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107. Impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES) with Diana Rice, LMHC, CIMHP, CTP, QS

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

On today’s episode, Carrie sits down with Diana Rice, a licensed mental health counselor and certified integrative mental health professional. They delve into the impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and their relevance to anxiety and OCD.

Episode Highlights:

  • The impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) on mental health, with a focus on anxiety and OCD.
  • Diana Rice’s personal journey and her path to becoming a counselor.
  • The significance of the ACE study and its ten-question questionnaire for assessing childhood experiences.
  • The distinction between externalizers and internalizers in response to trauma.
  • Strategies for healing, including neuroplasticity and holistic well-being approaches.

Episode Summary:

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD, episode 107. I’m Carrie, and today we’re diving into the impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) on anxiety and OCD with Diana Rice, a licensed mental health counselor from Through the Valley Therapy in South Florida. Diana, whose journey from a peer counselor in middle school to a seasoned mental health professional is inspiring, shares her deep insights into how early childhood experiences shape mental health.

In this episode, Diana explores how her upbringing as an immigrant child and her ACE score of six have profoundly influenced her therapeutic approach. She reflects on how these formative experiences led her to seek an integrative approach to therapy, highlighting the importance of understanding one’s past for effective mental health treatment.

We also discuss the ACE study’s significant findings, revealing the correlation between high ACE scores and increased risks for chronic health issues and mental health disorders. Diana explains how ACEs can contribute to conditions like high blood pressure, diabetes, and addiction, emphasizing the need to address these early experiences for effective therapy. Diana’s insights into addressing underlying trauma, rather than just symptoms, provide crucial perspectives for managing anxiety and OCD effectively.

Related links and Resources

Transcript

Welcome to Hope for Anxiety and OCD, episode 107. For anyone new to our show, we are all about reducing shame, increasing hope, and developing healthier connections with God and others. I have with me today on the show a licensed mental health counselor and certified integrative mental health professional, Diana Rice of Through the Valley Therapy in Florida. 

Carrie: Are you in the Miami area? Is that right?

Diana: I’m in South Florida. 

Carrie: Okay. Today, we’re going to talk about adverse childhood experiences. People may have heard them referred to as ACEs. I’m talking about how these things impact us, which is really relevant for conversations surrounding anxiety and OCD.

Diana: I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about your personal story in terms of just what led you to be the counselor that you are today.

Diana: Wow, I could say I could blame my middle school, my Broward County middle school that I went to. Honestly, my father’s family kind of kept me here. My mom is an immigrant from another country and my dad is as well.

I’m originally from New York, and when I came to visit one summer, they kept me, so I was in middle school and then I started middle school here. My mom ended up coming back, but at that time, she didn’t know her rights. It turned out for God’s glory, of course, because here I am now. But in seventh grade, I became a peer counselor.

I think that’s where my love of helping others plus, my mother’s only child and I have older siblings, but they’re from my dad’s side. I just wanted to help people. I could see now back in the past like I had to disentangle what was I trying to heal because of my background and what is actually my calling, how my personality is and what the Lord has given me to do in this place we call earth.

That’s where it all started, and in high school, I was a peer counselor. I remember they interviewed me in the yearbook and asked,, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” I’m like, “I want to be a psychologist.” That time, I was already doing the wrong thing. I wasn’t a Christian then. I was raised Catholic with Santeria, which is a religion. You guys could look it up, but be aware. It wasn’t as bad as you’ll see if you do look it up, but my grandma was a medium.

Carrie: Oh, okay. Wow, so that’s like two different worlds intermingled there.

Diana: Yes, so I had that kind of spiritual trauma along with other things. I know that we’re talking about ACE, adverse childhood experiences, and my score is a six. I did not know these things when they were happening because most of us when we’re growing up, we think that’s just the norm of what’s happening.  Everybody must be going through that plus our brains aren’t fully developed at that time.

Carrie: Right. I think a lot of people are just like, “Well, that’s just kind of how it was. That was the water we swim in. That’s what maybe all the neighbors were going through as well. Until we get outside of our box or bubble of how we grew up, we don’t really know that things can be different or are different for other children and teenagers out there.

Tell us a little bit about how you got interested in the ACE study because I think when you and I had chatted before, you said you felt like it was kind of a life’s work for you, just really understanding this and applying it in your counseling.

Diana: When I was in college, we have to do our practicum and our internship. I spent a year in a Broward County school that was cognitive-behavioral therapy-based. It is sort of an alternative school, but the students that were there, they were from other schools sort of got kicked out or they needed help and they had to be seeing a psychiatrist. At this school, that was my internship and I was basically for that year, the only intern, but there were like eight other therapists, a psychiatrist, and a couple of psychiatrists.

It was probably one of the best educational times of my life for that year. I learned a lot of what not to do as a therapist, the red tape and the understanding of insurance, sorta there. So basically I was just learning from a lot of different modalities of how people practice back then and that was in 2004. It was almost 20 years ago before social media and it was at school. I was mostly teens. I mean, we had middle school and I think there might have been an area of elementary, but most of my clientele that came to me were teenagers. I realized I was there and I’m not the psychiatrist and I was getting frustrated because it was basically they came to me and a fat file of the student or whatever it is that follows them along the whole system. I’m like, “I don’t want to read it. My supervisor would be like,”Yyou have to read it. That’s your job.  I’m your supervisor.”  I’m like, “I know, but then you’re giving me this.” I’m going in already kind of with a judgment on the student.  I’m from Broward County, so I was a product of the Broward County school system.

 I have that little bit of that sass. Basically though, I was seeing like, why aren’t we listening to these students? I’m seeing these things that are happening and they’re angry and they’re frustrated or they’re not being heard.  I ended up taking what Carl Rogers talks about unconditional positive regard and I was new. I was just new to the game. I just basically started listening and questioning and then I would go home and go to my library and research or go back to my college and ask my professors.  I was just always asking why, why, why would we do this back then? I think the DSM might’ve been three or TR or something like that. I’m like, “Why do you keep telling me this book my Bible?”  That’s what we’re taught in a public secular college when it comes to licensing and everything. And then I would open it up and see all the names and I’m like, no offense. Why are all these white people the ones that are telling me what to do?

Why are we not taking into consideration the cultures? Or the understanding of other people’s backgrounds. I was questioning and questioning. Some of my professors loved, that I was questioning things.

Carrie: And some hated it.

Diana: Oh, some of them were, but I was used to that already because that’s how I’ve learned most of my life, even in high school and stuff. Just like questioning why. That’s just how I still do that to this day.

Carrie: Right, and very valid questions. I think psychology was based off of a bunch of white men at the end of the day. It started, that’s not where it is now, you know, things have progressed, but there’s still a lot of that bias in a lot of the research materials and things of that nature in DSM.

Back in the 90s, just for anybody who’s not familiar with the ACE study, adverse childhood experiences. Kaiser Permanente, which is an insurance company that’s more on the west coast of the U. S., if you’re not familiar with them, they decided they’re going to do this study and try to figure out, we have these people that have chronic health issues that are obviously taking a lot of money to take care of.

People with addiction issues, people with high blood pressure, diabetes, all of those chronic conditions that we think about. They wanted to figure out what makes some connection points between their physical health and their mental health and what they found through questions. They had, I think, 10 questions on there. 

Diana: I have the questions in front of me and it’s basically simple and people don’t understand what it does. It makes you understand things that you never do. That’s the way I like it in a holistic practice because we really touch on some stuff and it does get utilized in my practice anyway. In a way that’s like, whoa, but they don’t ever see the correlation.

The 10 questions are like this, “Did a parent or another adult in the household often swear at you, insult you, put you down, humiliate you, act in a way that made you afraid that you might be physically hurt? And then it keeps going. “Did a parent, or other adult in the household often push, grab, slap, or throw something at you ever hit you so hard that you have marks or were injured?”

I don’t know, I know these could be trigger questions right now for your audience. I want to be careful because now I’ve realized like, okay, because I utilize it so much, every client has to fill this out when they come to me. I’m realizing now that I got to be careful because your listener might never have heard these and they’re going to be like, because if we end up saying all 10 questions and they say, “Oh, yeah.I have seven” then what do we do here as therapists?

Carrie: Yes, people can go look them up online and I’ll link them. Even something like the divorce of your parents is on there and that’s pretty common in today’s day and age.

Diana: Or drinking or alcohol. Anybody had a mental illness or was depressed in your household. “Did anybody go to prison?”  It is questions that are basic, but when you put all 10 of them together and you start seeing the scoring, anything higher than a four, I think is cause for a little bit of concern. The higher the score, of course, the more you going to have to be aware. It’s an awareness. It’s not like you’re doomed.

Carrie: Right. It’s just a look at how that connection is, and they found that people who had scores of four or more ACEs were more likely to have these chronic health issues, the high blood pressure, the diabetes, addiction issues, and it was very significant. It was kind of like the graph was small at 1, 2, 3, and then jumped when it got to 4 and above. It’s a very eye-opening, and it’s not a new study, but I think a lot of doctors don’t take these types of things into account. A lot of individuals who have chronic health issues or chronic anxiety or chronic insomnia don’t take these types of issues into consideration because, like we were talking about before, It was just kind of how they grew up.

It was the water they swim in and they don’t always identify with the word trauma or abuse. I think that’s why some of those questions get very specific. Because if you say, did you experience physical abuse in your household? Someone might just think, well, that was discipline, but yet they ended up with marks, or they ended up getting hit in ways that are clearly not disciplinary.

Diana: What I see in my practice for the last 20 years is that It is a cultural thing at times. I also understand because I use a lot of Myers Briggs too. I try to come up with free assessments so we can have a holistic picture. Say you have this young person who is an introvert and is nervous by nature, like, and that’s okay. All of a sudden the father comes home drunk and is yelling. It doesn’t even have to put hands on, but, your nervous system just gets turned on. All these layers of emotional wounds, that’s how I explain it to the teen or the young adult or the adult that’s come to me is that we have emotional wounds.

We all experience these emotional wounds. The intergenerational trauma. A lot of people want to call it intergenerational sin, generational sin or whatever it is that’s happened. But if we don’t deal with them, then this is why symptoms happen.

Carrie: Absolutely. Those types of things that affect our nervous system and get us into that fight, flight, or freeze energy on the regular basis, that’s almost like teaching our brain for that fire alarm to constantly go off when it’s really only meant to go off in high danger, high-stress situations so that we have that energy to fight, flight, or freeze.

When you’re in a chronic situation like that, and like you said before, your brain is still developing. Now we’re affecting kind of how the brain is developing in these processes with children and teens. Similar to you, I started out working with children and teens, not in a school setting, but in a home setting, trying to prevent them from out-of-home placement.

When I first went into it, I thought, what’s going on with these kids? What is the deal here? Why are they acting up so much? Was it something about how they were raised? I didn’t know. Do they just have no structure in their home or no discipline? But then you start to peel back the layers and you start to look at, we had a, oh, I’m trying to think of what the assessment was.

It wasn’t an ACE assessment, but it was a trauma inventory, and it’s got a really long acronym, but we would go through that with every client and ask about, have you ever experienced this, homelessness, times where you didn’t have enough food, all kinds of different experiences. Has anyone ever hit you? And then you find out all kinds of things that have happened – bullying, abuse that they’ve experienced, and then you go,  “Oh, these kids aren’t bad kids. They’re not behavior problems. They have been through an enormous amount, and their nervous system, like, does not know how to process or handle even day-to-day situations.”

Diana: On fire, that’s what I say. That’s inflammation and when we understand the science of the mind and the body all together, it’s places of yourself that are inflamed. If your gut is inflamed, you start feeling it in other places. The same with the brain. If your central nervous system is always protecting, I mean, think about back in the day, a long time ago, thousands of years ago, when you have a sabertooth tiger running after the caveman, that’s the alert.

Your adrenal glands are going squirt, squirt, squirt with chemical and it’s fight or flight or freeze or fawn. If you’re on, but the thing is with the chronic, like you’re saying, if it’s happening every day, your system just learns to stay on. And then people that have a safe environment or healthy foods, or they don’t have to worry about resources or gang life or abusive home settings.

They don’t have that understanding and then they’re judging it now. For us therapists, if you’re a therapist listening to this, this is something that can revolutionize your whole practice, understanding the holistic approach to mental health and especially with the ACE, understanding the neuroplasticity and the science behind that, I mean, the brain and the gut connection, things like that.

“If I did not learn these things, I think I would have been, I was a wreck. I mean, I was smoking pot. I was drinking alcohol all through my teen.”  And that’s why they’re like, they’re just teenagers, but if we get to understand the why, why are they taking it so personal? Why are they popping off? I think we’re going to talk about internalizers and externalizers.

Carrie: Yes, let’s go into that. Your externalizers are the poppin’ off kids.

Diana: Yes, the Poppin off kids. The ones that are  people see and they think that they have a chip on their shoulder, like, “What you lookin at”, or whatever it is. If you take those personal, if you’re working with adolescents, or you have one, and you’re taking it personal constantly and saying, well, they’re just teenagers, they suck, or whatever it is or instead of taking a step back and going, “Why are they poppin off? Why are they punching the teacher in the face?” And those are the students that I worked with. I worked from there, and then I worked in a non profit organization that went into the houses, too, into the inner city homes, so I was seeing things we are the richest country and we’re allowing people to live this way.

I don’t get it. I get it, but I don’t. It’s such a system. I’m not even gonna go there. But you have those that externalize, which they’re fighting. They’re angry. They’re the little kid who might be diagnosed with ADHD. They might be diagnosed with a thousand different things and on five different medications. We don’t realize at home they’re eating Captain Crunch and Mountain Dew for breakfast. We don’t see this whole picture because we have to, I get why in the system, if you’re responsible for thousands of kids in one school, you can’t do what we’re trying to do, individualizing therapy for each, so you have to come up with answers quickly so you could keep the fire down.

Carrie: Yes. Absolutely. 

Diana: Those are the externalizers, the ones that you see that are angry or cussing or upset or wanting to fight and you feel it. The internalizers, they’re usually the cutters. They’ll stay in their room all day long playing video games, or they’re doing other things that they shouldn’t be doing. They’re the shy ones, they’re the suicidal ones.

Carrie: Right, they just keep everything inside and bury it as much as possible and even occasionally they may blow up at some point, but it’s usually against themselves, like you were saying.

Diana: Some of them will do both, depending on what’s going on in their own system, like in their own body, their vessel. It depends on how much a human being can take. Each one of us only has a threshold. We only have a certain amount of bandwidth.

Carrie: I’m sure it drove you crazy like it drove me crazy that the trauma wasn’t taken into consideration, so then we were just looking at symptoms. We were trying to match people up with the DSM and trying to match people with medication.

Therefore, there was a turning of students who got diagnosed with ADHD and then bipolar disorder. That’s what we saw all the time. 

Diana: ADHD and bipolar borderline. I’m trying to think there was one more. I mean, when I had anxiety and depression that year. I came and I think I am quite fine, I’m in private practice now. After that, when I was working at the nonprofit, I took a little break because of a certain situation that happened personally in my family, and then I went into a different career. After the Parkland shooting, and the Stoneman Douglas shooting in 2018, I had a couple of parents ask, “Hey, are you still a therapist?”, and I’m like, “no, I’m not.” And then little by little, the Lord kept saying, “You’re going back.  I’m like, “no”, but I see now since 2018, everything. I’m like, Okay, I’m just going to be obedient. This is of service for you. It’s a calling. I’m grateful that I do get paid for it and I get to help others learn about it. When I went back, I ended up in a school being the crisis intervention counselor serving about 200 students and I was the only licensed therapist there.

Carrie: Wow, that’s a lot of students to take care of. What hope is there? Because this is hope for anxiety and OCD, what hope is there for individuals who’ve had these types of experiences?

Diana: There’s so much hope. Listen, I am one that had these types of experiences. Like I said before, I have an A score of 6. It’s reframing what has happened and understanding, but getting the help and doing the work. Because some people do the healing process, they get stuck in the victim. And they don’t know how to get out of it because it’s been their life for so long and they might be surrounded by other humans in their family or in their community.

That’s all they know as well, so it’s understanding there is hope and it starts with you understanding you being that curious observer of yourself watching YouTube videos on CPTSD. Reading books like Dr. Gabor Maté’s book, The Myth of Normal, or The Body Keeps the Score by Dr. Vessel Van de Kock, or CPTSD, From Surviving to Thriving by Pete Walker.

There’s so much information out there. Or listening to podcasts like this, saying, Hey, no, there’s hope and understanding the science of your brain. Neuroplasticity is a real thing. They’re finding it out there in more and more information on the brain and how rewiring your system you can do it. I have done it.

It took a lot of hard work to grieve my childhood to learn to forgive those that hurt me and it’s not only my home. It’s understanding. We’re all raised in a village.

Carrie: Yes.

Diana: We’re all in a village now. If you’re hearing my voice, you’re part of a system. You’re part of a village, but we were also raised by one.

Some people might hurt you which can cause anxiety and depression, which are symptoms of numerous things. Finding out that you are not anxiety and you are not depression. These are just things you’re wrestling with or struggling with. I like wrestling better because wrestling means that you could get up on top of it.

When I use the word suffer, I don’t like that too much because it’s like, “Oh, I’m suffering. Oh, what was me?” To me,  I had to go through that part. I was grateful for EMDR. There are modalities that can help internal family systems, EMDR. I do cold plunges now. I do sauna work, infrared sauna, acupuncture, and things that have been around for thousands and thousands of years that are Westernized medicine. It doesn’t utilize because it’s either free or they can’t make money off of it.

Carrie: The cold plunge. How does that work?

Diana: I just started honestly last month and you go into like 40-degree water and I’m up in 90 seconds. I started off at 30 and I thought it, but it was the weirdest, craziest, most amazing feeling I ever had.

I do Wim Hof breathing. Wim Hof, you should look up his story. I started with the breathing techniques because these things are not taught in churches. They’re not taught our profession either much, and a lot of people see them as woo woo or new age, but I’m like, “No, the Lord made breath.”

Carrie: There are certain breaths that I know, like from yoga. There are certain ways to breathe where you can warm up your body or cool off your body. So are you trying to warm up your body like in those situations or no, you’re trying to take your temperature down?

Diana: Are you talking about breath work or with a cold plunge?

Carrie: With the cold plunge, are you trying to breathe a certain way while you’re in there?

Diana: It is actually trying to wake up my mitochondria to healing. It’s also understanding your mindset. We have a fixed mindset, many of us, especially if we wrestle with anxiety because I do, I wrestle with anxiety, honestly, like I can’t drink coffee. I have to do the work and I have to be okay. Kind of like an alcoholic shouldn’t be drinking alcohol. 

Carrie: Right, yes.

Diana: Someone like me that has anxiety and wrestles with it. I have to do the work and understand like, “No, I can’t touch that substance because that substance is going to make my anxiety worse or depression or whatever symptoms being exasperated by whatever’s around you. With the cold plunge, I am trying to, first of all, wake up myself and at the same time realize that I have the power in my mind to do this. Tthat is the rewiring of the brain that is creating new neurons to be able to connect.” Whatever fires together wires together.” That’s what Jim Quick says.

Carrie: Right. Yes.

Diana: I love to listen to and it’s true. If I would have stayed like, “Oh my gosh, I’m going to be a pothead of all my life, or I’m going to be depressed, or I’m never going to be able to be around my family because they trigger me too much. I had to rewire my brain. I have also been diagnosed with SERS, Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome, but I also know it’s because of how high my ACE score.”

It’s an autoimmune, so I have to do the things to keep that fire down because it’s inflammation. And I do the work and it was trying to shrink the inner critic because you grow up in that kind of environment with a high A score. It’s constantly like, I’m not worth it. It’s attachment issues,

Carrie: Putting yourself down a lot from things that you’ve heard from other people and just kind of repeating those things to yourself.

Diana: Because it’s been chronically done constantly, you start believing and that is something I had to realize with my walk with the Lord. To me, guilt and shame, because that’s what most of us who have anxiety, a lot of these diagnoses come and they’re really in guilt and shame. Guilt and shame is from the world. Conviction comes from the Lord.

Carrie: Right. That’s good.

Diana: It’s different. If you’re going against God’s word, then of course you’re going to get convicted.

Carrie: That’s a good thing.

Diana: Yes. If you’re feeling guilt and shame constantly and you’re blaming God and you’re not understanding, like, where is that voice coming from?

Who said those things? And you start recognizing those voices, the inner critic, and then you just sit with it because a lot of people that have anxiety, that I’ve come to find out in this 20 years I’ve been doing this, is they’re storing these emotions in their bodies, so they’re either so depressed and sad about it, and they’re just giving up with no hope, or it is stored so deeply that it’s like when a deer gets hit by a truck, or any animal. 

Carrie: They’re sort of shaking.

Diana: That’s our nervous system, which causes the anxiety, or the OCD. I still struggle with that too, and I have to realize, I got bad news. This is an example that happened lately. My sister was put in hospice.  My husband, because he has done his work with me and understands he or she is starting to clean everything and make everything perfect. She took everything out of the gap because that’s what I did. Then he took me and was just like, “Honey, you’re going to have to go see your therapist. Please calm down. I could tell because it happens.”

Carrie: Fall back into those patterns. I really like what you’re saying on a spiritual sense of that there’s a verse that talks about work out your salvation with fear and trembling for it’s God that works within you and you’re talking about really partnering up with God and the Holy Spirit to do the work, not just kind of sitting back and being a passive observer and say, God, just come over me and just fix all the brain cells, just make them all like wired together the way they’re supposed to and heal up this yuck stuff that happened to me.

You’re like, “No, I’ve actually sought the Lord, but I’ve also gone to counseling and I’ve also done these other healing modalities and read a lot or watched a lot of videos and really absorb the Information because knowledge is really helpful in these types of things and it does help reduce some of the shame so that you’re not thinking why in the world am I responding in this way?

Why in the world am I acting like this? When you understand, you can peel that back and say, “Oh, okay, now I get it. Now that I get it, I can start to take a step towards change.”  If a lot of times we don’t understand what’s going on in the first place, it’s really hard to make changes into it. If we don’t sit with it and go, “Oh yeah, this is what happened to me. This is how it affected me. This is how my relationships have gotten so hijacked for the last 10 years.”

Diana: We have to remember as believers that Satan’s only reason is to steal, kill, and destroy every relationship that you have, including and especially the one with yourself.

When you notice that and you realize, like, this is why I really am a mind, body, spirit connecting therapist here. When people come to me, they understand my position in Christ. I do not force. I’m not a biblical counselo. People argue with me all the time and we all have our journey. To me, what has worked thus far with people. I have quite a few people with a lot of spiritual abuse from church where I have to disentangle because some people don’t understand they grew up and was forced into some kind of say religion or whatever it is. And then they come to me with this hatred towards God and they want to deconstruct. I’m there going, okay, I think you want to disentangle and understand your situation that happened in ACEs is not only in inner cities, I mean, there’s higher scores there because they have fewer resources. It’s just how our system in this society has been for so long. And this is. In the last three or four years, that’s the uprising that we’re feeling and people misunderstanding.

That’s why I encourage those to educate themselves, but it starts within ourselves. Psalm 139 verses 23 and 24, search me, Oh God, and know my anxious thoughts starts with us being responsible for us. Despite anything that has happened to us. That’s the power we have.

Carrie: Towards the end of the podcast, I like to ask every guest to share a story of hope, like a time where you received hope from God or another person.

Diana: Wow. I could actually talk about this morning. I had a client, mostly my clients gave me hope due to them doing the work and seeing the progress. I’m very grateful for that. Just like this morning, I had a client that came to me two months ago and she was in a very, very bad place. When I say very bad place, it was just, I don’t know if I could. It takes energy.   I think the listener needs to understand we’re humans with our struggles and we care about our clients, or we would not be in this. And we care about them, not just for the hour or 90 minutes we have them.

Carrie: True. Very true. 

Diana: We’re trying to find other ways to help them. I’m in a lot of prayer. If you come to see me, I’m praying for you before you come in. We pray together and then when they leave, I pray, “All right, Lord, what do I have to do for the next session? Or what do I do next?” This person came in and I’m just like, I don’t know if I can help them. I can’t after crying out to God for a while.

I’m like by this time, if I can’t help and she came in today and I was just blown away with how much progress it was amazing. It’s like every time I want to quit, I honestly want to retire or go back to the other career I was at because this is heavy work for us.

Carrie: It’s not easy.

Diana: It’s not easy. It is a calling because I’m sure that if you are a therapist listening, you did not get in this for the money. If you got in it for the money, then your heart is not in the right place to be a therapist. If you’re coming in thinking you’re going to make a lot of money, then you’re not seeing your client as the human that we should be seeing them as.

To me, I’m talking to my husband, “Shiver. I’m older now. I’ve done some time already.” The second I think that, a client comes in and boom, something out. I’m like, “All right, Lord. Okay. I hear you. All right.” He reminds me, it’s not about me. It’s not even about the client. All of that price and utilizing our gifts and talents, which each one of us have, and it’s just getting in tune with that. The only way to get in tune with who you are to heal is to sit alone and be still with the Lord.

Carrie: I love your office too. For those that are just listening, she has lots of plants all over her office and natural lighting is a very warm and inviting therapy space. I really like that. I’m still working on my office, I moved into it a few months ago, and it’s just not quite where I want it to be. There are still some tweaks that need to happen, but I’m going to get it settled, and it’s going to be great when it gets done.

Diana: You have to send me a picture of it.

Carrie: Okay, we’ll do. Thanks for being on the show today and sharing your wisdom with us.

Diana: Carrie, thank you for having me.

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Carrie: I loved interviewing Diana because it’s always great to find another therapist with a similar heartbeat about treating trauma and letting people know that is possible for them to have a better life moving forward, even if their background has been kind of rough.

As some of you know, I do EMDR intensives with clients who are looking to process trauma in a short, condensed amount of time, instead of having to spread that over weeks and weeks and open up issues and close them up. If you want more information on that, feel free to check out my counseling website at bythewellcounseling.com. I am also working on longer intensive packages specifically for clients who are dealing with the intersection of trauma, childhood wounding, and OCD. If any of that is of interest to you, definitely contact me and I would love to share more about it with you.

Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By The Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of myself or By The Well Counseling.

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

106. Maximizing Your First Counseling Session with Carrie Bock, LPC-MHSP

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

On today’s episode, Carrie delves into the importance of maximizing your first counseling session. She offers insights and tips on how to navigate your initial counseling session effectively while emphasizing the importance of building a genuine therapeutic connection.

Episode Highlights:

  • The importance of managing expectations and not overwhelming your first counseling session with too much information.
  • How to build a good connection with your therapist right from the start.
  • The significance of assessing the counselor’s approach and the therapeutic environment to ensure a good fit.
  • Strategies for communicating your needs, goals, and boundaries effectively with your counselor.

Episode Summary:

Hi there, I’m Carrie Bock, a licensed counselor from Tennessee, and in this episode of Christian Faith and OCD, I want to help you get the most out of your first counseling session.

I often see clients who come in feeling the need to share everything at once—like dumping a jumbled play script on the floor. They try to fit their entire story into a single 50-minute session, which is just not realistic. Even with my own 40 years of life, I couldn’t cover every detail in that short time.

The first session is about starting to build a connection. It’s not about telling your whole life story but giving a broad overview of your life: your daily routine, work, family, or even how your pets provide comfort. You don’t need to share everything in one go. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, jot down the key points you want to cover. Intake paperwork can help frame your story too, so use it to your advantage.

Ultimately, therapy is a journey of building a supportive relationship where you can work towards your goals. Reflect on what you hope to achieve and what you’re willing to do to reach those goals. If your first counselor isn’t the right match, keep searching until you find someone who truly supports your healing journey.

Thank you for joining me on this episode. May you find comfort and guidance in your path to healing.

Explore further:

33. What is it Like to be a Counselor? Steve Interviews Carrie

Transcript

Christian Faith and OCD, episode 106. I wanted to do a show on maximizing your first counseling session, and I’ll tell you a little story about where the idea for this episode came from. Sometimes, I have people who come in, and they feel the need to tell me absolutely everything or for me to understand the totality of the story. There’s like this pressure or urgency. And I gave this analogy to Steve. I said it’s almost like somebody comes in with a play. The play has about ten characters, but all the pages are shuffled, so they’re out of order. Somebody dumps it on the floor, and I’m trying to make sense of what’s happening in this story.

If you’re going to your first counseling session, I want you to relieve yourself of some of that pressure to get all of the information out in one 50-minute session. It’s just impossible. I mean, think about it: I’m 40 years old. I could probably write a long book on my entire life story, and to believe that I could somehow share all the pertinent pieces with someone in a 50-minute session is unrealistic.

The first session is for your counselor to get to know you, for you to get to know your counselor. Having a general big picture of what’s going on in your life, how you spend your time, if you’re working, going to school, what your family life is like. Maybe you don’t have a family and come home to snuggle with the dogs.

That’s still relevant because maybe that’s a robust support system for you to have that comfort of your animals. So, trying to get a big picture, overarching view of where are the strengths in this person’s life? What do the support systems look like? What do the relationships look like?

Sometimes, people can get bogged down in a particular story. And they were jumping around to different timelines of that story. It may be helpful if you have a lot that you need to get out; maybe jot down what you feel are the most important things. Now, depending on how your counselor does their paperwork process, I often have opportunities where people can go into more depth in my intake paperwork. Some people use that to do that, and they feel more comfortable with it. Other times, people don’t want to put much information down, and they glance over that. But sometimes, that paperwork can at least provide the frame of reference. Who are the players in this play, and what’s the general overarching theme of the space versus having to figure it out by a bunch of different stories where somebody is all over the place just verbally vomiting? I wanted to make everyone aware that you don’t have to talk about things you don’t want to talk about in the first session.

That’s important to capitalize on because counselors are naturally nosy, and we want to know certain things, so we may ask questions that are more personal or vulnerable than you want to go in your first meeting with your therapist. It’s entirely okay for you to say, “I’m not quite ready to talk about that,” or, “I know I need to go there, but I don’t feel comfortable yet. Can we address that in a future session?” Often, people go into these counseling situations not knowing what to expect but not thinking through their needs and wants. For the session, I think this doesn’t just apply to the first session but can also apply to other sessions.

Sometimes, I’ll ask people, “What do you think is the best use of our time today?” Or, “What would you like to get into or process today?” Because you have a sense of that inside. Maybe you need to bounce some ideas off someone and get feedback like, “Okay, is what I’m thinking off base? Or is it a normal experience that I’m going through?”

Sometimes, you need to vent, for lack of a better word. You need to get all of your thoughts and feelings out and run them by somebody so the person can kind of help you can summarize and give it back to you in a way where you will gain new insight on it. And so there’s certainly, definitely value on that. There may be other times where you say, “What I need today, this kind of tuning in is I need to learn some skills to manage this situation in my life or be able to manage this relationship.” And then, by diving in and asking more questions, we can get more information.

I’m always hesitant to give people advice right off the bat. Let me caveat that because it depends on the situation, but we don’t always have enough information in the first session to give you certain levels of guidance on something, and maybe that’s a really good topic. Let’s ask these questions and explore that a bit more; ultimately, you are the decision-maker in your life.

I’m not the person who will be dealing with the consequences of whatever choice is made. So, I know that can be difficult for some people because they want the counselor to go in and tell them precisely what to do. And all that does is make you dependent on somebody to get answers. You can do this with pastors, parents, and other people.

If you say, “Okay, I have this problem. What do I do? Go to that person. They give me advice. I follow it. Next time I have a problem, I go back to that.” You want to come to a place where you can think critically and make decisions independently. And sometimes, when dealing with anxiety and OCD, you don’t have the confidence or comfort to make those decisions alone.

If there’s one thing I would want you to know, it’s that your first counseling session is about building a safe and healthy relationship with your counselor so that you feel you can do the work together that you need to do. I recently took my daughter to a new pediatrician because hers left the practice.

Steve and I were able to process because he also went to the appointment that we didn’t feel 100 percent comfortable after that first visit that this will be our child’s long-term pediatrician. However, we decided to give her another try. It’s like, did we have this interaction, and it was an off-interaction?

Maybe she had a bad day. Maybe I was extra sensitive today. Whatever the situation, or was this just somebody, I got a negative feeling. I didn’t feel safe or comfortable with them, and I don’t think I will be able to handle my daughter’s whatever health concerns she has come up with.

Maybe this is not the person I want to help us walk through any of those, and that’s a hard call, I think, sometimes to make after the first session. So, say you go to the first session, and there are some things you feel good about and maybe some things you don’t feel good about. You might want to refrain from judgment until perhaps the second session.

Think about this as any other relationship that you run into. So, for example, maybe you and a co-worker get off on the wrong foot, or you and a roommate get off on the wrong foot, but then perhaps the next time you meet up and talk, things are a little different, or you see where they were going with it, or their perspective is different.

Ultimately, you want to feel a sense of safety and comfort to open up and talk about hard things. I know people who have been in counseling for several sessions and still don’t feel that sense of safety and positive connection with their counselor after a month or two. At that point, it’s okay to say this may not be a good fit.

As a therapist, I must accept that I’m not what everybody wants. I try to be as compassionate as possible. Still, I can sometimes be very direct and aggressive because I want to help people move toward their goals and improve. I’m not the right therapist for someone who wants to come in every week and complain about the same things but not be willing to do anything to change those things.

That’s not a valuable use of my time or theirs. Questions to ask yourself after the first session. Is this counselor someone that I feel safe and comfortable opening up to? Can this counselor help me with the issue I’m bringing into counseling? Hopefully, you can answer this by looking at their website or having a short conversation with them via email or phone before your first session.

Ideally, you’d want to make sure that’s an area that your counselor works with. Sometimes, though, people will have experiences of a counselor saying, “Yes, I can work with you on OCD, or Yes, I can help you with anxiety reduction.” But you may not feel comfortable with the way they’re doing that.

I started using more parts of language and inner child work a few years ago. And had a client tell me, “You know, this just isn’t working for me.” And it was good. It was helpful feedback that let us discuss what she was looking for in therapy and who might be the best person to give that to her, even if it wasn’t me.

There are some times when we can change directions in therapy. Maybe I’m trained in something different, or I see how another therapeutic technique might be beneficial, and sometimes it’s me, and sometimes it’s not, and that’s okay. Another question you might want to ask is, did I feel comfortable with the environment that I saw my therapist in?

Thinking about my therapeutic experiences, I know some environments I felt much more comfortable in than others, based on where the building was located, how the waiting room was set up, and what the counselor’s office was like. Some of those things may seem minor. But if it’s someplace you will go to repeatedly, you want to ensure you feel comfortable with some of those elements.

Otherwise, that may be a barrier to getting what you need, and you don’t want that to happen. I would encourage you to think about the timing of your first session. Would it be better for you to do that on a day off or a day that you can leave work early, especially if you don’t know how you’re going to react or respond, you don’t know what emotions are going to be stirred up for you, and that is something that can be hard to deal with especially if therapy is new for you. I remember one time I was practicing with some other therapists on different techniques, and we were doing an awareness exercise that wasn’t supposed to be particularly troublesome or triggering, but in the process of that Awareness exercise and the feedback that I received from the other therapist. I got super triggered, which shook me up for a good chunk of the day afterward. It was completely unexpected, something that came out of nowhere. Think about your timing in terms of going to therapy. Because something may trigger you or upset you, or you may become aware. That you didn’t see coming.

You want to be able to work with your therapist on coming up with a goal for yourself. And even though it may not be fully clarified in the first session, it may take a little while to tune in and realize this. You want to ask yourself, “What do you want or hope to get out of that time?”

Often, people will make generic comments like, “I want to feel better,” “I just wish not to be anxious,” or “I want to be less depressed.” And in those situations, we’re focusing so much on reducing the symptom. We’re not focused on what’s behind that, what’s beyond the symptom for you, so when you feel less depressed, can you connect better with your spouse? Does that mean you can leave the house more and attend your kid’s sporting events? Does it mean that you’ll feel more confident to present at work? What does it mean? If you can dig a little bit deeper and answer some of those things for yourself, that might help you know what’s getting in the way of you feeling better.

Even if all you can see is the symptom right now in front of you because it’s so big or so bold, trying to imagine what life is like beyond this symptom can give you and instill in you a sense of hope that even though you may, for example, struggle with anxiety later in your life, it’s not something probably that’s going to be magically cured or gone away. What would it be like if you had a different relationship with it where it didn’t hinder you from being the person you want to be or doing the things you want to do? That may be hard to imagine at the beginning of therapy, but if you can, it will help push your brain toward that more hopeful track; I can have a better experience than I’m having right now.

Another consideration would be, what are you willing to do to get what you want? So, if you’re saying that you want less anxiety, are you ready to practice relaxation strategies outside of your counseling process? Are you willing to take the time to journal about some of your triggers?

Are you willing to expose yourself to challenging situations appropriately so that you can let your mind and body know that you can do these hard things that it doesn’t believe you can do? And if you are willing to do those hard things, what kind of support might you need from your therapist or others in your life to do the hard things that will help you get to a better place with your mental health?

There may be something that your therapist says or does that isn’t necessarily wrong or unethical in some way. It’s just off-putting. So, for example, I had a therapist, I think, that was a little bit more of a behavioral bent. I saw her only for one session. The reason was that she had this timer. That went off 15 minutes before the session ended and then again 5 minutes before the session ended. It felt superfluous and unnecessary to me, and I felt a little bit like I was being treated like a child. I’m pretty sure she sees other clients who don’t have a problem with it, or they may feel like, in their situation, it’s helpful to them to keep them on track. Maybe the therapist feels that way for herself.

It helps her keep track of her session ending and wrap-up time. I think more than a personal preference of just not liking it was that I didn’t feel like I had any say or choice in the whole-timer situation. It might have been slightly different if she said, “Is it okay if we try this,” kind of like inviting me into the process?

Is it okay if we try this timer and see if you find it helpful, or do I find the valuable timer for me? Would it be okay if we tried it out? It was just kind of something that was thrown in there.

In closing, the last thing I want to say is that if you don’t find a good therapeutic fit on the first try, that’s okay. Don’t give up; get up and try again. We do the same thing with doctors we might not feel comfortable with or dentists we might not feel satisfied with. We go out and find a different provider. At that point, the worst thing we could do is say, “Oh, well, maybe therapy’s just not for me.” That’s like saying, “Well, maybe I shouldn’t get my teeth cleaned because I didn’t feel comfortable with that dentist.”

Hope for Anxiety and OCD is a production of By The Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of myself or By The Well Counseling.

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

105. Joy Comes in the Morning: 3rd Year of Marriage

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Podcast Episode.

In this special episode, Carrie and her husband, Steve, reflect on their three-year marriage journey and the joy of overcoming difficulties. They share insights on the importance of open communication and their experiences as parents to their daughter Faith. They also offer practical tips for maintaining a solid relationship while looking ahead with optimism and gratitude for each day.

Episode Highlights:

  • The significance of finding joy and hope in difficult situations as inspired by Psalm 30:5.
  • The importance of open communication in a marriage, even when addressing challenging topics.
  • How to navigate and adapt to life’s unexpected changes and challenges, such as health issues.
  • The value of adjusting and accepting new norms in life and relationships.
  • Their experiences in parenthood, including insights into their daughter, Faith, and the joys and challenges of raising her.

Episode Summary:

Welcome to Episode 105 of Christian Faith and OCD!

In this episode, we dive into our year of challenges and growth, centered around the theme “Joy in the Morning,” inspired by Psalm 30:5. We explore how we’ve navigated trials and found hope and joy through our faith and resilience.

Highlights of This Episode:

  1. Reflecting on Our Journey: Steve and I look back at our dating days, the trials of our first year of marriage, and our growth as a couple. We share how our experiences, including Steve’s diagnosis of spinocerebellar ataxia (SCA), have shaped our relationship.
  2. Adapting to New Normals: Steve discusses how he’s adjusted to life with SCA, including his memorable Crazy Hair Day at Vacation Bible School (VBS). Despite the challenges, Steve’s involvement in ministry and our lives has been a source of inspiration and joy.
  3. Mission Trip to Guatemala: Steve shares his incredible experience on a mission trip to Guatemala. Despite the obstacles, he found purpose and connection, highlighting how disabilities don’t have to limit our ability to serve others.
  4. Communication and Growth: We delve into how effective communication has been crucial in our relationship, especially when addressing and resolving issues that arise. Steve and I discuss the importance of understanding and patience in our journey together.
  5. Parenting and Faith: With our daughter, Faith, turning 18 months old, we reflect on the joys and challenges of parenting. We explore how our faith has guided us through these experiences and strengthened our bond.

Listen to this episode to gain insight into how faith, communication, and resilience have guided us through our journey. We hope our story inspires you to find joy in your own challenges and embrace the morning light after the night’s trials.

Keep listening with this related episode!

81. On Becoming Parents: Year Two of Marriage with Steve and Carrie Bock

Transcript

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD, episode 105. I am joined here once again by my lovely husband, Steve.

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Carrie: Hi Steve.

Steve: Hey. How are you?

Carrie: Welcome. We’ve been doing this as a tradition almost every year. It started before we got married. We did an episode about our dating experiences, and then, in the first year of marriage, I was pregnant. I remember crying a lot in that episode because we didn’t know what was happening to your eyes other than we knew you had lost vision. It was super scary. Thinking about all the uncertainties there, then you had just been diagnosed with neurological conditions, spinocerebellar ataxia.

We sat down and thought about what we wanted to discuss for our third year of marriage now that we’ve been married for almost three years. This scripture had come to mind: Psalm 30 verse 5 says, Weeping may stay overnight, but there is joy in the morning. And so, we thought about titling this episode Joy in the Morning. Do you want to tell our audience a little bit about why we chose that?

Steve: Yes, because I think going through trials, as everyone does, our trials that we have dealt with, there have been tears, and there have been difficult moments, but the joy that comes out of that, being able to look back and say, oh my goodness, I’ve made it through this. And it gives others hope that they may be going through the same thing. That’s the beauty of going through something difficult: when you make it to the other side, to a better place at least, you can share that with someone and help them. We have been through a lot; it has been difficult, but we’ve done it with a smile. As best as we can anyway, so, that’s kind of, it’s a good verse.

Carrie: Yes. Some of the highlights of this year of you adjusting to the SCA diagnosis and realizing that you can still be involved in ministry with which you’d like to be involved. And I wish we had a picture of your crazy hair day at VBS.

Steve: That was so much fun. They’d asked me to, at church, well, they didn’t ask me, but I signed up for VBS, which was a challenge at the time because I’d yet to serve in any way by myself amidst all the chaos of all those wonderful kids who were having fun. And here I am, with my walker, trying to hurry through and make it work but having a blast. They had different themes for each day, whether it be sports, and one of those days was crazy hair day, so I said, why not? So, each night, I participated, but that was probably the best one for me because, as a bald man, I could wear a wig with blue hair. I think it was. Was it blue?

Carrie: No, it was all white.

Steve: All right, there we go.

Carrie: But you had a blue headband.

Steve: That’s what it was. I knew something must have been blue, but A, there’s my memory for you, and B, there’s my eyesight for you. But yes, it was all white hair. I remember that now. And it was crazy. It was out there. And I got so many comments on that. And it was fun. It was a lot of fun.

Carrie: Right. Yes, and then this summer, you took a mission trip to Guatemala, which was the first time that you had been really since COVID and us getting married, having a baby, all these different things happened.

Steve: That was one of those experiences I did not know if I would get to continue with. But the team I went with was so gracious and so giving, so compassionate that they knew where my heart was. They knew they wanted me to go on that team with them and invited me, which was humbling. I never had to ask for help, whether I thought I needed it or not, and more times than not, I did need help.

They were right there, by my side, to grab a bag and help me up and down the stairs, which is funny because I took a walker with me. A smaller walker that would be easier to pack and carry and all that stuff takes up less space. I never got to use that thing, except in the airport once, because flat ground didn’t exist where we were.

There was no way of using that: there were so many stairs and different things. Anyway, the team was so good though to help me. I made sure I got from point A to point B and got to teach with people, and the people in Guatemala were so gracious with their time and compassionate, too, so it was a blessing.

Carrie: Great. And I think you got some positive feedback from people there that your story was just inspirational and that you had sacrificed to go to another country because you could have easily said, I’ve done mission trips for years; my time is over, and I have this disability. It’s time for me to kick back and rest.

Steve: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And I’ll never forget this. Pastor Mark, who led the group, commented when we discussed whether I should go or not that we have people with club feet and different things that come to see us. Why not have someone else come to see them with a problem, whatever, a disability? I hadn’t thought about it that way. I just thought, how will I be able to do this? That’s all I was focused on. That changed the way that I thought about it. When I got there, the people were just so, I don’t know, I think it was a different way of looking at things for them too. Someone who has a disability came to speak with them. It was a cool thing in the end. It was very humbling, though.

Carrie: This year has been about adjusting and accepting our new normal. I guess you could call it our new life situation, and it comes with many changes and challenges in relationships and daily life. What’s been your experience of that?

Steve: I had to adjust and change to, you can sit on a couch or sit in the bed and cry and give in, or you can tweak how you do things. You can change or adjust to the new normal. And that’s what I’ve done, and I still do what I like. I don’t get to go outside as often, and I don’t get to go hiking. However, there are ways that I can do things.

I’m very happy with the life that I’m living, getting to do those things. I still get to meet with my friends occasionally and can’t just get in the car and drive there. But I still get to go, so there are no complaints. It’s still a blessing to play with our child and do all the fun things that I think are important.

Carrie: Faith just turned 18 months old, and she’s a little firecracker sometimes. But it’s been a journey, lots of learning, lots of adjustment, lots of growing as parents. And I think all these things that we’re talking about related to your marriage are, like, these are things that can either bring you closer together or create conflict and drive you farther apart.

Steve: Definitely. I think that for us, you always have to look forward. You have to pick your battles. I constantly tell myself that, not so much with you, but with Faith. Just with our daughter, trying to figure out, okay, she’s upset. Why is she upset? Or, she is, like most children, she gets her mind set on something.

I want to carry that blanket around. And drag it while we walk outside. I want to drag it through the dirt and never want to let it go. She reminds me of Linus with those blankets, but sometimes, you must decide how important it is for me to take this blanket away from her. Or to take whatever this toy or whatever it is.

Is it a deal breaker if she hangs on to it? Am I training her incorrectly if I let her hang on to that? Or, there’s a lot of decision-making there, but sometimes I’ve learned it’s okay to let her hang on for just a minute longer. And then, whenever she forgets about it, take it away and hide it; she’ll never think of it, and you won’t have to deal with the fuss. I don’t know if that always works, but picking your battles is very important.

Carrie: I think that’s true in a relational sense. And what you were talking about before, essentially honoring your limitations, is helpful for all our listeners, just listening to your body. There are some days that you can do more than others and some days you’re very fatigued and have to take it easy, and all you may get done is one load of laundry, and that’s it.

That’s a hard thing to accept. And just in terms of the mental health realm, it’s like, okay, some days I may be prepared to socially interact in a certain way with others, and some days I just may not be able to do that and respecting and honoring, like, my body and where I’m at today.

Steve: You have to decide sometimes if you’re going through fatigue, are you not feeling well, and you need rest, or are you just depressed and pushing away people? Because that’s a big difference. There are days, I’ll be honest, I don’t feel like doing the people thing, but it’s just me being whatever, me being me, or wanting to avoid people. And then there are other days I want to be around people, but my body is too tired, and I need to rest. Those are decisions that you have to think about, I think, for me, in the sense of, is it me, or is my body just really needing the rest? And so more times than not, for me, it’s my body really needs the rest, and so I have to force myself to lay down. I’m not a very good stop-and-rest person. I’m getting better at it, but not by choice, because I have to.

Carrie: Usually, other people tell you to sit down rather than you decide to sit down.

Steve: And anyone who knows me knows I was always a person that just wanted to go. Not that I couldn’t stop, but I didn’t like to sit down. I like to fix things. If something is on my mind, I want to finish it. I’m not a procrastinator, but when you have something like I have, you have to sit down. It’s not procrastinating; it’s resting until you can.

Carrie: I wanted to bring something up, and we can always cut this out if you don’t want us to talk about this, but without going into a lot of details, we had an, like, a communication issue come up in our marriage this year where we were both unhappy with like one aspect of our life. Do you know what I’m talking about? And neither one of us said anything because we’re both conflict-avoiders. And then finally, I got up the courage, and I said, “Hey, I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of unhappy in this one area, and then it was surprising for you to say, yeah, me too.” We were able to, like, do something about it. And so, I just wanted to share with our listeners that sometimes it’s hard to bring up those difficult topics in your marriage and talk about hard things that make you feel uncomfortable or your concern that’s going to make your spouse feel uncomfortable or that they might be mad at you.

Steve: That was one of those things when you said it. When you said something to me, I thought, yes, I agree and it wasn’t a bad thing.

Carrie: Right.

Steve: It wasn’t like she was acting this way, and I’m annoyed. No, it wasn’t that. It was literally a communication issue. It’s like mentally sitting at that four-way stop, and neither one of us is going. But we’re both annoyed with the other because we think it’s their turn or we think it’s something not right here, go when you said something “Oh, good, good, yes” and we dealt with it, and everything went well.

Sometimes I think I tend to be the go-with-the-flow type of personality, and something will bother me. I’m like, it’s not that big of a deal. Just suck it up. And really, you don’t want to gripe every time something comes up. And I’ve been that guy, too. I’ll be honest, but you also don’t want to just, no big deal, and keep pushing it away, and pushing it away, and then one day, you’re going to blow up. It’s not pretty, so sometimes it’s better to talk, and the struggle is, how do you bring it up? How do you say it? That always comes up because when I say things, I tend to be a very sarcastic person. I’ve really had to work on that, and nowhere near success in that department. I’ve worked on my sarcasm because I like to be funny and sarcastic, but it doesn’t work when communicating in a profound moment. It’s always taken as a negative, even though I may not mean it that way. For instance, if you say, Steve, I really need to go to the store or the library, and my response is, oh, goody, I can’t wait. I may think nothing of that. I meant simply as humor but when you say that enough, it bleeds out as this jerk doesn’t even want to go, and he doesn’t have the guts to say, I don’t really want to go carry. Is that okay? Instead, it’s, Oh, goody. The sarcasm doesn’t help me and I’ve had to work on that honest moment.

Carrie: Well, I think coming to a place of when you say this, I hear this. In your marriage relationship, men and women communicate things differently, and there are times when you’ll say something, and I’m like, I heard this, and then you’ll say, no, that’s not at all what I said.

Steve: Yes, and I am so caught off guard in those moments but again, it may be how I’m saying it, orr the pattern of how I’ve said it before. I think that really you could set a tone.

Carrie: Yes, it also taps into what I’m learning, like your past relational baggage because it’s like, okay, I hear him talking like my dad or my ex or something like that, and then I’m absorbing it through that lens. I don’t even realize that I’m doing it at that point until maybe later, and I have moments of self-reflection. I think that piece comes up in marriage a lot.

Steve: I think that’s why I’ve always heard the first two years of marriage are the most difficult. I think it could go beyond that. I don’t know, but I think the reason is that you’re getting through communication and likes, dislikes, and all of that stuff. You’re learning about your other half. I hope we can be one of those cute older couples that everybody wants to go to. Oh my gosh, you’re going to make me throw up, or they say they’re so cute. The old couple that’s kissing and holding hands. Anyway, so you hope when you’re older, you don’t even have to say anything. You know what the other person would think.

Carrie: In this process of growing together, I always tell clients that you’re either growing with someone or growing apart from them because you might be growing at different levels. I’ve seen that happen in friendships; I’ve noticed that it occurs to various people in romantic relationships. So always, like, keeping those lines of communication open, being self-aware and knowing what you’re contributing to the relationship, what might be detrimental to your relationship, and how to work on those things. And I think if we can look at it as we were talking about our communication, It’s not always bad, like sometimes we need some enrichment in certain areas. There’s not a problem yet, or there’s not a crisis. If you can catch it before something becomes a problem, or becomes a crisis, or before we feel like we don’t talk about that at all, if you can address it on the front end, it’s a lot easier than waiting for things to, like you said, build up and build up, and then somebody blows up, or somebody withdraws or walks away.

Steve: Absolutely. I think, too, that sometimes we get angry in our head, and that builds up, and to the point where, and you say this about faith all the time, she doesn’t even know why she’s angry. Something triggered you, and then your state, not you, but in general, and I’ve had this to me, and I stop, and I think, why in the world am I even angry? I don’t even know why. And it may simply be I don’t feel well, and I have to stop and say, okay, I cannot take that out on anyone. That is not fair. I just need to shush, not say anything, let it go. Try to remember those techniques of how to calm down or how to relax. And then there were other times when I did have something that bothered me, but I didn’t want to say anything. And I held it in, and then, kaboom, it’s not pretty, all over something really silly.

Carrie: I think timing is vital in terms of bringing up topics. In your marriage, it’s hard to know. You can’t necessarily bring something up when there’s all that heat of the emotion on both sides. You have to take a break, like pause. Okay, let’s talk about this. Let’s go to our separate spaces, reflect on it, pray about it, and then come back together and talk about what in the world just happened with that last interaction. I don’t even know, but we went from a happy couple to all of a sudden. We’re at each other’s throats or something.

Steve: That would be those moments when I have to say, okay, Steve, calm down. Why are you upset or okay? Maybe your reasoning for being upset is justifiable, but there are two of us in this marriage, so what can I do? What can I say to try to calm this down? There’s no hero, no winner, no individual here. How do we do this together? How do we work? That’s hard because we always want to win; we always want to be right. As humans, you always want to be in the right, and we never stop and think; it seems most of us don’t; maybe I’m wrong here. Perhaps I need to change the approach. Maybe I’m not wrong, but my path is wrong, or how I’m saying it. And that’s where it’s difficult because the focus is on you to change. And that’s hard. We always want the other person to change.

Carrie: Right, and I think working with our daughter and trying to help her when she has these completely age-appropriate meltdowns because she’s been teething or refused her nap that day or her stomach hurts, and we don’t even know about it. You know, all these things come up, and at the moment, it seems like it’s, you know, I want the banana over the strawberries; really, it has nothing to do with that. It’s all these other factors and knowing that we can have the opportunity to bring the calm into the situation and like get down on her level and talk to her and like, okay, you know, I can see you’re really upset right now.

Steve: Well, and that isn’t easy in general. And it’s easy for a couple, I think, with children. They have problems because they have a child or children, in our case, a child, who may have been screaming for 20 minutes at the top of their lungs. You’re just at wit’s end to please make it go away, just stop, not the child, the screaming, and then the communication between the two of you can be rather snappy. It’s not personal, just give me the sippy cup, take the child here, do this, and it’s nothing personal, it’s just, oh my gosh, have you checked your diaper lately? There’s always something. And what are those moments you look at later and go, I’m sorry, I may have been a little snappy. It’s hard to focus on how to calm her down, and you’re going off on your spouse—just a tricky thing.

Carrie: I think, too, there’s that element where sometimes we’ll be trying to have a conversation in the car, and then all of a sudden in the backseat is because she can’t talk fully.

Steve: She wants to join in.

Carrie: Yes,

Steve: Those are the moments I kind of smile myself and then begin to insert her name every fourth word, maybe asking you when we go to the store, are we going to buy this, that, or the other, and then I insert her name, which makes no sense in real-time, but when talking with her, she hears her name and is happy to be a part of the conversation, I’m hoping.

Carrie: Despite all the difficult things that have happened this year, in terms of our themes of joy coming in the morning, we will talk about where you see things going.

Steve: Yes, I think there are so many opportunities that have come up already, be it with church or missions or whatever; there’s just so much to look forward to. And I know that there will be, as the song said, mama said, there’d be days like this. There are going to be those days. But I look forward to good things as well, and I think that some elegant stuff is coming up the pike, so I’m excited about that; I’m excited that some of my doctor visits, my annual checkups are already behind me, got my eyes taken care of, and no significant change there, and that’s a blessing. Some of my neurological visits and all that are coming up have already passed. They’ve already passed for a while. So those are good things. I look forward to those. Most people don’t like the doctor’s visits, but I like them because I get the news, and I’m done with it for a while. Get it behind me. I’m looking forward to what’s coming up the pike for sure.

Carrie: When you have this generative disease, stability is a blessing; staying the same and not deteriorating further is always a positive. So, we appreciate that whenever we hear that. Just in general, your health numbers are doing well.

Steve: Those are doing really well. On top of that, knowing that I am doing as well as I am is a blessing in the sense that we didn’t know when we first got this diagnosis, we didn’t know. It almost gave me the feeling like golly, I could die tomorrow. But now I’ve heard some individuals have the same thing. Maybe we don’t necessarily know which type, yes, thank you. Which type that I have? But we know that I have it. And the lifespan, again, I thought, golly, I could die tomorrow. Who couldn’t die tomorrow? I hear about people who have been living to be 80 years old. And I hear about, because of what they’ve discovered through studies for Parkinson’s disease, they’ve been able to say, hey, that’ll work for SCA as well. And now I’m not on this medication, but for certain types of SCA, they can take this medication, which slows it down a little bit, they think. I don’t have all the details on that, but I know that it’s exciting that they found something. Those types of things are exciting to me. That’s definitely something to consider a joy, and I can get up and spend time with my family, enjoy the days I have now, and make the very best of each day. That’s exciting.

Carrie: We got involved in an SCA support group and have just learned so much through the other individuals, things that have worked for them, been helpful, not helpful, and then been able even to take some of that information like to your eye appointment and say, hey, This was recommended to us, or we found out this doesn’t work as well with SCA. That’s been a blessing, I think, for me and just this whole podcast journey and our relationship. I want to impact more people positively for the kingdom, just continuing to spread messages of hope. That people can get the help that they need out there. I know that you have stepped in and been a big support in promoting the podcast, even sometimes talking to people or supporting me in going to the AACC conference when that happened.

There were some long days there, and you had more duties and responsibilities at home or with Faith. I appreciate everything that you’ve done to help support this podcast. It’s been a wild ride, and it’s hard to believe that it’s been about three years. Just all the things that God has done indoors that he’s opened and to be able to launch the course recently, and I hope this next year to work on a book I’m thinking it’s going to be for Christians with anxiety some focus on OCD. They want to do some writing about anxiety, So I’m not exactly sure what direction or bent I’m going to go with that. I want to provide some practical tools to help and support people experiencing that. Still, I’m just excited to see what the Lord is going to do, and we are hopeful to be able to move in 2024 possibly. Praise the Lord. So, we are looking for better accessible housing than we have right now. Not that our accommodation is terrible as far as you’re getting around. It’s just not going to serve us in the future. And we know that. And so, we are trying to get something that’s more one level or flatter yard or something. That’s going to be more,

Steve: Flat is the keyword there, at least as far as the yard goes and fewer steps. Also, I’d like to say that I’m proud of you for how much effort and time and all of that you’ve put into the podcast and your work and what you do, and knowing you as I do, of course, I’m going to brag on you, but you put a lot of heart into what you do. And I think it shows, I definitely think it shows.

It’s exciting that I remember when you hadn’t even started the podcast. And now you’re on number 105 or something crazy like that? That’s wonderful, and there are days, I’ll be honest, I listen and think I will need a dictionary. I don’t know what that means because I’m not in that world. And then I’ll listen and say, “Oh, well, that’s really interesting. I never knew that.” I tell people if I’m talking to someone at the doctor’s office or wherever, and they say I have a problem with anxiety. I have perfect help for you here. I always try to remind them that if they look through the episodes, one may stand out to them. It’s not focused on one little thing, and even when it’s not something you’re necessarily interested in, as you listen, you find, wow, that’s got a lot for me to take away. I had no clue that that also pertained to me or that I would get that much out of it. So, it’s not boring. I’ll give it that. It’s very informative, and I enjoy that—so good job.

Carrie: Well, thank you. I want all of our listeners to know that I made some great connections at the AACC conference. So that means more interesting guests to come next year. And kind of now that we’ve had over a hundred episodes, we’re able to just branch down different rabbit holes.

There are still more things to talk about. It’s kind of surprising that there are always new topics and ways that we can apply what we’re learning to help with anxiety and OCD. Everyone, definitely stay tuned. We have some free resources on our website. I’d love to tell you about it, too. You can go to Hopeforanxietyandocd.com. We have our download from our hundredth episode on A Hundred Ways to Help You Manage Anxiety. We have an OCD resource: five things every Christian with OCD needs to know. We’ve got a few different things going on there and would love to have you check those resources out. Thank you, everyone, so much for listening today.

Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, a Licensed Professional Counselor in Tennessee. Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of myself or By the Well Counseling. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.

104. Being Kinder to Ourselves and Others with Greg Atkinson

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 104. Being Kinder to Ourselves and Others with Greg Atkinson

Carrie interviews Greg Atkinson, an entrepreneur, speaker and author, about the power of kindness.

Greg shares his personal journey and how forgiveness and kindness have played a pivotal role in his life. The conversation highlights the ripple effect of kindness and its power to make the world a better place.

Episode Highlights.

  • How Greg Atkinson’s life experiences, including anxiety, inspired his commitment to kindness.
  • The importance of forgiveness in fostering a kinder world.
  • The significance of vulnerability and openness in sharing personal stories and breaking down the stigma surrounding mental health.
  • Practical ways to incorporate kindness into your own life and make a positive impact on those around you.
  • Greg’s Book: The Secret Power of Kindness

Episode Summary:

Welcome to the Christian Faith and OCD podcast! I’m Carrie Bock, your host, and today’s episode features Greg Atkinson—an insightful speaker, author, and educator on mental health issues.

Greg recently authored The Secret Power of Kindness, a book that opens with a deeply personal account of his journey through trauma, mental health struggles, and ultimately, forgiveness. Greg shares how his experiences with sexual, verbal, and physical abuse shaped his life, leading to diagnoses of anxiety and bipolar disorder.

The central theme of Greg’s book is forgiveness—a process that has taken years of therapy and personal growth. He emphasizes that holding onto anger and bitterness can prevent us from living a kind and compassionate life.

Greg also discusses the impact of mental health in his life, from the physical symptoms of anxiety to the mental battles of catastrophic thinking. He highlights the importance of understanding mental illness, especially within faith communities, where there can be harmful misconceptions about anxiety and depression being purely spiritual issues.

Through his story, Greg aims to educate and encourage others to approach mental health with kindness, both towards themselves and others. His insights challenge the stigma surrounding mental illness and promote a more compassionate understanding within the church and beyond.

Join me in this episode as we explore Greg Atkinson’s journey of healing, forgiveness, and the power of kindness.

Related links and Resources:

www.gregatkinson.com

The Secret Power of Kindness: 10 Keys to Unlocking Your Capacity to Change the World

Tune in for another inspiring episode:

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

103. Bouncing Back with Resilience with Donna Cox Gibbs, LCMHCS

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Counseling, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 103. Bouncing Back with Resilience with Donna Cox Gibbs, LCMHCS

On today’s episode, Carrie sits down with Donna Cox Gibbs, a licensed clinical mental health counselor and author. They explore the true essence of resilience – not just bouncing back, but moving forward through life’s challenges.

Episode Highlights:

  • Misconceptions about resilience and its true nature.
  • The significance of self-awareness in recognizing physical, emotional, and relational responses.
  • How faith and spiritual well-being contribute to building resilience.
  • Balancing emotional, physical, and spiritual aspects for whole-person resilience.
  • Practical tools for navigating life’s challenges and developing resilience over time.
  • Donna’s Book: Bounce: A 60-Day Devotional to Jumpstart Your Resilience

Episode Summary:

Welcome to Episode 103 of Christian Faith and OCD. I’m Carrie Bock, your host. I had the privilege of speaking with Donna Gibbs, a licensed clinical mental health counselor and supervisor from North Carolina. We delved into the concept of resilience—a topic that resonates deeply with all of us.

Donna simplifies resilience as the ability to keep moving forward through life’s challenges without getting stuck. Rather than bouncing back to where we were before, resilience is about bouncing forward, adapting, and growing through the trials we face. She shares a powerful personal story about a three-month hospitalization that tested her resilience and how the support and wisdom of a trusted physician and friend helped her navigate that challenging season.

Throughout our conversation, Donna emphasizes that resilience isn’t just a trait some people are born with—it’s something that can be learned and developed over time. She discusses the importance of a whole-person approach to resilience, integrating mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health. This holistic perspective is central to her work and is the foundation of her devotional book, Bounce: A 60-Day Devotional to Jumpstart Your Resilience.

As we reflect on resilience, I’m reminded of how God uses our trials to build character and perseverance. Whether you’re facing a life-changing diagnosis, a significant loss, or any other form of adversity, remember that resilience is about moving forward with faith, trusting that God will bring good from our struggles.

Related links and resources:

www.summitwellnesscenters.com

Explore Related Episodes:

112. Finding Motivation to Finish with Carrie Bock, LPC-MHSP

102. Anxiety and Coparenting with Tammy Daughtry, LMFT

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Counseling, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 102. Anxiety and Coparenting with Tammy Daughtry, LMFT

In this episode, Carrie sits down with Tammy Daughtry, author of “Co-Parenting Works: Helping Your Children Thrive After Divorce,” to discuss the challenging topic of co-parenting and its impact on anxiety. Tammy shares her personal journey as an adult child of divorce and her mission to provide hope-filled resources for co-parents through Co-Parenting International. 

Episode Highlights:

  • The impact of managing emotions on co-parenting dynamics and children’s well-being.
  • Techniques for seamless transitions during handoffs using body language and tone.—The importance of prioritizing child safety and well-being over personal disagreements.
  • Creating secure spaces for kids by acknowledging parenting style differences and encouraging open communication.
  • The significance of self-care for parents during alone time, promoting personal well-being and smoother transitions upon children’s return.

Episode Summary:

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD. In this episode, we’re diving into the complexities of co-parenting, a topic that resonates with many of our listeners who may be facing anxiety and stress due to the challenges it brings. Today, I’m joined by Tammy Daughtry, the author of Co-Parenting Works: Helping Your Children Thrive After Divorce.

Although I went through a divorce several years ago, I didn’t experience co-parenting, as I didn’t have children in that marriage. But I know this is a significant issue for many, and I wanted to bring Tammy on to provide insights and hope to those navigating this journey.

Tammy shares her personal story, rooted in her experience as a child of divorce and later as a co-parent herself. After an eight-year marriage, Tammy found herself at a crossroads, leading to divorce and the beginning of her co-parenting journey. Her quest for hope-filled resources led her to create Co-Parenting International, a platform aimed at providing support and guidance to parents in high-conflict situations.

In our conversation, Tammy emphasizes the importance of the “handoff”—the transition of children between parents. She highlights how body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice during these exchanges can deeply impact a child’s emotional well-being.

Tammy also addresses the often-overlooked aspect of alone time for single parents. She offers practical advice on making healthy choices during these periods, emphasizing the importance of self-care and community engagement to cope with the emotional void that can arise when children are with the other parent.

This episode is packed with wisdom and practical tips for anyone navigating the complexities of co-parenting. Whether you’re dealing with the daily challenges or preparing for the long-term impact on your children, Tammy’s insights provide a roadmap for fostering resilience and hope.

Related links and Resources:

www.coparentinginternational.com

Explore related episodes:

86. How to Catch Your Teens Anxiety Before it Gets Out of Control with Gina Nelson, LCSW, CDW

101. A Secret Life (OCD) with Jim Juliana

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in OCD, Personal Testimony, Podcast Episode. No Comments on 101. A Secret Life (OCD) with Jim Juliana

Join Carrie as she sits down with Jim Juliana, an author, former high school teacher and an athletic coach, who opens up about his journey of enduring and overcoming OCD. He candidly reveals the obstacles, triumphs, and the profound impact of combining faith and therapy in his recovery.

Episode Highlights:

  • The intensity of Jim’s OCD episodes and how they affected his daily life.
  • The impact of OCD on Jim’s academic and professional pursuits.
  • The familial nature of OCD and its genetic implication
  • Jim’s struggle to reconcile treatment approaches with religious beliefs.
  • Jim’s book, “A Secret Life: Enduring and Triumphing Over OCD

Carrie also offers her insights on Jim’s treatment, providing additional context and highlighting the importance of individualized therapy plans for OCD.

Episode Summary:

Welcome to Episode 101 of Christian Faith and OCD. I’m Carrie Bock, your host. In today’s episode, I’m thrilled to introduce Jim Juliana, author of “A Secret Life.” Jim shares his deeply personal journey with OCD, detailing his experiences and treatment.

Jim first noticed something was wrong during elementary school in the 1950s. He recalls an incident where he fixated on an inappropriate image, leading him to fear eternal damnation. Despite being a top student and devout altar boy, he struggled with feelings of guilt and scrupulosity, intensified by his religious upbringing.

As a teenager in the 1960s, Jim faced increasing OCD symptoms, including tics and obsessive thoughts. He recalls an event where he ran away before returning to high school, seeking refuge in a tree house. This marked the beginning of his journey toward professional help, although he did not receive an official OCD diagnosis until 1980.

Jim emphasizes the importance of recognizing OCD in children, noting how it can affect well-behaved students who may internalize their struggles. He shares insights from his own experiences and from conversations with educators and parents about the prevalence of OCD in younger populations.

Join us as Jim delves into his past, the challenges he faced, and how he ultimately found healing. Tune in to hear his full story and gain valuable insights into living with and overcoming OCD.

Related Links and Resources:

Jim Juliana

Jim Juliana’s Book: A Secret Life: Enduring and Triumphing Over OCD: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

International OCD Foundation

More Episodes to Listen to:

74. Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) and NOCD with Stacy Quick, LPC

Transcript

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD episode 101. I am your host, Carrie Bock. On today’s episode, we have a personal story of someone who’s dealt with OCD and has gone through treatment and has written a book about it. So I’m very excited to have Jim Juliana on the show talking about his book, “A Secret Life.”

Welcome to the show.

Jim: Thank you, Carrie, for having me.

Carrie: When did you really first start to show signs of OCD and like, what were those? Even if you didn’t have a diagnosis or you didn’t know that that’s what it was.

Jim: I first knew something was wrong when I was in elementary school, we’re going back now to the mid 1950s, I’m showing my age, and I can remember and relate in the book, an incident where we had a plumber or electrician at the house working.

For my mom and I was snooping around the truck outside and there was a picture in the truck of a partially naked woman and of course I fixated on it. And then after the gentleman left, I started having very serious feelings that I had done something wrong. I was the oldest of eight children. I don’t think we had eight at this time, but went to Catholic school through 12th grade.

Was very religious. I was an altar boy. I was at the top of my class academically, and I thought I was a pretty good person. And then this event occurred and it took my mother and me. The rest of the afternoon for me to realize or come to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to go to hell for having looked at this picture.

Wow. And I remember it very, very vividly. My mother was my best friend all through my teenage years, and I worshipped her and loved her very much, and it was, uh, mutual. And she sat me down, I remember, in the kitchen and tried to explain to me what had transpired, and it wasn’t a mortal sin, and I wasn’t going to hell, and eventually I felt better about it later in the afternoon, and we’re talking several hours where she consoled me and talked to me, and so that was the very first incident where I knew there was something unusual going on.

Back then, the word scrupulosity came into play because of my religious background and upbringing. The other event that took place, which was really probably the most important event in my adolescent years, I had completed the first semester of Catholic high school. In an all boys Jesuit high school, it was Christmas vacation and I was scheduled to go back to school the next day to start the second semester in January.

Now we’re talking 1964 and as I had mentioned, I was a straight A student did very, very well. I like school, enjoyed school, but I had been having a lot of problems. My first semester at PrEP, Georgetown PrEP, was headaches, and I had developed some facial and bodily tics. And it was all trying to get rid of thoughts or ideas that I thought were sexually wrong or inappropriate.

And my grades had reflected this interruption, so to speak. And I was just afraid to go back to school, so the night before I was supposed to return, I ran away. And basically what I did was I went into the park. We lived near Rock Creek park and my friends had a tree for tree house. So I spent the night there freezing my butt off and got back to the house about eight or eight 30 in the morning.

And of course my folks were beside themselves. And that was the first time that I ever received any professional medical help for what was going on. I had just turned 15 years old then.

Carrie: Did they know that you were struggling with this thought process? Was there a lot of confessing that was going on to them?

Jim: No.

Carrie: Or assurance seeking? Okay.

Jim: It was my secret only at that point. And I was very timid. Even though I was a good athlete and a good student, I was behind the eight ball a little bit socially. I was very quiet and introverted. Even with my parents, they would have to pull things out of me, so to speak. You can imagine having a house full of children, all ages, all in school.

We had a nice middle class family and I was pretty happy most of the time, but this was an offshoot of what had happened in grade school and it just kept getting worse and worse and more invasive in everything that I did to the point where. I knew I needed help. I didn’t quite know how to ask for help.

So this was my way of speaking up and getting my parents involved.

I think it’s important to note for parents and others that sometimes like the kid that’s well behaved, that doesn’t mean that they don’t have the internal struggles going on. Because a lot of times we see situations where. A child can be very well behaved and they’re good in school, but then they’re holding on to this anxiety inside and unless it manifests in some way externally, a lot of times people don’t know.

Yeah, and I think I’ve mentioned to you, we have 4 children and 3 of our girls are school teachers. It’s amazing today just how many youngsters suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder. It would shock a lot of parents and… Through discussions with my girls and in the last few years I taught, it was just startling how many children are affected adversely in school and in their activities and at how young it happens.

My wife and I spoke to a lady who was a secretary work for our financial planner and Betsy started talking one day to her and she had twins, seven years old, and one of the twins was having nightmares. and all kinds of problems, and had been diagnosed with OCD. And this was just a couple years ago.

Carrie: Yeah, fortunately, like, they’re catching it a lot earlier, so that there can be earlier intervention.

Yes. Whereas, you know, many years ago, they did not catch these types of things earlier. When you got help at 15, did you get a diagnosis of OCD then, or no?

Jim: I’m laughing at remembering. We went to a doctor, psychiatrist that was a good friend of the family, Dr. Fitzgerald. He had a couple of sons attending prep with me.

He was a good friend of the family. And my parents and I never received or heard the word OCD until 1980, if you can believe that. I was married, had four children and into my career as a teacher and coach. Before OCD was ever mentioned.

Did you label yourself with something random, like I’m weird or quirky, or I feel crazy inside because I think a lot of times people with OCD do feel internally crazy until they get a diagnosis.

Yeah, you’re right about that. A lot of people I’ve met, they don’t want to talk about it. They’re embarrassed. Yeah. I think would be the word I would use, or they feel they’re lesser human beings.

Carrie: How did you explain this to yourself?

Jim: To this day, I think of what happened to me freshman year in high school, for lack of better words, is I had a nervous breakdown of some sort.

I had an emotional… breakdown. I had a mental disorder of some nature that I had no idea what was going on. In fact, just within the last couple of years, when I was meeting with my present Dr. Jim Gallagher, who inspired me to write my book, he talked about the fact that I was a 15 year old, going through puberty, going through all kinds of Emotional, physical changes at that time.

And a lot of that was part of what produced the headaches. The headaches were real. A lot of my teachers thought that I was faking it. I remember that. It was much, much more complicated than anyone thought back in 1964. And it encompassed everything I did, every day, every minute, something was going on and I knew it.

I knew I was different. In fact, later on in my adolescence, when I dropped out of college, I was drafted. It was during Vietnam and our pediatrician was able to write a letter and explain what was going on with me. And I really wasn’t trying to dodge the draft. In fact, I was thinking about going into the service.

They wouldn’t take me because I was, I think the phrase they used was mentally unstable or mentally incompetent. I was four F and didn’t have to worry about going to Vietnam.

Carrie: Wow. Well, you said it took until 1980 for you to get a diagnosis and hear the words O c D. While you were going through this in high school and beyond, was it always mainly themes of scrupulosity, like worried about offending God or going to hell or other things?

Jim: Yes, my wife and I were high school sweethearts and started dating. Oh, I first met her when I was 14. So right around, so she knows all about this and lived with this more than anybody else now that my parents are gone. And it was always a scrupulosity problem. It always, because of my deep religious Christian faith, my Catholicism, my love of God, but it always was, had sexual overtones.

And it was never talked about that. I had something going wrong with the chemicals in my brain. There were pathways that I had developed forcing me to go sideways in different areas. Even when the O C D was used in 80, I was seeing a doctor here in Denver and he actually was trying drugs, prescription drugs to use some of the effects of the OCD.

They hadn’t been accepted yet by the FDA, so my doctor had to get him from Canada. That’s the point where I was in the 70s and 80s where I’m trying every different prescription drug for anxiety, for depression, for whatever they thought it might work. And I probably went through half a dozen to a dozen different types of drugs.

And drugs have never really been a great assistance to my problem. Never. In fact, Dr. Gallagher says it’s normally about only 30% of people that have OCD find any kind of relief from prescription. Antidepressants, those kind of things.

Do you remember what some of the things you were on? Were you on like, because this was before the standard treatment now is SSRIs.

Were you on like a tricyclic antidepressants? Or do you remember? I was

on Prozac at one time. I know my brother. I can’t remember the drug that he used because he’s OCD as well. And I mentioned it to my doctor and we tried and it did have some side effects, but it helped a little bit, but it was never more than just mellowing me out.

Carrie: Okay.

Jim: Kind of controlling my temper and frustration and anger and anxiety in my case anyway.

Carrie: But it never helped like lessen the intrusions for you?

Jim: No, never.

Carrie: That’s hard to deal with. So I imagine that it was probably hard trying to navigate a sense of like healthy sexuality. It’s normal for teenagers to think about sex or be curious about sex or have questions about them.

But those things weren’t talked about. People weren’t having open conversations. Was that hard for you to navigate? Try to figure out like, I don’t know what’s normal versus like what’s OCD related.

Jim: Yeah, what was normal for me was what I had been taught in 12 years of Catholic school, nuns for eight years, Sisters of Charity, which I loved them, they were great teachers, but they were strict, and it was all by the book, the Catholic Church, the doctrines of the church, so I, being the person I was, That was kind of how I acted and reacted.

And if I thought it was a mortal sin to look at a girl walking away from me who had nice legs and a nice butt and swayed. And if that was a mortal sin, then that was a mortal sin. I had to go and confess that, go to church for that. I think like a lot of kids in the fifties and sixties, there wasn’t a lot of, uh, sex education or discourse on sex.

It’s what I learned in school, and it seemed like, as I look back now, just about everything was bad, was wrong. That was my approach, gotta be careful, and I never dated much. I never kissed a girl until my wife to be kissed me when I was probably 16. I was way behind the curve. A lot of it had to do with the OCD and worrying about sin and having to go back to church, confess my sins, talk to the priest, that kind of thing.

Carrie: Did that cause you to engage in confession maybe more than the average Catholic? I don’t know exactly how that works, but did you find yourself going back a lot and confessing impulsively?

Jim: Yes, absolutely. It’s like hitting your head on the brick wall, like, okay, this is going to help. And then you walk out of the confession. Confession works where you can go anytime you want. Okay. It’s up to the individual and it’s a sacrament, just like receiving the Eucharist or marriage. So it’s supposed to receive help from God and grace from God by going to confession, supposed to be helpful. And I turned it upside down on its head and it became drudgery and something that I avoided more than took advantage of.

Carrie: Okay. Did you have a lot of compulsive praying during this time? Like you’d have a certain thought and say a certain prayer or feel like you were repeating certain prayers over and over?

Jim: Yeah, that’s a good point. I’ve thought about that. Yes, most definitely. I used to, in grade school, during Easter, during Lent, Advent, Christmas time, I tried to go to church every day before school. And then in high school, we had mass, daily mass. Optional. And I went a lot. In fact, half of the kids that went to prep were boarding students. So about 200 day, we were called day hops and then 200 boarding students from all over the United States. And we would go back in early August for football camp to start practice.

And I was one of the captains my senior year. And the tradition had always been go to church, go to mass every morning before we start practicing the day. And a lot of kids were rebelling against that. And I remember along with the other co captain, we had a team meeting and I was the one that said, Hey, we’re going to go to church every morning.

We’re going to keep this tradition. And a lot of guys were upset with me. As I recall, that was an example of how. Impulsive I was about the religious. I even carried it into my responsibility as captain of the football team, making the rest of the guys go to church every morning, just because I thought that’s what I wanted to do.

It wasn’t anything I was hurting him, but I’m sure there’s some guys to this day that are still resentful why Juliana made us go to church on, uh, every single day during camp.

Carrie: I think that’s a good point though, where sometimes when people struggle with OCD, they can rope other people into their compulsive behaviors. And this especially happens for spouses, children, others that are closest to you. I’m curious, what was the impact on your wife and children? Because you had told me when we met a little bit before that they actually wrote parts of your book, right? Or you included parts from them in the book.

Jim: Each of the four children, they’re all adults now in their 40s. And then my wife, Betsy, wrote probably half a chapter. And what I wanted people to see is how my OCD affected them. I knew as a father with them growing up and trying to be a good dad, but I knew a lot of times they had no idea what was going on and what my actions, why I was doing what I was doing. I wanted them to have an opportunity to relate people who read the book, what it was like for them , especially for my son, he spent a lot of time with me in the fall. He was always the manager of the football team, and he was around me a lot during football practices and that kind of thing. Both my youngest daughter and Jimmy, our son, I taught both of them at the Catholic school they attended for, I taught them two years, which they talk about a lot of it was fun and it was a good experience, but there were some tough times for them. And then of course, Betsy’s perspective is probably the most intuitive and the most real because she knew me as the boy next door. Literally, her family moved next door to my grandparents at the beach.

She told her father the first summer that we knew each other that she was going to marry me. Now, how she knew that, I still don’t know. She said, Dad, I’m going to marry that guy. But she had an awful lot of insights and I give her a lot of credit because I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for her. She got me through a lot of tough times, especially in college.

When things got really bad, the thoughts got really bad, I called them episodes or sessions in the book, I think, where I would have a thought and it would kind of take control of my brain. When I went to see Gallagher in 2015. Those sessions amounted to 60, 70 times a day. I was interrupted in my mind related to something having to do with OCD and oftentimes sexual nature, 65 to 70 times.

Carrie: That’s a lot.

Jim: It’s terrible. In graduate school, I got my master’s because of my OCD. I couldn’t read my textbooks because I was interrupted so often. And I loved to read. There were times before that where, and I said, I think I mentioned I developed tics, shaking my head and trying to get rid of these thoughts and the children and Betsy offered, I think, excellent perspective to the book.

The other point that people should realize is OCD is familial. It’s genetic. Everybody, all my children have some form of OCD. My dad had it. My uncle had it. In fact, in 15 or 20 years ago, the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland was doing a study trying to isolate the familial gene that causes OCD.

And about eight people in our family, my family, participated in the study to isolate that gene. Now that I’m better, and we can joke about it, but back then it wasn’t, like my dad was super OCD and perfectionist, and, but he would never admit that he had OCD or suffered from any kind of, It’s actually, I think, technically referred to as a phobia, OCD.

And yesterday, for the first time in several years, I went to see my doctor, just to kind of, he calls it a tune up. We talked for an hour and just got caught up, and he mentioned that I’m losing my train of thought, he, I can’t remember what the point I was trying to make, but anyway.

Carrie: What was that process of treatment like for you? So when you went in 2015, you feel like that was when you got some really good therapeutic help.

Jim: Yeah, it’s capital E, capital R, capital P, Exposure and Response Prevention Therapy. And I could spend 20 minutes describing it exactly. I’m not a doctor. I don’t want to do that, but it’s very controversial. My doctor, Dr. Gallagher, is the expert in the western part of the United States. People come from all over. In fact, the waiting list in 2015 to see him was a couple of years when he found out my age and what I had been through, I was getting close to 70 then, and it had to do with sex and religion. He knew he could treat me and help me.

So he saw me right away and within weeks and then months of seeing him, I experienced a change. Basically what he does is, for example, he went to my daughter Stephanie’s house. Stephanie has a mild case of O C D and it’s the cleanliness O C D. Okay? You wash your hands and organizational, everything has to be perfect, that kind of thing.

And some of those attributes are good, especially if you are a teacher. She teaches the little one second, third grade. So he went over to her house and he’s walking around our house and he would see a picture and he’d make the picture crooked and he’d move the furniture and play games with her head. We have fun talking about that.

And my uncle Charles, he had all his clothes organized. He showed me one time later in life. Perfectly white shirts, colored shirts, striped shirts, Hawaiian shirts. It’s amazing the way people will react to the OCD, and I was in the process of writing the book in the 2018, I guess, and there were two sisters that happened to live in Colorado, and they were in their 20s.

And they had suffered their entire life from clemennitis OCD to the point where they hardly ever left their home.

Carrie: Yeah, it can get really severe with the avoidance.

Jim: Yeah, and at one point, I mean, they were taking showers five and six times. Anyway. They moved out of their home and were living together, and during the course of my writing the book, they committed suicide. And Dr. Gallagher had never treated them, but he had been in a seminar where they were present, and he talked about some of the things that he might have done to treat them, but that was a really sad story. There are a lot of people that attempt suicide or commit suicide because of OCD.

Carrie: Tell us about, do you remember some of the exposures that you had to do that were really hard, like, I don’t know if I can do that, and not, like, give into a compulsion, because essentially that’s what they’re asking you to do, is kind of expose yourself to certain things and then, or have an intrusion and not give into the compulsive, whether it’s the tick or the prayer or the thing that you usually do, to kind of resolve that angst.

Jim: I had a doctor, a psychiatrist, MD, treated me for over 20 years, and he was the one that recommended Gallagher. We had talked about Gallagher before, but he knew of my strict Catholic faith and my religious background and everything, and he never thought I was ready for the exposure and response therapy because of what it asks you to do sometime.

Betsy and I saw Gallagher first time. He said, I’m never going to ask you to do anything that’s illegal or hurtful or harmful or against the law or anything like that. What I ask you to do may go against what you’ve been taught in your religious background. And I was to the point Betsy didn’t think I was going to do.

He said, if you do what I tell you to do, I can cure you. That’s how confident he was. And I was all in. I was surprised Betsy thought I was going to get up and walk out. Which a lot of people do. He told me that. And to answer your question directly, what did he have me do? He had me stop going to church.

Stop praying. I had never purchased any kind of a pornographic book or a Playboy or any of that kind of stuff. Second visit, we went on a field trip. He took me to a Barnes and Noble and told me to, and bought me three or four Playboy magazines, told me to look at the pictures, read the articles, that kind of thing. Gave me a couple websites on the internet, pornographic websites. The idea is to totally overwhelm you with what you don’t want to do. Like I said, within weeks and then months, Betsy could tell immediately that just by doing what he told me to do. And then initially I was seeing him a couple times a week. And then it was once a week, and then it was once a month, but it was pretty intensive.

Carrie: So you went weekly at first, or did you go more than?

Jim: I went weekly at first, yes. In fact, I think the first month I went twice a week. And then I went once a week for maybe another month or two, and then we got to the point where I went once a month and for an hour.

Oh, I know what else he did. He made tapes that I had to listen to. Anti prayer tapes. You don’t need to go to church. There is no hell. And a lot of people look at it as being very controversial, but I do too. I mean, pornography and those kinds of things are sickening to me, but it works.

Carrie: So that cut down after engaging in those activities, that cut down on the intrusive thoughts that you were having?

Jim: Absolutely. So what it did was, the pathways in my brain were destroyed by my having done those activities.

Carrie: Hey, Carrie, interrupting this interview just for a moment. Wanted to say that it sounds like what our guest went through was flooding. There’s a difference between in behavioral exposure therapy.

There’s a difference between flooding and gradual exposure. Flooding is kind of what it sounds like where you’re immersed in something very quickly. Gradual exposure is where you bite things off into smaller steps and you have a hierarchy and you move through that exposure hierarchy starting with things that are lower on the exposure level and then moving upward.

It’s quite possible that flooding was chosen in this situation for treatment due to the severity of the level of the issues, but I’m not familiar with many therapists today who are still using flooding techniques. There may certainly be some. I also want to point out that the International OCD Foundation, which is not a faith based organization, has principles of effective and religiously sensitive exposures for ERP.

We will copy that website and put it in the show notes for you so you can read those. They talk about not asking a client to do something that they knowingly would violate their safety or supported beliefs and being able to do the activities that other people from their faith community can do as a part of normal practice and identifying working with the faith community and the therapist.

We talk a lot on the show about various types of treatment, and so just to know that I just want people who are listening to this for the first time or maybe this is their first exposure to exposure and response prevention. I don’t want anyone to get scared or overwhelmed or think that this is going to be the absolute way Treatment plan for them.

Your own therapist has to assess what’s going to be best for you and your situation. So just keep that in mind.

Jim: Like I said, I went from 65 to 70 sessions a day to the peak of where I was feeling my best, maybe one.

Carrie: Okay. Wow. That’s a huge difference.

Jim: I was to the point where suicide was always in the back of my mind. The only thing that kept me from committing suicide was my family and crazy as it sounds, my religion. Because of course it’s suicide is mortal sin is a grievous act. I would assume most Christian churches. And yeah, it was startling revelation. I was a totally different person.

Carrie: How did you reconcile this concept of almost like, I have to sin in order to get better for my OCD. Like, I have to stop doing things that God wants me to do and start doing things that are against my faith system in order to, like, I think that’s a piece that a lot of people would really, like, wrestle with. liike, how can I be asked to do these things in order to get better?

Jim: That’s why the first doctor didn’t recommend Gallagher all those years, because he knew how religious I was. And to answer your question, and the way Gallagher explains it, he’s not Catholic, but he’s Christian. He was raised Christian. I think he’s married to a Catholic woman.

Anyway, I came to the conclusion that no loving God wants any human being to live the way I was living. To suffer at that level. Anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts. If you’re a good teacher, it makes you tired because you put a lot of effort into it. My girls were always telling me how tired they are, and I said, I can relate.

So if you put on top of that, all this other, these thoughts and gyrations that I was going through to not sin, and I would come home at night, totally exhausted. That makes sense. Would sometimes lash out and get negative and be angry. Especially to my children when they were smaller, and to Betsy, because that wasn’t me, that’s not the kind of person I was, but this overwhelming guilt and anxiety and depression was just like a pall that surrounded my whole life.

So when Gallagher and I talked, and it was like, This is not what God wants. God’s a loving God, a forgiving God. If you make a mistake and you’re sorry, it’s over, done with. You don’t have to carry it for the next 25 years. So that’s the way I looked at the pornography and stuff. It was not sinning. It was allowing me to live the life that Christ really wants everyone to live, a happy life.

I have a God given talent to work with kids. And I always knew that, always considered myself, this is not a profession, it’s my vocation. I was meant to be a school teacher and I could motivate kids and help kids. And why would God allow me to lose that attribute because of OCD? That’s not what he wanted.

He wants me to be a good teacher, good father, good person, so in a perverted way, it’s not perverted, it’s not the right word, but in a strange way, doing what would be normally wrong was really making me a much better person, much better individual, able to live the life that I’m supposed to live. That’s why I’m talking to you today.

I feel this is my responsibility. I’m not teaching anymore. Dr. Gallagher told me yesterday, by the way, he said, I gotta tell you, there are three people that have read your book, and they’ve all been my patients, and they’ve all been kids. He said, and I’ve cured them all. That’s positive. And I couldn’t have done that had I not listened to him and done what he told me to do.

Carrie: Why did you decide to write the book? I know he encouraged you to write about your experience, but obviously, like, some of these things are personal, you know, that you’re opening up about. Why did you decide to kind of put yourself out there like that?

Jim: Because I thought it was my responsibility, my worst enemy, to have to live with OCD the way I did, and others do, like those two sisters that the only way out for them was suicide.

That’s not the way life’s supposed to be. The children were a little hesitant when I asked them to write something for the book, and I said, Hey, you could be helping some other people. You could be doing some good. Sure. And Betsy’s always been supportive. That’s her M. O. She’s a good, caring, empathetic individual.

It was kind of a team effort, and when I hear stories like Gallagher told me yesterday, makes it all worthwhile.

Carrie: So can people find your book on Amazon and other places?

Jim: Amazon is the best place, Jim Juiliana, author, is my Facebook, and it has a lot of pictures of the children and a lot of reviews from people who have read the book.

If they think they have it, they need to find out, determine if it is OCD. Especially with children, because so much going on with little children. I remember middle school children getting up out of their desk and falling down for whatever reason. They’re just all over the place, and you never know what they’re thinking and doing, and I hate the thought of teenagers and young children having to suffer OCD and not have any help from parents professionally.

Carrie: Well, thank you so much for sharing your story.

Jim: It’s been great. And I appreciate your putting the word out. Pay it forward.

Carrie: I’m really glad that we had Jim Juliana on the show to share with us about his experience with exposure and response prevention. It was tough for him, but it worked. We are very much about increasing hope on the show and wanting people to know that wherever you are on your OCD or anxiety journey, you can get better.

Never give up. And as always, thank you for listening. May God be with you on your next step towards treatment and greater mental health. Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the use of myself or by the wealth counseling.

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

100. 100 Tips for Managing Anxiety

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Anxiety, Counseling, Podcast Episode. 2 Comments on 100. 100 Tips for Managing Anxiety

In this special 100th episode, I dive into a comprehensive list of 100 tips for managing anxiety.  Divided into different sections, we explore various aspects of anxiety’s impact on our life and relationships.

From practical tips to heartfelt reminders, I’ve got you covered in this list.

More Episodes to Listen to:

85. Anxiety FAQ with Carrie and Tiffany

99. My Grief and Loss Journey

Written by Carrie Bock on . Posted in Podcast Episode.

On today’s episode, I want to take a moment to open up and share my personal journey of grief and loss over the past year. It’s been a challenging road, but I find purpose in sharing my story with all of you, knowing that it might help someone going through similar challenges.

Episode Highlights:

  • The profound impact of losing both parents and navigating the complex emotions that arise from such a significant loss.
  • The importance of allowing yourself to grieve and acknowledging the unique challenges that come with losing both parents.
  • Honoring your loved ones’ memories and finding ways to keep their legacy alive in your own life.
  • The transformative power of surrendering to God’s plan and finding peace amidst adversity.

Episode Summary:

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD, episode 99. I’m Carrie Bock, and today I’m sharing a very personal story that’s been unfolding over the past year—a journey through grief and loss. As hard as it’s been, I believe there’s value in sharing these moments because grief touches us all in different ways.

My journey through grief began in March 2022 with the birth of our daughter, Faith. Just a few weeks after, my mom came to visit, and we discovered that she was battling pancreatic cancer. At first, we thought it might be pancreatitis, but the diagnosis quickly turned to something more serious. We were hopeful she could undergo surgery, but unfortunately, the cancer had already spread too fast. It was an overwhelming and crushing realization, coming at a time when I was still recovering from childbirth, processing the emotional and physical toll of bringing new life into the world while confronting the reality of losing someone so dear to me.

As I reflect on this past year, I’ve come to see how deeply intertwined joy and sorrow can be. While there have been moments of profound pain, there have also been moments of grace. God has met me in unexpected ways, showing me that even in the midst of heartache, there’s room for healing and growth. I know many of you are walking through your own journeys of grief, and my prayer is that through today’s episode, you’ll find comfort in knowing that you’re not alone and that God’s presence can sustain us through even the toughest of times.

More Episodes to Listen to:

105. Joy Comes in the Morning: 3rd Year of Marriage

Transcript

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCOD, episode 99. I am your host, Carrie Bock. If you’ve been following along with our podcast, then you know that I’ve experienced some pretty significant grief and loss over the last year. And even though it’s a hard thing for me to talk about, I wanted to share because I feel like since having this podcast, I’ve been through a lot and every time I go through something and learn something new, I definitely want to put that out in the world and share it with you.

I don’t want to just suffer in vain. If this can help someone else who is going through grief and loss, I really want to share that with them. All of us are going to experience grief and loss at some point or another. It’s just a part of our lives now. And it doesn’t matter how young you are, how old you are, how rich or poor, whether you live in America or in Australia.

At some point, you’re going to go through grief and loss. Whether that’s the loss of a person that’s close to you, the loss of a job, divorce, a move that was stressful, involves loss of relationships, there’s definitely something that we can all learn from each other as part of this process in the joint collective human experience.

I wanted to start by going over, just the bird’s eye view of what’s happened since Faith was born, our daughter.  In March, 2022, Faith was born and my mom flew up a few weeks after my in-laws were here right after she was born. And mom was having some problems with her stomach. She was saying, “You know, I’m not eating certain things.”

She had been treated for pancreatitis. The doctors didn’t have answers as to why she was continuing to struggle with her stomach issues. Just a couple of months later, Memorial Day in May, Mom got diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She had to wait to have all these scans and different things. I guess several doctors had to be involved in the ultrasound process to look at the mass on our pancreas, and Steve and I had gone away at that point for the weekend.

We just wanted a little mini vacation before I got back to work. I had been on maternity leave for 12 weeks. Things were just a little bit different in our life. We had support system that felt a little bit shaky, somewhat isolated from staying home with the baby for the first few months, but then also we were trying to get connected with another church.

We ended up making a difficult decision towards the end of 21 to leave the church that we had been going to, and so we were in the process of trying to get in a small group or some type of Sunday school or ministry at the new church in mid-July of 22. On my birthday, we flew down to see my mom.

At this point, I knew things weren’t great with my mom. They had told her that she could have surgery to have the cancer removed and only about 25% of people with pancreatic cancer can actually go through the surgery. I think it has to do with a certain blood vessel in that area, and once that gets wrapped around surgery is too dangerous.

We had this surgery that my mom was supposed to be able to have or that we were hopeful that she would be able to have and then have a longer life. It turns out that the cancer spread too quickly, and so she had to go back into the hospital. They were not able to do the original surgery to remove the cancer, but of course, she was having other problems and they were trying to work with different tubes to get things straightened out so that she could function.

I remember telling my mom that I didn’t want to wait until she was on her deathbed to come out and see her and let her know how much I loved her, Steve Faith, and I ended up getting a one-way flight to Florida and we stayed down there for three weeks while I was working online, trying to rebuild a practice after coming back for maternity leave.

In a summer, in which no one wanted to be online because everyone had Zoom fatigue from COVID, they would have rather run off and gone on vacations understandable than see a therapist. That was tough. I really just made sure that everyone else was taken care of except for me. I would go visit Mom in the hospital. I would pick up dinner for Dad or make dinner. Sometimes I was seeing clients. I was making sure that my husband and my daughter were okay. During that visit, we kept hoping that my mom was going to be able to get out of the hospital where she would be able to spend more time with my daughter. And unfortunately, mom was only out of the hospital for a couple of days and then things happened with her feeding tube.

She had to go right back in. It was unfortunate that we didn’t get more. Time with her outside of the hospital, but we decided to celebrate all the summer birthdays in our family, which is myself, my brother and my dad all have birthdays in the summer. And then towards the beginning of September after we had gotten back, my husband was having a little bit of some mild balance issues, more when it was dark or couldn’t see very well, or the lighting was bad, but most of the time he was getting around pretty well. When last year, in July and towards the beginning of September, the day Faith turned six months old, Steve had an appointment with the specialty neurologist. He was diagnosed with SCA or Spino Cerebellar Ataxia and that was like a big hit as we are dealing with my mom dying and a few weeks later my mom dies on the evening of September 22nd.

My mom really suffered a lot with this cancer and that was so hard to see my mom go through that. She was always just a very devoted person to the Lord, to church ministry, and I really had a lot of spiritual wrestlings about moms suffering towards the end of her life. It just changed the way I have viewed a lot of things, which I’ll talk about a little bit later.

Losing Mom was really such a big hole because she was a person that I would talk to about everything. She was a go-to person. I talked to her every week and let her know kind of what was going on with my business efforts that I was trying to do.

She was my biggest fan for the podcast. Absolutely, just an incredible woman of God. I know that she struggled in her own faith journey towards the end just wondering, do I have enough faith for God to heal me? And of course we were praying so hard during this whole process of my mom being sick and having cancer and okay, praise God, she can have surgery. Like, “Oh no, she can’t.”  Now what does this mean for our family? It was tough. It was really tough going through all that, but knowing also that because my mom had a relationship with the Lord that when she died, she would go to heaven and it was a hard piece kind of, there was a little bit of role-switching in a lot of ways towards the end with my mom because I felt like I had to be strong for her as she was going through everything and.

I’m dealing at the same time with this new diagnosis for Steve and I don’t really have the support of anyone to process that with or talk to them about it. And in this process, Steve, his balance was really declining and started using a cane. Got him in October, I think, into a vestibular therapy. It was just a tough time.

And in October, it was about a month after my mom died that we had her memorial. That timing was hard waiting a month because it felt like I was trying to work through things. But then also there was this lack of closure because we knew we had to go back to Florida and deal with the funeral and everything else and eally the silver lining of the whole situation was being able to have Faith there to spend so much time with my extended family and with my dad while she was in her first year of life. Obviously, we didn’t plan to go back and forth to Florida that many times in her first year, but it was just a good time with my immediate family. But my dad’s extended family, most of them are in Florida as well, and both my parents came from pretty big families.

It is nice to have the support of aunts and uncles and others. Since we had already planned to come down for Thanksgiving and I think had already booked flights or made arrangements to come down, we went ahead and came down for Thanksgiving. That was ended up being about a month later, and I didn’t know that at the time. That would be the last time that I’d seen my dad in person. He was struggling, of course, as we all were with like the first holiday without mom, and he told me that he. I was gonna really miss this cake that she used to make.

It’s a family recipe that we always make around Thanksgiving and Christmas. It’s horrible for you. It’s mostly Crisco and eggs and flour. But anyway, we made this cake. I told Dad I would make the cake for him, and I’m not lying. That is a hard cake to make and not get dry. It was like the best one I’ve made probably ever, which was just really cool, so everyone appreciated it, and of course, it was all eaten. I didn’t last on the dessert table very long, but that was a good time and just a good memories with my family.

We spent Christmas with Steve’s family and it was super cold in Tennessee and March. We had Faith’s first birthday. My dad had been telling me, “Okay, when Faith turns one, I want an updated picture of her, like an eight by 10.” I was like, “Okay, well you’re gonna have to tell me like which picture you want of her?” And he said, “Well, no, she has to turn one first.” So I was like, “Okay, dad.” And we ended up having a video call with my dad, aunt, brothers, and nephews, and my dad got to see Faith walk on the video call, and then Dad died.

A week later, after Faith’s birthday, we were back down in Florida about a week later for the funeral. We decided not to have so much time in between and where it was gonna be close to Easter. So we didn’t want to interfere with Easter plans and those things. My dad wasn’t in the best of health, whereas my mom had been in really good health, so when she got cancer, it was a huge shock because she’d always taken such good care of herself, was into vitamins and eating vegetables, all those things. She didn’t drink soda. She didn’t drink a lot of coffee. She just lived a pretty healthy lifestyle. She was walking on a regular basis. When mom got sick and died before dad, it was a shock for all of us as a family because dad hadn’t been in the best health for years, and my dad had a stroke several years ago and he’s had trouble with his blood pressure and weight.

He had been overweight for probably the majority of his adult life. I had always thought for the last few years when I would visit my dad or he would come to Tennessee, I would have thoughts like, what if this is the last time I see my dad? And wanted to let him know obviously that I loved him and he was one of these people that he never thought about, like his own mortality.

He was just kind of, I think, expected to live forever. He wasn’t, didn’t seem to be really worried about those things, but when Dad died, even though I knew he wasn’t in good health, I didn’t really understand the weight that I would feel over no longer having parents at all. It just felt like I was in this child orphan situation.

I kept saying I feel lost and used the word weird more than once to describe the feeling. There’s just no other feeling like that when you lose both of your parents, especially in such a short time period. My head was super, super cloudy. Right after that, I had to write everything down for my reminders. I know I wasn’t functioning at max capacity.

I wanted to tell you a few of the things that I did during my grief process that I felt were helpful for me. One was I showed up in my relationship with God even if I didn’t have the words, or I couldn’t even think to pray. And I can’t explain to you what happens in those moments spiritually, but I know that the Bible says that the Holy Spirit intercedes for us. And that brought me a sense of comfort because I really didn’t know what to say and couldn’t think straight.

When mom got sick, I made the decision to go back on antidepressants because I knew that I had to function and when I was crying for like an hour straight, it just wasn’t functional at all. And I just made that decision that I was gonna be on them at least the first year after mom died to get through all the first pieces, first holidays and things like that. I made the decision to go to bed at the same time every night. You wouldn’t think that’s like a major life change, but it really has changed my life. Steve jokes with me about it. He is like, “Hey, it’s five minutes till your bedtime.” I used to be one of those people who were like, one more thing before I went to bed, and It didn’t work out for me well because it was usually my one more thing somehow engaged my mind and required some mental activities. So it was a little too stimulating before I needed to go to sleep. So now my nighttime routine is much more mellow and I found that by going to bed around the same time every night or by a certain time, has helped me to get more restful sleep and helped me to feel better and more refreshed in the morning.

I haven’t had problems falling asleep since I started doing that. And as many of you know, from a prior episode, I cut back where I could on work to take care of myself and reduce mental energy. It meant saying no to some clients that wanted to work through grief and loss issues. It meant saying no to all clients for a short time period.

I struggled with this because I had some type of imaginary deadline for this course that I wanted to put out for Christians with OCD, and I just emailed everyone on the list and put the whole thing on hold. If you’re not a part of our email list, you can join by going to hopeforeanxietyandocd/free, if you want the OCD resource. It was tough to have to slow down because I enjoy living at a little bit faster pace and I’m naturally like a goal setter and I have things that I want to accomplish and things that I look forward to around the corner. But, That wasn’t where I was at at the time.

I had a severe lack of motivation. I would tell my counselor, I would tell other people I get out of bed right now because I have to because I have a daughter and a husband who need me and need my help. Other than that, if it wasn’t for them, I probably would have spent a lot more time in the bed just moping around and being sad and a lot less functional, but because I essentially had to put one foot in front of the other and do the basics, I just really focused on the basics of making sure that we were eating, sleeping, and the house was relatively clean, somewhat.

I learned in this grief process to engage and enlist my support system, and it’s so humbling to ask for help, and I realized I wasn’t gonna make it through without the support of others. I asked for more help on our last trip to Florida than I had on any of the others. If you want to help someone going through grief and loss, what can you do?

Make them food or bring them food because the last thing you want to spend mental energy on at that moment is what is for dinner. It’s almost like your brain is just constantly trying to multitask, working through the grief and loss process. It’s very taxing mentally, physically, emotionally.

You can mow someone’s lawn, you can watch their kid, and there are so many different little things that you can do. One of the sweetest things that someone did for us was give us a few groceries when we got back from Dad’s funeral since we’d been gone for a couple weeks and I was helping clean out my parents’ house at that point too. I didn’t have the perishable food, the basics, bread, milk, eggs. They bought us just a few things and it was simple, yet incredibly thoughtful. So just know that even if you can’t relate to what someone’s going through, or you’re not sure how to respond, those little acts of kindness and love will really stick out to them.

There’s been so much that happened in the last 15 months as I wrote all this down. I was just overwhelmed, That was a lot to go through, and I’ve learned a lot, not just about some healthy things I could do for myself, but some things about grief. Some I knew from the experience of going through my divorce, but to be honest, I had forgotten how tough the grief process is.

Grief is exhausting. It takes time. There are no shortcuts. I went back and started reading the book, “Life After Loss” again, that I had read after my divorce. The author talks about how you can’t get over grief, you have to go through it. I highly recommend that book. It’s about losses of many different kinds. He talks about death, divorce, moving to a new city, starting over. I learned that in terms of family members, other people may be at a different phase of grief process than you are, and that can be really challenging. My dad never really accepted that my mom was dying, even up to the very end saying that he was shocked when she did die, and that she’d been very sick for some time. But I think that he was still holding onto a lot of hope that they would be able to do chemo and get rid of the cancer, and Mom just was never strong enough to do chemo. Her body just wasn’t in a place where it could handle that due to all the drains and different things she had going on. You may be in a stage of grief where you’re angry about the grief and loss and someone else is really sad.

You may be in a place of sadness and somebody else is in anger and it’s. Sometimes it’s hard to meet your other family members on that level. That definitely was something that came up for me. I had a lot of anger about my mom’s care, or somewhat lack of care that she experienced while she was in the hospital by her doctors.

I felt like they weren’t really honest with her about outcomes. You know, just were insensitive. There were some things that were said that were pretty insensitive, and I became very angry and frustrated in that process. I really just tried to advocate for her wherever I could. When I would go there, I was reminded that grief is hard when you know it’s coming, and it’s hard when you don’t.

One isn’t better than the other. They’re just different. With Mom, we knew she was dying. We got to have a lot of goodbye conversations. Just a lot of time spent in the hospital talking about her as a mom and even my parents were able to have conversations about, you know, being a spouse and all of that.

With Dad, we didn’t get to say goodbye. It was just suddenly he died of a heart attack in his sleep, basically. I’m glad that he didn’t suffer, even though we didn’t get those opportunities necessarily in the same way that we got them with Mom, when you have the sudden grief and loss, it’s shocking. It jolts you in a way and when you know it’s coming, you still don’t know when it’s coming, so you’re anticipating something.

I remember even telling some people, I didn’t tell them the whole story, but I was trying to kind of make plans and letting people know, “Hey, I may have to travel at a moment’s notice and I may not be able to fulfill that responsibility just without trying to tell them the whole story of what was going on with my mom. So definitely grief is hard either way. I realize that you could have a lot of different conflicting emotions and grief that mess you up like I was talking about before. One moment you might be intensely sad, and then another moment you might be super angry.

Another moment you might have some regret. I think that regret is probably the hardest emotion to have. I really try mostly to live my life without any regrets. I think that’s why I wanted to come down and see my mom when I did, and Steve was definitely a strong supporter and proponent of that. He was like, “Just do what you have to do to be with your family.”

Even though it was hard, I know on him and Faith just change of schedule and routine and location, that I’m glad that I did that in that situation and I’m glad that I saw my dad, you know, at Thanksgiving. I’m glad that we had that time to spend together and I’m thankful for that. In my own ways, I always tried to communicate to him how much I loved him and valued him as a parent. I had a much probably closer relationship with my mom than I did with my dad, even though I know he still loved me in his own way, but I just had different feelings about the situations and the deaths.

Definitely, there’s a lot of spiritual questioning that can come in these situations. Why did my mom have to suffer this way?Why did on the way out of her life, especially when she served God and served the church, you know, why didn’t God answer our prayers? For healing in the way that we wanted to so that we could still have Mom here with us. I don’t know. I don’t have full answers for those things. I know that God gave me peace about my mom’s suffering because my mom was very open about her faith to people in the hospital, and she was open about, She loved telling them that she had a granddaughter who was actually born on my mom’s birthday, believe it or not.

We did not plan it that way. That’s just the way it happened. But she was supposed to be born several weeks later. My mom was very open with people about her faith and she would give out these little Billy Graham tracks. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen those. I’m surprised there are still tracks out there really, to be honest, and people still use that.

If it works and it brings someone to Christ, that’s great, but she would hand out these little steps to peace with God. Billy Graham tracks. I know that there was one time I was in the hospital sitting with her and one of the nurses came in and she said, “Oh, I took that booklet that you gave me and I showed it to some of the other nurses.” I told God, during this process of prayer, I really hope someone in that hospital got saved up in there and I probably will never know this side of heaven if what the impact of my mom being there was. God gave me the piece, that was her last mission field on this earth was just sharing the love of Christ with people on her way out, and that’s just how she was.

My mom went to school actually to be a missionary. She never left the country. That’s a long story, but she spent most of her time in her career as an ophthalmic assistant working for an eye clinic.

I learned no one wants to have the hard conversation about death, not even the doctors. Whereas I think I’ve heard other experiences where doctors were quick to predict how long a family member had. They definitely weren’t in my mom’s situation. In some ways, that was good. But in other ways, it was really to the detriment. I think when she got down to the final weeks and days left, we were able to get her home with hospice for a few days to spend those time with my dad, but then she actually went back to the hospital and passed away there. I think for some reason she didn’t want to pass away at home. I don’t know if that had to do with, she was concerned about how it will affect my dad, but I’m glad that she had some time at home before she passed away.

It’s tough because I don’t think my mom fully faced her own mortality until palliative care came in and started talking with her about if she wanted to sign, do not resuscitate or what she wanted her final wishes to be for her living will. She ended up being very upset by that conversation, and I fault the doctors for that because I don’t think they prepped her for how little time that she had left and how her body was essentially shutting down at that point. This, especially with Steve’s diagnosis and all the uncertainty, it’s prompted us to have a lot of conversations about death, living will, final wishes, and those conversations are so important to have. I can guarantee you that your loved one does not want to sit there and think about what song you might like at your funeral, because when you’re going through grief, just thinking about something like that, it sounds so simple, but yet it’s so hard in that moment to know like, I don’t know.

Well, would they have wanted this song or am I just picking that because it sounds good or It’s easy? I would say that’s one good thing that has come out of the situation for Steve and I to have honest conversations about, do you want to be kept alive by a breathing machine? Do you want to have a feeding tube? What do you want? If things get really bad or you’re in a coma and nobody thinks you’re gonna wake up, those are. Hard conversations to have, and we also had a lawyer that really walked us through the entire process of getting a will and making sure that our daughter was taken care of in that process.

If something should happen to us before she’s 18 and how she will be taken care of, who will take care of her? We both have living wills now and some paperwork if we need to get medical records from each other. It’s just really good. I feel a lot more at peace having that prepared now, and hopefully we won’t need our wills for quite some time, but you just never know.

It’s important that we have these conversations about death. My counselor told me about a book, and I don’t exactly remember what it was called, but it’s a book where you can fill out even what you would like to have happen to your pets and what type of funeral or burial would you like to have? Those types of things. Are you wanting to donate your organs or your body in some way to help others? I would encourage you to have some of these hard conversations, especially if you have older relatives in your family. Ask them, “Hey, do you have a living will or have you thought about what you might like or not like? Do you have any plans that you would like for your funeral?” Of course, nobody wants to talk about when they’re gonna die, but these conversations are just so vital for our families because it really, not having to plan all that stuff or not having to make the decision for you because you’ve already made the decision on paper, that is just a great gift that you can give your family.

I learned that grief is best shared. One of the most powerful things I did as part of my grief and loss process was going to an all-day grief intensive, which sounds bad, I guess, to some people, but it was nice. It was at the Refuge Center for Counseling in Franklin, and I spent all day with a small group of people really to process various griefs and losses that we were going through. And even though everyone’s story was different, it’s like we understood each other on a certain level of shared experience, and that was such a gift. We were able to go through several different experiential activities. We did art projects and other things. We were able to process information in different ways, and it really got me thinking about how those experiential in the moment, Therapy exercises can be so helpful and wanting to do more of those with my clients.

I think my biggest takeaway was that I got to be the client again, and nobody knew that I was a therapist, which was so beautiful. With the grief intensive brought out that I’m not sure that I would’ve gotten there in just an individual setting or just by talking about it if we weren’t doing these different activities. Was that because Steve got his SCA diagnosis? Just a short time before my mom died was that I never had an opportunity to grieve that. I never had the opportunity to grieve the change of my life, the big change of becoming a mom because I became a mom and then my mom got sick, so there was no sense of me like adjustment period to becoming a new mom.

There’s grief and lost with that because you rarely leave your house after seven o’clock. There are so many things that revolve around nap times. Whether or not your child got enough sleep the night before, if they’re teething, how they’re feeling. It just really kind of restricts your activities quite a bit, and I don’t think I had ever taken the time to even process through that.

Who am I now that I’m a mom? There was that piece that came out, but also, this piece of who am I now, that I’m also caring for someone who’s disabled and even though my husband is at a place where he can do a lot of things for himself, things are changing and there are some things that I have to be more responsible for we’re definitely remind him of.

The thing about grief and loss is that you end up with a new identity in the end because there’s this missing space in your life of someone who used to be there who used to be such a big impact on you. I felt that when I went through my divorce process, and I also felt that after my parents passed away, I really needed to feel the depth of that related to the life that I thought Steve and I were gonna have in the life that we have now.

It’s still a great and amazing life, and I can say that in a place of acceptance, but I needed to really be sad and frustrated about what it’s like to have, of course, a very rare diagnosis that most people don’t get. I can’t say, “Hey, my husband has Parkinson’s, or my husband has MS.” People know what those things are. I have to say my husband has SCA, or my husband has ataxia and hear people say, “What does that mean?” And then you have to go into this explanation of what it means, and it just can be pretty frustrating. Of course, everyone wants to be helpful and a lot of times doesn’t know what to say or how to act or how to be helpful.

There were a lot of different things that I was able to process that. I realized there was some completion around, or acceptance around the grief and loss of my parents because there was some pre-grieving that happened before they actually died, but also because there was some finality to it and I knew, okay, they’re in heaven, they’re okay. Whereas with my husband and my daughter even too, it’s like sitting on the edge of uncertainty. What is next month going to be like? What is next year going to be like? Even the doctors can’t tell you that no one knows, only God knows. We really have to sit in a place of trust with Him and just say, “Okay, you got this.”

We’re just so thankful of how well Steve is doing all things considered, and he’s come just such a long way in therapy. He was able to graduate through that and has been walking well.  So far, so we’re just, every day we’re thankful. Having faith really keeps them active, which is good as well, cuz that’s an important part of this particular diagnosis is just staying active.

If you’re grieving right now, what I want you to know is that there is hope on the other side. That if you take the time to process this, to talk about your loved one, whether that’s in individual therapy or group therapy or some type of art therapy process, that you can come to a greater place of peace about losing your loved one, even if it was a challenging relationship or even if it was a traumatic loss for you.

The main thing is that you have to stay the course and stay with the process. You can’t just shove it down or try to ignore it, or pretend like something didn’t happen. Really being able to acknowledge this hurts me, or I’m angry about this, or I’m confused. I don’t understand. That expression is so important and vital to your grief process.

If you can find a support group or other people that are going through it as well, I think that’s an incredible opportunity too. One of the reasons I chose to do the intensive was because I just couldn’t seem to get it together to fit a support group in my schedule. And I didn’t want to go in the evening somewhere after I hadn’t seen my daughter and had been working all day.

That just didn’t quite seem right and some, I couldn’t quite fit the Zoom group in. Then my schedule, I was just having problems making space for this. So when I saw the intensive option, I thought, okay, this is good. I do some intensive work with my clients and it’ll be good for me to see what that’s like.

On the other side, I will say that the next day, I don’t know if this was related to the intensive or not, I had the worst headache that I had had in a really long time, so I don’t know if that was just from all the mental and emotional processing that I had done the day before. That piece was a little rough, but I definitely left feeling a lot lighter.

It’s great to be in an environment where people are just holding emotional space for you. And that’s a lot of like what we do in therapy, and my friend and I talk about this, who’s also a therapist, is that a lot of times we don’t know how to sit in that space with people to just say like, “I’m here. I’m here if you want to talk. I’m here if you want to be silent.” I think most importantly, “I have no advice for you because there’s really no good advice that you can give in that moment” or to say like, “I know how you feel” because you really don’t know how that person feels even if you’ve been through a loss. Their loss was different than yours in so many ways. That was one of the best parts about the grief intensive was being told, “Hey, here’s one of the rules.” You can’t give advice or just make platitudes.

Another rule was that we had to own our own grief process instead of making general comments. Grief or saying, well, when you go through grief, but we had to say like, when I’m grieving or my experience with my grief process is, and that was really good too for us to be able to take ownership over the process.

You aren’t in control of all the feelings that come up. You aren’t in control of the actual grief situation, but you can be, take ownership for the process of healing, and that piece is hard. Hard, but a good process and a good journey to be on.

My story of hope right now is that even though my daughter’s going grow up in, she’s not going to remember grandma and grandpa as far as my side of the family goes, but know that I want her to know them, so I know that I will keep talking with her about them, and I will keep expressing to her, how excited they were to have her as a granddaughter and how loving and supportive they were towards her. 

Thank you everyone for listening and really just being a part of this process on the journey with me. I think God knows exactly what we need at the time that we need it, and to be just completely frank with you, I think if I didn’t have this conference coming up, Where I was going to promote the podcast to a bunch of counselors and hadn’t already paid that money to do so. I may have just thrown in the towel on the whole thing.

I don’t want to do that unless it’s something that God tells me that, “Hey, we’re done and you need to stop doing this.” But that was so tough for me to keep going. And what I really thought about was all the people who said, this podcast has helped me in some way, shape, or form, or, it’s helped me understand my loved one better.

So many people have written and said, “Hey, I knew I had anxiety, but I didn’t know I had OCD until I started listening to your podcast. That’s such a beautiful story and journey because then now they can get proper help and proper treatment and know how to deal with it. Their situation is different than they did before.

It’s such a beautiful thing just being able to share these things with you guys each and every week and spread that there is hope for anxiety. There’s hope for OCD. Of course, our ultimate hope is in Jesus Christ. So know that even though we may have never met, you are a blessing in my life, and I enjoy the opportunity to be able to share parts of my life with you.

Stay tuned because I’m doing something very special for our 100th episode, and that’s bringing you 100 tips for managing anxiety. Come listen along with us in a couple weeks. 

Christian Faith and and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of myself or By the Well Counseling. Until next time. May you be comforted by God’s great love for you. 

98. Stories of Hope (Part 2)

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

We continue sharing inspiring stories of our past guests finding hope amidst anxiety and OCD struggles.

These stories highlight the power of hope, faith, and supportive relationships in overcoming anxiety and OCD.

Episode Highlights:

  • Rachel Hammons, in episode 8, discovered hope through faith and contrasting God’s love with intrusive thoughts.
  • Ed Syner, in Episode 42, found hope with the support of his mother during bullying and emotional challenges.
  • Rhett Smith, in Episode 5, witnessed God’s redemption through his daughter’s confidence in a school play.
  • Peyton Garland, in Episode 26, experienced a powerful moment of hope when a stranger displayed grace and prayed for her during an obsession-related incident.

Steve and I, in Episode 81, also shared our own story of hope, with our daughter, Faith, bringing immense joy into our lives and how her presence reminds us of the goodness of God and His faithfulness.

I also share a bonus story, reminding you of the possibility of finding reciprocal friendships through intentional effort.

Episode Summary:

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD, episode 98! I’m thrilled to share part two of our series on stories of hope with you. If you joined us last week, you heard some incredible testimonies about finding faith and courage amid OCD. Today, we continue that journey with more inspiring stories.

First, let’s revisit Rachel Hammons from episode 8. Rachel opened up about how discovering she had OCD was a pivotal moment of hope for her. She emphasized that understanding the character of God brought her immense comfort.

In episode 42, Ed Snyder shared his story of dealing with anger and emotional abuse. Ed’s experience with bullying and the impact it had on his self-esteem was profound. His story highlights how God often works through people to bring us the encouragement and strength we need.

Next, in episode 5, Rhett Smith shared a touching story about how watching his daughter’s confidence in theater gave him hope. Rhett saw his own struggles reflected in his daughter’s success and felt reassured that God redeems our past difficulties. It’s a beautiful reminder that even though we face challenges, God can transform and use our experiences for good.

In episode 26, Peyton Garland recounted a harrowing moment of her OCD journey involving a car accident. Despite the fear and stress, she encountered a stranger who prayed for her and showed her unexpected kindness. This moment of grace provided Peyton with lasting hope and reinforced her faith in God’s providence.

Lastly, in a special anniversary episode, Steve and I reflected on how our daughter has been a beacon of joy and hope in our lives. Her presence reminds us of God’s goodness and faithfulness, even during difficult times. It’s a testament to how God’s blessings can come in the form of everyday miracles.

Thank you for joining us today. I hope these stories have uplifted and inspired you. I look forward to sharing more about my own journey through grief and recovery in our next episode. Until then, may you find comfort and hope in God’s great love for you.

Transcript

Welcome to Christian Faith and OCD, episode 98. Today on the show we are going to share some more stories of hope. This is part two from last week.

On episode 8, Rachel Hammons shared with us about her story of hope related to the character of God.

Rachel: I think that there’s a lot of little moments of hope for me, and so I think that, like looking back on my story, kind of like I mentioned earlier, the biggest piece of hope for me was learning the fact that I had OCD that was eyeopening and huge, but I also know that I think one of the biggest pieces of hope too, that I had, if you’re a Christian or if you’re a religious faith, reflecting on who you think God is or even doing some research on like. Not necessarily this specific event, this specific sin, this specific fear, but who is God? If I can learn more about the character of God, and I know that times that I’ve learned more about the character of God, the way that Jesus treated people, that is going to look vastly different than the way that my thoughts tend to speak to me.

When I reflect on who God is or at least even if that is a question because sometimes I’m like, well, I don’t know who God is, like I don’t know how he would respond. Well then just reflect on something that you know about God. I know that God is love. so if God is love, He loves me and He wants the best for me.

At least I know that I have that support. I have that hope. If God wants, just like any, hopefully, parents are loving their kids. God wants the best for his kids. God wants the best for me. At least in that, I know that I have someone on my side that’s walking through Ooc D or walking through my struggles with me, and I think that’s kind of what I tend to reflect on, especially when I’m really stuck in the obsessions and I don’t see an end to this particular one reflecting back on what you know, grounding yourself in what you know to be true.

Carrie: I really liked what Rachel said about grounding yourself back to biblical truths and things that you know about the character of God. Think that that’s so helpful.

In episode 42, Ed Snyder shared his personal story about anger and how he had to learn to manage his anger in a healthier way.

Ed: We’re going to talk about probably a lot of anxiety that I experienced in my life with everything else that’s going on. Somebody being bullied like I was, or you’ve got somebody in your life that is, they may not physically be bullying you, beating you up physically. They are beating you up emotionally and making you feel small, making you feel insufficient. It really messes with my emotions and kind of makes my eyes water a little bit when I think about the kid, Ed Snyder, and I knew me. I just love everybody. I just wanted to get along with everybody and everybody’s making fun of me and tormenting me and all of that stuff.

It literally destroyed my self-esteem. I couldn’t see my way up, and if it wasn’t for God putting somebody in my life that I called Mother, where every day I come home from school after going through a day of it’s supposed to be a day of learning, which was a day of abuse, she was there telling me, Hey, you don’t need those people.

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

You are better than that, you’re a good kid, et cetera, et cetera. As I grew, God just kept putting people in my life, one being my wife, we’re together. I mean, we’re peanut butter and jelly, and of course she knows me. I think everybody needs in their life is somebody that knows them inside and out, and she knows when to back off of me.

She knows when to get in my face and with that Irish face of hers, and I take it because I know she loves me. It’s amazing how God puts people in your life that will help you. They’re there. To be a blessing to you, to build you up. And of course, again, I don’t wanna take anything away from God, but God uses people.

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

I don’t wanna be like this anymore. And I get up and a day or two later, I’m back at it again. I had to figure out the work. What do I need to do? Myself to partner with God’s power and prayer to make it happen. Maybe that’s what I need to help. It’s a listener of yours in your audience. Whether you’re dealing with anxiety or you’re dealing with stress or frustration or even anger, God’s putting people in your life.

This podcast, perhaps get back to this podcast and get the help that you need so that you can put the work with your faith and God’s going to do great things in your life.

Carrie: I think that’s really great that Ed’s mom was able to just speak truth and encouragement over his life. We all need that kind of support.

In episode five with Rhett Smith, “Can God Use Your Anxiety for Good?”He has written a book on that, and here is his story of hope.

Rhett: I feel fortunate that I feel like there’s a lot of people around me who’ve given me hope or who’ve encouraged me, but the thing that came to mind was my daughter, who I had mentioned earlier, is 13.

She’s in theater at her school, and so last year when she was in a theater production, I was watching and she had a couple different parts where she spoke and I was watching her speak and she did it with such confidence and that really hit me at the core. I think also because I pictured myself at her age and I was in a school play that you had to be in, and I remember stuttering my way through that and living in fear and anxiety. Seeing her be so confident, I think gave me a sense of hope that God changes and he redeems situations. He transforms people’s lives. Even though that I struggled with anxiety and stuttering and things were really difficult for me, he was able to help me work and to grow that somehow maybe changed my daughter’s life in such a way that she didn’t have to deal with those same struggles.

Though my daughter’s not me, I felt like in some way it was a mirror of God saying things are gonna be okay. It just gave me a sense of hope. I saw my younger version of myself in her and that’s been something I’ve thought a lot about. I think over the last probably five or six months since she had that play, and that’s something I’ve been really encouraged by through difficult times, that things are gonna be okay. We’re gonna be okay, we’re gonna get through these times, and God will redeem the situations and he’ll fix the broken pieces. That for me is huge.

Carrie: I appreciated that story about his daughter. I’m definitely thinking about my own daughter and things that I want to be different for her childhood than things that I experienced.

I didn’t have a whole lot of confidence when I was a child and teenager, and I hope that I can instill some of that confidence. In my daughter when she gets into those ages. 

In episode 26, Peyton Garland shared with us a powerful story of hope, about a time that she got stuck in an obsession.

Peyton: OCD is just, oh, it’s wild. Harm OCD for me. I’m always afraid of random people off the road. I’m always turning my car around to make sure I haven’t run anybody off the road. There was one day I was in my little black Chevy car that I had gotten in high school, and I was driving home. And I just had one of those intrusive thoughts of, I tried to pick up my phone because someone was calling me.

I thought, oh my gosh, like for those five split seconds, you have no idea. If you were looking at the road, what could have happened? So I just hit the brakes. It’s a quiet country town, but I still hit the brakes in the middle of the road, and I went to whip my car around and somebody sideswipes me because I’m irrationally flipping my car in the middle of the street and I thought, oh my word, I have just caused a wreck.

I have no clue if this person is okay. I don’t know how I’m gonna tell a cop. I have intrusive thought, OCD and that’s why I’ve had a wreck. I pull off on the side of the road and this woman pulls off and I see her and she’s older and I think, gosh, like she’s 85. I have partially killed her. She’s going to need a hip replacement.

This woman gets out of her car. Now I’ve damaged her car like this was on me. She comes over and grabs my hand and she looks at me. And even in a small town, this was one of those random chances where I didn’t know who this was. She said, “I just want you to know that this is God’s providential hand, that you’re safe and I’m safe.” And she prayed over me and just left. And I’m sitting here going, my insurance is going to go through the roof. I definitely just clipped the back end of her car, so no insurance going up. I didn’t pay anything for this woman’s car. I swear she was an angel, but that was just hope because that was a hard thing.

I made a very, mentally I was in a bad place. I had made a bad decision as a driver. And this woman just prays over me, gives me grace, and just drives off. I will never forget that day. I will never forget her face, the street name, any of it as long as I live. That was some serious hope that I will not forget.

Carrie: This last story of Hope is from Steve and I’s second anniversary podcast. We do one every year around our anniversary, and this one was about becoming parents and what our daughter has meant to us.

Steve: When you’re down or something’s just difficult and you’ve got this baby that is just giggling and smiling and sticking her tongue out at you, you cannot be mad.

You cannot be upset with life. I really believe our daughter has this gift, and that is to be an encourager, to be someone who just, she doesn’t even know words yet, but we just kind of pass her around for the hugs and smiles, and it just really lightens the mood. It changes the focal point from your problem to just this happy little girl that just wants nothing more than to make you happy. Just been a blessing.

Carrie: Yes. I think about that too, and just that faith was conceived and born really during some dark times and some emotional struggles, but that. She’s a reminder of the goodness of God and of the faithfulness of God.

You know, when people ask like, “Why did you name your daughter Faith?” It’s like, “Well, you know, it took a lot of faith for us to get to this point, to be alone, and then to be older and find each other, not knowong if we could have a child or not and have her.” I really believe that she was born for a purpose in, in God’s plan. Had we received this diagnosis before we got pregnant, we probably would’ve said, you know, I don’t think we should do this. I don’t think we should go through with this. So she showed up at just the right time. And part of my process right now is, Just trusting God one day at a time, to be able to gimme the strength, to make it through the day, but also to know that he’s in control, that he loves us and that he’s gonna take care of us regardless of what happens, that he’s going to provide for our needs. Just knowing that God is good and he loves us and even in the dark times that he’s still here, he’s still present, he’s for us and that keeps us going just one day at a time, one step at a time. We’re thankful every day that Steve can walk. We’re thankful for every day that you get to see your daughter grow up.

There was a time period where I was praying that God would preserve your sight, that you’d be able to see even be born. You know, we just didn’t know. There was so much we didn’t know at the time.

Steve: We are so blessed. I hope that as a listener you don’t hear this or someone doesn’t hear this and think we have some problems. I hope you see that we are blessed that yes, there’s something I’ve been diagnosed with, but God’s still blessing me.

Carrie: I want to give you a little bonus story of hope in closing that’s a little bit more recent. I was thinking about a friendship that I have and how this person used to be more of an acquaintance role in my life, and I took the risk to step out and say, “Hey, would you like to hang out sometime, you know, outside of our kind of already acquaintance time that we had” It’s hard to do. It’s hard to be vulnerable and step out and make adult friendships. I know that many times it hasn’t worked out where. I’ve tried to reach out with someone or tried to spend time with them, and they’re too busy.

They’ve got this going on or that going on. Maybe they don’t have room for other people in their lives. Well, what I’ve found is that the more people that you. Reach out to or invite into your world. Eventually, you’re going to find someone who’s also looking for that same sense of friendship and companionship that you are.

It may take you a little while to find your person, but for somebody out there that’s. Feeling a little bit lonely today. I wanted to really encourage you that you have to put a lot of intentionality into your friendships after adulthood, especially after getting married or having kids or working a high stress job.

You just have to be really intentional about getting together with people, and if you’re not, then a lot of times that’s where those relationships sometimes can fall by the wayside. It’s hard to find a reciprocal friend, but I know from experience that if you keep working on it and you keep looking at it, that you will find probably somebody in your acquaintance circle that you can bring in a little bit closer.

It just takes some risk and working through some potential fear of rejection on the front end. I hope you have enjoyed these stories of hope today. Thank you for everyone just giving me a little bit of time and bandwidth to be able to recover from the grief and loss journey that I’ve been on. I hope next episode to be able to share some of that with you, what that experience has been like for me. I went to a grief intensive and it was absolutely powerful and therapeutically healing for me 

Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. Our show is hosted by me, Carrie Bock, a licensed professional counselor in Tennessee. Opinions given by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of myself or By the Well counseling.

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