated the same. You are not that special. I don’t say that in a mean way, but the reality is when you look at the obsessional reasoning process, it is exactly the same regardless of your theme. It just attaches to different things, different ways. OCD is still using past personal experience to tell you that, oh, it happened to you last time.

It could happen to you. This time. It’s still gonna be using things like other people’s experiences or newspaper stories or things you find on the internet. Lemme tell you, my clients tell me information that I’m like, how do you know these things? Like, are you seeking this out? Or just like, it just pops up on their social media feed because the algorithm knows what kind of things you search for.

I gotta watch out for that. I had a client who was watching a bunch of recall videos and I’m like, why are you watching this? This is not good. Or clients that really get stuck up on health anxiety that they’ll tell me about all these different strains of viruses and. Bacteria things that you can catch.

And I’m like, what? I mean even about special hand sanitizers, like you guys have done the research, you know the things and the reality is that you can get so sucked into all of that extra information that’s not relevant to what’s actually going on. Right here and right now. So that’s what ICBT teaches you is to like really narrow down, like exclude information that’s irrelevant, exclude information that is completely a result of like your hijacked imagination system where OCD takes over and creates all these pictures and horrible things that are gonna happen to you.

So you learn how to really dismantle that, but it’s the same regardless of the theme. OCD is still going to come up with all kinds of hypothetical scenarios. It doesn’t matter if they’re possible or not, it doesn’t matter the probability. OCD is going to convince you that it is real. It is going to happen, and then it’s gonna provide some lovely things we call phantom sensations, so that it not only sounds good, but now it feels real.

And because it feels real, then therefore we’re going to pop back and believe that it’s true. It just strengthens that whole doubt process for you. I noticed that people who are finding and listening to this podcast really are struggling the most with mental ruminations and automatic thought processes or words even repeating certain scriptures or Christian ideas, and obviously those mental compulsions can be very, very hard to break.

These things take time and practice and intentionality. So know that if that’s something that you’re dealing with, that A, you’re in the right place because these are the types of things that we talk about on this podcast dealing with, especially in the spiritual realm. But B, know that what I believe are there’s difference between compulsions and rituals.

I know this kind of like splitting hairs maybe for some of you, because. All rituals are composed of compulsions, but how I see it differently is like if you’ve always responded to a situation automatically with this mental compulsion, it’s now become a ritual and that’s going to be harder to break down.

It’s gonna be harder for you to not engage in that way. It still can be done. And you still have to know like why you’re doing it, I think is a big key component of it. Why you don’t need to give into that repetitive prayer is a huge thing. Once you know that, then it’s also learning to deal with some of the distressing anxiety and emotion of, if I don’t respond to this, it’s gonna feel really bad.

Then we kind of hit up against identity work of who am I if I don’t respond in this way? That’s huge. Talk about that a lot in I Ccbt. I think it’s a huge missing experience in ERP therapy. That’s just my opinion. I’ve not really met ERP therapists who are talking to me about how their client’s identities have to change in order to not give into these compulsions.

But after seeing hundreds of ooc D clients, this is what I believe. You cannot be the same person and continue to do these same behaviors, your identity itself is actually gonna have to change. And that’s not a bad thing. What rubs up against is how are other people gonna respond to me in my life if I do change?

Like, what’s gonna happen there? So just know that, that those are really important pieces. I think what I wanna say about the survey is that. So many of you have been struggling with OCD for so long. It feels really entrenched. It may have waxed and waned over these years depending on how stressed you were or how not stressed you were, how stuck you were on a particular theme.

Or sometimes that theme just kind of runs its course and then it’s done and you think, okay, well maybe I’m doing a little bit better and maybe I’m okay here. I do have a tremendous amount of empathy for how hard that is. How hard it is to get up every day and feel like you’re in a battle before your feet even hit the floor, because you can wake up having thought processes.

Sometimes that happens to me. I know, I’m sure it happens to other people as well. I woke up in the middle of the night the other night and I told my husband, I said, I woke up having thoughts. I can’t tell you what they were about. I just know that my brain was kind of like running when I woke up, and at some point I went back to sleep.

Sometimes your thoughts are always gonna be there, and so really learning, okay, how can I make the most of this struggle? How can I adapt my life? How can I live in a way that’s purposeful, that’s honoring to God, that where I can love God? I love other people knowing that there may be a remnants of this struggle in here till the day I die.

This may be the thorn in the flesh. Some of you probably, if you’re earlier on in your journey, don’t wanna hear that. Don’t wanna believe that. And while I say that, I do believe that there’s hope that you can have a different relationship with your OCD. I do believe that treatment works. It doesn’t mean that you’re never gonna struggle with this ever again.

And so coming to that place of understanding. Leaning into that acceptance that at the end of the day, OCD is a chronic condition, and what I want you to know is that you can have tools to be able to respond to these mental compulsions differently tools to be able to respond to physical compulsions differently and know that you can dismantle some of these OCD arguments.

There were a lot of frustrations with ERP that came out of the survey as well. People who feel like, Hey, I tried it. It didn’t work. It hasn’t been successful. Sometimes people feel like, okay, ERP was really helpful for this theme that was maybe a little bit more physical compulsion related, but now that I have more of a mental.

Or more scrupulosity theme. I’m not finding ERP to be helpful or you don’t want to engage with ERP because it requires sitting with some very uncomfortable thought processes and not responding to them or exposing yourself to things that you don’t want to expose yourself to because they don’t feel aligned with you spiritually.

And I would say if that’s you, you fall into that category, you’re definitely in the right place. There were a couple of survey responses of people who had taken the self-help worse and who feel very positive about it and felt like it was very helpful to them. I think there were a couple people who felt like they were in a level of remission of OCD symptoms from taking that.

Like I said, it depends on how long this is going on, what your level of severity is. Whether there’s a lot more like generalized anxiety that has not popped into OCD symptoms. Obviously this is gonna look different for different people, but I just found that so encouraging that people in different parts of the United States or in other parts of the world could hop on, learn from these live trainings that I have done, that have been put now into the self-help modules and feel like.

They’re in a good place with their OCD. That to me, was so huge, especially for many of you who are dealing with sexual themes. That’s something that comes up quite a bit and can be very shameful. Blasphemy can be really hard for people. To go into therapy and talk about, and while I believe that there’s huge value in sharing your life with another trusted person, where you can unpack some of these things together, I know the challenges that people have.

Maybe it’s three to six months to get into see a therapist. Maybe they’ve called around and they just haven’t found anybody. Maybe it wasn’t financially feasible, whatever the story is. The fact that people were able to hop on and it takes some level of diligence and planning, some intentionality to say, Hey, I’m gonna get on here every week, watch this 45 minute video.

I’m gonna take about 30 minutes to do these homework worksheets and really apply it to my life. But the fact that people have had the diligence to get on there and do that was very encouraging to me, and I am so thankful. I know that empowered mind is not for everybody out there, because I know some of you say, you know what?

I don’t have the self discipline to go in there and do the work. Or you may not be ready. There may be some type of ambivalence. You may be struggling with hopelessness. You may feel like, man, that’s gonna take a lot of emotional energy or mental energy that I just can’t expend right now. And if that’s, you know that, that’s okay.

But I would just really challenge all of you who are listening to this. What is your next step in your OCD journey? Know that you are not alone, that there are many other people out here struggling with you. That was part of the point of talking about this, that many people are suffering in silence. But what is your next step?

Maybe you haven’t ever bought a self-help book before. You want to try that verse? Maybe you haven’t ever been vulnerable with anybody and talked with them about your OCD. Maybe it’s just a friend or a family member or a spiritual mentor or a pastor. Maybe that is the next step for you to ease some of that shame and practice a healthy level of vulnerability.

Obviously, you wanna make sure that that’s a safe person. We have an episode on that that you could search for on our website about telling someone else about your OCD. Maybe your next step is to try medication if that’s something that you’ve never tried before, so that you’re not having to constantly fight thoughts over and over and over again, and if medication could help ease some of that burden for you, maybe that’s your next step.

So really think through and process. What’s the next step that I wanna take on my OCD healing journey? For some of you, it’s gonna be to get better sleep. For others of you, it might be to reduce your stress or to eat a little bit better, whatever it is. I just encourage you to take action today. Take one small step towards the life that you’re wanting to live and really pray through.

Ask the Lord. What is my next step? What’s the next thing I need to do? Maybe it’s search for a counselor. Maybe it’s send an email. Maybe it’s talk to a trusted person. Whatever that is, I want to encourage you to do that and just know that you can always find me online@kerryblock.com. I have an email that I send out once a week as a point of encouragement to you.

I’ll share little stories about my daughter and other things that I’m learning, things that are going on in my life, funny little stories and things like that. So we’d love to have you get our weekly newsletter comes out every Wednesday morning. Thank you so much for listening and tuning. 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.

204. Putting to Bed Year End Regret to Start Fresh in the New Year

Written by Carrie Bock on December 31, 2025. Posted in Podcast Episode.

In this episode., Carrie explores how Christians can navigate year-end regret with both honesty and grace, especially when OCD keeps pulling them back into “what ifs” and past decisions.

Episode Highlights:

How to acknowledge regret without getting stuck in rumination or shame.
Why accepting God’s forgiveness is more powerful than trying to “forgive yourself.”
A simple four-step process for moving through regret with honesty and grace.
How OCD distorts regret and keeps you replaying the past, and how to step out of that cycle.
What Peter’s story teaches us about restoration, calling, and God’s tender pursuit of His children.
How to trust God’s sovereignty when you fear your decisions may have “messed up” His plan.

Episode Summary:

Have you ever stepped into a new year wishing you could go back and undo something from the year before? As we wrap up 2025, I am talking about the quiet weight of regret and how OCD can magnify it until it feels overwhelming.

In this episode of Christian Faith and OCD, I share from my own life and from years of counseling Christians with OCD who struggle to let go of the past, often fearing they have somehow stepped outside of God’s will or His forgiveness.

I’ll walk you through a four step process that helps us face regret with honesty, compassion, and a deeper awareness of God’s presence in our story. You will hear how I have had to apply these steps to my own year, from business decisions that did not go as planned to relational fallouts that left me seeking wisdom and healing.

We also look at Peter’s story in Scripture and how Jesus restores him after his denials, reminding us that God knows exactly where to find us when we feel ashamed or stuck.

If OCD has kept you replaying your decisions or wondering if you have ruined something God intended for your life, I pray this episode brings reassurance that His sovereignty covers your missteps and His grace is more than enough.

Tune into this episode, and share it with someone who needs a gentle, hope filled reminder of God’s love as they enter a new year.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the last podcast episode of the year. Since we’re closing out 2025, I wanted to talk a little bit about dealing with year end regret as you’re evaluating 2025, looking to 2026 or whenever you happen to land on this episode, if you’re dealing with regret. That’s what we’re talking about today.

Hello and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD with Carrie Bock.. I’m a Christ follower, wife and mother licensed professional counselor who helps Christians struggling with OCD get to a deeper level of healing. When I couldn’t find resources for my clients with OCD, God called me to bring this podcast to you.

With practical tools for developing greater peace, we’re here to bust through the shame and stigma surrounding struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories of healing and helping you replace uncertainty with faith. I’m here to help you let go of the past and future to walk in the present abundant life God has for you.

So let’s dive right into today’s episode. I think this is a very common topic for Christians. Worked with many different types of people. Worked with people who were carried regret over abortion, past drug and alcohol use, relationships that fell apart. Mistakes that they felt like they made that maybe they felt like were mistakes that they couldn’t recover from, or that OCD told them they couldn’t be forgiven for those things.

Of course we know that is a lie. We know that if we confess our sins, God does forgive us, but OCD will tell you all kinds of things like that. I really try hard not to live with regrets, and the reason for that is because I do believe that I’m intentional about the decisions and choices that I make, and I know that things don’t always go as we plan in life, that we’re only dealing with the information that we have now to make a certain decision.

And when we get further on down the line, we say, oh, if I had only known this or only known that, I wouldn’t have made that decision. Of course, that’s something that we all go through, but we didn’t have that information perhaps prior. And so we can enter this conversation, I think with a level of self-compassion, but also reframe mistakes or failures as an opportunity for learning.

And if we do that, then we can grow. Change into who God desires for us to be. If we spend all of our time just beating ourselves up about mistakes or regrets, things we wish we had done differently, it actually keeps us from being able to move forward in a healthy, productive way. This is just what I have noticed from my own life experience, but also of course, the experience of counseling hundreds of thousands of people at this point.

Are there some things that I wish went differently in 2025? For sure. I think that I stayed in certain business relationships for too long. I had tried to hire an assistant. I worked on training her and it just didn’t work out. We weren’t a good fit in this particular situation. I kept her for too long. I should have let her go much sooner than I did, and I should have done a better job of recruiting the next person.

The next person, unfortunately, did not work out either, but I made some shifts and changes. I decided to hire within some personal connections that I had and thought, okay, this is gonna work out better. Unfortunately, it did not. So I learned once again from that experience now on my third assistant, which makes me sound like a horrible person to work for.

I don’t think that’s the case. I think I just really didn’t know what I was doing in terms of hiring and had to make these mistakes in order to figure it out and say, okay, I need to approach this with a different level than I had been. I was approaching it with this like very chill. Laid back Carrie approach.

I just need somebody for a few hours a week. Do you think maybe you could help me out approach, instead of approaching it from, Hey, Carrie is the boss and has specific needs for her organization that really would help her out be able to fulfill the things that God has called her to do. And so when I got into that stance the third time around, I believe that God brought me the right person.

I can carry that experience with me to the next time that I bring somebody on the team. I think I was super blessed with my very first podcast assistant that I ever hired several years ago who does all our editing, who edits videos for the course, who does really a variety of behind the scenes stuff for you guys that you just don’t even know about.

Works on our emails every week. She has been amazing, and I didn’t have to go through that same process. That I had to go through this time around hiring someone. I didn’t have the opportunity to learn it then I am thankful ’cause I might have just given up and tried to do it all myself. But I had the opportunity and persevered and learned from this experience.

But I said, well, do you have any wishes about it going differently? Yes. Would I advise someone else to do things differently? Definitely, yes. Don’t take the casual energy approach in hiring somebody, even if you only need a few hours a week. That’s my free tidbit of advice that has nothing to do with OCD.

I also had some relationship disconnections and fallouts this year, which has really caused me to pray through and evaluate the friendships in my life and the business connections. I knew that at some point or another, this relationship was going to fall out because that was this person’s pattern. I had even said something to them about it, like, I’m kind of surprised that you haven’t written me off.

Uh, like you have written most of the other people off in your life. And of course the response I got was, oh no, this is different, et cetera. That was those other people. And then of course I became the other person, because when people are trying to tell you about themselves and you look at the pattern, then you’re going to see that pattern be repeated unless that person is intentionally working to change that pattern.

And in this individual, they were not working on changing that pattern. I think what I took away and learned from that experience was. To be selective about who I invite into my inner circle. That was one thing that I learned and unfortunately the sad part about that is I’ve been a little bit more closed off probably from some people that are trying to get to know me.

I think because of the hurt and the woundedness there, that’s something I’m still in process and I’m praying through and just asking God to give me the wisdom and know like when it’s okay to open up and when I need to hold back a little bit more until I know that person well enough to open up to them.

I don’t have any regrets about being in that relationship for the time that I was in it. I think that we were able to support each other in a way, and we both needed that. I am sad about how it ended and unfortunately there just wasn’t any desire on that other person’s part to make any type of repair or restoration or coming back together.

That was hurtful because I felt like we were worth that and had hoped that we would be able to do that or find some type of resolution. So know that sometimes you can do your best and things still don’t go the way that you want them to go or the way that you feel like they should go. That’s just a reality that we have to sit with in life.

The thing about OCD is that it likes to keep you ruminating on the past. Maybe you’ve replayed scenarios in your mind over and over again of things that have already happened, and typically these are negative things that you’re playing over and over. If we’re stuck in the past, then it’s a huge distraction from whatever God is calling you to in the present right now.

And so we have to be able to put some of those. Things from the to bed so that we can move forward in confidence and in walking where God wants us to in the present and moving into the future. And the new year of course, is a great time for that fresh start. I have a four step process for you on dealing with.

I was preparing for this episode, I thought, what’s a good Bible character that we could really look at together who maybe dealt with some regret, and how did they deal with that in a healthy way? First, you can look at someone that didn’t deal with it in a healthy way. We have Judas who has a regret over betraying Jesus and then ends up going out and killing himself.

And you can contrast this with Peter’s denial of Jesus three times and how he’s restored in John 21. We’re gonna get into that a little bit later. Spoiler alert. But the first step is acknowledge that you can’t change the past. Now, this sounds pretty simplistic and it is, but it’s still hard to do. I think we spend so much time fighting reality of what is, if I were to say about that relationship, well, what if I had brought up this or what if I had said that?

Would that have somehow changed the outcome? Or should I not have connected myself with that person as deeply as I did? Should I have kept some distance? You could just go around and around and around that block all day long. But the reality is that relationship is now severed and I can’t do anything about it.

And the only person that can potentially do something about that is that other person. Peter could not go back in time and say, okay, I’m not gonna deny Jesus no. Now that was his full intentions because he told Jesus No. Like I would die for you. I wouldn’t deny you. And Jesus predicted that at the Last Supper.

However, once it was done, it was done. He couldn’t change his behavior. So know that you can’t go back and change your behavior, whatever that a part of the equation was, and it may be something that you had some control over. It may have been a situation that you didn’t have full control over, that the other person made some negative decisions and you were affected by them.

We have to actually sit here and acknowledge what happened, what was my role or my decisions in this situation, and then to be really, really honest with ourselves at a very flat line. Newspaper headline level, for example, the relationship is over. My first two assistants did not work out, and when we sit with that, we have to then therefore be able to sit with the emotions that come up with that, whether that’s sadness, whether that’s anger and frustration.

Because oftentimes we are fighting the reality or fighting the truth because we don’t wanna sit and feel those hard things. These are God-given emotions, and there are going to be experiences that you have in life that are hard, that involve suffering. That involve pain and we need to be able to deal with the feelings that arise when those things come up.

Being honest with ourself also leads into step number two, which is to seek repentance and forgiveness as necessary. If there’s something that you’ve done wrong and you know that you need to ask God for forgiveness, you know that maybe you need to ask another person for forgiveness and if, if you don’t follow step one and aren’t honest about what’s really occurred.

Then you’re not gonna seek step two of being able to acknowledge that sin to God, acknowledge that regret that you have to God so that he can do something with it, so that we can, like I said, move forward from it. So if we’re acknowledging it, then we can give it over to God. We can seek forgiveness. And if you have sought forgiveness, then you need to know that you are forgiven.

I see communication sometimes where people will say to me, you know, I just need to forgive myself. I know God’s forgiven me, and I need to forgive myself. And this actually came up in our small group recently, and I said, I just don’t see that in scripture. I don’t see anywhere where it says God’s forgiven.

You now go forgive yourself. What we need to do is we need to accept the truth of God’s forgiveness. We need to say, I’m forgiven because the scripture tells me that I’m, that I know that I have asked for forgiveness for this. I know I have confessed. I know I have turned away from that sin and made a different choice.

That’s repentance. It’s taken a step turn away from it and people can hold on to stuff for years, in years in years. You can accept God’s forgiveness and let that rest. You do not have to continue to ruminate on past sins. God has separated your sin as far as the east is from the west. If someone’s bringing it up, it’s either you or the devil, and it’s time to let it go.

It’s time to not feed into that really being able to acknowledge the sin or like acknowledge the thing that you felt like you did wrong. Give that over to God, receive forgiveness. Say, and if it’s something that was a long time ago, say, yes, I know that I am forgiven because of what one John one, nine says that if we confess our sin, he’s faithful and just to forgive us our sins.

There are no exceptions to that rule. There are no, well, if you committed this sin, you’re not gonna be forgiven. It is what it is. Now the interesting thing about Peter’s situation, when you see him in John 21, your sword, you have to remember what Peter’s original calling was in Matthew four 19. Jesus told Peter, follow me and I will make you fishers of men, because he was out fishing with his brother, Andrew, but this was his calling.

Come follow me. I’m gonna make you fishers of men. What does Peter do after he denies Jesus? He goes back to his old way of life. He goes to fish, can’t even fish anymore, right? Like he doesn’t catch anything. Kind of a disaster until Jesus says, throw your net on the other side of the boat, and then they collect a bunch of fish.

This is interesting, right, that Jesus comes to Peter to restore him. I don’t see a situation in here where Peter is going to Jesus. Necessarily, he does get outta the boat and run towards him, which is really cool. But God is able to meet us in the midst of our lowest place in the midst of our shame regarding our sin, in the midst of whatever you have been through.

And that’s really, really incredible, is that Jesus knew where to find Peter, that he was gonna find him on this beach. He was gonna find him going back to fishing for fish instead of fishing for men. Has this encounter with Peter of, do You Love Me? Peter says, yes, I love you. And this goes through three times.

And it’s a mirror, essentially of his denials of Jesus, right? And each time Jesus tells him to feed my lambs, feed my sheep, and in this way, kind of restoring him back to his original calling and original ministry as a disciple. So regardless of what you have done, whether it’s something that you did before you were saved, something you did after you were saved, that God has the ability to restore you back to your calling of what he desires for you to do and who he desires for you to be.

The third step in dealing with regret is to learn from it. I think that this is absolutely crucial and important. What is it that we can learn from this and take away and be able to do something differently? In order to do something differently? You have to know how you got there in the first place.

Okay? Where did the door of temptation open up? We know that God always provides a way of escape. But it also talks in scripture about if your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out, which is very dramatic. Please don’t go to that level. But sometimes things in scriptures are said to an extreme for emphasis, okay, how did I get in this situation where I committed this sin?

What warning signs did I ignore? Was the spirit trying to nudge me in a different direction? Did I not have a filter on my computer system like I knew that I needed one? Was I lonely and bored and scrolling through TV that I shouldn’t have been watching? Did I need to deal with my loneliness or my bored?

I’m in a different way, like really evaluating your experience. And saying, okay, what do I want to do next time? Do I need a certain level of accountability in my life that I don’t have? What do I need in order to not fall back into this same situation again? This is really huge. A lot of people, they do something, they feel shame from it.

They beat themselves up, they hide. And then they repeat the cycle. They don’t actually ever learn how they got into that place to begin with. So if you’re on the cycle of beating yourself up and living in shame, and then still making the same decisions, know that you can change that. God does provide a way of escape that you can learn new behaviors and that it’s hard, and also that we can submit ourselves to God each and every day for him to change us from the inside out.

It’s not just about us white knuckling through making different choices. Step number four I think is really, really important for OCD. Okay. Understanding that theologically, our sin and the sins of others are covered under the umbrella of God’s sovereignty. That God still used Peter, even though he sinned, even though he denied him three times.

God still used him very mightily. Why did God allow this to happen? I don’t know. Maybe it did something inside of Peter. Maybe it caused him to be more humble and to recognize his need for Christ in a greater way instead of relying on his own self-confidence. Would he have had the same level of passion for Christ had he not denied him?

I mean, I don’t know. I think that’s a question for heaven, right? Like, how did the Lord use this in your life for your good, for his glory? We know that Peter was used very mightily and became one of the apostles of the early church. There’s so much in OCD about decision making where people really fear messing up God’s sovereign plan for their lives.

I feel like if I turn right instead of left, and then somehow I’m really gonna screw things up. I just want you to know if it’s. A moral decision making that you’re trying to make, or maybe it’s not incredibly clear to you right now that the Lord wants to lead and guide you, that he’s not hiding his will from you.

That we have some very clear things that we are to do as Christians and they are love God, love people. What does the Lord require you? But to act justly, love, mercy, and walk humbly with your God. Micah six, eight. We have these commands. In scripture for us that are global, and there is a level underneath that where that could look very, very different.

How you love people and serve people might look a little bit different from how I love and serve them based on who is in your life, based on the passions that God has put within you to serve different people. And that’s okay. And know that if you are seeking God and his will, if you are. Praying and reading your Bible and being in Christian community that God is going to lead and guide you.

We have several scriptures that tell us this and that you’re not gonna mess things up. You were actually not that powerful to be able to do that. Now, you may have made a decision for the Lord and it resulted in some hardships. Status called suffering. That happens quite often. It doesn’t mean it was the wrong decision.

Let’s say for example, that you made a decision to share Christ with one of your coworkers, and then after that your coworker kind of gives you the cold shoulder, seems kind of like angry at you distances themselves, and maybe this is somebody that you are a good friend with. We know that God calls us to be, uh, witnesses, and that always going to go well for us, that we are going to experience persecution as Christians, but oftentimes, OCD will get really wrapped up and say, well, maybe you shouldn’t have said that, and maybe that wasn’t really what God wanted you to do.

And if God wanted you to do it, then it would’ve turned out better. Same thing could be said that just because you go through hard times in your marriage doesn’t mean that God didn’t want you to marry that person. It means that when we get married, it’s like the great grounds for God’s sanctification work in our life.

Marriage and children definitely will do that to you. Watch out because we really start to see ourselves in a different light when we’re in these types of close, intimate relationship and it’s sometimes it brings up best in us. Sometimes that brings out the absolute worst in us, and then we have to bring that to God and say, okay, the worst to me just came out right now.

Like I need the Holy Spirit to transform this ’cause. I don’t want to be this person. I want to be dead to my sin and alive in Christ. And that is a day by day by day process. Doesn’t happen overnight. There are no instant fixes in Christianity. That we are on a journey. We are on a walk, we are abiding, we are being pruned at times so that we will bear more fruit.

That just know that maybe what OCD is telling you might be a distorted or a twisted view of suffering in terms of decision making. I guess sometimes you can do the right thing and things just still don’t work out, and that’s a part of life and it’s hard to deal with. Then we have to feel those feelings, bring those to God and say, here’s where I’m at with this, or I’m confused.

I’m not sure what is my next step here. Regardless of whether you’re dealing with regret from 2025 or you’re dealing with regret from an experience that happened a long time ago, I want you to see if you can take some time to go through these four steps that we outlined, to pray through them, to journal through them and process and see where God has.

I think it’s a beautiful thing in scripture that we have these stories like Peter that give us hope that if God can use someone who denies Jesus three times, then certainly he can use you as well. Thank you so much for listening. 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.

203. Immanuel: God is With You Always

Written by Carrie Bock on December 15, 2025. Posted in Podcast Episode.

In this Christmas episode, Carrie dives deep into a truth we often miss in the middle of all the holiday noise, and what Immanuel—God with us truly means for those moments when we don’t feel His presence.

Episode Highlights:

The meaning of Immanuel and Jesus’ humble arrival.
How to trust God’s nearness even when you don’t feel Him
How God draws close to the brokenhearted and understands every layer of your suffering.
How the humility of Christ’s birth reflects God’s desire for intimate relationship with us.
What it looks like to walk with God daily through the Holy Spirit

Episode Summary:

As we step into the busyness of the Christmas season, I wanted to pause with you and return to the heart behind all our celebrating: Immanuel, God with us.

In this episode, I share how easy it is to get caught up in the whirlwind of gifts, lists, pageants, choir rehearsals, and all the holiday expectations that quietly pull our hearts away from the simple, stunning truth that God chose to step into our world as a humble baby. He did not come in power or prestige; He came in vulnerability and closeness so we would know, without question, that He is near.

If you’re walking through OCD, wrestling with fear or spiritual uncertainty, or carrying wounds from past hurts, especially church hurt, you will hear why your feelings of distance do not change God’s unshakable promise: “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” I walk through key Scriptures that remind us that nothing, not our doubts, not our past, not our emotions, can separate us from the love of Christ. God understands every layer of your pain, your questions, and even your fears surrounding Him. He draws near to the brokenhearted and sits with us in the messy, raw places we often hide from others.

My prayer is that this Christmas, you experience Immanuel in a fresh and deeply personal way, that you sense His compassion in your suffering, His steadiness in your uncertainty, and His invitation into a closer, moment-by-moment relationship through the Holy Spirit. He came near because He wants to walk with you, not just in the joyful moments but in the hard and lonely ones too.

Tune into the full episode for encouragement, biblical grounding, and a gentle reminder that God is truly with you, right in the middle of whatever you are facing this Christmas.

Transcript

Hello and Merry Christmas to each and every one of you. I’m saying it a little bit early because we don’t put out an episode on Christmas week here on the podcast. Hopefully you are enjoying the joys of this season, and of course, every year I try to do an episode to help bring us back to. The reason for the season, the reason that we are celebrating Christmas.

Hello and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD with Carrie Bock. I’m a Christ follower, wife and mother licensed professional counselor who helps Christian struggling with OCD get to a deeper level of healing. When I couldn’t find resources for my clients with OCD, God called me to bring this podcast to you.

So let’s dive right into today’s episode. We can get so caught up in the hustle and bustle of buying gifts, making lists, baking cookies, going to Christmas plays and pageants. Maybe you’re even in one at your church. I don’t know. Maybe you’re singing for the choir. We often sing Christmas songs with the word Emmanuel in them.

I wanted to see, do you know in Isaiah seven 14, this is a common verse we hear around Christmas. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and she’ll call his name Emmanuel. Emmanuel means God with us. That’s really the heart of Christmas. God, who could have saved us in any way that he wanted to, chose to become a baby, to come into the world like we do.

He chose to be born essentially into a stable, a place of poverty, a lowly place, not a palace where you would imagine a king coming into. That’s how God entered our world on Christmas, and I wanna thank about the promise that we have, that God is always with us. One of Jesus’s final words on Earth is at the end of Matthew 28 20.

Behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age, when we’re going through hard times, we often question, we say, God, I don’t feel you. I don’t sense your presence. It doesn’t seem like you’re here. I feel abandoned right now. But the truth of the matter is that God has never left us. Even in the times where we’ve left him, God continues to call us back, continues to say, you are still my child and I still love you.

Romans 8 38 and 39 tell us for I am sure that neither death nor life nor angels nor rulers. Nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Hebrews 13 to five tells us, I will never leave you nor forsake you.

So when you are lied to by the enemy, who doesn’t want you to believe that God loves you, who doesn’t want you to believe that God is with you? Who doesn’t want you to believe that God is for you? Or when you doubt because you don’t feel God being close to you or you feel like he’s abandoned you just remember to hold on to these truth principles.

And say, okay, God, even if I don’t feel you in the midst of my circumstance right now, even if I feel afraid, lonely, understanding that my feelings aren’t always facts, sometimes they’re based on past experiences that have happened to me. They’re based on potentially church leaders that have hurt me.

Other family members that have wounded me, and I’m now taking that and projecting that onto God and saying, you must be like this person that hurt me, but God is not like that person that has hurt you. And even though there are people in the church that are not representing Christ, we cannot blame God for other people’s behavior.

We have to be grounded in the scriptural truth of who God is. Know that if you are hurting, that the Bible tells us that God is near to the broken hearted in Psalm 34 18. That’s a beautiful scripture verse because when you feel hurt and you feel like God is so far that the scriptures tell us that he is near to you, he is near to people who are hurting and who are suffering.

If you’re listening to this and you’re struggling with OCD, you may really be questioning and doubting who God is. You may be doubting who you are in relationship to him. You may have all types of fears surrounding God or the Holy Spirit. Know that God understands those things. Know that God relates to you and identifies.

Know that God understands everything that you are going through, even more than you do at a deep, intimate level, and he loves you and wants to come alongside you. He loves you and wants to show himself to you. So I encourage you as you go throughout this Christmas season to really seek God, seek Jesus for who he is.

Be like the shepherds who were told that Jesus was here and they stopped and they ran to see for themselves. You may be relying on what other people have told you about God, which may or may not be true. You may be relying on some information you received from a persona on the internet that may or may not be true about God, but we have the opportunity to come to Jesus, to meet him through the scriptures and to seek him in prayer to find out who he really is.

God entered our world, became God with us at Christmas because he wants to have an intimate relationship with us. He could have stayed lofty, aloof, distant, said, Hey, I am holy. I’m set apart, and I don’t want to get that close to you. You’re sinful. God could have said that. But he didn’t do that. He could have saved us from afar, but he decided to come near because he wants to have an intimate relationship with you, and that intimate relationship isn’t just about being saved.

It’s about a day to day walk where you get up and you say, good morning to God, where you say, Hey, I lay my day before you. These are the things that I have on my calendar. Allow me to be open to your Holy Spirit and what you want me to do now, that if you are in Christ, you have the Holy Spirit inside of you.

I’m super excited to be having a podcast guest that’s gonna come on, and we’re gonna talk about this a little bit more in depth about hearing from God. Jesus said that it was good for him to go away so that we could receive the Holy Spirit. This is so mind blowing. How could it be good for Jesus to go away?

I’m sure the disciples were thinking the same thing. What do you mean it’s good if you go away? Jesus said, I am sending you the Holy Spirit. I am sending you the counselor. Jesus is sending us an advocate to live inside of us. So that we can be in tune with God on a day-to-day, moment by moment basis.

This is an absolutely beautiful thing. If the Holy Spirit is inside of you, he’s not leaving you. We know that we can quench the spirit, that we can distance ourselves from God. And harm that relationship. Then we have an opportunity to repair it through repentance, through forgiveness and grace and mercy.

So we in ourselves can push God away, but God doesn’t remove himself from us. If we are in Christ, we have been justified, which is a legal term, to show that our sins have been wiped clean. God is not holding those things against us. I know oftentimes I talk with people who are still holding on to guilt and shame for past sin.

You don’t need to do that. The forgiveness is available for you. We can’t undo the consequences. We can’t change the past, but what we can do is say today as I’m here, I am standing in Christ’s forgiveness and I am going to walk out as a forgiven person. Because what we do, and we’re still stuck in that guilt and shame is oftentimes we go back to those types of behaviors because our focus is all off.

Our focus is not on being renewed and sanctified in Christ day by day. We’re looking in the rear view mirror, trying to drive the spiritual car, and God wants you to know that he came so that we could have a fresh start, a new beginning in Christ. I wanna talk about God being with us always, even in the midst of our suffering.

OCD may be taking hours out of your day. I want you to know that Joseph and Mary, who were following God’s desires for their life and were following in obedience, they didn’t have an easy road. Mary was bouncing along on a donkey at nine months pregnant. That sounds. Terrible. Has anyone ever thought of that?

That sounds horrible. Joseph had public disgrace and shame. Both of them really did. Why are you marrying this woman that’s pregnant now? You guys have done something that’s not honoring in God’s sight. I’m sure that they were judged. They ended up with no room at the end. Not because they didn’t have family that they could stay with.

They most likely had family they could stay with. They were traveling to where they were originally from. They didn’t have an easy road doing what God had called them to do. Sometimes we mistakenly think if I’m in the will of God or if I’m doing the things that God wants me to do, if I’m being obedient and somehow God is gonna pave this smooth road before me.

And everything’s going to be easy and fine. It just doesn’t work that way. God is refining us. He’s making us new, and there’s blessing in obedience, but there can also be a cost to it as well, and we have to know that we have to understand and know that there is a cost to being a disciple and following the ward.

Know that if you’re suffering right now, there’s a greater story. There’s a purpose in it. We don’t fully understand it when we’re going through it at the time. It’s really hard. We can rest. Knowing God has our best interests at heart, knowing that he sees everything and we only see a small sliver of a detail.

God being with us doesn’t mean that always, that the difficult pieces are going to be removed. What it does mean is that he will walk with us on that difficult journey and carry us through the hard moments. Jesus understands what you are going through. He knows what it’s like to have friends walk out on him.

I’ve lost some significant relationships in the past couple of years. It’s been hard. It’s been a difficult road. I’ve outgrown some of my friendships in the sense that we’re just two different people living two different lives. They’re a great person. Still love them. We’re just not jiving the way that we used to anymore, and it’s okay.

Jesus understands that. He understands loneliness. He understands loss of community. He understands relationship issues, rejection. He knows what it’s like to be tired, to be exhausted, to feel like you just need God so desperately. That’s why Jesus got up early in the morning and prayed. That’s why the night that he was betrayed, he was in the garden praying as his disciples were falling asleep because he knew that he needed God so desperately.

If you are feeling or thinking, God is not with me today. Know that Christmas provides us his beautiful truth. God is Emmanuel. He is with us. He is not too far off removed from what we are going through. He understands and he feels our pain at the deepest level of suffering. Whether that’s suffering is physical or emotional, or whether you even just feel spiritually wounded from church hurt situations or rejections.

May you be blessed this Christmas season. May God give you the eyes to see that he is right there with you. This whole time. I’ll be back on the podcast right before the new year to talk about letting go of end of the year regrets in order to be able to move into. This is the new season of 2026, so if you’re holding onto anything from the past, you’re gonna wanna check out that episode.

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.

202. Why I’m Grieving When No One Has Died: The End of my Individual Therapy Practice

Written by Carrie Bock on December 9, 2025. Posted in Counseling, OCD, Podcast Episode.

In this episode of Christian Faith and OCD, Carrie shares the unexpected grief she’s walking through as she steps away from individual therapy. She reflects on how God is leading her into a new chapter and explores how you can move through your own transitions with faith, courage, and compassion.

Episode highlights:

Why Carrie is no longer offering weekly individual therapy and what this shift has looked like emotionally, spiritually, and practically.
The unique benefits of intensive therapy like EMDR and ICBT for Christians with OCD and trauma, and how it differs from weekly counseling.
How overthinking, early childhood experiences, and self-doubt can fuel OCD, and why deeper work on these roots can bring meaningful relief.
How ICBT integrates with Christian faith, especially around identity in Christ.
Practical ways to walk through your own transitions with honesty, grief, and hope, while trusting God’s leading.

Episode Summary:

Welcome back to the podcast, OCD Warriors. As we move toward the end of the year, I’m opening up about a tender place in my heart and a transition that has brought its own kind of grief.

I’m calling this episode “Why I’m Grieving When No One Has Died,” because sometimes the deepest aches come not from losing a person, but from letting go of a season we’ve loved.

In this conversation, I share why I’m closing the doors on providing individual therapy after several years and how God has gently led me into a new chapter through prayer, discernment, and a whole lot of wrestling. You’ll hear how grief can quietly weave its way through life transitions, even when the world around you is cheering you on. I open up about the emotional weight of telling long-term clients goodbye, the beauty I’ve seen in intensive therapy, and the way God keeps inviting me to trust Him as I expand my work with Christians learning ICBT.

As you listen, you’ll learn how grief shows up in transitions, why my practice is shifting, what intensive work is making possible, how I’m processing both fear and obedience, and the new ways I hope to support this community moving forward.

My hope is that as you listen, you feel permission to honor the grief in your own transitions, even the ones that others may not notice or fully understand.

If you are grieving something right now and no one has died, please know you are not alone. God meets us tenderly in these in-between seasons, and His love remains steady through every change we face.

Transcript

Welcome back to the podcast OCD Warriors. As we’re getting towards the end of the year, I wanted to share a little bit of a personal episode for you and I titled this, Why I Am Grieving When No One Has Died.

Hello, and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD with Carrie Bock. I’m a Christ follower. Wife and mother licensed professional counselor who helps Christians struggling with OCD get to a deeper level of healing.

I’m here to help you let go of the past and future to walk in the present abundant life God has for you. So let’s dive right into today’s episode. You may be familiar with grief and loss and what that experience feels like if you’ve lost a loved one. However, we often don’t talk about how certain life transitions that we have carry a sense of grief with them.

Think about graduating college or graduating high school. If you didn’t go to college, you develop these close friendship relationships. And it’s a super happy time, right? Everyone’s happy for you. They might throw you a party, give you gifts, you get money. Yay, rah rah. But then on the flip side, life as you know, it is definitely changing.

You have to leave your familiar environment. You may be getting your first adult job and it can be exciting and scary all at the same time. Oftentimes, we don’t take time to reflect how transitioning from one season to another can carry with it grief as well as joy. So that’s what I’m talking with you about today as I talk about this transition that’s happening in my practice, and I wanted to give you this information for two reasons.

One, to talk about normalizing grief outside of death, grief in transitions, but also to let many of you know who are inquiring about services from me. That I am closing the doors on my individual therapy practice. It’s even hard for me to sit here and say that out loud to you. I have said it over and over to many people that I have emailed in a form email recently.

I haven’t been super public about this. I think partially because it’s scary because it’s a new, because it’s very different than how homeless therapists operate. But it’s really just a process that the Lord has had me on, and this is the next step for me. I don’t know exactly what it’s going to look like.

I just know it’s going to look very differently than it has over the, say, the last 10 years of providing outpatient therapy. About eight of those have been with my own practice, and then two of those were with a group practice prior. And when I started out on this journey of getting out of community mental health that I was in, I’ve pretty much run the gamut of counseling that I have done.

I’ve counseled children and families in their homes. I have counseled people who are in residential treatment centers, people that are coming out of addiction or facing some serious mental health challenges. That feels like a very, very long time ago now. When I say it to you, but that was where I got started with.

Then moving into more of an outpatient counseling and then moving into private practice, having my own business. There have been a lot of transitions along the way. I made a very significant. Transitional decision in 2019 to say, Hey, I am had this practice in Nashville for two years, and now I am moving it to Smyrna.

That was a really big deal. Traffic wise, Nashville is kind of far in terms of dealing with traffic. It’s not far distance wise, but those of you who live in a city or a suburb and understand that transition or that commute. That was a struggle and obviously some people were commuting from other areas to get to me where I was in Nashville, so I wasn’t necessarily moving closer to any client, but I had made a big decision to say, Hey, I want to have a marriage and a family one day I want, and if I’m going to do that.

My practice location needs to be more closer to my home. And that was hard because it meant saying that if you’re going to see me, you’re either going to have to go online and we’re gonna have to see each other online, which was a newer thing. This was prior to COVID. People weren’t really as keen on that, or you’re gonna have to drive a significant distance.

Of course, I had no idea that office space was barely going to be used for six to eight months until. Everybody was online and I made a decision to remain online until my daughter was about one years old, that I would only come into the office in 2023. I got some office space in Smyrna, so I have been there providing individual therapy and intensive therapy as well as.

Online therapy for people in the state of Tennessee. What’s really shifted and changed over the last year is that my intensive therapy side of my practice has exploded. That was something that I was really enjoying and have been happy. That it’s grown. Of course, it’s hard to manage seeing people individually on a weekly basis, and then also having people come in often from out of town for a Wednesday through Friday intensive retreat type scenario.

I was able to move my clients all to Monday and Tuesday, do some shuffling there. That took a little bit of time, but even after doing that and also focusing on the podcast, focusing on Christians learning ICBT. I really got to a point where I was too busy this year busier than I would like to be trying to balance my family life and my work life, and it’s really been just a process of contemplation, prayer.

Dreaming about where things are going in the future that I have made this difficult decision to not take on any more individual therapy clients and to take time to wind down and finish up the work that I have with the individual therapy clients that I have now. I think I’m probably down to around eight clients, a few that I see every week, and then the rest I see.

Every other week right now, but this transition has been hard. The grieving process has been that several people have come back to try to get on my schedule or see me that I had been seeing for a long time in the past, and I had developed deep relationships with, and I said, I can’t see you anymore. I’m really trying to eliminate this part of my practice.

Let me try and see if I can provide you with a referral. It’s been so hard to tell people. No, that has been very painful. ’cause of course I love these clients and I want them to thrive and do well, and I know how hard it is to start over with somebody else. Steve and I were even talking about this in a friendship sense.

At a point I was telling him, I’ve been trying to get to know this one mom friend for about a year now. Off and on. We’ll get together and hang out. I said, there’s so much that she just has no idea about me. Like I’ve lived lives that she doesn’t even know about me. I don’t know that she knows that I was ever married before.

I don’t know if she knows I have a podcast unless she’s Googled me. Probably not. It’s not something that I’d say, Hey, I’m Carrie Bach and I have a podcast. When I meet people in my personal life, which is super interesting. I got called out on Front Street one time by somebody that said, Hey, I looked you up and saw that you had a podcast, and I was like, oh, oh.

Yeah, that thing. So imagine you’re sitting down to talk with somebody and trying to fill them in on this stuff that you know, your previous therapist just has this kind of vault of information about you. And people will even look at me and say, oh, you remember that story I told you? I was like. Yeah, no, I don’t remember everything and I do take a lot of notes, which helps me remember things and helps me stay on track.

But it’s just nice to have somebody that you have that history and have that background with when you’re navigating care. So I’ve been in this place of really wanting to honor my clients and the work that they’ve done. My past clients as well as, um, and people that would just kind of randomly pop in every once in a while and check in.

I’ve had to say no to that in order to say yes to the new things that God is doing, and once again lives and things being separate. I had people that were coming in for individual therapy that are not necessarily following along with podcasts, not necessarily even maybe knowing that I have an online course.

They’re just there for individual therapy and that’s what they want to do and receive. So they’re not necessarily knowing all these other things that are going on in my life and practice. I’m really thankful for this season that I had to sit down with people. Week after week after week and be a consistent presence in their life.

I think that that’s so huge to just provide a sense of hopefully unconditional love of Christ for people. When I started out in practice, many of the people, I was very insurance based and many of the people were not Christians, and they had no idea why I named my practice by the well counseling. They were like.

That’s cute. The Christians would always say, well, I came to you because I saw that you had this name and read your, your bio information and figured out that you were a Christian. I didn’t hide it by any means, but I didn’t have a openly Christian practice. When I started out, I was like, Hey, I am a Christian.

If you want something Christian, we can incorporate that, but if not, we don’t have to. Through the process of having this podcast has really shifted my practice to now pretty much exclusively Christian clients who are seeking the spiritual integration for their OCD or for their trauma. It’s helped me understand and realize my calling more to the church and to empowering Christians to get back out on the battlefield.

Be in the game, so to speak. I want to be that person on the sidelines that helps bandage people up and sends them back out to do great things for the kingdom. I’m thankful for that whole process and road that the Lord has had me on in this time of individual therapy. I think there’s really something beautiful about.

The level of consistency, the level of building trust that you can have with somebody. For some people it takes ’em a really long time to build trust with a provider, and some people have really been burned in the past, and that’s understandable. Just being able to be. Patient and walk alongside people until they were ready to share parts of their story has been a beautiful learning process for me.

I tend to be a little bit of a speedy rabbit going down the trail like, okay, you wanna do this? All right, let’s go. Here’s A, B, C, D, and have this tendency and need to sometimes pull back and slow down and meet people where they’re at. That’s something that the Lord has had to work with me on over time.

Definitely patience, but I am a big doer and go-getter. Some of you can really relate to that, whether it’s talking about work or spirituality or other things. I’ve had to learn to rest and to follow other people’s leads in terms of joining with them. If I’m not going to be doing individual therapy, of course that begs the question, what am I going to be doing?

And I alluded to this a little bit earlier in the conversation. As my intensive therapy offerings expanded, and I started to have more and more people traveling out of state for multi-day intensives, two to three days where they’re able to dive into some deeper level material work on trauma that they know is contributing to OCD.

Or maybe they wouldn’t identify it as trauma, but just early childhood messaging or experiences with caregivers that really led to self-doubt. That led to a need for a lot of reassurance that led to questions and with identity or feeling bad about themselves or being unable to trust their internal data, trust their emotions or feelings.

As I saw, just the huge value in all of this. The time that it takes for overthinkers to really sink down into their nervous system. Sometimes it’s just hard to get there in a 50 minute session where people are having to then go pick up kids or go back to work or talk to their spouse and connect in that type of way.

Trauma work can be done in 50 minute sessions, and I did that with EMDR for years. There’s certainly pluses and minuses to that approach. The difficulties and the challenges is that sometimes people can become very dysregulated when they’re going through trauma processing, and it takes a little bit of time to come out of that and regroup when you only have 50 minutes.

That really shortens your time for processing because then you’re leaving this time. For people to calm down and to regulate. It seems like if you give people more time, they become less dysregulated. That’s been my experience so far, is that people are able to move through the trauma process and it almost gives their brain this permission slip to go there, to go deeply, but then also to know like, Hey, we’re gonna package this up.

We have enough time to get through this. It’s okay to really get in there. Feel, get in there and cry. If we need to get in there and see the messaging for what it is to be able to change our thought process about something, it’s just been really incredibly beautiful work. I’ve seen people experience an immense amount of relief in these intensive sessions.

Usually, for those of you who don’t know, we do three hours in the morning, take a hour lunch break, and then do three hours in the afternoon. Sometimes people, of course, feel really spent after a day of therapy, but then if they’re coming in from out of town and really just only focusing on therapy, they can go back to the hotel and sleep it off if they need to, or just relax and decompress.

They don’t have to have that same level of. Pressure of, oh, I’ve gotta be on and go back and have all these responsibilities. I have people that are more local that maybe they just know they have two or three memories they wanna process and deal with difficult things that have come up in the last five years or so.

They have come in and processed those experiences and left feeling a whole lot lighter and a whole lot better. I know that typically when you have weekly therapy and you’re trying to do trauma work, life happens. Things come up, somebody in the family dies, the pet gets super sick. You are wanting to verbally process and get some validation surrounding some of those things.

Absolutely nothing wrong with that. What it does though is that it ends up like pushing and delaying the trauma work to the back burner, the trauma work’s, driving all the symptoms in the present. So it’s like if we can take this time to really dig into those things in the past that are keeping people stuck.

Then it’s going to help them cope in a healthier way in the future. I definitely have had many people that have had an individual therapist, either for trauma therapy or for OCD therapy who come for a few days to work on some of those deeper level things and then they can go back and follow up with their OCD therapists or with their trauma therapist.

It’s a really beautiful thing, and another option for intensive work is just. Deep diving into the OCD, looking at these different components of I CCB T, looking at how they’re playing out in that individual’s life, really helping people get down to what is it that you’re actually doubting in this situation.

So many times people just, they’ll look at that top surface layer level of what’s going on, and they will make their doubt specific to that situation. But one thing that I’ve learned is that there’s usually a deeper layer there. It’s usually not just about, this situation kind of goes back to some of that feared possible self.

What are some of the layers underneath this? How do your themes have somewhat common thread about them? Maybe it’s, I’m gonna be negligent in some way or another, or I’m gonna lose control somehow. I’m gonna be that person. And for people who have come and done intensive work and it has gone really, really well for them, some of them come back to do some more work because they know they have a lot that they need to continue to work on.

So it’s really been just this beautiful way of providing therapy, of seeing life transformation. I don’t wanna say it’s like better or worse than individual weekly therapy. It’s just different. And typically I will tell people if I don’t think they’re a good candidate for an intensive, we have a consultation ahead of time.

I send a lot of paperwork for them to fill out. We look at it all together and go through it. There’s preparation and planning involved. We don’t just dive off the deep end of the pool and say, yes, come here for six hours. We wanna make sure that it’s a good fit and that there’s a plan in place.

Definitely realistic expectations. For people. I wouldn’t want somebody who has had years and years of trauma and OCD to come in and think that three days is somehow going to cure everything that ails them in their life. The beautiful thing about EMDR is that you don’t necessarily need space in between sessions in order to make good progress because you’re tapping into that nervous system center of the brain you’re really working on.

The amygdala response, the fight, flight, or freeze, and you’re just making new neural connections. So time in between sessions doesn’t necessarily do anything for you other than it gives your brain more space to live out life and maybe possibly start looking at things differently. When you have weekly EMDR therapy, you may see in between sessions, different ways that you respond to triggers, and that may reinforce to you that it’s working well.

You don’t necessarily need that time in between sessions. A MDR is a past, present and future therapy, so you’re clearing out things in the past that are keeping you from living the life that you’re wanting, and then you’re looking at what are those present triggers, and then how would I like to handle them in the future?

When we have intensive therapy sessions, we’re able to cover all of those in the same retreat weekend. Maybe you are in a place where you just feel stuck. And you aren’t sure which way to go, you think. I don’t know if an intensive would be right for me. Definitely reach out to me through the website@curiebach.com.

Hit us up on the contact page and let me know that you’re interested in an intensive consultation or finding out more information if you want to even give me a little snippet and say, Hey, does this sound like something that we can work on together? Even if you have a therapist maybe that you have a good relationship with, but you want to go in and do.

Some deeper level work and then follow up with that individual therapist for ongoing issues. I’m totally open to that. We can communicate with back and forth with your therapist as needed to make sure that there’s just a really great continuity of care there. I am going to be working very hard on improving.

Expanding Christian’s learning ICBT. The online training program that I have, I have a self-help course right now and I teach it live twice a year. Now. We’re probably gonna be changing the name next year from Christian’s learning ICBT. To something else. I haven’t totally decided on that name yet. Been batting around a couple ideas.

I want the name to really reflect the transformation that people who are buying into that are receiving, because I think that’s important. Just Christians learning ICBT maybe sounds even a little bit passive to me. Sounds like something we’re doing, but not really a transformation that’s happening within a person.

The reason I think it’s so important for me to go into this course is I’ve got some professional reasons for that and personal reasons for that. One reason is we know ICBT is growing in the US and it’s really becoming more widely used. Even the clinicians that are trained in it. It’s really a process and there’s a depth to it.

You can kind of know something at a surface level, but then as you really continue to sit with the materials, you just go deeper and deeper and have a greater level of understanding. For me, every time I’ve taught it. It’s helped me understand the material a little bit better as I continue to study and prepare so that I can teach it to others.

Creating PowerPoints, trying to create visuals for certain aspects of the training so that people can understand it a little bit better. I’ve been incorporating a lot more examples of how this plays out with different themes, and I hope to take December to really be able to do that more to work on expanding the material that’s in the ICBT course.

The examples improve the PowerPoints, really look at the order and how things are taught. I have spent the last several months going through our last cohort and trying to incorporate over 600 pages that are in resolving OCD one and two, condensing them down to digestible bites for everyone. Really, the biggest challenge of that is that as the way ICBT is being taught, has shifted and changed, we’re moving away from this 12 module idea.

Even though all of that core information is still in there, it’s really been expanded and presented in a much different way. Some of the modules have been kind of incorporated with others, some have been moved around, but all of the information ICBT itself per se. Hasn’t gone through any drastic changes.

It’s just been expanded upon and explained in a different way. My commitment really stays the same. I wanna be able to provide an alternative to exposure and response prevention therapy for people that are looking for that. You can find plenty of people online who would say that ERP has saved their life.

And that it’s been very beneficial for them. On the flip side of the coin, we also have people who say, exposure therapy hasn’t been working for me, or It worked for some of my themes, but now I’m getting into some more mental compulsions, and it really hasn’t helped address those things. I believe ICBT is a beautiful option for that.

I want to be able to present to the Christian community because there are definitely plenty of pieces where I see it overlays with our faith beautifully, just in terms of finding our identity in Christ, resting in him, resting in the sensory information that God has given us with our external senses, but then also really being able to tune in.

And identify what are our true internal senses, our true desires, our true emotions about a situation, because OCD will cause all of that. To get really confused, and as I process ICBT, as a Christian therapist who’s also in touch with the Holy Spirit, my desire and passion really is to say. What is the spiritual sense data that we have in this situation, especially as you’re wrestling with scrupulosity?

What is the truth that we know in scripture to be true? And how can we use our spiritual senses in a way that is honoring to God and helping us align with truth and healing? You don’t have spiritual senses. I don’t mean that in like the sixth sense or something type of way. That’s not what I’m talking about.

But the sense of being connected to God and to the Holy Spirit. If you’re a Christian, I think you understand what I’m talking about. That can get very twisted and confused in terms of scrupulosity. So bringing people back to that anchor. Of who they know Christ to be is super important and helping people really dig deep into healthy theology about who God is.

If I have enough interest next year, I will also be leading a coaching group, which I’m calling a advanced ICBT group for people who are just ready for that next level. They’ve been through the training that I’ve offered. They’ve seen some relief and some results, but there are pieces that they’re still stuck on or trying to tease out in terms of developing their obsessional story or.

Getting in touch with what is my fear itself versus my real self? How do I write an alternative narrative in a healthy way? There are many different nuances, obviously, of I ccbt, and for people in my audience who have struggled to really find an individual therapists that can walk them through some of these pieces.

I’m providing this advanced ICB T group for them. That’s something that might interest you, or maybe you’ve had ICBT with another therapist, but something felt somewhat incomplete. Certainly email me and reach out and contact us through the website and let me know that group is in the process of forming right now.

But I will also be emailing our audience about it for people who have taken the self-help course, gone through that material and are wanting a little bit more. I have some people that start out with Christians learning ICBT and learning those skills and then decide to do an intensive, there’s so many different avenues available for you and the Christians learning I CCB T, or whatever we decide to call it next year.

The live training with the ability to ask questions as we’re going through each of the 12 weeks, and that is gonna restart probably sometime in early February. So if that’s something that you might be interested in, please let me know that as well. Always love to hear from you guys and what you have going on, even if you’re just doing some individual ICBT therapy.

In another state and you just wanna say hello. You’re certainly welcome to do that at any point. We love finding people who are interested in sharing their OCD story, so know that option is available to you as well. If you are grieving something right now and no one has died, just know that you’re normal.

And then it’s okay. And if you’re going through a scary transition, know that I am right there with you and it can be equally exciting and totally terrifying at the same time, the important thing is just following God’s lead in what you feel like he is wanting you to do. It’s our responsibility to be connected and in prayer.

And obedient and follower, the Lord is leading us. Even if that means saying no to some things so that we can say yes to other things and there is support for you, regardless of where you are on your OCD journey, there’s anything that I can do to help connect you with someone or to provide that support for you.

I would be honored to be able to do that and walk alongside you in this struggle. The best way to keep up to date with what’s going on with podcast is to join our email list@careybach.com. I hope to have some new free resources to bless you with as well. As soon as I can get those put out there, I will let you all know right here on the podcast.

Stay tuned because next week we have a special Christmas episode coming out. See you then. 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.

201. What Does it Look Like to Have both OCD and ADHD? with Nikole Krueger, LCSW

Written by Carrie Bock on December 3, 2025. Posted in OCD, Podcast Episode.

In this episode, Carrie welcomes a special guest, Nikole Krueger, LCSW, to explore the often-overlooked overlap between OCD and ADHD. They share practical tools and guidance for understanding your neurodiversity with clarity, compassion, and a Christ-centered sense of hope.

Episode Highlights:

How Nikole defines ADHD as attention dysregulation rather than a true “deficit” of attention, and what that looks like in everyday life.
How hyperactivity can show up on the outside or stay hidden on the inside, causing many people, especially women, to miss a diagnosis for years.
Why more adults are being diagnosed with ADHD later in life
How trauma, depression, sleep issues, and other conditions can mimic or overlap with ADHD and OCD, making accurate diagnosis more complex.
The ways OCD and perfectionism can mask ADHD symptoms
What evidence-based assessment and treatment can look like when someone has both OCD and ADHD

Episode Summary:

As I continue to walk alongside Christian clients who are navigating OCD, I’ve noticed something becoming more and more common: many of them are also showing signs of ADHD. These overlapping symptoms can make life feel confusing, exhausting, and at times discouraging.

In this episode, I sit down with Nikole Krueger, LCSW, to explore this important and often misunderstood intersection.

Nikole brings both clinical experience and personal insight. She was diagnosed with severe, sudden-onset OCD at age nine. Now she works with neurodiverse clients with OCD, autism, and ADHD, which gives her such a compassionate and informed perspective.

Nikole and I talk about what ADHD truly is and why it is often misunderstood. She explains how some people experience hyperactivity on the inside rather than in their behavior, which can make ADHD especially easy to miss in girls and women. We also discuss how ADHD can hide underneath OCD and why some people notice their ADHD symptoms more clearly once their OCD feels better.

We touch on how trauma, sleep issues, depression, and OCD can all mix with ADHD symptoms, making it hard to know what belongs where. Nikole shares encouraging reminders that complexity does not mean failure and that our stories matter to God, who meets us with gentleness in the places we struggle most.

There is so much more in the full conversation, including stories, examples, and insights. If you’ve ever wondered whether ADHD might be part of your story, or if someone you love seems to be walking through both OCD and ADHD, this episode offers clarity and encouragement.

Connect with Nikole Krueger:

www.ocdtherapies.com

Transcript

Today I have a special guest on our show to talk about this intersection of OCD and ADHD. The more Christian clients that I work with who are struggling with OCD, the more people I see with unique and complex clinical presentations. Today I’m joined by my guest Nikole Krueger. Nikole is not only a licensed clinical social worker with 15 years of experience, but she has a personal story of OCD that began when she was nine years old.

And was diagnosed with severe sudden onset OCD. She received ERP treatment for several years before her OCD symptoms became subclinical. Now that she is an OCD therapist herself, she specializes in working with neurodiverse clients, those with OCD, autism, A DHD, using ERP as well as ICBT for OCD.

Carrie: All right. Well, welcome to the podcast Nicole. So glad that you’re here with us today.

Nikole: Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Carrie: Today we’re talking about kind of this overlap and intersection between OCD and A DHD, which is something that know a little bit more about than I do, so I’m excited to learn from you as well.

We’ve had a previous conversation that was just really helpful. I know A DHD gets thrown around a lot. A lot of people probably have a general idea about what it is, but how would you briefly define it for our listeners?

Nikole: A DHD stands for Attention deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. I really hate that name.

It’s a misnomer. People with A DHD don’t have a deficit of attention. They have plenty of attention. They just have difficulty directing it at the correct tasks, at the correct times. A more appropriate label might be attention dysregulation disorder. There’s been different things put out there, but alas, A DHD is what we’re stuck with for now.

The hyperactivity part of the name can also be misleading though, because some people with A DHD do experience that externally observable. Hyperactivity or impulsivity, but other people don’t really look hyperactive to others on the outside, but they may still experience internal hyperactivity. Like for example, their thoughts might kind of be always zooming around like alphabet soup in their head versus like getting from A to C might feel really difficult, right?

Carrie: Having a coherent thought expression, you.

Nikole: Yeah, exactly. And just being able to follow this place, to this place, to this place versus kind of being scattered all over. The example I give is, it’s kind of like if someone who is neurotypical or whose brain has formed and, and functions in a more typical fashion, it’s almost like they have like this little internal administrative assistant that organizes and prioritizes their thoughts in neat stacks and um, hands them to them.

Whereas people with A DHD, their brains look more like my desk when I’ve just cleaned my kitchen and kind of shoved all the stuff there so that at least my counters are cleaned, right? There’s no order. It’s just kind of all there and it’s hard to sort through, like what’s the most important or what should take priority.

Some common phrases I’ll hear from people with a DHD. Include things like people saying time isn’t real, or if I think of something I wanna say, I have to say it immediately, or I might forget it. If I try and hold it in my mind. I get so focused on remembering it that then I can’t follow what happens next.

In the conversation. I hear people say a lot, like, I have no problem getting stuff done the night before it’s due, but it feels impossible to start before then. So a lot of that procrastination or like I know I do better with structure, but it feels like my brain is rebelling against it. Or I set something down and then two seconds later I have absolutely no idea where I put it.

Even just funny things, like example I’ll give people sometimes is if I’m stuck in traffic, I would rather just take a side street to get around it, even if it will take me longer. ’cause at least then my car is moving. Just the sitting still. That’s kind of a more adult example of the hyperactivity piece.

A lot of people will say like, I’ve tried 14 different planners, but none of them work. I lose it or I forget to check it, or I quit writing things down after a week.

Carrie: And then you feel like a failure, right? Because you’re trying to structure or organize in a way that everybody else is telling you. Like, well just get the planner.

Just write it down. I don’t know, like why you can’t get it together or why you can’t remember your appointments, or whatever the conversation is like.

Nikole: Right, exactly. It’s like you can’t depend on your brain to remind you of the things that are important when they’re important. Yet, if there are things that spark your interest, you can get really engrossed in that and do amazing work and get really engaged in it.

The example that I like to give is that people with A DHD have more of an interest-based nervous system rather than an important space nervous system. Neurotypical people are gonna be motivated primarily by importance, rewards, consequences, versus people with A DHD are motivated much more strongly by interest or novelty or a challenge or urgency.

So typical motivation strategies often don’t work for them, and they have to find alternative methods to motivate themselves. And even with that, because of that novelty piece, what works today or this week might not work next week. And I tell people, that’s not a failure. That’s just your A DHD brain doing its thing.

So now we just recycle that strategy we were using and pick a new one. Right? So it’s kind of that learning to stay one step ahead and kind of have grab bag of lots of different strategies we can use to motivate when the things that other people are suggesting aren’t really working. One book I wanted to share, this is my favorite book on A DHD.

It’s called Extra Focus. It’s Jesse Anderson and a lot of the stuff I just talked about he talks about in here. He takes a lot of his work from Dr. William Dotson, who’s a huge leader in the world of A DHD. And then another great place just to learn more about A DHD is attitude mag.com. Attitude is spelled a DD attitude and they have a podcast called A DHD Experts that they have tons of great information on.

So those are a few like good places to learn more, but that’s a little snapshot of what, how I would describe A DHD and some of the challenges that come with it.

Carrie: We’re seeing a trend of more people getting diagnosed later in life in terms of, typically we would see this diagnosed in childhood adolescence, whereas now there are more adults being diagnosed with A DHD.

And so that leads me into like, why do you think that is? And what are we missing maybe in childhood or adolescents that they’re not getting diagnosed then.

Nikole: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think when kids are getting assessed, it’s because their behavior is a problem for the adults around them. When adults get assessed, it’s because their symptoms are now a problem for them personally, and they’re getting in the way of work or family life or other areas.

The largest increase in diagnoses nationally right now is for females ages 31 to 40, so you’re right. A lot of it is females, and we can talk more about that later. When an adult comes in for assessment, some factors that could be at play include things like maybe growing up in a family that has some fear around labels, like A DHD, or some preconceived ideas about stimulant medications.

So in these cases, even if teachers or others in their lives are raising concerns, parents might be unwilling to have their children tested or treated for A DHD. Then the child becomes an adult and now it’s a problem for them and they wanna seek it out. A DHD is also largely inherited, about 70 to 80% heritable.

So there can also be this perception of, from the parent’s perspective, well, I figured it out like you’ll too. Another factor can be that when parents are highly involved in structuring their kids’ time and schoolwork and like staying on top of them to make sure. They get everything in on time. We call that scaffolding.

In those circumstances, kids may do just fine academically until they maybe get to college and those support systems are removed and they’ve never learned the skills for themselves on how to structure their own time and responsibilities. So I always encourage parents to like gradually step back to see like, okay, is my kid picking up on these skills and able to implement them for themselves so that it’s not just like dropping them in the deep end when they go off to college.

Carrie: That’s huge. I think for many different areas of life, a lot of times parents don’t slowly remove the scaffolding in adolescence and allow their children to fail or mess in some way, and they have to. Sometimes. That’s the best way that we learn and we don’t like seeing our children fail. But I know for me, that’s where I’ve learned most of my lessons of how not to do things is by making mistakes and trying to do something different.

Nikole: Absolutely, and little people, little problems, big people, big problems, right? I’d rather my kid make mistakes and mess up when I’m still around to help them clean up the pieces and figure out how to fix it than when they’re on their own. Another factor that can play a role is that when kids are highly intelligent, they sometimes develop strategies to get through school without being flagged as problematic.

So they may not be doing as well as they could be academically, but if they’re not failing, there may not be anyone raising red flags if they’re not also a behavior problem in the classroom. And then I think another big reason is that social media has played a big role in raising awareness about A DHD and autism and other conditions.

A lot of times adult assessment is triggered by this newfound knowledge, and that can be a double edged sword. Social media isn’t always the greatest source of information. Anyone can put anything out there, but it has helped a lot of clients I’ve worked with who legitimately do have a DHD and just weren’t aware of it or didn’t know what to look for.

Begin to investigate it and go down that road of like, huh, that sounds familiar. I wonder if that could be describing me. Ultimately, I tell people A DHD isn’t a problem in and of itself, given the right circumstances. An A DHD brain can be an asset. When we look at the general population, about 5% of adults have a DHD, but about 30% of entrepreneurs have a DH ADHD Careers that require high energy or creativity or problem solving are great for people with A DHD worked with plenty of doctors, lawyers, et cetera.

Who like thrive on that fast paced, go, go, go. They, they’ll even say like, it matches my brain speed. That can really be an asset. They may need somebody else to fill out their expense report or complete their paperwork, but if you let them do what they’re good at, they may be way more productive than a neurotypical counterpart.

The problem is we live more and more in a society that requires us to sit at computers to do our work all day, and that kind of reality is not conducive to an A DH ADHD, interest-based nervous system. So I think that’s where people are more and more feeling impaired because they just like can’t get through a day at a computer.

It’s not interesting enough, it’s not engaging enough. They’re just like dead in the water.

Carrie: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. How do you feel like this presents differently for men versus women?

Nikole: Another great question. So on average, women and girls tend to experience less of that external hyperactivity and impulsivity than men and boys do.

And women have tended to have more of those inattentive symptoms like difficulty focusing or forgetfulness. They may still struggle with that internal mental hyperactivity, but it’s not necessarily something that others are seeing externally. So because those symptoms are less noticeable teachers or parents.

Are often less likely to make the connection that they might have a DHD, so they’re often not diagnosed until later in life, if at all. Or they might be misdiagnosed with depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, other things. Interestingly, when someone with A DHD is trying to self-motivate, the way we understand it is that there’s not enough dopamine in the brain to consistently activate our prefrontal cortex, and that’s the largest part of our brain where ex our executive functioning skills operate out of.

When we can’t access that consistently, our brain starts to use the limbic system to accomplish tasks, and that is the emotional centers of the brain. So when something is due two weeks out, for example, and we would normally use. Our prefrontal cortex to plan ahead and motivate ourselves and work a little bit at a time to pace ourselves well.

When that’s offline, we procrastinate. We don’t do what we’re supposed to. We know it’s there. It’s not a matter of knowing it needs to be done. It’s a matter of doing what we know. That’s the problem. Then we get to the night before and now all of a sudden we have anxiety because it’s due tomorrow and there’s gonna be consequences if we don’t get it done.

Now that we have anxiety that triggers the limbic system to turn on and we can get the thing done.

Carrie: Wow.

Nikole: That explains a big piece of why we see a lot of overlap with depression, anxiety, and A DHD. Vast majority of people with A DHD also have some other, yeah. Depression, anxiety or, or something else going on.

And I think a big piece of that is because they’re using the wrong part of their brain for the wrong task. That’s not what your limbic system is meant to do. The other piece of that is that primarily inattentive men are also less likely to be diagnosed in childhood because they’re also not the hyperactive ones that have behavior problems in the classroom.

So they might be less likely to be identified. Then the last thing I would say is that women and girls hormones also play an important role in A DHD symptom presentation. Dopamine is the brain chemical that’s involved with A DHD, but estrogen modulates dopamine. So during the first half of the menstrual cycle when estrogen is high and increasing symptoms might be less noticeable and medication may be more effective.

Then in the second half of the menstrual cycle when estrogen plummets medication may be less effective, symptoms can go up a lot. And so there’s more of this like up and down rollercoaster ride feeling, mood swings, things like that. Premenstrual dysphoric disorder, lots of other things that can kind of co-occur at higher rates in women with A DHD.

Carrie: I wanna go back a little bit to this whole like limbic situation because people are so complex in terms of what we’re talking about with things they have experienced. When I was working a lot with kids and adolescents, everyone would say they can’t focus. Of course, teachers are then saying, well, they must have.

DHD. But then I’m sitting there knowing that their home life is absolutely a chaotic wreck because I’ve been in their house and I know what traumas they’ve been through and these types of things. And not to say that you can’t have PTSD and A DHD, or certainly you can have OCD and A DHD, and that’s what we’re gonna talk about.

I mean it. That’s I think just to give people an idea of why these things sometimes can be really hard to tease out is you’re essentially bringing a cluster of symptoms into the treatment room and somebody is trying to tease out, okay, what belongs to what. Yes. You can’t focus. Sometimes people can’t focus because they’re just so depressed.

I was diagnosed with sleep apnea. I can tell you, you will not be able to focus if you have sleep apnea at all. You will have memory problems. You really have to look at the whole picture. I want people to hear that in terms of, I think it’s helpful if you suspect you have some of these things to go get evaluated by a psychologist or somebody that’s been trained to diagnose and help you kind of tease some of these things out.

I think that’s really important.

Nikole: Absolutely. It just goes to that how important that differential diagnosis piece is because there’s plenty of examples of why someone, you can have the same behavior, but the function of the behavior can be different depending on what’s going on. Trying to tease apart.

Yeah. Where is that coming from? Getting a thorough history, all that kind of stuff is so important. Totally agree.

Carrie: Yeah. Let’s get into the OCD piece. How have you seen where OCD can mask the A DHD symptoms?

Nikole: Yeah, I think there’s a few different ways. We know OCD and perfectionism often go hand in hand, so when somebody has a DHD, their brain might be kind of rebelling against doing a boring or an uninteresting task.

But their OCD part of their brain might be insisting on them doing it anyway and doing it perfectly. It may take them more time or effort to do the task, but they may still get it done. And then I think just having both OCD and A DHD can be incredibly discouraging because on the one hand, your brain is telling you you have to do things just right or according to specific rules.

And then on the other hand, you’re constantly missing small details or you’re losing your train of thought. So there can be a lot of that frustration and shame that can come compound when you don’t have logical answers for why your brain is acting this way. This is again, where that differential diagnosis is really important.

So looking at the function of the behavior, one example I like to give is rereading. Somebody with a DHD will reread the same page because their eyes went over the words, but their brain had wandered off and was thinking about something more interesting. And so they didn’t register what was happening.

They couldn’t tell you what they just read versus someone with dyslexia rereads, because maybe the lines look like they’re moving on the page or the letters or the words are flip-flopping, and so they’re having trouble comprehending what the meaning is and just the mechanics of it. And then someone with OCD Rereads, because what if I missed something important?

And it was vital. So they didn’t, they fully comprehended what they were reading, but they have this anxiety and this obsessional doubt that is fueling that compulsion to reread over and over and over to make sure they didn’t miss something. The behavior of rereading is the same, but the function underlying it is very different.

Carrie: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It really does. What if someone potentially comes to see you, and this is an area that you work with and they’ve either been previously diagnosed or they go through the process and you believe they have a DHD and OCD, what does treatment look like or how might that differently for that person?

Nikole: I’m a big believer in evidence-based treatment. I think each diagnosis needs to receive the evidence-based treatment for that specific condition. So for A DHD that generally looks like some combination of A DHD coaching and medication, and I like to do some blood work to rule out other commonly mimics of A DHD.

You mentioned sleep apnea, that’s one. Thyroid disease can be another one. So there’s some different things we’d like to rule out. First medications for A DHD might include stimulants or non stimulants. For OCD treatment would include OCD specific therapy, like ERP or ICBT and possibly medication, usually an SSRI.

When I’m looking at like helping people figure out what to start with or which condition we target first. I always wanna look at the one with the most impairing symptoms first and then proceed from there if they’re able to do concurrent treatment of both rate. But I know finances don’t always allow for that, so we try to prioritize what’s the primary issue and let’s target that first.

And then if co-occurring symptoms are getting in the way, then doing something concurrent treatment might be more beneficial or bringing in pieces of the other treatment. If you can find a clinician that knowledgeable about all things, that’s great, and that kind of can be hard to find sometimes, but that’s the ideal situation.

Carrie: Yeah, and I think part of the spark for this episode too is just noticing when you and I had talked previously about how some of my clients had their OCD became much more manageable, and that was when the A DHD kind of rose up and became unmanageable because the OCD was kind of keeping them more in check.

And so once they stopped those compulsions, then it was like life became unmanageable.

Nikole: Right? Now how do I motivate myself? I don’t have the dopamine doing it now. I don’t have the anxiety doing it. So now what?

Carrie: Yeah, so I mean, I think that that’s just something for people to become more aware of or more in tune with.

If they feel like, oh, okay, now OCD is better, but now I have these other issues with organization and structure and getting things done and. Et cetera. I know I’ve had a couple clients that were diagnosed at post-treatment for OCD and I found that very interesting. Like, oh, hey, this is a thing that this is a pattern that’s happening, and did we miss something Potentially, but it just had not potentially risen to the surface.

And I think kind of what you said, it’s like sometimes people will come in for counseling and they’ll say, I want to do this or that, or even I want to do OCD treatment, but they’re so depressed. Like you’re gonna make no progress. There’s no motivation to even engage in OC d treatment. Like until you take care of the depression first, like, okay, we’ve gotta get you in a, like feeling better enough to engage in that treatment, which is challenging.

And I would imagine you’ve probably seen things like that as well. Okay. There’s something in the way of what you’re saying you’re wanting, and if we don’t address that first, then we’re gonna have problems later on down the road.

Nikole: Absolutely. And I think just a lot of like self-compassion and in compassion for people are doing the best that they can.

And sometimes there’s something else like a DH, ADHD or autism getting in the way of follow through on homework or stuff like that for therapy too. And it’s not always that people are just trying to self-sabotage. Sometimes they legitimately real difficulties with these things or maybe have never been taught them before.

Carrie: And even just in terms of using your phone to remind you of things or using a planner or using visual cues to keep yourself on track. Some people have not learned to do those specific things or structure their day in a certain way. Even energy levels. What, where is your energy the highest during the day and getting maybe some of those non-preferred tasks done.

I don’t know. Are there other kind of things that you’ve seen that you’ve found really helpful for people?

Nikole: I think it’s very individualized. When I assess someone and I give them like a report back, I have like 10 pages of different ideas and recommendations. But a lot of them have just like come from people’s own experience of like, I really like this app, and then this person’s like, I hated that app, but this one worked for me.

So it’s really just finding what motivates you individually. Then trying to incorporate that into the tasks that are harder for you. For me, I know I can be very competitive person, particularly if I’m like playing games or something. Something that might be motivating for me would be setting up non-preferred task as a game where I’m like playing against myself or racing the clock, or I’m gonna do like 20 minutes and see how much I can get done in that time, versus just trying to sit down and write a full report.

But for other people that might not work. Again, I think learning more about it, understanding how the brain works. One of the reasons I love this book so much is because he has a few chapters at the beginning about understanding A DHD, but then the whole rest of it is just strategies, and they’re only like a page or two.

There’s pictures. It’s spaced nicely,

Carrie: easy to digest.

Nikole: I read, this is a skinny book. I have a hard time getting through a whole book as someone who does have a ADHD and OCD. And this was an easy rate for me and it’s something you can like pick up and be like, oh, here’s another strategy. Lemme try that one.

So I think it just comes back to like being flexible, not expecting your brain to always want to do the same thing the same way every time, which is really what we’re trying to teach with OCD treatment too, right? That we can do things differently. It doesn’t have to be this regimented pattern every time.

Carrie: Yeah, our brain goes towards what’s familiar, which is not always what’s best for it. Learning to take different pathways in your brain and understanding that now that we know more about the brain and we understand neuroplasticity is a possibility and that we can create new neural pathways, it’s really exciting to, and how that applies to this material as well.

It takes some practice. It’s not a quick fix thing, but you can retrain your brain to respond differently to different situations. So if someone thinks that they may have a DHD, what does that assessment process look like for them?

Nikole: A lot depends on what resources are available in the area where they live.

There’s not just one type of specialist who can diagnose A DHD, A primary care physician can diagnose, but generally, at least in my area, they don’t because. They don’t have the capacity to spend multiple hours with one patient, so they usually refer people to psychologists or other mental health professionals for assessment.

Unfortunately, because A DHD is a neurodevelopmental condition and not a mental illness, there’s often very little training in medical school or mental health programs on conditions like A DHD or autism. Finding a knowledgeable professional on ADHD is not so much dependent on the letters behind their name as it is on like professional development they’ve engaged in and how frequently they work with people with A DHD.

I think the more important thing for someone looking to be assessed is asking good questions ahead of time about what is included in the evaluation. Good evaluation should include a detailed patient interview of at least 90 minutes. Ideally using a semi-structured diagnostic interview tool like the Diva five or a Connor’s, that should include going over health history, mental health history, family history, timeline of symptoms when they onset contexts where symptoms emerge.

Examples of impairments. A DHD has nothing to do with intelligence. So if a provider tells you you’re too smart or successful to have ADHD, find a different provider, that as well my biggest piece because it, you can have a super high IQ and have a DHD. They’re different things, but you still have to have impairment in two different settings that may just look different.

So it should also assess for differential or comorbid diagnoses, things like autism, learning disabilities, O-C-D-P-T-S-D, bipolar disorder, major depression, generalized anxiety. Those are the ones I see most commonly. And then at the end of the day, we’re looking for like what is the most likely explanation for this particular set of symptoms given this particular context.

The idea is like we’re looking for horses, not zebras. Like we don’t need the most fancy shiny diagnosis out there. Sometimes A DHD is seen as like a trendy diagnosis. No. We’re looking for which set of symptoms best matches these particular conditions given this particular context. The other things that we want to see in an A DHD assessment include informant rating skills, looking at what symptoms the person presents and impairment from loved ones, or people who know them well.

So often like a spouse, a roommate, a close friend, parent. Then we want self rating scales for adult symptoms as well. I like to do a continuous performance of test that also measures activity. The one I use is the QB test. Really like it. A lot of people will be able to focus as long as they can move their body, but that movement is really important.

So if you don’t measure activity, it’ll look like they pass the test, but they’re only passing the test ’cause they’re moving around and fidgeting the whole time. So that’s interesting. And then when possible, I also like to have. Self and informant rating, scale of childhood symptoms or like reviewing report cards from when they were little things like that.

For your listeners, I would say like start with asking your doctor if they have a referral list of the local providers who assess for A DHD, but then do your own research. You can look up provider ratings online. Just keep in mind that a good clinician isn’t gonna diagnose everybody, so there’s gonna likely be some responses of people who complain if they don’t like the diagnosis they get.

Everything with a grain of salt. But the other thing is, if it’s a child, someone who’s still in school and they’re struggling academically, they could ask the school to formally request in writing that the school assesses them for A DHD and learning disabilities Also, unfortunately, be prepared to pay out of pocket.

A lot of times insurance doesn’t cover a DHD assessment very well, and because we really need to look at that thorough history and get a lot of different pieces, there’s a lot involved in it.

Carrie: Yeah. It can be a pretty extensive process. Okay. Well, thank you so much for sharing that information. I think this has been really helpful and beneficial for our listeners.

Nikole: Yeah, you’re very welcome. Thanks for having me on.

If any of you would like to connect with Nicole, as always, we put our guest information in the show notes. If you aren’t receiving our email newsletter, I encourage you to go to kerry bach.com to sign up for our email list.

My newsletter goes out every Wednesday and it’s just a personal story. Maybe something that happened that week. Something that God is showing me in my own life or something that I just some support and encouragement I really felt like he wanted me to share with you. When I did the listener survey, one of you had commented that you appreciated the emails and.

I just wanna say thank you so much for saying that it really touched my heart because I do put effort into them every week to write something that I think will benefit those that are gonna receive it. Just a little piece of my heart to you guys, so if you’re not on there, I just don’t want you to miss out on all of the good stuff.

As always, thank you so much for taking the time to tune in today.